Neal Asher: The Skinner

‘I know it’s not enough,’ he said. ‘You may kill me now, but the machine that is me will keep working after I am dead. So go ahead and tear my arms off.’

Slow realization dawned on her as he initiated the cybermotors in his fingers and completely relinquished his mental control of them.

His fingers began to close on her hard Hooper neck.

Even with its wavering unbalanced gait, the Skinner easily stayed ahead of them. They only gained on it when it fell, or when it needed to shove its way through thickening dingle, but wherever there was open ground it quickly pulled ahead again. Ambel just kept going at the same dogged pace, though Janer was beginning to find the chase exhausting. He had reached the stage where he felt he must soon quit, when the Skinner began to stumble and show signs of slowing.

‘Now we have you, my lad,’ growled Ambel.

The Skinner suddenly fell forwards in a rocky open space, sprawled out like something dead washed up by the tide. They quickly moved in and, with grim purpose, Ambel approached it holding his machete to his side. Janer stood back and watched with morbid fascination as the machete whistled down.

Thunk. A diseased leg jerked away. On the backstroke, he took off the Skinner’s remaining hand. Janer stared at the head: the hate-filled black eyes and gaping mouth. There was no sign on it of the yellow that denoted sprine poisoning, and it had nearly detached itself from the body.

‘Ambel!’ he yelled in warning, then began firing.

Ambel turned and hurled his machete. It struck rocks with a ringing clash that sent sparks skittering into the air. Janer set those same rocks smoking as he pressed the trigger down and kept on firing. Thumping between the rocks like a pig escaping the slaughterman, the head moved quickly into cover. They ran to the spot where it had disappeared, and stared down at a dark hole cut deep into the ground. Janer crouched forward, pushed the snout of his carbine into the cavity, and pulled back on the trigger. Nothing at all happened. He stepped away and peered at the carbine’s display. Empty.

‘Bugger,’ said Ambel.

They continued to gaze into the hole, and Janer even thought he caught the glint of eyes looking back out.

‘We could bury it in there,’ Janer suggested.

Ambel shook his head. ‘It’d only dig its way out again. Just one thing for it.’ With the power of a machine he stooped, gripped rock, and broke it away from the edge of the hole, then reached down for more. There was a tenacity in the Captain Janer found a little difficult to comprehend.

‘Why wasn’t the sprine killing the head too?’ he asked.

‘Had never fully connected itself. I wounded the body,’ said Ambel, still relentlessly pulling away rock. Janer watched him a while longer, then removed his own backpack, extracting from it the hexagonal box. He couldn’t help feeling a certain inevitability about this moment.

‘I have a way we can kill it,’ he said. ‘All I need is a crystal of sprine.’

‘At last,’ breathed the Hive mind.

Ebulan reached out with rigid control, and Pilot touched and manipulated the various complex controls to start AG and warm the thrusters. Through another blank, the Prador put the weapons console online and checked the loads. All readings were optimum. The rear nacelles contained a hundred and forty-four missiles fitted with CTDs, as well as cluster and planar explosives. There were four defence lasers and two giga-joule particle beams. Even the old rail-guns were in perfect order, and had carousels full of ceramo-carbide missiles that could be fired at half the speed of light.

Meanwhile other blanks were running on the slave programs loaded into their thrall units, maintaining the ship, or standing ready to replace Pilot or the blank seated at the weapons console, all ready and equipped with hull patches and fire retardants, should the ship be hit.

The Prador destroyer rose out of the trench spilling an accumulation of silt and broken shell from its upper surfaces. It rose past heirodonts pausing in the depths for one brief respite in their painful lives, till finally it came up underneath an island of sargassum. As it rose it hauled up tonnes of seaweed with it, so that leeches and prill cascaded about it in organic rain. For a short while the hull matched the colour and texture of the floating mass of seaweed, then a line of fire traversed the ship, from its sensor arrays to its rear thrusters. Weed exploded from the armoured hull and fell flaming into the sea. Clouds of superheated steam were blasted away, then recondensed in an expanding cloud as the destroyer began to move. As it tilted, the sea below it flattened, then three evenly spaced thrusters blasted ribbed blue flames, and with a crash the destroyer accelerated into the sky.

Pilot moved a hand across the weapons console and slapped in a launch-and-seek program. A rear nacelle opened and three lines of fire sped away. Ebulan viewed them for just a moment then turned his attention to the detectors ranged before his own eyes and the eyes of his blanks. It hardly mattered if those departing missiles found their target; they were merely diversionary.

The Warden observed the path of the three missiles for a microsecond then sent a warning to the Dome.

‘Acknowledged,’ said the submind there, with a heavy emphasis. The Warden probed a little and discovered that the submind had been on to the missiles from the moment they were launched so had already been tracking them for at least a whole second. It ignored the mind’s sarcasm and, with that part of itself not tied up in trying to crack Prador code, it turned its attention elsewhere.

‘Twelve, take the SMs out from the island, to attack the Prador ship,’ it sent.

‘Yeah, let’s kick us some ass!’ returned one of them.

Two observed, ‘I note you say “attack” not “destroy”. You realize we’ll be lucky even to slow it down?’

‘If you can realize that then the Warden certainly can,’ said Twelve patiently.

The Warden watched the seven drones accelerate out from the island and fall into an arrow formation. It prepared itself to upload all the subminds, should — at the moment of their physical destruction — they even have time to transmit themselves. Through their eyes it watched the Prador destroyer come into view and with a little further probing, learnt that the enforcer drones were ready and willing for the fight, and that SM12, though ready to do what it could, felt certain it was about to become a metallic smear on the ocean surface.

‘We go in like this,’ explained Twelve, sending them details of an attack formation selected from its library. One, Two and Seven slid to the fore and spread to the three points of a triangle. The remaining drones spread to the corners of a square. Both shapes began revolving.

‘And the purpose of this?’ enquired Two.

‘We’ll present a dispersed and more difficult target,’ said Twelve. ‘We also have a better chance of firing past shield projectors, and intercepting lasers and rail-gun fusillades.’

‘In your arse,’ said a voice.

‘Who the…?’ began Twelve, but by then they were already on the Prador ship.

The drone formation slid over the destroyer like a tube. Lasers heated their casings on this pass, and they only managed half a second of fire. Their missiles needled down at the golden armour, most of them blasting against projected fields so that for half a second the destroyer was surrounded by coins of fire. Some missiles did get through to blow concentric ripples of flame around the hull of the ship. But where they struck, they left only glowing spots on its armour, and those spots quickly faded.