Neal Asher - The Gabble

‘Get down, assassin!’ Hendricks yelled.

What the hell for?

Instinct took over before Ansel could think of an answer to that question. All fire ceased and the Golem was running towards them. Suddenly there came a roar and blue fire speared above Ansel. The heat of it seared his back and he saw the Golem take that fire full on. It was stripped down to its metal chassis in an instant. It leant into flame then started to bend and distort. Abruptly it was coming apart and the blast picked it up and flung it over the edge. When the thruster motor cut out Ansel stood and glanced round at Hendricks.

‘AG was out,’ said the monitor. ‘Not the thrusters.’ He dropped the remote control he held, but managed to holster his pulse-gun before he fainted.

Ansel walked over and gazed down at the monitor. He owed the man. He turned and looked at Kelly. So easy now to complete his mission. Feeling an unaccustomed discomfort he became aware that Erlin was studying him.

‘Come to kill me?’ Kelly managed.

‘Not now,’ said Ansel, holstering his thin-gun.

‘Hendricks wouldn’t. Too. . moral.’

Ansel understood in an instant.

Kelly limped forward and held out the book to him. Ansel could not understand how the man was not screaming. His clothes were stained horribly and he must be losing the flesh of his body just as he was losing the flesh on his face.

‘Take it,’ Kelly said.

Ansel took the book and tucked it under his arm.

‘Are you a … good friend?’ Kelly asked, and turned his back on him.

‘I am,’ said Ansel, and he drew his thin-gun and brought it up. Erlin’s protest came half a second after the dull concussion that took the top off Kelly’s head.

‘Of course,’ said Hendricks, a sneer in his voice, ‘in those first thirty-seven years THC offered more than generous wages and free symbiont implantation so the colonists could partake of Fores’s bounty. When the first colonists died in ways too horrible to imagine THC came storming to the rescue: “Look,” they said, “we have this drug that seems, if taken in regular doses, to prevent the symbiont attacking its host. Admittedly it is expensive.” Work it out for yourself, assassin.’

As he engaged AG and lifted it out of the valley, Ansel stared out of the screen of Kelly’s shuttle. He knew how the Company operated, since he had spearheaded some nasty operations himself. But he had never expected to be on the receiving end. Forty years of loyal service and they had done this to him.

Hendricks said, ‘The original colonist miners here were virtual slaves to the Company. In the end they were working the mines for one drug patch a month. Kelly’s great-grandfather wrote all this down, and took signed statements from over five hundred miners. Kelly’s deposition told us this, but we’d yet to see those statements.’ Hendricks, who sat in the navigator’s chair, rested his hand on the thick book on his lap.

‘Bastards,’ said Ansel, his voice flat.

‘I’d imagine that for your service, in thirty-seven years the Company would have paid you in drug patches. After Kelly’s deposition you became inconvenient, what with you possessing a new symbiont the precise twin of those here — proof that no mutation had taken place, that producing a killer symbiont had been precisely the Company’s intention.’

Erlin leant forwards. She had been silent for a long while after he had killed Kelly, but that silence had ended when they reached Kelly’s shuttle.

‘He called you a good friend,’ she had said.

‘I know what he meant,’ Ansel had replied.

‘Not entirely I think.’

‘Then explain it to me.’

‘They live with certainties here, Ansel. They know their lives will be short and will end in horrifying agony unless they kill themselves. They have a celebration here called The Leaving.

When a colonist feels his or her symbiont changing — usually signalled by stomach cramps — they throw a wild party. When the individual concerned is so drunk on cornul liquor he loses consciousness a good friend will cut his throat.’

Ansel swallowed drily as he engaged the thrusters. What of his prospects now? The Company would be unlikely to provide him with the drug the miners had used. All they would supply was a quick death.

‘You are evidence. You’ll come with us to Earth Central, and after this book is presented you’ll stand in court and give your statement. THC will pay and they’ll pay heavily,’ said Hendricks.

‘I’ll come,’ said Ansel.

The grey-bearded park labourer reminded Salind of Earth and autumn, though the man was not raking up leaves. It was treelfall on Banjer — a season with no real Terran equivalent — and the snakish creatures squirming from the pox of holes in the banoaks were dying. Having raked the fallen into slightly shifting drifts, the man began forking the spaghetti tangle into his wheelbarrow.

‘I’ll be damned,’ said Salind, initiating the ‘save’ facility in Argus.

He watched the man for a while longer, then hoisted his rucksack more securely onto his shoulders before moving on. Shortly he came to where a black and twisted banoak had spilled from its hollow branches a thick crop of treels across the path. The banoak itself reminded him of a baobab, though he vaguely recollected it was not in fact a tree, being more akin to a tube worm. The parasitic treels were black and grey, and on average half a metre long. With their narrow heads and discshaped feeding mouths, they appeared more like lampreys than the eels after which they were named. Salind subvocalized a question and Argus, his internal augmentation, replied in its lecturing tone:

Because its life cycle is utterly confined to the soft tissues and hollow branches of the banoak, it will attempt to feed on any soft tissue with which it comes into contact. Avoidance is recommended.

Salind looked askance at the writhing mass as he stepped off the path and onto the spherule grass to bypass it.

‘Why do they die?’ he asked.

There came a pause from Argus as it accessed the relevant files.

A poison from the aforementioned soft tissues accumulates in the creatures and kills them off in their fifth year. Shall I continue?

‘Might as well,’ said Salind. ‘I don’t suppose Garp’s there yet.’

As I mentioned, the treel’s entire life cycle is confined to the interior of the banoak. There it feeds on the soft tissues of the polychaete body, mates and lays its eggs. By their fifth year the treels die from a cumulative poison in the polychaete’s flesh. It was first thought the poison served no other purpose than to rid the banoak creature of this parasite. It is now known that the treel’s relationship with its host is mutualistic rather than parasitic. The treels, as well as feeding on the banoak, protect it from predation. Creatures that feed on the banoak inevitably ingest treels and can sicken and die from the poison concentrated inside them.

‘They harvest them, don’t they?’ said Salind, his attention drawn to the large tanker parked under some distant banoaks. He could hear the cavitating roar of a vacuum pump and see another park labourer sucking up the creatures with a wide-ribbed hose.

The poison accumulates in their skin. For humans that substance works as a narcotic and mild hallucinogen. The treels are mulched, pressed and dried and what remains is mostly skin.

They make a tea from it here.

‘I guess I’ll have to give that a try then,’ said Salind, though he did not particularly relish the prospect.

The tea is as addictive as nicotine. Most people here drink it.

‘Then I’ll take a detoxicant course afterwards. My audience will want to know what it’s like.’