The Gabble and Other Stories

by Neal Asher

  She scanned about herself, not quite sure where to go now. Across the body of the ship from her was the mouth of one of those tunnels, curving down into darkness. There? No, to her right the mouth of another tunnel emitted heat a little above the ambient. Stepping over hull beams she began to make her way towards it, then silvery tentacular fingers eased out around the lip of the tunnel and heaved out an object two yards across and seemingly formed by computer junk from the ship compressed into a sphere. Lights glimmered inside the tangle and it extruded antennae, and eyes like the one she had seen outside. Settling down it seemed to unravel slightly, whereupon a fleshless Golem unpeeled from its surface, stood upright and advanced a couple of paces, a thick-ribbed umbilicus still keeping it connected.

  During the Prador – Human war it had been necessary to quickly manufacture the artificial intelligences occupying stations, ships and drones, for casualties were high. Quality control suffered and these intelligences, which in peacetime would have needed substantial adjustments, were sent to the front. As a matter of expediency, flawed crystal got used rather than discarded. Personality fragments were copied, sometimes not very well, successful fighters or tacticians recopied. The traits constructed or duplicated were not necessarily those evincing morality. Some of these entities went rogue and became what were described as black AIs.

  Like Penny Royal.

  Standing at his shoulder the boosted woman, Gene, gave Koober the confidence to defy me. I’d already told him that I knew Jael had bought the gabbleduck from him, I just wanted to know if he knew anything else: who else she might have seen here, where she was going … anything really. I was equally curious to know how Broeven’s ex-employee had ended up here. It struck me that this went beyond the bounds of coincidence.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you nothing, Sandman,’ he said, using my old name with its double meaning.

  ‘True, you don’t,’ I replied. I really hated how the scum I’d known twenty years ago all seemed to have floated to the top. ‘Which is why I’m prepared to pay for what you can tell me.’

  He glanced back at his protection, then crossed his arms. ‘You were the big man once, but that ain’t so now. I got my place here at the Arena and I got a good income. I don’t even have to speak to you.’ He unfolded his arms and waved a finger imperiously. ‘Now piss off.’

  Not only was he defiant, but stupid. The woman, no matter how vigilant, could not protect him from a seeker bullet or a pin coated with bone-eating nanite glued to a door handle. But I didn’t do that sort of stuff now. I was retired. I carefully reached into my belt pouch and took out one of my remaining etched sapphires. I would throw it, and while the gem arced through the air towards Koober and the woman I reckoned on getting the drop on them. My pepperpot stun-gun was lodged in the back of my belt. Of course I’d take her down first. I tossed the gem and began to reach.

  She moved. Koober went over her foot and was heading for the ground. The sapphire glimmered in the air still as the barrel of a pulse-gun centred on my forehead. I guess I was rusty, because I didn’t even consider throwing myself aside. For a moment I just thought, that’s it, but no field-accelerated pulse of aluminium dust blew my head apart. She caught the gem in her other hand and flipped it straight back at me. With my free hand I caught it, my other hand relaxing its grip on my gun and carefully easing out to one side, fingers spread.

  ‘I believe my boss just told you to leave,’ she said.

  Koober was lying on the floor swearing, then he looked up and paused – only now realizing what had happened.

  I nodded an acknowledgement to Gene, turned and quickly headed for the stair leading up from the pens, briefly glimpsed an oversized mongoose chewing on the remains of a huge snake on the arena floor, then set out towards the market where I might pick up more information. What the hell was a woman like her doing with a lowlife like Koober? It made no sense, and the coincidence of her being here just stretched things too far. I wondered if Broeven had sent her to try and cash in – guessing I was probably after something valuable. Such thoughts concerned me – that’s my excuse. She came at me from a narrow side-tunnel. I only managed to turn a little before she grabbed me, spun me round and slammed me against the wall of the exit tunnel. I turned, and again found myself looking down the barrel of that pulse-gun. People around us quickly made themselves scarce.

  ‘Koober had second thoughts about letting you go,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ I managed.

  ‘He is a little slow, sometimes,’ she opined. ‘It occurred to him, once you were out of sight, that you might resent his treatment of you and come back to slip cyanide in his next soy-burger.’

  ‘He’s a vegetarian?’

  ‘It’s working with the animals – put him off meat.’

  I watched her carefully, wondering why I was still alive. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’

  ‘Many people, but in most cases the choice was theirs.’

  ‘That’s very moral of you.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ she agreed. ‘Koober is shit-scared of you. Apparently you’re a multiple murderer?’

  ‘Hit man.’

  ‘Murderer.’

  Ah, I thought I knew what she was now.

  ‘I think you know precisely who I am and what I was,’ I said. ‘Now I’m a xeno-archaeologist trying to track down stolen goods.’

  ‘I stayed here too long,’ she said distractedly, shaking her head. ‘It was going to be my pleasure to shut Koober down.’ She paused for a moment, considering. ‘You should stay out of this, Rho. This has gone beyond you.’

  ‘If you say so,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the gun.’

  She lowered her weapon, then abruptly holstered it. ‘If you don’t believe me, then I suggest you go and see a dealer in biologicals called Desorla. Apparently Jael visited her before coming to see Koober, and their dealings involved Jael shooting out the cameras and security drones in Desorla’s office.’

  ‘Just biologicals?’

  ‘Desorla has … connections.’

  She moved away, and right then I felt no inclination to go after her. Maybe she was feeding me a line of bullshit or maybe she was giving me the lead I needed. If not, I’d come back to the pen well prepared.

  In the market one of the stallholders quickly directed me towards Desorla’s emporium. I entered through one of the floor-level doors and found no activity inside. A spiral staircase led up, but a gate had been drawn across it and locked. I recognized the kind of lock immediately and set to work on it with the tools about my person. Like I said, I was rusty, it took me nearly thirty seconds to break the programs. I climbed up, scanned the next floor, then climbed higher still to the top floor.

  The office was clean and empty, so I kicked in the flimsy door into the living accommodation. Nothing particularly unusual here … then I saw the blood on the floor and the big glass bottle on her coffee table. Stepping round the spatters I peered into the bottle, and in the crumpled and somewhat scabby pink mass inside a nightmare eyeless face peered out at me. Then something dripped on top of my head. I looked up …

  Over by the window I caught my breath, but no one was giving me time for that. Arena security thugs were running towards the emporium and beyond them I could see Gene striding off towards the exit. I opened the window just as the thugs entered the building below me, did a combination of scramble and fall down the outside of the building and hit the stone flat on my back. I had to catch my breath then. After a moment I heaved myself upright and headed for the exit, closing up the visor and hood of my envirosuit and keeping Gene just in sight. I went fast through an airlock far to the left of her, and some paces ahead of her, and was soon running down counting arches. I drew my carbide knife and dropped down beside one arch, hoping I’d counted correctly.

  She stepped out to my left. I knew I could not give her the slightest chance or she would take me down yet again. I
drove the knife in to the side, cut down, grabbed and pulled. In a gout of icy fog her visor skittered across the stone. Choking, she staggered away from me, even then drawing her pulse-gun, which must have been cold-adapted. I drove a foot into her sternum, knocked the last of her air out. Pulse-gun shots tracked along the frigid stone past me and I brought the edge of my hand down on her wrist, cracking bone and knocking the weapon away. Her fist slammed into my ribs and her foot came up to nearly take my head off. Blind and suffocating she was the hardest opponent I’d faced hand-to-hand … or maybe it was that rustiness again. But she went down, eventually, and I dragged her to Ulriss Fire before anoxia killed her.

  ‘Okay,’ I said as she regained consciousness. ‘What the fuck killed her?’

  After a moment of peering at the webbing straps binding her into the chair, she said, ‘You broke my wrist.’

  ‘Talk to me and I’ll let my autodoc work on it. You set me up, Gene. Is that your real name?’

  She nodded absently, though whether that was in answer to my question I couldn’t tell. ‘I noticed you said “what” rather than “who”.’

  ‘A human who takes the trouble to skin someone alive and nail them to the ceiling without making a great deal more mess than that shouldn’t be classified as a who. It’s a thing.’ I watched her carefully, – trying to read her. ‘So maybe it was a thing … rogue Golem?’

  ‘Rho Var Olssen, employed by ECS for wet ops outside the Line, a sort of one-man vengeance machine for the Polity who maybe started to like his job just a little too much. Who are you to righteously talk about classifications?’

  ‘So you know about me. I had you typed when you insisted on calling me a murderer. Nothing quite so moralistic as an ECS agent working outside of her remit – helps to justify it all.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Hit a nerve did I?’ I paused, thinking that perhaps I was being a little naïve. She was baiting me to lead me away from the point. ‘So it was a Golem that killed Desorla?’

  ‘In a sense,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘She was watched and she said too much – to Jael, specifically.’

  ‘Tell me more about Jael.’

  Staring at me woodenly she said, ‘What’s to tell? We knew her interest in ancient technology and we knew she kept a careful eye on people like you. We put something in the way of your sifter and made sure she found out about it.’

  I felt hollow. ‘The memstore … it’s a fake?’

  ‘No, it’s the real thing, Rho. It had to be.’

  I thought about me lying on the floor of my home with a rock hammer embedded in my skull. ‘I could have died.’

  ‘An acceptable level of collateral damage in an operation like this,’ she said flatly.

  I thought about that for one brief horrible moment. Really, there were many people on many worlds trying to find Atheter artefacts, but how many of them were like me? How many of them were so inconvenient? I imagined this was why some AI had reckoned my life an ‘acceptable level of collateral damage’.

  ‘And what is this operation?’ I finally asked. ‘Are you out to nail Prador?’

  She laughed.

  ‘I guess not,’ I said.

  ‘You worked out what Jael was doing yourself. I don’t know how…’ She gazed at me for a moment but I wasn’t going to help her out. She continued, ‘If she can restore the mind to a gabbleduck she has an item to sell to the Prador that will net her more wealth than even she would know how to spend. But there’s a problem: you don’t just feed the memstore to the gabbleduck, you’re not even going to be able to jury-rig some kind of link-up using aug technology. That memstore is complex alien tech loaded in a language few can understand.’

  ‘She needs an AI … or something close …’

  ‘On the button, but though some AIs might venture outside Polity law as we see it, there are certain lines even they won’t cross. Handing over a living Atheter to the Prador is well over those lines.’

  ‘A Prador AI, then.’

  ‘The only ones they have are in their ships – their purpose utterly fixed, and hard-worked. They don’t have the flexibility.’

  ‘So what the fuck—’

  ‘Ever heard of Penny Royal?’ she interrupted.

  I felt a surge of almost superstitious dread. ‘You have got to be shitting me.’

  ‘No shit, Rho. You can see this is out of your league. We’re done here.’

  ‘You put some kind of tracer in the memstore.’

  She gave me a patronizing smile. ‘Too small. We needed U-tech.’

  Suddenly I got the idea. ‘You put it in the gabbleduck.’

  ‘We did.’ She stared at me for a long moment, then continued resignedly, ‘The signal remains constant, giving a Polity ship in the Graveyard the creature’s location from moment to moment. The moment the gabbleduck is connected to the memstore, the signal shuts down, then we’ll know that Penny Royal has control of both creature and store, and then the big guns move in. This is over, Rho. Can’t you see that? You’ve played your part and now the game has moved as far beyond you as it has moved beyond me. It’s time for us both to go home.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I guessed she didn’t understand how being tortured, then nearly killed, had really ticked me off. ‘It’s time for you to tell me how to find Jael. I’ve still got a score to settle with her.’

  Jael did not like being this close to Golem. Either they were highly moral creatures who served the Polity and would not look kindly on her actions, and who were thoroughly capable of doing something about them, or they were the rare amoral/immoral kind, and capable of doing something really nasty. No question here – the thing crammed in beside her in the airlock was a killer, or rather, it was a remote probe, a submind that was part of a killer. As she understood it, Penny Royal had these submind Golem scattered throughout the Graveyard, often contributing to the title of the place.

  After the lock pressurized, the inner door opened to admit them into the Kobashi. While Jael removed her spacesuit the Golem just stood to one side – a static silver skeleton with hardware in its ribcage, cybermotors at its joints and interlinked down its spine, and blue-irised eyeballs in the sockets of its skull. She wondered if it had willingly subjected itself to Penny Royal’s will or been taken over. Probably the latter.

  ‘This way,’ she said to it once she was ready, and led the way back towards the ship’s hold. Behind her the Golem followed with a clatter of metallic feet. Why did it no longer wear syntheflesh and skin? Just to make it more menacing? She wasn’t sure Penny Royal was that interested in interacting with people. Maybe the usual Golem coverings just didn’t last in this environment.

  At her aug command a bulkhead door thumped open and she paused beside it to don a breather mask before stepping through into an area caged off from the rest of the hold. The air within was low in oxygen and would slowly suffocate a human, but having it mix with the rest of the air in the ship while this door was open wasn’t a problem, as the pressure differential pushed the ship air into here. The briefly higher oxygen levels would not harm the hold’s occupant, since its body was rugged enough to survive a range of environments – probably its kind was engineered that way long ago. Beyond the caged area in which they stood, the floor was layered a foot deep with flute-grass rhizomes – as soggy underfoot as sphagnum. The walls displayed Masadan scenery overlaid with bars so the occupant didn’t make the mistake of trying to run off through them. Masadan wildlife sounds filled the air and there were even empty tricone shells on the rhizome mat for further authenticity.

  The gabbleduck looked a great deal more alert and a lot healthier than when Koober owned it. As always when she entered the cage, it was squatting in one corner. Other than via the cameras in here she had seen it do nothing else. It was as if, every time she approached, it heard her and moved to that corner, which should not have been possible since the bulkhead door was thoroughly insulated.

  ‘Subject appears adequate,’ said the Golem. ‘It will be nece
ssary to move it into the complex for installation.’

  ‘Gruvver fleeg purnok,’ said the gabbleduck dismissively.

  ‘The phonetic similarity of the gabble to human language has always been puzzling,’ said the Golem.

  ‘Right,’ said Jael. ‘The memstore?’ She gestured to the door and the Golem obligingly moved out ahead of her.

  She overtook the Golem in the annex to the main air-lock, opened another bulkhead door and led the way into her living area. Here she paused. ‘Before I show you this next item, there are one or two things we need to agree.’ She turned and faced the Golem. ‘The gabbleduck and the memstore must go no deeper into your complex than half a mile.’

  The Golem just stared at her, waiting, not asking the question a human would have asked. It annoyed Jael that Penny Royal probably understood her reasoning and it annoyed her further that she still felt the need to explain. ‘That keeps it within the effective blast radius of my ship. If I die, or if you try to take from me the gabbleduck or the memstore, I can aug a signal back here to start up the U-space engine, the field inverted and ten degrees out of phase. The detonation would excise a fair chunk of this planetoid.’

  The Golem just said, ‘The AI here is of Prador manufacture.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘My payment will be a recording of the Atheter memstore, and a recording of the Prador AI.’

  ‘That seems … reasonable, though you’ll receive the recording of the Prador AI just before I leave.’ She didn’t want Penny Royal to have time to work out how to crack her ship’s security.

  At that moment, the same Prador AI – without speaking – alerted her to activity outside the ship. Using her augs she inspected an external view from the ship’s cameras. One of the tunnel tubes, its mouth filled with some grublike machine, was advancing towards Kobashi.

  ‘What’s going on outside?’ she asked politely.

  ‘I presume you have no spacesuit for the gabbleduck?’