Neal Asher - The Gabble

She lowered her weapon, then abruptly holstered it. “If you don’t believe me, then I suggest you go and see a dealer in biologicals called Desorla. Apparently Jael visited her before coming to see Koober, and their dealings involved Jael shooting out the cameras and security drones in Desorla’s office.”

“Just biologicals?”

“Desorla has … connections.”

She moved away and right then I felt no inclination to go after her. Maybe she was feeding me a line of bullshit or maybe she was giving me the lead I needed. If not, I’d come back to the pen well prepared.

In the market, one of the stall holders quickly directed me toward Desorla’s emporium. I entered through one of the floor-level doors and found no activity inside. A spiral staircase led up, but a gate had been drawn across it and locked. I recognized the kind of lock immediately and set to work on it with the tools about my person. Like I said, I was rusty-it took me nearly thirty seconds to break the programs. I climbed up, scanned the next floor, then climbed higher still to the top floor.

The office was clean and empty, so I kicked in the flimsy door into the living accommodation. Nothing particularly unusual here … then I saw the blood on the floor and the big glass bottle on her coffee table. Stepping round the spatters I peered into the bottle, and, in the crumpled and somewhat scabby pink mass inside, a nightmare eyeless face peered out at me. Then something dripped on top of my head. I looked up….

Over by the window I caught my breath, but no one was giving me time for that. Arena security thugs were running toward the emporium and beyond them I could see Gene striding off toward the exit. I opened the window just as the thugs entered the building below me, did a combination of scramble and fall down the outside of the building and hit the stone flat on my back. I had to catch my breath then. After a moment I heaved myself upright and headed for the exit, closing up the visor and hood of my envirosuit and keeping Gene just in sight. I went fast through an airlock far to the left of her, and some paces ahead of her, and was soon running down counting arches. I drew my carbide knife and dropped down beside one arch, hoping I’d counted correctly.

She stepped out to my left. I knew I could not give her the slightest chance or she would take me down yet again. I drove the knife in to the side, cut down, grabbed and pulled. In a gout of icy fog her visor skittered across the stone. Choking, she staggered away from me, even then drawing her pulse-gun, which must have been cold-adapted. I drove a foot into her sternum, knocked the last of her air out. Pulse-gun shots tracked along the frigid stone past me and I brought the edge of my hand down on her wrist, cracking bone and knocking the weapon away.

Her fist slammed into my ribs and her foot came up to nearly take my head off. Blind and suffocating she was the hardest opponent I’d faced hand-to-hand … or maybe it was that rustiness again. But she went down, eventually, and I dragged her to Ulriss Fire before anoxia killed her.

“Okay,” I said as she regained consciousness. “What the fuck killed her?”

After a moment of peering at the webbing straps binding her into the chair, she said,

“You broke my wrist.”

“Talk to me and I’ll let my autodoc work on it. You set me up, Gene. Is that your real name?”

She nodded absently, though whether that was in answer to my question I couldn’t tell. “I noticed you said ‘what’ rather than ‘who.’”

“A human who takes the trouble to skin someone alive and nail them to the ceiling without making a great deal more mess than that shouldn’t be classified as a who. It’s a thing.” I watched her carefully-trying to read her. “So maybe it was a thing … rogue golem?”

“Rho Var Olssen, employed by ECS for wet ops outside the Line, a sort of one-man vengeance machine for the Polity who maybe started to like his job just a little too much. Who are you to righteously talk about classifications?”

“So you know about me. I had you typed when you insisted on calling me a murderer.

Nothing quite so moralistic as an ECS agent working outside of her remit-helps to justify it all.”

“Fuck you.”

“Hit a nerve did I?” I paused, thinking that perhaps I was being a little naive. She was baiting me to lead me away from the point. “So it was a golem that killed Desorla?”

“In a sense,” she admitted grudgingly. “She was watched and she said too much-to Jael, specifically.”

“Tell me more about Jael.”

Staring at me woodenly, she said, “What’s to tell? We knew her interest in ancient technology and we knew she kept a careful eye on people like you. We put something in the way of your sifter and made sure she found out about it.”

I felt hollow. “The memstore … it’s a fake?”

“No, it’s the real thing, Rho. It had to be.”

I thought about me lying on the floor of my home with a rock hammer imbedded in my skull. “I could have died.”

“An acceptable level of collateral damage in an operation like this,” she said flatly.

I thought about that for one brief horrible moment. Really, there were many people on many worlds trying to find Atheter artifacts, but how many of them were like me? How many of them were so inconvenient ? I imagined this was why some AI had chosen my life as an

“acceptable level of collateral damage.”

“And what is this operation?” I finally asked. “Are you out to nail Prador?”

She laughed.

“I guess not,” I said.

“You worked out what Jael was doing yourself. I don’t know how…” She gazed at me for a moment but I wasn’t going to help her out. She continued, “If she can restore the mind to a gabbleduck she has an item to sell to the Prador that will net her more wealth than even she would know how to spend. But there’s a problem: you don’t just feed the memstore to the gabbleduck, you’re not even going to be able to jury rig some kind of link-up using aug technology. That memstore is complex alien tech loaded in a language few can understand.”

“She needs an AI … or something close…”

“On the button, but though some AIs might venture outside Polity law as we see it, there are certain lines even they won’t cross. Handing over a living Atheter to the Prador is well over those lines.”

“A Prador AI, then.”

“The only ones they have are in their ships-their purpose utterly fixed. They don’t have the flexibility.”

“So what the fuck-”

“Ever heard of Penny Royal?” she interrupted.

I felt a surge of almost superstitious dread. “You have got to be shitting me.”

“No shit, Rho. You can see this is out of your league. We’re done here.”

“You put some kind of tracer in the memstore.”

She gave me a patronizing smile. “Too small. We needed U-tech.”

Suddenly I got the idea. “You put it in the gabbleduck.”

“We did.” She stared at me for a long moment, then continued resignedly, “The signal remains constant, giving a Polity ship in the Graveyard the creature’s location from moment to moment. The moment the gabbleduck is connected to the memstore, the signal shuts down, then we’ll know that Penny Royal has control of both creature and store, and then the big guns move in. This is over, Rho. Can’t you see that? You’ve played your part and now the game has moved as far beyond you as it has moved beyond me. It’s time for us both to go home.”

“No,” I said. I guessed she didn’t understand how being tortured, then nearly killed, had really ticked me off. “It’s time for you to tell me how to find Jael. I’ve still got a score to settle with her.”