by Neal Asher
‘Look,’ said Anna, shining the torch at something over the other side of the hold.
A great tangled mass lay there. For a moment he thought it a pile of cables and other junk a ship like this often acquired but, as they moved closer he began to discern the true shape of it: bones. At a glance they looked like human skeletons, but closer inspection revealed otherwise. The bones he could see were bulkier, the skulls crested with forward jutting jaws filled with lethal looking teeth. Most of the bones were under sheets of carapace with jutting spikes and sharp edges. He noted that the leg and arm bones were the same length. Here then was a creature that could probably both stand upright and run on all fours.
‘Damn and fuck,’ he said, looking to Anna. ‘No tank-grown monsters?’
‘No, none at all.’
He waved a hand at the mass. ‘Then how do you explain this?’
‘Descendants.’
‘What?’
‘It wasn’t just the biology of this world that was altered for warfare, but people too.’ She shook her head. ‘These were on my side – vicious efficient killers. I got a scan at a distance on your Stalker but I wasn’t sure. I told you about the dumb plague? Well, here are the descendants of its victims.’ She squatted, reached in and pulled out a skull, then slammed it down on the floor breaking it open. Holding up one half she pointed inside. The thing had a series of bony compartments with spicules of bone growing across them – no place in there at all for anything like a human brain. ‘Little more than animals now but retaining their weaponised characteristics. I imagine these wiped out the standard humans infected with the plague.’
Ben watched her as she put the skull down, almost regretfully.
‘I felt there was something you weren’t telling me,’ he said.
‘I didn’t tell you because I just wasn’t sure.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s something I just didn’t want to get into and… I didn’t want to hunt that creature down until I knew.’
‘Until you knew what?’
‘I guessed it to be a descendant, but I wasn’t sure about the mind. Perhaps I was trying to convince myself that people had survived. I hoped…’ She shook her head. ‘I should have known. If they had retained any human intelligence… if that Stalker had retained it then it would not have been hunting but digging up podules. If they had retained any intelligence this would have been a very different place.’
And there, he thought, a perfect example of the fact that Golem were not just machines – a whole gamut of complex emotions and impulses. He could not quite understand what she was feeling but did have some empathy for its effects on her.
‘So what do you think happened here?’ he gestured to the pile.
She stood up. ‘They weren’t stacked here like this. It looks to me like they gathered together – tied themselves in this knot – and I see no weapons burns. I think it likely that this is how they aestivated during the day, but their day here when they did this was their last one.’
Ben nodded. ‘Radiation.’
‘As I said, it is low now, but it would have been a lot higher at the beginning.’ She pointed vaguely into the ship. ‘Fusion reactors don’t fail like that unless deliberately made to do so. It would have irradiated the ship in one burst and thereafter waned, but everything would have been toxic for some time. People here would have survived by dint of their nanosuites, though they would not have been in a good way. These creatures must have come in shortly after the crash, perhaps with some degree of human curiosity remaining, perhaps still running some war time programming, but certainly to hunt.’ She shrugged. ‘And, as you know, nanosuites are not heritable.’
‘And now the whole scenario here has become even more complicated,’ said Ben. ‘We need to find the captain’s log if we can, though I wonder if there are any entries after this crash.’
‘Perhaps this is something we should leave for another day?’ Anna asked.
‘Why not now?’
‘Perhaps you weren’t paying attention to the position of the sun.’ She smiled tentatively.
‘Damn. How long?’
‘Maybe two hours before the innocular flies, but they are not my main concern.’ She gestured to the bones. ‘The Stalker used to arrive at your house later in the night and whenever the mantid population was higher. It seems likely that this is where it aestivates during the day. And there may be others.’
‘We’ll take a look at the bridge – it shouldn’t take long to reach there – then get out before nightfall. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
They headed out to the dropshaft. Anna leaned into it and shone the torch up and down, then picked out the rungs running up the side. She clicked the torch off. He was about to suggest that wasn’t such a good idea, but then his eyes adjusted to light penetrating from above – just enough to see the rungs by. Inside they climbed, Ben leading. The light steadily increased until he swung into a bright corridor with square chainglass ports running down the side and doors down the other. Crew quarters. Here lay the broken bones of what looked like two skeletons, scattered about a machine mounted on a circular grav sled. He inspected the large number of coiled power leads, the boxy quantum cascade units and the snout of the thing with its photon compression barrel.
‘Industrial laser,’ he said, again thinking how useful a tool this was. ‘I wonder why it was up here.’
‘Easy to speculate if we are considering mutiny,’ Anna replied.
Pieces of carapace were scattered about the area, but when he picked up bone fragments and a cracked open skull he did not find the marks of mantids. All the large bones had been split open, probably to get at the marrow, which was something of which mantids were incapable. Doubtless the skull had been split open to access the lump of fatty matter inside. The fragments bore teeth marks and he did not need to speculate too much to guess from what.
‘Seems the descendants came up here,’ he said.
‘Seems so,’ said Anna tightly.
They moved along this corridor then round, finally turning at a junction through a long tubular corridor to a bulkhead door. He tried the locking handle then the manual wheel but had no luck. Stepping back, he studied cuts on the surface, before peering down at another device abandoned against the wall. Here lay an atomic shear, its cable plugged into a universal wall socket. Foolish, he felt, to try a shear on a door like this. It wasn’t just hardened ceramal but layered with meta-materials that would rebind any narrow cuts and cracks. He supposed that’s why they had decided to bring up the industrial laser.
‘The bridge lies behind here,’ he said. ‘It’s certainly locked and likely they damaged the mechanism when they first attempted to cut through.’
Anna stripped off her pack and put it on the floor with the torch on top, stepped forwards and gripped the locking handle.
‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked.
‘They used the wrong approach – trying to cut through the door,’ she said. ‘They would have done better to bring a hydraulic lever of some kind. The door is very durable but the locking mechanism is plain ceramal and, to a limited extent, brittle.’
She struggled with the handle, then, bracing her legs apart, got both her hands on it. With a deep cracking thump it went down.
‘It was damaged?’ he asked.
‘No, locked from the inside and corroded.’
Next she took hold of the wheel and, accompanied by similar sounds of things breaking, it turned. With a ripping sound the door lifted from its seal, but then just stuck there.
‘Stand back,’ Anna instructed.
She got her fingers in at the edge of the door as he stepped away. He thought her emulation pretty good, the way the muscles stood out on her arms, but knew they weren’t doing the work. He saw the floor bowing underneath her feet, then with a crack something further broke in the door frame and it swung round on its hinges to crash into the wall.
The bridge was well lit too with the thic
k wrap-around chainglass screen set to transparency before the power went out. Consoles and screens with chairs before them ran around one wall. The other wall was screen painted and used to show cam pictures and other information about the ship but was now a nacreous grey. Two corpses lay on the floor, mummified and intact enough that Ben almost recognised them, almost. A third corpse sat in the captain’s throne in the middle of the floor.
‘Constance,’ he said, recognising her long pale hair and the armoured envirosuit she always wore.
He walked over and peered into her empty eye sockets, then turned his attention to one arm of the throne. He pressed down a clip and hinged up a control panel revealing a line of data tabs.
‘We have the telemetry and public log here,’ he said. ‘But I would be more interested in her private one, which should be in her cabin.’ He turned. Anna had sat in one of the seats before a console – U-space control. ‘Do you need the battery?’
She looked round. ‘It should be possible to run a diagnostic without that,’ she said, pulling up a sleeve then swiping a hand down her arm. Her skin split open to reveal glittery internals and she reached down to her pack to a take out a combined optic and power lead, and plugged it into her arm.
He walked over as she found the requisite port in the console and plugged in the other end, and stooped to take the battery slab and leads from her pack. The console powered up and a dim screen began to run code. She started working the controls as he headed back to the captain’s throne. Power being limited he opened the other arm of the throne and took out a small tablet. He ran a power lead into that from the battery and it came on to show a charging bar. It surprised him to see that it still did have a charge. He put the tablet down then reached out a hand and patted Constance on the shoulder.
‘Sorry about this, but time for you to move.’
‘What?’ said Anna, looking round, then, ‘Oh,’ as he hauled the corpse out of the throne and deposited it on the floor. How weirdly light she felt, he thought – a reminder that humans were essentially just bags of water complicated by some other chemicals. Brushing down the seat he turned and sat, picked up the tablet then made a selection from the other throne arm. Pulling one of the data tabs out, he inserted it into a socket in the side of the tablet and immediately on the screen got a long list of entries, with the first words spoken written out as text. He selected one on the basis of that text and pressed play.
The scene was the interior of the bridge with Constance sitting where he now sat. Off to one side he could just see two others sitting at consoles. Constance looked both worried and angry. She grimaced, then spoke.
‘They were working against me almost from when this journey began, Alison, Kamarg and the others. They chose most of those aboard and they were all in on it, and the equipment manifest, and it was Alison who set the survey roster so my three main supporters were aboard when it went down. I don’t know who sabotaged the shuttle…’
She shook her head and punched a button on the throne arm and the recording ended. He frowned and scrolled down the list. It was a long one and to run through it all would take many hours they did not have here. He would look at it when they got back to the house. Glancing round at Anna he saw that her hands were no longer moving and she was doubtless now making a mental inspection of the U-space communicator. He considered wandering off into the ship to find some useful items to take back with them, but then reconsidered. They had a lot to discuss concerning what they would do here. This ship contained a wealth of resources and perhaps his house – valued as it was – would not be the best place to be. Perhaps they should relocate here and, almost certainly, any further exploration and assessment would be better started with a new day.
He decided to pass the time while he waited for her to finish by setting the log to play at random, and from that perhaps get an overview, and know where he wanted to look. Setting random play he got Constance again, looking haggard, sipping from a water bottle. There was blood on her clothing, crusted below her nose and one of her eyes was bright red. Behind her and to the right he saw the corpses where they still lay now. When she was done with the water she looked up to speak, her voice hoarse.
‘Kamarg told me when he was “negotiating” from the other side of that door. They’d spent ages scrubbing data stores of the location of Afthonia because they knew about the podules and what they contained, and knew that controlling them meant fortunes could be made. I was just the mug they used to get here…’ She shook her head. ‘I never understood the need for so many sub-AI digging machines with the materials to set up a base, nor the near half a hold full of expandable cargo boxes.’ She put her hand up to her mouth for a second, looked startled then leaned over and vomited bloody water.
A brief recording selected next.
‘They had no intention of letting any of those who weren’t on their team walk away from this,’ said Constance, then just turned away, and the recording ended.
Another brief recording, this one from earlier and obviously before the crash:
‘They killed them. They killed them all.’ She looked haunted, and then her face twisted with rage. ‘And they have probably killed themselves and us too. What kind of idiot allows a fire fight with armour piercers around a fusion reactor?’ She glanced round at the other two. Ben recognised them now but just could not remember their names. She continued, ‘We’ve agreed. We can’t U-jump out of here and the stored power won’t last. We’re taking the ship down. Judging by the present power levels…This may be my last entry here. In which case: goodbye.’
The next one was longer, she looked grey now.
‘They didn’t have time to get through the door. Through the ships cams that aren’t busted I counted about eight of them, and then just five after that first night, and by the next day they were as sick as me. They started hauling out equipment to set up a camp when Kamarg started coughing blood. He came up here to try and speak to me, to get me to call for help. I told him to fuck off. The reactor failure had dosed them with enough radiation to kill a base format, but they could survive it. They would be very sick, though, and I doubted they would survive another night with the mantids…’ She looked to one side. ‘I was wrong about that.’
Ben stopped the random selection and flicked to the next recording.
‘Kamarg was at the door again, begging for me to let him in, begging me to call for help. I can see the other two survivors in the hold, getting a heavy duty laser out of its case. I fucked them by turning the power off outside of here, but they have cable to run to laminar storage on the engineering deck. Could be they’ll get through the door. They’ll find an unpleasant surprise here if they do…’
Checking the time stamp he then saw a long break before the next recording. Constance looked even worse if that were possible.
‘I saw three of them die. Maybe others. I can’t tell. I saw someone or something else in the ship. Looked like a ’dapt of some kind – human but insect appearance. Heard someone screaming.’
Ben felt the skin on his back creeping and looked round to the door. Night had to be drawing in now. He glanced at Anna, but she was still rigid in her seat. He put it to random again. Random gave him: ‘I’m pretty busted up and, with the radiation dose, I don’t think my nanosuite is up to it. I’m aug linking and finding failures throughout. Thigh bones busted, pelvis and spine. Heavy organ damage. But it is keeping the pain down.’
Ben stopped it, feeling sick of what he was seeing. He looked to Anna again.
‘We really ought to be getting out of here now,’ he said.
She did not respond and he supposed she must still be deep in the programming. Putting the tablet aside he got up and walked over. Peering round at her face he saw her eyes had gone metallic again, but were also running rapidly changing cubic patterns. Next looking at the screen he watched the code, managing to work out some of what it was. It seemed to be stuck in a repeating cycle, though why that would be…
&
nbsp; Cold fear washed through him and Constance’s words replayed in his mind. She had said, ‘Could be they’ll get through the door. They’ll find an unpleasant surprise here if they do…’ Kamarg, the leader of the expedition that had hired Constance and her crew to come to Afthonia had wanted in so as to access the underspace transmitter, which was precisely what Anna was doing right now. Without a second thought he reached down and jerked the dual function cable out of her arm. If he was wrong, maybe she would be annoyed with him but no harm would be done, if he was right…
She remained utterly still in her seat, the patterns in her eyes slowing. Some sort of virus? He reached out to shake her shoulder and a blinding light flashed and cracked, a shockwave took hold of him, compressing his chest and flinging him. For a second he was airborne then he crunched down on something, utterly dazed. Hauling himself upright he felt an object turning under his hand, glanced down through afterimages and saw a mummified face, the dry skin of the neck fractured. He had landed on the corpses. He scrabbled clear onto his hands and knees, blinking to try and clear his vision. Anna lay sprawled over to one side of her chair. The console had erupted, shards of composite peeled up like the rind of a podule.
‘Anna?’ No response.
He felt too shaky to get to his feet and the side of his face hurt. Reaching up to that he touched wetness and saw the blood on his hand. Probing his skin he found a long lump of something under his skin running from his cheek to up beside his nose and a ragged end protruding. A piece of his own skull? No, it had to be a lump of composite. Knowing now from long experience that this would hurt a lot more later, he tried to get a grip on that ragged end and pull the thing out. He couldn’t, so crawled over to his pack where a fortunate addition had been a pair of pliers. With these he got a good grip on the shard and pulled fast and hard, and yelled, blood flooding down his cheek.