Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“The ship AI there, Box, is loading every Jain study, every relevant piece of information. It might help.”

“Is that it?” Chapra was beginning to feel a vague disappointment.

“They moved suns, Chapra. There are those who theorise that here we are in the backwoods of a civilization that still exists. I guess my message is: for all our sakes, don’t fuck up. Ciao.” Alexion flickered out of existence.

Chapra turned to Abaron. “This changes nothing,” she said.

Abaron nodded, but he looked scared again.

The Jain — this was how both Abaron and Chapra referred to it now, it was better than ‘the creature’ — took the containers from the jetty to its machine. Chapra smiled to herself. Perhaps they might never be able to speak to each other, but they understood each other. When she and Judd had collected them the containers held samples of what the Jain wanted in quantity. One of them contained a sample of only a few atoms inside a small vacuum sphere of glass. The Jain’s requirements had stretched from the prosaic to the exotic. It had wanted iron, it had wanted tantalum, and it had wanted a metallic element only theorised until then. Making a few ounces of the stuff had stretched the main onboard laboratory and required five Golem to come out of stasis to assist.

“You note it only requires elements,” said Chapra.

“Confirmation that it can build all the molecules it wants, so long as it has the atoms,” said Abaron. He was being very correct and very logical, very in control.

“I wonder though… ”

“What?”

“That metal, the Jainite, and the niobium… I’ve checked. There was nothing like that in the isolation chamber, nor in the tanks.”

“They could have been present in the escape pod.”

“No. I had Box check back on every scan. We were thorough.”

“What are you saying then?”

“We missed something, or with that machine the Jain is able to synthesise atoms, even if in minute quantities.”

“It’s Jain,” said Abaron, as if that was all the answer required. Some hours later the Jain manufactured something else.

“The device is a scanner,” said Box. “It scanned the entire ship with some kind of neutron burst.”

“That’s not possible,” said Abaron.

“It’s Jain,” said Chapra, relishing the moment.

The device the Jain had built was about the size of a human head and looked like the bastard offspring of a whelk and the insides of an old valve radio. After using it the Jain saved one small component then fed the rest of it back into its bigger machine, its creation machine. Afterwards it fed in one of the large crustaceans. Then it came to the jetty and left something squatting there.

“This I have to see,” said Chapra, hurrying on her way. She glimpsed Abaron licking his dry lips as he reluctantly followed her. In minutes both of them were in hotsuits and walking out on the jetty. Judd strode behind them.

“It’s the crustacean. It’s been altered,” said Abaron, then he stepped rapidly back when the beast lifted its armoured belly up off the jetty and, walking on four armoured limbs, began to come towards them bull terrier fashion. After a moment Chapra moved back as well. The beast squatted down a couple of metres in front of them, waiting.

“Look at its back,” said Abaron.

Chapra did so and there saw a triangle of ridged and pocked flesh. It was the negative of the end of the Jain’s tentacles, she saw this at once.

Judd said, “This was one of the crustaceans. It has been stripped of its digestive system and now has a small organic power cell. Its sensorium has been upgraded to eighty per cent of received spectra and there are additions to its primitive brain. Its blood is heated by metallic heating elements.”

“It’s a probe,” said Chapra. “I bet the additions to its brain are memory.”

“Cannot be determined,” said Judd.

“All right, I bet there are direct links between those additions and that triangle on its back.” After a pause Judd said, “There are.”

Chapra turned to Abaron and tried not to notice that he had pressed himself up against the door.

“I’ll bet the intention is for it to wander around the ship then come back here. Once back here the Jain probably plugs in and reads off all the information it has gathered.”

“That seems likely,” said Abaron, a quaver in his voice.

“Okay, let’s see,” said Chapra, and she hit the door control. The beast got up again, advanced to the door, and through. They followed it into the lock, opened the next door into the ship. Beyond this door awaited the Golem named Rhys, who in appearance was an Australian aborigine.

“Rhys will accompany our little guest on its tour around the ship,” said Box. The beast moved off down the corridor, clicks and buzzes coming from a sensorium that was a mass of complex spikes, facets, brushes, and dimpled plates, all shifting and swivelling.

“Is this a good idea?” said Abaron, and Chapra wondered how he had restrained himself for so long.

“I think everything is under control, and won’t be allowed to get out of control… what is that on your belt, Rhys?”

Rhys glanced back and tapped a hand on the gun holstered at his hip. In appearance it was a Luger made out of chrome, but with a few strange additions.

“It is a singun,” said Rhys, his usually happy demeanour at once very serious.

“You see?” said Chapra to Abaron.

“But… I didn’t think such things existed.”

“They do. One shot from that will have the effect of turning our friend inside out through a pin hole in space.” She observed Abaron’s confused expression and explained. “For about a second it generates a singularity in its target. Our friend there would be reduced to sludge.”

“Wouldn’t an energy weapon have been better?” asked Abaron.

Judd said, “There is a high probability that the creature can generate defences against energy weapons. We have no known defence against the singun.”

Chapra decided not to point out to Abaron that use of ‘we’.

“It’s all rather moot,” she said. “The Jain has shown no signs of hostility.”

“The Jain has placed a container upon the jetty,” said Box.

“Let’s go see what it wants now,” said Chapra, and they trooped back into the lock. Soon they were out on the jetty. The container was at the furthest end.

“What the hell is that?” wondered Chapra as she strode towards the container. Showing great fortitude, Abaron strode at her side. Inside the container was a coil of something fleshy. They halted at the container and stood over it.

“It looks like something alive,” said Abaron, crushing the dread in him under the cool analytic scientist.

“It certainly—”

The coil snapped straight out of the container, cobra fast. It hit Abaron’s arm, hung there for a moment as it recoiled, then snapped out into the water. Abaron yelled, staggered back, and sat down.

“Oh,” he said, then looked down at his shoulder where blood was spreading between the layers of his environment suit. “It bit me.” In a moment Judd lifted him up and all but carried him to the door. Chapra followed. In the lock Abaron’s legs gave way and he looked more bewildered than scared.

“It’s just shock,” Chapra told him, but she could not put from her mind visions of an ancient celluloid film she had in her collection; of the contents of an egg shooting out and attaching to a man’s face, and the consequences of that.

Box looked upon the world with all its superbly precise senses and analysed it with a mind that made the mind of any god humans had imagined appear that of an infant throwing a tantrum, and it found the world beautiful. The eye of the beholder. Box could find beauty in anything because it could look at things in so many thousands of different ways. Many philosophers in the human polity now posited that humans were not created by gods, that in fact the complete reverse applied.