The Gabble and Other Stories (15 page)

Movement behind...

Jael whirled. Rho, catching his breath against the door jamb, preparing to rush her. Her gaze strayed down to one of the manacles, a frayed stub of wire protruding from it. In his right hand he held what he had used to escape: a chainglass scalpel.

Careless.

Now she had seen him he hurled himself forward.

She could not afford to let him come to grips with her. He was obviously many times stronger than her. As he groped toward her she brought the hammer round in a tight arc against the side of his face, where it connected with a sickening crack. He staggered sideways, clutching his face, his mouth hanging open. She stepped in closer and brought the hammer down as hard as she could on the top of his head. He dropped, dragging her arm down. She released the hammer and saw it had punched a neat square hole straight into his skull and lodged there, then the hole brimmed with blood and overflowed.

Gazing down at him, Jael said, “Oops.” She pushed him with her foot but he was leaden, unmoving. “Oh well.” She pocketed the box containing the Atheter memstore. “One dies and another is destined for resurrection after half a million years. Call it serendipity.” She relished the words for a moment, then headed away.

* * * *

I woke, flat on my back, my face cold and my body one big ache from the sharpest pain at the crown of my skull, to my aching face, and on down to the throbbing from the bones in my right foot. I was breathing shallowly—the air in the room obviously thick to my lungs. Opening bleary eyes I lifted my head slightly and peered down at myself. I wore a quilted warming suit that obviously accounted for why only my face felt cold. I realized I was in my own bedroom, and that my house had been sealed and the environment controls set to Earth-normal.

“You look like shit, Rho.”

The whiff of cigarette smoke told me who was speaking before I identified the voice.

“I guess I do,” I said, “though who are you to talk?” I carefully heaved myself upright, then back so I was resting against the bed’s headboard, then looked aside at Charles Cymbeline, my boss and the director of Arcosect—a company with a total of about fifty employees. He too looked like shit, always did. He was blond, thin, wore expensive suits that required a great deal of meticulous cleaning, smoked unfiltered cigarettes though what pleasure he derived from them I couldn’t fathom, and was very, very dead. He was a reification—a corpse with chemical preservative running in his veins, skin like old leather, with bone and the metal of some of the cyber mechanisms that moved him showing through at his finger joints. His mind was stored to a crystal inside the mulch that had been his brain. Why he retained his old dead body when he could easily afford a Golem chassis or a tank-grown living vessel I wasn’t entirely sure about either. He said it stopped people bothering him. It did.

“So we lost the memstore,” he ventured, then took another pull on his cigarette. Smoke coiled from the gaps in his shirt, obviously making its way out of holes eaten through his chest.

He sat in my favorite chair. I would probably have had to clean it, if I’d any intention of staying here.

“I reckon,” I replied.

“So she tortured you and you gave it to her,” he said. “I thought you were tougher than that.”

“She tortured me for fun, and I thought maybe I could draw it out until you arrived, then she used the kind of drugs you normally don’t find anywhere outside a Batian interrogation facility. And anyway, it would have come to a choice between me dying or giving up the memstore, and you just don’t pay me enough to take the first option.”

“Ah,” he nodded, his neck creaking, and flicked ash on my carpet.

I carefully swung my legs to one side and sat on the edge of the bed. In one corner a pedestal-mounted autodoc stood like a chrome insectile monk. Charles had obviously used it to repair much of the torture damage.

“You said ‘she,’“ I noted.

“Jael Feogril—my crew here obtained identification from DNA from the handle of that rock hammer we found imbedded in your head. You’re lucky to be alive. Had we arrived a day later you wouldn’t have been.”

“She’s on record?” I enquired, as if I’d never heard of her.

“Yes—Earth Central Security supplied the details: born on Masada when it was an out-Polity world and made a fortune smuggling weapons to the Separatists. Well connected, augmented with twinned augs as you no doubt saw, and, it would appear, lately branching out into stealing alien artifacts. She’s under a death sentence for an impressive list of crimes. I’ve got it all on crystal if you want it.”

“I want it.” It would give me detail.

He stared at me expressionlessly, wasn’t really capable of doing otherwise.

“What have you got here?” I asked.

“My ship and five of the guys,” he said, which accounted for the setting of the environmental controls since he certainly didn’t need “Earth-normal.” “What are your plans?”

“I intend to get that memstore back.”

“How, precisely? You don’t know where she’s gone.”

“I have contacts, Charles.”

“Who I’m presuming you haven’t contacted in twenty years.”

“They’ll remember me.”

He tilted his head slightly. “You never really told me what you used to do before you joined my little outfit. And I have never been able to find out, despite some quite intensive inquiries.”

I shrugged, then said, “I’ll require a little assistance in other departments.”

He didn’t answer for a while. His cigarette had burned right down to his fingers and now there was a slight bacony smell in the air. Then he asked, “What do you require?”

“A company ship—the
Ulriss Fire
since it’s fast—some other items I’ll list, and enough credit for the required bribes.”

“Agreed, Rho,” he said. “I’ll also pay you a substantial bounty for that memstore.”

“Good,” I replied, thinking the real bounty for me would be getting my hands around Jael Feogril’s neck.

* * * *

From what we can tell, the Polity occupies an area of the galaxy once occupied by three other races. They’re called, by us, the Jain, Csorians, and the Atheter. We thought, until only a few years ago, that they were all extinct—wiped out by an aggressive organic technology created by the Jain, which destroyed them and then burgeoned twice more to destroy the other two races—Jain technology. I think we encountered it, too, but information about that is heavily restricted. I think the events surrounding that encounter have something to do with certain Line worlds being under quarantine. I don’t know the details. I won’t know the details until the AIs lift the restrictions, but I do know something I perhaps shouldn’t have been told.

I found the first five years of my new profession as an xeno-archaeologist something of a trial, so Jonas Clyde’s arrival on the dust ball I called home came as a welcome relief. He was there direct from Masada—one of those quarantine worlds. He’d come to do some research on the platinum producing plants, though I rather think he was taking a bit of a rest cure. He shared my home and on plenty of occasions he shared my whisky. The guy was non-stop—physically and mentally adapted to go without sleep—I reckon the alcohol gave him something he was missing.

One evening, I was speculating about what the Atheter might have looked like when I think something snapped in his head and he started laughing hysterically. He auged into my entertainment unit and showed me some recordings. The first was obviously the view from a gravcar taking off from the roof port of a runcible complex. I recognized the planet Masada at once, for beyond the complex stretched a checkerboard of dikes and ponds that reflected a gas giant hanging low in the aubergine sky.

“Here the Masadans raised squirms and other unpleasant life forms for their religious masters,” Jonas told me. “The people on the surface needed an oxygenating parasite attached to their chests to keep them alive. The parasite also shortened their lifespan.”

I guessed it was understandable that they rebelled and shouted for help from the Polity.

On the recording I saw people down below, but they wore envirosuits and few of them were working the ponds. Here and there I saw aquatic agrobots standing in the water like stilt-legged steel beetles.

The recording took us beyond the ponds to a wilderness of flute grasses and quagmires.

Big fences separated the two. “The best discouragement to some of the nasties out there is that humans aren’t very nutritious for them,” Jonas told me. “Hooders, heroynes, and gabbleducks prefer their fatter natural prey out in the grasses or up in the mountains.” He glanced at me, a little crazily I thought. “Now those monsters have been planted with transponders so everyone knows if something dangerous is getting close, and which direction to run to avoid it.”

The landscape in view shaded from white to a dark brown with black earth gullies cutting between islands of this vegetation. It wasn’t long before I saw something galumphing through the grasses with the gait of a bear, though on Earth you don’t get bears weighing in at about a thousand kilos. Of course I recognized it—who hasn’t seen recording of these things and the other weird and wonderful creatures of that world? The gravcar view drew lower and kept circling above the creature. Eventually it seemed to get bored with running, halted, then slumped back on its rump to sit like some immense pyramidal Buddha. It opened its composite forelimbs into their two sets of three “sub-limbs” for the sum purpose of scratching its stomach. It yawned, opening its big duck bill to expose thorny teeth inside. It gazed up at the gravcar with seeming disinterest, some of the tiara of green eyes arcing across its domed head blinking as if it was so bored it just wanted to sleep.

“A gabbleduck,” I said to Jonas.

He shook his head and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. “No,” he told me, “that’s one of the Atheter.”

Lubricated on its way by a pint of whisky the story came out piece by piece thereafter.

During his research on Masada he had discovered something amazing and quite horrible. That research had later been confirmed by an artifact recovered from a world called Shayden’s Find.

Jain technology had destroyed the Jain and the Csorians. It apparently destroyed technical civilizations—that was its very purpose. The Atheter had ducked the blow, foregoing civilization, intelligence, reducing themselves to animals, to gabbleducks. Tricone mollusks in the soil of Masada crunched up anything that remained of their technology, monstrous creatures like giant millipedes ate every last scrap of each gabbleduck when it died. It was an appalling and utterly alien nihilism.

The information inside the Atheter memstore Jael had stolen was worth millions. But who was prepared to pay those millions? Polity AIs would, but her chances of selling it to them without ECS coming down on her like a hammer were remote. Also, from what Jonas told me, the Polity had obtained something substantially more useful than a mere memstore, for the artifact from Shayden’s Find held an Atheter AI. So who else? Well, I knew about her—though, until she’d stuck a narcotic needle in my chest, I had never met her—and I knew that she had dealings with the Prador, that she sold them stuff, sometimes living stuff, sometimes human captives—for there was a black market for such in the Prador Third Kingdom. It was why the Polity AIs were so ticked off about her.

Another thing about Jael was that she was the kind of person who found things out, secret things. She was a Masadan by birth so probably had a lot of contacts on her home world. I wasn’t so arrogant as to assume that what Jonas Clyde had blabbed to me had not been blabbed elsewhere. I felt certain she knew about the gabbleducks. And I felt certain she was out for the big killing. The Prador would pay
billions
to someone who delivered into their claws a living, breathing,
thinking
Atheter.

A tenuous logic chain? No, not really. Even as my consciousness had faded, I’d heard her say,
“One dies and another is destined for resurrection, after half a million years. Call it
serendipity.”

* * * *

The place stank like a sea cave in which dead fish were decaying. Jael brought her foot down hard, but the ship louse tried to crawl out from under it. She put all her weight down on it and twisted, and her foot sank down with a satisfying crunch, spattering glutinous ichor across the crusted filthy floor. Almost as if this were some kind of signal, the wide made-for-something-other-than-human door split diagonally, the two halves revolving up into the wall with a grinding shriek.

The tunnel beyond was dank and dark, weedy growths sprouting like dead man’s fingers from the uneven walls. With a chitinous clattering, a flattened-pear carapace scuttling on too many legs appeared and came charging out. It headed straight toward her but she didn’t allow herself to react. At the last moment it skidded to a halt, then clattered sideways. Prador second-child, one eye-palp missing and a crack healing in its carapace, a rail-gun clutched in one of its underhands, with power cables and a projectile belt-feed trailing back to a box mounted underneath it. While she eyed it, it fed some scrap of flesh held in one of its foreclaws into its mandibles and champed away enthusiastically.

Next a bigger shape loomed in the tunnel and advanced at a more leisurely pace, its sharp feet hitting the floor with a sound like hydraulic chisels. The first-child was big—the size of a small gravcar—its carapace wider and flatter and looking as hard as iron. The upper turret of its carapace sported a collection of ruby eyes and sprouting above them it retained both of its palp-eyes, all of which gave it superb vision—the eyesight of a carnivore, a predator. Underneath its mandibles and the nightmare mouth they exposed, mechanisms had been shell-welded to its carapace. Jael hoped one of these was a translator.

“I didn’t want to speak to you at a distance, since, even using your codes, an AI might have been listening in,” she said.

After a brief pause to grate its mandibles together, one of the hexagonal boxes attached underneath it spoke, for some reason, in a thick Marsman accent. “Our codes are unbreakable.”

Jael sighed to herself. Despite having fought the Polity for forty years, some Prador were no closer to understanding that, to AIs, no code was unbreakable. Of course all Prador weren’t so dumb—the clever ones now ruled the Third Kingdom. It was just aping its father, who was a Prador down at the bottom of the hierarchy and scrabbling to find some advantage to climb higher. However, that father had acquired enough wealth to be able to send its first-child off in a cruiser like this, and would probably be able to acquire more by cutting deals with its competitors—all Prador were competitors. The first-child would need to make those deals, for what Jael hoped to sell, it might not be able to afford by itself