by Neal Asher
‘None of them know where she is.’ Speaking to Zephyr, Puff indicated Erlin with one claw.
Erlin turned. ‘Until Sniper, our present Warden, spots you, for he has many eyes. He’ll be even less inclined to non-interference than the old Warden. He’ll certainly let the Old Captains know, and might even do something drastic himself.’
The two normal sails looked to Zephyr for guidance.
‘You feel that you are important,’ the Golem sail stated.
Erlin frowned, realizing how arrogant she had sounded. It probably stemmed from her utter self-absorption.
Zephyr continued, almost dreamily, ‘As of only a few days ago, Sniper ceased to be Spatterjay’s Warden, and the old Warden, now back in control, has too many other concerns. No one is coming to rescue you, Erlin, so you might as well finish your meal and get some sleep. We still have a long way to travel.’
Erlin did as suggested. She knew there was no way out of this until they reached Mortuary Island, and at least during that time, her destiny was out of her own control. However, when they did arrive there she was going to damned well stir up some trouble. She lay down on hard stone and was soon sleeping fitfully, dreaming that a giant whelk was bearing down on her out of the darkness.
In deepest dark, the moon gone from the sky, she was woken by a hard scrabbling sound, and opened bleary eyes to look up at Zephyr. The sail’s eyes were black hollows directed behind her and to one side.
‘Sentience is life. Intelligence is anti-Death,’ the Golem sail whispered.
‘What? What’s that?’
She flinched away as the turquoise flash of a particle cannon ignited the night. The scrabbling became a clattering as something fell down the side of the atoll. Huff launched and dropped out of sight, finally returning with a large glister, its front end a charred hollow. The glow in Zephyr’s eyes slowly went out. Remembering her earlier exchange with the Golem sail, it occurred to Erlin that Zephyr probably ranked quite high up on the scale of the mighty… and the deranged.
* * * *
The darkness, Ambel felt, reflected his mood. Leaning on the ship’s rail, he gazed across at the island and wondered what the hell he was going to do. For some years Erlin had somehow defined his life, and now she was gone he felt without purpose—disjointed from his ‘long habit of living’. He was calm—a bulwark of calm rested at the centre of his being, steadily built, layer upon layer, over the centuries he had lived—but there was no completion here, as there never was when someone died such a pointless death. Vengeance was no good to him. If they remained here, even though on the other side of the island from Erlin’s encampment, the creature that had taken her might attack the Treader, and he very much doubted they could survive such an onslaught. And if they sailed away to obtain the equipment he would need to kill such a monster, it would likely be gone by the time they returned. Anyway, it had been defending its young and, though the creature was no doubt ancient and canny, there was unlikely to be any real malice in it.
‘Peck,’ he said, without looking round. ‘Get the anchor up—time we were away from here.’
He heard Peck’s sigh as the crewman headed away, his shouted orders, the rattling of the anchor chain, then the inevitable cursing as whoever had been given the task clubbed away whatever had come up on the chain.
Ambel turned. ‘Galegrabber, take us out!’ he called.
The sail, which until then had been perched high on the mast because it could smell the creature that had probably gobbled up Erlin, cautiously lowered itself back into position and gripped its various handholds. It turned to the wind, turned the other masts to present their fabric sails to the wind, and the Treader eased round. Ambel glanced to the bridge, where Anne controlled the helm. He ignored her querying look and headed for his cabin. He closed and locked the door behind him, unstrapped his blunderbuss and placed it on his table, then went to his sea chest to remove a silvery Polity device. It was hemispherical, inlaid with touch controls. Placing it flat side down next to his weapon, he clicked down one control and waited, still and utterly patient. It took half an hour before, with a slight whisper and a flicker of light, Captain Sprage materialized in the cabin.
‘Well then,’ said the other Old Captain, sparking up his pipe with a laser lighter.
Ambel felt sure he could smell the tobacco, but the holographic conferencing device was on a low power setting, so produced only sound and image.
‘Erlin was taken by a titanicus. It seems she grabbed one of its young for dissection,’ said Ambel woodenly.
‘Taken? You mean dead.’
‘Yes. I searched the island. She’s gone.’
‘Not clever, taking one of their young.’
Ambel felt a surge of irritation, repressed it. ‘I was the fool. I assumed she would know not to do something like that. Because of me she is dead… or maybe even worse.’
‘Seems to me you’re still a bit attracted to the idea of guilt,’ said Sprage.
‘Only when I’m guilty.’
‘Really, then I wonder who it was that Verlan spotted being carried off east of you by a bloody great big Golem sail called Zephyr?’
‘Ah…’ said Ambel.
* * * *
It was one of Bloc’s sidekicks, clad in a hooded flak jacket over a uniform grey envirosuit. Shive knocked the shrivelled hand away from his shoulder and swore.
‘Sorry, friend,’ said the reif, and moved on.
Shive sniffed the crabskin armour at his shoulder. Some horrible stink. He would have to disinfect it later. Had he his own way here, he would take a flame-thrower to the lot of them. It was unnatural keeping one’s body going like that after death. Bloody things should load to Golem chassis or clones, or biostructs, or any of the more natural alternatives available. He continued on about his nightly patrol around the fence, to check the guard posts and make sure his people were not slacking. Few of them did so now, ever since Saolic had lost one side of his face to a leech the size of a potato sack. Shive knew, from his check of Batian records, that this was a dangerous place. It had eaten up a small group of mercenaries led by one Svan who had been a soldier like himself, very efficient and capable. He did not like the rumours he had heard about what might have happened to her.
Reaching the gates he approached the two guards. ‘Anything to report?’
‘Three deadbeats went through earlier, Commander, but I checked one of them out and his reasons were valid—not a Kladite and having no love for Bloc, according to his record. I think to the normal reifs the Kladites reek the same as they all do to us.’
‘You mustn’t judge them so harshly. Everyone has a right to their own beliefs no matter how imbecilic.’
‘Why, yes, Commander.’
Shive grinned and was about to move on. Then he frowned. This was after all the first night Bloc was here and, though Shive had this area sewn up, he would not put it past the reif to try something rash. He keyed the comlink at his collar.
‘Saden, three reifs down your way. I guess you’ve got them in your sights, but if not, find them and see what they’re about.’ He paused. ‘Saden, if you’re chewing some of that damned squeaky weed again I’ll come down there personally and pull out your teeth.’ Still no response. Shive turned to the guard again. ‘I want one of you to—’
The entire fence shuddered, scattering sparks, the gates rattling together behind the two guards. Explosive charge—had to be. Shive switched to general com.
‘Eyes up and lights on. Watchtowers report.’
One and Two immediately reported in: something had definitely hit the fence. There was a pause, nothing coming from Three, then Four and Five reported.
‘It took out Tower Three. Something took out Tower Three,’ babbled the watcher in Four, when given the opportunity.
Shive was already running. ‘I want the response squad to Tower Three, now!’ He swung his weapon down from his back and gripped it before him. Through his aug he initiated the link between his vision and the sight
on the weapon, then set the weapon to three-round bursts. When the lights were tardy about coming on, he was about to set his vision to infrared, but then suddenly they did come on, flooding the area with light bright as day. The response squad came in from every direction and by the time Shive reached the third watchtower, all of them were with him. Only there was no Tower Three.
‘Missile launcher,’ someone suggested.
‘Lights, out on that jungle,’ Shive instructed over com.
Beams stabbed into the close foliage, revealing the wreckage of the tower. Just then someone started screaming in the shadows beyond. Shive ignored the sound—it was an old trick probably meant to lure them out. He upped the magnification of his eyes and studied the ruined tower. If a missile had been used, it had to have been a zero-burn variety fired from inside the compound, else the wreckage would be here where he was standing. The screaming stopped.
‘Someone is going to pay for that,’ a trooper muttered.
‘Shut it.’ Shive held up his hand. There was something moving in the dingle. Big leech, that explained it. The damned thing must have stretched up and torn down the tower, whose guard deserved whatever had happened to him out there. He should have paid better attention. Then, concentrating on the presumed leech as it flowed through the thick undergrowth, Shive saw it consisted of rigid segments. Something else caught his eye and he looked up and caught a glimpse of two vertical rows of red eyes.
‘Oh… hell,’ someone said slowly.
Shive took a step back, glanced down at his weapon and almost unconsciously switched it to continuous fire, with the charge in each round unrestricted. He reasserted self-control, deliberately took that step forwards again.
‘Okay, you in the towers, get down here now. It’s now learnt there’s fresh meat there so it might attack your towers. Everyone listen,’ he raised his voice, ‘we’ve got a hooder out there, a small one I estimate, probably about twenty metres long, and thin, so it’s hungry. Pull back to cover amidst the buildings, and designated troops break out the armour piercers. When it comes, hit it with everything we’ve got.’ He turned to the two nearest to him. ‘You two, with me.’ He headed away, with the two men running behind him. He was aware, though, that everything his men had got, including the missiles used for taking out armoured aircars, might still not be enough.
* * * *
Leaning against an inflated wall, Aesop stripped off his transparent surgical gloves as he observed the watcher scrambling down from Tower One. The hooder had hit Tower Three, on the other side of the compound, and so hopefully it would still be over there. But Aesop waited cautiously. Only when he heard the buzzsaw racket of Batian weapons on full automatic did he head for the nearby fence.
Bloc was positive that the monster would only go after those marked with the pheromone extracted from the glands of a certain grazing animal from its home planet. Thus he had been assured by the lunatic who sold it to him. Aesop felt Bloc was losing it, and now with the thrall unit inside him not directly under Bloc’s control, Aesop intended to get as far away as possible while the thing attacked. All he knew about hooders was that they went for anything moving and, pheromone or not, everyone was in danger. And since he had spent most of the day marking Batian mercenaries with the stuff and was himself probably saturated with its aroma…
At the fence Aesop removed a small pen laser from his belt and began to cut. No one would notice as, with the present furore, all alarms would be attributed to the hooder attack. It was all damned madness, and it seemed very likely to him that many would not survive it. Aesop’s main hope was that the creature would kill Bloc himself, and then he, Aesop, would be free for the first time in his… death.
The wire fell away and he ducked through, moving swiftly out into the night. Pushing into dingle he knocked away leeches that fell on him. He was dosed up on a balm-soluble Intertox-Virex cocktail so it was unlikely the virus would establish inside him, but he at least wanted to get through this retaining some of his flesh. That was not because of any Cultist belief that true resurrection could only come about through preserving intact the original flesh. He just did not want to end up like Bones.
Neither he nor Bones had ever considered the remaining dregs of the Cult anything more than a bunch of idiot fanatics the time they had gone to collect on a contract put out on Taylor Bloc, then a Klader scientist studying alien technologies. Bloc’s interest in reification had been only a hobby then, until Aesop and Bones murdered him, when it became a total obsession. It was a killing they of course wished they had never carried out, especially when the reified Bloc pursued and then killed them. Awaking thereafter to reification had come as a surprise. It became a nasty surprise when they discovered Prador thralls had been connected in to their memcrystals, and that they were now Bloc’s slaves.
* * * *
In the shallows surrounding the island the giant whelk encompassed bitter loss and it was an organic pain, so she ignored the presence of the ship directly above her. Stirring silt she picked up pieces of cleaned-out whelk shell, and one by one stacked them on the skirt of flesh within the embrace of two tentacles. She tasted the strong aromatics of turbul in the water and the scales of those creatures still glittered in the silt, but there was no recourse: this shoal was already gone, since no turbul would voluntarily come anywhere near her, and she was not fast enough to catch even one of the creatures.
After a time she had gathered every last piece of shell, and closed her fleshy skirt around them like a large sack. Her impulse to protect was still there, and anger grew in slow waves in some lobes of the fibre-bound organ that was her brain. She turned an eye-stalk to watch an anchor being hauled up from the bottom, snaked out a tentacle, and knocked it against the familiar object, but could not summon up the inclination to find out what might happen if she pulled. She vaguely recollected another instance like this, long in the past, when the result had been… No, the memory was gone again. Whelkus titanicus began dragging herself to the shore.
As she emerged from the sea the whelk’s anger took on a sharper edge. If only… if only… Abruptly the supply of oxygenated ichor flooded to one of the dormant brain lobes. If only she had not gone ashore after that other… thing that had killed one of her young, then when she came after it, managed to abandon its one shell and flee. It was all the fault of that one.
On the shore the whelk stacked the remains of her young where they would be safe from the further attentions of the sea’s denizens. Then she turned an eye towards the remains of that other’s shell, snaked out a tentacle and probed the wreckage. There were new scents here, connected to the object earlier floating above her. This puzzled her, as did the fact that there now seemed less… small objects—things had been taken from this dwelling. Another brain lobe abruptly fired up. The giant whelk turned her eyes to look back at the sea. The… ship… was gone. She remembered then when she had once hauled on an anchor chain and pulled down a large object made out of island trees. Those who tumbled from it, and on whom she had fed, they were the same—the same as that other!
She tasted and sensed the ground again, detected trails leading inland, swivelled her eyes to look out to sea again, could not decide what to do, then understood she had only the land trails to follow. Abruptly she surged forwards, knocking over trees and following those trails to the lane she had earlier cut across the island. From a high point, in darkness, she dimly discerned the ship turning into the wind beyond the far shore. She hurtled downslope, staying to her previous trail as on it she could move faster. Soon she reached the tideline and paused. Then she surged on.
Throwing a huge wave before her the giant whelk slammed back down into the sea. She remembered things so much more clearly now. The other had done this and.. other… was in the vessel heading away from her. Licking her corkscrew tongue through the water she detected the taste of them, and the vaguest hint of the other from the island. Confusing memories arose: sounds with meanings disconnected from their inherent meaning within the
sea, objects fashioned like shells but extraneous to the body, hints of understanding of things beyond her watery home. But the ship, yes the ship, contained others like the killer of her young, connected to that one by small objects taken from its dwelling on the island.
And she would avenge.
* * * *
Janer jerked awake to the sound of explosions, glanced towards the window of the bunk house he had been directed to the previous evening. He had quickly realized that there were certain tensions here. Now it seemed they had come to a head. He rolled off his bed, pulled on his trousers and slipped on his envirosuit boots. As an afterthought he took up the skinstick box containing two hornets and pressed it against the bare skin of his shoulder.
‘What the bugger is that?’ said a Hooper in one of the other bunks.
‘Shut yer gob, Loric.’
‘Let’s be taking a look at it then, lads,’ said the calm voice of Captain Ron.
‘Batian weapons? the hive mind informed Janer. ‘Perhaps you should not have come here.’
‘No shit,’ said Janer, moving to the door.
He paused for a moment, glancing back at his belongings, but decided against collecting one particular item from among them. Opening the door he peered out.
The mercenary Shive ran across in front of him, two comrades dogging his footsteps. They reached a storehouse, quickly opened its door and darted inside.
‘Big leech?’ Janer wondered.
The hive mind just buzzed at him.
He stepped out as the Hoopers bestirred themselves behind him, and turned towards the staccato crackling of projectile weapons. A group of six Batians were firing at something between units. Something large.
‘Big leech,’ he confirmed, and began walking in that direction to watch the show. He did not suppose it would be a long one, since the weapons the mercenaries carried would make short work of the soft-bodied creature, no matter how large it was. He was ten metres from his unit when a group of reifications ran past him with that off-balance gait they assumed when trying to move fast. Something rose up into the night from further over in the enclosure. Large and spoon-shaped, it turned and he glimpsed two vertical rows of glowing red points. Weapons fire began to impact on it, lighting it up. He glimpsed armoured segments, saw that the weapons were having no effect. Then a missile streaked in from the side and exploded against the creature, which dropped out of sight.