Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“Here. Soon.”

Diana stared down at the sea. Abruptly she stood. Movement out there. She glanced at her soldiers as they nervously fingered their weapons. Something was coming out of the sea.

“Let’s not have any more incidents,” she said loudly.

It was red, whatever it was, and huge. It broke the surface like the back of a whale and ploughed in to the shore. A giant red worm, thought Diana, then remembered the description of the Jain machine.

“No shooting!” She turned on Alexion. “What the hell is that?” It heaved up onto the beach, sending a wave of sea water that washed to Diana’s boots. The mouth was three metres wide, speckled at the lips and iridescent white inside. The mouth of a long and impossible shell. The water drained away and Diana could see nothing deep inside but a gradual thickening of shadow.

“Christ knows,” said Alexion.

Movement. Two shapes walking out — human shapes. Chapra and Abaron strode out of the Jain machine, the remains of their environment suits hanging on them in tatters, visors discarded, hoods pulled back. But were they Chapra and Abaron? How could they be alive? They were standing in temperatures that should take off their skins.

“You’d best come to the shuttle,” said Diana, watching them intently. Chapra stood before Diana. “We are human. He repaired us, rebuilt us.” Abaron said, “I guess he found it easier to alter us to survive here than to repair our suits.” Chapra turned to Alexion. “Alex, it’s good to see you.” She smiled and Diana saw Smith’s strange look of yearning.

“It’s good to see you. New body?”

A weak joke.

“I’m me,” she said, that smile still there. “The Jain is very good at what it does. If anything I’ve been improved. So much is clear now. And this body… ”

“What have you learnt?”

“A fraction. Some figure after the point. There’s so much… I cannot explain… ”

“Try.”

“It will take time. Have you a century or so free?”

Alexion stepped forward, impulsively Diana thought. She caught his shoulder and halted him. He turned to her. “I have to do this. In my research the questions always outnumber the answers. Always. You can’t stop me. I’m not security.”

“Come along,” said Diana. “I should think you want to get home.”

“No.”

She released her hold. His choice. Alexion went to stand with Chapra and Abaron. Chapra grinned at him then returned her attention to Diana.

“We’re staying here. There’s so much to learn. You understand?” Diana felt she might.

“Here, a gift.” Chapra held out her fist to Diana.

With reluctance Diana held out the flat of her gloved hand. Chapra dropped something into it then turned back to the tunnel. Alexion followed, eagerly. As the three of them walked into the Jain machine, Diana saw through a tear in Abaron’s suit a triangle at the base of his spine. She shuddered, and just stood there until they were gone. Eventually the tube filled with sea water and drew back into the sea. She opened her hand to look at the small red shell Chapra had given her. It was shaped like a worm cast; a small coral of convolute tubes. She’d seen recordings; she knew what it was — knew it was the future. There was not much Diana feared. She feared this.

The other passengers went to their cabins and cowered there like the limp city dwellers they were. The cabins were shell-walled dead stuff, braced by shock-absorbing muscle, and internally free of slime. Janer was no city man and there was so much more he wanted to see and experience. He had yet to walk Upper Shell and look from the Spire, and it was not in his nature to give up so easily. Besides, now might be his only chance before his freedom of movement was once again curtailed.

“It means a storm is coming or we are coming to a storm,” the CG told him before casually stripping off his uniform and sealing it in a plastic bag. Embarrassed by the man’s nakedness Janer looked around the CG’s cabin. The walls glistened. When he glanced back, the CG was watching him analytically. Janer tried to keep his eyes level with the man’s. Crew were different, he had known that, but seeing one naked was… disconcerting. On the front of the CG’s body was a diamond of white flesh extending from his white genitalia to the base of his throat. It was segmented like the body of some worm, each segment a couple of inches wide, and there were other differences he tried not to observe too closely.

“You’d best do the same,” said the CG, wryly noting his discomfiture. “Clothing becomes crusted and stiff if it dries, or takes on a heavy build up. Only skin sheds it well.”

“As you say.”

Janer left the Chief Geneticist in his cabin — a cyst in the body of the Graaf — and headed down the glistening artery of a corridor, half-lit by bioluminescent globes clinging to the fleshy walls and sucking their juice. Everywhere these things. Janer had not realised they were alive until he saw one detach its tick mouth and scuttle along the wall to a new feeding spot. For a day after that the skin on his back crawled whenever he walked underneath one. But in the end one must get used to the presence of life: it was everything around him.

Soon he saw that many of the crew of the Graaf had dispensed with their clothes. Eller, naked on a hyaline strut bone, rested her chin on her knee and grinned at him. She slowly and deliberately parted her other leg to one side as he slowed to make some passing greeting or wry comment. He found he had no words and quickened his pace, aware of the flush rising in his face. The diamond of white wormflesh on the front of her body included her hairless genitalia and ended at a narrow point by her anus. There was something incredibly erotic about it. Behind him he heard her chuckle. Damn. He would have to do something about her. There were stories about what went on inside a snairl when the walls slimed. The creators of holofiction became quite sweaty-palmed about the subject. Janer wanted to find out. He wanted to find out a lot of things — for himself for a change.

In his dry and civilized cabin Janer stripped off his clothing and pulled on the rubber trunks of his surfsuit. He didn’t want to wander about the Graaf with a permanent erection waving about in front of him. That kind of thing delimited serious conversation. Admittedly, he did intend to screw Eller at the first opportunity. Finally into his trunks and considering what else he might take out with him he turned to the sudden buzz from beside his compscreen. Jumpy today — very jumpy.

The hornet rose into the air above the antique plastic keyboard — a blur of wings suspending a severed-thumb body and dangly mosquito legs. Faceted eyes glittering. All over its body the hornet was painted with intricate designs in red and yellow-green fluorescent paint.

“I thought you were exploring,” said Janer. The hivelink behind his ear buzzed for a moment before the mind replied.

“The slime could kill this unit and I only have five on the Graaf.”

“Where are the others?”

“They are in Upper Shell, but even there the conditions are inimical.”

“How come? There’s no slime there.”

“No, but there are rooks.”

“How inconvenient.”

“They require instruction.”

“Are they intelligent enough to learn?”

“You were.”

Janer sighed. The ‘you’ in this case was the human race. It wasn’t having another dig at him, for a change. It had come as one shock in many when arrogant humanity had discovered it wasn’t the only sentient race on Earth. It was just the loudest and most destructive. Dolphins and whales had always been candidates because of their aesthetic appeal and stories of rescued swimmers. Research in that area had soon cleared things up. Dolphins couldn’t tell the difference between a human swimmer and a sick fellow, and were substantially more stupid than the animal humans had been turning into pork on a regular basis. Whales had the intelligence of the average cow. When a hornet built its nest in a VR suit and lodged its protests on the Internet it had taken a long time for anyone to believe. They were stinging things, creepy crawlies, how could they possibly be intelligent? At ten thousand years of age the youngest hivemind showed them. People believed.