by Neal Asher
He closed the inner door manually, closed up his hood and visor, then hit emergency evacuation and felt his suit inflate as the air went straight outside. The outer door opened easily and he pulled himself out onto the hull of the Fist. He had already decided that Porrit Town was not the place to go, but Moloch Three had many such areas scattered throughout – all with their space docks and departing ships. Engaging gecko function he walked round to an area he had already selected, looked up from his perspective, squatted, disengaged gecko and jumped.
Jonas sailed out from the ship toward the bay wall. He looked back at the Fist and then Porrit Town as it came into view and almost felt disappointment that his escape had been so easy. In mid-air he turned over and re-engaged gecko function as he headed for the bay wall. As he drew closer he saw that what had apparently been a clear area between the bases of two structor towers – the long umbilicals from their tops stretching to giant multi-limbed robots attached to the hull of the Fist – was in fact patchy. He saw holes through the bay wall where massive sheets of bubblemetal or composite had been removed from an underlying framework. Closer still and he saw his course would take him straight through one of these. No matter. This would take him closer to his destination – to those materials conveyors leading to an internal factory and then to the next bay.
Movement over to one side.
He turned to look and saw a shape heading towards him fast on a vapour trail. Had Ganzen fired a missile at him? The shape grew clearer and he soon saw an armoured man – the vapour being output from suit thrusters. The man raised some kind of weapon and fired as his course took him behind Jonas. He felt something hit and next found himself tumbling through vacuum wrapped in the sticky strands of an arrest net. Just seconds later the impact of a hard surface drove the wind from his lungs. He didn’t bounce away, however, because the sticky net stuck to that too. He lay there gasping as Hoskins floated in, carefully adjusting his course with air-blast thrusters and landed. As he gasped for air and noted pain probably from broken ribs, Jonas tried to care about his failure, but couldn’t.
Hoskins hadn’t said much after dragging him back through the airlock, just deactivated the sticky net then ordered him to remove his envirosuit. When Jonas was tardy in doing so Hoskins hit him, hard in the stomach, and he found that pain still worked as a motivator despite his fucked emotions. He undressed, struggling because the ribs in his back hurt badly and his shoulder too, which seemed to be stiffening up. He did manage to walk, but wincing all the way as Hoskins brought him naked here to this chair.
‘I guessed you would try,’ said Ganzen, ‘but I wasn’t really sure. The behaviour of someone entering ennui is not completely predictable.’
Jonas looked past him, expecting to see the tiger, and felt a brief frisson at the thought of that, but it quickly faded. He next looked aside, slowly because his neck was stiffening up too. The robot Dr Giggles still crouched under the bench where it had gone after finishing its surgery on him that first time. Probably Ganzen would have it repair his ribs, since the injury would interfere with his work. He would be glad of that at least because the pain in his back and shoulder had only grown worse. He sat there feeling cold, but none of fear he should be feeling, just a hint of chagrin about being captured.
‘Of course I had to try,’ he said. ‘You soon made it plain how stupid I had been in coming here. Perhaps you should consider your stupidity in so quickly demonstrating your violent and vicious nature. But then I guess for people like you it’s almost obligatory.’
Ganzen tilted his head, smiling nastily. ‘It gets the job done.’
Jonas looked away from him, bored with the exchange.
‘I also guessed you would try something with the hooder segment,’ Ganzen continued.
Jonas turned back. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘The hooder segment requires a substrate that contains the nutrients of deep Masadan soil – see I’ve been keeping up with your reports.’ Ganzen moved closer and leaned over him, face to close. ‘You designed a transparent gel that contained all those nutrients, all set up to flow in automatically this morning.’
Jonas acknowledged that with a shrug. ‘Yes, that was today’s job.’
‘So why the nanites?’
‘Oh I see,’ said Jonas, next continuing with the lie he had earlier prepared should questions be asked about the nature of the gel when he was making it. ‘They’re essential to weave the fibrous matter the segment also feeds on. Without them it would be necessary to get soil directly from Masada.’
Ganzen snorted and stepped away. ‘How unfortunate for you that you are not the only expert here. Caster worked it out fairly quickly.’
‘Caster?’
‘I’ve had another expert watching you constantly – she knows enough to recognise when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing. She analysed the nanite and found that yes it will generate fibres out of the substrate, but highly loaded with radicals that would make them poisonous to the forming creature.’
Jonas focused, managed to find some fragment of passion. ‘Do you think I would willingly allow someone like you to have a hooder? Do you think I would then help you breed the things?’
‘I guess not.’ Ganzen turned away. ‘You haven’t had suitable motivation yet.’
Jonas just stared at him.
The grey haired woman arrived pushing a drip feed again, put a port in Jonas’s chest and plugged in two tubes – one there and one in the port still in his neck. Ganzen walked back to the wall and leaned against it, watching. Jonas pushed against the straps holding him in place but he wasn’t boosted and had no other physical augmentations so desisted. The woman leaned over and undid the two straps about his torso but, leaving the others in place, tightened straps about his biceps before picking up a remote from the side of the surgical chair and stepping back to operate it. The chair shifted, bringing him to an upright sitting position. He winced in pain from his back, then wished he had more self-control. Another shift behind, and he felt a section of the back of the chair drop away, leaving the pieces to the sides with the biceps straps. She moved behind him and brought in a scanning head. His back felt hot and sensitive now as she operated it.
‘You have a broken scapula, three cracked vertebrae and one broken, and four broken ribs,’ she told him. ‘I’m surprised you managed to walk here.’
Ganzen pushed himself away from the wall. ‘Thanks Margaret, that’ll be all.’
She moved to head out but paused at the door. ‘You sure he’s worth the trouble, Durk? I would have thought a trip through the airlock without his suit a better option.’
Ganzen nodded. ‘He’s the expert I require.’
She shrugged and departed.
Ganzen walked over and tapped a finger against the drip feed. ‘This provides all the fluids you require, but also a cocktail of neurochem and stimulant drugs. I can assure you that you won’t die, though you will wish to, nor will you lose consciousness.’
The sound of soft mechanical movement drew Jonas’s attention as Ganzen moved over to one side to grab a chair. He carried the chair over and put it down on the floor ahead and sat astride it. Dr Giggles, meanwhile, was out from under the bench and standing. The thing walked over, stooped and looked closely at Jonas with those tourmaline eyes in that nightmare face, then moved round behind him.
At the first stab of pain Jonas yelled, more in disbelief than anything else. As the cutting continued he shrieked. The unbelievable agony of the robot peeling skin from his back brought rhythmic groans and the utter irrelevance of emptied bowel and bladder. Eternity passed in that room, the robot cell-welding his bitten-through tongue a later subtext. As it ended and some coherent thought returned, Jonas knew he would now do anything Ganzen told him to do.
The main aftermath lasted two days. The aug loading clicked over switches in his brain while the drug ’factor stuck to his ribcage fed him neurochem and other drugs to quell the psychol
ogical damage. The terror and the phantom pains dropped to a manageable level and finally Jonas became capable of coherent thought. And then Ganzen put him back to work with just the one warning:
‘Imagine what it will feel like to be flayed alive,’ he said. ‘And then to have the doctor put all your skin back on, only to take it off again, and again.’
In his laboratory Jonas dumped the gel he had made into recycling, then made another precisely to the nutrient specifications of deep Masadan soil and without the additional nanites. As he finished this work he received a message notification in his aug. At first he thought it might be someone from outside trying to contact him and felt a terror of opening it and this somehow deserving punishment. He then realised he wasn’t thinking clearly because the Fist network was enclosed, and opened it. The message was text only and this again rolled out the terror because that was how one of the agents who had pursued him had communicated.
>That nutrient profile is the closest you’ll get in a gel substrate.
‘Who is this?’ he asked.
>Caster. I’m sorry for what happened to you.
‘The closest I’ll get?’ he asked.
>Masadan soil is complicated.
The subsequent sudden surge of terror at this observation, and that the gel might not work left him coiled up on the floor where Hoskins found him. Another day of drugs and aug loadings and he was functional again, even the fear that he might not have the intellectual capacity for this work now, faded. He became robotic, but did everything he could to ensure that the hooder would be born – fear still rolling in the under-strata of his mind. He answered the questions arriving in his aug from this Caster woman in precise detail and then with elaborations and explanations as fear that she might not understand arose. After her previous comment about what had happened to him in that room he tried to engage further with her, but she simply ignored anything that did not relate to work. And the hooder grew.
The segment now sat in gel three feet deep. He implanted pinhead scanners all around it and watched the internal changes. Just a few hours after the gel had solidified the nodes at the surface of the segment burst and spread fibrous roots throughout it. These and other changes to the constituency of the gel soon rendered it opaque about the segment and translucent beyond it, however, relaying scan data to his aug he set it up so he could look at and into the thing as he had that hooder breaking apart on the Masadan surface three years ago. After two weeks the infant hooder began to expand, more clearly showing its carapace divisions, and the hints of legs appeared, while a terminal segment spread as it turned into a hood. Also at the end of that time Jonas noted less of that shadowy fear and that the drug ’factor did not need to be topped up so often with its base fluids, and felt happy about that. It was a strange and rare emotion for him.
Anger returned next when Hoskins told him to stay in his room while Caster assessed his progress in the lab. He allowed the feeling to roll through him and inspected it from a safe intellectual distance, knowing he could never allow it to govern his actions because that room and Dr Giggles waited. Then, thinking about what Caster would see in there – about the growing hooder – he felt excitement and the weary opening eye of pride. And he wondered at Ganzen’s radical cure for ennui, for it seemed he had come out the other side.
‘Come with me,’ said Hoskins, later on in the day.
Jonas hadn’t even noticed the man come into the room. He felt a smile awakening in his face and suppressed it, knowing its source had much to do with Stockholm syndrome. He swung his legs off the bed and pulled on his slippers – now of course wearing only the clothing they provided.
Hoskins led him through the Fist towards the hull on the Porrit Town side. The corridors here were more salubrious with floors of thick carpet moss and alcoves made to take sculptures. In passing he glanced at a leaping tiger, paused at a very realistic skinless man and eventually came to hooders rendered in something like obsidian, coiled on pedestals either side of what looked like double real-wood doors. Hoskins opened the doors.
‘I’ve brought him.’
‘Send him in,’ Ganzen replied.
Hoskins stepped out again and gestured him in, closing the doors behind him. The apartment was wide and luxurious, a sofa pit in the centre, wood furnishings scattered around, paintings hung on the walls and a collection of smaller sculptures scattered around. On the far side a wide bubble screen gave a view across to Porrit Town and Ganzen sat there on one side of a table laid out for dinner. He gestured to the seat opposite him.
Jonas walked over, resenting this display. Ganzen had tortured him and now he must sit down to dinner with the man and be polite – any other option was unconscionable. He took a breath while stepping up onto the raised floor on which the table stood, stepped to the chair and there paused to look out. Something was happening in Porrit Town. He could see crowds by the space dock at the end, others heading out of various exits into Moloch Three, and sparkles and flashes he felt sure must be gunfire.
‘What’s happening over there?’ he asked, and sat.
Ganzen poured him a glass of red wine before answering. Jonas stared at the drink, frightened he might lose his fragmentary self-control with alcohol inside him.
‘Porrit Town was first simply extra accommodation for Ganzen Combine staff and warehousing for goods brought in,’ said Ganzen. ‘Over time it grew as any human community does. The problem with that is it has brought in those who are not loyal to the Combine and do not have its best interest at heart.’
‘Like Polity agents.’ Jonas took up the wine and sipped. It was very good.
‘Yes, like them, and spies for other concerns. I could not find the two agents who came after you and this has compelled me to do something I have been contemplating for some time. I am clearing the town.’
‘You can do that?’ Jonas asked.
‘Quite simply there is no one to stop me.’ Ganzen smiled. ‘I cancelled all their rental agreements, since I own all the property there and told all those not in my employ to leave. Some are reluctant as you can see.’
Jonas had nothing more to say about that, though the small frightening idea of another escape attempt involving hiding in that town and trying to contact those agents receded.
‘Time to eat now,’ said the man, looking past Jonas.
Jonas glanced round and felt any appetite he might have had collapsing. Dr Giggles had come out of a nearby kitchen carrying some joint of meat on a large salver, with other dishes clasped in its multitude of hands.
Emotions rose and fell in Jonas now as they did for any normal person. Coming out of the other side of constant fear he felt his mind reasserting and knew that others would label that his arrogance. His emotions settled over time as he assessed what had been done to him, and out of this rose a simple motivation: utter cold hatred of Ganzen and his combine.
Now he gazed upon a perfectly formed hooder coiled in the segment. About the exterior of the thing the root system had begun to degrade and he estimated that the creature would break free in about ten days. When it did so it would be about ten feet long and the width of his thigh. He contemplated what next.
When the hooder broke free it would be hungry. Fabricators were already programmed to produce flesh, bone and venous systems that matched the genome and nutrient profile of Masadan grazers. A problem might then arise concerning feeding stimulation since he knew of no hooder that would feed on dead meat. Now, using screens, control panel and aug, he set about designing skeletal robots to carry that meat and hoped these would be enough. A fact that had him putting a lot of effort into this was that Ganzen might decide on some other form of mobile meat for the creature, though Jonas would argue that the nutrients from Masadan life were necessary at this stage of its development.
As he worked he thought further. He would never be free of this place. However, as he fed it, the hooder would grow to adulthood and then Ganzen would be pushing him to get it to segment. He k
new there was a way but that this work could continue for years. He also knew that others could find this way because, in his previous research, he had discovered the creature’s biological clock and seen how it could be altered. It might be that Ganzen knew this, perhaps from Caster, and would consider him no longer worth the effort. The moment this creature was born he would become dispensable. Failure, or even Ganzen’s boredom with him, now would be punished terminally and he was certain as to how, because the man would soon have a new toy out of that segment.
Jonas sighed and sat back. He had made no attempts to escape or to sabotage what was being done here out of the terror of Dr Giggles and that room. But memory of pain necessarily grew dim and now he began to realise that inaction had ceased to be an option. He had to do something. As he leaned forwards again to continue designing the carrier robots he reached up and touched his scalp. A possibility was there, under the skin, highly dangerous and likely to get him killed. He needed to find out.
Jonas manufactured a chainglass knife to his specifications, then used it to whittle a chunk of hooder under-carapace he had printed so as to run comparisons with the growing beast. He did this while running biological models he necessarily handed over to ship computing, or during other times when at a loose end. The block of material began its transformation into a human skull. He was oddly pleased with this – muscle memory taking over from when he had learned this skill over a hundred years ago.
