Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘You’re one of the Polity agents who were chasing me?’ he asked, so she knew.

  >Well spotted. Twenty points.

  ‘Why are you talking to me now?’

  >We’ve been throwing messages at all aboard the Fist for the last six hours, but only now has Ganzen’s blocking gone down. I felt beholden to contact you, and warn you.

  ‘Warn me about what?’

  >You have less than an hour to get off that ship, maybe not even that much time.

  ‘What?’

  >Well, it seems that having an alien biomech war machine activate within its station was enough to wake up the Moloch Three AI. And it’s woken up tetchy. It ejected the ship you are aboard, incidentally tearing up half of Porrit town in the process, and now intends to neutralise the threat with a CTD imploder. It’s obviously quite anxious, or peeved about the situation, since it appears to have loaded a gigaton warhead.

  ‘How far are we from the station?’ Caster interjected.

  >Who’s this… ah, Caster Neamuller. You’re eighty miles out. The AI will hit you at a hundred miles even though that’ll cause some damage here, and may hit you earlier if that thing you have aboard looks to be getting out of the ship.

  ‘We only have envirosuits,’ she said.

  >Doesn’t really matter what you’re wearing. You need to get clear in an ejection pod as it seems most of the surviving Ganzen staff are doing.

  Caster caught hold of his shoulder and gestured ahead. ‘I’ve got it mapped.’

  Jonas tried to access the station map but got nowhere. Meanwhile it seemed the Polity agent had no more to say.

  They threw themselves onward, breaking the gecko stick of their boots, grabbing and propelling themselves forwards using rungs on the corridor walls provided for just this purpose. Back in towards the centre of the ship through another corridor brought them to a drop shaft, a fire burning down at one end. They went up it in the opposite direction, tracked along another corridor to another of the exterior ones. Along here, bulkhead doors interspersed the square ports. Beside each door a red light glared, which indicated what they could see through the ports: that the escape pods here were all gone. Jonas swore.

  ‘Try the network again,’ he said. ‘My aug is screwed.’

  She gave him a puzzled look then frowned in concentration.

  ‘Patchy now, but I’m getting a link to Moloch Three,’ she said. More frowning then, ‘Time series program giving me release of the escape pods. Yeah, got it. I know where there are some left.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  ‘Someone’s following us,’ she said, indicating with a nod the corridor behind him.

  Jonas looked back. Smoke misted the long curve of the corridor here and many of the lights had dropped to a dull red glow. But peering through this he could see a figure coming fast, frog leaping from wall to wall. He felt a sinking sensation – that looked like someone in power armour and though they had their weapons he could not see how they stood a chance. They propelled themselves on.

  ‘In!’ Caster shouted, gesturing to the next turning, and they went through towards another drop shaft and hurled themselves into that. Intermittent grav from below began to tug them down so they grabbed the ladder up the side.

  ‘Up,’ she said, and they climbed fast – the grav effect feeling less than a quarter terran normal. As Caster went through an exit he looked down. Coming fast up the shaft the figure did not look like a human bulked out by power armour, and something was wrong about the shape of its head. It then passed one of the lights set in the side of the shaft and he got a much clearer look. Dr Giggles was coming after them.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Caster.

  They swung into the new corridor – grav at about a half – and ran. Ganzen must be abandoning the ship, he realised, but had first sent Chard to get him, and now Chard had failed he had sent the Doctor. Predictably the man wanted revenge against Jonas who had, effectively, destroyed the heart of Ganzen Combine. As they ran a curve away from the shaft exit, he kept looking back, seeing the robot still pursuing. How had he mistaken that for an armoured man? Too many limbs and it moved more like a spider. He brought up his carbine.

  ‘We go up from here then across,’ she said, and made an attempt to send him a map which he managed to get the gist of before it shattered like a safety screen.

  ‘You realise we’re probably heading towards Ganzen,’ he said. ‘He’ll be at the remaining escape pods.’

  She caught his shoulder, them both coming to a stumbling halt. ‘We’re going nowhere,’ she said.

  His focus had been back towards Giggles – just an awareness of wreckage and a fire burning ahead. He looked properly. The hooder was coming out of a hole in the wall, its hood up and facing them, steadily focused on him, he felt, as the coils of its body oozed out behind, filling up the corridor.

  His mind, frantic in speculation wound down to the horrible conclusion: Giggles coming in from behind and now the hooder ahead. They were dead, and it seemed the only choices remaining were how they died. He reached up and touched the control on his collar, the visor rolling down to the neck ring, the helmet softening then doing the same at the back. Hot vapour in the air tightened his lungs and had him wheezing in a moment. Caster had also shed her head covering and inverted her pulse rifle, lodging it under her chin. He turned away, not wanting to see her kill herself, drew his pulse gun and brought it to the same position. Could he do this? Or would he, like so many before, keep delaying until too late? He gripped the gun tightly, terrified of it being knocked out of his hand, but then the scrabbling sound of Dr Giggles approaching behind initiated a wave of sick anger.

  Jonas abruptly holstered the pulse gun and turned, raising the carbine. Giggles came down the corridor fast, bouncing from wall to wall. It was the nature of the hooder to do the things it did and it was here through no fault of its own. He knew that Giggles was much the same – just made and programmed to be what it was – but he could not dismiss the anger. He feared and detested the robot, yet felt an illogical kinship with the more fearsome creature behind.

  ‘Fuck you! Just fuck you!’ he shouted, and opened fire. A moment later pulse rifle fire punctuated the air along with the air-searing half-seen beam of his weapon.

  Their fire intersected on the Doctor, but the thing was moving too fast for them to hit it for long. He saw a surgical limb flaring and spraying metal droplets, a leg burning and white muscle turning black and peeling, but the robot did not slow. Then something slammed him aside into the corridor wall, a large insect limb hit his chest and the hooder was coming past. On the other side of it Caster fell against the other wall, looking bewildered. A moment later the creature’s tail section passed over his legs. Looking along the corridor he saw the thing knock Giggles down from the wall and, like someone trying to catch a spider in a cupped hand, the hooder bringing its hood down on the robot. But Giggles shot free, bounced against the wall again, then up to cling to the ceiling. Hooder and robot faced each other, hood to hood, then the robot, who must have had some survival instinct programmed in, began scuttling away along the ceiling.

  Jonas had his hand around the grip of his pulse gun, his carbine in his other hand. His mind felt slow for he couldn’t decide which weapon to use on himself. A thump ran through the wall behind him and a vague pink meniscus passed down the corridor, raising sparks from his envirosuit. The main wave he saw went the other way to sweep over the robot and bring it crashing to the floor. Then the hooder was on it, nearly covering the struggling thing.

  ‘Time to go?’ suggested Caster.

  They got up and ran.

  Again grav was out when they took the next drop shaft. Lighting flickered for a while then flipped over to emergency power saving. Jonas suspected a reactor had gone down, but even though the spectrum of the lighting had taken on a blue tint it was more than bright enough – the light panels did not draw a great deal of power and would be amply supplied by subsidiary
generation from meta-material convertors throughout the ship. Light enough to die by.

  Why was he now so utterly sure the hooder had taken its time over Dr Giggles because the robot had been so interesting? And now why, with that curiosity resolved, did he feel so utterly sure it was coming after them? That they, or rather he, had become its intense focus?

  ‘Hopefully it’s found something or someone else to occupy itself back there,’ said Caster, revealing that she felt nothing of what he felt. This seemed to key into his mind and crack open something that should have been obvious but which, on some unconscious level, he had been denying. As they exited the drop shaft and towed themselves through further corridors – it now rare for them to find anywhere grav still operated – he concentrated on his aug feed. His inner vision opened up with kaleidoscope and fractal patterns filling everything. He mentally pushed, groping for deeper connection he could usually obtain through menu selections – for voice, data input feeding into his brain, for virtuality. Then it hit him and he lost control of his limbs, slamming into a wall and drifting limply through the air.

  Hadn’t the supposed malfunction of his aug started directly after the hooder ate its first meal that initiated the changes within it? Hadn’t this malfunction increased when he had supposed it had expected him to let it out of its enclosure? When it was angry? He found himself in a glittering space, distorted imagery falling past him, data like the untranslated feed from an AI directly into his brain. Pain burned in his forehead and he lost perception of his self. And there with him he felt the mental presence of something utterly alien. He tried to understand something he could in no way get a grip on. He felt some vast and callous darkness pulling him apart and on some level knew he was screaming.

  – haitus –

  Jonas came back to himself, flat against a surface, his visor open and Caster pinning him there. He could smell vomit and saw the remains of his last meal drifting away like some airborne amoeba. Gradually he got control of his shaking and managed a nod as she held something up in front of his face: his aug, unplugged from his skull.

  ‘It had to be that,’ she said. ‘Ganzen must have put in a virus or something.’

  She pushed away from him as he got his limbs under control and floated from the wall. He held out his hand and she gave him the aug, which he put in a pocket of his suit.

  ‘No, not Ganzen,’ he said.

  ‘Well what then?’

  ‘The hooder. Right from the start it initiated some connection – probably something automatic. Maybe it assumed I was one of its atheter creators.’ He glanced back the way they had come. ‘Let’s keep going – maybe it can’t find me now.’

  They moved on. Jonas was glad of the lack of grav here because he wasn’t sure if his legs could have supported him. Gradually strength returned and they were travelling quickly again when they began to find the bodies.

  ‘What’s been happening here?’ Caster wondered.

  ‘Ganzen,’ Jonas replied.

  Three bodies were floating in the corridor just ahead. He had noted that two wore Ganzen Combine overalls and one was clad in businesswear. All had been burned either by pulse gun fire or laser. They moved on, pushing the corpses aside, entered a new corridor and found more of the same.

  ‘Why has he been killing his own people?’ Caster asked, then answered her own question. ‘Probably concerned about the number of escape pods or they were just in the way.’ She paused speculatively, then added, ‘None of his mercenaries here.’

  They kept moving, Caster counting down the corridors at each intersection.

  ‘Here,’ she pointed ahead.

  At the end of this corridor, crossed by one of those hooder burrows, lay another of those running around just inside ship’s armour. Here Caster’s very intermittent link back to Moloch Three had told her escape pods were still in place. But when they crossed to the nearest port and looked out they could see none, and red lights glowed all the way down the corridor.

  ‘Can you get an update from Moloch Three?’ he asked.

  ‘Mine seems to be malfunctioning too,’ she replied. ‘Weird fractal patterns. But I still have some data streams.’ She dipped her head and closed her eyes, then after a moment raised it. ‘Every escape pod is gone.’ Her eyes looked glazed as she concentrated on the information. ‘Seems they were leaving intermittently until twenty minutes ago, then every remaining one detached. Wait a minute…’ She grimaced. ‘No, there’s one pod left.’

  ‘Ganzen,’ said Jonas. ‘We’re going to be walking into a trap.’

  It seemed obvious. Ganzen had aug access to the ship’s network, spotty and malfunctioning as it was. He also probably had a link to Giggles, prior to the hooder attacking that robot. He knew where they were and where they were heading. He knew they needed a pod to escape this ship and had sent all but his own out into vacuum so they had no choice but to go there if they wanted to live. Caster nodded at him, asking no questions, she too had worked all this out.

  ‘A pod can fit quite a few people,’ she said.

  ‘And he’ll certainly have those people with him,’ he replied.

  ‘Not normal working stiffs – mercenaries in power armour.’

  ‘We don’t stand a chance.’

  ‘We don’t have a choice.’

  They moved on. Almost certainly there would be a fight, Jonas thought. He would die in that fight rather than let Ganzen capture him. They moved inward again, up a length of dropshaft then back along another corridor linking to one of the hull corridors. Jonas caught hold of Caster’s arm as she moved ahead of him, held a finger to his lips and then crept forwards to peer around the edge. An armoured figure squatted facing him in the corridor. Two other figures were coming behind, and fast. He jerked back as narcotic beads shattered near his face and on the wall to his left. He urgently waved Caster back and they retreated, but that same armoured figure slammed into the wall where his bead shot had hit, denting it, then threw himself towards them. Jonas opened fire with his carbine held in one hand, hit the control to close his visor and hood, then drew his sidearm too. A bead blast hit him square in the chest sending him staggering back just as Caster opened fire. Another bead blast hit her too but by then he realised the beads did not penetrate their envirosuits.

  The mercenary crashed into him, groping for his weapon as he burned into the man’s stomach armour. He rolled with it, thinking to shove the man into the drop shaft, but then realising the stupidity of that now grav was out. Caster came in close, shooting the man in the back, but she got too close when he backhanded her and sent her crashing into the wall. A hand closed on Jonas’s neck – a choke hold – and he knew he could not burn through that armour fast enough. He would be unconscious in a moment or this one’s comrades would be here in a moment. Then, on the edge of unconsciousness, he saw a human hand, skinless, the muscles white, reach round the man’s visor. The visor turned white then collapsed –chainglass decoded – and the hand went inside and immediately turned bloody. The grip on his neck slackened and he kicked away to the sound of screaming. Now he saw Dr Giggles, hand deep inside, the man kicking and flailing then growing limp and discarded in a slew of blood, minced flesh and shattered bone sketched across the air.

  The two others crowded in at the end of the corridor and bead blasts swept the bloody debris from the air. Jonas felt impact after impact on his suit as Caster grabbed his arm and propelled them both towards the drop shaft. He had time to glance back and see Giggles bounce off the wall and slam into the approaching figures – a weird shrieking sound penetrating. In the shaft he got control of his limbs again, realised that despite what had happened he had at least retained his sidearm. Caster, he saw, had lost her pulse rifle. They started to go down but in dim lights below saw another figure enter the shaft, so climbed quickly. A figure appeared above and bead blasts hissed through the air.

  ‘Here!’ Caster moved down past him, pulled a lever freeing a hatch to a maintenance bot tunne
l. She still had access to the station map – or at least he hoped so.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ he asked as they scrambled through the tunnel.

  ‘I have no fucking idea,’ she replied.

  They exited into another shaft and went up. He didn’t need a map to tell him that the next corridor took them to the one the mercenaries had come along. A body tumbling past, its armour torn up like a descaled fish, confirmed this. Weapons fire flashed in the escape pod corridor and looking round the corner they saw Giggles up against the ceiling wrapped around another mercenary and steadily tearing away armour. They started to go in the other direction, but two more mercenaries came stepping towards them on gecko stick. As they fled down the only tunnel available Jonas grimaced at their previous thought about fighting to the pod or dying in the process. Actually coming face to face with people in power armour had a stimulating effect. They passed a turning, but then another figure appeared ahead and they backed up and took it. More turnings, more figures appearing.

  ‘This is directed,’ Caster gasped. ‘We’re being herded.’

  ‘We’ll try for an airlock,’ Jonas said. ‘Maybe we can get clear in time. Maybe there someone out there…’

  Caster just gave him a blank look.

  Figures behind again, side routes blocked, and then they came out, sailing over a railed gangway into a small chamber packed all around with tangled machinery. Some kind of nexus – maybe something to do with the engines or other ship machines. Even as they sailed out to catch one of the looped skeins of optics, Jonas realised they had arrived precisely where someone wanted them to arrive. Caster jerked backwards from him, shuddering through the air with electric discharges crawling over her suit. He reached for his sidearm and was just searching for someone to shoot when the second shot hit him. As he shuddered and jerked through the air he saw Ganzen, propelling himself up from another gangway, and then the rest of his mercenaries coming in.

  He and Caster drifted through the air. Whatever he had hit them with left them weak as if beaten, but had not rendered them unconscious. With a suit steering jet Ganzen slowed to hover before him then moved in close, pulling the sidearm from his hand and tucking it in his belt.