by Neal Asher
When it had completely finished its meal the hooder came up to the glass and inspected him for a long moment. He felt his skin prickling and recognised the sensation of active scan. Checking his equipment he saw that yes, it had used radiations close to what he used on it. It caused no alerts because his own scans produced a lot of this EMR but he really hoped it would not do the same when Ganzen or any of the others were in here. As it finished and turned away, the prickling of his skin continued, but down his back. Was it checking him out as potential prey and a source of the nutrients it needed, or curious about the one feeding it? He began making more of the earlier iteration of robot grazer and feeding them in. By the end of his day the hooder had visibly grown – half again its original length and now the thickness of his torso.
‘Soon,’ he told Caster that evening, as they talked, but again curtailed their conversation because the diagnostic and reboot had not rid his aug of its problems.
Ten days, thought Jonas.
Ganzen, sometimes with his men and sometimes alone had visited four times. On every occasion Jonas had been on edge, half expecting the hooder to scan them. He had his excuses in place, having upgraded a scanner on the far side of the room so he could explain away the scan as having come from that. Yet it seemed to show no interest in them, while it had scanned him four more times.
In that time the hooder had continued to grow. The structures within its body had become much more defined and harder to ignore by anyone who inspected them and Caster had, by agreement, ceased to comment on them. They did at least have an organic appearance – they were not like the components of some early machine – but then so it was with most Polity robots now. When Ganzen arrived again, this time with Hoskins and two others dragging along some other individual between them, Jonas thought on inevitability.
‘Now it’s time to see some real action,’ Ganzen said.
Jonas stared at him, then at the woman they had brought. For a horrible moment he had thought she was Caster, felt relief when he saw the dark hair and ripped envirosuit, then guilt because he felt relieved.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
Ganzen just stared at him for a moment then said, ‘You know exactly what I mean.’
Jonas began to get up out of his seat, but Hoskins was soon beside him pressing a hand hard down on his shoulder. The woman, slumped between the other two men, looked up. She had been beaten – one eye swollen and her mouth bloody. She looked a bit out of it as she studied her surrounding, then her gaze fixed on the window and what lay beyond it.
‘Oh Christ no,’ she said, then began to struggle. ‘Ganzen, please no.’
Ganzen walked over to the heavy outer door beside the window and palmed the control there. The plug door lifted out then swung aside as the two dragged the woman forwards.
‘Ganzen! No! I can work for you! I can get things from them!’
One of the men cuffed her, then looked guiltily towards Ganzen, who gave him a stern look. Jonas felt sick. They had obviously been instructed not to beat her senseless because he wanted her conscious for what was to ensue. They shoved her into the space between doors, but she wasn’t going easily and kept throwing herself out again.
‘Fuck it,’ said Ganzen. ‘Atres, stick her.’
The mercenary presumably of that name took a shock stick out of his belt and this time when they forced her into the space he jabbed her with it. The thing contacted with a crackle and left her shuddering on the floor. Ganzen set the door closing but apparently the shock had not quite been enough. She tried to get out again. Jonas saw her hand as she ridiculously tried to stop the door closing, her shouting turning to a scream as the door thumped home with a sickening crunch. As it locked into place a mess of blood and mashed flesh squeezed out at one point of the rim and dropped to the floor.
Ganzen worked the control again, this time opening the inner door. He turned away as that door began to open, obviously annoyed, and moved round to look through the window. The hooder was up like a cobra about to strike, its hood directed towards that opening door. It abruptly dipped and shot over, its head end disappearing out of sight behind the door and wall on that side. The woman started screaming in sheer raw terror, then the hooder moved abruptly and Jonas saw her sail through the air, arms and legs wind-milling, to land in the centre of the enclosure. Only when she shouldered into the rubbery surface and scrabbled up again did Jonas see the blood squirting from where her right arm had been crushed away below the centre of her forearm. Terror still drove her, for she scrambled for the other side of the enclosure as far away from the hooder as she could get. There she sat making a horrible keening sound.
‘What’s it fucking doing?’ said Ganzen.
‘It’s trying to find a way out,’ Jonas replied.
The sound of the creature scrabbling in the door opening came over the sound system, but also through that door. It sounded like someone taking power tools to stone. Abruptly Jonas felt his skin prickling and knew that the thing was scanning the doorway, but fortunately no one else seemed to notice. Perhaps other physical effects, like excitement and perhaps abhorrence, were overriding it. But then something happened that there was no way of hiding. A loud thump resounded and a wave of pinkish light escaped the doorway within the enclosure. Jonas froze for a second, then glanced to the exit from the laboratory.
‘What the hell?’ said Ganzen.
Jonas thought fast. Maybe the thing would get through that door, though he suspected the technology growing within its body had not reached sufficient maturity. If it got through he would run, now Hoskins had moved away from him to try and see more of what the hooder was doing. If it did not he needed an explanation.
‘You fucking let her in there with a weapon!’ he exclaimed, all anger and offence as he stood up, though he stood up so as to more quickly get to the exit from here.
Ganzen looked round and stared at him, then transferred his attention to the two that had brought the woman in here.
‘We scanned her and physically searched her,’ said Atres. ‘No way she had anything on her.’
The hooder now backed out of the doorway. Ganzen stepped forwards and hit the control again, closing that inner door. Jonas nodded confirmation to himself. Whatever the hooder had used it wasn’t yet strong enough to break the creature out. He moved round his consoles and closer to the window.
‘You could have damaged it,’ he said, still apparently angry, but less so now. ‘But they are tough creatures and it seems okay.’
Ganzen gestured to his consoles. ‘Go back and check.’
Jonas nodded, all serious, and headed back. But he did not like the suspicion in Hoskins’ expression as the man watched him. He sat down and called up scanning images of the hooder in motion. They were current, but he and Caster had created a filter program so they showed nothing of the new growths inside it. Then he looked up into the enclosure.
The woman still crouched, bleeding out onto the floor. She was whimpering now, her eyes wide as she stared at the approaching hooder. Jonas felt a clench in his guts as he recognised something there: that utter disbelief in what was happening to one, even while it was happening. But surely, her in an envirosuit and being a totally different prey to everything thus far provided, the hooder would kill and ingest her quickly?
It rose up before her, then came down on her as she raised her arms to defend herself, then up again with her dangling, like a cat with a mouse. With her legs kicking and her screams sounding hollow in that hood, it turned her to the centre of the floor, and dropped her. She hit the ground on her back, turned over and tried to crawl away. The hood came down again. It didn’t cover her completely like and adult hood – her arms legs and head lay clear. She screamed in utter agony and thrashed for at least two minutes.
‘Motherfucker,’ said the mercenary who was not Atres.
Jonas looked at him, and then at them all. There was no sympathy there, no empathy. They were watching with horribl
e fascination and relish. He turned back as the tone of the screaming changed. The hood had come up again and she was crawling again, all the skin and muscle of her back stripped away to the bone. Watching her contemplatively, it waited until she neared the wall, came down and took her up again. This time it worked on her in mid-air, before dropping her. Jonas gaped in horror. I had stripped her skull down to the bone and she was still alive. And it had left her eyes. She crawled, slower now, and then like a cat tired of the game it came down on her and really went to work. Her screaming stopped a few minutes later and thereafter they just heard the sounds of feeding.
In utter silence now they all watched as it stripped her down, cutting up the pieces and feeding them into its vertical maw. It even ate her clothing and started hoovering up the blood and fragments that had escaped it. Finally Gazen turned away from the window. He appeared replete, satisfied, his eyes half closed with closely remembered pleasure.
‘Harsh indeed,’ said Hoskins.
‘I don’t like spies,’ said Ganzen. He sighed, turned to Jonas. ‘Check the creature has not been harmed and do whatever needs doing to keep it healthy.’ He headed for the exit, the others falling in beside them.
As Jonas watched them go he noted that Ganzen, like the previous two times he had visited, no longer had his tiger with him. Perhaps he no longer considered it such an exciting pet now he had something to replace it? Jonas shook himself, feeling numb, aware that his ’factor had been pumping more drugs into him. He stood up from the console and stared at the hooder. A species of disappointment had risen in him. He had hoped for something other than the horrible lengthy death it had given. Turning to the door he reached down and detached the drug ’factor and pocketed it. He was done for the day.
The shakes and the vomiting hit him in the night long after he finished his latest conversation with Caster – mostly because he simply did not want to talk, not because of the increasing malfunction of his aug. She had seen it all too, and he wondered if she had a ’factor pumping calming chemicals into her all the while. Never thought to ask.
After his second round of vomiting and the feeling of just sheer awfulness, he contemplated putting the ’factor back on. He then thought again about that woman in the enclosure and knew that he had to have his mind at the best it could be, and for that he needed to be free of the thing. Justifiable paranoia was also involved because he would be unsurprised if the factor did not have some kind of tracer in it, and some way of knocking him out. Sleep finally took him again and when he woke in the morning it was to a deep depression, even so, after washing and eating he found that beginning to dissipate. His own body was fighting it as was his own nanosuite because it too balanced neurochem, just with more subtlety than the ’factor.
When he returned to the lab the hooder was waiting by the glass, observing him. He nodded to it, as if to a work associate, then went to his console to check unfiltered scans and set the feeding routine running again. The creature seemed to have returned to being voracious and he could not help thinking that it killed the woman the way it had because she was capable of suffering. This led him to thoughts on its form – how perfectly designed it was to extract every last dreg of agony from a victim – and that perhaps the Atheter who had made its kind had been cruel.
Alternating grazers and adding elements to those with composite and metal skeletons, he soon ascertained that the hooder’s internal and external growth had accelerated. It seemed the woman had provided something it had desperately needed, which he tried not to think was pain. Later, when it began to leave parts of its prey scattered about its enclosure, he stopped feeding it and stood up from his consoles to head over to the window. The creature came up to its side of the window too to watch him. He went up to it, face to face, and stared back. Its eyes had turned from orange to red and its carapace was turning obsidian black like those on Masada, though with odd streaks of white here and there. He then turned away and walked over to the outer door through which they had put the woman, and opened it.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Caster – direct into his aug this time, the words slinging shards like broken glass across his inner vision.
‘Checking something,’ he answered offhand.
The door thumped and then oozed out, a thin film of blood, flesh and bone peeling away and hanging there till he brushed it away. Glancing across, he saw that the hooder was now out of sight – almost certainly on the outside of the inner door to its enclosure. As the door on his side swung open he inspected first its inner face then the space within. Both looked burned, and with a weird white frosting over that. Here and there patches of holes had been drilled into ceramal – an impossible task for most living creatures. A hemisphere of ceramal lay on the floor. He stared at it, then reached out and touched the burned material of the nearest surface. It felt odd and he prodded it. The stuff crunched and his finger went in up to the first joint. When he pulled it out flakes fell to the floor.
The realisation hit him as he pressed a foot down on one of those flakes, turning it to granular dust. He considered how he had been feeding it all morning, when he should have been as far away as possible. Time had run out. If the thing could do this it was all but free and he should wait no longer for some undefined point in the future when it supposedly reached its full adolescent size. He stepped back and hit the control, watched the door swing back into place and lock down with a rusty crunching. As he stepped away again the hooder shot back into sight, moving fast, violently. It came up to the glass and hammered against it, and this seemed to reflect in his aug with internal vision of menus disappearing in a kaleidoscope flash of migraine optics. He could not help but feel it had expected him to let it out, and was now angry that he had not. It retreated then and ran a couple of circuits of the enclosure, while Jonas moved around the lab, collecting up two items he had made and just left amidst the other tools he had scattered around the area. Into the end of the cylinder he inserted a chainglass knife handle first and locked it down, before sliding the cylinder into his sleeve.
Surely now…
Doubts came and sat on his shoulder. He gazed back at the hooder as it came up against the glass again, felt intense scan once more and stepped back. The hooder did not hammer this time, just moved the underside of its hood close to the glass. A thump resounded and the whole window turned white. A moment later a whitened inner lamination of chainglass fell to dust. The thing had just decoded it. He walked backwards to the exit, horrible fascination slowing his steps. Now that wave of pink fire spread across the glass from its hood, and another lamination turned blue then crazed into hexagonal fragments. Another lamination, probably sapphire.
‘We go now,’ he said to Caster, then turned and ran for the door from his lab.
‘Really,’ she replied. ‘You think?’
Jonas jerked the door open and stepped out, straight into the path of Hoskins.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Hoskins asked, gazing at him with almost tired contempt. The man had looked at him like this many times before. He was their pet scientist who had been sufficiently subdued into obedience. He wasn’t an ex-ECS soldier now working as a mercenary. Jonas walked straight at him, dropping the cylinder out of his sleeve into his hand and drove the sharp end into his face – the chainglass blade going straight into Hoskins’ eye. The impact initiated the charge in the in the cylinder and the thing crackled in the man’s face spitting out smoke. When Jonas pulled it out Hoskins dropped bonelessly to the floor. Jonas stepped over him and ran, the cylinder whining up to charge again. This had been something he and Caster had discussed. What the likes of Hoskins tended to neglect, was that you didn’t get to live for a hundred and seventy years without learning something of violence.
As he rounded a turning at the end of the corridor a great crash resounded from the lab. He glanced back as a wall of energy, like glowing pink fog, burst out of the corridor leading to the lab. It hit the wall and spread down towards him, but more diffuse
now. He turned and ran, but not fast enough. A sizzling meniscus swept over him, picking him up off the floor with his legs kicking in the air. It transmitted a shock through his body, as if every bone in it had been hit with a hammer, then discarded him. He scrabbled on the floor trying to get his limbs working as debris and smoke exploded into the corridor behind, got to his feet and staggered on, gradually regaining control. The utter certainty that the hooder had broken free and was now behind him, gave him the edge he needed and he ran again.
Following a route he had rehearsed in his mind many times before, he ran faster than he had thought himself capable. Yes, he was terrified of what lay behind him, but also shivering with a weird excitement. However, every time he had taken this route in his mind he hadn’t thought too much about the contingencies. He had reached Caster and thereafter they had followed through their escape plan. In none of those imaginings had he run straight into four heavily-armed mercenaries. He skidded to a halt as they raised their weapons and moved forwards.
‘We have to… we have to –’ he began, wanting to get them running too.
One of them stepped right up to him, grabbed him and slammed him against the wall, armoured hand round his neck like a docking clamp. One of the other three reached up to touch a control at his collar.
