The Gabble and Other Stories

by Neal Asher

  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 recognize 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. He 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 carcass 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 imminently 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 be 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 lay 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. Everyone 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 fo
llows 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.

  ‘How far do you have to travel from here?’ he asked Grable.

  ‘You don’t have to know that. All you have to know is that we’ll be back here in two days solstan.’

  Grable took precautions as well, but then he had no choice, that was the only information I had given him. He did not know the direction in which we would be going just yet. I took my own precautions.

  ‘We’ll see you then.’

  The ramp retracted with swift finality and the shuttle rose with an eerie lack of sound on its AG. A few minutes later we saw the accelerating flare of its engines. The sound reached us as we hurriedly unpacked our equipment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Grable quickly get hold of some kind of handgun and glance at me speculatively. By then I had a control box in my hand and was stepping back from my luggage.

  ‘This should keep us secure,’ I said, and flicked a nail against a touch plate.

  The Tenkian autogun rose out of the box like some terrible chrome insect. Red and green lights flickered on its various displays and its barrel glimmered in the starlight. Soon it was hovering above the box with its turret revolving, pausing, considering.

  ‘I have it programmed for a twenty-metre circle from me,’ I said. I watched as Grable carefully holstered his gun. He didn’t know what else I had it programmed for.

  The sun was a spherical emerald when it breached the horizon and gave even the ash around us the appearance of life. Scylla’s binary companion was days away yet, on the other side of the planet, where it had dragged the planetary sea. As the sun cleared the horizon the tint became less garish, but by then the life of Scylla was coming to meet us. The first murder-louse approached with the dainty and deadly purpose of a spider. The auto-gun killed it at an invisible line.

  ‘If one of those gets through it’s a toss-up between whether you get eaten or injected full of eggs,’ Grable told me after he had named the creature.

  ‘I’d have thought you more prepared,’ I said.

  He smiled bleakly and pulled on gloves that keyed in at the wrists to the body armour he was wearing under his normal clothing. I felt a little foolish.

  ‘I’ve an autogun as well, but not as good as that Tenkian.’

  It killed nine more lice before we had the portable gravcar assembled and the rest of our equipment loaded upon it. Only when we were twenty metres above the ground with the autogun perched at the back of the craft did we relax, though not for long – the Tenkian’s purpose then was one of dealing with creatures like a cross between a moth and a crab which seemed to want to come and visit.

  ‘Okay, which way?’ Grable asked. I took out my palm computer and called up my satlink, direction-finder and map. After a moment I read off the coordinates to him. There was a pause. I expected him to make his move then, but it wasn’t to be. He punched the coordinates into the autopilot and off we went, just as if we were partners. I thought it likely he wanted to be sure I was telling the truth.

  The trip took five hours. Once we passed over the edge of the incinerated area we got a look at what the surface of Scylla was really like. I realized then why this planet had first been named Shore. (Like probably a hundred other planets. How many Edens, New Earths and Utopias would there be if the naming of planets had been left to humans?) The surface was a tideland. The plant life was seaweeds: kelps and wracks and huge rotting masses of something like sargassum. There were rocky areas, muddy areas, sandy areas, and pools dotted across the shorescape like silver coins. Through a set of image-intensifiers I observed a multitude of different kinds of molluscs. There were plenty of arthropods as well, the murder-lice being the most prevalent. Perhaps there were other dominant kinds, but I didn’t like to keep the intensifiers to my eyes for too long, as it meant my eyes weren’t on Grable.

  As we drew close to our destination we began to see centuries-old wreckage. I passed the intensifiers to Grable and pointed at the blurred squares and lines in the mudflats below us.

  ‘Looks like the remains of an earlier attempt,’ I said.

  He glanced over but didn’t accept the intensifiers.

  ‘Where shall I put us down?’

  I pointed to where a rock field rose up out of the mudflats. The entrance to the base was in such an area, if this place had not changed too much since Paul had been here. As Grable brought the craft down between two huge boulders he gazed out at the mudflats dubiously.

  ‘It’s an underground installation?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, and before you ask, I brought a pump.’

  A wide-field metals resonator found us the entrance in a matter of minutes. A shot from Grable’s handgun turned the door into a molten ruin. After that we had to leave my pump labouring away for hours to get rid of the water and liquid mud. Sitting in the AGC we ate a meal of recon steak, croquette potatoes and courgettes, and watched the Tenkian splattering murder-lice with metronomic regularity. Off to one side the roar of the outlet hose was like the warming up of a shuttle engine. It was a good pump; made of nano-built ceramics and powered by a couple of minipiles.

  After we had eaten we checked on the pump and found that a couple of rooms were now accessible and that the inlet hose had attached itself to a wall like a leech. I turned the pump off, moved the hose down into an underwater stairwell, and turned it on again. The exposed rooms contained little of value or interest other than orgiastic clumps of those molluscs called hammer-whelks, one shell of which had got me into all this. The floor was half a metre deep in reddish slimy mud.

  Two hours passed and the outlet hose of the pump shifted, as one of its ground staples came out, and created a geyser over the mudflats. For a while we had a blue-shifted rainbow, until I went out and drove another staple into the rock. In another hour the next floor was revealed and things became a lot more interesting.

  I hadn’t expected to find human remains and was most surprised when I did. The man, or woman, had climbed into an armoured diving suit and died there. What I found was a skeleton inside a thick crust of grey corrosion. I only knew the skeleton was there because the salts that had corroded the armour had kept the faceplate clear, inside and out.

  ‘The Golem Twos might be the same. They didn’t make very good ceramal then,’ said Grable.

  ‘They crated them. There’s a good chance the crates were some kind of vacuum-sealed plastic. Let’s just hope we’re lucky,’ I told him.

  We found three crates and our scans showed us the contents were intact. I felt a surge of joy, excitement, justification. Grable showed unexpected friendliness. We attached AG units and loaded two of the crates with efficient cooperation. Grable was all smiles.

  ‘You get that last one and I’ll detach the pump,’ he suggested. Grinning, I raised my hand and entered the base. Only when I reached the crate, turned on the AG unit and found it didn’t work, did the nasty distrustful part of my mind come out from under its stone and say, ‘You dumb fuck.’

  I ran outside in time to see the gravcar ten metres up in the air and rising. Its units were struggling and I noticed that a cluster of hammerwhelks was clinging
to the underside.

  ‘Grable you bastard!’

  ‘The world-tide should be along in a few days! Enjoy your swim!’

  For a moment I considered programming the Tenkian to go after him. But it was still spattering murder-lice. I shuddered to think what would happen to me without its protection.

  I am using the keypad now to input this. I have no choice. I came out of the blackness with a leaden heaviness in my lungs and a strange numbness to my skin. I staggered to my feet and felt the skin of my arm. It is no longer skin. It is an exoskeleton. I reached up to my face with hands like complex pincers and screamed at what I found there. My face has deformed horrifically. I looked down and saw my teeth lying in the mud. I have no need of them now. I managed to click my mandibles a few times before I blacked out again. I thought that perhaps my mind was becoming as irrelevant as my teeth. When I woke next I was feeding on the remains of the murder-louse I was stealing my shape from, and I felt no inclination to stop. That wasn’t what got to me. What got to me was that I wasn’t breathing, not at all.

  The nightmare lasted perhaps ten hours before either I began to accept or something in the structure of my brain was altered or excised. I was frighteningly hungry and the lice beyond the perimeter of the autogun looked good. I turned the gun off and waited. In moments the lice were on me, mandibles grating on my shell and ovipositors thumping against my torso like bayonets. I tore them apart like handfuls of weeds, then turned the autogun back on while I fed, cracking open legs and carapaces with my mandibles. It sure beat the hell out of the nutcrackers they provide in restaurants.

  A minute ago the autogun showed a red light and I shut it down. No more lice came though. A steady vibration is shaking the air and the ground under my feet is jerking spasmodically. The binary is rising; another sun, a small blue sun. The horizon it breaches is a line of white and silver. The world-tide. At the first signs I folded the autogun and, copying the lice I could see, I found a crevice and jammed myself in it. Here I am. The initial wave I estimate to be about twenty metres high; a mountain of water swamping the world. Behind it the sea is mounded up like a leashed monster. The sight is terrifying, exhilarating, magnificent. Now I must hold on.