The Parasite

by Neal Asher

  A sudden sickening fear choked Gene as she heard a key click into the front door of the flat. Something was wrong; no one should be coming here. Carlson has sent his men for me. I’m dead. She put her hand inside her carryall and gripped the comforting solidity of her Taser as the door opened.

  Jack?

  Jack scrutinized the clothes on the bed, the carryall, and the suitcase.

  ‘You didn’t expect me back, did you?’

  Gene licked her lips. There was something about him, about his stance and the rapid, almost birdlike movements of his head. She watched him carefully as he placed his case on the coffee table by the wall. They had failed. Somehow Carlson’s two killers had failed. She eased the Taser from her carryall and kept it from view.

  ‘I’ve had it, Jack. I’m leaving.’

  He flicked a glance at her then rubbed his hand up his arm as if he were cold. Gene saw the blood on that hand and crusted under his fingernails.

  ‘You’ve always worked for Carlson,’ he said. ‘I was ill when I sold him that first memory crystal ... didn’t really know what I was doing ... you latched onto me shortly after.’

  Gene lifted the Taser and fired. She was a good shot, and the darts should have taken him in the middle of his chest. His hand blurred as he snatched the darts out of the air, then he was still, the two wires trailing from his hand and hair-thin blue lightning crackling up his arm. Gene glanced down in panic at the Taser’s meter, seeing he had taken a full charge. Then, in an eye-blink he was right up by her, ripping the Taser from her hand and smashing it to fragments against the wall. Next he slammed her down on the floor, knocked the breath out of her, pinning her and speaking in a horribly intense voice.

  ‘No. ... No. ... No. ...’

  The hand round her neck closed like an iron clamp, choking her. She struggled against him but he seemed wholly made of stone. Then abruptly the grip eased.

  ‘You came very close to dying then.’

  He stood up and moved away from her. Gasping and rubbing at her throat she sat upright.

  ‘What ... now?’ she managed.

  Jack had reached the kitchenette by the time she was on her feet.

  ‘You will go to Carlson,’ he said. ‘You will tell him I will meet him at the agreed time in the Cicero. Tell him I have nineteen more T-storage TCC memory crystals for sale for which I want twenty-five thousand Ecu each or the equivalent in Dollars, Marks, or United African Shillings.’

  Gene moved unsteadily to her carryall, threw in the rest of her belongings, grabbed up her suitcase and headed for the door. Like an automaton, Jack broke eggs into a jug. When she reached the door, he looked up. ‘He knows that this is a very good price and one he can make a very great profit on. Tell him also that if he tries to have me killed or the crystals stolen, I will kill him. If he does not believe that, then tell him he will find his men in the alley opposite the computer hypermarket on Magdalene Street.’

  Gene believed. At the door she said, ‘They say that cybernetic augmentation is the latest thing out of Osaka. Is that what you have?’

  ‘Yes, if you like,’ he said, and gulped eggs.

  The Cicero was one of those cellar bars where criminals gathered like rats in a grain store. A flickering neon sign with a downward pointing arrow showed its location, and the hugely fat Chinaman with a shaven head and rat-tail moustache, who sat on a stool by the door, demonstrated that it had a certain seedy exclusivity. As Jack approached, the Chinaman rose to his feet with the silk of his galabia clinging to his rolls of fat.

  ‘I’m expected.’

  ‘Know you?’ wondered the Chinaman, tilting his head.

  ‘Jack Smith. I’m here to see Carlson.’

  The Chinaman picked up his stool and moved to one side. Jack stepped through the door as that visceral something twitched inside him. He was not fully in control. He knew he was walking on the edge of a razor.

  Stairs led down into a huge dimly-lit room redolent of stale drink and hashish smoke, and vibrating to the monotonous thump of dub. Under the tube lights Jack peered through the crowds until he detected Carlson, who sat at a table by the wall with four of his men, and Gene, who sat on his lap with his hand inside her shirt. As Jack advanced to the table Gene spotted him, and whispered in Carlson’s ear.

  Unlike his men, Carlson did not look the part he played. He was a thin, dapper little man with a tendency to wear suits in pale pastel colours. He was dark-skinned, yet dyed his hair blonde. A single jewelled ring glinted in his nostril. Jack edged warily past a Rasta who was stamping in erratic circles and communing with his god through a cannabis prayer stick, and crossed the room.

  ‘Jack Smith, have a seat.’

  Carlson nodded to one of the thugs, who heaved himself reluctantly to his feet and held out his chair for Jack. Jack stared at the man until he backed away, then he sat down placing his case on the table before him. Carlson shoved Gene from his lap and leaned forwards. She rested nervously back against the wall, sneezed, and then coughed. Jack noted her bloodshot eyes then was riveted by the smear of blood on her ear lobe. Abruptly he returned his attention back to Carlson. He did not want to think about what such symptoms might mean.

  ‘The merchandise,’ said Carlson with relish, then he studied Jack calculatingly. ‘We found Julio and his brother.’

  Expressionlessly Jack undid the case, exposed the crystal cubes in their packing, and turned it towards Carlson, who continued to watch Jack for a moment before reaching out to remove one of the cubes.

  ‘How did you come by these?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘I used to pilot a link miner for TCC.’

  Carlson nodded and took an expensive personal unit from his breast pocket. He placed it on the table, opening it out like a wallet, then pressed the cube into the receiver. It flickered. He pressed a couple of touch plates and viewed the display.

  ‘Ten terabytes, finest resolution. I am impressed. The first you brought me was only one terabyte...’ He peered at Jack again. ‘Twenty-five thousand each you say?’

  ‘A good price and you know it,’ said Jack.

  Carlson greedily eyed the case then abruptly snapped his fingers. The thug who had given up his chair came to the table with a similar case, which Jack regarded suspiciously.

  ‘High denomination,’ said Carlson, nodding to the thug, who opened the case.

  It contained ten slim bundles of five-thousand Ecu notes. Jack counted the notes, checking the circuitry imprinted in the paper of each with the anti-forge scanner set in his watch. Carlson checked each and every one of the cubes with his personal unit. When they had finished they sat back, Carlson watching him carefully and Jack studying Carlson’s dubious companions.

  ‘I do hope there are going to be no further ... dealings,’ Jack suggested.

  Carlson stretched his back, fiddled with his nose ring and smiled weakly. ‘Of course not. As you said, “a good price”. Tell me ... these new implants from Osaka...’

  Jack smiled as that something squirmed impatiently within him. ‘They are very effective.’ He picked up an aluminium ash tray, crumpled it like paper into a ball in one hand then dropped it on the table top. Carlson stared at it expressionlessly as Gene sneezed and shivered and the thugs warily shifted in their seats.

  Jack took up the case of money and headed for the door. The Chinaman stood aside for him and he was soon on the street and walking quickly away.

  Done, finished.

  The attack came two streets away. Suddenly his left arm felt very light, strange. He lifted it and, without understanding, stared at the smoking stump of his wrist. Smoke burst from his jeans at his hip, then from his shirt.

  Laser.

  Suddenly he was running, faster than he had ever run before. A woman screamed next to him, but by the time she began falling he was ten yards beyond her and accelerating. A store front window flickered red and the manikin inside caught flame and slumped like a man without bones, but by then Jack had darted into the alleyways and was gone.


  Jack collapsed behind the rubbish skip, his body awash with pain and the case of money clutched in his right hand as if welded there.

  Bastards ... a laser ... the bleeding.

  He looked around vaguely for something to use as a tourniquet, then peered down at the stump of his left wrist and saw that it was as dry as biltong.

  Am I dying?

  But no, the pain was fading and his head clear. He sat upright and wondered what he must do now.

  They cut my fucking hand off.

  He had to recover his hand. He had the money, and there were freelance surgeons enough in Sao Paulo, just like the ones who came here to offer expensive cosmetic surgery to the likes of Carlson. Jack forced himself to his feet, searched the skip and found some black plastic, which he awkwardly wrapped around his butchered wrist.

  Why do I feel so calm?

  But he knew that was a question he need not ask. He felt calm because he had been made to feel calm, just as his fear and anger had been controlled, his strength, his speed, his bleeding. Something that had lain dormant in cometary ice for God knows how many millennia, now resided in his body, and perhaps in the bodies of others...

  On the streets again Jack bought a long coat to cover his blood-stained clothing, not that it was noticeable in the neon and hololight. He bought food, lots of food, and bottles of glucose tablets. Then he bought a small portable cooler to hang on his belt, stowed his money in a street safe, and headed back towards the Cicero.

  He found his hand in the gutter where it had been kicked, lying like some fat cave-dwelling spider. As the crowds passed him without a glance, he scooped it up and dropped it into the cooler. As he stood up he saw a long black hydrogen-powered sedan pull up outside the Cicero, and Carlson, Gene, and his four men climbing into it. Carlson was agitated: waving his arms about and shouting to one of his men. Jack felt an anger that brought him round with sickening lurch.

  Not now. No, not now.

  He fought against what roiled inside him, tried to damp his anger, and he turned away. There was a time limit. This he knew. If he was to save his hand he had to get to a surgeon as quickly as possible. Carlson could wait to die. Jack walked away.

  The sign said ‘Doctor Benedict Jones’ whilst underneath were listed all the services catered for, including plastic surgery, augmentation, and much else besides. Jack pushed open the panelled door and walked in, scanning the waiting room.

  Everything was clinically white; comfortable seats were scattered around low glass coffee tables on a tough cream carpet. A young man in a business suit sat in one of the chairs reading a portable console, the side of his head shaven and a dressing over what Jack supposed to be the connections for a cerebral augmentation. From behind a desk of painfully white plastic, a nurse with rainbow-dyed hair and a blue uniform glanced up from her nails and squinted at him suspiciously. Jack was in a hurry. He strode to her desk and took out a wad a five-thousand Ecu notes.

  ‘I need attention right now,’ he said.

  She stared at the money as she dropped her cosmetics in her handbag. ‘What ... do you require,’ she asked, then added, ‘sir.’

  Jack could think of no other way to put it. He held up the stump of his wrist. ‘My hand has been severed.’ He opened the cold box at his side and showed her its contents. She paled and sat back.

  ‘One moment.’ She got up and hurried to the side door of the waiting room.

  Jack turned away from the desk, glanced at the business-suited man, then took a seat. He was at a loss to know what else to do. He felt no pain, and as a consequence he felt much like a man who had come in to have repairs made on his car.

  Jones came into the waiting room after a couple of minutes, studied Jack for a second then gestured him to follow. The receptionist came out to her desk and sat down again.

  Jones led him down a corridor, past a room where a woman lay on a table with a loom of wires plugged into her head. He took him into another room much the same and instructed him to lie on the table.

  ‘What medication have you taken?’

  ‘None,’ said Jack, and this evinced surprise.

  ‘I have to know else there could be mistakes with the anaesthesia.’

  ‘As I said, I have taken nothing. This has only just happened.’

  Jones stared at him for a moment then said, ‘Right, I’ll put you out now, that way there will be little pain. That’ll be five thousand dollars down.’

  Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a five thousand Ecu note, which was near twice the amount. Jones took the note and pocketed it then he reached down and unhooked the cold-box from Jack’s belt.

  ‘Laser,’ he said as he dropped Jack’s hand into tin tray. Then he took up a multi syringe and primed it. Jack felt a terrible urge to avoid the syringe and run, but he suppressed the urge long enough for a sheet of blackness to cover him.

  Chapter 3

  Out of the blackness, like a potholer coming up after a week’s subterranean journeying. Lights were bright all around him and the smell of disinfectant astringent in his nostrils. A surge of adrenaline jerked him upright even as the nurse pulled the mask from his face. Jones and the nurse gaped at him in shock.

  ‘That is the quickest recovery I have ever seen,’ said Jones.

  Jack studied at his re-attached hand, now splinted and bound.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘There was some dead tissue, and unfortunately some of the nerves could not be reconnected since they were too severely damaged.’

  Jack slid his legs off of the table and jerked a drip from his arm. The nurse moved to protest, but Jones caught her arm and held her back.

  ‘What is it?’ Jones asked, ‘Some sort of augmentation? Drugs? A PCP derivative? Nobody recovers this quickly.’

  ‘How much more do I owe you?’ asked Jack.

  Jones looked askance at the nurse before picking up a pad from a table scattered with instruments. ‘One moment.’

  ‘Just give me an estimate.’

  ‘This is not so—’

  ‘An estimate.’

  ‘You’ll probably be in credit. It will be in the region of four thousand Ecu.’

  Jack liked him for that, for he could have demanded more.

  ‘Keep the change,’ he said, and headed for the door.

  Two constables sat in the waiting room, in chairs by the wall, drinking coffee. Jack glanced at them and continued on through. The door opened behind him, and he saw one of the constables glance aside, then leap to his feet, spilling his coffee in the process. Just like Jones they had not expected him to recover so quickly.

  Slow motion.

  Jack whipped round and stepped towards them, back-handed the one who had risen. The man hit the wall and slid down senseless. His companion tried to rise but Jack brought his hand back in a flat slap that laid the man out on the floor. Then he paused and studied what he had wrought. He was proud of himself, for he had not killed them. He moved to go, but changed his mind when he saw the weaponry one of them was carrying. Both of them carried stun batons, but the one he had struck first must have been a ‘special’ for at his hip, in a security holster, he wore a twenty-millimetre flack gun. Jack reached down, broke the armoured holster open as if it was made of brittle toffee then, tucking the gun under his jacket, exited the surgery. Jones and the nurse were long gone, perhaps hiding in their aseptic operating theatres.

  Carlson was scared. Gene knew this because he was no longer trying to fondle her in his usual contemptuous manner; no longer displaying his power and control to his juniors, his virtual ownership of her – or perhaps the dose of flu she seemed to have picked up was putting him off. He sat in the car as tense as a wire, his hand wandering to the comfort of the Tosh holstered under his jacket. All four of his men, including the driver, were likewise armed for this trip to the Cicero, which had become almost obligatory to Carlson since Jack Smith’s escape. Carlson dared not show his fear in any obvious manner.

  ‘He’s probably l
ong gone by now, or dead in some alley,’ said Gene, by way of desultory comfort. She was bored and fed up now and felt like hell. Her payment from Carlson had not been quite enough for her to make a break from him and she was coming to regret some of her choices. Jack, if he had survived, was carrying near a hundred-thousand Ecus. Perhaps she could have made the break with him? It wouldn’t have been so bad. Some of his habits were a bit disgusting, but at least they did not cause her the pain of some of Carlson’s little games. Carlson glanced at her with annoyance then gazed out the window as they pulled up outside the Cicero.

  ‘That may be the case—’ he began, and got no further.

  The explosion frosted the screen and it seemed as if the driver was turning to say something, yet the side of his face was gone. Gene screamed as Carlson groped for his Tosh. A second explosion jerked one of the front seats back and the driver’s companion spurted his life out through burst upholstery over Gene’s legs. She screamed some more.

  ‘Out!’ yelled Carlson, and the two remaining heavies exited their doors with a well-rehearsed roll, their Toshes coming from their holsters with practised ease.

  ‘Shit! What’s he got! Shut up!’

  Gene shut up, thinking with some calm part of her mind that Jack must have got hold of either police- or military-issue weaponry. She sneezed and dropped down to the floor. Irrelevantly she realized she was ravenously hungry, and even the raw eggs Jack enjoyed seemed appetizing now. Carlson was swearing unremittingly as he crouched down beside her.

  Through the doors Gene could hear the static hissing of the Toshes, then she heard another sound: the familiar whoosh of a police-issue twenty. The explosion threw slivers of glass into her hair. The car jerked and she saw one of its doors bowling down the street. People were screaming and running out there, and Gene moved to where the door had been torn away, ready to run too. She saw one of Carlson’s men stand, fire, then be blown to bloody fragments, his head hitting the sidewalk still attached to a length of spine. She rolled out of the car. It was a death trap, and to hell with Carlson. A glance over the car showed her something moving so fast it was hard to identify. A man? The figure blurred past the second of Carlson’s man, who he fell slowly to the road with the top of his head missing. Gene sat down on the pavement in plain view.