The Gabble p-13

by Neal Asher

  “I told you that,” I said, confused.

  “No, you misunderstand me. Until Golem fifteen compartmentalisation was used, not wholemind programming. The LTM unit has been physically removed. Probably at about the same time as the missing syntheflesh and skin.

  “Oh,” I said brilliantly.

  “I would of course like you to acquire this LTM should it become available…”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I told her.

  Of course she was far too polite to bring my integrity into doubt. As she flickered out of existence I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I studied the bracelet. Could this be it? Seemed unlikely. I decided to check.

  My hand scanner revealed a complexity it could not analyse. I used my system scanner and paid for time on one of the runcible subminds. It took a few minutes, but I soon received the analysis, along with the bill. The bracelet went under the name of a four seasons changer. It was a twenty-seventh century adaptogen laboratory. Not particularly old, but quite valuable if you can find the right buyer, and the right buyer was almost always an adapted human to beyond the fifth generation. I wondered, as always with the kind of morbid fascination that comes with the discovery of such an artefact, if it still worked. I was not to know then that one day the answer to that question was something on which my survival might depend.

  Three solstan days later I had expert advice on the changer and the advice was, “Use this at considerable risk, the construction is far too complex and old for any kind of study that would not involve deconstruction, and why the hell do you want to know?” I was of course hoping for documented proof of working order as this would double the value of the bracelet. There are experts and there are experts.

  On the same day as I received this piece of negative equity I picked up the mollusc shell and listened for the sound of the sea — I hadn’t identified the shell yet. There was no sound and feeling hard put upon I shook it in irritation as one would shake any other piece of malfunctioning hardware. A cuboid crystal with silver circuitry etched in three faces like strange glyphs, fell out and cracked the top of my coffee table. Okay, it wasn’t that valuable, but I was attached to it, which was probably why I was pissed off enough to download a copy of what turned out to be Paul’s LTM to sell to Grable before passing the original on to Henara. As was to be my luck at that time I discovered I could not find Grable anywhere. I ended up studying the memory myself, determined to make a decent profit somehow that week.

  It took me a couple of days to run through the last mission. Much of my time was spent fast forwarding by hand or by computer instruction ie stop when something interesting occurs. It seemed to me that these Golem spent most of their time standing about waiting to be given orders. The tale I eventually managed to piece together was one of incompetence and failure.

  The PSC had tried to establish a base on a planet called Scylla before something called the world-tide occurred. This was to be done by a mixed crew of hired labourers and androids.

  The whole thing was severely disorganised. The androids weren’t complex enough and the workers not clever enough to sort out the discrepancy. There were disputes about pay and an attempt, considering the time limit on the project, at what can only be described as extortion. I saw the base half-finished and a belated attempt at evacuation. Some of the humans got away, others boxed the androids and attempted to seal the base against the world-tide. Paul was not boxed because he was almost as useful as the humans. He was a very new design. The rest was like some Atlantean disaster; explosions, water, sparks, floating bodies. When Paul’s memory greyed into auto shutdown — after a long period of time recording the marine life feeding — I realised what Grable had been after. The androids. They were Golem twos, the first workable androids to be sold by Cybercorp — there had only been one Golem one — and if still there they were worth disgustingly huge amounts of money. I wondered then where he got his information from and why Paul’s LTM had ended up in that shell. But even as I wondered I packed the equipment I would need and sought the required permissions for its transportation. By the next solstan day I had booked myself for transmission to Scylla’s runcible, for while running through Paul’s memory I had seen a map and a map reference. I knew where the base was.

  The crate is hidden. The world-tide is coming. And there are only two things that stand between me and death. My Tenkian autogun keeps the lice away, but there is no sensible way it can keep me from drowning. There is another way though. Even as I record this I pull up my sleeve and look at the bracelet clasped around my wrist. The jewels seemed to have taken on a sinister glitter.

  Jane was not happy about my sudden business trip, but I managed to bring her round, as I normally do. After spending one pleasant night with her I got up early and made my way to the transmission station. The runcible transmission, the longest and most unbelievable part of any interstellar journey, took no time at all. I don’t even try to pretend to know anything about the technology that can shove me through an underspace non-distance and drag me out a hundred or more light years away, and in that I am more honest than most. Skaidon technology; brought about by the linking of a human mind and AI. It’s impossible to understand unless you are both a genius, like Skaidon himself, and plugged in. In my life I have been neither and am unlikely to be.

  One moment I was there standing in the containment sphere as before the altar to Minotaur; silver bull’s horns on a dais of black glass, horns holding the shimmering disk of the cusp, then one step after I am one hundred and twenty-three light years away on the other side of another cusp in an identical sphere: standardization across the galaxy — as awesome as it is depressing.

  Beyond the standard one G gravity in the containment sphere the gravity was rather less, but being a fairly well-seasoned traveller I soon adjusted. A wide concourse led from the row of containment spheres to a huge embarkation lounge, this being because I had arrived on the moonlet Carla; the closest companion to Scylla, which was too unstable for siting a runcible. At the opposite end of the lounge I could see a delta-wing shuttle waiting to heave itself into a violet sky and was surprised to see how few people there were waiting for the flight. I made my way to an information console and called up one of the runcible subminds.

  “Name?”

  “Jason Chel.”

  “What information do you require, Jason Chel?”

  “There are certain packages under my code and I wish to pick them — “

  “The packages have arrived at cargo runcible four. There are AG drays available at all cargo runcibles.”

  I regarded the console with a degree of suspicion. It had been very quick for a submind.

  Perhaps it was Carla AI taking an interest itself. The contents of one of my packages were somewhat unusual.

  “Er, could you also tell me when the next shuttle is leaving for Scylla?”

  “There will not be another shuttle to Scylla for two hundred solstan days.”

  “What?”

  “There will not be another shuttle — “

  “I heard what you said. Why will there not be another shuttle to Scylla for two hundred days?”

  “Because it is summer.”

  “I beg you pardon?”

  There came a sound very like a sigh from the console as if it was tired of repeating this information to people who hadn’t checked.

  “Scylla is closed to all traffic for a period of two hundred and seventy three solstan days during its summer season. All ground bases are sealed. This is due to the accelerated activity of dangerous life forms at this time of the year.”

  I walked away from the console feeling like a complete idiot. Some of the equipment I had in my luggage was brought along to deal with the life forms I had seen in Paul’s memory, a precaution which had cost me a fair lump of credit for transportation under seal. Now I’d discovered that in my eagerness I’d made a complete bollix. I’d have to go back to Ganymede and wait three quarters of a year before I could come back. In a daze I headed
for one of the bars at the edge of the lounge with the vague idea of getting plastered.

  I was into my third scotch when a vaguely familiar figure slipped into the seat on the other side of my table. It took me a moment to recognise him, even then I wasn’t quite sure. He looked too clean, too suave, not the man I’d known.

  “What a surprise to meet you here,” said Chaplin Grable, and he grinned as amiably as a shark. I sat upright and looked at him in surprise. His smile made a small transition into a sneer as he took out a chainglass blade and began cleaning his nails. They didn’t need cleaning.

  “My contact tells me there was a small foul up. I didn’t get time to put the LTM back so he concealed it in the hammer-whelk shell.”

  He glanced up from cleaning his nails and I wondered why I had always considered him to be a faintly ridiculous, irritating, but harmless fool.

  “Seems the shell went into the next lot, which was then purchased by a Mr Chel. That would be you wouldn’t it?”

  He slid around the table into the seat next to me, his arm along the back of my chair and the chainglass knife held between his fingertips with its point pressing against his leg. I considered hitting down on the knife and driving it into his leg, but decided that was a fool’s move. I needed to know how much he knew, how much he had planned. I put on my best buying and selling face.

  “Grable, I doubt very much you could get away with using that here, so put it away and let’s talk a little business.”

  He watched me coldly and the knife disappeared with practised neatness into a wrist sheath. I’d have to watch him.

  “Correct on the first point, a little awry on the second.”

  “Your speech is somewhat altered Mr Grable.”

  “It suits the situation,” he said with a nasty smile.

  I needed to get a step ahead of him. I decided to take a little gamble.

  “Of course, it is a shame you don’t know the location. Didn’t your contact have time?”

  It was a hit. Grable turned a sickly white, then came back with, “But I’ll have two hundred and seventy-three days in which to scan this planet and find the base.”

  His was a hit as well.

  “An arrangement, perhaps,” I suggested.

  “Yes, it seems the most sensible course.”

  I’d never understood the expression ‘eyes like gimlets’ until that moment. Grable had shed his normal unpleasant exterior and what was revealed underneath wasn’t much better.

  About an hour ago I reached this location. It will do. There is a hollow in the surface with a sheltering overhang on the eastern side. Here I will be protected from the first destructive surge of the flood. All that remains is for me to survive when this area is under forty metres of sea.

  When I arrived here I sat on a fairly dry rock and fingered the bracelet. Nearby the autogun settled down on its tripod legs: an improbable steel mosquito. After a moment I pushed my fingernail under the edge of the green diamond. With a faint hum the diamond hinged out to reveal a polished cavity. I knew what to do next but was again reluctant. I looked across at the nearby scorched carcase of a murder-louse then moved over to it. It smelt of boiled lobster and was steaming slightly. Using a piece of shell I scooped up some ichor and dribbled it into the hollow in the bracelet. The diamond has now clicked back into place. I sit upon my rock and wait.

  Grable’s contact on Carla was a man who ran an exclusive minishuttle service to Scylla. It wasn’t illegal, just a little grey. The console had informed me that the planet was closed to all traffic at this time of its year, which didn’t mean it was against any law to go there. All the individual protection laws had been thrown out centuries ago. If a person wanted to risk his own life that was his privilege, just so long as no other unconsenting individuals were put at risk. The powers that be look upon it as evolution in action, an eminently sensible view in my opinion.

  His name was Warrack Singh and he had the appearance of someone out of a flat screen pirate film; a kind of new millennium Errol Flynn, deliberately so, I think. His companion was one of the later Golem and was perhaps the reason Singh’s launch equipment and shuttle were in such good order, but then, with the money he charged there should have been no reason for the situation to have been otherwise.

  “We agreed on a percentage basis,” said Grable. He showed no anger and could have been discussing something completely irrelevant by the tone of his voice. It had been some time since Singh had told us he wanted a straight credit payment for transportation. I watched while Singh grinned rakishly then I turned to help the Golem with the loading of our supplies and equipment.

  “You want to go down there to find something in the summer, friend Grable, then you pay me first.”

  Which didn’t say much for his confidence in our chances. I wondered just how bad it could get down there. Perhaps I should have left Grable to it and come back in the winter. Too late now.

  “We had an agreement,” said Grable, his tone not so easy now.

  “We had an agreement in the winter, and you’re in no position to argue, Grable.”

  I took no part in the exchange. All I knew was that if I was Singh I would be watching my back from then on.

  Singh’s craft was not the usual delta-wing but a glide effect re-entry shuttle covered with a ceramic outer skin. As I had noted on first seeing it; it was beautifully maintained. But I still felt queasy when looking at it. It was old. The AG units were a new addition — about a century back

  — as were the bolt-on fusion boosters. I knew we were going to be in for a rough ride.

  Once everything was loaded and we had clearance from the runcible AI we boarded and the craft was sealed. Grable and I had the only seats available. The rest of the row had been folded down into the floor to make room for our baggage. Singh took a seat in the pilot’s chair while the Golem checked something at the back of the shuttle. I stared through the front screen and saw huge bay doors sliding aside. Beyond was the tight curve of a not too distant horizon.

  The moonlet Carla was only a few tens of kilometres across.

  “Please, strap yourselves in.”

  I glanced up at the Golem then did as instructed. I was too used to travelling on shuttles with shock fields in the passenger areas. Grable seemed to have some trouble with his straps.

  “Let me help you,” said the Golem.

  It reached down and buckled his straps for him.

  “We would not want you to get hurt,” it said, in the flattest of voices. I think Grable got the message.

  The hum of the AG units made my teeth ache, but the lift was smooth and the shuttle slid out of the bay doors without a perceptible waver. I glanced across at Grable and noted with satisfaction that he had gone white. I had thought I was the soft one. Soon we were gliding rapidly above a landscape of jagged rocks with the glitter of runcible installations between like spilt mercury, then there was a roar as the old shuttle motors flung us out of Carla’s well. The acceleration shoved me back into my seat and I prepared myself for more. We weren’t far enough from the moonlet for the fusion motors to be ignited. When we were far enough I certainly knew it; the world grew a little dim around the edges. It comes as a surprise when you find out how much internal AG shields you from reality on the commercial passenger shuttles.

  The journey took us two solstan days and I’ll say no more about it than that it was strained. Entry into Scylla’s atmosphere was frightening, but it came as a relief.

  There are fifth generation adapted people who can survive in vacuum. They live in the Outlink stations which travel on the edge of human expansion into the galaxy. Their adaptations are somewhat different from the kind the bracelet would deliver. It used localized genetic material whether DNA based or not. It read the code, picked the high level survival characteristics, transposed them. I once saw a Sundancer human at Darkander’s; his skin silver as mercury. It has never been made clear whether they are adapted humans or Sundancers with human shape.

  Everyo
ne has seen high G adapted humans. In all cases it was done with nanotech and biointegration. I am about to join the ranks…

  A sharp pain in my wrist as my blood follows a new path, round the bracelet where it is used as a source of raw materials, and from where it comes out much changed. They are in: the nanobots and nanofactories; reforming legions of the invisible. I feel dizzy…

  Now my heart is thundering at double speed. The Tenkian…!

  Ah, better. I altered its programming, widened its recognition parameters. Don’t want to be shot by my own weaponry. Now I will lie down on the sandy mud and stare at the sky. This is why I spend so much time at Darkander’s and why I have such a love for antiquities: technology like sorcery, it scares the shit out of me.

  Losing it…

  Blacking -

  It was two hours until dawn and the sky was the colour of old blood and had clouds across it as ambiguous as Rorschach blots. We stepped down the ramp onto rocky ground that had been incinerated in a half kilometre radius from where we stood. According to Singh this was what was called taking adequate precautions.