Neal Asher - The Voyage of the Sable Keech

‘Where’s Bloc?’ Aesop asked.

‘Bloc is in a tank, and it looks likely he’ll come out of it alive,’ Keech replied. ‘I’m confident he’ll be coming back to the Polity with me to answer for his crimes.’ He glanced at Erlin and grimaced. ‘Old Captains permitting.’

‘He could answer for them here.’ Bones now sat up.

‘We leave him,’ Aesop said, studying his companion, though there was nothing to see. A skull could wear no expression.

‘Why?’ asked Bones.

Before anyone else could reply, Erlin interjected, ‘There’s no need for threats or for discussion.’ She turned to one of the Hoopers. ‘Forlam, you have your instructions?’

Forlam nodded.

‘What are you going to do with us?’ Aesop hurriedly took off his last restraints and removed himself from thetable. He then glanced round at the other tables, most of whose occupants seemed to be Hoopers—there were just one or two who might be successful resurrectees. He knew that many had gone into tanks and that there had been many failures.

Erlin eyed Bones as he too stood up, then turned to Aesop. ‘You’ll be confined in Bloc’s stateroom until some decision is made about you. If you attempt to leave that room, Forlam will then follow his Captain’s instructions. What were they, Forlam?’

Forlam smiled. It was not a nice smile. ‘Tear off their arms and legs and chuck them over the side.’

As two of the Hoopers took Aesop and Bones by the arms and led them to the door, Aesop experienced startlingly clear memories of the crimes committed by himself and his partner before their reification. Bloc’s murder had been just one of many—but no one here knew that for certain. Keech might have some intimation, but as yet no proof. He and Bones were culpable of nothing they had done while under Bloc’s control. If the Old Captains decided against them being extradited under Keech’s custody, it was just possible they might survive this. Then he realized all his hopes were based on a simple premise: that, like Polity AIs, the Old Captains would consider them innocent of crimes committed while under Bloc’s control. He glanced aside and tried to read the expressions of those Hoopers close around him—probably men whose companions had been killed by the hooder he himself had led into the encampment on Mortuary Island. Only Forlam showed any sign of emotion, and what Aesop read in his face was not at all reassuring.

‘Who are you?’

The woman stumbling towards him he immediately identified as Olian Tay.

‘I have come to stop this,’ said Wade.

She eyed his APW, naturally coming to the wrong conclusion. That was a last resort for him. He and Zephyr could resolve this between them.

‘But what are you stopping?’ she asked, as he moved past her.

Wade winced on experiencing a sudden doubt. He was not sure if he knew.

Out at sea, he had opened his internal hivelink via the runcible back to the planet Hive, but had found no reassurance there, and no advice. He had sensed only deep confusion, fear, anger, with an undertow of fractured and contradictory instructions:

Destroy Zephyr—destroy yourself—flee—load to crystal—lie—live.

Faced with this coming from the mind from which he had earlier been copied, Wade had become increasingly reluctant to face Zephyr, until at one point he found himself just hanging motionless in the sky. He realized that the conclusion to his and Zephyr’s long-running debate might be no resolution for either of them. It was the sight of the submersible moving on ahead that had finally jerked Wade into motion again. That was Janer, almost certainly, and the man would have no reservations about using the weapon he carried. Arriving at Olian’s and descending through the damaged roof, Wade had felt he might be too late, even though he could still hear the mad mutter of Zephyr’s mind. Stopping Janer had been necessary—the man just did not grasp what was at stake, and would strike even though it might not be necessary.

The door into the vault room was open. Wade paused to one side of it and sent, ‘I cannot allow you to do this.’ But no reply returned over the ether. Wade stepped round the door jamb, abruptly squatting and levelling his weapon. Sprine was scattered all around inside the open vault. Zephyr stood there, holding a pressure grenade certainly full of the virus—seemingly waiting for something? Obviously Zephyr wanted to be dissuaded from its present disastrous course. He opened his mind to the Golem sail, totally, and began transmitting all that he knew, all he had recently learned. He replayed all the arguments at high speed, created and then collapsed all the relevant logic structures, laying out his final case. This could bring about their resolution, in this moment of the sail’s crisis. The surge of information would overwhelm its confused mind, and then it could do nothing but agree.

But the information he sent just seemed to drop into a black pit—and Wade recognized despair. He understood then just what his other half awaited: the enemy. Death. He increased the pressure on his weapon’s trigger, but found he could not pull it back all the way, because then the irrevocable decision would have been made. The pause lasted only microseconds—but an age in Golem terms. Then Zephyr’s agonized cry filled the room, and the Golem sail fired its particle cannon. The turquoise blast struck Wade in the chest, hammering him back against the wall.

I’m going to die, he realized, I waited too long.

On the planet Hive, up on its promontory, the building resembled a World War II concrete pillbox, with horizontal windows gazing slit-eyed across the lowlands. Beyond the bare and mounded earth surrounding it, which further lent the appearance of a recently installed machine-gun post, lay dying algae gathered in green and yellow drifts amidst the vines, wide-leafed rhubarbs and cycads. Snairls, ranging from the size of a man’s head to creatures as large as a sheep, grazed on this abundance. The air immediately around the building seemed filled with smoke, but closer inspection revealed this to be clouds of hornets, killing each other.

Physically infiltrating the ancient mind’s redoubt had been impossible at first, so the young mind’s only means of access had been either by conventional inter-hive radio or by intercepting and interpreting spillover transmissions between individual hornets. The former means had slowly degraded—the ancient mind’s communications becoming increasingly contradictory and opaque—and the latter was swiftly following the same course. The old mind was clearly fragmenting. But now that very fragmentation offered an opportunity to actually get inside both the redoubt and, by intercepting direct hornet-to-hornet transmissions, the ancient mind itself.

The six hornets did originally belong to the old mind, but the youngster had isolated them, shutting off their radio communication with the rest of the mind, then inside them installed transmitters tuned to his own mental coding, but also linked to their original transmitters. Such a ploy could never work on a guarded mind, for such minds constantly monitored their own function. The six of them flew into the swarm gathered around the redoubt, and through their faceted eyes the young mind observed hornets attacking each other in mid-air, chewing in with mandibles or stinging each other to death. Now entering this swarm, the youngster began to pick up straight-line neuro-radio transmissions between hornets, and found that the mental coding of the old mind was beginning to vary. The young mind identified six variations: five still very close to the original, but one that was wildly astray. He lost four of his own six hornets to attacking insects before confirming that the attackers all used that disparate code. The old mind was now fully divided into two parts: one finite and hostile, the other in the process of breaking into yet another five. The surviving two spies finally entered the redoubt.