Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 107

by Clarke,Neil

  He started moving in, gun at the ready, letting me follow behind. I tried to peek at the future, but there was nothing to see. Not anymore. Too many muddled pieces on the board, too many people trying to bluff and get a better result out of the hand fate dealt them. Occasionally we’d pass a body, see drips of blood on the concrete or smears of it on the wall. It’s a twisty path, heading down to the doc’s lab, and plenty of corridors leading off to the side. We found him hiding in one about halfway down, crouched in the darkness with a bone-saw in his fist. He was bleeding, the doc, but he moved okay when he saw us. “A grazing shot,” he said, “lucky, at best.”

  “The dragon,” Coody said. He pumped his shotgun for emphasis, chambering a live shell.

  “Deeper in,” Doc Cameron said, “there’s a few boys towards the lab, trying to contain it.” He paused a moment, stared at Coody. “They’re doing your job, sheriff, unless I miss my guess. Perhaps you should go join them.” There was steel in his voice as he said it, and his good hand at his belt hovering over the little box patched into his computer.

  “The dragon’s your mess,” Coody said. “What if I say no?”

  The doc’s gaze slid over to me, then back up to Coody. “I gather you’ve been informed of that,” he said. The laugh that followed was high-pitched, a trill of amusement.

  Down the corridors, in the doc’s lab, we heard someone screaming. “Probably best if you hurry,” Doc said. He laughed again, winced, put his hook against the wall to steady himself. Blood loss, I figured. The scratch in his side weren’t as minor as he made out. Prescience said the doc was already dead, just running out the final moments before the injury put him down. The only question now was whether the dragon and Coody went with him.

  He wheezed for breath, leaning forward, and the hand over his computer box strayed a little too far. His eyes were stuck on Coody, waiting for the decision. I thought about Da for a moment, about dying old and safe, then I trusted my gut and Da’s knife and went at the doc with a bloody yell and the knife twisting straight for stomach.

  It cost me a hook across the face, stabbing the doc in the gut. He slashed me hard, but it didn’t kill me; didn’t even hurt when he followed up, jamming the hook in my stomach and ripping a shallow trench through the skin and the gizzards. The pain was bad, even looking back with hindsight, but I figure it was worth it. I got the knife in the doc two or three times in return, kept him busy while Coody lined up the shot and let the shotgun go boom ‘til he ran out of ammo. I weren’t conscious to see it happen, but the doc went down. Went down hard, a bloody mess, and Coody standing over him with the gun just-in-case, calling down the clones to stitch me up and get me walking.

  I spent a week or two in bed, healing up from my injuries, and would have myself some nice scars to show off by the time I was healed. The dragon was gone by the time I came to, walked out of town by Coody with supplies and a warning. There weren’t much left for him in town, with the doc laid out for burial, and there were plenty of folks out for his blood after the business with the explosions. He went quiet, which surprised me, and he was missing an eye to go with his broken horn.

  We were due some hardness, everyone knew that, and there were a couple-a folks held grudges against Coody for doing in the doc. But we held off against the scavenger beasts and the retaliatory raids by the last of doc’s ‘borgs, found ways to make do when his tech ran down and people started limping ‘round town on malfunctioning limbs. I started wearing my Da’s gun, when Coody asked me for help. He was running short of clones, now. There were men in doc’s labs trying to fix the machines, but they weren’t none as smart as him and it would take a while to get things running, if they ever did.

  Things are good, though, since the dragon came. Tougher, yes, but not so bad as they were. My Da used to tell me that people cope, that the war proved that more than anything. But they’ll do more than cope, if you ask them too, if you show them there’s another option. That they’ll do the right thing, eventually, ‘cause doing otherwise there ain’t much to life. I’m not saying he were right, mind, but he saw a lot of what might happen. He was a smart man, Da, and he were better at lookin’ forward than me.

  But that was him, and he did his part. Now there’s me and Coody and a bunch of broken parts, a town that needs savin’ and a future stretchin’ forward. And maybe I get to make it to the end I’m meant to have, and maybe I get sidetracked a little along the way. It doesn’t seem so bad, not knowing, not like it used too.

  And Da always used to tell me there were worse things than dying young.

  First published in Eclipse Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2011.

  About the Author

  Peter M. Ball is the author of Horn, Bleed, and the Flotsam novella series from Apocalypse Ink Productions. His short stories have appeared in venues such as Weird Tales, Electric Velocipede, Eclipse 4, and Daily Science Fiction.

  Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck

  Neal Asher

  Lost in some perverse fantasy, Tameera lovingly inspected the displays of her Optek rifle. For me, what happened next proceeded with the unstoppable nightmare slowness of an accident. She brought the butt of the rifle up to her shoulder, took careful aim, and squeezed off a single shot. One of the sheq slammed back against a rock face then tumbled down through vegetation to land in the white water of a stream.

  Some creatures seem to attain the status of myth even though proven to be little different from other apparently prosaic species. On Earth the lion contends with the unicorn, the wise old elephant never forgets, and gentle whales sing haunting ballads in the deeps. It stems from anthropomorphism, is fed by both truth and lies, and over time firmly embeds itself in human culture. On Myral, where I had spent the last ten years, only a little of such status attached to the largest autochthon—not surprising for a creature whose name is a contraction of “shit-eating quadruped.” But rumors of something else in the wilderness, something that had no right to be there, had really set the myth-engines of the human mind into motion, and brought hunters to this world.

  There was no sign of any sheq on the way out over the narrow vegetation-cloaked mounts. They only put in an appearance after I finally moored my blimp to a peak, above a horizontal slab on which blister tents could be pitched. My passengers noticed straight away that the slab had been used many times before, and that my mooring was an iron ring long set into the rock, but then, campsites were a rarity amid the steep slopes, cliffs, and streams of this area. It wasn’t a place humans were built for. Sheq country.

  Soon after he disembarked, Tholan went over to the edge to try out one of his disposable vidcams. The cam itself was about the size of his forefinger, and he was pointing it out over the terrain while inspecting a palm com he held in his other hand. He had unloaded a whole case of these cams, which he intended to position in likely locations, or dangle into mist pockets on a line—a hunter’s additional eyes. He called me over. Tameera and Anders followed.

  “There.” He nodded downwards.

  A seven of sheq was making its way across the impossible terrain—finding handholds amid the lush vertical vegetation and traveling with the assurance of spiders on a wall. They were disconcertingly simian, about the size of a man, and quadruped—each limb jointed like a human arm but ending in hands bearing eight long prehensile fingers. Their heads, though, were anything but simian, being small, insectile, like the head of a mosquito but with two wide trumpet-like probosces.

  “They won’t be a problem will they?” Tholan’s sister, Tameera, asked.

  She was the most xenophobic, I’d decided, but then such phobia made little difference to their sport: the aliens they sought out usually being the “I’m gonna chew off the top of your head and suck out your brains” variety.

  “No—so long as we leave them alone,” said Tholan. Using his thumb on the side controls of his palm com, he increased the camera’s magnification, switching it to infrared then ultrasound imaging.

  “I didn’t load anything,�
� said Anders, Tholan’s PA. “Are they herbivores?”

  “Omnivores,” I told her. “They eat some of that vegetation you see and supplement their diet with rock conch and octupal.”

  “Rock conch and octupal indeed,” said Anders.

  I pointed to the conch-like mollusks clinging to the wide leaves below the slab.

  Anders nodded then said, “Octupal?”

  “Like it sounds: something like an octopus, lives in pools, but can drag itself overland when required.” I glanced at Tameera and added, “None of them bigger than your hand.”

  I hadn’t fathomed this trio yet. Brother and sister hunted together, relied on each other, yet seemed to hate each other. Anders, who I at first thought Tholan was screwing, really did just organize things for him. Perhaps I should have figured them out before agreeing to being hired, then Tameera would never have taken the shot she then took.

  The hot chemical smell from the rifle filled the unbreathable air. I guessed they used primitive projectile weapons of this kind to make their hunts more sporting. I didn’t know how to react. Tholan stepped forwards and pushed down the barrel of her weapon before she could kill another of the creatures.

  “That was stupid,” he said.

  “Do they frighten you?” she asked coquettishly.

  I reached up and checked that my throat plug was still in place, for I felt breathless, but it was still bleeding oxygen into my bronchus. To say that I now had a bad feeling about all this would be an understatement.

  “You know that as well as putting us all in danger, she just committed a crime,” I said conversationally, as Tholan stepped away from his sister.

  “Crime?” he asked.

  “She just killed a C-grade sentient. If the Warden AI finds out and can prove she knew before she pulled the trigger, then she’s dead. But that’s not the main problem now.” I eyed the sheq seven, now six. They seemed to be confused about the cause of their loss. “Hopefully they won’t attack, but it’ll be an idea to keep watch.”

  He stared at me, shoved his cam into his pocket. I turned away and headed back. Why had I agreed to bring these bored aristos out here to hunt for Myral’s mythic gabbleduck? Money. Those who have enough to live comfortably greatly underestimate it as a source of motivation. Tholan was paying enough for me to pay off all I owed on my blimp, and prevent a particular shark from paying me a visit to collect interest by way of involuntarily donated organs. It would also be enough for me to upgrade my apartment in the citadel, so I could rent it while I went out to look at this world. I’d had many of the available cerebral loads and knew much about Myral’s environment, but that wasn’t the same as experiencing it. Still there was much for me to learn, to know. Though I was certain that the chances of my finding a gabbleduck—a creature from a planet light-centuries away—anywhere on Myral, were lower than the sole of my boot.

  “She only did that to get attention,” said Anders at my shoulder.

  “Well, let’s hope she didn’t succeed too well,” I replied. I looked up at my blimp, and considered the prospect of escaping this trio and bedding down for the night. Certainly we would be getting nothing more done today, what with the blue giant sun gnawing the edge of the world as it went down.

  “You have to excuse her. She’s over-compensating for a father who ignored her for the first twenty years of her life.”

  Anders had been coming on to me right from the start and I wondered just what sort of rich bitch game she was playing, though to find out I would have to let my guard down, and that I had no intention of doing. She was too much: too attractive, too intelligent, and just being in her presence set things jumping around in my stomach. She would destroy me.

  “I don’t have to excuse her,” I said. “I just have to tolerate her.”

  With that, I headed to the alloy ladder extending down from the blimp cabin.

  “Why are they called shit-eaters?” she asked falling into step beside me. Obviously she’d heard where the name sheq came from.

  “As well as the rock conch and octupal, they eat each others shit—running it through a second intestinal tract.”

  She winced.

  I added, “But it’s not something they should die for.”

  “You’re not going to report this are you?” she asked.

  “How can I—he didn’t want me carrying traceable com.”

  I tried not to let my anxiety show. Tholan didn’t want any of Myral’s AIs finding out what he was up to, so, as a result, he provided all our com equipment, and it was encoded. I was beginning to wonder if that might be unhealthy for me.

  “You’re telling me you have no communicator up there?” She pointed up at the blimp.

  “I won’t report it,” I said, then climbed, wishing I could get away with pulling the ladder up behind me, wishing I had not stuck so rigidly to the wording of the contract.

  Midark is that time when it’s utterly black on Myral, when the sun is precisely on the opposite side of the world from you. It comes after five hours of blue, lasts about three hours prior to the next five hours of blue—the twilight that is neither day nor night and is caused by reflection of sunlight from the sub-orbital dust cloud. Anyway, it was at midark when the screaming and firing woke me. By the time I had reattached my oxygen bottle and was clambering down the ladder, some floods were lighting the area and it was all over.

  “Yes, you warned me,” Tholan spat.

  I walked over to Tameera’s tent, which was ripped open and empty. There was no blood, but then the sheq would not want to damage the replacement. I glanced at Anders, who was inspecting a palm com.

  “She’s alive.” She looked up. “She must have been using her own oxygen supply rather than the tent’s. We have to go after her now.”

  “Claw frames in midark?” I asked.

  “We’ve got night specs.” She looked at me as if she hadn’t realized until then how stupid I was.

  “I don’t care if you’ve got owl and cat genes—it’s suicide.”

  “Do explain,” said Tholan nastily.

  “You got me out here as your guide. The plan was to set up a base and from it survey the area for any signs of the gabbleduck—by claw frame.”

  “Yes . . . ”

  “Well, claw frames are only safe here during the day.”

  “I thought you were going to explain.”

  “I am.” I reached out, detached one of the floods from its narrow post, and walked with it to the edge of the slab. I shone it down revealing occasional squirming movement across the cliff of vegetation below.

  “Octupals,” said Anders. “What’s the problem?”

  I turned to her and Tholan. “At night they move to new pools and, being slow-moving, they’ve developed a defense. Anything big gets too close, and they eject stinging barbs. They won’t kill you, but you’ll damned well know if you’re hit, so unless you’ve brought armored clothing . . . ”

  “But what about Tameera?” Anders asked.

  “Oh the sheq will protect her for a while.”

  “While?” Tholan queried.

  “At first they’ll treat her like an infant replacement for the one she killed,” I told him. “So they’ll guide her hands and catch her if she starts to fall. After time they’ll start to get bored, because sheq babies learn very quickly. If we don’t get to her before tomorrow night’s first blue, she’ll probably have broken her neck.”

  “When does this stop?” He nodded towards the octupal activity.

  “Mid-blue.”

  “We go then.”

  The claw frame is sporting development from military exoskeletons. The frame itself braces your body. A spine column rests against your back like a metal flatworm. Metal bones from this extend down your legs and along your arms. The claws are four times the size of human hands, and splayed out like big spiders from behind them, and from behind the ankles. Each finger is a piton, and programmed to seek out crevices on the rock face you are climbing. The whole thing is stronger, fas
ter, and more sensitive than a human being. If you want, it can do all the work for you. Alternatively, it can just be set in neutral, the claws folded back, while you do all the climbing yourself—the frame only activating to save your life. Both Anders and Tholan, I noted, set theirs to about a third-assist, which is where I set mine. Blister tents and equipment in their backpacks, and oxygen bottles and catalyzers at their waists, they went over the edge ahead of me. Tameera’s claw frame scrambled after them—a glittery skeleton—slaved to them. I glanced back at my blimp and wondered if I should just turn round and go back to it. I went over the edge.

  With the light intensity increasing and the octupals bubbling down in their pools we made good time. Later, though, when we had to go lower to keep on course after the sheq, things got a bit more difficult. Despite the three of us being on third-assist we were panting within a few hours, as lower down there was less climbing and more pushing through tangled vegetation. I noted that my catalyzer pack was having trouble keeping up—cracking the C02 atmosphere and topping up the two flat bodyform bottles at my waist.

  “She’s eight kilometers away,” Anders suddenly said. “We’ll not reach her at this rate.”

  “Go two-thirds assist,” said Tholan.

  We all did that, and soon our claw frames were moving faster through the vegetation and across the rock-faces than was humanly possible. It made me feel lazy—like I was just a sack of flesh hanging on the hard-working claw frame. But we covered those eight kilometers quickly and as the sun breached the horizon, glimpsed the sheq far ahead of us, scrambling up from the sudden shadows in the valleys. They were a seven again now, I saw: Tameera being assisted along by creatures that had snatched the killer of one of their own, mistaking her for sheq herself.

  “Why do they do it?” Anders asked as we scrambled along a vertical face.

  “Do what?”

  “Snatch people to make up their sevens.”

  “Three reason’s I’ve heard: optimum number for survival, or seven sheq required for successful mating, or the start of a primitive religion.”