Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  Jonas noted the ‘we’ and that this meant the tagreb AI must me fully in the circuit – occupying the Golem’s mind.

  ‘Let’s look at that zygote.’ He turned away, focused. The zygote was simply a segmented worm wound in a spiral with little inside it that he could resolve. He pulled back and looked to the other segments, but none of them had the spirals inside them. Yet it was evident now that the creature had begun to break apart. He examined the thing further, looking for new linkages between segments but found none. He reckoned overall control ran from the creature’s mind and the link was simply its nervous system.

  ‘Schematic test,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  He flicked a finger at the coiled zygote. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if that simply dies and breaks down with the rest of the creature. In living organisms you don’t see this so much but of course you see it in factory production: the first test piece of a new run of some component to see if it is turning out as expected.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ said Cheller. Jonas knew the Golem did but just wanted him to elaborate and elucidate.

  ‘Another artefact from their biomech past,’ he said. ‘It’s created one of its young to see if everything is functional and if, over time, any errors have developed in the schematic or, rather, it’s finding mutations and removing them, or has probably removed them.’

  ‘I see,’ said Cheller.

  They both turned back towards the hooder. The changes were accelerating now and with the gaps widening between segments its length had grown by twenty or so feet. It tried to move again – rolling as it writhed – and scrubbed off the remainder of its legs and more of its carapace against the ground. Jonas also noticed glinting objects in the grasses near its front end, focused in and saw it had begun to lose its eating apparatus too. They continued watching over the ensuing hour – neither saying much. Jonas felt his own inclination to talk because he was witnessing something unique, but also aware that the thing felt pain, and it almost seemed rude to keep talking. Finally he moved closer to the rail of the platform and looked down at the framework of the derrick.

  ‘All quite inevitable now,’ said Cheller.

  Jonas nodded. ‘It is indeed.’ Grasping the rail he vaulted over, got his feet on the cross struts of the derrick and began to make his way down. Glancing up, he saw Cheller looking down at him. The Golem said nothing because, of course, warnings were redundant and Cheller knew precisely what was happening.

  Jonas dropped into flute grass reaching over his head, multi-coloured buds all around him, and pushed through to where it lay crushed down. He moved out, feeling the sense of danger and relishing it, then some disappointment with a thump on the ground behind. He glanced round to see Cheller pushing out after him. The Golem would not let the hooder kill him and that in turn killed some of the frisson. He moved in closer, smelling something both putrid and spicy, picked up a leg and inspected it before moving closer. The hooder abruptly shifted and scrubbed itself against the ground again – outer carapace peeling away and lying scattered all around it like debris from an explosion. Jonas kicked one of them over, saw black prawn-like creatures already feeding.

  The hooder, but for a few remaining patches of carapace, looked like a stretched out coin tube. Between each segment ‘coin’ the flesh was shrinking, spilling fluids as it did so. He moved even closer, then took a step back when one of these joins near the rear just a few segments in from the tail, broke with a wet snapping sound, remaining flesh retreating into the relevant segments. Jonas saw the pain of this when the hooder’s front end reared in response. He felt Cheller’s hand on his arm but no intent to drag him away just yet. The front end came up high as if reaching for something in the sky, then a series of those sounds ensued. The hooded head, with that test segment behind, snapped off and fell. Other segments behind snapped away too as the rest of it fell. Its impact with the ground transmitted a shock through the soft surface below Jonas’ feet, and all along its length the rest of the segments separated. He wondered if the original beast was actually dead now, or if, its brain having been a neural snake stretching the length of its body, some kind of mental continuity ensued.

  ‘What happens now?’ he asked, glancing back towards the derrick then beyond towards the tagreb. He saw platforms and aerofans rising into the sky over there.

  ‘We collect all extraneous remains but none of the viable segments,’ Cheller replied. ‘Each of those will have scanning gear attached so we can watch their growth in the ground.’

  ‘Interesting work for someone,’ said Jonas. What he had felt for a moment there had begun to fade. How prosaic, he thought, to be behaving utterly as expected and seeking out danger. Now, he waited for Cheller’s and the tagreb AI’s final pitch, certain he would refuse and not just because of what he wasn’t allowed to study.

  ‘It will be necessary to analyse the quantum crystal data in conjunction with this,’ said Cheller. ‘Anyone who commits to this will have to agree on limited publication and, otherwise, proscription on the data he can share.’

  Jonas stared at him. ‘But, nevertheless, that person gets to see the data?’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Cheller agreed.

  Jonas abruptly realised he wasn’t quite so far gone as he thought.

  ‘Looks like I may be staying, then,’ he said.

  *

  Jonas felt a boiling anger inside, but also a crazy joy that he could feel such anger. The period of emotions dying had now moved into a new phase, as if they were thrashing about in their attempt to stay alive. Sometimes they surged in him, like this, other times he simply felt dead. He ran with the anger, turning over the apparent reasons for it. Evidently he was not to be trusted, even with the data excised from his mind – relevant portions of his memory edited out. The injunction not to leave the Polity had seemed almost irrelevant. Hell, he had so many alien environments to explore and so many life forms to examine within its borders, he hadn’t really taken it seriously, that was until he did actually try to book passage into this semi-borderland.

  He’d researched the place a great deal before coming here. It was well known that, when the alien prador usurped their king and made a truce with the human Polity to end a devastating war, both sides agreed on a border area between their two realms. Because it encompassed ruins of that war it came to be called the Graveyard, and it also came to be a home for the dispossessed from both realms – usually of the criminal kind. Less well known was that the edges of the Graveyard are not clearly delimited and on the Polity side there are areas of space neither Graveyard nor Polity. These are places where illegality in the main border is tempered by Polity AIs, but where they do not and cannot hold full sway for fear of infringing the truce. They’re halfway realms – neither one thing nor the other. And so it was with Moloch Three occupying one of these zones.

  At a mere fifteen miles long the war factory was one of the smaller of its kind, and one of the oldest. It was Polity territory and it was not. It being a war factory the prador did not like it being in that maybe border territory but, with its engines war-damaged and its AI somnolent they did not push the point. In fact, they found it quite useful. This practically lawless realm right on the edge of the Polity, with inhabited areas wound through its structure like fungal growths throughout a rotting log, had its prador areas. Other prador – supposedly having fled the kingdom – could go there. And no doubt some of them were spies keeping a careful eye on their old enemies. It was also, Jonas realised, the kind of place where a person could be hunted down and killed without anyone knowing.

  And that was a rush.

  He paused, leaning against one wall, gasping for breath. Peering down at his leg he noted his internal doctor nanosuite had stopped the bleeding, and took a patch from his belt to slap it on the envirosuit tear. The slug had just clipped his calf, cutting a groove through the skin and muscle. He’d filled it with healer gel and the nanosuite had taken away the sting. It didn’t slow
him and in reality he’d got off surprisingly unscathed considering who was after him. He tried coms again but just got a fizzing from his aug. They’d used some other kind of weapon against him in the construction bay when Olsen’s men threw him out of the airlock – terrified when he told them who was on their tail because of him. Some kind of EMP with a viral content took down his aug. But right at the moment that was the least of his problems because though the envirosuit had saved his life in vacuum, it had begun to run out of air. Yes, pressure surrounded him now, but the nitrogen-argon mix used in some sections of Moloch Three was deliberately free of corrosive but life-giving oxygen.

  Shrugging his pack up higher, and re-tightening the straps, he moved on. He didn’t really understand why it had come to this. Down on Masada there had been rules about the life forms on the world, but they mainly concerned not getting killed by them. All sorts of concerns had arrived there even while he was studying hooder growth to sample the local wildlife. Ares Combine had taken tricones – molluscs that could grind their way through rock – and modified them for a mining operation on another world. The black prawn-like creatures that acted as the morticians of that world had been adapted for recycling elsewhere, while some of the animals and plants were appearing in collections, parks and private gardens all across the Polity. So why were they so serious about him, and that damned injunction, when all he knew about hooders was in the public domain?

  Unless they knew?

  Emotion rose again at that thought – the sense of danger, of risk, of being bad, but the fear he wanted to feel remained muted. He reached up to touch his scalp but his fingers bounced off his head covering. With too brief annoyance he lowered his hand and looked around.

  The walls of the large square corridor here were dented and scarred. The size of it told him it must be an access for manufactured war drones and this gave his some vague idea where he must be. He moved on, gecko soles sticking him to what he deemed the floor. Vaguely remembering the map he had loaded to his now inaccessible aug, he felt sure this corridor must be one of those that ran between construction bays. He reckoned on being two bays down from Porrit Town – a small city built on one of the bay walls.

  He moved fast along the corridor to where it elbowed right. A human-sized bulkhead door lay ahead of him and he tried the handle. It opened easily which told him he must be near an inhabited area. Glancing back he saw no sign of his pursuit. He knew he’d lost them by running deep into the old war factory because, by shutting down his aug, they now only had infrared scanning to find him, and his suit cut most of that. Beyond the door he entered a smaller corridor and turned right as motion-sensor light squares ignited in the ceiling. Breaking into a steady jog, he came athwart a long window overlooking a manufactory. The machines were motionless of course but, even after so much time, they still gleamed.

  Cleaning and maintenance robots crawled amidst them, as he had learned they did amidst much of the machinery of this station. Also, though the AI of Moloch Three had become somnolent, robots responded to any attempt at salvage with hostility. Some of the machinery and infrastructure of the war factory had been stripped out, sold or repurposed, but the danger in doing this now outweighed the gains. However, the people living here did have free access to the systems and manufacturing of this station just so long as they did not try to remove them. They had access to power, water, air, recycling and hydroponics too. Some said this was because the AI was one of the dispossessed that felt it had no purpose when the war ended. It allowed people here just as someone might give a person the keys to a car he is abandoning for a time – to run it for a while to ensure everything still worked. The speculation was that the AI had merely gone into somnolence to await the recommencement of the war.

  Beyond the window a series of doors punctuated the corridor. Jonas checked beside each until finding one with a map screen beside it. He touched the thing, half expecting nothing, but it came on showing a local map of the war factory and his position within it. He had just a couple of miles to go before reaching Porrit Town, and now other concerns, though not really worries. He might have lost his pursuers but sure as shit they would head to the town knowing that was the only place he could go. He needed to send a message – Ganzen would know what to do.

  Right and left, then through an airlock door out onto a gantry, his envirosuit puffing up around him in vacuum. He paused here, staring into the vastness of the construction bay. Down on what could nominally be called the floor lay four skeletons of attack ships – ribcage structures marking out shapes like giant squids, each a quarter of a mile long. Above these, occupying most of the bay, hung a partially completed dreadnought. According to what he remembered of his history upload, before people came to occupy this ship it had no name. because that was usually imparted by the installed AI. The residents of Porrit Town had called it Brueghel’s Fist, but he could not remember why now. The thing did sort of have a knotted appearance like a fist made of grey, yellow and black alloys and composites two miles across. It hung in place with gantries and crane extended structorbots all around it, while leading to the bay wall were numerous bridges. Many people lived in that ship but, since the water, power, air and other facilities within were supplied at cost by Ganzen Combine, most lived in the town.

  Porrit Town sat against the left-hand wall under a series of three geodesics – the masses of interlinked buildings there almost touching that roof of chainglass hexagons, tunnels and enclosed bridges spearing through it to reach the Fist. Ganzen would have people in the town and should be able to send any over fast. He just needed to talk to him.

  Jonas walked the gantry to the left wall then turned in towards the town, standing at ninety degrees to his perspective. Ahead, a square frame about the gantry had been painted with hazard stripes and, as he drew closer, the pull of grav twisted his perception. Leading through the square the gantry twisted to the wall in which grav plates had been set. He followed the twist easily, the town turning until level with his perception, and walked towards the entry arch.

  Loading…

  The word flashed briefly to his inner perception. It meant his aug was coming back online, but it also meant the two pursuers would be able to locate him. He hurried towards the arch but before even arriving there a text page in his aug appeared to his inner vision.

  >Stay where you are and we’ll come collect you.

  He stared at the words and then tried speaking to see if the to-text conversion was working. ‘Fuck off,’ he said succinctly and the words appeared.

  >Understandably you have concerns.

  ‘You fucking well shot me,’ he replied, but with no heat in his words.

  >It was a shot intended to disable.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then.’

  >You agreed not to leave the Polity and you have done precisely that.

  ‘And this is so serious I have Polity agents on my tail taking shots at me?’

  >This is a Beta Level injunction, which means we make every effort we can to take you back, but if that is impossible, another option remains.

  He felt a thrill of fear but then it immediately turned to delight in rebellion – a brief wave of emotion that quickly foamed out of his mind. When he received the first message from this individual he had been half inclined to obey the instruction not to board the trade ship heading here to Moloch Three. But he then felt delight in rebelling at such tight control of his travel plans.

  Before his last return to Masada, all worlds he had ventured to began to fit into variations of many he had already seen, as did the people on them and the life forms he studied. The excitement of discovery he had felt exploring hooder biology with Shardel had been lacking. In fact, excitement about anything much at all seemed to be lacking. After his last visit to the world of the hooders and gabbleducks he had travelled just a bit more and studied further alien life forms, but the ennui allowed it to be no more than repetition. Until he received that message from Ganzen.

 
Reaching the gate, Jonas paused and looked around. Unless they had been trying some subterfuge it seemed likely the two agents were outside of the town and some way behind him, else they could simply have waited on the other side of this gate for him. He walked up to the outer door, fisted the panel and it thumped up on seals and swung open. As he stepped inside more of his aug functions came online and he was able to sort through addresses. Voice to text still the only option open to him, he selected one and spoke while the airlock pressurised.

  ‘Ganzen, I’m coming in through the factory side gate into Porrit Town. It seems that even though all my studies are now in the public domain the Polity objects to me coming here. I have two agents on my tail. Some help would be good.’

  He received no response as the airlock reached the required pressure and opened its inner door. A street lay ahead with shops, bars and restaurants on either side, stairwells leading up to further gantry streets above, all weaving through the wide mix of buildings here. He touched a control on his collar, both his visor and hood softened as they withdrew air from their foam structure and the suit sucked them back into its neck ring. The smell of barbecued food hit him at once. Ridiculously, despite his danger, he suddenly found more interest in a nearby stall selling meat and vegetables on skewers. He began to walk towards this when the reply came.

  >Head for Gantry Six – the Hoffstader.

  ‘They screwed my aug and I have no map available at the moment.’

  >Take the nearest stair up to Six – it’s marked – then head in towards the middle of the dome you’re in.

  ‘Okay.’

  Jonas swerved right to the nearest spiral stair and began climbing. As he did so he looked back towards the entrance airlock and through the geodesic panes on one side saw two bulky forms heading towards the airlock from the outside. He speeded up, his hunger forgotten, passed access to ‘Level Two’ then the others in quick succession. Reaching the access to Gantry Six he peered back down and saw the two figures now in through the airlock. They wore heavy suits someway between an envirosuit and a full spacesuit, with helmets that concertinaed back and visors that rolled up to the fore. A man and a woman stood there, the latter looking up directly at him. Of course they might not be human at all but Golem. He stepped out onto the wide gantry and hurried along it. Halfway, a couple of hundred yards ahead, he could see one of the bridging tunnels running across to the Fist, with people walking along it horizontal to him. Just before this the sign for the Hoffstader blinked from pink to green – the bar or restaurant itself a series of circular platforms arranged like those of a 3D chess set. He hurried towards it.