Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“My God… do something!”

Suddenly Carmen was walking forwards, her arms spread wide, like the thrake’s. Soon she was standing before it, below it. It paused over her like a wall of scrap-iron about to fall, then slowly it stooped, placed the head at her feet, then turned and moved away. In a moment it had picked up the rest of the corpse and was loping for the horizon. Carmen stooped down and picked up the head.

“Souvenir?” she asked Mark.

He stared at her, feeling sick. She tossed the head back on the ground.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, tiredly.

The monitor’s hand did not leave Mark’s shoulder as they boarded the raft.

Recently, Lavie Tidhar, a reviewer on Dusksite, managed to obtain a copy of The Engineer (Tanjen), and at the launch party for Tor UK said to me he really liked the ‘Owner’ stories and felt them to contain material for plenty of books. He is absolutely right, and if I can just drag over a few more versions of myself from parallel universes I can get on and write that stuff, and rewrite the four fantasy books and the contemporary novel, produce large collections of Mason’s Rats stories, write the next Heliothane/Umbrathane book, produce many more short stories, start pushing the TV scripts, and write more of them… Of course, what I really need is the capability of a ten-thousand-year-old immortal with godlike powers and vast intelligence and wisdom. I wouldn’t mind the spaceship too.

Mr Coti pulled his rain cape closer about his shoulders and looked nervously out from under his barley-bowl hat. Cloud occluded the light of the moons. The rain was coming down in sheets and, having turned the street into a quagmire, was now turning it into a stream. This was good for Coti’s work, since as a board-cutter in the wilderness, he was much in demand at this time of the year, but the cutting of boards was the last thing on his mind at that moment. It was imperative he got to Chief Scientist Lumi before they found him. This was his only insurance of survival: once he had imparted his news, Cromwell would leave him alone. Cromwell would not dare to go up against C S Lumi. Coti halted at the corner of Blue Street, the boards creaky and slippery underneath him, and for a moment thought he might be able to reach his destination without mishap — Lumi’s house was only a street away — then he saw the caped figures lurking in a side alley and darted back for cover. Few options now remained to him. He could either make a run for Lumi’s house while making as much noise as possible and attracting all the attention he could, but the probable result of this would be a dart in the back, or he could sneak there, using what cover he could, but he reckoned every access would be covered. He decided his best option was neither of these. He would hide until morning and try to get to Lumi when he came out. Cromwell’s people always preferred the cover of darkness for their nefarious doings. Hugging a wall Coti stepped off the boardwalk and crept back down the alley he had been about to leave. Back that way he had spotted a suitable woodpile he could hide in, but before he reached it, a girl stepped out of a shadowed doorway.

The girl was young and innocent looking and Coti thought she might just live here and have nothing to do with Cromwell. When she grinned and said, “Mr Coti,” he knew otherwise. Two bulky figures followed her out of the doorway and stepped past her to grab him. Coti pulled his board cutter and switched it on. It hummed in the rain, inset lights flickering from red to green and back again. He swung it at his nearest assailant, who screamed and fell back as a board-thick slice of flesh and bone peeled from his shoulder. The second man dropkicked Coti in the chest. The cutter flew from his grip and landed sizzling in the mud. In a moment, the man had Coti on his knees with his arm wrenched up around his back. The girl stepped forward, pulling something from under her rain cape while the first man staggered to the wall to lean against it moaning while he clutched his half-severed arm.

“Hurt the fucker! Hurt him!” said that one.

She knocked away Coti’s hat, grabbed his hair, and pulled his head back. Coti awaited the cut that would open his throat, but it never came.

“You know what a blade beetle is?” she asked him.

Coti managed to scream just before the blade went into his guts. He retched and choked at the feel of it cutting into him, the feel of it still there. The girl held up an empty handle before his face and when the man released him, Coti fell face down in the mud, clutching at the full wound in his belly. Why did they have to do it like that? They didn’t have to do it like that. The pain and horror of the knife wound in his guts were redoubled with a blade that remained inside, and began to make a nest there. C S Lumi had been working in his laboratory since dawn when his doorbell chimed. It was not that he was by nature an early riser, but that the privilege he had been granted brought with it a deep feeling of responsibility. He saved the information he had been collating, from his notescreen to his house computer, took a long contemplative look at the nautiloids feeding in their tank, then took off his lab coat and headed for the door. The Chief Constable stood waiting for him.

“Sorry to bother you so early, sir, but there has been a killing.” Lumi studied the constable’s leather uniform and thought how closely it made him resemble a Proctor. He thought how one day he might write a paper on the psychological effects of this.

“No bother, Brown, come in.”

Chief Constable Brown removed his leather helmet, wiped his feet on the door mat, and stepped into the hall to stand almost at attention. Lumi had no authority over the police, nor any position in local politics, but having been granted privilege by the Owner, he was looked upon with respect and deferred to by all.

“Was it anyone I know?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, yes, it was Coti, the board cutter.”

Lumi looked around in surprise as he pulled on his jacket. “Why would anyone want to kill him? Where did this happen, and how?”

“It happened very close to here, in the alley leading to the wood yard.” Brown paused, obviously uncomfortable. “We think he was killed with a blade-beetle.”

“Cromwell,” said Lumi, his expression grim.

“There is, of course, no proof of this. We are questioning his people, but they will all alibi each other.” Lumi snorted and picked up the bag containing his study kit. “Let’s go and have a look then.” Out on the boardwalk he gazed up at the clear sky, then down at the pools in the street. What a night for dying, and to die in such a way… Brown headed down the boardwalk to the street bridge, beyond which Lumi could see a crowd around a taped-off area. In the centre of this area lay a muddy shape. It had been done in the alley. Coti must have managed to crawl that far before the beetle reached a vital organ or he had collapsed from blood loss.

The crowd parted before Lumi then closed behind him as he ducked under the tape and squatted by the corpse. Coti was on his back, his face in death relaxed into a kind of idiocy that belied the agony he must have suffered. Lumi opened his kit, pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, then removed a long set of tongs and a reinforced plastic bag. He parted the wound with his fingers and pushed the tongs up the path of lacerated organs into the chest cavity. There was movement there and he closed the tongs on something hard and slick, and withdrew it from the body.

“Oh my god,” said someone in the crowd, turning and rapidly staggering away. The blade beetle was the length of a hand and shaped like an almond. Its legs were flat paddles and the edges of these and its wing cases, as Lumi well knew, were sharper than broken glass. It was an adult, he saw; there would be eggs in the body.