Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“Kiss me… just once more,” she said.

Janer was leaning forward when he heard the low buzzing. Distorted speech came through his link, but he could not make it out. He turned his head slightly as the hornet darted in. Eller made a horrible sound, somewhere between a groan and a hiss, jerked her hand away, her mouth opening wide at the pain as the hornet launched itself from her arm. It had stung her. Janer wanted to crush it at once, then he saw her mouth; her white tongue open at the end like a flower, rasping teeth wet inside it. More buzzing, more glittery shapes in the room. Five hornets hovered between him and Eller, darted at him, and because he could no longer hear their speech his fear returned and he stumbled back. Eller tried to crawl towards him and he realised, like the biolights , and shuddered in horror. The hornets drove him out into the corridor. The walls were cracking and liquefying now. The death stink had turned to something else, now. Stumbling ahead of the insects he was numb to thought. They drove him to the Upper Shell. The floor was cool against his cheek. The hornet, standing on the side of his neck and working with the cellular structure behind his ear, finished its task and flew from him.

“We were unaware of the danger,” the mind told him.

“It’s wrong, that they should die like that.”

“They all lived for as long as the snairl. Though they could feed on other things after its death they would not long survive it. The chemistry is too complex. They are one being, like ourselves.”

“Is all this what you came to learn?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“The shell does not decay. The body below will drop soon and the shell will need to be counterweighted. We came for the salvage. Here we can be safe.”

Janer, his shoulder against the crystal wall of the spire, could see them. The cloud was vast and grey, and moved with purpose. He could feel the presence of many minds — a million hives. The hornets were coming to their new home.

Spatterjay is the planet where all the action takes place in The Skinner , and all the characters and events here will be familiar to readers of that book This story is in fact a precursor, whereas from Snairls I only snatched Janer and his hornets. Again it was a story published in Grotesque (issue 8 ’95) and suitably so, though not enough so to justify changing the title to ‘Splatterjay’. It is a story whose genesis was in a nightmare of long blue and bony hands reaching out of dense jungle to grab someone, and of trout in a stream, which weren’t. It spent a number of years in a folder, in the form of a few scribbled lines, then grew out of some free-association writing I was doing to limber up my brain one day. Acorns and all that.

Sweating green blood, a lung bird wheezed from the tree tops, its flaccid wings groping for the clouds. Ambel tucked his trumpet-mouthed blunderbuss under his arm and despondently watched its limping progress.

“Suitable protein,” suggested Jane.

“There isn’t any. Would you eat that?” asked Peck.

“Depends on how hungry I got.”

“I guess we could make a stew.”

Ambel made no comment on this, but he closed up his blunderbuss and aimed. The weapon flashed and banged, sparkles of still-burning powder gouting through the air. A cloud of acrid smoke obscured view for a moment, then they saw the bird falling into the trees, bits breaking away from its ill-made body.

“Let’s go,” said Peck.

They trotted through the knee-high putrephallus weeds, their masks pulled up over their mouths and noses. The pear-trunk trees shivered as they passed. By the time they reached the area where the bird had fallen it was gone. They caught a glimpse of something huge and glistening dragging the squawking and flapping mess into the deep dingle.

“Bastard,” said Peck, turning to Ambel. Ambel shook his head as he squatted down and thumped another paper cartridge down into the barrel of his buss.

Jane lifted her mask, winced at the smell wafting off the weeds then said, “Leech. A big one. Best leave it alone.”

“Can you eat leeches?” asked Peck. He always got a bit weird when he hadn’t had enough to eat. Ambel shook his head.

“Too acid,” he said. “Makes you fart like a wind machine and burns your ring when you crap. Know a guy died of it once. Terminal wind. Blew his arsehole across the room.” Peck snorted disbelievingly. “Well, we gotta get something to take back.” He looked towards the dingle.

“Not there,” said Jane. “We’ll go back to the beach and circle around. Might get a rhinoworm coming in.” The three moved back through the weeds onto the green sand of the beach. Ambel gazed out at the ship and noticed that the masts were still bare. They needed a sail something bad. They needed food, yes, but whatever they got from the island would only keep them going for a little while, as they were. They had to get back to port and get some real Earth-food inside them; some dome-grown grain and meat.

“They say there are people out here who survive on wild food. They say the Skinner lives out here on one of the islands,” said Jane.

“You gotta be kidding, all alive, and Hoop?” said Peck.

Ambel nodded morosely to himself. “They all survive, but they ain’t people no more, Hoop included.” That killed the conversation until they reached the first stream winding out from the deep dingle. Ambel looked into the water and thinking about the dome he thought; salmon, then, seeing how they were grouped he thought; eels. But of course some of them broke from the water, their glistening ribbed backs rolling in the glitter, round thread-cutting mouths probing the air.

“Leeches again,” said Peck. “There anything edible on this island?”

“Yes,” said Jane avidly as she pointed out to sea.

The rhinoworm was as long as a man and its sinuous body as thick. It was aptly named. It had the head of a rhino, little different from those pictured in the old zoology books, and it had the body of a thick eel. It was pink and red-speckled. They watched it approach the mouth of the stream and rear its head out of the water with a leech writhing and flicking in its narrow mouth. Ambel’s blunderbuss boomed, part of its head disappeared, and it sank back down into the water, clouding it blue.

“Quick! Quick!” shouted Jane, leaping up and down. Peck waded out, hooked his grapple into its flesh and waded back in, trailing the line out behind him. He was nearly ashore when he yelled and splashed in very quickly.

“Gerrit off! Gerrit off!”

A four-foot long leech had attached itself to his hip. He fell in the sand and grabbed hold of the horrible thing in both hands to try and prevent it boring in even further. Jane grabbed up the line and began hauling in the rhinoworm while Ambel tended to Peck. He did the only thing that was possible in the circumstances; he grabbed hold of the leech in both hands, put his foot against Peck’s leg, and hauled with all his might. Peck let out a scream as the leech pulled away with a fist-sized plug of his flesh in its circular mouth. Ambel bashed the creature against a rock until the lump came free, then after trampling the creature to slurry he handed the piece of flesh back to Peck. Peck screwed it back into his leg, then wrapped a bandage from his pack around it to hold it in place.

“Help me with this,” said Jane. She had got the rhino-worm to the edge of the water, but could not haul it up onto the sand by herself. A mass of leeches was building up around it, each of them after its plug of flesh. Ambel rushed over and helped her haul it in, then the both of them stomped as many of the creatures as they could. As they stomped the last of them Peck was able to join them and relished splattering the last few.