by Neal Asher
“We can travel, though?”
“Yes.”
“What needs replacing?”
“Railgun missiles and warheads. There are no CTDs left. There are also no solid-state laser assemblies and high-temperature fabricated components for the reactor and fusion drive. Some of these items I can make but these would be better supplied from a military depot.”
Heading back toward the ship’s cortex, I knew for sure I needed weapons. Without them, what the hell was I going to do when I found Penny Royal? Use strong language? I also realized by Flute’s use of “military depot” that it was still thinking in terms of war supply and demand. It didn’t seem likely that I could roll up at some ECS military base and select CTDs like tasty snacks from a buffet.
“Which items can you make?” I asked, pausing in the corridor and noting that the corpses were gone. The areas of wall and ceiling where they had been were now pristine.
“Simple railgun missiles can be smelted from debris or asteroid iron using lasers and hardfield moulding. High-temperature components can be made in the same way, but with higher energy demands. Solid-state laser assemblies can be built by nanobot, but that is a lengthy process. CTDs cannot be made with the resources available to this ship.”
Of course, these ships were made so they could resupply most of their own needs. As for the CTDs, it was understandable that running up a chunk of anti-matter might be stretching things. I would have to check to see if Isobel had anything like that secreted away aboard her ship, and there were other options to try.
“What about fusion and fission bombs?”
“It will be possible to make them if the correct ores can be obtained.”
I walked up the tunnel into the ship’s cortex and paused at the entrance, feeling reluctant to enter. But then, dipping my head in for a look around, I saw that any danger from the Golem had been completely eliminated. A mid-sized maintenance robot had cut off its arms, detached its torso from that tentacle and was now detaching the tentacle from its wall socket. I studied the robot for a moment then returned my attention to the Golem. It was still impaled on Penny Royal’s spine. My next step—to get to the source of that spine—was overdue. It was time for me to leave. However, first I had to deal with Isobel Satomi …
ISOBEL
Everything within her mind was accessible, but nothing outside it worked. At first she had struggled endlessly to try and regain control of her body or reach out to her ship’s systems, but she could affect nothing at all. However, straining against her invisible bonds seemed to accelerate other processes in her body. Although she could not move her arms and legs, she found she could now move the hooder manipulators growing out of her face. She could also flex her cowl and see out of yet another newly opened hooder eye. Her connection to these from the predatory part of her consciousness was also so much firmer, which only increased her overall panic. In the end, she deliberately put her mind into a state of semi-consciousness, woken when the door to her cabin opened once again.
“Isobel,” said Spear. He squatted down beside her bed and peered into her face. She tried to reply but this time he was not allowing her to speak. “Looks like your changes are accelerating, but then that’s probably because they’re no longer fighting your body.” He stood up and paced. “This is how the situation stands with you: I have set in reverse the prion cascades in your body, and those in Trent and Gabriel. You’ll all be mobile again in a day or so, but I will be long gone by then. I have helped myself to various items from your vessel, including your surprising collection of CTDs. I have also disabled your U-space drive, but in ways you just won’t be able to repair. It will take you approximately four years to reach the nearest place where you can get that drive repaired. By then either Penny Royal or I will be dead. If by any chance it is I who survives, I’ll have returned to the Polity and will be far beyond your reach.”
After a long pause he again squatted down to gaze into her face. “I was once subject to a spider thrall, Isobel, so doing what I did to you and your men did not come easy to me. However, considering what you have done, you’re lucky I didn’t decide to shove you all out of an airlock.” He was lost for words for a moment, his attention wandering, then he remembered something. “Oh yes, there’s another factor we should consider. You won’t be in any condition to come after me in four years, because by then your arms and legs will be gone. You’ll be crawling on your belly and cutting up food with those things growing out of your face. I don’t know if whatever remains of you by that time will even be interested in me—if you’ll even remember me. Goodbye Isobel.” He stood up and left.
Isobel just lay there screaming silently, then bleeding when one of her facial manipulators, which had now sprouted an object like a scalpel, sliced across her nose. Eventually she managed some self-control and shut herself down—timing a period of unconsciousness to last for two days.
Hiatus …
Isobel Satomi opened her many eyes and the effect was something like the sensory enhancement of her cowl, but with the visual feed coming from different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The input went into different mental partitions, and she was able to make selections from these on the basis of need. That need was human at that moment and so everything in the human visual spectrum opened to her. However, she knew at once that her human eyes no longer existed. She rolled onto her back then sat up, but even that action was different. She found herself peeling up from the bed, her spine as supple as a snake’s and paused at a mid-point when her upper body was essentially upright. However, it was curving up from the midpoint of her long torso, which had now grown by at least another six inches.
Next, sitting all the way up with her weight coming down on her buttocks, she could feel a large lump down there and knew that her tail had grown by the same amount as her torso. She swung her legs off the bed and tried to stand, but her feet felt all wrong and she started to fall forwards. The prions had not worn off completely, because nothing was working properly. She felt a moment of panic when she realized she wasn’t putting out her hands to break her fall, tried to turn her face to stop it smashing into the floor and just couldn’t move her neck at all, then halted her fall just a few inches from the floor … but not with her hands.
Creeping horror worked its way up her hard flexible spine. She tried to turn to look back down along the length of her body but still couldn’t move her neck. Something else moved instead, her spine twisting just below her neck at an angle impossible for a human body. Something crunched horribly as if her shoulder blade was dislocating, and now she could see her body. Five hard, insectile legs had torn their way free of her padded clothing to rest upon the floor; thick centipede legs terminating in feet that consisted of rearward-pointing curved hooks. She could feel those legs and she could move them. She felt a sense of irritation with the hard floor below, with a need for soft rhizome-layered ground to dig those hooks into, and thus propel her forwards. She screamed—abruptly folding the legs in to try and hide them—and dropped, smashing her damaged nose against the floor.
“Isobel! Isobel!”
Someone was hammering at the door. She had to get control of herself and she couldn’t let them see her like this. It would be hard enough to dominate them when they learned just how long it would take them to return to civilization.
“I’m okay,” she called then, realizing how odd her mouth felt, wondered how long it would be before she lost the power of human speech. “Go check if that destroyer is still out there, then give me a report over intercom.” She paused, trying to think of other make-work tasks for Trent and Gabriel while she made herself presentable, but finished with, “I’ll join you on the bridge in an hour.”
She could hear muttering out there, then listened more intently and, as words became clear, her inner predator awoke.
“She’s getting more erratic,” said Gabriel. “I bet she just sprouted another fucking leg or eye. It’s gonna be time to move on.”
“Let’s
just head for the bridge,” said Trent.
“The destroyer’s gone,” said Gabriel, his voice getting fainter as they moved away. “He told us that anyway.” Then after a pause. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“Have you got prion paralysis in your brain?” Trent enquired mildly.
Isobel now realized she didn’t have to use her substantially increased hearing to continue eavesdropping. She linked into the ship’s system, listened in through microphones, and peered through pin cams, just in time to capture Trent pointing to his ear then up towards the ceiling. Trent knew she was listening and wasn’t going to say anything that might offend her. She listened avidly anyway, finding herself rising back up onto her insect legs and turning. She wanted to go after the two of them. She wanted to get hold of them and …
Isobel fought the predator and her new legs closed up again, but this time she turned her head as she hit the floor. She had to retain control and so deliberately cut the sound and image feeds from Trent and Gabriel’s location. There was no point listening to them anymore, she told herself, because they wouldn’t be saying anything damning now. Instead, she forced herself to link to other ship’s instruments and saw that the destroyer had indeed gone. Spear had also been as good as his word and had disabled the U-space drive. He hadn’t actually broken anything, but he had destabilized energy balances in the Calabi-Yau frames—which was something that would require shipyard retuning to put right. Isobel swore, and concentrated on her immediate problems.
She found herself not only fighting to use her arms, hands and legs, but fighting to want to use them—as if her body didn’t consider them relevant any more. At length the predator in her subsided and she did want to stand up again, like a human. But now that felt as if she were trying to move parts of her body that just weren’t there—or as if she was trying to twitch her nose when she simply didn’t possess that ability. She was getting very little feedback or sensation at all. Finally, feeling as if she wanted to cry, she had to admit defeat and run searches using her haiman hardware. They located the nerves for her human limbs and programs deep in storage to fire them up, and then link them back to her mind. As these began to load, sensation returned and she remembered how to move her limbs. The software for such an exercise, if you could call it that, had been wiped from her mind.
Managing to get her hands underneath her, she tried to push herself up, but her spine bent into a ridiculous curve again. She straightened it, positioned her knees under her, then stood, tottering unsteadily. However, with every movement and the subsequent feedback from that movement she became more sure. It was also noteworthy that her predatory urge was now all but somnolent. She understood the connection then, and the separation—the more she transformed into a hooder, the harder it would be to fight that irrational predator. Penny Royal’s transformation of her apparently went deeper than the physical. As a human she had always been a predator, but now she felt that predatory part of her human self separating out into her hooder part. Meanwhile, what remained of her human part, or even humanity, grew weaker and more difficult to maintain.
She moved over to her large cabin screen and, gazing at the blank slab of nanofabric, remembered how in times past she’d had it on the mirror setting. At one time she’d been a beautiful woman. Now it was mostly like this: blank grey. First preparing herself for the undoubted shock, she turned it on with a mental twitch.
Isobel gazed at her reflected image for a long time. Her head was now twice as long as normal, cylindrical, and possessed three pairs of red eyes evenly spaced down its length—her own human eyes now having changed into hooder eyes. The lower set of eyes was positioned just above her mouth and below her nose. Her mouth was now narrower, with a pronounced harelip above. The nose was smaller, melting into her face. She reached up to run a hand over the bald dome of her skull, then reached down to each shoulder, scooping out the tangled mass of her own hair to discard it. Her sensory cowl had grown wider and sprouted more petals. It now extended out to the width of her shoulders, and, reaching back, she felt how it had attached itself to the back of her long head. Feeling along the cowl’s base on either side, she noted that her jacket had ripped—this to accommodate the lower petals of the cowl, which were now attached to her shrinking shoulders.
She stared. She had expected to feel disgust, horror, fear or anger but all those were dispelled by the sight before her. She had passed some stage in her development. Previously she had perceived herself as a deformed human. Now she was something else; now she was hardly human at all.
With slow care she undressed, her clothing snagging on hard pieces of carapace and insectile legs. Her body was now a long column, her breasts sunk away and her nipples and her belly button fading. The legs below were like those of a dwarf, short and bowed, and her feet were toeless stumps. Gazing at that smooth column with its neatly folded legs, scales of carapace protruding in a neat dorsal line behind them, her perceptual change came home to her. For now she saw her human legs as the deformity and the rest as somehow … right.
Still she stared, feeling suddenly completely cold. She reached up to the ugliness that was her human mouth and almost negligently pulled out one of her loose teeth, to cup it in the palm of a hand. She stared at the bloody tooth, framed by a hand which only possessed two fingers and a thumb. A sensation rippled through her and her spiky tail twitched as the predator stirred. A huge need set the manipulators arrayed down each side of her face rippling. She quickly turned away, discarding the tooth.
Selecting the right clothing was a trial. Her usual trousers and blouses just wouldn’t do. In the end, heavy-world support boots and a long dress of rippling nacre over a padded jacket were the only things that made her look remotely human. Exiting her cabin, she headed straight for the ship’s refectory, knowing that lightly cooked vegetables and chicken weaves just wouldn’t do either. She hoped that Trent and Gabriel had remained on the bridge, knowing that they would.
CAPTAIN BLITE
Blite gazed at the metre-wide plastic cube sitting on the labouring sled. The contents of the box were heavier than anything that size had any right to be, and the necessity of having to use a grav-sled worried him greatly. Although it was shielded, there were some watchers here who might see through even that. Masada was a dangerous planet for this kind of operation now it had acquired an AI warden. Wardens in themselves were bad enough, but this one had been a war drone before its upgrade—a slightly psychotic robot fashioned in the shape of a giant steel scorpion. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, its sidekick was rumoured to be something even stranger and more dangerous …
“I’m sure something’s following us,” said Ikbal.
Blite paused to gaze back across the landscape of flute grasses rippling in the evening breeze. It was bright out tonight because Calypse, this system’s inevitable gas giant, was on the horizon, while one of the numerous moons of this world was speeding along above. He could see nothing in the flute grasses, no gabbleducks or siluroynes, no hooders and no sign of what Ikbal really feared.
“I’ll say it once and no more,” said Blite, “and you’d better listen good, Ikbal.” He knew he could make no more threat than that. Ikbal had been with him a long time and was well aware of just how far he could be pushed.
“There is no black AI haunting this fucking bog,” he continued. “This Amistad, even if he was a crazy war drone, would not allow such a thing to exist here. The Polity simply would not allow it.”
“Those Tidy Squad guys seemed pretty certain,” said Martina, pacing along behind the grav-sled and controlling it with a remote.
Blite glared at her, then realized that in this light she probably couldn’t see his face through his breather mask. He sighed, took a deep breath and tilted his head back to gaze up at the nebula. Like some sculpture fashioned of glass, it spread across the dark aubergine sky. The sight calmed him, as did the sight of the space port’s foam-stone raft when he lowered his gaze. It was now just a mile ahead.
; “Look,” he said, “this place is supposed to have had every kind of shit thrown at it, ever since the Theocracy ruled here.” He held up a gauntleted hand and began counting off on his fingers. “We’re told it’s had revolution—fomented by Polity agents—it’s also had some psychopath arrive in a Polity dreadnought blasting the fuck out of everything. Dragon dumped on them here too and left dracomen.” He lost the thread for a moment. They had actually seen a dracoman working on the landing platform shortly after they landed. The things were lizard-like humanoids, based on an old human idea of what dinosaurs would have evolved into but for the intercession of a large meteorite. And it was a verifiable fact that they were also created by the entity called Dragon—a giant alien biomech that looked nothing like the name it had given itself. The presence of dracomen here somewhat undermined the point he had been intending to make about the plausibility of anything those Tidy Squad members had said.
“Jain tech’s supposedly been let loose here,” he continued doggedly, then had to pause again when he realized he was running out of fingers. He lowered his hand. “It’s also been attacked by some alien machine, a hooder that was apparently an ancient war machine and an artist defeated that. And apparently one of the ‘dead’ races is now living here. And do you know what all this tells me?” When there was no reply he continued, “It tells me that this is the perfect place for rumours and conspiracy theories. It tells me that the best thing to do is disbelieve at least half of what you’re told and reserve judgement on the rest. It tells me you got to use your noodle.” He stabbed a finger against his head a little too hard. “It tells me to think twice when I’m told that the Polity has forgiven the black AI Penny Royal and absolved all its sins. Especially when it’s supposedly working here like some security drone, in the service of a fucking warden! And it tells me you really need to shove the face of the one telling you this stuff into the nearest table, repeatedly, until the shit stops coming out of it!”