by Neal Asher
“Unlikely,” said Mr Pace. Then he blinked those black eyes with their white dot pupils and rubbed his hard hands together as if he was cold.
“Does it matter?” Lelic asked.
Mr Pace shrugged, then turned and strolled away.
Lelic shook himself to try and dispel the creepy feeling he always got when Mr Pace decided it was time for some input, and turned back to Henderson. “Maybe we should make this the last private . . .”
He trailed off, seeing that Henderson was staring past him, eyes bulging and flat tongue whipping out and across them to wipe them clear. Lelic turned back towards the survivor. The guy was standing up, so Lelic signalled to two crab-armoured guards. They moved forwards, each grabbing an arm in serrated claws.
“Bring him,” Lelic instructed.
They tried to hustle the guy forwards but struggled to move him at all. Then, suddenly, the man swept his right arm round, sending the guard there crashing hard into the wreckage. He grabbed the other guard’s ribbed neck and hoisted him up off the floor, before hurling him away. The guard travelled almost in a straight line, bouncing off the side of the wreck before slamming into a mass of constructor coral where he clung, groaning. As he carefully backed away, Lelic watched as the space-suited man pulled a torn-away claw from his arm. Lelic glanced at the one in the wreckage. The other guard’s carapace was cracked and leaking, and he wasn’t moving at all.
The guy wasn’t wearing a motorized suit, so had some heavy boosting or other augmentation. Lelic’s webbed hand strayed back to his stinger, but the bee stings wouldn’t penetrate that suit. It didn’t matter: by now all sorts of unusual weapons were pointing at the survivor, and they weren’t all biotech. Lelic let out a tense breath.
“All we were doing was trying to help you,” he said. “Now why don’t you just come this way and let us get you out of that suit and checked over.” He gestured towards a series of circular organo-ceramic doors up on the equator of the sphere. “Come on,” he added, beckoning.
The survivor just stood there for a long moment without moving, then took a pace forwards. Followed by another pace. Lelic kept himself always a good distance in front, while the colonists buzzed all around. Henderson walked behind, having furtively produced a short proton cannon adapted into a hand pistol for one of his huge slablike hands. Lelic didn’t want any of the energy weapons being brandished to be used here as that would lead to disappointment and unrest. They needed the death match; it was part of their culture. Following Lelic, the man steadily trudged along the base of the sphere then up its side. They all knew where he was going. Everyone watched silently, some with expressions of cruel amusement.
The second ceramic door opened into a big tunnel from the docking sphere. It was the one along which they had led the captive prador. Lelic hit the skin reader control on the door and as it swung open gently, he beckoned again. “This way.”
Really, this survivor seemed more than capable, so the only preparations required would be the same as those with the prador. The prador young-adult whose name translated as Sfolk had been found inside the severely chewed-up remains of the prador ST dreadnought that had come through some months back. Having snagged him in one of the huge internal spaces of that dreadnought, they had brought him here ready to cut him out of his armoured suit. Unfortunately, he started to revive and, as was the manner of the prador, had become very aggressive. Henderson had made himself a target and apparently fled here, and Sfolk, obviously still operating on instinct rather than intelligence, had followed.
“Through here,” said Lelic, as the ceramic door closed behind.
The space-suited figure just trudged on. Perhaps he was stunned, in shock, just didn’t know what he was doing. At the end of the tunnel Lelic went through another ceramic door into a domed ceramic chamber with a further large side door and one smaller door. Still lying on the floor over to one side was Sfolk’s armour, edges still gleaming where they had been cut by the diamond tendril belts of the octopus. The chips and dents in the walls caused by Sfolk during the process of removal were only halfway to healing, Lelic noticed, as he propelled himself across the chamber to the small door. Pausing there, he watched the survivor enter the chamber. He then palmed a skin sensor, pulled the small door open and went through, quickly pulling the door closed behind him. Palming another control, he closed the big door into the chamber. Next he pushed his face up against the chain-glass window to see what the suited figure would now do.
The figure just trudged on in, conveniently halting at the centre. Lelic smiled and pulled himself over to the nearby gel console and activated it with a slap. Above it the screen lit to show the survivor now tilting his head to look up at the ceiling as if he knew what was coming. Fingering cell controls, Lelic chose the required program and initiated it. Now he needed to do no more than watch.
A hatch irised open in the apex of the dome and on its thick ribbed stalk the octopus dropped through, its hard tentacles writhing and shimmering along their inner faces with the high-speed traversal of tendril belts of micro diamonds. It engulfed the figure and tried to haul him from the floor but, after a moment, a bio-warning light ignited in the console. For some reason it couldn’t lift him up. Lelic quickly altered the program so the octopus could work in situ. More warning lights ignited, then the console stung him and he quickly withdrew his hands. The octopus’s frenetic activity continued for a few minutes then it abruptly slumped, as if stunned.
Lelic stared in disbelief. What the hell was that suit made of, that diamond tendrils, which could slice through prador armour, were failing here? He watched as the octopus rose up off the suited man, clenched into a fist as if burned, then retreated into the ceiling, its hatch slamming shut. The man in the space suit still stood where he had been standing before, seemingly untouched. He turned his head so his blacked-out visor faced the screen view, but then did just nothing at all.
Trent
Trent stepped into the ward and looked around. This was a military hospital, space had been at a premium and most equipment dropped from the ceiling on robotic arms or umbilicals. The patients also had the option of VR entertainment to escape into, so the beds were close together in four neat rows extending the full length of the place, almost like some hospital from centuries in the past. Every one of the two hundred beds here was occupied while wards of the same size on either side of this one were filling up even now. The place buzzed with medical drones, and autodocs were regularly dropping from the ceiling to check each patient systematically. However, the equipment here was doing no more than checking, for not one of these patients had woken up yet.
Pausing just inside the doors, Trent now focused his attention over to one side at a row of three beds in one corner. There were Reece and her young son, Ieran, and in the next bed was her older son, Robert, now with a prosthetic left arm. The enzymic acid had dissolved all his prador additions, and numerous corrections and interventions had been made inside him. He was no longer bloated and his body was rapidly returning to natural human function. The decline of his brain too had been reversed. Cole, meanwhile, had made many alterations to his mind to wipe out the trauma and was confident that Reece would have her child back. Trent moved on.
“Happy now?” asked Sepia, quickly catching up with him.
Trent glanced at her, certain she hadn’t seen where he had been looking and that her question was a general one concerning all the shell people. “I’ve done what I can for them but wonder if it will be enough.”
“Well, soon enough we’ll find out,” said Cole, who had just stepped through the door.
“Time to start reviving some of them?” asked Trent.
“Yes—we can’t just leave them like this.”
“It’s going to be confusing for them,” interjected Sepia, “but then perhaps they’ll see some novelty in that.”
“Not as confusing as you might suppose,” said Cole. “I create
d a limited data package detailing the events that led them here. They know about the enzyme acid used to save their lives, and that they are now aboard a space station.”
“What about the detail?” Trent asked.
“I said limited.”
“Do they know about Cvorn, and the destruction of Sverl’s ship?” Trent paused for a second. “Do they know about Sverl?”
Cole grimaced. “I left a lot out, since something akin to hero worship of Sverl sits at the heart of what they tried to be.”
“But surely it’s better if they do know what he is?”
“It’s complicated,” said Cole. “They’ll be aware that they’ve knowledge they haven’t experienced and if I . . . overload them, they’ll tend to dismiss a lot of it. Giving them full knowledge about Sverl could tip some of them into paranoid psychosis. Even telling them their present location, this particular station, is risky. Some knowledge needs to be introduced as part of their . . . experience.”
Trent absorbed that, liking the idea that there wouldn’t be so much explaining to do as they revived these people, but wishing there had been a way to take them all the way to his idea of sanity, which was not wanting to die or turn themselves into monsters.
“I think we should start with Melissa,” he said.
“Okay,” said Cole, seeming a bit hyped. “Let’s go.” He led the way down one of the aisles and then turned in at a bed. The woman lying on it had been the one whom Trent had first seen aboard this ship, her skin replaced by articulated shell. That was gone now, replaced by a transparent printed-on cell scaffold which already showed blooms of growing dermal cells. Unlike those here who had received artificial limbs and synthetic flesh and skin, she would eventually look completely human. However, right at that moment she looked like a drawing from an ancient book on human anatomy, because most of her underlying muscle lay visible. Blood-filled tubes ran from a heart plug into a pillar detoxifier beside her bed, steadily filtering out prador organics, deactivated nanobots and other dead matter remaining inside her. Attached to her skull was a sleep disc which Cole pressed with his finger. It dropped away and he caught it in his hand, stepping back.
Melissa opened her eyes instantly, then raised her hand and peered at it. With the muscles visible in her face and her eyelids and surrounding skin all but transparent so the whole of each of her eyeballs was visible, it was difficult to read her expression, though Trent thought she frowned. After a moment she sat upright and looked down at herself. She ran a fingertip over the heart plug then looked up and studied each of them in turn.
“So, I’m alive,” she said, her voice phlegmy and somehow disappointed.
Trent felt as if someone had closed a fist inside him and felt the need to respond. “Being alive, you can now make a choice about whether or not you continue to be so. You’ve tried to turn yourself into a prador and you’ve experienced what that ultimately means when enslaved by prador pheromones.” He wanted to add more, but didn’t know what to say.
She focused on him. “Don’t you think I made such choices long ago?” She paused for a second then added, “You arrogant fucker.”
Trent flinched. What kind of response had he expected?
“What would you have done?”
“I would have minded my own business.”
Obviously she wasn’t going to be grateful. He glanced at the detoxifying pillar and noted how long its program had to run. “As far as I can gather—” he glanced at Cole “—you understand the circumstances that have led you here and you understand much of your situation.” He paused, waiting for a response, but she gave none so he continued, “One of the station AIs is in the process of repairing and stocking one of the old barracks areas adjacent to this hospital. When you’re done here, in twenty minutes or so, a drone will conduct you there. Clothing and food will be supplied and thereafter what you do is your own concern.”
“And if I want to leave this place?”
“Eventually there’ll be a way.” Trent winced. “It may be possible for us to commission one of the ships here, or maybe we’ll be able to use the runcible Sverl has set running again.”
“Sverl is here?” she said, her eyes glassy.
Not trusting himself to reply reasonably to that, Trent turned to Cole. “Let’s try another.”
As they headed off to another bed he could feel the woman’s gaze boring into his back. Why did he feel disappointed? Surely a person shouldn’t do good in the expectation of thanks but out of pure altruism? Or was it truly the case that everything anyone did was essentially based on selfishness?
The next one they revived, a man with artificial legs, arms, jaw and eyes, couldn’t have been more grateful. He talked interminably about how, in seeking novelty, he had wanted to transform himself into a prador and how, after spending years in pain and fighting endless infections and rejections, and then experiencing enslavement, he had seen the error of his ways. They recruited him to revive others and tell them about the barracks. By then Sepia had, perhaps, grown bored and headed off about some other task.
“Reece and her children next?” Cole asked.
Trent was grateful he hadn’t asked that while Sepia was here—that would have been uncomfortable. He paused to gaze down at his space suit with its burns and encrustations and reckoned, despite its internal sanitizers, he probably didn’t smell all that good. His usual clothes were compressed in a package attached at the base of his back. He didn’t know if they were damaged, but would check.
“Not yet,” he said, “but soon.”
Over a number of days, more and more of the shell people were revived and moved to the barracks, while others were brought in to occupy their beds. The wards were very busy with people being led out either by their fellows or small floating guide drones. Some were as grateful as that second patient, others were bitter, indifferent, euphoric or hostile. There had been no standard response, Trent found, and he guessed that was because they were human. There was, however, a majority response, because many of them wanted to know about Sverl, about the prador and what they were doing, which was depressing.
On the third day they had their first suicide when one of the revived stepped out through an airlock. On the fourth day they had their first killing, when one of them went berserk and attacked the patient who had revived him. Luckily it wasn’t a permanent death, since a broken neck here wasn’t terminal.
Trent did what he could, but soon found himself tiring of the involvement. Still he empathized with those around him, but he no longer found himself inwardly cringing, either at their reactions to being revived, or at the sight of their injuries. He felt tired, disappointed. He saw that the empathy Penny Royal had cursed him with was beginning to develop calluses. However, surely in doing what one believed was the right thing one had to continue even when the idea palled? Altruism, in the end, was not about personal satisfaction. Trent, ultimately, looked for that elsewhere as he found and prepared a family room in the barracks, and analysed other feelings he had never been accustomed to.
Lelic
Four octopuses had failed and the figure in the suit just stood untouched in the preparation chamber. Resting his webbed hand on the gel console, reluctant to push it in again and perhaps end up getting stung, which was the usual response when you asked too much of such biotech, Lelic was both puzzled and annoyed.
“They’re getting restive,” said Henderson.
Lelic glanced round. The man was a little restive himself, the slabs of limpet muscle covering his body clenching and unclenching as if in search of a safe wall to stick him to. The other colonists had been making increasingly sarcastic and annoyed queries over the last few days. They wanted their fight. Bets and bids had been revised after the failure of the first octopus, then as the other three failed they had turned frenetic. Many colonists had over-extended themselves, some so far as to lose even their ships if things didn’t go the
ir way. Fights between colonists had broken out, and there had been two deaths.
“What do you think it is?” Henderson asked.
“I’ve tried some analysis,” Lelic replied. “The suit is as standard as it looks but has some kind of hardfield reinforcing at the surface. I’m not sure those readings about an occupant are true, either. They could just be projections or some kind of chameleonware.”
“But what’s inside the suit?” Henderson asked.
“I just don’t know. Seems it might still be some highly augmented human with some defences we haven’t seen before, else why the suit in the first place?” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter how augmented he is; he’ll have to come out of that suit at some point.”
“So what do we do?”
“I think we’re just going to have to send him into the arena against Sfolk.” Lelic paused, not liking to be coerced like this but not seeing any other choices. “With any luck, he won’t just stand there doing nothing while Sfolk attacks . . .”
“Probably mean we’ll lose Sfolk.”
“Yes, probably.”
Just to try and calm things, Lelic had sent in their last normal snatched from the Graveyard. Sfolk had made short work of the woman, despite her ceramic armour and shearfield blades: torn her apart and eaten her very quickly. He was hungry, and almost certainly was getting hungrier by now. He was also a valuable fighter with high entertainment value and Lelic didn’t want to lose him. He shrugged. He would have to accept it and, anyway, The Zone would surely provide another prador in time.
“Tell them that we’ll have a bout in five hours,” said Lelic. “When it’s done we’ll expel this—” he gestured at the figure on the screen—“from the station.” He turned away and with a flick of his tail propelled himself along the tunnel, Henderson clumping and sucking along behind.
Lelic returned to his personal cyst within the station and there accessed the combined bio and crystal computing available to him. They had no AIs here like the Polity—their U-space-capable ships used child minds purchased from the Kingdom—but the brain of the station still contained more than enough data and processing. He ran searches to try and find out what it was they had picked up with that wreckage.