Neal Asher: Polity Agent

‘Taking no chances, but this is an insystem ship, so where or to what is it carrying me?’ he asked as he began walking towards it.

Moving beside him, Fethan shrugged and made no comment.

Thorn glanced at him. ‘So you definitely are staying.’

‘I’m needed here.’ Fethan grimaced then removed something from his pocket, weighed it in his hand for a moment then tossed it across. Thorn snatched it out of the air and inspected it. It fitted in his palm, a five by three by a half inch cuboid of burnished metal, coppery, its corners rounded. Along one end of it was a row of ports, nanofibre and optic, designed to interface with just about any computer known, and probably many others unknown. It was a memstore.

‘It don’t say much, but it might come in handy,’ said Fethan.

‘What’s inside?’

‘It’s what killed that Jain tech construct down here, and what helped to kill Skellor in the end: a hunter-killer program constructed by Jerusalem.’ He patted his stomach. ‘I carried it inside myself for some time. I don’t need it any more and I don’t want it any more.’

They reached the ramp and paused there. Thorn held out his hand and they shook.

‘Stay well, Thorn,’ said Fethan, ‘and try not to let that bastard Cormac get you killed.’

‘You stay well, too. It’s been—’

‘Yeah, interesting.’ Fethan pulled his hand away and gestured towards the ship. ‘Get out of here.’ He turned and began walking away.

Thorn thoughtfully pocketed the memstore, then entered the cargo pod. Behind him the ramp immediately began withdrawing back into the floor. He spied just one acceleration chair bolted to one wall—there were no other facilities.

‘Spartan,’ he commented, then grinned to himself. He had, after all, himself been a member of the Sparkind who based their ethos on those ancient Greek warriors.

After he strapped himself in, the take-off was abrupt and sickening for, though the whole ship lifted on gravmotors, the pod itself contained no compensating gravplates. Sitting above the gravity-negating field he became immediately weightless. Strapped in his chair, and without a view, there was no way of telling how fast the ship was rising, or even if it rose at all.

Many space travellers, Thorn knew, had their temporal bone and its related nerves surgically adapted to enable them to shut down any physical response to signals from their inner ear. Others used drugs to dampen the effect. Sparkind, however, were conditioned to control their reaction, so Thorn merely clenched his teeth and held onto his breakfast. Within seconds he brought the disorientation and nascent space sickness under control, and relaxed. He remembered once watching one of the Cull natives being sick over the side of a balloon basket, prompting a subsequent conversation with Fethan about his own Sparkind conditioning.

‘Those must have been messy training sessions,’ Fethan had observed.

‘It was all carried out in VR and thus the sickness was just potential sickness to us trainees. Gant used to…’ Thorn trailed away. Gant was dead—again. He had continued, ‘It is just a matter of you deciding at first what is up and what is down, then finally deciding and accepting that there’s no up or down. Drugs and surgical adaptation disconnect you too much from realities, especially if you’re caught in a fire-fight aboard some tumbling ship with fluxing gravplates.’

‘Tough training, then?’

‘Yeah, you don’t get to become Sparkind without logging five years of combined virtual and actual combat training in similar rough situations.’ He glanced at Fethan. ‘The two are deliberately combined so you don’t get disconnected from reality. Troops fully trained only in VR develop a tendency to feel that what they then experience in actuality is something they can later unplug from. Makes ‘em sloppy, and very often dead. What about you? I know very little about you.’

Fethan grinned and scratched at his beard. ‘I worked for Earth Central way back before you were born, and even before memcording of a human mind became a viable proposition. I crashed a lander on Earth’s moon, after my passenger threw a grenade into the cockpit and, when I survived that, tried to decapitate me with a garrotte.’

‘Nasty person,’ Thorn opined.

‘Memcording wasn’t possible for a whole mind then, but partial recordings could be made. That bugger had overindulged in black-market memory copies made from the minds of imprisoned killers. The lander hit the ground but held together. Next thing I knew, everything was dark and EC was yammering at me non-stop. What was left of my body was too damaged to restore—oxygen fire. My choices were that dubious memcording technology of the time, or flash-freezing of my brain for storage, or installation in an android chassis—or death.’

‘Obviously you chose the android chassis.’

‘Yeah, my nasty passenger survived the crash and escaped. He’d set the fire. I later caught up with him on Titan, where he was making a dog’s dinner of his new career as a serial killer. I hauled him outside the dome with me and dropped him down a surface vent. He’d frozen solid by then, so broke apart on the way down.’

Thorn nodded to himself, then after a long pause had said, ‘Enough of this macho bonding for now?’

‘Yeah, I reckon,’ Fethan had replied.

Now sitting in the cargo pod, Thorn smiled at the memory of that conversation. He would miss the old cyborg, but at least Fethan remained alive, which was more than could be said for certain other people Thorn missed. His smile faded, just thinking of them.

Some time later he felt the acceleration from the craft’s ion drive. This lasted for an hour, next came abrupt deceleration, followed by various clonks and bangs from outside, then an abrupt restoration of gravity and a loud crump as the craft settled.

As Thorn unstrapped himself, the end of the cargo pod opened and the ramp extruded. He walked to the end of it and peered out into what he immediately identified as a spaceship’s small docking bay. As he stepped down the ramp he saw that only the cargo pod lay inside the bay, after being detached from the rest of the craft and transported in by the telefactor which now slid into an alcove of the nearby wall.

A precaution against Jain infection, obviously.

Ahead of Thorn a line drew itself vertically through the air, then from it unfolded the holographic image of a woman. Her hair and her skin were bone white, but her eyes black. She wore something diaphanous, barely concealing her naked body. Speaking, she revealed the red interior of her mouth.

‘Welcome to the NEJ,’ she said.

‘Hello, Aphran,’ Thorn replied to this recording of a dead woman, then added, ‘NEJ?’

‘The Not Entirely Jack,’ she replied, and grimaced.

Of course the AI aboard this ship would not be ‘entirely Jack’, for Jack was now tangled up with the absorbed personality of Aphran herself—one time Separatist and enemy of the Polity.

Cormac rubbed his wrist as he watched the screen. Celedon station seemed clear of Jain infestation, and now manoeuvred away from the sun. But as a precaution it would remain partially quarantined for some years to come. Earlier he had watched the thirteen evacuees towing themselves up the telescopic boarding tube extended from Jerusalem. One of the Golem in the group carried a lozenge-shaped block of crystal caged in a partial skin of black metal—the AI of the long-range spaceship, the Victoria. But Cormac’s attention focused on a woman clad in the distinctive blue overall of a runcible technician. By now the thirteen were through scanning and installed in an isolated area aboard this great ship. Shortly he would go and speak to one of them.