by Neal Asher
In his gridlink, Cormac created a visual patch to fill his blind spot—and felt something like a knife blade going into his cortex. Skellor, it seemed, was playing with him, for Shuriken was now darting around the butte like a mosquito in search of bare skin. Cormac tracked it round, focusing, pushing himself into a fugue of concentration. He could not allow the slightest shake or jitter, as he would get few chances at this. Finally he fired twice, missing the first time with a ranging shot, but hitting with the second. Flung back, with chipped and cracked chainglass blades extending, Shuriken turned upwards so it resembled a gleaming eye gazing down at him. Cormac fired again, centred perfectly on target. Shuriken pulled in its blades like a sparrow folding its wings and dropped out of the sky as had the telefactor before it.
It occurs to me that it is time I used my hostages, Skellor sent.
What do you mean? Cormac asked, not worrying about his signal being located, as Skellor certainly knew where he was right now.
Well, there’s these to begin with.
Images now came through. Cormac was wary of them, expecting some attached virus. He ran them through a scan program, viewed them. The creatures he had earlier seen were turning on each other, tearing each other apart. Why was Skellor doing this?
They’re not sufficiently human, I suspect, Skellor pondered. How about a little look through Tanaquil’s eyes?
Now Cormac’s point of view was of someone up on the city platform and, bleeding through with that, Cormac could feel the rigidly suppressed anguish of this victim of Skellor’s. Tanaquil turned to look as people came towards him from the surrounding buildings. Zombie-like they moved past him, gathering into a crowd rubbing shoulders. The sense of anguish increased and, in the network he was partially in contact with, Cormac could feel the silent screams. The first one to reach the edge, a man dressed in thick clothing and a long padded coat, paused before climbing the two steel fences there, and just stepped off. He bellowed—Skellor returning to him enough control to do that—then others were following him, seemingly eager to throw themselves to their deaths.
No…
The one word came through; Skellor ruthlessly suppressed anything else. Tanaquil now watched a naked woman climbing the same fences. She too went over the edge, screaming. The eyes Cormac was seeing through now blurred with tears. Jeelan. The name broke through Skellor’s rigid control. Just audible came the sounds of bodies impacting far below.
What do you want? Cormac asked.
Why, you.
I should give myself up to save a few natives?
With what felt to Cormac something like a mental shrug, Skellor set a man walking towards the fences. Cormac could hear the man bellowing inside his head, then begging as he climbed the fences. Cormac wanted to shut it out, but was not sure he should.
I’m not so convinced about your lack of empathy, said Skellor. I’m sure you are a very moral man.
Okay, you can have me if you stop the killing.
I’m walking to my way off this world, right now, said Skellor.
Something then came through from the biophysicist, and Cormac routed it into safe storage in his gridlink, expecting this to be an attempt to enslave him. Using the programming equivalent of donning thick gauntlets and safety goggles, he inspected what the biophysicist had sent, and was surprised when all he received was coordinates—an area outside the Sand Towers, some fifty kilometres away from where he stood.
Best you hurry to join me, said Skellor. Let us say, for every fifteen minutes you are out of my sight, I’ll walk another one of them off the edge.
* * * *
Fethan adjusted his vision to infrared and gaped at the hellish scene in the Undercity. Though aware that people often misapplied the term ‘unnatural’ to alien life, that would not have been the case here. The creatures he saw were not the result of evolution, nor, it seemed to him, were they designed for any more useful purpose than to horrify. Why give a human mandibles, why give a huge insect soft hands—and why that other thing with the screaming human face? Yes, he guessed that some reasoning could be applied: give a man mandibles so he could handle alien food, or give that insect hands so it could manipulate tools as easily as a human. But that took no account of the personal suffering caused by such experiments. Anyway, Skellor could not have had time to do all of this, so that left only one other culprit. Fethan shuddered, and wondered what Dragon had been trying to achieve here.
Though many of the creatures in the Undercity were fearsome indeed, none of them attacked Fethan, and he soon realized that they were all aug-controlled and mostly heading away from him, like a procession of the damned heading out for judgement. It was a mystery he decided he might pursue some other time, for the aug creatures he had followed under the platform were teeming here, and he tracked their lines of progress easily back through the darkness. He followed one of these lines, perpetually slapping away those of the insects that dropped onto him from above, also deliberately crushing the same things underfoot. Eventually, in this horrible place, he passed corpses bound to the ground by filaments and sucked dry, with tentacular things writhing in the dirt underneath them. Then he spotted the source of the aug insects.
Fethan would not have recognized the bloated thing as once being human had it not been for some fragments of clothing clinging to its bruised skin and a bracelet buried in the flesh of the one limb that had not been fully absorbed. The head was just a hairy nub over a frogmouth orifice that continuously leaked a foamy mucus squirming with aug insects. This mouth was not for feeding. Fethan guessed that the tentacles extending below this… creature were intended for that, and that it had not already dragged him down because he was inedible.
Unshouldering his APW, he paused for a moment, knowing that this thing before him had once been human. But it was not human now, and what he was about to do amounted to a mercy killing. Conscious of metal pillars nearby, he carefully chose the setting on his weapon. He fired once.
The thing burst before him in a ball of violet fire, and the detonation had aug creatures raining down all around. In the deeper darknesses of the Undercity, other things screeched and bellowed, but none of them came into view. Stepping closer to the steaming mess, Fethan knocked his weapon’s setting right down, and kept firing small bursts to burn the embryonic creatures crawling about in the slimy remains. Afterwards, as the smoke slowly cleared, he saw the rest of the aug creatures still marching away in lines to find their victims. He had destroyed the source of the insectile creatures, but not them.
Fethan stared, wondering how many creatures he could burn before the power supply of his weapon gave out. What else could he possibly do? Then it became obvious. No matter how this looked, it was aug technology—sophisticated computer networking. He extended his forefinger up before his night vision, sent an internal detach signal, then removed the syntheflesh covering. Allowing the kill program to see through his eyes, he slowly surveyed his surroundings, taking in the remains of that thing he had destroyed, the now revealed root-like structures in the ground, the multitude of aug insects.
‘Do you see this?’ he asked.
I see.
‘Where could you go in?’
Try substructure in the ground.
Fethan brushed away earth with his foot, exposing a grey fibrous tentacle that shifted slightly. He stooped and pressed the metal tip of his finger into it. This was Jain tech, he knew, but worth the risk. Fibres parted, his fingertip sank in, and he felt the ache of transference as another killer program transcribed.
* * * *
The Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts were decelerating at slightly different rates, the Reaper eighty thousand kilometres ahead of the King. Jack would have preferred them to be the other way round because, though Reaper was the more aggressive, Jack considered it also the more stupid. Perhaps King had let the Grim Reaper take the point for this very reason. The gas giant was close now, coming up like an undersea blue hole, and Jack was beginning to taste chemicals in the vacuum: h
ydrogen and hydrogen peroxide, methane and wafts of mercury vapour—a strange combination that was perfect for the AI’s requirements.
‘You are gambling all on one shot, and if that fails you will be vulnerable as you climb back out of the planet’s gravity well,’ Aphran noted.
Jack allowed processing space to stand a projection of his avatar on the ship’s bridge amongst his splintered collection. Aphran, choosing her own routes to processing, placed her own avatar beside him.
‘I should at least get one of them, then the odds won’t be quite the same as they were on Cull,’ he replied.
‘Still the odds will be against you.’
Jack allowed that this was true, but noted that his children had screwed up once already, and might do so again.
The Jack Ketch hammered down and down towards the gas giant, with Jack continually adjusting the human side of his perspective. What began as a mere dot in space grew to fill the fullest extent of vision—seeming to become vaster than the space all around it. Eventually the ship was speeding at an angle down onto a vast plain of cloud much like anything seen in a virtuality. This plain appeared endless, any curve to the horizon not visible to human perception. But Jack wasn’t human, and that made his comprehension of this immensity even greater. It struck him as decidedly operatic.
Constantly adjusting his angle of approach so that a line drawn through his body intersected with the Grim Reaper a quarter of a million kilometres out, Jack turned on ram-scoop fields designed to pick up the sparse hydrogen of interstellar space. Gas funnelled in towards him in a huge thickening wave. This decelerated him more effectively than anything he could have done with his gravmotors. By the time it reached his baleen-tech fuellers, the gas was dense as any liquid, but also turning to plasma. From the fuellers it entered the dropshaft positioned down his length, where irised gravity fields accelerated it to as near light-speed as made little difference. For seconds only could the Jack Ketch act as a pressure valve, but it was enough to make a difference.
The beam of photonic matter lashed up from the gas giant, straight into the nose of the Grim Reaper. The ship did not have time for evasion, but the AI mind inside it had an eternity of nanoseconds to contemplate what was happening to it. There were no real explosions; the beam just took away the ship’s main body, converting it to a plume of plasma many kilometres long. The Reaper’s two weapons nacelles tumbled through space: bird’s wings severed from the bird itself. Turned at its fulcrum, the Jack Ketch, the beam then swept across towards the King of Hearts. The second ship initiated all its hard-fields and flung itself into an eight-hundred-gravity swerve that must have wrecked it internally as much as the Jack Ketch had been, for King had only microseconds to prepare. Jack knew that the other AI understood the futility of what it was doing: it could not outrun the swinging end of a lever hundreds of thousands of kilometres long.
Now I am shitting laser beams! Jack bellowed across the ether.
But then, through either calculation or pure luck, the King of Hearts slid behind one icy moon that took the few seconds remaining of the blast. The moon broke up on a gaseous explosion, began to tumble apart. Behind it, the King of Hearts peeled away and began to swing round.
‘Bugger,’ said Jack, ram-scoops now off and baleen-tech fuellers closed, as he laboured back up out of the gravity well.
* * * *
Running with unhuman speed towards the place where the landers had come down, Skellor felt a sudden surge of joy as he began to realize that he might actually get himself out of this. Not only that, he could take down that ECS shit in the process. But his happiness, as is the wont of such things, was short-lived. Tanaquil’s confusion up there on the city platform alerted him, and in the man’s memory Skellor observed the scaled moon climbing rapidly into the sky. Then, as if this were sucking the energy from him, he suddenly found himself slowing, as a huge human weariness overtook him. Finally he ran out from the Sand Towers at simply human speed and stumbled to a halt, stopping to rest, even supporting himself against a sulerbane plant.
To his left smoke rose from the city of Golgoth and, again focusing through the aug network and through Tanaquil’s eyes, he observed a metallier walk woodenly to the edge of the Overcity platform and hurl himself off. He had set the program now: the entire population, with Tanaquil last, was queuing up to do the same—and one would go off every quarter-hour until they were all gone, whether Cormac joined Skellor at the landers or not. But Skellor’s problem was not there.
Focusing inward to the Jain substructure of which more than eighty per cent of his body consisted, Skellor finally located the growing nodes that were sapping his strength. They had burgeoned secretively, concealed from his internal diagnostics almost with the collusion of those same diagnostics. He felt a perfectly human panic. It was because of these changes inside himself that he had come here at all, yet he had only endangered himself and learned nothing, and now the one who might have had some answers was gone. He had failed.
He reached out almost instinctively, but Crane was also still unavailable to him. Pushing away from the sulerbane plant, Skellor screamed with rage—but focused rage.
He isolated the worst and most hungry of the nodes, then started working to eject it. But his own body, his Jain body, now fought him. Agonizingly, he opened a split in his stomach, and a single node pushed through like a golden eyeball and fell out. Skellor gasped and staggered back against the sulerbane plant. That had taken nearly… everything in him. He keyed to the network, searched around, found what he wanted. Within a few minutes a sleer with the face of a woman scuttled out from the Sand Towers towards him. Skellor greeted her with arms open wide and Jain tendrils breaking from his skin, then embraced her and fed. Only minutes later he discarded the empty carapace, and was turning his attention once again to the nodes when, like the stars at Armageddon, the network began to fade.
‘What the hell?’
Precisely, something hissed at him out of the ether, and tried to bore its way into his mind.
You?
He had fought this in the network on Ruby Eye. So how was it here? He reached out, tried to find some human suffering to counter this attack, but the more he groped for victims, the more of them slipped from his grasp. Suddenly he realized the futility of what he was doing. He had to get away, and having control here was nothing to him now. He broke into a run, shut down his connection, killed the pseudo-aug inside himself. He accelerated, now re-energized, travelling faster than any human. He also grinned to himself, for Cormac could know nothing of this and would still come. Skellor would have that victory, at the very least.
* * * *
The lizard possessing the double wings of a dragonfly — obviously—rested in the rigid curve of a sulerbane leaf and with sapphire eyes observed Skellor run on. When he was out of sight it launched into the air to hover above the remains of his prey. Then it descended and began to tear up the few remaining fragments of meat — it too needed to eat after all. Replete, it turned its attention to the golden node resting in the sand nearby and observed vague cubic patterns travelling over its surface. The creature’s programming was simple, but its mind was still somewhat part of the mind of its creator. It still also possessed the survival instinct engendered by its original DNA (which had as its source, human scientists might be frightened to learn, a lizard from the Australian outback, some tens of thousands of years before any human knew what DNA was, as well as another fragment it had amused Dragon to find in a piece of amber). Therefore, seeing that node and recognizing what the cubic patterns meant, the creature took off and fled just as fast as it could back to the sulerbane plant. There, perched again in the curve of a leaf, it knew it had ventured too close to something. Might be infected by something. Its kin, resting on buttes, roosting in empty sleer burrows or secreting themselves in the iron gutters of Golgoth, whilst observing other scenes, other human dramas, as they had ever since Dragon had first created them thirty years before, abruptly shut it out. It began sh
ivering, knowing it would soon be uncreated.
* * * *
As Anderson mounted Bonehead and Arden climbed up behind him to sit on one of his strapped-down packs, Thorn eyed Tergal and then his strange mount. Its carapace was much like that of a horseshoe crab, but more stretched out, and its forelimbs also were similar to that creature’s. Its rear limbs, however, resembled the powerful reverse-kneed legs of a land bird, but armoured with chitin. It showed no sign of eyes or antennae until it flipped up its complicated dual, feeding and sensory, heads—sometimes appearing independently from under different areas of the carapace rim, or sometimes joined like mating components in a child’s build-your-own-monster kit. As the creature dropped down onto its crawler legs, Thorn grabbed at the rim and jumped on. He then moved up behind Tergal and, gripping the back of the youth’s saddle, squatted down carefully, as the creature rose back up again. Soon the two sand hogs were advancing through a haze of dust, the ground still shaking as parts of the plain collapsed into the kilometre-deep hollow Dragon had left behind them.
‘I heard him call his own beast Bonehead,’ Thorn said to Tergal. ‘So what’s this chap called?’
‘Stone,’ Tergal replied briefly.
‘I see it’s smaller than Anderson’s… sand hog. Is that because it’s younger, or of a different sex?’
Tergal glanced at him as if he had said something idiotic, which Thorn supposed he doubtless had.
‘Stone’s the younger hog, and females aren’t used as mounts—there’s fewer of them and they tend to stray very quickly. They’re pampered and kept for breeding.’
‘Ah.’
Within a few hundred metres, the sand hogs were stepping carefully across uprooted boulders and ground that had been churned up by Dragon’s departure. Thorn noted the iridescence of scattered Dragon scales, shed pseudopods like snake skins, and other abandoned, unfathomable devices obviously of draconic origin. He wryly considered just how Mika would kill for a chance to be here studying these things. Then he directed his attention ahead to where the ejected VR chamber still rested at the edge of this widespread devastation. The monster, which Arden had named a droon, was nowhere in sight and, with that particular danger no longer evident, Thorn felt he should consider what to do next. He was still experiencing a feeling of unreality, and was aware of the danger of VR detachment which led people to believe that nothing happening around them mattered. Even so, as they drew athwart the VR chamber, though still sufficiently detached not to be making any plans, his reactions had not slowed at all.