by Neal Asher
Janer considered what might be the result of Zephyr’s attempt to kill Death. The collapse of the present planetary economy, which was based on sprine, was the least significant worry. Through long and painful experience, humans had learnt how subtly balanced were all ecologies. The big leeches topped the food chain here, consuming whole other large creatures living in the ocean. Without them, therefore, their prey would just keep on growing and feeding, wiping out other species and causing a further cascade of imbalances. All the leeches would then die out, because it was only the large ones that procreated. Some might think that a good thing. It was not. If they were lucky, some new balance might be restored—in about ten thousand years or so. Quite possibly the entire biosphere would collapse into something almost Precambrian.
Janer tried forcing the joystick even further forward, but it was already at its limit.
* * * *
With her single remaining eye, the giant whelk gazed behind herself and down towards the beach. Observing swarms of juvenile rhinoworms gradually venturing ashore, she again tested the ropes securing her, but found little give in them. There was even less give in the numerous harpoons embedded in her flesh, for it had healed around them, holding them firmer. She was now so exhausted and hungry she found it difficult to think. When she did manage to mull over what had happened, she felt hurt. It seemed almost like the betrayal of some contract in which she pursued the ships and they fled. They should not have stopped and ambushed her in this way. That was so unfair.
Turning her eye further, to study her shell, she observed that the split in it had nearly closed up. With luck it would be fully sealed before the rhinoworms started chewing pieces out of her, for if those things found their way in there, to her softer parts, it would all be quickly over. However, if she remained trapped here like this, she would still die. It might take them longer to munch away her harder extremities, but they would never give up. She struggled again, the harpoon wounds aching in her flesh and the trees around her shaking. Some of them did loosen a bit, but the taut ropes binding her to immovable outcrops of rock prevented her getting the leverage to pull the looser trees completely free. Then, vibrating through the ground from the ocean bed, she heard a familiar thumping.
The male whelk was out there. If she could attract him in he might be able to free her, but to do that she needed to free at least one tentacle. She struggled again, some of the ropes definitely slacker now, but every effort left her weaker. She focused her attention on one tentacle only: the one from which the fishing line depended. There was a harpoon driven right through it, a metre back from the tip of it. Folding that tip up, she could just touch the thick rope stretching taut from the harpoon’s shaft to a nearby tree. That was all she could manage, but remembering how the fishing line had cut so easily through heirodont flesh and gristle, she now had an idea. Flipping the free extremity of tentacle, she whipped the line up from the sandy soil. It looped up and touched the rope, before dropping down again. After five attempts she got part of it up and over the rope, but it slid off again. On her fourteenth attempt it went over, and she finally caught hold of the line’s loose end with her tentacle tip, wrapping it round securely. Just then pain messages began to register from some of her other tentacles. The rhinoworms were beginning to tentatively gnaw on her flesh.
Pulling on the line itself only tugged the rope down, making the harpoon tilt. It was only by accident, when her grip slipped for a moment and she drew the line across the rope, that she observed a few severed fibres spring up. Urgently, she began sawing the line back and forth.
By now some of the rhinoworms, finding she was not retaliating, were biting a lot harder, and the commotion they were making was attracting many more who were heading rapidly up from the beach.
Finally, the rope parted, and the giant whelk twisted her tentacle to snap off the harpoon haft. Then reaching over to snatch up the most persistent rhinoworm, she raised the writhing creature and used it like a rubber drumstick to beat a tattoo on her shell. The male whelk out at sea responded with an excited drumming. The rhinoworm, its skull now shattered, she fed under her skirt, to her beak, and quickly devoured. Now she reached round to tackle the next harpoon, trying to tug it out. But it was stuck solid and, with its rope still attached, she could not get enough leverage with just one tentacle to break the haft. At least there was less urgency now the rhinoworms had retreated a little way. Realizing that once she freed another tentacle things would get very much easier, she looped the line over another rope and again began to saw. She was about halfway through when the waiting rhinoworms began running for cover. A crusted shell had broken the ocean’s surface and begun to head ashore.
Extending her remaining eye rearwards, the female giant whelk watched the male approach. She did not like the look of his shell for, encrusted like that, it looked untidy, and meant he spent most of his time on the bottom. He was smaller, as all males were, but it struck her that this one was particularly scrawny. He oozed onto the sand, moved up to the edge of the clearing and halted, focusing both eyes down to where a rope was tied around a rocky outcrop. He tracked the rope up to the harpoon embedded in her body, then his eyes swung apart to take in the other ropes. She tugged briefly on a couple of them to be sure he got the idea. He paused, mulling the situation over, then reached out a tentacle and plucked the nearest rope like a guitar string. She wondered if he was particularly thick when he moved aside and chose to slide towards her up the lane between two ropes, careful to avoid dislodging any of them. When he reached her and reared up, extruding the long, tubular, glassy corkscrew of his penis, she realized he had certainly assessed the situation here.
Angrily the giant female thrashed back at him with her one free tentacle, which was larger and more powerful than any of his. But, having all his free, he caught hold of it and held it down against her shell. His penis partially unwound, probing under the back lip of her shell. At this point, instinct took over in her, and she extruded some of her softer body from underneath her shell. His penis felt this, and snapped out straight, stabbing deep inside her. Feeling something that was both pain and pleasure she emitted a hissing squeal. Letting loose a series of whistling hoots, he began rocking back and forth, his penis groping around between her internal organs. One organ reacted, opening with a ripping feeling inside her, and he soon found it. She bucked hard in reaction, and observed a couple of trees go crashing down. His flailing about dislodged one rope so its looped end snapped up free of the outcrop to which it was secured. This constant rocking motion loosened a harpoon embedded near his entry point, and the growing mass of slime there lubricated its progress out of her body. Then, with a final long-drawn-out hoot he filled her up, and with a gasp came to rest flat and limp against her. Screwing itself back out of her, his penis dropped flaccid into the sand.
The female felt strangely invigorated by this mating. Peering at the male, she observed his eyes blinking tiredly, and felt his grip slackening. Pulling her tentacle free, she snatched up the loose harpoon and drove it deep between his eyes. He squealed and retreated, becoming entangled in a fallen tree. Turning, she brought more trees crashing down and snapped two more ropes. Now with four tentacles unrestrained, she used them to snap harpoon shafts one after another, till finally breaking free. Her assailant meanwhile crushed his way over foliage and began heading back for the shore. She surged forward, picked up the relevant rope and waited. As the rope drew taut, he was jerked to a halt. Gradually she began to reel him in, clacking her beak the while. The reversal would have been lost on her: he’d had his way with her and now, dinner.
20
Lung Bird:
this creature seems to be an abortive attempt by the life of Spatterjay to get into the skies. They appear to be perpetually on the point of coming apart and possess a sparse covering of long oily feathers, between which is exposed purplish septic-looking flesh. Seen stationary on a branch, a lung bird looks like a half-plucked crow that has been dead for a week or more. But they a
re a fascinating oddity. On close inspection it can be seen that their beaks are extensions of a light carapace that entirely covers them, as are their feathers, for these birds have no internal skeleton. They are in fact closely related to the glisters, being crustaceans that took to the air. However, close inspection of lung birds is not something to be enjoyed by any human, and most investigation into these creatures is conducted by telefactor or by the planetary Warden, for the creature’s body is heavily laden with putrescine, which comes from their main diet of putrephallus weeds—
Erlin gazed back at the Prador spaceship, hovering just out from the island which the Sable Keech was now rounding. It was itself a metal island, clouds forming around it as sea water boiled off hot cowlings then recondensed in the air.
What’s it waiting for? she wondered, and as if in response to her silent query its fusion engines sputtered and sent the leviathan slowly drifting away. She pursed her lips. At least now, with every second that passed, the chances were reduced of them being caught in the middle of some bombardment from orbit.
‘Look,’ said Sable Keech himself, now standing beside her.
‘I see it,’ she replied.
Lowering his monocular, he caught her shoulder. ‘No there.’ He pointed towards the island shallows where a Hooper ship was making its way out to sea. Its progress was necessarily slow because its rear mast was missing and it was sailing under some temporary rig manipulated by its living sail. Erlin took the monocular Keech passed to her and studied the vessel. At first she did not recognize it, because of its current rig, then realization hit home.
‘The Treader,’ she breathed, then directed her attention to the deck. There seemed a lot of Hoopers aboard, and she wondered what Ambel had got himself into now.
‘Why’s it here?’ Keech asked.
Abruptly Erlin felt guilty, understanding that the Old Captain may have come in pursuit of herself. There seemed no other explanation for him to be way out here, and she wondered if she deserved such concern.
‘Perhaps we should tell…’ she began, but there was no need. The Sable Keech was slowing and turning. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ She turned and pushed back through the door leading into the Tank Rooms. She headed over to a nearby restraint table and rested her bottom against it. Looking mildly puzzled, Keech followed her in. She did not want to deal with what she was feeling at that moment, and did not want him asking her questions. Instead she eyed the new occupants of the restraint tables: six Hoopers—dosed up with Intertox but still fighting their bonds—and three others.
‘Maybe we should just drop him over the side,’ she suggested, eyeing the closest to her of the latter. That was not an acceptable Polity approach, but certainly how Captain Ron would like to deal with the problem.
Strapped naked to his table, Bloc showed no sign of movement. She studied his exposed injuries with belated interest, wondering what the hell had originally killed him. Aesop and Bones also lay immobile on tables nearby.
‘Were I not an Earth Monitor, I would tend to agree,’ said Keech. ‘But I want to take him back with me. Would that be possible?’
‘Aesop and Bones, too?’ she asked.
‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Tell me, why did Bloc just collapse like that?’
Erlin glanced at the status lights on Bloc’s cleansing unit, which was positioned on a tray folded out from the restraint table. All showed red, and one of the pipes connecting into the reif’s body was black with fouled balm. She then picked up a palm console, connected via an optic cable into the cleanser, and studied its readout.
‘He seized up—not enough memory space for all the information he was processing.’ She gestured at Aesop and Bones. ‘Rather than use one unit to control one thrall, as do the Prador, his unit is partitioned. The readings I’ve been getting show three main partitions, and I’ve been able to assign two of these to Aesop and Bones. The third one is wide-band, its channel operating twenty-seven thralls in parallel. I thought at first this was to control twenty-seven reifs, but that could not possibly work. Again, checking dates, I found that eleven of the thralls went offline while Bloc was on Mortuary Island, before I arrived. Then a further seven of them went offline at just about the time the hooder lost its head.’
Keech grimaced. ‘The figure twenty-seven tells me all I need to know. The number of the beast, you might say—that’s how many body segments a hooder possesses.’
‘He obviously controlled it, though I’d question the extent of that control with him needing to use grazer pheromone to mark out its victims. Anyway, as those eighteen thralls were destroyed, they scrambled formatting in his memory space. Then the Prador somehow linked through the remaining hooder thralls, thereby controlling him. It also used him as a conduit for a while in order to run some sort of mathematical program in the minds of those other two. But that alone wasn’t what pushed him to the limit. His viral infection was causing more and more diagnostic programs to run in his reification hardware, and as a result more error messages kept coming up, taking up more memory space. Then I think the sight of you pushed him over the edge.’
‘Is that mathematical program actually running now?’
‘It did shut down, but out of interest I recorded some of it. Now I’m running it cyclically with some strong memory he has retained, to keep him locked in a virtual loop.’
‘How’s his viral condition now?’
‘Pretty far gone—at about the stage you were at when you resorted to using your nanochanger.’ She gestured to the others. ‘Aesop over there is nowhere near as bad. In fact there are many in a worse state aboard this ship, and,’ she gestured, ‘already in these tanks.’
‘Bones?’ Keech asked.
‘He’s beyond infection. Take a look.’
Keech moved over to Bones and pulled back the reif’s hood. A bare skull grinned up at him, its lensed eyes shuttered and the tip of a metallic tongue protruding between the teeth. He opened the reif’s jacket for further confirmation, and eyed the bare ribcage exposed.
‘He was called Bones when he was still alive,’ Keech noted.
‘Perhaps it amused Bloc to have him resemble his name. I wouldn’t be surprised. So, what about Bloc? What do you want me to do with him?’
‘Can you shut down his control unit? I’d rather he retained no control over these two.’
‘Doubtful. I’ve had a look and it’s closely interfaced with his memory crystal, so one mistake might wipe him out’—she shrugged—‘which would be no bother to me, but is obviously not what you want. How did you know about it anyway? Forlam said you already knew about the thralls.’
‘Bloc was a student of esoteric or alien technologies even before he died. I found that out when I was researching him, just as I found out that some time back he had purchased spider thralls through an agent on Coram. That he had already used the technology seemed the only proper explanation to account for Aesop and Bones. Altering a Prador thrall to control memcrystal would have been no problem to him.’ Keech walked back and stood looking down at Bloc again. ‘Would our best option be him shutting down his own hardware?’
Erlin stared at Keech for a long moment, running her fingers across the scar tissue on her neck. She frowned, then realization dawned.
‘My recent problems must have scrambled my brain,’ she said. ‘It happened to you: the changer rebuilds the organic brain and then the program causes a complete download to it from the memcrystal before shutting the whole memplant down. Of course, this is presupposing the organic brain does get rebuilt fully.’
Keech shrugged. ‘It is a risk, agreed.’
Erlin nodded, then unplugged the optic cable from Bloc’s cleanser, wrapped it round her palm console, then put the console aside. From a table nearby on which she had piled Bloc’s clothing prior to examining him, she retrieved his nanochanger. On pressing an inset button on top of Bloc’s cleanser, a lid nipped up exposing a recess for the lozenge-shaped changer.
‘Well, here goes.’ Erlin pr
essed the changer into place, while Keech moved over to stand beside her. The lozenge clamped down and from all around its edges extruded small golden tubes which mated into sockets in the cleanser. The status lights then turned blue. ‘Okay, let’s get him into a tank and all connected up. He’ll have to forgo his intended prior visit to the Little Flint.’ She glanced around at the other tanks in use. ‘He won’t be alone, anyway.’
Half an hour later as Bloc was floating in his tank, autodoc clinging to him and optics plugged in through his suppurating flesh, the door banged open. Glancing past Keech while she wiped her hands, Erlin observed a crowd of Hoopers dragging in other Hoopers bound up squirming in sail cloth.
‘Looks like my workload just increased,’ she muttered.
* * * *
The body of her rapist assuaged her hunger for a little while, but her insides processed his meat like a combined waste compactor and acid bath. Her guts bubbling and squirming, she crashed through the forest sending lung birds honking from their perches in the branches. Then, encountering a stand of putrephallus over which more of those horrible baggy birds squabbled, she turned and made her way down to the shore and into the sea. She could feel the organ he had penetrated expanding in slow pulses within her. Her ichor was thundering in her veins. Sometimes it became difficult to think.
Bloated and heavy she no longer floated, and had to push herself off the bottom again and again. Her hunger returned with confusing speed so, moving deeper, she began feeding upon negative-buoyant masses of young rhinoworm corpses. Then a hint of a taste permeated the water, and with it the slow return of vague memory. Yet it was a difficult memory to hold onto, since eating and that growth inside her now seemed so much more important. Bouncing aimlessly along the seabed she tried to regain her earlier sense of purpose, and to recall how it had felt to swim. It was only happenstance that took her to where that taste in the water grew stronger. And her intellect made another bid for freedom.