Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  They returned at the same time as the previous evening. Eight Qell. Six Nzaghi. And the creature that El Silencioso had explained was a symbiont, all led to the village by Hue.

  That afternoon, El Silencioso had answered Hue’s question: “The Qell communicate by dance and ultrasonics. We communicate by scent and fur-patterns. The symbiont provides the interface between the species. The connection is at the base of the cranium.”

  “Like a cyberjack,” Hue commented.

  “Exactly. Without symbionts, there is no communication between Nzaghi and Qell. The queen’s tendril has evolved, to connect with a nerve, at the base of your neck, there.” It showed him. “Not every Nzaghi is suitable. I’m not. Maybe you could be joined. You might even live.”

  “Why tell me all this now?” he had asked El Silencioso.

  “You asked me.”

  “That was days ago.”

  “But still the question was asked. I owe you much, and answers may pay some debts.” El Silencioso spoke increasingly fluently, but sometimes still without meaning, Hue decided.

  Many questions remained unanswered. And would remain so, Hue thought, leading the patrol to his house. He’d walked over the headland and approached the nearest aliens.

  “We need medicines and food,” Hue explained sheepishly, wishing he felt better about his betrayal.

  “I understand,” El Silencioso said as they led it out, an Nzaghi flanking it on each side, fur dappling in furious exchanges. El Silencioso lunged, and pushed one of its guards, brandishing the gun it had taken earlier from under Hue’s bed.

  It bolted for freedom, and someone screamed as a shot rang out; one of the patrol slumped. Lasers lanced across the square in response.

  El Silencioso fired again; the symbiont’s larger head jerked back, then it flopped to the ground.

  Lasers flashed again; El Silencioso staggered and dropped, the smell of searing flesh drifting in the evening breeze.

  Hue ran to the fugitive first. He turned it over, though he knew it was dead.

  “I’m sorry,” Hue whispered, closing the alien’s eyes. He turned toward the symbiont, pushing through its colleagues.

  “This creature is dying,” another Nzaghi said. “We must connect the host to another.”

  “Are you volunteering?” Hue asked.

  “We are unsuitable,” the alien replied. “We will take too long to return. It will die.”

  “What if you connected it to me?” Hue surprised himself. Does the need to heal run so very deep?

  “You?”

  “Me.” Hue added, “Theoretically, it’s possible.”

  “You,” it said, “are too old. And you are needed to perform the operation.”

  “You’ll have to patch a comm-link to your ship, to talk me through the operation. We still need a host.”

  “That one,” the Nzaghi said. The Qell circled José.

  “Impossible!”

  “If you refuse, we will destroy the village,” the creature said.

  “If we agree, can we have more drugs? More medicines?” You can’t do this!

  “We do not barter.” The alien’s voice was flat. “You must co-operate.”

  But if you don’t, the whole village dies!

  Emilio shook his head., “God forgive us.”

  “Oh, I hope so,” Hue agreed. “José, will you help me be a doctor?” The boy nodded and Hue thought, Call me Judas.

  “No!” Martin gripped his arm so tight Hue thought it might snap, but Hue managed to prise Martin’s fingers loose. “You mustn’t do this!”

  “Then tell me how, Martin!” Hue hissed. “Tell me how I save these people!”

  “We can fight them!”

  “With what, boy? Sticks? Rocks? Against those things?”

  Martin whispered, “You did this. You brought them here.” His head dropped.

  Hue thought, I’m sorry I couldn’t save your mother, Martin. He turned to the alien: “Set up a comm-link. I’ll need guidance.”

  “Agreed.”

  Hue held out the mask they brought, and José put it on. Hue’s world narrowed to a tunnel containing only him, José and the Nzaghi. Instruments seemed to materialise from thin air. His hands became slick with his sweat and José’s blood. Snick; sever the vestigial link between the Qell Queen, an ugly flaccid thing limply waving around for a new home. He felt his gorge rise, but forced it down. Cut, the incision either side of the medulla oblongata, careful of the braceiocephalic artery, Hue, we don’t want to damage him and the waving tendril forcing its way in with his assistance, enzymes from the tendril bonding with the boy’s vestibulocochlear nerves. Hopefully, the Qell can fire signals up the fibres to the brain. And God help him, if the enzymes damage him, or the boy’s immune system rejects the truly alien tissue.

  “I don’t know if this is going to work,” Hue said.

  “It must,” The Nzaghi said. “This is an honour for your species.”

  “Enough for you treat us like civilised beings?” Hue asked.

  “Perhaps,” the alien said. “It will be a start. If the boy lives he will be an ambassador.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled,” Hue closed the incision and stitched it.

  “What he feels is irrelevant. It is –”

  “– necessary. Yes, I think we understand. Now he must sleep.”

  His tunnel world opened, and Hue noticed the intent way the onlookers watched them.

  “He can sleep while travelling with us,” the alien said.

  José’s eyes opened. “Mar. Tin,” he gasped. Hue thought what looked out was already not wholly human, but perhaps that was imagination.

  “Here, little brother.” Martin stroked José’s forehead.

  “Be…not…fear, for me.”

  The Nzaghi lifted José into the transport, and Martin wrapped his arms around his aunt’s shoulders.

  The flyer lifted off in near silence.

  Hue’s hands shook in reaction from having to hold them steady. He had thought that nothing could be worse than when Tranh died, than when he passed the corpses lying in ditches on his long walk south from Barcelona. He knew now that he had been wrong.

  Hue bowed his head, unable to meet the villagers’ eyes.

  Martin spat at his feet, and turned his aunt around, so that their backs faced Hue.

  Emilio cleared his throat: “Martin was right. You brought them here. From now on, you live apart.”

  One after the other, the villagers turned their backs on him.

  “Six days,” Hue spoke into the wind. “And I’m already half-crazy with boredom.” And loneliness. He watched the ship that had hovered over the village all morning. It was like watching a mountain clamber into the sky when it eventually ascended. “They carry on as if nothing has happened,” he murmured. He ate the bread they villagers left him at dawn. They wouldn’t let him starve. They might need him yet.

  He heard a noise, but didn’t turn around.

  “The aliens visited us,” a familiar voice said. “They offered to take the children. For education, they said.” He spat the words, “for a fresh start. I suppose you were right,” his visitor said. “We won’t beat them with sticks or rocks.”

  Hue turned around, surprised. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Martin stared at him, his expression unreadable – it might have been hate, or it might not. “Teach me to read,” he said.

  Sussed

  Keith Brooke

  I walk up Central High, head tucked down, collar turned up against the drizzle, face hidden as far as possible from the cams and the goons. All around, people jostle and harry, places to go, things to do, while the streetsellers hawk noodles and innoculations, and cars and bikes cut paths through the bustle.

  I reach the Slash, the crowds thinner here. To left and right there’s a clear swathe bisecting the city, buildings cut clean through, the ground burnt to black glass. Kids ride boards among the ruins, and cars use the Slash as a throughway as if it had been part of so
me radical act of urban planning and not a war wound, a vast particle-beam burn from the heavens.

  I head left, the Slash offering the most direct route towards the transit depot. I have a ticket out of here, a settler’s permit for some backwater planet something like fifty light-years away from the war zone, a fresh start.

  All I have to do is reach the depot in one piece.

  I dip my head. The gel-refits have rewritten my facial geometry enough to fool any pattern-matching programs scanning the cam feeds, but I don’t have anything that would get me past one of Geno’s goons with a DNA sniffer.

  I pass a four-storey office block sliced in half by the Reps’ beam strike. Teenagers sit on the cut-off floors, legs dangling, watching. It feels as if everyone is watching out for me.

  I keep walking.

  I stand in line. The depot is a big hangar of a building, thrown up overnight about a month ago to process the exodus. The lines of emigrants rank deep across the departures hall, maybe fifty queues in all.

  The man ahead of me wears Jensen shades and a sharp tailored suit. Like everyone else, he has no luggage. We will leave this world naked, our only possessions those that can be liquidated and wired ahead in a data-feed. The air is heavy with cologne and perfume, and mingled scents of fear and relief.

  Two queues up, voices suddenly rise. An arm flaps, hands point, and security goons close in.

  “But it’s clean!” cries the woman, as one of the guards takes her arm. “I’m in the feed, man. I tell you, I’m in the feed!”

  Maybe. Maybe not. She could be trying to scam her way on. It could be that she had been on the feed but then someone with better credit and more favours to pull in had knocked her out of the queue.

  Two goons haul her away, still protesting, even though she must know that no matter how good her case she could never get back on the feed by arguing with two meat-head security guards.

  It takes about an hour, and then Jensen-shades is at the desk, submitting himself to ret-scan, DNA sniffing, voice check. He removes his wraparounds for the scan and leaves them on the desk. He won’t be taking them with him. The transit clerk takes the shades, pockets them, smiles, waves the guy through.

  Now it’s me. I nod, smile. I don’t have any bribes with me, I’m just a guy in a stolen Swank suit. A cam profiles me. I’ve removed the gel-refits for this: now I have to pass as me to match the ticket credentials. It’s a risk, but by now I have to trust that I’m so far ahead of Geno that I’m safe.

  The clerk smiles back, indicates the reader and so I swipe my wristchip across it as I lean into the ret-scan, let it ID me as a pin-prick probe samples DNA from the skin on my temple.

  This is where it could all go wrong. This is where you could really begin to see the consequences of crossing the guy who owns half of this fucking planet and then having the balls to un-glue his network and use his own credentials to buy your ticket out of here.

  The clerk looks bored, reading columns of check-lists being fed to him via a retinal projector. Yeah yeah yeah. Check check check. My booking is clean, my credit good, my itinerary standard. I made sure it would look that way. I am good at what I do.

  At the next desk a guy in baggy joggers and a feathered fleece says, “But that can’t be right… No, really, it can’t…”

  I glance across at him, but dodge eye contact. Someone, somewhere isn’t going to get out of here because I am. Is it him, maybe?

  “My wife… My kids… They’ve gone ahead. We’re all on the feed. There’s been a mistake.”

  Outside there’s gunfire, but nobody reacts. There’s a war going on. Attacks from the Republic above, all kinds of factions fighting here on the planet, including rumoured Rep infiltration units and sympathisers.

  My clerk is talking, gesturing. “All clear, Mr Chan. Please proceed to Processing.”

  I nod. I smile. I walk past the desk, and away from the only world I have ever known.

  I follow my arrow as it flashes on the floor a stride ahead of me, while others follow theirs. It takes me along a corridor to a side-room containing maybe a hundred suspods, each sensuously curved coffin-like pod moulded from some bulbous pearlescent material. A dozen or so people mill about in here, mostly travellers with a couple of techs.

  Once filled, the pods will be transported to the voidships and loaded like blobby frogspawn into the ships’ holds for their journeys to the stars.

  My arrow takes me to a suspod halfway along the far wall and then vanishes. The pod’s screen displays my name. Following the screen’s instructions, I place my palm on the reader and the pod’s lid gives with a slight sigh of escaping gases.

  I step back and the lid lifts, flipping sideways to reveal its fleshy interior.

  A tech approaches, nods towards me and the pod. “Time to get naked,” she says.

  I shrug, pull at my Swanks and feel the fabric relaxing away from my body. I step out of the collapsed suit and kick my pumps off my feet.

  The tech appraises me, then stoops to gather my discarded clothes. She’ll get a few bucks for them. One of the perks.

  I turn back towards the suspod.

  “You sussed before, mister?” the tech asks.

  I shake my head, aware of her eyes on my skinny backside.

  “Just climb in, okay? Relax into it. You good?”

  I step up, gingerly place a foot in the pod, feel warm flesh closing over my toes.

  “It’s wet,” I say, suddenly nervous.

  “Keeps your skin good,” says the tech.

  I put my weight on the half-enwrapped foot, feel the pod’s interior give a little, and then step in, both feet.

  I sit, feel moist flesh sliding around my legs, my balls, my waist.

  “Go on.”

  I lie back.

  The sensation of flesh growing up around me is unlike anything I’ve ever known or imagined. The physical sensations of warmth, skin on skin, moisture, the salty, meaty scents… like a primal womb-memory, like sex, like a child’s self-discovery. The swirling mix of sensuous envelopment, of wrongness, of fear – being smothered, immersed, drowned…

  The tech swings the suspod’s lid over me, and it hangs just short of closing. I’m suddenly in semi-darkness, and the feelings of panic surge to the fore.

  And then… subside.

  The lid closes softly, and I am in a pearly half-light, my body enwrapped, my face not quite touching the lid’s interior.

  Calm.

  I know the pod is doing this. Passing soporifics through my skin and into my blood, soothing me with the mix of the air that I breathe.

  Flesh touches my cheeks, the bridge of my nose, my forehead. Moistness spreads up my nostrils, as fleshy tendrils probe me. I experience a sudden tightening as something slides down my trachea.

  I stop breathing.

  I am fully enclosed, at one with my pod… drifting… suspended.

  Everything would have carried on being fine with Geno if his sister Elsa hadn’t come back from Earth, and if Elsa didn’t have a bit of a thing going on for Chinese code monkeys.

  I’d been with Geno’s organisation for five years, head-hunted from a gang running a banking scam on the back of stolen wristchips. I’m not so much a coder as a code-fixer: I understand other people’s code. I see what needs fixing, and I see the holes left if things aren’t fixed. Geno needs people like me: we can either protect or attack, depending on circumstances.

  When the war with the Reps came close enough that our planet was exposed to occasional raids, Geno needed people like me even more. In my time with Geno I’ve worked with state military programmers on safety-netting our orbiting defence sats, I’ve bred bidding agents to help reshape the global economy, I’ve run security bit-checks on the surgeons hired to give Geno his latest lift or tuck. Often all before lunch.

  And, of course, I fell for his knockout baby sister with her Earth-sophisticated ways and her smooth skin and her soft spot for geeky Chinks.

  It all came to a head six days before my
departure.

  I was working with Joni Garval, leader of a gang of street vigilantes, sowing stories in the media feeds about one of the rival gangs, the Fraternity of Zeal. The Fratz had been gaining the upper hand in some territorial run-ins with Joni’s mob, but it turned out Joni had some favours to call in with Geno, which is how I became involved.

  My role was to design some spin agents to plant stories that the Fratz were being armed by Republican infiltrators. The attack that left the capital marked with the Slash was still fresh in people’s minds, so any taint of the Rep was about as damaging in terms of brand management as you could get.

  And so it was that I was waiting in one of Joni’s safe-houses for a quiet little rendezvous with Elsa when instead of my girl with a suck like a thirsty camel I saw Geno standing alone in the doorway. Geno doesn’t need to be lined by goons to be intimidating. He has presence. And even when he appears to be alone, you just know that a single wrong move and his goons will be all over you in a blink.

  “Geno,” I said.

  “Cozy,” he replied. “Very cozy, Chan. It’ll never last. You hear? You think you’re in love? You think she is?”

  I stood facing him, my hands spread. “We’re just having some fun, Geno,” I told him, trying to keep the pleading out of my tone.

  “So you don’t love her?” Geno asked now. He waved a hand across the room. “All this, and you don’t love her?”

  “I…” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I felt and I didn’t know how to handle this situation. The one thing I did know is that Geno would have me trapped whatever line I took.

  “I make her smile, Geno. I like that I do that.”

  For a moment, I thought he was going to soften, but then he said, “You touch her again, Chan. You so much as look at her. You do that and you’re atoms. You hear? You’ve seen what happens to people who try to cross me, haven’t you? Don’t ever cross me, you hear?”

  I heard. I nodded. I watched Geno go, and then, quietly, I got my coat and walked out into the street.

  Five days before my departure, I walked back up to my apartment with its view out over the harbour. I palmed the door and walked through into the living room and Elsa was there, stretched back in the love seat, tall glass of fizz cradled in her hands, and a snatch-your-breath-away smile across her face.