by Neal Asher
The man-thing had been down on all four limbs, moving like a dog chasing a scent. He froze for a long moment then abruptly scuttled aside and leapt up onto a boulder beside the stream and began climbing a muddy cliff towards overhanging vines. The sleer, obviously seriously miffed about being turned away from one prey, was having none of this. It revolved to one side, sinking its limbs in the same cliff further up the course of the stream, and went along this as if gravity didn’t matter. Its pickaxe mandibles clashed closed on the man’s torso, one of them going through, its spike coming out of his back below his collarbone. He punched it with his remaining fist and I heard the impact. Both of them fell from the cliff in a blur of limbs, the smack of further impacts like gunshots. The sleer turned its ovipositor tail in and stabbed repeatedly, while the man flailed at it with both arms. Drawing closer, I noted that where one hand had been severed away now grew another, small and folded up.
They bounced off the surface of the boulder then down into the stream, kicking up a spray as they fought. I drew close enough to ensure the accuracy of my shots, settled behind a boulder and braced the carbine across the top of it. I felt a sudden reluctance, similar to earlier, to fire on something nominally human. I remembered how he had behaved aboard the King’s Ship, the intelligence I’d seen in his eyes, and that the frame attached to his body controlled his subsequent actions. But then I fired anyway.
My first shot hit him in the side and flamed there, peeling up smoking skin. I swore, aimed more carefully, then hit the control frame where it lay across his shoulders. The thing smoked, and further down his spine near the base of his back, one of the segments running down folded up on a small detonation. This sent him into a fit, which gave the sleer an advantage. It managed to force him down underneath it, its carapace saws cutting in, but slowly, on either side of his torso. He recovered, driving his fist up underneath its head with a shattering impact. I saw him tear away carapace and reach in to pull out something glutinous. The sleer began shuddering and they rolled. It continued stabbing with its ovipositor and I had clear shots again.
I hit the metallic device cupping the back of his head. Something blew inside it, knocking his head out of the thing to expose a hole in his skull via which numerous fibres entered. The cup then started to pull back in, but rather than continue his attack on the sleer he reached behind, closed his hand around those fibres and wrenched, tearing them out of his skull. His body convulsed hard, flinging him from the sleer’s grip and tearing off one of the imbedded pincers. He landed beside the stream, now shuddering so hard and fast he was almost a blur, while the sleer coiled up, shaking. I waited. Eventually the convulsions ceased and he collapsed on his face. The sleer began to uncoil, looking around as if confused about what had happened to it. Stepping out from behind the boulder, I walked over. I didn’t feel at all good about what I had done, and what I intended to do.
Standing over him, I fired into each of the segments down his back in turn, punching molten holes through. Next, putting the carbine barrel into the hole in his head, I grabbed the cup device and pulled. It tore up, the section below seeming alive and trying to cling on with numerous hooked limbs, then one of the lower segments broke away. I pulled it up, long fibres coming out of his body, and the piece of technology writhing. I tossed it aside and fried it until it stopped moving. More movement came from the sleer. I aimed at its head but watched it steadily collapse. It was no Spatterjay-virus-infected creature and couldn’t sustain the damage he had inflicted. Its head dipped down into the stream, the water bubbling for a moment and then the bubbles died.
I returned my attention to the man, reached down and heaved him over onto his back. He just lay there staring up at the sky. Despite the pincer through his body and the burns on his back from where I’d destroyed the control frame, he was still breathing. The sensible thing for me to do now would have been to cut him into pieces with the carbine and scatter them, or perhaps burn them all down to ash. If what the king had told me was true – that he’d been involved in the coring and thralling trade – he certainly deserved to die. But I doubted much remained of the original in there, and I wasn’t the man from whom I’d been created. After a moment he blinked, and his eyes focused on me, head twitching, lips folding back from those carnivore teeth. There was no movement from his limbs, so I reckoned the spinal damage had shut him down, at least for now. And with the unit gone, the prador could no longer control him.
‘I’m sorry for what happened to you,’ I said, shouldered my carbine and walked away.
‘I’ve just watched the recordings,’ said Suzeal.
She had opened communications as I was sitting outside a cave I’d found, trying to decide whether to spend the night there or not. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to cut off options for retreat and it also looked like something had been living in there or, rather, feeding. Pieces of sleer were scattered on the cave floor.
‘Really? What recordings?’
‘Of your recent … encounter. Good idea to drive that sleer into him, but surely you’re aware that the damage you inflicted isn’t enough to stop him?’
‘I’m aware of the effects of the Spatterjay virus.’
‘So why didn’t you destroy his body?’
‘Because I am not a murderer.’
‘It would have been appropriate self-defence.’
‘I stopped him as far as I needed to. I destroyed the control hardware and without either Vrasan or an earlier program directing him, he shouldn’t have any further motivation to come after me.’
‘Yes, you may be right. They’re little more than animals in that condition.’
I contemplated that. As she didn’t know the truth about the king and his children, she didn’t realize that despite their extreme mutation, they still retained their intelligence. She also hadn’t seen the man-thing attempting to talk, or the strategic nature of his attack against the king. It then occurred to me that I shouldn’t be so confident he wouldn’t come after me. Who knew what might drive him, whether it was just the commands or that he now held a grudge against me?
‘How far am I from this installation now?’ I asked.
‘You’ve covered little more than twenty miles, and I suspect you won’t be reaching it anyway.’
I was learning that Suzeal enjoyed taunting me, but this still sparked my anger anyway. ‘I’ve managed to survive thus far.’
‘Yes, and against some ferocious creatures. Nevertheless they were just animals.’
‘And your point is?’
‘Do you understand how prador thrall technology works?’
I raked through my mind for knowledge on the subject and found it was extensive. Why did she want me to prove it to her, though? I decided to play along, to see what it would get out of her. ‘The thralled creature runs mostly on programs that are sub-AI but complex. These programs direct autonomics and all the complexities of physical movement, so the prador in control just gives his orders and the program responds. Those who’re cored and thralled are capable of obeying complex instructions but are essentially mindless, while those only thralled retain their mind, which allows them to follow even more complex instructions. But they’re still incapable of disobeying.’
‘Correct. Now what do you know of the recording facility?’
I felt a flash of anger because I knew she was playing some game, but I continued anyway. ‘A lot is recorded through the slave’s senses so the programs running it can make adjustments for efficiency. So, if the slave loses a limb, for example, then alterations must be made for that. This isn’t the case for a slave that’s retained its mind, though.’
‘You do know a lot.’ She smiled. Nastily. ‘Of course the recording resides both in the thrall and in its control unit. What do you think would happen if a slave went offline or was otherwise disconnected?’
I sat there considering that and then felt my back creeping.
‘I don’t think you’ll last the night,’ she added, then cut the link.
I stood up, then abruptly ducked down and ran for the nearest cover, which was a mass of bushes covered with white berries. From there I looked up at the sky. Stars were out with wraiths of reddish cloud strewn across them. A moon had risen, like an iron-coloured apple with a bite taken out of it. But nothing else was visible up there. No prador, as yet. Suzeal was right, the prador controlling the man-thing would’ve been aware the moment his thrall hardware – the frame I’d destroyed – went offline. The next thing it would’ve done was look at the recording, seen me and at once known my location. But was the one with the control units Vrasan? Maybe the others didn’t yet consider him stable enough for that. And if so, could it also be that whoever’d been in control didn’t consider hunting me down a priority?
No, I was kidding myself. The prador might be stuck down here but that didn’t make them any less vengeful and aggressive. So why hadn’t they come yet? Perhaps they were otherwise occupied at present, but they did have their hounds. I moved round behind the bushes. The mountain slope here had terminated at the base of a tall cliff – the one in which I had found the cave. I’d spent some time working my way along it trying to find a way either up or around it to put me back on course. I continued along below it, eventually finding myself again on one of the animal tracks and just kept going, hoping to survive till morning. I might then have more chance of seeing the hunters I felt sure were out here.
Nothing much happened for a long time, then suddenly a figure loomed out of the moonlit night, three red eyes gleaming at me. I backed off quickly and leapt to one side, slipping over, then sliding partway down the slope on damp vegetation before coming up against a tussock of the stuff. Shouldering my carbine, I pointed it at the creature, which had turned to watch me fall. Large horns curved inward above the eyes, with another jutting up behind. A long thick tongue protruded from its tube-like mouth and parted. As the two halves rubbed against each other, the noise was like a knife being drawn. It then dipped its head and pulled up a clump of vegetation with that tongue, drawing the mass inside, and grinding it with a sound like a wood saw. It gazed at me contemplatively then moved on. I could now see its low six-legged termite body and hooked tail with what looked like a morning star on the end. A line of smaller versions of the creature – without horns or tails – followed, and even smaller creatures scuttled along below them. A male with his harem of females and brood of children? That was too prosaic again and centred on terran biology. The idea of male and female might not be relevant, with more than one sex or no sex at all. The smaller creatures could even be the adults, or a herded food source.
Once they’d drawn past, I climbed back onto the path and moved on. I started to relax and, perhaps as a consequence of that, to feel tired. Trudging along, I sank into a fugue and wasn’t completely aware of my surroundings. A sound behind snapped me out of it, panic surging. I squatted and turned, the carbine levelled. I then recognized the sound of falling stones and saw them tumbling down the cliff face and bouncing on the slope below. From above came another sound: a groaning, a hiss and then an ‘Oh!’ that sounded suspiciously human. The fall of stones ceased and it all went quiet for a moment, then a large object fell down through the night, hitting the slope to bounce and sprawl. For a second I thought it might be the man-thing, but in the moonlight I saw a naked woman. I couldn’t see the colour of her skin, but she still moved, despite being headless, and was clearly one of the clones: a Jill.
Stepping away from the path, and partway down the slope, I scanned the cliff above. Sheer rock rose a hundred feet, nothing else. I headed over to have a look at the body and found her twitching and shifting like someone having a nightmare. I stepped round and studied her neck. Her head hadn’t been severed but torn off and I could see no signs of thrall hardware in the stub of her neck vertebrae, just a hollow slowly filling with glistening fluid. I stared for a while longer, wondering what to do. Should I burn her up? No, that might attract unwanted attention and she’d ceased to be a danger to me. As I trudged back up the slope I reckoned the virus inside her was advanced enough and had enough materials to work with. She would grow a leech mouth with which to feed, as well as some kind of brain or ganglion, from the virus’s eclectic collection of genomes, to guide the body, and then join the host of monsters here.
I felt no more danger of drifting into fugue as I walked. The clones were out and about, almost certainly hunting me, and something, perhaps a sleer, had torn the head off one of them. But an inconsistency kept nagging at me as I progressed. Then, as I rounded a corner and saw that the cliff had collapsed ahead, I realized what it was: her clothing. She’d been naked yet the clones I’d seen were still wearing the overalls we’d put on aboard Suzeal’s ship. Why would the prador have ordered them to strip naked? Because their garments were white and easily seen? Perhaps, though the last time I saw the clones their overalls had been filthy and no easier to see than their skin. Perhaps the metal in them could be detected by some of the animals here? Perhaps during her fight with a sleer, or whatever had got her, they’d been torn away? The more I thought about it the more puzzled I became, then I reached the rubble pile and put such thoughts aside.
This rock collapse offered me a route upwards, but if I climbed here, would I end up running into more clones? The woman had been up there and perhaps the others were too. I decided to climb anyway. Most likely they had been spread out to cover a wide area and, by climbing here, I would be heading somewhere that only the woman was meant to have been searching. I heaved myself up onto a tilted slab, scrambled up a scree pile above it, then decided to avoid the scree when it slid down, making a racket as it went. I stepped from rock to rock and walked where the steep slope seemed more stable. Weariness hit again and I ached from head to foot. A gap where slabs lay tilted against each other beckoned to me, and a quick flash of my torch showed it empty of anything nasty. I crawled inside to a corner and flashed the torch again, finding nothing, then put up my hood and visor and curled up out of sight of the entrance. Each time I started to drift into sleep a surge of panic dragged me back out of it. I thought I would never sleep, then it seemed just a moment later I woke to full daylight.
Screw you, Suzeal – I had survived the night.
I lay in my hideaway feeling logy and disinclined to do anything at all. My body was leaden and the prospect of fighting for survival for another day held no appeal. Finally, a full bladder, the need for a shit, and hunger and thirst drove me upright. I moved deeper into the hide to piss and then detached my envirosuit trousers and squatted. I’d just finished that business and was looking up to clear sky through a gap in the rocks a few feet away, when a slippered foot came down to block the view. One of the clones. As carefully and quietly as possible, I pulled up my trousers and moved back to where I’d left my pack and carbine. I hoped to hell the one out there wouldn’t be able to identify the smell, because it was foul. What should I do now?
I could continue to hide and look out for danger as I journeyed but the clones would always be about. One of them could ambush me at any moment whereas, right now, I had the advantage. As I moved carefully towards the entrance, carbine ready and pulse gun in my belt, I understood how easy it was to make the small step from self-defence to killer. I moved out, slow and careful again, not making the slightest noise. She stood thirty feet downslope from me: another Jill. Her back was to me, a pulse rifle braced across her stomach while she scanned the slope below, her head turning from side to side with robotic regularity. I took aim across the top of a rock, carbine firmly braced. And I fired without hesitation. No second thoughts and no momentary guilt.
My shot hit her squarely on the back of her neck, burning away skin and then flames flaring. She stood for a moment longer than she should have, reaction time with the thrall running a longer circuit than the human nervous system, then was propelled into action. She flung herself down in utter silence, turning and firing upslope as she did so. I moved out fast, leaping up and firing at her again. With her arm flaming, her
pulse rifle dropped, clattering to the rocks as she scrambled towards me, horribly fast. I fired and kept firing, punching burning craters in her tough body as she kept coming at me like a running cat. The beam just wasn’t penetrating and didn’t slow her at all. She covered twenty feet and I concentrated on my aim, the beam travelling up her torso and into her face, then I jumped aside. Blind, she careered past me until her leg went down into a crevice. I turned as she struggled to pull free and fired into the back of her neck and then her skull. Her movements became frenetic and then disjointed. The stem of her thrall hooped out of the ruin of her neck, then snapped free, flicking like a tail. I kept the beam on the back of her skull until something blew away some of the charred bone. Trailing smoke and fire, she bowed her forehead to the stone and just stayed in that position twitching, as if being electrocuted.
I shut down the carbine, noting its low charge and that only one energy canister remained. I stared at her, just for a second feeling sick about what I’d done, but that quickly cleared. Controlled by another, her purpose had been either to kill me or to drag me back to the prador for a harsher death. Survival instinct kicked in and I ducked down, scanning my surroundings because she might not have been alone. When no one else showed themselves, I immediately grabbed up her pulse rifle and checked its controls to be sure I knew how to use it. Shouldering the strap, I moved back over to her to use the butt of my carbine against the back of her skull, which broke open easily, being so charred. I grabbed the still-slowly-moving tail of the thrall and pulled. The whole thing came out with a sucking crack. The legs around the cylinder which had been in her skull still flexed in and out as they tried to find the inner skull to brace against. I threw the thing as hard as I could downslope, and then searched her.
She wore a belt around her waist with a sidearm and three reloads for the rifle. These contained the combined energy and metallic dust packs and slotted into the weapon like bullet clips in ancient projectile assault rifles. There were also five small spheres along a strip. Of course my earlier self, having had much interest in such things, recognized the grenades at once. I touched one of them and the number ‘1’ appeared on its surface, then on the surfaces of all the others. Running my finger down the side of it set the count higher. I took it to ‘4’ and left it at that. Detonation would be four seconds after I detached a grenade from the strip. I then pulled the sidearm out of its holster and inspected it. The thing was a pepper-pot stun gun which fired a cloud of beads filled with a neurotoxin that would paralyse a man. The sight of it sickened me because I now knew the intention of the prador directing these clones. I was to be brought to them.