Africa Zero

by Neal Asher

  We were about a hundred metres from the first building when I heard them. I turned to Jethro Susan.

  “Put your hood up and keep your head low—they’re here.”

  She did as instructed.

  “Last time I came through I let off a couple of shots and they kept away from me,” she said.

  I said, “The last time I was here I snapped a few necks and they kept away. But as I well know, people are never predictable. Have you any gloves?”

  She unfurled a glove from a pouch pocket on her sleeve and put it on her hand of flesh.

  “Keep your head down,” I said as we advanced.

  As we moved down into the city I saw that we might soon be in trouble, or rather, Jethro Susan might. Trees encroached on the path down there and made adequate cover for an ambush. I looked around on the ground and found a couple of rocks.

  “Put a couple of shots into those trees—that might deter them,” I said.

  Obligingly Jethro Susan unhitched her rifle and put a shot in the trees each side of the path. Two concussions blew burning foliage into the air. There was some shouting and the sound of running feet, then silence. As we drew closer to the trees I thought it might have worked, then something thudded in the side of my neck. I reached up and pulled out a feathered thorn just as another bounced off Jethro Susan’s monofilament hood. I saw movement in the bushes and threw a rock. There was a soggy thud and a cry of pain. Just then Jethro Susan’s rifle cracked and there was an explosion above. A feathered man fell out of the trees with all the aerodynamics of a brick. He hit the path and bounced, a hole where his chest used to be. I heard running feet, retreating.

  “Stragglers,” I told her.

  There were no more attacks from the trees.

  We entered the city with a degree of caution and stayed at the centre of the streets. A man showed himself at a window and Jethro Susan loosed another shot. The explosion lit the inside of a room. There was a horrible creaking, then a large lump of vine-choked wall fell crashing to the ground. Pieces of stone bounced past us.

  “Save your shots or we’ll have the lot down on us. Building inspectors would have nightmares about this place.”

  I noticed that under her hood she was grinning.

  Halfway into the city and with no more shots fired, the natives began to show themselves. In a doorway we saw a naked child of about four with a huge preying mantis crouching on his shoulder. He was petting it. Jethro Susan shuddered.

  “You were right about the unusual pets. I never saw them before. I was moving fairly quickly though.”

  I considered that.

  “It might be an idea if we did that now. You never know what they might be planning. Your monofilament gear might stop darts but it won’t stop an arrow or a spear.”

  We broke into a trot, turned down a side street leading in the direction we wanted to go. Behind us there was more movement as people began to come out of their ancient homes.

  “Faster,” I said, and we began to run. Ahead of us I could smell wood smoke and wondered if it was something they were preparing for us. Soon we rounded a corner and came face to face with about twenty Zag tribesmen, women, and children. It seemed we had stumbled in one some kind of celebratory feast. On spits, over the fire, were the gutted corpses of four men. The air smelt of roast pork.

  “Jesu!” said my companion at the sight.

  We came to a halt. Those in front of us did not look as if they had any intention of moving. Others were gathering behind. The situation was beginning to look decidedly sticky. I would have survived it. I am not so sure Jethro Susan would have.

  “Look!” I shouted, and held up my arms.

  Jethro Susan looked at me as if she thought me mad. I guess she wanted to start shooting about then. I shook my head at her.

  The Zags were watching me closely now. I lowered my hands to my neck and pressed my fingers to a sequence of soft spots, then I sent an internal signal to a number of superconductor nerve nexuses. My face went numb as seals broke and fibres and synthetic muscle auto-detached.

  “Look!” I shouted again, and when I was absolutely sure I had their attention I pulled my face off.

  To say that the effect was electric would be an understatement. Just about all of them screamed. Jethro Susan only just managed to stifle hers. About half of them ran for it. A lot went face down on the concrete. The remainder stood there with their mouths open and just stared. I looked behind and got a similar reaction there. By this time Jethro Susan was getting the idea. She held her hand of ceramal high and pulled back her sleeve to show the rest of her arm. Like showmen we advanced then and none barred our way. One gawper reached out to try and touch my head as I passed but I slapped his hand away and grinned at him, which at that moment was all I was capable of doing.

  Soon we reached a clear street, broke into a run, and in a matter of minutes were out on the plain of the landing field. There we stopped while I put my face back on.

  “You ever pull a stunt like that again ...”

  I looked at Jethro Susan and noticed how white her complexion was. She did not look very well.

  As the seals pulled down and the fibres reattached, feeling returned to my face, and I managed a normal-looking smile.

  “I’ll try my best, but it was all I could think of at the time. It worked well, didn’t it?”

  Angrily she pulled her hood back, took off her remaining glove, and went stomping off to the south. I shrugged and followed on. That night we continued walking and did not make camp until we were well away from Z’gora. Jethro Susan was not very talkative. I guess it must be unnerving to see the true nature of things. But as she was settling down for the night her curiosity got the better of her.

  “Doesn’t it bother you being ... what you are?” she asked me from her blankets.

  “You mean, does it bother me that I have a wider sensorium that any man, hyperstrength, and am virtually immortal, then no, it doesn’t bother me.”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

  I grinned, but in the darkness I doubted if she could see me.

  I said, “Tell me, why do you not have a synthiflesh covering on your hand and arm? Such could be easily manufactured at JMCC, and once linked in to your nervous system it is almost as sensitive as normal flesh. Could it be you were making a statement to your fellows? ‘Here, I have lost my arm. I am physically imperfect. Look at me.’ Rubbing their noses in it a bit, weren’t you?”

  “You’re getting away from the point,” she said angrily.

  “Ah, so you don’t like personal questions either.”

  She was silent for a while, then she said, “You’re right. I was rubbing their noses in it. My imperfections were not my fault. What right did they have to judge me by them?”

  “What am I, Jethro Susan?”

  “A cyborg.”

  “A cyborg is something part machine and part human. Are the proportions important? You should know.”

  “I see ...”

  “I’m human, Jethro Susan—I think and I feel. Yes, sometimes it bothers me how I appear to others. But overall I feel the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I think, it would be better if you asked these questions of yourself.”

  There was a long silence then, but I knew she had not gone to sleep. Eventually she asked another question.

  “Are you? Are you really human?”

  “Go to sleep, Jethro Susan.”

  part three

  On the fifth day we left our camp of the night and headed toward the distant sound of vultures squabbling. I was sure of what we would find. Half an hour’s walk brought to us the stink of putrefaction. An hour’s walk brought us to the slaughtered carcase of a young female mammoth.

  I held myself at the edge of the trampled clearing and watched as a pack of wild dogs fed. At my side Jethro Susan pulled the cloth from her mouth then swore and spat in a most crude manner. I moved to inspect the kill but her hand on my arm halted me.

  “One l
ike you is killing them,” she said, “I did not know there was another.”

  I turned to her. “There were many of us once, nigh indestructible, unkillable. In time some of us sought death because of ennui or despair. Those that did sought it from their own kind mostly, as being the only ones capable. I have been called.” I turned to go, but she held onto me, staring into the clearing suspiciously. I said, “It is the curse of some that they must kill those things they loved.” She released me, and just at that moment I heard it—the sighing whine, and the electric crackle of undergrowth exploding into flame. In one motion I caught Jethro Susan round the waist and leapt five metres into the jungle to one side. My shutters went down as there was a candent purple flash behind me and a gust of sparkling cinders. I dropped Jethro Susan.

  “Hide,” I said, and leapt again.

  To my right I caught the nacreous glitter of the beam and dropped to the ground as it swept above me blowing a cycad to candent flinders.

  I ate dirt and felt real fear for the first time in decades. Someone had an antiphoton weapon. Someone was trying to kill me and could succeed. I could die.

  I was up and running at full speed, circling the clearing, but trying to keep to cover which was rapidly being blown away. Trees disappeared like pillars of ash in a hurricane and red fire flashed through the undergrowth. I had an idea where it was coming from now and by another circuitous route headed that way. The firing stopped. I closed in, found the vine-covered log used for shelter ...

  It rested against the log. It looked like a stubby carbine made out of glass and old wood. Under the glass salamanders writhed. For a moment I did not hear the high-pitched terminal whine—when I did, I turned and ran. In the clearing I saw Jethro Susan coming towards me with her rifle.

  “Run!” I yelled. She ran. As I came up beside her I explained while she gasped for breath. I did not need to gasp. No part of me needed oxygen.

  “Antiphoton rifle keyed to dump its load. About a kiloton.”

  She looked at me with horror.

  “I’ll have to carry you.”

  She nodded agreement. This was no time for silly arguments. She knew my capabilities. I dashed ahead of her, stopped and stooped down. In a moment she was on my back and I set out at increased speed.

  “Christ!” she managed, before she got her head down.

  In a moment I was up to thirty-five kilometres an hour, which is fast enough over such terrain. I was on the edge, clipping cycads and groundsels and only just maintaining my balance on the soft ground. Jethro Susan yelled as a branch tore her leg. Nothing I could do then. In a minute we were on to the three-lane swathe cut by the main herd. I accelerated, feeling heat build up in my joints because of the extra loading. I turned on my sweat glands, but there was no water in my gut to supply them. I swore. Forty kilometres an hour, forty five. I intended to keep this up for as long as possible. Flies spattered my face and the occasional small bird did not get out of my way quickly enough. Fifty, and I leapt a very shocked looking lioness. Jethro Susan was swearing unremittingly in my ear. Her legs and arms were wrapped round me vice-like. Then it hit.

  The jungle whited out. I decelerated fast and got us behind a tree. Jethro Susan lay face down with her arms around her face and I lay atop her. My eye shutters adjusted to the glare and I saw the facing sides of trees and cycads smoking. The flash went as the sound hit: the sound of matter being destroyed, a sound without regard for animal frailty or softness, hard-edged as broken glass. Then the air seemed to shift to one side. The pressure dropped, rose steeply, then a hurricane brought the jungle down on us like a wave.

  It is only fair to say that every vital part of me is shielded against radiation. Should every shred of synthiflesh be burned from my body I would survive. I had been out of danger once we were on the trail. I am not flesh. Jethro Susan was.

  The storm ended while the jungle burnt. An ash of burnt and burning leaves snowed down. Jethro Susan shifted under me and complained with muffled swearing about my weight. There was no water in me to supply my tear ducts. There were ashes in my mouth. She could complain as much as she liked, but she was dead, if not now then some time soon, about a thousand rads dead.

  * * *

  “Will you get off of me you great lump of scrap!”

  She had managed to turn her head to one side. I obliged her, hauling her to her feet as well. She brushed dirt from her coverall, yelled then swore when a burning leaf touched her face, then unzipped the coverall’s hood from a pocket at the back of her neck and pulled it up over her head.

  After a moment she said, “I thought we’d lost the tech for those things. How come there was one here?”

  If I choose for there to be no expression on my face there is none. I was glad of that ability then. She did not know.

  “It was an old one. It would have fetched a small fortune at JMCC or one of the other Family complexes. Over five hundred years old. Antique.”

  She looked round at the carnage.

  “How dirty was that explosion?” she asked carefully.

  “Pretty bad, we’ll have to circle round.”

  I set out into the burning jungle with her trailing behind.

  Pretty bad.

  At some point I would have to tell her that the explosion we had been on the edge of was equivalent to that of a tactical neutron bomb. Even the jungle we were walking through was fatal. I led us out of the area as quickly as I could.

  We made about ten miles before she started to vomit. Five miles more and she was vomiting bile turned pink with blood and staggering to keep up with me. I halted. She sat down abruptly and I saw that she was crying, her tears leaving dirty streaks down the powder of ash on her face.

  “I don’t want to die,” she protested, her voice breaking.

  It got to me. I realised then I had come to care for her. I did not want her to die, or rather, I was not indifferent. I unhitched my pack and took out my sampling and field study kit. She watched me as I took out a hand diagnosticer and ran it over her from head to foot. I might well have used a Geiger counter.

  “How long have I got?”

  One statement and one question that have dogged humanity for all their time. I loaded a hollow-beam injector with the few drugs I had that would help her.

  “Five days at the outside, unless you get help.”

  I reached over, pulled back her hood. The injector sighed against her neck. She slumped immediately. Five days at the outside. With help she might live another five. I considered increasing the dosage so she would never wake up, and rejected the idea. A plan was forming: something I might attempt, and which had a strange kind of justice. Yes. My decision made I scooped her up and ran into the jungle, heading southeast to where the JMCC complex lay under the harsh sun of the savannah.

  Two days and one night brought me to the edge of the jungle and the beginning of a green sea of elephant grass ornamented with theoccasional flat-topped acacia. Once this place had been called the Sahara Desert, but like the Atlas foot hills it had bloomed.

  I suspected I had outdistanced the Pykani because I saw no sign of them on that night of travel. After a further half day of travel through the grasses I had to search for a water hole for Susan and myself. I had kept her under for most of the time, only waking her to drink from her water bottle, which was now empty. I needed water because the extra loading, even at a fairly steady pace of twenty kilometres per hour, was causing me to overheat again. I needed to fill my gut and glands with it so I could sweat to cool. It took me the rest of the day to find the water hole, which lay in a concealed hollow below three huge baobabs like sentinels. I threw a blanket over Susan and left her to sleep and wake naturally so she could drink before we moved on. At the water’s edge I filled her water bottle and myself, batting away curious turtles while I did so. This done I returned and settled down by her. While I waited I ran a diagnostic on myself. It was unlikely there was anything wrong, but it passed the time.

  By evening Susan had not stirred a
nd I was considering picking her up and moving on. As I reached for her a shriek echoed across the plain as if from the inner ring of Hell; part man, part bird, and part madness. It was distant, but I well knew it was not far enough away. The next shriek was closer, and shortly after that a dark shape occluded the stars and there was a booming as of sails caught in a wind. The shape descended to land on the central baobab. Again the shriek. I saw eyes glinting red madness and upgraded my vision. There he was—the Great African Vampire himself, last male of his kind unless the child I had heard being born two years back was a male as well. He was an impressive sight: a twelve-metre wing span, the body of a man crossed with a cat, claws like hook knives, feet of an eagle, and the bear-dog face with four-inch fangs trailing saliva. I observed him clinically as he folded his wings. He then spoke to me in that hissing voice, his tail cracking like a whip.

  “I smell the moon’s blood on her ... machine.”

  “I am aware of the sharpness of your senses, vampire.”

  “She dying. Why concern yourself with her? You waste. Give her to me. I know her and she escaped me.”

  “I have your code. You are one of the last. It would pain me to kill you, but in this you are on dangerous ground.”

  “Feelings, machine?”

  “Yes, feelings.”

  “I could take her from you.”

  “I never sleep, and I could break you like a handful of twigs. You know this.”

  That got the civilities out of the way. He settled down in the tree and was silent for a while. When he spoke again it was with less bravado.