Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“The shafts are ahead,” the hivelink told him needlessly. He had studied a plan of the internal layout of the snairl before boarding. In a moment he came to open mouths of metal that curved up into darkness. He stepped into one, groped until he found a rung, climbed.

He was in the dark for only a short time before he reached a hatch that irised open as he reached the rung below it. The sudden light made his eyes ache momentarily as he climbed up into it. This is what he wanted to see. The floor was smooth and iridescent. To his right the curving wall of near transparent shell showed him the vastness of sky, welcoming after the confines of the snairl body. From a floor space three metres wide, he gazed out at thick strobe-lit cloud and down at the snairl body below, its huge glistening head swaying from side to side, horns probing the storm. To his left bulged the huge helium bags veined with snairlflesh. The floor sloped up following the spiral of the shell. He climbed, breathing easily air that gradually cleared of the taint of the living body below. Cold breezes gusted in at him from occasional splits in the ancient shell. He tasted rain and cloud, and thunder made the floor vibrate. The moisture here gathered in small droplets and ran away. He climbed spiral after spiral, each one tighter than the last. Higher up he noted the bird droppings on the floor, some kind of nest between helium bags, two dead rooks on the floor.

“Instruction?” he asked.

“They lack the intelligence to learn. It has been the same with their kind since the time they ruled the Earth.”

Birds — the direct descendants of the dinosaurs. There were hiveminds old enough to remember, but they were strange and did not communicate much with the younger minds, and not at all with the human race.

Eventually Janer reached the glassy cone of the spire and its level circular floor. He saw the other hornets clinging to the transparent wall, flaws in glass. He walked over to the opposite side of the chamber and gazed out.

“You are content now?” asked the hivemind.

“I feel an easing of certain tensions,” he replied.

“That’s good, because we’ll be spending the rest of the journey here.” Janer paused. “Why?”

“Look it the direction my companions are looking.”

Abruptly the hornet launched from his pocket and was buzzing in the air. He gazed across the chamber, past the hornets, stared intently through the wall at the tumble of cloud. Then he saw it, wreathed in lightning: another faerie castle, another snairl approaching.

“It is not the storm that causes the activity below, but the anticipation of this snairl. Every five hundred years they mate.”

“Esua!”

“Yes, this is why we are here. This is why we are interested.” Janer noted the royal we. The hivemind was completely at the link.

“Why such great interest?”

“This snairl is male,” the mind told him.

“I don’t understand.”

“Like their mollusc brethren, male snairls manufacture in their bodies a harpoon of calcite they use to spear the female and hold it close. Normal snails then mate and part. For a male snairl, the making of this harpoon is a killing effort. Such mate only once.”

“It will die?”

“Yes.”

“There is danger then. What of the crew, the passengers?”

“Look down.”

Janer peered down past the body of the snairl and saw egg-shaped objects being spewed out into the air, opening gliding wings, falling through the sky.

“They are safe.”

“The passengers, yes. For the crew there is never any escape.” Janer whirled around and faced the hovering hornet. “What! No warning! Just let them die!” He turned and ran back. Eller. He found that he did care what happened to her.

“Fool,” the link told him. “The geneticists made both: snairl and crew.” Again, Janer did not hear.

Janer was halfway down Upper Shell when the snairls met. The impact threw him back against the helium bags, and the shells clashed and rang. He saw fragments of shell fly glittering through the air. There was a giant sound: a bubbling groan, the sighing of caves. As the shells rocked and scraped he staggered to the wall and looked down in time to see the male snairl extrude a barbed spear of cloudy glass and thrust into the body of the female, and the bodies ooze together. Foamed slime spiralled up on the wind like spindrift. The towered shells closed throwing Janer back against the helium bags then parted high, ground at the base. Janer went head-first into the glassy wall, lost it all in a flash of black. Janer’s immediate reaction to consciousness was to vomit on the floor and clutch at his head. There was a weird buzzing from his hivelink, something he had never heard before. Perhaps he had broken it. He staggered upright and tried to blink the double images from his eyes. Unsteady on his feet, it was a moment before he realised the snairl was back on an even keel. At the wall he peered down. The sky was clearing and he could see everything in detail. The female was gone. The male snairl hung in an arc under its shell, flaccid, its connections to the shell stretched taut. The crew. Eller. Supporting himself against the wall Janer made his way down, wondering as he went, how long he had been out. Minutes?

Hours? As soon as he reached the down-tube into the snairl body he realised it must have been some time.

The floor was drying, tacky, as he stepped out of the tube, and he wondered about that until he heard the rustling of air pumps — something previously disguised by the living sounds of the snairl. They were not biotech and would run until clogged with decaying flesh. A biolight lay nearby, its legs waving weakly in the air, and its tick-mouth gaping and clicking hungrily. The air smelt of death. Janer carefully stepped around the biolight, but he need not have worried; it was too weak to get at him and would never have got through his monofilament clothing. He peered down the corridor artery at the other biolights there and one fell while he watched. They would all be hungry. He pulled the hood and mask from the neck-pocket of his overall, and put on the gloves. They would go for exposed body: his eyes and mouth. He would just have to be very careful.

Janer found the first of the crew shortly after crushing under his foot the third biolight to drop on him. As he crushed it, its juices spread in a glowing pool and Janer left bright footprints behind him. He noticed then a change in the quantity and spectrum of the lighting.

The man had crawled away from his partner with five biolights attached to his back. Their glow was reddish, their energy drawn from near to human blood. The man had left a thick slime trail that was now skinned over. The woman was curled in a corner with a biolight attached to the side of her head. As he turned to her the biolight fell away, leaving a bloody hole, and tried to drag itself towards him. He stood on it and it burst with a wet pop. The woman turned her head, opened her mouth with a dry click and tried to open her crusted eyes. He stooped down by her and caught hold of her.

“Dead,” she rasped, her last breath hissing out foul in his face. He let her go and ran, something of what the hivemind had said coming back to him — the geneticists made both . He remembered then that he had never seen crew eating, never seen much in the way of personal effects… They are like us — all one . They were dying now their host was dead, like the biolights. The door ripped like wet paper as he pulled it aside. Eller blinked at him from her place on the floor in the ropes of slime. A pot of water rested to one side of her. She had cleaned her face and her eyes, but her eyes were dull, drying out.

“Eller… this… ”

“Janer,” she said and smiled, shifted. Her body had grown long, gaps as wide as his arm between the segments, there her heart, beating slowly, there her intestine, drawn taut. He knelt beside her and she managed to get a hand up to his shoulder. She shifted again.