The Gabble p-13

by Neal Asher

  ‘Can I start transmitting now?’

  Garp glanced over to where a long and expensive-looking hydrocar was parked. ‘Yeah, I reckon so. She’s only got access to the Polity networks back in the city, and by the time she finds out it’ll be too late.’

  With some relief Salind turned his aug’s transmitter back on.

  They pulled on the armoralls, Salind trying not to notice his were still warm. Climbing from the gully to one side of the main building, they headed towards the doors. Those unloading the cropsters did not notice them for a moment. When they did, Garp raised his hand and continued walking. A hand was raised in return, but they were otherwise ignored. Salind just kept his head down and his teeth gritted. He’d just seen the previous possessors of the armoralls lying in a drainage ditch. Passing the trucks, they entered the building. Salind tried to ignore the crying from inside one truck.

  Message from Jennifer Tarjen: Great job, Salind. You’re live on Earthnet right now!

  Somehow Salind couldn’t get excited about that. He wondered how the Polity citizens were reacting to what he was seeing right now. Inside the building a group of three men were strapping cropsters to frames. They had it down to a fine art: no one escaped. After the victims were in place, two women went down the rows pulling bags from heads and pushing metal devices into the cropsters’ mouths. Salind supposed those devices were to stop them biting through the tubes that were then forced down into their stomachs.

  ‘Sap from the banoaks,’ said Garp. ‘It takes an hour or so to reach sufficient concentration in the bloodstream.’

  Salind jumped when he heard an agonized scream from deeper in the building.

  ‘That was a cropster whose sap levels just reached sufficient concentration,’ said Garp.

  ‘What the hell are they doing here?’

  Garp explained, ‘It was some lunatic ancestor of Soper’s who first drank tea made from the treels that had fed on an enemy he had nailed to a banoak. He discovered that tea to be powerful indeed. He had discovered the human-specific narcotic, praist. In his subsequent gruesome experiments he also discovered that treels live longer in victims who like their tea too much, and that in those cases the yield of praist increases.’

  Deeper in the building Garp abruptly halted and gestured ahead. Here an old grey-bearded man, who Salind thought resembled the park labourer he had observed before meeting Garp the reif, was doing something to one of those strapped to a frame. It took a moment for Salind to absorb this further horror. The woman on the frame was unconscious. The old man cut slits in her body and opened them with sprung clamps. Into the holes, through a wide funnel, he fed finger-length treels.

  ‘During the later years of the cult of Anubis Arisen it was discovered that if you fed someone on pure banoak sap to get a sufficient concentration in the bloodstream, and if the treels are inserted just so, they will attach quickly without causing too much internal damage -

  without hitting an artery. Allowed to grow in a sap-fed human body for as much as five days, the yield of praist is fifty times more than when it was done the old way. The victim dies eventually, as you can see.’ Garp gestured down the row of frames to where corpses hung, larger treels writhing in and out of holes in their bodies.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ said Salind, and for once he wasn’t thinking about the story. He thought about what Geronamid had said: eight hundred of these places.

  Garp nodded, then unhooked his rail-gun and handed it across. ‘Protect yourself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I intend to use my hands,’ said Garp, and walked over to the old man. The man looked up, grinning, for he obviously enjoyed his work. Garp reached out and pressed his hands to either side of the man’s face, then twisted. Salind could hear the bones breaking from where he stood.

  Now Garp turned and headed back, passing Salind without looking at him as he headed for the building’s entrance. Salind turned and followed. Reaching the first of the women, Garp chopped once and she went down. The next woman went down the same way. The first two of the three men strapping people to the frames, Garp grabbed and slammed together. They dropped soggily.

  The third man tried to run.

  Message from Jennifer Tarjen: Polity monitors coming in through the runcible and two gamma-class dreadnoughts in orbit. Geronamid has ordered immediate intervention on Banjer!

  This has to be because of your transmission!

  Like hell, thought Salind. Geronamid had intended intervention here from the start.

  Salind’s transmission was just part of the justification.

  What’s Geronamid doing now?

  Message: Geronamid cannot be traced at present.

  Garp caught the third man by his collar, dragged him back and broke his neck. He was going to do them all. He just wasn’t going to stop. . Then there came a turquoise flash that left afterimages on Salind’s retina. He saw Garp fly back, his clothing and skin burning. He hit the ground hard then immediately sat up. Deleen Soper walked in from outside, three men in armoralls walking in behind her.

  ‘It was obvious you’d been uploaded to a Golem,’ she said. ‘And typically arrogant of you to consider yourself invulnerable.’ She held up her weapon and went on. ‘This is Polity hardware.

  It will stop a Golem, as you’ve just found out.’

  Garp began to chuckle, then to laugh.

  ‘It amuses you that you are finally going to die?’ she asked.

  From where he was hiding behind a row of frames Salind shakily raised the rail-gun. He had to do something; had to commit. He couldn’t just observe.

  ‘I’ve already done that. It’s not something that scares me,’ Garp replied.

  ‘It’s a shame you can’t be put on a frame,’ said Soper.

  ‘Nothing you can do but destroy me. You can’t even use me for some idiot assassination attempt this time. You might have got your hands on a fancy gun, but no way you’ve got the tech to access Golem hardware.’

  Soper leant the weapon across her shoulder and gazed down at Garp. ‘No point in that now. The fact that I could get an assassin through all the Council’s defences brought most of them back into line. I also gained the unexpected bonus of making Mr straight and true officer Garp kill an innocent Polity citizen.’

  Salind could feel sweat running down his back. This was it: he could delay no longer.

  Message: Salind, put the gun down before you shoot your own foot off.

  Who the hell?

  Just then he felt Argus go offline, but it wasn’t him that had made it do so.

  Garp now began to rise.

  ‘Stay on the fucking ground!’

  ‘Polity hardware,’ said Garp, continuing to stand. ‘Had you the opportunity I know that you would have some strong words for your supplier.’

  Soper aimed her weapon at him and pulled the trigger, again and again. Nothing happened. Salind could see first confusion then terror growing in her expression. Her three accompanying thugs were backing off, ready to run. He tried the record facility in Argus — that didn’t work either. On his feet now, Garp held his hands apart before him.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Deleen. I’m not going to kill you.’ For a moment she found hope, then Garp gestured to the doorway behind, which now filled with a huge shape. ‘He’s going to do that.’

  Soper and her three thugs turned. Salind stepped out to see more clearly as Geronamid, still in the form of an allosaur, stepped delicately into the building.

  For a moment, stillness, then Soper laughed with relief and tossed her weapon on the floor. ‘You can’t do that. You’re an AI. It’s against all Polity law.’

  ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ asked Geronamid, pacing forward.

  ‘You can’t interfere in places where that law doesn’t apply, and if it ever does apply here there’ll be a general amnesty.’

  ‘Who said anything about law?’ Geronamid asked. ‘But since you mention it, amnesty doesn’t apply in cases of intervention.’


  ‘What?’

  Geronamid stepped in closer. Salind thought Soper must smell the last meal on the allosaur’s breath. What happened next was nightmarish. Geronamid’s head snapped to one side and one of Soper’s men fell over. His head was gone. Geronamid spat the head at Soper’s feet.

  ‘I think I would like you to run now.’

  Soper stared at the head for one interminable moment, then turned and fled, her men following fast. Salind understood now why Argus was totally offline. The AI had remotely shut it down: no recordings, no transmission. He watched the allosaur take off after the three and disbelievingly watched what happened in the shadowy interior of the building. No one would believe this: Polity AIs were just so measured and moral.

  Breathing ash out of his burnt mouth, Garp stepped up beside Salind. ‘Even AIs can get pissed off when a friend gets killed.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Salind replied, remembering the acrobat.

  Soper’s scream, the last one, seemed more protracted than that of her two fellows, probably because Geronamid took his time about eating her.

  The Sea of Death

  So lay they garmented in torpid light,

  Under the pall of a transparent night,

  Like solemn apparitions lull’d sublime,

  To everlasting rest, — and with them

  Time Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face

  Of a dark dial in a sunless place.

  — Hood

  To say it is cold is to seriously understate the matter. The inside of the shuttle is at minus fifty centigrade because of what Jap calls ‘material tolerances’.

  ‘These coldsuits we’re wearing — take ‘em above zero and they’ll fuck up next time you use ‘em outside,’ he told me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Two centuries ago I’d have believed you, but things have moved on since then.’

  ‘Economics ain’t,’ was his reply.

  I am careful not to respond to his sarcasm.

  The landing is without mishap, but I am surprised when the side of the shuttle opens straight down onto the surface of the planet Orbus.

  ‘No point maintaining an entrance tunnel,’ says Jap over the com.

  I don’t mind. It is for moments like this that I travel, and it is moments like this that fund my travel. I walk out with CO snow crunching underfoot and the clarity of starlit sky above that 2

  you normally only get in interstellar space. I gaze across land like arctic tundra with its frozen lakes and hoared boulders. In the frozen lakes trapped faerie lights flicker rainbow colours.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask.

  ‘Water ice. Below one-fifty it turns to complex ice and when it heats up and changes back it fluoresces. Talk to Duren if you want the chemistry of it.’

  I don’t need to. I remember reading that this is what comets do. It had taken a little while for people to figure that the light of comets was not all reflected sunlight — that comets emit light before they should.

  ‘What’s heating it up?’ I ask, turning to gaze at the distant green orb of the dying sun.

  ‘The shuttle, our landing. There’s nothing else here to do it,’ he replies.

  We walk the hundred or so metres to the base and go in through a coldlock. In the lock we remove our coldsuits and hang them up. Jap points to the white imprint of a hand on the grey surface of the inner door.

  ‘Keep your undersuit and gloves on until we’re inside,’ he tells me. I stare at the imprint in puzzlement. Is it some kind of safety sign? Jap obviously notes my confusion. He explains.

  ‘Fella took his gloves off before going through the door,’ he says.

  The imprint is the skin of that fella’s hand, and some of the flesh too. Later I speak to Linser, the base commander, and ask why they take such risks here. We stand in his room gazing out of a panoramic window across the frozen wastes.

  ‘Thermostable and thermo-inert materials are expensive, Mr Gregory. A thermoceramic cutting head for a rock-bore costs the best part of fifty thousand New Carth shillings and has to be shipped in. Doped water-ice cutting heads can be made here. Coldsuits that can function from plus thirty to minus two hundred cost fifty times as much as the ones we use. That’s a big saving for a small inconvenience,’ he says.

  ‘I never thought this operation short of funds,’ I say.

  ‘Energy is money and there’s none of the former here. It costs fifteen hundred shillings a minute to keep one human alive and comfortable. We have over two thousand personnel.’

  I walk up beside him and focus on what has now caught his attention. Machines for moving rock and ice are busily gnawing at the frozen crust out there. Floodlights bathe something that appears a little like a building site.

  ‘Found an entrance right under our noses,’ he tells me.

  ‘Lucky,’ say I.

  He turns to me with an expression tired and perhaps a little irrational.

  ‘Lucky?. . Oh yes, you’ve been in transit. You haven’t seen the latest survey results. You see, we were having a bit of a Schrodinger problem with the deep scanners. The energy of the scan was enough to cause fluorescence of the water ices down there, full-spectrum fluorescence. It was like shining a torch into a cave and having the beam of that torch turn on a floodlight. We saw only a fraction of it until we started using those low-energy scanners.’

  ‘A fraction?’ I say. ‘Last I heard you’d mapped twenty thousand kilometres of tunnels.’

  ‘That’s nothing. Nothing at all. They’re everywhere you see. Yesterday Duren told me that they even go under the frozen seas. We’re looking at millions of kilometres of tunnels, more than a hundred million burial chambers with one or more sarcophagi in each.’

  I absorb this information in silence, slot it in with a hundred other details I’ve been picking up right from Farstation Base to here.

  ‘Obviously I want to see one of the sarcophagi,’ I eventually tell him.

  He glances at me.

  ‘See and touch it I would have thought. Unfortunately you don’t get to smell anything. Too cold for decay here,’ he says.

  ‘Seeing and hearing are the most important,’ I reply. ‘Most people don’t go for full immersion for a documentary. There are much more enjoyable FI entertainments.’

  ‘Okay, get yourself settled in and we’ll run you down in an hour or so. Will you be needing any of your equipment off the shuttle?’

  ‘No, I have my eyes and ears,’ I reply.

  He studies me, his inspection straying to the aug nestled behind my right ear. He seems too tired to display the usual discomfort of those confronted by a human recorder like myself.

  The tunnels resemble very closely the Victorian sewers of Old London on Earth. The bricks are made of water ice and are, on the whole, over three quarters of a million years old. A strange juxtaposition of age and impermanence. Just raise the temperature and all the tunnels will be gone. Of course, the temperature will not rise here for many thousands of years. Duren, who walks with me to the first chamber, is distracted and gloomy. I have to really push to get anything out of him. Finally he comes out with a terse and snappy summation.

  He tells me, ‘It will keep on getting colder and colder, but not constantly so. Every eight hundred years we get the Corlis conjunction and the resultant volcanic activity. In about a hundred thousand years Corlis will fall in orbit round here and all hell will break loose for a time.

  The volcanic activity will destroy all these tunnels, melt all the ice. That’ll last for a few hundred years then things will settle down and freeze again.’

  ‘So future archaeologists will have to dig the sarcophagi out of the ice?’ I ask.

  He waves his hand towards a side chamber and we duck into there. The lights inside are of a lower luminescence than those outside. They don’t want the light damaging things, apparently.

  ‘Doubt that. Hundred thousand years and we’ll know all we need to know about this place. We’ll let them sleep in peace then.’

  I study him a
nd try to figure the tone of his voice. It is too difficult to read his expression through his coldsuit mask, though.

  The sarcophagi are metallic chrysalids averaging three metres in length. I say metallic because they appear to be made of brass. I am told that they were made of something very complex that does have as its basis some copper compounds. I ask if it is organic. I am told no, it is manufactured — it isn’t complex enough to be organic.

  There are two sarcophagi in the chamber. One off alone, untouched and easily viewed, the other so shrouded in scanning equipment, I don’t know it is there until Duren tells me I can look inside.

  No one has yet opened a sarcophagus, simply because there is not a lot more to be learned that has not already been learned by scanning. Inside each sarcophagus, suspended in water ice that is thick with organic chemicals, is an alien. These aliens are frightening. What is most frightening about them is how closely they resemble us. They have arms and legs much in proportion to our own. Their bodies are longer and wasp-waisted, their feet strange hooked two-toed things, and their hands equally strange, with six fingers protruding from all sorts of odd points, and no palms. Their heads. . how best to describe their heads? Take an almond and rest it on its side, expand it only where the neck joins it, hang two sharp barbs at the nose end and back from that punch a hole straight through for eyes … It is theorized that they had used some kind of sonar sense. This is one of the theories.