Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘So what did you do to Dr Giggles?’

  The question sounded utterly reasonable, but the vicious anger written in Ganzen’s expression overrode that. Jonas coughed, tried to get his voice working.

  ‘No… thing,’ he finally managed.

  ‘So you did it.’ He had turned his attention to Caster. ‘You will tell me the hack you used or things will start to get really bad for you.’

  ‘Like they aren’t going to anyway.’

  Jonas understood Giggles must still be operating, but even if the robot was he could not see it going up against the hardware in this chamber and surviving.

  ‘There is that,’ said Ganzen. He jetted closer, grabbing Caster’s suit then slicing something down the front, splitting it open. She managed a weak yell and beads of blood floated through the air. He then reached over and snared Jonas, who now saw the short vibro-blade. He felt the hot slice of it down his front but, by the length of the blade knew this had not been to kill, merely to open their suits. Pushing back, Ganzen pulled a bead blast stun gun from his belt. Jonas began trying to force some movement into his limbs. He managed to reach up and press the control to open his visor and hood.

  ‘What do you want with us now?’ he asked, just to say anything, just to delay the man from using that weapon.

  ‘What do you think I want?’ said Ganzen. ‘You’ve fucked my operation here. The world of pain you are going to enter when we’re away from here is going to be legendary. I may let you die. In a few years.’

  Jonas groped in the pocket of his envirosuit. Ganzen was watching him closely so he didn’t try to hide what he was doing. He simply took out his aug, raised it to the socket in his skull and plugged it in.

  ‘Those agents on Moloch Three aren’t going to help you,’ the man said.

  The lights crashed on in his skull – the fractals forever folding into each other. He pushed for connection and the broken crystal patterns seem to explode out of his skull into his surroundings. Maybe he was calling his own death, maybe not, but he was definitely calling. The patterns shifted, bringing the mercenaries and Ganzen into relief, highlighted. He just thought about their situation here, about dying and pain and what lay in store for them, packing as much detail into the narrative as possible, hoping for something to get through. He felt sure of an acknowledgement, and a weird hissing delight in purpose. The patterns folded again and retreated into his mind – a whirling core.

  ‘No, they won’t help me,’ he said to Ganzen. ‘But maybe something will.’

  ‘The fuck,’ said Ganzen. He looked around. A keening teeth-aching vibration had started up and everything seemed to distort. Light flashed and one of the mercenaries simply exploded as a lightning-bright beam stabbed through him, straight across the chamber to nail another one of them. The thing then cut across, slicing through machinery in a fog of vaporised metal, chopped another in half, then flickered out. Angle of firing difficult, Jonas understood, as the patterns ground their way into his mind. A moment later the pink wall of energy slammed in from the side. Hurled mercenaries and debris across the chamber, picked up Ganzen, Jonas and Caster too and flattened them against the far wall. Then the hooder exploded into view.

  Those of the mercenaries that could, opened fire on it, but their shots just disappeared into a shimmering surface passing down its length. Jonas felt its playfulness as it coiled, smacked its tail into one of them and smeared him across twenty feet of wall. It reached down and grabbed another in its hood, peeled him as if he was being run through a lathe, then discarded him skinless and screaming.

  You are cruel, Jonas thought.

  Seemingly in response to that, the bright beam stabbed out once, twice and turned two more to burning fragments. Then Ganzen was on him, pulse gun jammed up under his chin.

  ‘Stop it! Make it stop!’

  The beam flickered and flashed again and the last of those in the chamber who had not managed to flee became drifting clouds of burning debris.

  ‘I’ll burn your fucking face off!’

  Jonas hiccupped a laugh, then found it difficult to stop. The man pressed closer to him as the hood rose up before them, as if proximity might save him. Jonas felt the trigger go down and just didn’t really care, but nothing happened. The gun tumbled away and Ganzen pulled the vibro-knife, blade extending, then he just jerked away from Jonas, drifting back towards that hood, kicking and stabbing at the air. The hooder closed its sickle limbs around him and took him down.

  ‘We’re too… late,’ said Caster.

  He looked over at her. She pushed herself away from the wall, reached up and opened her visor and helmet. Dark circles round her eyes and blood on her lips.

  ‘The hooder… the energies it used. Moloch Three has fired that missile,’ she told him.

  Jonas pushed away too and caught hold of her arm. He looked down at the hooder where it had pinned Ganzen, the man kicking and screaming as the thing did what hooders did. It had responded to him calling it cruel and now he felt sure it was responding to his feelings about Ganzen, and killing the man slowly.

  ‘Send detail on that to my aug,’ he said.

  She blinked and he certainly felt something arrive, though it dissolved in the swirling patterns in his mind before he could grasp it. He didn’t know if it would do them any good, but he had to try.

  The hooder abruptly jerked up, sending Ganzen tumbling across the chamber. He was making a horrible gobbling sound. The thing had stripped him down – his ribs and the musculature of his face exposed, a thread of intestine trailing him. The creature swung up towards them and Jonas wondered if, time being limited, it intended to give them their portion of pain. He felt a force grab him and tow him out into the centre of the chamber with Caster beside him. The hood of the creature came up close to them and that force pushed them together, even rearranged their limbs so they were wrapped around each other. Then its body coiled in all around them, enclosing them in a sphere consisting of segments and legs and the underside of its hood facing in, only a few feet away from them. He saw through gaps between the coils of its body, but as through distorting glass for some kind of energy field shimmered there. He could still see Ganzen kicking weakly through the air, then everything whited out. A moment later came a wrench, light glaring in so brightly he could feel it burning his face. He turned away, the wrench becoming a deep twist he felt in his bones, and at last recognised as a sensation he had felt many times before when a space ship dropped into U-space. The glare waned and he looked out again and saw that somehow they were surfing a wave of fire and debris out into vacuum. Then they slid beyond it and now he could see Moloch Three in the distance and the huge explosion nearby. The ball of fire expanded outwards, filled with chunks of debris and molten materials, then it stuttered to a halt and collapsed back, growing ever brighter as it collapsed down the intense gravity slope the imploder had created. The bright point then exploded again – a fusion blast expanding another ball of fire, but this one consisting only of disassociated atoms and hard radiation.

  ‘And that’s the Fist gone,’ said Caster.

  Her face was close to his, he felt her breath on his cheek.

  ‘And now what?’ he wondered, unable to feel much emotion now, overloaded.

  The hooder began to uncoil around them and his apparent lack of care quickly faded. Though it had contained air around them, vacuum lay beyond and Ganzen had split open both of their envirosuits. In his mind the patterns kept shifting as if the thing was talking to him, but the language meant nothing. Abruptly the loosening sphere rolled, bringing an object into view: a simple bullet shape, thrusters burning at the back and that went out even as he saw them. The hooder descended towards it and thumped against its side, rolled around to bring and airlock into view between its coils.

  ‘I’m struggling to believe this,’ said Caster, as the force holding them together came off and they pushed apart.

  She kicked against the hooder’s body to send her to th
e airlock and worked the touch panel. A moment later Jonas followed her. He caught hold of the back of her suit as she opened the outer door. From there he looked back into the underside of the creature’s hood, at those columns of red eyes and in his mind the patterns shifted, then began folding back into each other and winking out. Perhaps he was anthropomorphising the feeling of disappointment coming through and the feeling that its attention was turning away from him, reaching out elsewhere, searching.

  He followed Caster into the airlock. They pulled the door closed and sealed it. His ears popped as pressure came up to standard. They pulled close together to peer through the narrow chainglass window as the hooder rolled away from the escape pod and uncoiled further. It straightened up then writhed across vacuum as if its feet had some purchase on nothing, waves of light ran down its body and it seemed to stretch out to infinity, walking across space, then disappeared in a pink flash.

  ‘Where has it gone?’ Caster asked.

  Without a doubt Jonas replied, ‘In search of its real masters. It won’t find them.’

  They turned to the inner door where she worked the controls. It would be crowded in the pod, but the journey back to Moloch Three was short. There, he had no doubt, the Polity agents would grab the both of them. They would face lengthy interrogations about these events, and probably some kind of punishment.

  But they were alive, so there was that.

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