by Neal Asher
‘Small detail,’ I repeated.
‘Horse trading,’ said SM17. It swung round to face towards the distant whelk. ‘The pressure increases the closer this creature gets to the inhabited islands.’
‘That’s dirty.’
‘You thought Polity AIs were clean?’
‘I guess not.’ I turned and started walking again.
As we drew closer to their target faeces pile we passed others along the way. Despite the danger all around I now began to think more like a xeno-biologist. Stopping by one pile, I used a stick hauled out of the mud to probe it, levering out pieces of vegetation and wood, a chunk of fatty flesh and a length of bone with stringy flesh still attached that I identified as heirodont. I even found a couple of live leeches in the mass.
‘This is not right,’ I said. ‘It’s eating hugely but not properly digesting its food.’
‘Perhaps because it’s the wrong kind of food?’ SM17 suggested.
I tossed the stick aside. ‘No – they are omnivores in the ocean deeps and the vegetation and animal life of the islands is not that different. It seems likely they also have a sprine bile duct like the big ocean leeches and pelagic heirodonts. Those leeches should have been dead.’
‘So all this devastation because it has an upset stomach?’
I grunted dismissively and moved on. Further remaining life became evident. Another land heirodont the size of a domestic cat, sporting six limbs and a trumpet mouth, heaved itself from a shit pile and moved off. Seeing green items pushing through the soil I walked over and saw new sprouts. An earlier passing thought about surviving heirodonts starving, I now dismissed. Not that they would die anyway – the virus would not allow that. Finally I reached the requisite pile of faeces and dismissed the icon.
‘Give me a local scan,’ I instructed the drone.
The scanner initiated briefly and loaded a three dimensional image for inspection. I could see myself standing by the pile – all my organs visible if I cared to concentrate on that image. SM17 hung in view too, but inspecting its internals was not so easy – so densely packed were they. Assessing relative positions I began digging at the pile with another stick. The first case was about five feet in, with a large globular object, three-feet across, in the way. If I could get to that and heave it out, I would quickly reach the case.
In this pile the whelk’s digestion had worked a bit more efficiently. Chunks of wood and vegetation were bleached white amidst brown excrement. Collapsing the side of the pile, revealed the surface of that globular object. The pale rubbery skin of it yielded only slightly under the digging stick for it seemed as taut as a drum. Some sort of egg perhaps, or a scooped up life form of a kind I did not recognise? I dug round it and, getting a grip, heaved it out a little way, but it was too heavy and rolled back. I dug around one side to clear an area to stand in so as to get better purchase and tried again. This time the object came free and rolled out, bounced and then settled in the mud. But it also shifted. I pulled up the scan data again. Something was knotted up inside the thing and, seeing no openings or methods of locomotion I decided the thing must be an egg. I would inspect it later. Right now I wanted that case. Digging again revealed the edge of the case – its plasmel pitted by stomach acid but the handle conveniently facing towards me.
‘Bugger fuck!’ exclaimed SM17.
I turned in time to see the egg deflating as a creature shot out of it like a jellyfish sting. A long neck the width of my own, with fins flapping down its length, terminated in a blunt eyeless head, which opened a mouth full of square sharp teeth. The mouth clamped on SM17 and the neck whipped, sending the drone end over end through the air to stab in the ground ten feet away. The rest of the creature pulled clear of its egg – body folding out like a huge flatworm with fins rippling down its sides. I tugged frantically at the case, pulling it partially clear, then had to dive aside as the neck hooped and that mouth stabbed down at me. It thumped into the ground beside my leg, then came up with a lump of wood jammed in its teeth. On hands and knees I crawled clear, but the thing came after me fast, hooping up ready for another strike.
‘Deckz squirtzz,’ said a voice, as another figure loomed into view.
The creature stabbed down again but a big hand snapped out to catch its neck, stopping it dead, fingers digging in. The creature turned its head to snap at its attacker, but Captain Smurk pulled his head back, then abruptly forwards, his forehead slamming hard into its teeth and breaking them. It hung there for a second, dazed, and he did not give it time to recover. He turned, sweeping his arm in an arc, heaving the creature up off the ground and then slamming it down again. Next, releasing the neck, he delivered a hard kick to its body. The creature landed twenty feet away and with a great thwump simply exploded, spreading its internal organs and slimy yellow juices in every direction.
‘Captain Smurk,’ said I, climbing to my feet. I looked over at the creature’s remains, then peered down at the remains of its egg. The thing had been huge. It had expanded from the moment it left its egg, so what was that all about?
‘Squirtzzz,’ said the captain.
I studied him. Took in the baby arm sticking from his shoulder, the blue of his skin and the way he was twitching, then quickly headed back to pull my case clear. I tried to undo the latches just as fast as I could, but they had been corroded by stomach acid and wouldn’t budge.
‘Need…helpzzz?’ said the captain, suddenly close and looming over me. The man’s eyes would not keep still and didn’t go well with his crazy grin. Then his tongue protruded from the side of his mouth, opening out like a trumpet at the end to reveal rows of lamprey teeth. He stooped closer and I scuttled back, but the captain just reached down, snapped off both latches as if dead-heading flowers, then stepped clear. I moved in and flung the case open. The Spartech assault rifle sat in shaped padding in the top since I had expected that if needed it I’d want quick access to it. The thing was only a foot and a half long and quite light. A turn of its energy canister powered it up. I shoved a magazine in one side and another in the other, and stood up feeling just a little bit safer.
‘Be needin thatzz,’ the captain observed. He waved a hand at our surroundings. SM17 heaved from the ground and zoomed up high, while below pale shapes slid across the ground, long necks waving and teeth snapping. Hundreds of what Smurk had named ‘deck squirts’ were all around us.
‘Deck squirts you said?’ I moved out from the pile, but also away from the captain.
‘They haul them up from the deeps occasionally,’ said SM17 settling back down to hover beside me. ‘The pressure differential makes them blow up like balloons if they’re left long enough. Hoopers will usually equalise the pressure with whatever sharp implements they have to hand.’
‘Hence “squirts”,’ I said shakily.
‘Behind you,’ SM17 warned.
One of the creatures came scuttling on its body fins round the shit pile. I fired once without making an ammo selection and an explosive slug hit the ground beside the thing blowing open a smoking crater. I had all but missed but some chunk of debris must have penetrated the creature’s hide. A jet of slime shot out of the hole cutting a urine-yellow arc through the air. With its head waving from side to side the thing rapidly deflated, skin sinking back against lumpy internals and what looked like a proto-skeleton, neck growing thin and finally slumping, head nosing into the ground.
‘Come you buggerzz!’ Smurk strode away to where the creatures seemed most concentrated. He backhanded one that tried to bite him and the force of the blow flipped it over, its neck thrashing and the ruins of its head acting like a sprinkler for that same slime. He moved onto another, stamped on its body, the thing exploding under his foot and sending its neck and head tumbling through the air.
Other squirts where heading toward me so it seemed about time to improve the accuracy of my shots. Auging into the weapon, I brought up cross hairs to my vision. Since the things were vulnerable to just about any pen
etration of their hides I selected soft bead ammo, targeted the nearest creature and fired at its body. The semi-liquid metal bead spread out as it travelled, and blew a hole the width of a hand in the squirt. It exploded, flinging proto-bones and organs in every direction. I lowered the gun, now no longer vulnerable and suddenly ashamed to be killing the creatures.
‘They’ll die anyway, you know,’ said SM17. ‘The few samples we’ve seen indicate a very low viral infection level and inability to withstand the pressure differential from the depths.’
‘Give me what data you have on them,’ I said.
‘Not very much, unfortunately.’
I responded to the comlink request and got a surprisingly brief file. Almost without thinking, I fired at another creature drawing too close, then wiped jellied lumps of slime off the front of my suit.
‘Hoopers only catch them rarely,’ SM17 explained. ‘By the time one of us got to examine the remains of just one of them there wasn’t very much left. The crew concerned threw it back in the sea and most of it was eaten.’
‘One of those occasions when you had permission to come down here?’ I suggested.
‘Of course,’ said the drone, but I knew it was a lie. Though the drones weren’t supposed to come down to the surface without permission, they had their methods of concealment. I rather doubted the Warden allowed local politics to get in the way of data gathering down here.
Smurk was steadily wiping out the population of creatures in the surrounding area, his chore becoming progressively easier as they were getting slower, while some spontaneously burst open and spread their insides. I studied those creatures nearby and focused on the first one he had shot at. Having relieved its internal pressure through just one hole it seemed the most intact. I would start there. But not yet. I looked towards Smurk. The man seemed to be losing interest now the squirts weren’t putting up a fight and had started wandering back.
I called up that shit pile scan image while grabbing a collapsible trenching tool from the first case. Digging into the pile I quickly unearthed the second case, thoroughly aware of Smurk standing nearby watching me. Breaking off the latches with the shovel, I opened it, sorted through sample bottles to find one with a pale red fluid in it. As Smurk loomed at my shoulder, I held the bottle out.
‘Diluted three hundred to one,’ I said. ‘It was for me if I got infected by the Spatterjay virus. Though infection has its advantages, Polity technology can give me those.’
Smurk peered at the bottle. ‘Sprinezz,’ he said.
When the predators of this world got large enough they tended to swallow their prey whole. This caused problems because virus infected prey did not die in the gut and could cause damage. Evolution had provided sprine for large ocean-going leeches, heirodonts and, it was speculated, the giant whelks. Issuing from the bile duct it killed the virus in their prey thus enabling digestion. Hoopers, like Smurk, hunted large leeches and rendered sprine from their bile ducts. It was much prized by them as practical immortality had its drawbacks too, and sprine enabled them to die. However, for a hooper in the captain’s condition, diluted sprine retarded viral growth. It could bring Smurk back towards the nominally human and prevent him from turning into something nastier.
The captain took the sample bottle in his only hand, stared at it in irritation because he could not undo it, then shoved the whole thing in his mouth and crunched down. I expected him to spit out the tough plastic but he just kept crunching and swallowed. He then grunted and jerked, his massive hand closing into a rock crushing fist.
‘And these,’ I said hurriedly, handing over a pack of protein bars.
Smurk shuddered, forced his fist open, took the pack and walked away.
I glanced to the horizon where the sun was guttering out, turned to the case again to find water and food for myself. Weariness pummelled me after I’d eaten three protein and vitamin bars. Luckily the case contained my spare heat sheet for the night.
It had been an interesting night. I’d rolled myself in a spare heat sheet but the activity nearby kept pulling me out of slumber. Smurk’s yell woke me first, alerting me to a late hatching of squirts. I took the floater lamp out of one case – a device of bubble metal almost as light as air – turned it on and tossed it into the air. Using its micro-propellers it settled three feet above my head and maintained position, while I sat with the Spartech across my lap. None of the creatures got close – they were much slower now and leaking body fluids even as they hatched. Later still a squealing woke me, whereupon I saw the captain dismembering a small heirodont and eating it raw – he had already eaten all the protein bars. The man kept grabbing hold of his tongue to push morsels past it. In the early morning I woke to movement in my heat sheet and had to throw out a leech that had come to spoon me. Sunrise revealed the dismembered and still weakly moving remains of two big leeches the captain had caught in the night. The captain himself sat on a rock nearby. He did look a bit less blue now.
Time to get to work, I decided.
Now, with all the equipment retrieved, I chopped a small sample from the squirt and inserted it into a compact genomic analyser the size of a coffee mug. Linking to the device I tracked its start-up routine, then watched it steadily building a map of the creature’s genome. All the data I would need should come from this, but I would only get some basic information now since detail would require heavy processing. As I peered down at the deflated deck squirt I didn’t want to wait for that, however, so grabbed up a hand scanner and ran it from the thing’s head all the way down its length. I had retrieved the hardened scanner, its case battered and etched by stomach acid and the thing still functional, but it was a bit too high powered for this chore. I mentally explored the image of the initial scan and, running the scanner back up and down, viewed further detail being filled in. After a moment I took up a vibro-knife and split the creature from the base of its neck to its back end. On the basis of the scan I made two more side cuts and folded over a large flap of skin, split open an inner layer and studied the organs there revealed.
‘And the purpose of this?’ enquired SM17.
‘Occam’s razor,’ I replied. ‘The whelk is behaving in an unusual manner. It is eating hugely and not properly digesting its food. It has, as you said, an upset stomach. Meanwhile its excrement is loaded with these things.’
‘Two plus two equals five,’ said the captain from where he sat on a rock nearby, staring into the distance.
Smurk had lost that tongue buzz to his words, but I still did not trust his sanity. I dipped to the remains and cut out an organ vaguely resembling a bright green human heart.
‘Joseph,’ said SM17, but I ignored the drone to run the hand scanner over the organ, and accruing more detail dropped that into the overall image.
‘I think maybe it’s time,’ said 17.
I shook my head in annoyance at this interruption and ran comparisons between this creature and data on other creatures of this world, steadily building up a picture. I linked to the growing genome data and enlarged that picture.
‘Equals five!’ Smurk shouted, leaping to his feet.
I came back to myself, abruptly aware that the ground was vibrating. The captain pointed – unnecessarily because Bad Boy loomed large and was coming fast across the denuded ground towards us. SM17 shot from the top of the shit pile to hover above me.
‘Grab what you think you’ll need – not too much since we’ll have to move fast,’ said the drone.
I just stood there holding the organ, then dropped it. So deep had I gone that I’d all but forgotten the danger here. And why the hell was the whelk coming towards us now? It was crossing ground it had already fed from and there was plenty of other vegetation and animal life all over the island.
‘Move!’ 17 prompted.
Out of one of the cases I took a backpack, quickly slinging inside a number of items. With the pack full, and heavy, I looked down at all that remained in the cases. Took an expensive remote
laser spectrometer out of the pack and, after a moment, replaced it with a short reach atomic shear, since self-defence seemed more important now. I shrugged the pack on, then turned to follow Smurk, SM17 floating at my shoulder. We began tramping back to the shore.
‘Do you have anything yet?’ asked SM17.
I kept up with Smurk’s fast walk and, glancing back over my shoulder, saw the whelk’s tentacles groping across the ground towards us. It was moving faster than us, but we should be able to get ahead of it on the hard ground at the top of the beach. I looked into those dark eyes sure I read malevolence there, but that was probably just imagination. Looking away, I dipped my head and returned to analysis. Data was falling into a place in my programs – building a loose hypothesis.
‘Complex biology as it always is with parasites,’ I finally said as I laboured and stumbled through the mud.
‘Parasites?’ said Smurk, looking over his shoulder.
‘The things you call squirts are mobile oocysts and in the deep ocean feed and grow multiplying sporozoites inside themselves.’ I grimaced. ‘I’m using words that only loosely apply. Their purpose at this stage is to be eaten – probably by ocean-going carnivorous heirodonts.’
We reached the top of the beach where Smurk turned left. Ahead leeches lay on the sand beached-seal style again. The captain widened his stride on the harder ground as did I, now regretting some of the items in my pack but not the weapon, even though it now felt heavier.
‘Inside the host’s gut the sporozoites encyst,’ I said. ‘We know that ocean heirodont’s are one of the whelk’s favoured prey.’
‘And inside the whelk the things you incorrectly label sporozoites hatch out and produce more eggs?’ suggested SM17.
I looked back towards the giant whelk. Was it my imagination that it had changed course to line up with us?