The New Space Opera 2 (31 page)

Cannon, slower but craftier in her way, lifted out of the contact so that the spark shorted. Ozone crackled as Kallus stepped so slowly back and began the agonizing progress of drawing his shock pistol.

Siddiq spun on her left heel, the deck shredding away under the pressure of her movement, to bring her right foot and offhand up for a follow-on strike. Then she remembered the memebomb virus card.

She aborted, her balance slipping as her foot dropped. Cannon stepped in, grasped her close, too close, and slammed them together in a tooth-cracking impact that opened to a kiss.

A
BOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

Michaela gathered Raisa in her arms. Centuries fell away at the familiar scent, ghosts of long-vanished pheromones stirring. They kissed.

Somewhere close by, a starship screamed.

Somewhere close by, a man of divided loyalties struggled to bring a weapon to bear against a fight in which he had no part.

Somewhere very far away, a girl, long-lost to the fugue of years, returned to her body for a moment, surprised at its age and iron skin and the hideous decay in the face of the woman she loved.

Somewhere inside her own head, a woman looked into the eyes of a girl she'd once loved and recalled the existence of a betrayal so old she couldn't remember why, or what had been worth giving this up.

Cannon slapped Siddiq. The girl within had for a moment forgotten thirteen hundred years of combat experience, and so the blow broke her neck.

Kallus braced his shock pistol, face drawn tight as if he were nerving himself to fire.

“Oh, put it down,” said Cannon. She dropped Siddiq to the deck. The Captain landed hard, her neck at a strange angle, her eyes blinking. Cannon knelt and picked up a small, blank rectangle that had tumbled from the woman's fist. “She threw the fight to protect this…”

“A data card?”

“Maybe…” Cannon handed it to him. “Go figure it out, right now, someplace safe. I'm guessing that card carries something very bad for
Polyphemus
's health.”

“Captain Cannon,” the starship said, her voice echoing softly along the passageway. “An unknown ship is on a fast intercept course from the surface of Sidero. I am attempting to peel IFF data.”

“Whatever it is they think they're doing, they're missing an important piece.” She nudged Siddiq with her toe. “Lock down against the incoming. No landing clearance; hell, no response to comms transmissions. Have the pair-master teams go dark again, if they've lifted security. Everybody else inside the hull and button it up solid.” If the ship carried an antimatter bomb, they were dead anyway. Anything else could wait.

The Before Michaela Cannon bent to gather up the still-breathing body of her oldest lover. Raisa weighed almost nothing in her arms, as if the long years had subtracted substance from her instead of armoring both their hearts beyond all recognition.

“Where are you heading?” asked Kallus, the data card clutched in his hand.

“Sick bay.”

S
HIPMIND
,
P
OLYPHEMUS

She watched the Captain—Captain Cannon—chase everyone out of sick bay. Even the wounded. Four of Kallus's men showed up to guard the hatch while emergency surgery continued in the passageway outside. Inside, Cannon laid Siddiq into an operating pod and began digging through the combat medicine gear.

“Do you require assistance?” the starship asked.

“No.” She glanced around the room. “Yes. I don't know, damn it, I'm not a surgeon.”

“What is your goal? I can summon a surgeon from outside to assist you.”

Cannon found a tray of vibrascalpels. “I've amputated more limbs than that fool has ever sewn back on. Nobody ever
understands
who we Befores are. In any case, Siddiq is too dangerous to continue as she was.” She looked up again, as if seeking to meet
Polyphemus
's nonexistent eyes. The starship recognized this as significantly atavistic behavior. The odds of both Befores succumbing to temporal psychosis in the same moment were very slim, but certainly possible.

“I'm not going to let her die,” Cannon continued. “Too many of us have been lost. Too many memories. But I can't let her
live
, either.” She added in Classical English, “So I'm going to fucking compromise.”

Polyphemus
realized that the Before Michaela Cannon was crying.

The woman grabbed a set of lines, sorting through them. “Blood, plasm, thermals, neural interconnects.” She gave a bird-mad grin. “Just like open-heart surgery. No modern hospital would have this crap—too crude—but here in deep space, we're all third-millennium medical science.”

Then she began the bloody, rapid process of severing Siddiq's head.

S
IDDIQ, ABOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

The Before Raisa Siddiq dreamed. Mines, deep as the core of planets. A love sold away in the heat of combat. Asteroids rich in heavy metals. Women walking in sunlight with their hands twined together. Hidden troves of ice in hard vacuum. A petulant starship and a new mind, beastly eager to be born. A man in red robes with archaic lenses and the manners of another age.

When she tried to open her eyes, she found only more dreaming. This time she screamed, though her voice had no power behind it, so she keened like a broken bird until a sad man came and turned her down.

C
ANNON, ABOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

The Before Michaela Cannon watched as the Ekumen priest stepped cautiously out of the hatch of his strange little starship. It looked to be Polity-era equipment, which was curious. He seemed taken aback at what he saw.

“I seek the Captain,” the priest said, straightening and heaving his burden—a medical carrier.

For a strange, blinding moment, she wondered if he had brought yet another severed head.

“I am the Captain,” Cannon said, stepping out of the crowd of Kallus's men and reluctant neutrals led by Testudo, the engineering subchief. The mutiny was collapsing under its own weight, bereft of both leadership and goal.

She had promised herself the pleasure of a quiet purge, later.

“Ah, Captain Siddiq is indisposed?” By the tone of his voice, Cannon knew this man understood his game was already lost.

“Permanently so, you may rest assured.” Her hand waved to take in the blood-spattered front of her armor. “You will now declare the contents of your box, Father.”

“Medical supplies.” His head bobbed slightly with the lie. “At the Cap—At Captain Siddiq's request.”

Kallus hurried close, whispering, “I didn't want to put this on comms. That card was a memebomb. Would have melted
Polyphemus
's mentarium like a butter stick between a whore's thighs.”

“Where is the data card now?” she asked, her eyes on the priest.

“I destroyed it.”

Cannon doubted she'd ever know the truth of that. She shrugged the thought off and advanced on the newcomer. “Give it up, Father, and you might live to make the trip home.”

“Goulo,” the priest said sadly. “Father Goulo.” He added something in a language she didn't speak, then bent to touch the controls on the end of the box.

She didn't have seconds-subjective. Burning her reserves, the Before Michaela Cannon took three long, hard strides and launched herself at the priest. His fingers touched the controls just before her feet met his chest. The box exploded beneath her, the blast lifting her against the hull of his ship even as it shredded his face and body.

Cannon hit the deck with a hard, wet thump and slid. She felt compressed, flattened to nothing, but she was still alive. Conscious, even.

So much for the secret of her body armor. It was almost worth the look on Kallus's face when he reached her side to see her raising her hand for help.

S
HIPMIND
,
P
OLYPHEMUS

“Captain,” the starship said.

Cannon was on her third day in the sick bay, and getting mad about it. In the shipmind's experience, this was a good sign. “What?” she snarled.

She'd been staring at the head of Siddiq, floating now in a preservative tank with a jackleg tangle of hoses and tubes and wires joining to the neck stump. The eyes opened sometimes to flicker back and forth, but there was never any point of focus that
Polyphemus
could identify.

“Pair-master team is back on schedule and anticipates meeting the original milestones.”

“Good. Then we can go—” She stopped and laughed bitterly. “I was about to say ‘home.' How foolish of me.”

The starship didn't know what to say to that, so she pushed on. “We have not yet identified Gimel from Plan Green. Kallus is not certain of the name of the other leader.”

“Then Kallus is protecting them for a reason.” Cannon sounded very tired. “That makes this Kallus's problem. While I do trust the man not to be deeply stupid, please inform him that I will add his head to my collection if Gimel resurfaces.”

“So noted.”
Polyphemus
forwarded a clip of the Captain's words to Kallus.

“And, ship…”

“Yes, Captain?”

“I think she's been talking to me. Keep an eye on her, will you?”

Polyphemus
watched the Before Michaela Cannon slip into a troubled sleep. After a while, Siddiq's eyes opened. Her mouth began to move, bubbling slightly. The shipmind analyzed the words forming on the cyanotic lips.

The quantum matrix in the severed head was speaking. It rambled on about mining techniques in low-gravity, high-temperature conditions.

A voice box is required
, the starship told herself.
Some sort of output interface. The personality is gone, but the data remains. All has not been lost here.

A library of ancient knowledge, to be accessed at need.

Wondering what it might be like for her Captain to be as fully embedded in hardware as she herself was, the starship withdrew her attentions from the sleeping Before and her muttering lover.
Polyphemus
needed to examine the forensic reports from the death of Father Goulo, and contemplate the future.

It was good to have a Captain.

Born in Essex, England, but now living in Crete, Neal Asher started writing at the age of sixteen, but didn't explode into public print until a few years ago; a quite prolific author, he now seems to be everywhere at once. His stories have appeared in
Asimov's, Interzone, The Agony Column, Hadrosaur Tales
, and elsewhere, and have been collected in
Runcible Tales, The Engineer
, and
Mason's Rats
. His extremely popular novels include
Gridlinked, Cowl, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, The Engineer Reconditioned, Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity
, and
Hill-diggers
. His most recent books are a new novel,
The Line War
, and a new collection,
The Gabble and Other Stories
.

In the headlong adventure that follows, he reaffirms the wisdom of that old advice about never getting involved in religious disputes. Particularly
alien
religious disputes…

I
woke up panicking in the middle of the night, or rather what we called night aboard the
Gnostic
, sure that something catastrophic had happened. Then I realized that the gravplates weren't fluxing and that what I was experiencing was entirely due to the new drinks synthesizer Ormod had installed in the refectory. I settled back to try and sleep again, and found myself worrying about the disastrous course of my life and how it would probably end the next time some suicidal impulse overtook me—probably when I went to feed our cargo. I got up and took a couple of Alcotox and a sleeping pill, chased down with a pint of water, then returned to bed, sure I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep—then, seemingly an instant later, woke to the sound of the day bell.

As I sat up, the lights in my cabin flared into life. I peered at my clothes, crumpled on the floor, and at the general disarray, and again contemplated how it had come to this. At a standard two hundred years old, I was now hopefully getting through that watershed for the immortal when it's possible to drown, that period of their lives when people suddenly decide that free-climbing mile-high tower blocks or swimming with great white sharks might be a fun thing to do—and I agree, they were.

At age one hundred and seventy, I'd been safely installed in a design job at Bionic Plastics, had enough credit stacked up to afford a flat in New York and a beach apartment on the Dubai coast, and to not be too worried if Bionic Plastics should kick me out. I'd also just finished my fourth marriage and was contemplating doing the tourist thing and going world-hopping. Then, suddenly, none of it seemed enough; I was bored, terminally bored, just felt like I was no longer alive. The risk-taking started then; the usual stuff, though I credit myself for inventing lava skiing, which is somewhat risky. Then came my great idea: get out of the cir
cuit altogether, head somewhere really remote, and truly experience the alien. I sold everything, stepped from world to world to the very edge of the Polity, the Line, and there spent decades doing some things…well, let's just say that the Grim Reaper must have been sharpening his scythe in anticipation of a sure harvest. A few years ago, I decided to crew on some cruiser, probably because I had finally started to calm down. I found the
Gnostic
on a world where real coffee and a working coldsuit were the height of culture.

Outstanding.

I'd been on the
Gnostic
for a year now as a standard crewman, which basically meant I got the shit jobs the broken-down robots couldn't manage.

Stepping carefully from my bed, I picked up my discarded clothing and shoved it in the sanitizer, then pulled out some fresh clothes from one of the enormous cupboards in my huge cabin—cupboards that contained empty racks for pulse-rifles. Next, I pulled on monofilament overalls, and took up my armored gauntlets, visor, and stun stick. I followed this routine every morning, because every morning, it was feeding time. I stepped out of the cabin to be greeted by Ormod strolling down the corridor.

The captain of the
Gnostic
was a partial choudapt: the result of splicing human DNA with the genetic code of an alien species like giant woodlice, which were kept as pets on a world where the culture had gone the full biotech route, and even lived in cysts on giant seaweed floating in the warm seas. He stood about two meters tall, and looked like a heavily built hunchback with segmented armoring over his hump. His wide head lacked a neck, and mandibles ran down his jawline to fold up before his mouth. His ears were bat-like, his eyes pure blue, and his hair was styled in the cut and queue of a Samurai, to match the armor of those ancient warriors, which he wore over skin all shades of white, blue, and cerise. And I don't think he was entirely sane, which, though I seemed to be easing off on the self-destruct, was probably why I had decided to crew for him.

He parted the mandibles over his mouth and grinned distractedly to expose teeth sharpened to points. “Feed the little darlings?”

“It seems my lot in life,” I replied.

He patted me on the shoulder and moved on up toward the bridge, which lay about half a mile away. I headed on down toward cargo holds big enough to lose a couple of cathedrals in.

At the end of the corridor, I reached a drop-shaft, which had ceased to
function five days ago. Grav still operated down below, so I had to climb a fifty-foot ladder affixed to the side of the shaft, which wasn't so bad going down, but got a bit tiresome on the way back up. I'd queried the
Gnostic
's AI about this, and had gotten in response some obscure poetry by William Blake about invisible worms and roses. It seemed I'd gone for the full set—not only was the captain of this ship crazy, so was its artificial intelligence. It could perform its main task of operating the U-space engines to eventually get us to the required destination, but everything else seemed to be falling by the wayside. I often wondered how long it would be before the AI ceased to function at all, and stranded us out in the middle of nowhere.

Then again, perhaps all these faults were due to the huge structural alterations that had been made to the ship, because when I checked records, they showed that the
Gnostic
had started as a trapezoidal Polity dreadnought with external U-space engines. Now it looked like a set of pipes from an ancient church organ, with the U-engines located in the smallest pipe. I could see no reason at all for this, other than that it might reflect the unstable condition of the mind controlling the ship.

At the bottom of the ladder, I stepped out of the drop-shaft, reached around, and hit the manual control for the lights, which sometimes came on automatically, but on this occasion did not. Star lights in the ceiling suffused the massive space of Hold One with an eerie blue glow. From where I stood, I could not see the far wall. To my right lay an aisle between cargo containers and racks, down which lay the far wall, a mile away. Putting on my visor and pulling on my gauntlets, I headed to the left, where the “little darlings” were located—a cargo that had been aboard
Gnostic
for two years with seemingly no place to go.

The cargo containers here were stacked two high, each twenty-five feet square and fifty feet long, with a chain-glass sheet with an access door inset across one end. I climbed stairs leading up to a gantry giving access to the second level of containers to begin my work. Like all the others, the first container had the door set high up, because the floor level lay three meters up to accommodate a deep hollow with frictionless sides within the container. Turning on the internal light, I carefully peered inside, checking each corner, and around the boxes of perma-sealed food animals and the small handler I used to move their contents. Nothing in sight, but shindles had a tendency to stack themselves up in the side of the hollow to throw out their dying, which usually went to find a dark corner in which to expire. When they were in this condition, they were especially danger
ous, often unable to distinguish any warm living body from their usual hosts, and anxious to deposit the eggs their kind produced at the end of their short lives. Making sure I had missed nothing, I took up a breather mask that was beside the door, put it on under my visor, then stepped inside, drawing my stun stick, and went over to the food boxes.

First, I poked the stun stick between the boxes and down the gap between them and the wall, to be sure nothing was lurking out of sight. Sure then that I was safe, I opened one circular expanded-plasmel box, a meter across and half that deep, and gazed inside. The first thing that always struck me was the beauty of the shells of these food animals, then the familiarity. They just looked like big flat snails, like ammonites, colored in iridescent hues. Enclosed in a thin layer of impermeable plastic, these huge mollusks were in a state of suspended animation, started by themselves but chemically maintained. I picked up the control for the handler, and it lifted up on maglev and drifted over. Using the various toggle switches, I had it slide its fork tines under the box and lift it. I then pulled the ravel tag off the box and watched the expanded-plasmel begin to decay, drip to the floor, and evaporate. By the time I brought the handler to the edge of the hollow, the box was gone, with only the big mollusk in its impermeable coating remaining. Another ravel tag set that coating expanding into a wet jelly that fell away in clumps while I turned to gaze down into the hollow.

A great tangle of hair-thin, almost transparent, worms squirmed and writhed below me. It offended my sense of aesthetics that so large and beautiful a mollusk was to be sacrificed to keep these horrible squirmy little things alive. However, what was left of my suicide impulse countered with this: the things were very dangerous to feed, and it seemed likely that if Earth Central Security discovered that we were keeping them aboard, we would end up facing reprogramming or even a death sentence. Certainly the
Gnostic
AI would be taken away for reprogramming, and Ormod would lose the ship. This was because the one small colony of the creatures that had been found were being regraded to Sentience Level 3, with lots of provisos about hivemind potential. They were intelligent, apparently, and speculation abounded that their ancestors had arrived at their current location in the Polity in some sort of spaceship.

I ordered the handler to drop in the big snail, which was now starting to move. It landed just to one side of the main tangle of shindles and stuck out one big slimy white foot to right itself. It then immediately started heading away just as fast as it could, which wasn't very fast at all. In a moment, the shindles sensed its presence, all of them orientating toward
it—then they flowed onto and around it like syrup, engulfing it and then beginning to penetrate it.

These shindles were very different from those in the colony that had been discovered. They were much smaller, thinner, and transparent rather than white. Also, being surprisingly long-lived, their aim now seemed not just to lay eggs but to feed on the mollusk from the inside. Usually it took them many years to kill their hosts, but there were a lot of them, and our supply of the big snails was limited. It would take about half an hour before the snail started to expire, then in two days' time I would fish out the empty shell for disposal. Intelligent, indeed! I just saw squirmy parasites.

I was stepping into the third cargo container when the
Gnostic
shuddered and I felt an odd twisting sensation in my gut. The ship had come out of underspace too early, and it wasn't until an hour later, after feeding the rest of our collection of shindles and returning to the living quarters, that I found out why.

 

“It seem
Gnostic
find 'nother wreckage,” said Parsival.

She was slender, not particularly pretty, and perhaps the least screwed-up member of the crew. At a mere thirty, she was still far away from her two-century watershed. She came from an out-Polity world with no connection to the runcible network that was rarely visited by ships. She'd just taken the first opportunity that came along; that that opportunity was the
Gnostic
was perhaps unfortunate. She might have chosen badly, but she had promised to serve aboard for two years, and still had three months to go. Slowly, she'd begun to grasp standard Anglic.

“Any idea what it is?” I inquired, as I sat down at the refectory table.

“Captain looking,” she replied.

Gnostic
, like most ship AIs bearing the name of the ship it controlled, often took little detours to ogle some piece of spaceborne wreckage. I had always thought that the wreckage it sought must be left over from the big war that had ended just after I was born; the war between the Polity and the vicious, crablike Prador, the one the
Gnostic
was hurriedly built during and fought in. However, I was soon to learn my mistake—though
Gnostic
frequently found wreckage from that war, it certainly wasn't what it
sought
.

Pladdick, another crew member, slapped a plate down in front of me: bacon on toast. Being what passed for the engineering officer aboard this ship, he had disconnected the food synthesizer from AI control after it started providing us with raw eggs and a pile of some granular substance
none of us had attempted to eat, but now it could only be programmed for one simple meal at a time. We were all eating bacon and toast this pseudo-morning. I studied the others at the table.

Excluding Ormod, the crew of the
Gnostic
presently numbered four: Parsival; Pladdick; a squat heavy-worlder who seemed perpetually grumpy; Shanen, a standard-format human like me who talked too much (for my own health, I tried to avoid her) and who I deduced had reached that watershed stage of life I had reached thirty years back; and me, of course. All of us were present at the refectory table. Each of us, when not here or about our tasks, occupied one of the large number of enormous staterooms (previously bunkrooms for troops) always kept available in case anyone should want to pay to be a passenger. Ormod often complained about the lack of business from that source, and put it down to the ease and convenience of runcible travel between worlds. He never seemed to notice that other ships were quite often packed with passengers, and never questioned why such people might want to avoid this ship. However, this trip was unusual, since we actually
did
have a passenger. I glanced around as she entered.

Professor Elvira Mace wore a utile envirosuit, had twinned augmentations, and very infrequently ventured out of the computer architecture she had created in them. I knew her to be an expert in some obscure branch of alien computer science, but beyond that, knew very little about her. She only communicated when she wanted something, which was not often.

“Why have we left U-space?” she asked as she sat at the table.

“The AI running this ship—if ‘running' is really the correct term—seems to be looking for something,” babbled Shanen. “However, it's probably only found another chunk of Prador dreadnought or a space station. The last time,
Gnostic
found a Prador itself, still in its armored spacesuit. It was in suspended animation, but our lovable AI roasted it with one of the forward particle cannons.” Shanen gazed around at the others at the table. “I didn't even know this ship was still armed until then.”