The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “It is murder. Murder has been done here.”

  Hinks nods, the rich smell of slaughter in his nostrils. What else could this be? The Captain lies sprawled across his bunk in a tangle of bloody sheets. Driven up through his groin and into his guts is a spike made of solid glass, like an icicle. But maybe this was not the first cause of his death, since neat as a cylinder his right eye-socket has been reamed out to the back of his skull. Hinks knows the horrible fear of the supernatural. They heard nothing, perhaps a shark soul was loose on this ship.

  “Man overboard!”

  The yell is from above and breaks into their nightmare reverie. Hinks gains some command over himself and pushes the unnamed twin back to the door. What now? Another murder, or a murderer seeking to escape? Past the twin he rushes up on deck. The Barrelman is there leaning over the rail and Pallister is beside him.

  “Who is it?” Hinks asks.

  “I do not know. I do not know.” The Barrelman’s voice is strange, as if surprised at itself.

  “Pallister?”

  “I don’t know, but he is done.” Pallister points to the floating body and to the fin slicing moonlit water just beyond it. Hinks watches the inevitable: the fin disappearing, the body snatched from below.

  “Dead or unconscious when he went in, like as not,” says Pallister, then after glancing to the twin, “or she.”

  “Get the crew on deck, all of them you can find, find that boy if you can, bring them all, bring them all here. Murder has been done. The Captain is dead in his cabin and who knows who the shark took.”

  It takes little time for them all to be roused and assembled as many of them were coming onto the deck as Hinks made his speech. He counts and he appraises. Cheyne and the other twin look flushed. Cook has certainly been sampling the sea apple wine again and the others seem no different from normal. All are here but the boy and the Captain. Hinks wants to be sure, though.

  “I want the ship searched forward to aft, every unsealed barrel checked and every sail locker. Check the crow’s nest as well.” He turns to the Barrelman. “What say you, Barrelman?” The Barrelman shakes his head and goes below to his own kingdom. Cook follows him.

  No boy is found, just as Hinks expected. He speaks with Pallister and Cheyne as allies always and knows a loneliness when he realises he cannot trust even them. In the end he must ask those questions.

  “Pallister, did you throw the boy back into the sea?”

  “As the Book is my witness, Hinks, I did not.”

  Hinks inspects the rest of the crew who stand nervously around. Which one of them? Which of them committed murder? It could be any, even the twin who had him go to the Captain’s cabin might have come from there earlier.

  “Somebody cast the boy into the sea, dead or alive, no difference. Somebody has murdered our Captain.”

  “The boy,” says Pallister. “The shark soul. It killed him and returned to its element.”

  “You talk like a Reader,” spat one of the twins.

  Hinks stares at her. “Which one are you? Tell me now.”

  “I am Jan.”

  The rest of the crew study her carefully. So, Hinks decides, Jan is the one with her hair tied back and Char the one who was bedding Cheyne, this night, anyway.

  “She may be right, Pallister. What matter? If what you say is true then there is no blame or guilt to attach anywhere and I will be glad. But I must be sure.”

  “What are your thoughts?” asks Pallister.

  “I think one of you killed the Captain, and the boy, in disgust,” he gazes at all the crew, “or fear,” he now looks particularly at Pallister. “And the boy was thrown into the sea to bring belief in your story.”

  “It could have been you,” says Jan.

  “Yes, but I know it was not,” says Hinks. “Now you and Pallister will come with me and we will once again view the body before it is passed on to the Barrelman. The rest of you prepare sail for the morning wind. We head directly for Piezel.”

  “What weapon is this?” Pallister braces his foot against the Captain’s groin and tries to pull the spike from him. His hands slip along the glassy surface. “Too deeply imbedded, perhaps in his spine. It was put there with some force.” Hinks, suspicious of every action now, tries to remove the spike himself. He cannot.

  “And what weapon caused this?” asks Jan, pointing at the neatly reamed hole in the Captain’s head. Hinks has no answer for her.

  “Hinks.” Pallister has moved back by the door and is pointing at the floor. “This is not the work of a man.” Hinks looks down and sees a trail of slime leading to the door. He turns to the table beside the Captain’s bed and picks up the Book of the Sea. As he opens it to the first page there is a scream of horror, turned rapidly to one of agony.

  Crew, and he lies in a pool of blood upon the deck. Hinks turns him over gently. Holes have been bored into his neck. Another scream from below just as four more of the crew come onto the deck, amongst them are Cheyne and Char. Cheyne snatches up the metalled great knife and stares at the hatch to the crew quarters.

  “What is it? What is happening?”

  “Something…Something killing them,” Char replies to her sister.

  “What does it look like? Tell me, tell me now,” demands Hinks.

  “It is a man sometimes, and it crawls. There is slime and a tube like a wood bore…I cannot…”

  Hinks curses and in the moonlight he opens the book. He searches down the first tissue-thin page and finds the sea-life section: Dangers of the Sea. There are more sharks than he realised, giant squid and flatworms capable of ingesting a man. It is there. He finds it only a few pages in under ‘Sea Fages and Related Mullusca’. There is a picture of the glass dart; a love dart used during mating. It is barbed hence the reason Pallister could not remove it. Another scream just as Hinks reads the section which tells him of the shell they found in the stomach of the shark. Just then the hatch crashes open and out come the Barrelman and two others. All now watch the hatch and wait for what might come next. Pallister has armed himself, and the remaining great knives are shared. Only Barrelman, Hinks, and Jan are without weapons.

  “What is it Hinks? Tell us?” asks Pallister, terror barely suppressed in his voice.

  “It is a Fage. A kind of mollusc. That was its shell we saw inside the shark,” Hinks tells them all, and some of the terror departs. It is named. It is in the Book. Hinks continues to read, moving his finger from word to word, some of them unfamiliar, metamorph and shifter, syphon and ovipositor. He begins to feel a greater dread. The boy…He turns the page and sees the picture of a man, and something next to it that is half a man.

  “Dear God…”

  He looks up directly at the Barrelman standing behind the shoulder-to-shoulder crew. Out of the corner of his eye the Barrelman returns his regard, but does not turn his head. His head is deforming, pushing forward and taking on a goatish shape, lips peeling back from something that glistens. The Barrelman is not. It is the Fage.

  “Look out!”

  The man directly in front of the Fage turns, screams, falls to the deck with half of his face ripped away. His screams take on a liquid quality. Back into the glistening head part the glassy tube of the syphon retracts. All of its skin now glistens. Arms merge with sides, legs merge, now a standing slug shape it falls on Char, who is locked in place in her terror. It slides over her fast. There is a brief struggle. It leaves her slime coated and spurting blood from the hole bored through her ribs into her heart. There is a scream, fear, rage. A great knife pins the Fage, goes right in. The reaction is horrifyingly quick. A slime coated tentacle exudes then cracks like a whip. A man smashes through a rail and goes bonelessly over the side. The great knife falls out, leaving only a white mark on the grey skin. That cry again. It is Cheyne. He comes in with the steel great knife, ducks the tentacle then lops it off. He cuts again and the Fage falls in half. He cuts again and again in his rage. In moments the deck is spread with writhing pieces of slimy flesh no larger
than a man’s head. Cheyne drops his great knife, kneels down by Char. He cries silence.

  “Oh God… Is it dead at last? Is it dead? I would have preferred the soul of a shark. Yes…I would have preferred that.” Pallister is babbling. Hinks stands. He had not even time to get to his feet. That fast, it happened that fast. He looks at the remains of the crew. Jan, standing with her mouth open in shock, Pallister, babbling to himself now that no one else is listening, Cheyne, silent, three other crew, one on the deck with his face hanging off, but still alive, one squatting by the mast gazing about him in bewilderment, one mechanically stabbing pieces of the Fage with a great knife and flicking them over the side.

  “You, Tanis.”

  The man by the mast stands and looks to Hinks with a kind of hope. Hinks keeps the Book firmly tucked under his arm as he gives his orders.

  “Help him…in whatever way he requires.”

  Tanis gazes with compassion to his companion on the deck and draws a knife from his belt sheath. Cheyne is still grieving but now Jan is with him and they hold each other. Hinks does not want to go below decks just yet. He does not want to see what is there.

  “Hinks…sir,” the other crewman calls to him.

  “What is it…Lai?”

  Hinks walks over and stands beside him.

  “Watch,” says Lai.

  The man skewers a piece of the Fage and throws it into the sea—as it hits the water it changes into a turtle crab, the next piece turns into a green mackerel, and the next into a small shark. Hinks understands now why the Captain was always frightened. The Book is heavy under his arm and he has only seen a few of its many thin pages. He wonders what the Captain read that frightened him so badly, and if he ever read any more.

  ABOUT “THE THRAKE”

  Now here’s another story from the runcible universe. It first appeared in Fiction Furnace 3 (summer ’93) along with a line-drawing I’d done of the orbonnai, Paul. In this you can see some more of the outfall I got from reading a veterinary book on helminthology (the study of parasitic worms), which was lent to me by the vet who proof-read The Parasite for me many years before it was actually published. Similar outfall is the parasitic ecology of The Skinner. Anyway, I like this story for its parasites, for its pop at fundamentalism, and for the way it all tied together so neatly.

  THE THRAKE

  To Mark, the runcible was the altar to some cybernetic god of technology, and he felt like an acolyte come before it for the first time. He considered it the nearest thing to an icon in this Godless society, and consequently looked upon it as an enemy of his faith.

  Skaidon technology.

  The religion.

  The room containing the runcible was a fifty metre sphere of mirrored metal—the containment sphere beyond which the buffers operated. It was floored with black glass, and mounted on a central stepped pedestal or the same substance, were the ten metre incurving bull’s horns of the runcible itself. Between these shimmered the cusp of the Skaidon warp, or the spoon. Mark could remember someone trying to explain five-dimensional singularity mechanics to him, but the subject did not interest him.

  They dined on mince and slices of quince.

  He was to be quince: he was to be a mitter traveller.

  He advanced into the room, across the black glass to the steps, mounted them. Before the cusp he paused for a moment and tapped the cross, tattooed on his wrist, for luck.

  Our Father who art in Heaven—

  He stepped through.

  STOPSTART.

  Hallowed be thy name.

  He had travelled by runcible many times before, and on every occasion found it a deeply disturbing experience. He could not grasp that the step he had just taken had been light-years long. The universe should not be so big. He refused to believe there were things the unaugmented human mind could not understand.

  “Mark Christian?”

  He turned his attention to the woman waiting on the black glass of this second runcible chamber. She was short, with the muscular body of one raised on a plus G planet. Her hair was cropped and dyed with rainbow spirals and she wore skintight monofilament overalls. Her eyes were the eyes of a cat. In terms of Earth fashion she was about two years out of date.

  Mark allowed himself a smug little smile as he walked down the steps to meet her. “Yes, I am. Pleased to meet you.”

  He pumped her hand and gazed beyond her to the door of the chamber. Where was the Director? Who was this woman? He would have to have words. Didn’t they realise who he was? “I am Carmen Smith. Welcome to Station Seventeen.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Mark released her hand with a touch of distaste. She had calluses!

  “If you will come with me I will show you to your quarters. Sorry not to have a welcoming committee here, but we are very busy and don’t spend much time on the social niceties.” He only realised his gaffe when he was following her out.

  Carmen Smith… Oh God!

  He had just met the Director.

  * * * *

  Xenoethnologist my ass. I don’t need this.

  “I take it you received all your immuno treatments?”

  It was a stupid question to ask, she was well aware, but she did not think she would be having a sensible conversation with this idiot.

  “Yes,” said Christian.

  Carmen noticed he was a little pale. “You do know this is an open runcible?”

  Mark nodded. Carmen studied him for a moment, wondering what his problem might be. Perhaps he knew of her objections to him coming here. She shook her head and turned to the door. It slid open and they stepped outside.

  * * * *

  The sky was alien. No other word applied. He could have said it was the colour of blackberry cordial shone through with a sun lamp or that the clouds were like the froth on fermenting red wine. But those were descriptions taking as their basis things from Earth—things familiar. The sky was not familiar. It was something seen in Technicolor nightmares and the strangest of dreams. He stood under a sky an unimaginable distance from Earth. Another world. Another place. An element in the dreams of another species. Abruptly he realised Carmen was speaking to him.

  “—it’s fatal to anthropomorphise.”

  “Sorry…?”

  “The Orbonnai are very like us physiologically.”

  “Oh, yes…I am trained in these matters.”

  “I thought it best to warn you. There have been members of Station Seventeen who had formed too close an attachment to the likes of Paul.”

  “Paul?”

  Carmen gazed at him speculatively. Abruptly he felt foolish, but the sky and the weird contorted landscape below it had denuded him of words. He shrugged as if making himself more comfortable in his fashionable jacket.

  “That is anthropomorphising in itself,” he said. “I myself adhere to Gordon’s dictum; ‘If it is alien, give it an alien name’. ‘Paul’ is far too prosaic.”

  He glanced at her again and took in the angular beauty of her tanned features. She’d had alterations other than her eyes, yet, because she was out of date she seemed more…plausible.

  She said, “The runcible technicians named him Paul. Edron, the co-ordinator of the planetary biostudy team, then tried to have his name changed to Xanthos or some such. Never caught on.”

  Mark nodded to himself like someone with access to privileged information. “I would be most interested to view any studies made of him.”

  Carmen glanced at him. “I’ll have the recordings sent to your quarters directly.”

  * * * *

  After leaving the shower and donning his silk Faberge lounging suit, Mark dropped in the chair before his viewing screen and caressed a touch-plate with his finger. The screen flickered on to show him a scene of dense jungle on the edge of a stream with banks of blue sand. He fast-forwarded it until there were signs of movement from the jungle. A narrative began as he watched. He jumped with surprise then glanced around guiltily before returning his attention to the screen.
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  The orboni edged out of the jungle, wire-taut as it surveyed its surroundings, then squatted down in the sand at the edge of the river. It was difficult not to ascribe human characteristics to it, with its bilateral symmetry, arms and legs, and its upright stance. Yet, it was bone-white and with a head like the bare skull of a bird. Half listening to the narrative, Mark watched it intently.

  “—and the immediate and invalid assumption being that Paul was a tool user. Note the three fingered hands and opposable thumb. As we now know, Daneson was in error. It is far too easy to anthropomorphise when faced with creatures which bear such a close physiological resemblance to humanity. Here we see the true use of that opposable thumb, and more importantly, the long mid-finger with its hooked point. It is relevant at this point to add, that the Orbonnai do not have nails. As Gordon once had the temerity to conjecture; ‘If they don’t have nails they don’t use tools. Imagine bashing your finger with a hammer.’ A most dubious—”

  Mark turned the sound down as he observed Paul. He did not need the distraction of this babble. He knew what he was searching for, and he knew he would find it. According to the highest Church authorities the Orbonnai were pre-ascension.

  The orboni reached into the stream and fumbled around for a while. Eventually it withdrew its hand, holding a snail the size of an ash-tray. Mark watched it intently as it inspected its prize, and felt a momentary flush of excitement. Could it be that all the evidence he needed would be on these memory crystals? He noted a number of rocks laying nearby. Would Paul make the connection? The way he was inspecting the snail looked very much as if he was satisfying his curiosity. Mark willed Paul to pick up a stone. If there was no evidence here then he would have to go outside. He shuddered at the thought and turned the sound up again.