Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘Fuck you, Constance,’ he said eventually.

  Hand pressed against his face to try and stem the bleeding, he finally managed to get up and walk over to Anna. Her face looked burned and chunks of composite had stabbed into it, while the surfaces of the eyes were dulled and milky, but with none of that metallic look there now. He wanted to get hold of her and shake her, but that was a stupid thing to do with a human, and doubly so with a Golem. If she became conscious he would know about that at once.

  He thought hard about what to do, trying to suppress his panic. He had to do something! The physical damage, if there was any beyond the surface, appeared minimal. The main attack had been from the U-com console – a virus put there by Constance. He could do nothing about that, in essence her internal systems would be fighting it just like the immune system of a human fought a biological virus. The best thing to do would be to simply wait, but he could not. He knew he was operating more on instinct than common sense when he collected up essential items of their gear and packed them in a backpack. He then took hold of her under the armpits and dragged her to the door. He had to get her home – that’s all he thought.

  Beyond the door he started panting, and when he looked down at the front of his envirosuit he saw blood there, and not that still dripping from his face but from inside. The blast had obviously injured him elsewhere, and it had certainly sapped his strength. He kept going, dragging her tens of yards each time then stopping to rest. As he reached the end of the corridor with windows along one side he looked out and could tell by the light that the sun was on its way down. He laughed at himself, wishing he had brought his wheelbarrow, and knew he must be a bit concussed. Then he looked ahead to the mouth of the dropshaft.

  ‘Damn,’ he said.

  The shaft extended down at least forty feet into the hold area. He moved her to the edge and studied her eyes, but still nothing. She looked like the broken doll he had first found. Taking out the torch he shone it down below. He could simply drop her. Being Golem and very tough, the drop would probably cause very little beyond cosmetic damage. He couldn’t do it. Though he knew he was being as foolish now as when moving her in the first place, he simply couldn’t do it.

  Leaning against the edge of the opening, he thought about trying to carry her down. Maybe in his condition upon first entering this ship he could have managed that, but right now the idea appalled him. He searched around for something to use. Then, looking along the corridor, realised Kamarg had provided. He went over to the industrial laser and shouldered the coil of cable. It appeared to be enough and, if it had been their intention to run it to the engineering deck, then it should be. Bringing it over to Anna, he dropped it on the floor, found one end and was about to tie it round her under her armpits, but had second thoughts and first threaded it through one of the rungs in the shaft before doing so. After securing her he tied the cable off, dragged her to the shaft and eased her in. Stupid to be so careful, but he could not help but treat her like a flesh-and-blood creature.

  She swung into the shaft and hung there. Looping the cable about his body and getting a firm grip, he reached out and undid the slip knot he had made. Her sudden weight dragged him forwards so his face hit against the frame of the opening. He yelled and swore, then abruptly fell silent, sure he had just heard movement down below. Listening he heard nothing further. Maybe she had dislodged something and it had fallen…

  He began lowering her and, as he did so, a burning sensation spread across his torso and something clicked painfully. Broken rib – he knew from experience. Gritting his teeth, he just continued, the pain steadily increasing. He began sweating, and then that started to turn cold on him. A glance over his shoulder told him why: the sun had been further down than he thought and now it was gone, and cold seemed to be oozing up from below.

  At last the cable grew slack and he released it. Now hanging the carbine by its strap in front of him, he began to climb down, trying to take most of his weight on his legs because that hurt the least. At the bottom of the shaft he took out the torch and clicked it on, directing the beam at her face. Still no change. He hung the torch on his belt, still on, dreading the prospect of now dragging her out of the ship, but there seemed no other option. He used the chainglass knife to slice the cable high up and, gathering up that length, used it to haul her out of the dropshaft. And then, seemingly on cue, he heard something whickering nearby.

  Cold ran through him. Dropping the cable he backed up against the wall by the shaft, grabbed up the torch and flashed it to his left, and then to his right. It was there, just forty feet away from him and, caught in the beam it opened its mouth and hissed at him. He stared. This was the clearest he had ever seen it. The skeletons and Anna’s explanation gave it human origin but he could see little of that here. Segmented insect carapace, its body was long and its limbs too, but it had more than four of the latter. The major ones were kind of positioned like a human’s, but were thin and as insect like as the other two protruding each side of its torso, which ended in scythe hooks. Its hands were similar: a small stubby thumb, two small fingers and one large forefinger also ending in a long scythe hook. Its eyes gleamed red in the torch light, but too close together, while on the outside of each was a subsidiary eye. The skull crest moved like the feathers on a cockatoo, but seemed to consist of blades. It hissed again, then flung itself towards him, almost seeming to go airborne with its limbs hitting walls and ceiling.

  Ben abruptly understood that he had frozen up, that this wasn’t a nightmare, it wasn’t frightening sounds out in the night, but hard horrible reality heading straight at him. He scrabbled for the carbine, bemused about not having reached for it earlier, and dropped the torch while doing so. He raised the weapon and fired. The beam was blinding, lighting up the whole corridor in lurid red, and the creature much closer now. He hit one of its subsidiary limbs, the thing flaring and burning, and the shot tracked across it body. The creature shrieked and tumbled as the beam went out. Ben squatted, shifting the weapon so he held it by the grip with the butt under his arm, grabbed up the torch and shone it ahead. He was tempted to switch the weapon to continuous fire but knew that would soon deplete its battery. The creature was down on the floor and as he pinned it in the torch beam it emitted a combination of both shriek and hiss and rapidly retreated, disappearing into the hold where they had found the remains of its kin.

  He found himself gasping for breath, but his torso no longer hurt. He glanced down once more at Anna, thinking about dragging her out, dragging her to the shuttle. Outside he would be in the open and this creature, or others could come at him from any direction and, anyway, this thing had plagued him for years. It was time to end this – one way or the other.

  Ben advanced down the corridor, torch beam and weapon aimed at that entrance into the hold. He finally came up to the edge and listened. He could hear nothing. He thought about where it might be lurking. That pile of bones would be no hide so most likely somewhere between the robots. He abruptly stepped in and swung towards those robots, tracking the torch beam across and ready to fire. He could see nothing and he swung the beam back across in panic, then over to the pile of bones.

  Movement – nearby – a wash of warm air like breath.

  The horror of it froze his guts just before something slammed into his back to send him stumbling forwards, and then seemed to jerk him to a halt. He looked down in disbelief at the hooked claw protruding from under his collar bone and then, agonisingly, it began to lift him. How the hell had it got behind him? He then remembered a mistake he had made before when searching for the shuttle screen: flatlander thinking. He turned the carbine to point upwards even as he looked up to see his stalker clinging to the ceiling above the door, and fired, and fired again, and kept his finger on the firing button as it seemed the whole world fell on him.

  Awareness came back in flashes. Had he been unconscious? He lay on his side with the creature on top of him and the damned thing was moving. Where was the c
arbine? He couldn’t feel it in his grip and groping ahead of him he couldn’t locate it. A light came on, throwing dark spidery shadows over him. His shoulder suddenly screamed at him and he screamed back as he felt a wrenching behind and heard a gristly crunch. Then the weight was off him.

  ‘I think you got it,’ said Anna.

  He heaved himself up and looked to where she pointed the torch beam. The stalker was still smoking from where his shots had near cut it in half. He stared at it, then down at the claw still protruding below his collar bone. That crunching must have been her breaking the limb behind it.

  ‘Best we remove that back home,’ she said, reaching down and helping him to his feet. ‘Pull it out now and you may bleed to death.’

  They were grim words, but he abruptly felt unreasonably happy.

  ‘Yeah, let’s go home,’ he replied.

  While chatting to various readers on the social media I discovered something quite surprising. Many readers have been with me from or near the beginning – their usual introduction to my books being The Skinner or Gridlinked. But now it seems that many dropped in quite late with Dark Intelligence. Whether early readers or late I often hear the same thing from them, ‘Give me more Penny Royal!’ Obviously there is something quite alluring about the black AI, mental casualty of the war between the Polity and the prador, and provider of ‘transformations’ that always come at a terrible price. Deals with the Devil. Penny Royal is perhaps an extreme version of the antihero, with its own particular morality, and a rather unique approach to its treatment of others and to how the universe should function. Here is the black AI again, in that time when it wasn’t so cuddly.

  DR WHIP

  The tough virus propagated faster than anything he had seen before, and even massive infusions of nanobots or drugs had not killed it. As Arabella went into her only hope – the zero-freezer – Doctor Whipple wondered again: why am I alive? He’d been caught in the lower hemisphere of Hercules Station when the AI went down and Master Alban ordered the full quarantine, and was now the only survivor here. He had tended people being eaten alive by the virus, been sprayed by their blood and other bodily fluids, and even been bitten by one victim as she fought for life, yet he remained uninfected.

  He stepped forward and rested a hand against the freezer hatch as it closed. The machine began vitrifying Arabella’s corpse and taking it down to close to absolute zero, before dispatching it to join thousands of others in storage. She had not been the last to die down here, but the last he had taken off life support. He still felt reluctant to let her go because the viral damage to her brain gave her little chance of resurrection. He remembered how they had planned to travel across the Polity together, maybe settle somewhere for a few decades and raise children… The future had been bright and open, and now it closed with a freezer door. Whipple swore and turned away, guiltily glad to be alive, even though he felt something had allowed him to live – something that had deliberately murdered thousands here.

  It had all started with the arrival of that survey ship last month. An entity had been aboard; a thing that didn’t show up on cams but still managed to leave a security team in bits before disappearing into the station. A subsequent security team found the four-person crew of the ship – naked dried-out husks of human beings – wound in a single knot and a forensic robot had needed to cut them into pieces to separate them. After that came the weird disappearances, followed by the horrifying reappearance of one of the same. Dr Whipple shuddered.

  Iano Yulos had been working outside in a space suit, but when informed his shift had ended he failed to respond – just continued working. Paranoia already on the rise at that point, Alban decided, rather than send someone out to him, to usurp Yulos’s suit motors. This he duly did and the man’s suit returned him inside the station, only, when they opened his suit, they found no one inside. Internal station cam footage showed him getting into the suit. External cam footage, and his suit log, showed him outside working in it. Even the station AI could find no sign of data tampering. But he was gone.

  Five days later he returned above the crowded station plaza in the lower hemisphere, naked, bloated and floating like a balloon even though grav plates tugged from below. He was kicking his legs and waving his arms and crying for help. This sight of course drew in an even bigger crowd before Security dispatched a crab drone to retrieve him. The moment the device gently closed its claws on him, he screamed in utter agony and burst. Offal and other bits of Yulos showered the crowd below, but medical staff did not learn until later that the shower had contained large quantities of the virus incubated in his body.

  Dr Whipple headed out of the freezer room and paused at the caduceus engraved in the glass door to his ward to peer in at the rows of empty regrowth tanks. He then headed to his office. He would have liked to believe his particular affectation – the one to make him stand out from other qualifying doctors – had kept him alive. Most of them had internal nanosuites boosting their immune systems and constantly repairing cellular damage – some controlled and reprogrammed by fashionable sub AI tattoos. His Barnard suit – named after a pre Quiet War surgeon – ran a nanosuite it programmed before injecting from outside through microtubules. It constantly monitored him and modelled the function of his body. It did pretty much the same as the other augmentations but was older technology, unique, quirky, and appeared to be fashioned of snakeskin. However, the suit had given him no alerts nor had it intervened in any way. No, he felt sure he was alive because something had chosen him. On that night of his first sleep, after working for a hundred hours and knowing the stimulants weren’t going to keep him going for much longer, it had visited him…

  Sitting at his console, Whipple put a call through to Master Alban, but got no immediate response. Unsurprising, really, now the virus had penetrated the upper hemisphere. Alban also had no AI help since, just after Yulos’s grotesque death, the station AI crashed – its crystal turned to dust. Alban was struggling to control the panic. He had already used troops to prevent a mob trying to get to the station docks – the protocol in this situation being that no one could leave until a forensic AI with its bio-crisis team had paid a visit. However, so soon after the end of the war, such AIs were still busy cleaning up the atrocious messes left by bioweapons of the alien prador enemy, and months had passed since Alban had requested one.

  As he sat waiting, Whipple thought again about that sleep time visitor. He had been alone in bed while Arabella worked her shift. He had not known she would not sleep beside him again. A sound had propelled him to that state on the edge of REM sleep, in the territory where dream and nightmare incorporate reality. The nightmare had felt real, but his knowledge and experience, his rationality, denied it. Something in his bedroom had seemed to hone elements of the darkness to razor sharpness. It also tangled it with mercury worms yet he could see through it to his door, and to the cabinet alongside that. When he’d tried to focus on the substance of this presence, it had seemed to dissolve under his gaze.

  It had whispered, too, that darkness, but no words had been clear. In response he gave his frustration and powerlessness in the face of the virus, of it killing all those around him. The darkness had found this interesting and focused on the heart of it. He had always wanted to be the best, but his ambition went further, and his choice of enhancement – the Barnard suit – reflected that. He wanted to be unique, iconic. Even as this had been occurring, he’d realised he was no longer sprawled on his bed, but hovered some way above it with his skin prickling as if being nipped at by thousands of gnats. It had all been too weird and his growing consciousness could not accept it. He’d suddenly fallen back to his bed, then jerked upright, completely awake. He would have next dismissed it all as a nightmare brought on by stress and stimulant overdose, were it not for his door being open, and it seeming as if cats had been sharpening their claws all the way across the soft coating on the floor.

  ‘Alban is unavailable at present,’ said a voice, catching
at the last.

  Whipple snapped back to the present, and gazed at the face on his screen. One of Alban’s unnecessary PAs had spoken – Alban being the sort who liked to have plenty of human underlings, even having to generate pointless tasks to keep them busy. She was, Whipple could see, ill. Fractured capillaries webbed her pale skin, and blisters were just visible under her hairline. She would be dead within a few hours.

  ‘There’s no point me staying down here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can help up there?’ He doubted he could save any lives, but he could give palliative care and, if he continued to survive, he could stick the last of them in a zero freezer.

  She glanced to one side, then turned back. ‘You’re instructed to go to the axial drop-shaft, which is being opened for you now.’

  ‘Good.’ He nodded, cut the connection and stood up. Surveying his surroundings for a moment, he realised he had nothing to take. They had all the equipment he might need up there, along with access to the data he had gathered on the virus. And, in essence, his life had ended here when he closed that zero freezer door for the last time.

  He headed out.

  Once bubbling with life, the space station now felt haunted and sinister. Since the end of the war, it always had its streams of refugees, crews from Polity warships on patrol, teams on stopovers from clearing up the wartime mess, and its salvage crews and traders dealing in the rich strata of wartime wreckage out here. The population had waxed and waned, but had never been less than three thousand. Of course, the people were still here, in the zero freezers, in a refrigerated hold or, if lucky enough to have memplants, in a safe in medical, their bodies disposed of.

  Whipple walked down the centre of a wide, deserted arcade, scattered with used analgesic patches, throwaway diagnosticers and drug vials. A couple of bars had been trashed, but the only movement he could see now was of a servitor drone, bumbling about the tables. He noted a big chain pharmacist’s had been looted, and paused to gaze at the caduceus etched into its window. Still the sight annoyed him. The winged staff with its two snakes entwined around it had become an icon of medical professions everywhere, but due to a mistake. This winged staff of Hermes was not the true medical symbol – that being the rod of Asclepius with its single snake. He had pointed this out to Alban and his people, noting that those who had named their station Hercules should know this. As a result, Station Medical had lost the wings but, in what almost felt like a snub, retained the extra snake.