Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  A lumpy blotch of something had come into view, swirled with colours. As she took the shuttle lower the patch began to resolve into fat barrel cacti, some seemingly stacked one upon another, all decorated with tubular flowers. Many sprouted pink, others in red, yellow, white and even blue.

  ‘A picnic,’ Anna said, bringing the shuttle down to land beside the patch.

  ‘Are these the ones you mentioned?’

  ‘They are indeed.’

  They unstrapped and got out of the shuttle. Anna hoisted out a food bearing podule and put it on the sandy ground. Again without discussion – just knowing what they both wanted – they set up a small camp. They laid out the fibrous blanket from his bed, and plates, cups and eating utensils. He was about to set to work on the podule when she brought one of his bottle bamboo containers and a length of tube.

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’ She gestured towards the cacti. ‘Bring the knife.’

  He followed her over. ‘Do we need Snooper?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ she replied. ‘I can test whatever we find, but I doubt these plants will have changed much.’ She paused for a second. ‘Though admittedly I better check for isopropyl alcohol, or methanol – your nanosuite can handle them but better not to drink them in the first place.’

  He remembered that at one time, when humanity was less rugged, those kinds of alcohol could, in excess, cause blindness.

  Anna pointed. ‘The ones with the pink flowers produce straight ethanol without flavourings. They usually got sold to companies that made their own drinks and when sold had built in obsolescence unlike those kept here. The flowers with other colours are more interesting.’ She headed over to a single barrel cactus protruding red flowers and stooped down by it. ‘The knife.’ She held up a hand and he gave it to her.

  He studied the cactus. Its skin was pale jade with sharp needle spines sticking out of ridges up its length. The flowers had bloomed out of the rounded dome of its top. Over to one side stood a cactus with yellow flowers and this had two sections. The lower one, with its domed top compressed by the section above, really did look like an ancient wooden barrel. He wondered if the shape had been deliberate. He turned back to Anna.

  ‘You’re tapping the barrel,’ he said, remembering the ancient phrase from a virtuality he had once tried – one that had involved a ‘tavern’ and a great deal of ‘quaffing’.

  ‘I certainly am.’

  Using the chainglass blade, she had cut a hole and even as fluid began to run out inserted the tube. It of course fitted perfectly. She ran the tube into the container for a short while, then, pinching the tube closed, picked up the container and took a sip before lowering it and letting the flow continue.

  ‘All the ethyls – propanoate, isobutyrate, acetate,’ she said. ‘Oak lactone, the alcohols…B-damascenone.’ She nodded. ‘Heavy on the caramel flavouring but almost pefect.’

  The liquid in the pot was as black as coffee and he caught a whiff of it as she pinched off the tube again, pulled it out and quickly inserted the plug of cactus she had cut out. It smelled familiar but precisely what it was escaped him.

  ‘We’ll give it a try shall we?’

  He smiled and nodded. In the early years here he had tried making his own wine from things like large raspberries that grew in the mountains, and it had been good. He had enjoyed that brew for a number of years, but later it had started to give him a hangover and he did not have access to Aldetox. Progressively the hangovers had got worse and the next time the berries were available he had not bothered again.

  They headed back over to the blanket and sat down. He took the knife and opened up the podule and just left it open – they could just grab what they wanted from this ready serving dish. Anna poured the drink into two cubs and handed him one. He took a careful sip and swallowed. The stuff was smooth and strong.

  ‘Brandy?’ he wondered.

  She gave him a disappointed look. ‘The genetics of the cactus contains some of that of cane sugar, some of vanilla and cocoa, and some of an oak tree.’

  ‘That’s my clue is it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  He sipped again, could feel it heating up his guts and remembered this pleasure in the days when inebriation was a nanosuite choice and hangovers could be dismissed with a nanosuite instruction or a pill.

  ‘A bar on the sea front on Cansonia,’ he said. ‘They claimed the ancient cast iron anchor on the wall was an actual ancient Earth artefact. It might have been because they had a security drone watching the place, though a replica could have been centuries old and very valuable.’ He lowered his cup. ‘Rum. Dark navy rum.’

  ‘You have scored ten points – you only have another fifty before you reach the prize!’

  ‘I will endeavour to score.’ He winked at her.

  She winked back and sipped her drink. ‘I last drank this precisely twelve hundred and sixty three solstan years ago.’

  ‘That’s not very precise,’ Ben replied, cutting himself some cheese and meat.

  ‘… and three months two days, four hours and thirty two minutes, presuming my internal clock is correct.’

  She cut meat and cheese too, then opened a couple of ‘paste’ seeds to use as a dip. Ben began to feel the intoxication quite quickly, and he couldn’t have been happier. He ate nuts too and seeing his cup was empty poured another shot. The container was nearly empty now too.

  ‘I’m feeling quite a buzz,’ Anna told him.

  ‘As much as you want to feel?’ he enquired, then wished he hadn’t because it seemed somehow rude.

  ‘I’ve set my emulation to match your likely capacity.’ She seemed unconcerned. ‘I’m using the alcohol as fuel at the moment, and storing it.’ She picked up the container and drained the last of the rum, then swilled it out with water. ‘Let’s try another one.’

  The next cactus she tapped – one with blue flowers – produced a clear liquid, glistening and nacreous like oil on water. He identified it at once as cips – or cool-ice psychedelic. It was usually served in two parts with the psychedelic component in the ice cubes. This cactus produced the whole drink, its chemistry subtly altered so upon freezing the ice cube component froze out before the rest.

  ‘Twenty points!’ she told him, but apparently he did not need to gain them all before receiving his prize, because a short while afterwards she pushed him down on the blanket and rode him like she needed to get somewhere fast, and did. He drank water afterwards, dried out and sucked dry, then fell asleep in the sunshine.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him when he woke.

  He sat up carefully but, besides a raging thirst and a slight numbness telling him the booze had yet to completely dissipate from his system, he felt fine. He stood up and looked around, his gaze coming to rest on six bottle-bamboo containers now sporting caps made out of carved wood they had not had before.

  ‘So what do we have here?’ he asked.

  She pointed to each in turn. ‘Cips, rum, gin, ouzo, Clian bandy and a passable bourbon. They were always the most popular here hence the survival of these cacti, but they exported many others of which we might find surviving specimens.’ She gestured at the sky. ‘It would be nice to find some of the carbonated alcohol and non-alcoholic drink versions in this heat, but I suspect it is the alcohol content that has enabled the survival of these.’

  ‘You’re kidding. A beer cactus?’

  ‘Many hundreds of varieties. They even had them growing company logos on their skins. Some versions even incorporated refrigeration.’

  ‘You are kidding.’

  ‘Am I?’

  He drank more water and they made coffee using a stove plate he had brought from the house, and packed away their camp. He felt very good now, for this stop had been a perfect antidote to the ruins. Soon they were in the sky, desert rolling underneath them and further patches of what he dubbed ‘booze cacti’ becoming visible. Anna
then turned the shuttle in towards the mountains.

  ‘Let’s take it higher,’ she said.

  ‘If you think that’s okay…’

  ‘I haven’t had a single fault develop, but higher will push the grav engine and we might see something.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The shuttle began to rise and vistas opened out around them. They rose up through a layer of thin cloud into bright air, looking down and ahead at the mountains, some of which poked up through that layer.

  ‘Oh,’ said Anna, turning the shuttle and sliding on along a new course.

  Ahead, leading up towards the mountains, he could see a line cut through the surface of the desert. As they followed this in, the greenery returned on low hills and the line became disrupted churned ground, heavily overgrown, slabs of rock and other items exposed. This had carved through the hills and terminated at what looked like some large old ruin on the side of a mountain. Perhaps the result of an earthquake, though he had not felt one here, or some devastation left by the war that had been fought here? As for the latter he had no idea. From what Anna had told him it had been a mostly biological thing without any of the kind of earth-shattering weapons like the Polity had once deployed.

  ‘We won’t need to go into orbit, I think,’ she said.

  He stared at her for a long moment, then turned to look back at what lay ahead. Of course, that line of torn ground was just a smaller version of the trench the shuttle had cut when it crashed.

  ‘Did you know?’ he asked, because it seemed more than coincidence that they had turned at that point.

  ‘I didn’t know, but I saw it long before you, which was why I came in this way.’

  A hint of paranoia rose and then died. He believed her. The ruins at the terminus of the trench, now they were coming clearer, still bore the recognisable shape of a ship: the Falcon.

  Anna landed the shuttle on a stretch of flat ground over to one side. The shape of the Falcon had been a long ovoid with a stretched-out turret along the top containing crew quarters and bridge, further cabins, holds and research areas below amidst the ship’s other infrastructure. The back of the ovoid had the appearance of being sliced off where the throats of the fusion engine resided, while two nacelles that had protruded downwards to the fore had contained a twin-balance U-space drive. Now the thing had been severely torn up. The U-space nacelles lay far back in the trail of devastation along with chunks of hull and a net of beam-work torn out from the underside. The ship itself was bent to the curved shape of the mountain slope it had finally impacted against. It rested there as if deflated, overgrown with vines and with small trees growing amidst the debris strewn around it.

  They climbed out of the shuttle with weapons and packs and gazed at the ruin.

  ‘We should go prepared,’ Anna said.

  They returned inside the shuttle. Anna went to the power supply and, after disconnecting some leads and pipes, drew out one of the battery slabs, and then from their supplies snared requisite power leads. Ben collected tools he might need, though it struck him that the most useful would be the pry bar. Once they were both outside again he closed up the door on its seals. He wasn’t sure why – a feeling that they were somehow unsafe. As they walked towards the ruined ship, he peered up at a young turtle-leaf tree, seeing a chunk of I-beam running through its trunk. Knowing how these trees grew, he surmised that it had not been penetrated by the beam but had grown up around it in the years since the crash.

  ‘One moment.’ Walking ahead, Anna stopped and reached back tapping her fingers against his chest. She dipped her head for a second, then turned to look at him.

  ‘Fusion reactors do not do that unless a lot of safeties are overridden, well, at least in my time.’

  ‘Thousands of safeties on them in even these primitive times,’ he replied. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Fission products. Radiation. The shell and containment field must have been broken while it was still running. It would have spewed what was essentially a particle beam.’

  ‘It would have had to have been deliberate,’ he said numbly. ‘So that’s the end of our exploration?’

  ‘No. It’s dissipated and is low enough now for your suite to handle.’

  As they trudged on Ben grimaced, wondering if this would be another unresolved mystery. Next, gazing up the slope of the hull, he did not feel disappointed, but the sight of the crashed ship did sadden him. They passed chunks of hull metal webbed with cooling pipes, optics and s-con wiring, standing like old monuments. Other things were scattered on the ground too: plasmel boxes, chunks of internal machinery, even a badly damaged nanoscope. Reaching the hull they walked along to where part of it had been torn away, vines hanging across the gap and darkness within.

  ‘I never thought to bring a torch,’ he said.

  Anna gave him a superior look then took his rechargeable torch out of her pack and shone it inside. The beam revealed a hold space, the walls split and bulging crash foam like fungus, skeins of optics and s-con hanging down like the vines outside. They pushed through the vines and entered. Anna scanned around with the torch, picking out a stack of plasmel boxes still held to the floor by straps, and two large shipping containers that had slid into the left hand wall and dented it. Only now, looking at all this, did it truly impact on him that all their previous aims had come to nothing, and still disappointment failed to materialise.

  ‘So we won’t be leaving this world on this…’ He looked at her. ‘Will we?’

  ‘I think this would take a bit more work,’ she said dryly.

  They moved further into the hold, towards a doorway at the back whose door hung off on one hinge. Twenty feet in, plant growth no longer matted the floor, but he began to see other items. Pieces of carapace lay everywhere, and amidst them he saw a carbine just like his own. He reached down and picked it up, then went to brush away the debris clinging to it. That’s when he saw the bony fingers wrapped around the grip, one of them coiled in the guard over the firing button.

  ‘I see,’ he said, showing it to Anna. He wanted to take the weapon with him, because it could be made to work, but he put it down on the floor again. There would be so much here they could use and he could collect that weapon any time. And, even though he had no religious sensibilities at all, this somehow felt like desecration. It was, he knew, a feeling he would manage to get over.

  ‘So what the hell happened here?’ he wondered.

  ‘I would say something similar to what happened to you,’ Anna replied. ‘This crash was hard and I doubt there were many survivors. The ship is open here and in other places.’ She kicked at the carapace debris on the floor. ‘Mantids.’

  ‘But I survived them,’ he said. ‘They had more weapons and other resources…’

  ‘We need to find the captain’s log – I’m assuming such data stores are still hardened in this time?’

  ‘Should be,’ he agreed.

  ‘That will maybe tell us what happened here on the planet, but more interesting to know would be why the ship ended up crashing in the first place.’

  ‘Mutiny, probably,’ he said. He could think of so many scenarios, in fact had already thought of many.

  ‘There is something else to consider,’ she said as they moved towards the door. ‘It may well be that the U-space communicator is either still working or can be made to work.’

  ‘I would have thought if that were the case, someone would have used it.’

  ‘True, but it’s worth bearing in mind.’

  They moved through into a corridor, dark as pitch. Here, scattered about the door were perhaps the rest of the remains of the owner of that carbine. Ben picked up the skull and peered at the marks from mantid mandibles. He then put it down, gently, respectfully, when he spotted something else.

  ‘Shine the torch over here,’ he said, squatting.

  She turned, blinded him for a moment with the beam, then brought that down onto the remains he squatted over.
One side of a ribcage lay there still attached to a length of spine. He pointed.

  ‘That wasn’t mantids,’ he said.

  The ribs were blackened around a laser hole that had nearly cut one of them in half.

  ‘So they fought,’ said Anna. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

  He looked up. ‘Your cynicism is showing.’

  ‘Isn’t it just?’

  ‘Mantids will scavenge given the chance, just like any other predator.’ He grimaced at the carapace scattered across the floor. ‘I’m still not clear on what happened here, however,’ He pointed at the carapace. ‘If they came in to scavenge, then why so much carapace here? And I don’t see any laser burns on them if they came in after surviving crew.’

  They moved on, finding another corridor strewn with bones. Ben did not bother checking these for laser burns because there were enough on the corridor walls. Turning into another corridor and now recognising his location in the ship, he pointed.

  ‘That makes no sense.’

  There were no laser burns on the walls and no human remains here, yet mantid carapace had been piled against one wall.

  ‘Perhaps they survived on mantid meat,’ Anna suggested.

  ‘Perhaps.’ He gestured along the corridor. ‘We go along here then up. We’ll have to climb because I’m guessing the dropshaft isn’t operating.’

  The corridor dog-legged to the right, and then terminated against the opening into a dropshaft.

  ‘Wait,’ said Anna, pausing by the open door into another hold. ‘In here.’ She stepped inside and he followed, studying the contents of the hold as she shone the torch around.

  Robots, painted with yellow and white stripes, were secured by straps along one wall. They were complicated, general purpose machines that ran on treads on most surfaces but could deploy spidery legs for rough terrain. Their tool arrays were folded up around their bodies and consisted of a wide variety of digging and cutting implements. Ben gazed at them and considered just how much easier his life would have been here if he could have deployed just one of them. Almost certainly their power supplies and sub-AI minds were still good, though the former would need to be charged up. It was something to think about for the future, now it seemed the future would be here.