Neal Asher - The Gabble

The journey took us two solstan days and I’ll say no more about it than that it was strained. Entry into Scylla’s atmosphere was frightening, but it came as a relief.

There are fifth generation adapted people who can survive in vacuum. They live in the Outlink stations which travel on the edge of human expansion into the galaxy. Their adaptations are somewhat different from the kind the bracelet would deliver. It used localized genetic material whether DNA based or not. It read the code, picked the high level survival characteristics, transposed them. I once saw a Sundancer human at Darkander’s; his skin silver as mercury. It has never been made clear whether they are adapted humans or Sundancers with human shape.

Everyone has seen high G adapted humans. In all cases it was done with nanotech and biointegration. I am about to join the ranks…

A sharp pain in my wrist as my blood follows a new path, round the bracelet where it is used as a source of raw materials, and from where it comes out much changed. They are in: the nanobots and nanofactories; reforming legions of the invisible. I feel dizzy…

Now my heart is thundering at double speed. The Tenkian…!

Ah, better. I altered its programming, widened its recognition parameters. Don’t want to be shot by my own weaponry. Now I will lie down on the sandy mud and stare at the sky. This is why I spend so much time at Darkander’s and why I have such a love for antiquities: technology like sorcery, it scares the shit out of me.

Losing it…

Blacking -

It was two hours until dawn and the sky was the colour of old blood and had clouds across it as ambiguous as Rorschach blots. We stepped down the ramp onto rocky ground that had been incinerated in a half kilometre radius from where we stood. According to Singh this was what was called taking adequate precautions.

“How far do you have to travel from here?” he asked Grable.

“You don’t have to know that. All you have to know is that we’ll be back here in two days solstan.”

Grable took precautions as well, but then he had no choice, that was the only information I had given him. He did not know the direction in which we would be going just yet. I took my own precautions.

“We’ll see you then.”

The ramp retracted with swift finality and the shuttle rose with an eerie lack of sound on its AG. A few minutes later we saw the accelerating flare of its engines. The sound reached us as we hurriedly unpacked our equipment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Grable quickly get hold of some kind of hand gun and glance at me speculatively. By then I had a control box in my hand and was stepping back from my luggage.

“This should keep us secure,” I said, and flicked a nail against a touch plate.

The Tenkian autogun rose out of the box like some terrible chrome insect. Red and green lights flickered on its various displays and its barrel glimmered in the starlight. Soon it was hovering above the box with its turret revolving, pausing, considering.

“I have it programmed for a twenty metre circle from me,” I said. I watched as Grable carefully holstered his gun. He didn’t know what else I had it programmed for.

The sun was a spherical emerald when it breached the horizon and gave even the ash around us the appearance of life. Scylla’s binary companion was days away yet, on the other side of the planet, where it had dragged the planetary sea. As the sun cleared the horizon the tint became less gharish but by then the life of Scylla was coming to meet us. The first murder-louse approached with the dainty and deadly purpose of a spider. The autogun killed it at an invisible line.

“If one of those gets through its a toss-up between whether you get eaten or injected full of eggs,” Grable told me after he had named the creature.

“I’d have thought you more prepared,” I said.

He smiled bleakly and pulled on gloves that keyed in at the wrists to the body armour he was wearing under his normal clothing. I felt a little foolish.

“I’ve an autogun as well, but not as good as that Tenkian.”

It killed nine more lice before we had the portable AGC assembled and the rest of our equipment on it. Only when we were twenty metres above the ground with the autogun perched at the back of the craft did we relax, though not for long, the Tenkian’s purpose then was one of dealing with creatures like a cross between a moth and a crab which seemed to want to come and visit.

“Okay, which way?” Grable asked. I took out my palm computer and called up my satlink, direction-finder and map, after a moment I read off the co-ordinates to him. There was a pause. I expected him to make his move then, but it wasn’t to be. He punched the co-ordinates into the autopilot and off we went, just as if we were partners. I thought it likely he wanted to be sure I was telling the truth.

The trip took five hours. Once we passed over the edge of the incinerated area we got a look at what the surface of Scylla was really like. I realised then why this planet had first been named Shore. (Like probably a hundred other planets. How many Edens, New Earths and Utopias would there be if the naming of planets had been left to humans?) The surface was a tideland.

The plant life was sea weeds: kelps and wracks and huge rotting masses of something like sargassum. There were rocky areas, muddy areas, sandy areas, and pools dotted across the shorescape like silver coins. Through a set of image intensifiers I observed a multitude of different kinds of molluscs. There were plenty of arthropods as well, the murder-lice being the most prevalent. Perhaps there were other dominant kinds, but I didn’t like to keep the intensifiers to my eyes for too long, as it meant my eyes weren’t on Grable.

As we drew close to our destination we began to see centuries-old wreckage. I passed the intensifiers to Grable and pointed at the blurred squares and lines in the mud flats below us.

“Looks like the remains of an earlier attempt,” I said.

He glanced over but didn’t accept the intensifiers.

“Where shall I put us down?”

I pointed to where a rock field rose up out of the mud flats. The entrance to the base was in such an area, if this place had not changed too much since Paul had been here. As Grable brought the craft down between two huge boulders he gazed out at the mud flats dubiously.

“It’s an underground installation?” he asked.

“Yes, and before you ask, I brought a pump.”

A wide-field metals resonator found us the entrance in a matter of minutes. A shot from Grable’s handgun turned the door into a molten ruin. After that we had to leave my pump labouring away for hours to get rid of the water and liquid mud. Sitting in the AGC we ate a meal of recon steak, croquette potatoes and courgettes, and watched the Tenkian splattering murder-lice with metronomic regularity. Off to one side the roar of the outlet hose was like the warming up of a shuttle engine. It was a good pump; made of nano-built ceramics and powered by a couple of minipiles.

After we had eaten we checked on the pump and found that a couple of rooms were now accessible and that the inlet hose had attached itself to a wall like a leech. I turned the pump off, moved the hose down into an underwater stairwell, and turned it on again. The exposed rooms contained little of value or interest other than orgiastic clumps of those molluscs called hammer-whelks, one shell of which had got me into all this. The floor was half a metre deep in reddish slimy mud.

Two hours passed and the outlet hose of the pump shifted, as one of its ground staples came out, and created a geyser over the mud flats. For a while we had a blue-shifted rainbow, until I went out and drove another staple into the rock. In another hour the next floor was revealed and things became a lot more interesting.