Neal Asher - The Voyage of the Sable Keech

‘He’s mine!’ Sniper sent to those of Vrost’s forces who had spotted Vrell’s drone and were hitting it from all sides. ‘Vrost, pull them off!’

Just then, Vrost suddenly discovered more critical concerns. Again that distorted U-space signature. Vrell’s ship juddered partially out of existence, shedding tonnes of armour like potato peelings. Then, with a screaming sound over every frequency, it flashed out of existence completely.

‘Fuck me,’ said Thirteen.

The ship reappeared a hundred kilometres closer to Vrost’s vessel, only it no longer looked like a ship. Now it was a meteor-sized mass of glowing metal travelling at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour. Vrost’s forces rapidly lost interest in chasing the drone, which was now falling into atmosphere, blackened and distorted and obviously without functional drives. Vrost himself kept firing every weapon available at what remained of Vrell’s ship. Sniper gave a salute to the hugely accelerated wreck, turned on his fusion drive, and himself dropped into atmosphere. Long minutes later, he spread his tentacles wide and came down on the burnt Prador drone like a hammer.

Having routed control to a joystick and simpler console mounted in the conning tower, Janer motored on the ocean’s surface under a starlit sky, only it was not just stars that lit the heavens. There had been some massive explosions up there, the glowing fallout from which was now dropping behind the horizon like a false sunset. Janer supposed Vrell had finally met his end at the claws of his fellow creature in orbit. He would find out eventually, but now he just wanted to get back to the Sable Keech, which was visible ahead of him, and there make use of the cabin and bed provided for him.

The big ship was slowing and turning, at the end of its journey, and had it been necessary for him to go in manually Janer doubted he could manage it, but the submersible possessed an automatic docking system. Before returning inside to start that procedure, Janer scanned the nearby ocean. On the console, the map showed him to be almost on top of the Little Flint, but he had yet to see it. Then, a few hundred metres out, he spotted that dish of black stone protruding from the ocean. This is what it had all been about: their voyage here. He hoped Bloc was satisfied.

With the hatch closed, Janer took up the primary controls and submerged the little vessel then, hoping he had got things right, he called up the docking icon, selected it with a tap of his finger, and sat back. The sub immediately dropped deeper and accelerated. Outside the water was dark, so he turned on the lights, just in time to see a frog whelk tumbling past, perhaps dislodged from the nearby flint. A few minutes later a massive wave of white water was boiling past above him, and he glimpsed the Sable Keech’s hull. The sub turned and rose, turned again and accelerated, then abruptly decelerated and veered. This happened twice more. Janer realized that the sub’s automatics were having problems compensating for the movement of the ship. On the third occasion a warning flashed up on his screen: IRIS door closed. He hit the nearby icon to open the iris and this time there was no deceleration. Suddenly the eye of the shimmer-shield was before him, then he was through it, the sub dropping half a metre with a shuddering crash. Clamps engaged, motors whined. He watched the sub enclosure revolve around him as the vessel was turned to present its nose to the iris, which was now drawing closed again.

Stepping out of the submersible, Janer looked around. It occurred to him that he should present himself to Captain Ron, but he felt too tired. Anyway, there was probably some signal on the bridge to tell the Captain that the sub had returned. He left the enclosure, climbed the nearest ladder up to a mainmast stairwell, cut through the seemingly unpopulated reification stateroom deck, then continued up a mizzen stairwell to the crew’s quarters. On his way he saw no one, and was grateful for that. It was with a feeling of relief that he closed his cabin door behind him.

Janer collapsed on his bed, allowing himself to just experience that moment of pure luxury—but something was niggling at his mind. He stood, pulled his backpack from a cupboard, opened it and removed his stasis case. Hinging open the hexagonal container, he observed two hornets ready in the transparent reservoir. That figured. He groped in his pocket and found his hivelink, stared at it for a moment, then returned it to his pocket. Not now— sleep seemed so much more important.

Taylor Bloc stood on his apartment balcony gazing out across Haldon, watching the sun rise over the city. He blew on his delicate porcelain cup of tea and took a sip, relishing its tobacco pungency. Imported all the way from Earth, China tea was a luxury others would not appreciate as did he, but then his tastes were somewhat more sophisticated. It was a pure thing, not some India tea adulterated with one of a thousand popular additives, not base coffee doped with stimulant enhancers. Bloc left such things to others, to the normals who lived in their millions all around him working through their drear dull lives. He shook his head and smiled, turning away from the sunrise just as mathematical formulae, in a language he had only just come to know, began sleeting down the sky behind the city. In some part of himself he knew this was all wrong, but that part was frozen in horrified fascination as it observed those elements of this scene it knew so very well.

Bloc walked back into his apartment, placed his cup down on a table whose top was made of a polished slice of Prador carapace, and dropped into an armchair beside it. He then picked up the spider thrall he had recently purchased. This was the sort of thing that fascinated him: baroque technologies, grotesqueries, the unusual. He supposed it almost inevitable that his interests had led him to greater and greater involvement with the Cult of Anubis Arisen. But thereby another of his needs was fulfilled: the acquisition of wealth. It was pointless possessing such sophisticated tastes if one could not gratify them. Bloc placed the thrall back down on the table underneath whose surface a six-dimensional shape—following the strictures of the formulae in the sky outside—was trying to turn itself inside out. He smiled again, his foot passing through Calabi-Yau space as he turned to glance to his left. The inversion, folding part of the room into a fifth dimension, impinged on him as little as the formulae in the sky and the shape under the table. Instead it was the two figures now standing in the room that caused him to gasp in shock.

‘How—?’

The one on the right, a mild-looking man dressed in a slightly rumpled disposable suit, raised a short squat gun with a snout like a pepper pot. The weapon thwacked, and something more than the force of the micropellets entering Bloc’s face flung him up out of his seat and across the table. He lay there quivering briefly, then quickly freezing up. The Calabi-Yau shape passed over above him like an interdimensional bat.

Neurotoxin, thought one part of his mind. What the fuck? thought another.

‘Hi there,’ said the mild man, gazing down on him. ‘I’m Aesop, and my partner here is called Bones.’

Bloc’s horror grew. Neither of them had bothered to cover their faces, and now they had revealed their names to him. Both faces and names could of course be false, but there was something else in their attitude. They were undoubtedly here to kill him. Deep inside himself, that other part of him already knew this, and it dreaded the how of it. That part now listened to well-remembered words as Bones, a slim fair-haired youth, dragged him off the table and deposited him in an antique rocking chair.