Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013

Neal Asher lives sometimes in England, sometimes in Crete, and mostly at a keyboard. He climbed the writing ladder up through the small presses, publishing short stories, novellas and collections over many years, until finally having his first major book,
Gridlinked,
published in 2000 by Macmillan, who have since published sixteen of his. These books have been translated into twelve languages and some have appeared in America from Tor. "The Other Gun" is a story produced from a proliferating plot thread removed from the first of a new trilogy about a black AI called Penny Royal—perhaps familiar to readers of
Asimov's
from "Alien Archaeology" (June 2007). Neal's other U.S. publisher, Night Shade Books, will be bringing out his Owner trilogy—
The Departure, Zero Point,
and
Jupiter War
—respectively in February, May, and September. For more information check out:
http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher/
and
http://theskinner.blogspot.com/.

As the bathysphere landed I fought to regain my humanity, even though my latest communication with the Client had been some hours ago. Talking to that entity was always a bizarre and confusing experience; one I would never get used to, and didn't want to. Every time afterward it felt to me like I was a new occupant of my old and battered body. I blinked, remembering the lack of eyelids, held up my hand to clench and unclench it and remembered a lack of fingers—or at least fingers like these—then, with the bathysphere settling, reached out and pressed a thumb against the door control.

The twenty-foot-wide circular door thumped away from me, releasing from its seals to allow in a waft of vapor and a smell like rotting vegetables, turned its inner locking ring to unlock, then slowly hinged down, first exposing a yellow sky bruised with brown clouds.

"Don't take anything for granted," I said to my companion.

"I never do," sighed Harriet, her voice as always surprisingly gentle from such a large mouth full of so many teeth.

I glanced at her and wondered how the people of this colony would react to her. Harriet was a Mesozoic era dinosaur, a troodon in the style of those dinosaurs from one of the paleo-history fashions when feathers were out and colorful skin was back in. She was jade on her upper surfaces and mustard yellow below and her back mackerel patterned with hints of navy blue. To add to her gaudy appearance, she had painted her claws gold and wore a variety of silver and gold bangles and neck rings. I was glad that in recent years she'd lost interest in applying eye shadow. She now stood up on her toes and extended her long neck to raise her sharp reptilian head, which was first at a level with mine, to peer over the door at the landscape lying beyond, and blinked bright slot-pupil eyes.

"Tasty," she said, which was often her response to overly muscled humans. She then clicked her fore-claws in frustration and ducked back down. This probably meant the humans concerned were armed.

The door finally came down to rest on boggy ground mounded with heather-like plants and nodular mosses, stabbed through here and there with black reeds. The colony raft sat about a mile beyond, a structure a mile wide and bearing some resemblance to an ancient aircraft carrier. Members of the Frobishers, who were the family I had come to trade with, stood between the bathysphere door and the vehicle they'd come over in—a swamp car with cage wheels. Four heavies clad in quilted body suits and rain capes stood out there, three of them carrying light laser carbines and a fourth holding something that looked suspiciously like a proton weapon. Before these stood a woman, clad much the same as them but studying an ancient computer tablet. This must be the woman I had come to see, scourge of the Cleaver family and a character with growing off-world interests. I moved forward, raindrops spattering against my crocodile-skin jacket and thick canvas trousers, my heavy boots sinking into the boggy ground as I stepped off the door.

"Madeleine Frobisher?" I enquired.

She was already looking up, studying both me and my companion warily. I advanced toward her and held out my hand, trying to ignore the laser carbines tracking my progress. "I'm Tuppence."

She didn't offer her hand in return, instead nodding toward the bathysphere behind.

"Novel form of transport," she opined.

I lowered my hand and turned to look back. The spherical craft was shifting—adjusting its gravmotors to pull itself back up out of the soft ground. Those motors were far too inefficient to support the entire weight of the craft and send it airborne—not because of their decrepitude, for even though they were centuries old they still functioned as they always had—but because when they were made the prador had only just begun inventing the technology. This was why the craft's main method of ascent and descent was attached to its crown: a wrist-thick stent-weave diamond-filament cable that speared upward to disappear into the bruised sky. Hundreds of miles of it attached at its further end to a giant reel in the underbelly of the
Coin Collector—
an ancient prador tug that had once borne a very different name under previous ownership.

"It is," I replied, "but it serves."

"And what is this?" Madeleine gestured to Harriet.

Pointing to my troodon companion, I replied, "Let me introduce Harriet, who by her appearance you would not realize was once an exotic dancer on Cheyne III."

Harriet dipped her head in acknowledgement. "Pleased to eat you."

"She of course means 'pleased to meet you,' since her artificial vocal chords sometimes struggle with the shape of her mouth." I eyed Harriet. The changes her brain had undergone, having been compressed in that reptilian skull, were a worry. Though, at that point, I couldn't figure out whether that "pleased to eat you" was a Freudian slip due to her lost intelligence or just a little joke at my expense.

"Is she... alien?"

I turned back to Madeleine. "Harriet is just the result of an extreme desire for change using adaptogenic drugs, zooetics and nanodaption, and is, if you were to stretch the term almost to breaking point, a human being."

"She will remain here," said Madeleine.

I shook my head. "She comes with me—that's not negotiable."

"Then our negotiations are over before they have truly started."

"Very well," I smiled at her congenially. "I have to admit to being disappointed, but if you're going to grandstand by setting pointless conditions..." I shrugged and began to turn back to my bathysphere. I was halfway back up the ramp door before she relented.

"Oh, if she must," she finally said.

I turned back to see her waving a dismissive hand, this all obviously being a matter of no consequence.

"It's just that there's little room in the ATV," she added.

"That's not a problem. Harriet is more than capable of keeping up on foot." I gestured to her vehicle as I returned to her. "Shall we?"

She held up one hand. "I do hope you've brought payment and are not wasting my time."

"Of course," I replied. "Twenty pounds of prador diamond-slate, etched sapphires to the value of one million New Carth Shillings, and the fusion reactor parts you detailed."

"Good." She nodded.

Catching her speculative glance toward the bathysphere I remembered to send the signal to close the door, and heard it groaning shut as I followed two of the heavies up the steps leading inside the swamp car. Within, seats lined the two sides with plenty of room for Harriet to squat between, but I didn't point this out. The heavies sat down, silent and watchful, while Madeleine sat beside the driver, who was obviously another of the Frobisher line. This weedy looking individual bore similar facial features as the rest in here, but also had a wart growing in precisely the same position on each of his eyelids—a sure sign of inbreeding. He started up the car—a hydrogen turbine engine by the sound of it—and set it into motion. I stretched up to look out of the narrow heavily scratched plastic windows to see Harriet bounding along beside the vehicle, then settled down patiently. Within five minutes we were in the shadow of the family raft, then driving up a ramp and parking, the engine winding down to silence.

"So where did you find the artifact?" I asked as I followed Madeleine out into a crammed tube of a swamp-car parking lot.

"It's been here in our raft for as long as I can remember," she replied, "but it was only when one of my people studied your broadcast that the object was identified... that was about ten years ago."

"Solstan?"

Madeleine paused, glanced round at me. "I haven't heard that expression in a while... no, it's maybe seventeen solstan years ago."

I grimaced. I'd been chasing rumors about the elements of the farcaster in the Wasteland for twenty years now and found nothing. I often wondered if they truly existed, because why, as the Client claimed, would the Polity AIs have ordered the weapon broken up and scattered? If they had truly considered it such a danger why hadn't they just destroyed it completely? I also often considered the unlikelihood of Polity AIs ridding themselves of such a potentially potent weapon, because that seemed very unlike them. But I could only obey and keep on searching, meanwhile slowly plotting my route to freedom.

Harriet had now re-joined us, panting but probably invigorated by the run. The armed escort closed in all around, seemingly a lot more confident now. I wondered if this indicated that they were thinking of doing something stupid. Past experience of trades like this told me they probably were, and knowing the Frobishers' history did not make me optimistic.

Confirmation came just a minute later as Madeleine led the way up steps so worn that the plating was gone to expose closed-cell bubble-metal. Concentrating on my footing with my body's eyes, I also looked through other eyes at the two swamp cars that had just pulled up by my bathysphere. I then watched some Frobishers unloading a heavy atomic shear from one of them, and wondered if this family had become so inbred there had been a loss of intelligence. It would be interesting to see what would happen when the atomic shear hit the prador alloy of the vehicle. The metal might not be the kind that armored their war ships, but it was very tough, and the defense system might be old, but had proven effective on many occasions.

"So what's its condition?" I asked to keep up the pretense. Of course, by the data package Madeleine had sent there had been a good chance that this was the real deal, but not now.

"I can't really say. It produces the power signatures you detailed and it's of the shape you described." Madeleine shrugged. "Hopefully you know your stuff and will be able to tell me." She added, "But we still get the agreed first payment."

"Of course," I said.

I did know my stuff, perhaps more so than she would want. A century of research and experimentation and of perpetual mental updates of the latest research in the Polity since the war had made me an expert in many fields. I would also recognize a fake, which, as I had been at pains to stress during my broadcast across the Wasteland, would result in no payment at all and quite likely some extreme response.

The stairs terminated in a long hall lined with heavy doors, each with a barred window. No doubt at all that this was a prison. Madeleine led the way across to one of them, punched a code into a panel beside it and the door popped open.

"We keep it here for the security." She gestured me inside.

Without hesitating, I stepped through, Harriet coming in behind me. It was fairly obvious what would happen next, and I was glad that they had not yet tried violence. I walked up to a plinth at the center of the cell and gazed at the object resting under a dome of chainglass. A curved chunk of white crystal lay there, rather like the sepal of some huge flower, but with a disc-shaped plug at its base from which protruded hundreds of micro-bayonets for data and power. I pinged it and received a facsimile of the supposed power signature of a farcaster element, but straight away I could see the joins. I peered at it closer, ramping up the magnification of my eyes and probing with a spectroscopic laser. The crystal was plain white quartz cut and polished to the required shape, while the base plug was just a not very good mock-up made of bonded resin. I turned as if to address my host, but just then the door slammed shut.

"Disappointing," I said.

Harriet was also peering at the object. She gave it a dismissive sniff, then turned to face me.

"No good?" she enquired eagerly.

"Another fake," I said. "The Client will not be pleased at all."

Harriet opened her mouth and licked her long red tongue over her white teeth. Evidently
she
wasn't displeased.

Through my other eyes—the cams on the bathysphere I'd linked to via my internal transceiver—I watched the Frobishers apply their atomic shear to the door. The door reacted by lifting off its seal then slamming down, smashing the shear and its two operators into the ground, then lifting and dropping slowly above the mess as if
like a beckoning hand it was inviting the rest to try again. One of them decided to fire some kind of explosive inside, but the door whipped up to send it bouncing back and it detonated by a swamp car, blowing off one cage wheel. The bathysphere defense system then decided to stop playing. Two hatches opened in the ring girdling the vehicle above the door, extruded two Gatling cannons, and began firing. The two cars, their liquid hydrogen tanks soon peppered with holes, exploded, but by then all the humans had become bloody smears across the boggy ground.

"Stupid," I said, then landed a heavy boot squarely in the center of the cell door. The force of my kick buckled the floor underneath my other boot and the door tumbled clanging into the space beyond.

"Can I?" asked Harriet, stepping from one clawed foot to the other. "Can I now?"

She had slipped into childlike eager pet mode again. Was that what she was designed to be or was it just a deliberate pose?

"Off you go," I conceded, and she shot through the opening, her claws leaving scratches in the metal floor.

She'll get herself killed one day,
I thought,
but not today.