Neal Asher: The Engineer Reconditioned

“Yes.”

Erlin understood him perfectly. There would be nothing to incriminate by the time anyone else came to that place. She spoke with Beck for a little while about parasites and ways to get rid of them, then she watched him while he slept. It was her turn to find it difficult to sleep. What was she? Ten times older than him, yet she had never experienced such violence. She had frozen back there and it shamed her, shamed her so much she was now prepared to interfere, prepared to do something about the parasite he carried. She owed him at least that.

“Why are the sheep like they are here?” asked Beck when the mountains were in sight.

“I don’t have all the answers. Don’t make that mistake.”

“Perhaps your guess would be better than mine though.”

Erlin smiled before replying. “Livestock was brought to worlds like this, worlds with indigenous life, in what was called genetically plastic form. That means that they are able to adapt to environments very quickly. From what I have seen, grass did not take here and most of the other plants are highly toxic. The sheep adapted. They became carnivores rather than herbivores. As to the details… ”

“I see… what did you hit me with?”

Erlin slapped her hand against the weapon she carried at her belt. Beck looked at it and rubbed the back of his head.

“I didn’t physically hit you. This weapon has a stun setting.” Yes , Beck had read something about that, but he was so used to weapons that created huge holes in his enemies that it was a difficult concept to grasp. He chewed that one over as they set foot on one of the mountain trails and as stone and snow loomed above them. When they came to a defile jammed with ground skate and crawling with water worms he remembered her life-cycle lecture, and watched for a while until he saw one of the skate extrude a worm, and that sperm-carrying secondary life form wriggle away. With a bit of rock-scrambling they rounded the defile. On the other side, where some of the ground skate had got through and were flopping up the trail, Erlin squatted by a water worm and inspected it.

The worm was as long as an arm and twice as thick. It was green, translucent and segmented. It inched along like a maggot.

“I find these fascinating,” said Erlin. “There is plenty of genetic justification for them but I’ve never come across anything like them before.”

“Careful,” said Beck.

Erlin shook her head in wonderment and prodded at the worm with the instrument she was holding. After a flaccid clapping sound, Erlin yelled and leapt back, with a sheet of creamy green sludge over the front of her coverall. Beck might have laughed then but something more urgent was calling him up the mountain. He walked on ahead, leaving her swearing and scraping the sludge from her body with a piece of slate.

The mountain was high, but Beck had the energy of that impetus and strode up the trail with the pot clutched close to his side. As he got higher he heard the sound of waterfalls to one side, and a damp mist gusted all about him, cooling his face. Soon he came to an area where thick bromeliads housed chirruping frogs, and ferny plants crawled across damp stone in search of soil-filled crevices. The spring gushed up in a wide pellucid pool where flat stones lurked like giant crabs. Beck knelt in the wet reddish shingle on a crescent of shore only just large enough for him. He uncorked the pot. He was here. At last he was here. He tipped the pot and the Gurnard slid into the water without a splash. The jolt of pleasure felled him and had him writhing in the shingle; stones in his mouth and in his boots, one arm in the water. He shit himself and he didn’t care. The experience was too intense… religious.

“Sirus.”

He wondered how many times she had said his name before he heard it.

“I hear you.”

“What do you want, Sirus?”

“Get this fucking thing out of me.”

“I can do that now. I think.”

“Good,” said Beck, and he slid into the water to wash himself. They sat on slabs warmed by the sun and watched worms inching to the pool and dropping in. As soon as they hit the water they burst and turned it cloudy. Beck could see their remains being jerked about in the water as the Gurnard fed — taking on protein for its next session of egg-laying.

“Here, this is you,” said Erlin.

They watched then as a sugar dog came to the shore, knelt as if to drink, then spewed a Gurnard and its water from one of its mouth pouches. As the dog fell and began to jerk about Beck turned away.

“This could kill you, you know.”

Beck studied the boxlike affair with its glinting ruby lights, strange chrome things she had pressed against his flesh, and a screen across which marched an army of black ants. The pain in his guts had grown and grown and was now almost unbearable, almost.

“Now,” she said, and held out the strange chrome gun-thing. He nodded. She pressed it against his arm and it spat fire into his biceps. For a moment the pain went away. She watched him. Then the pain came back so hard he screamed and set the sugar dog moaning. Later, he puked blood then something hard and chitinous. She shot something else into his arm and told him he was strong, that he would win. He kicked the pot then and it rolled off the edge and smashed down below.

“I will win,” he said and he knew it to be true. Some people do. The sugar dog howled.