The Skinner (24 page)

Peck looked at Pland, who was standing at the bows with two juniors. The three of them had dropped lines over the side and were trulling for boxies.
Nothing to worry about. Everything was
fine.
But then the whispering started again: a kind of hungry pleading.

‘Wants some buggering sea-cane does he?’ Peck said loudly.

Pland glanced at him. ‘Get it from the stern. I don’t want you stirring it too much here.’

Peck nodded, then moved to one of the rail lockers, where he pulled out a coil of rope and a grappling hook. He walked then to one side of the stern end of the ship, hurled the grappling hook
out, and began hauling away. Soon the hook snagged one of the sea-cane plants, and he pulled carefully until it slid up to lodge in the tangle at the plant’s head, then he increased the
pressure. With a puff of black silt the plant came up out of the sea bottom. He drew it in to the edge of the ship then hauled it up hand-over-hand as far as the rail. With it draped half over the
rail, he grasped the stalk, which was as thick as a man’s leg, pulled out his panga, and with one blow cut off the hand-like root and anchor stone to which it was clinging. Root and stone
splashed back into the sea, while the rest of the plant flopped on to the deck, its gourds thudding down like severed heads, scattering small leeches, trumpet shells, and coin-sized prill across
the planks. Peck then spent a happy five minutes stamping on the prill and leeches, and dropping trumpet shells into a cast-iron bait box. During that time he forgot the whispering, but when he had
finished it returned stronger than ever.

Come . . .

With a sweat breaking out, Peck clung to the rail – then he swore and headed for the rear hold. Down below decks, he muttered to himself and crashed barrels about with more vigour than was
entirely necessary. Two barrels he hoisted out on to the deck before climbing out of the hold and rolling them over towards the sea-cane. After opening the barrels, he stamped on the few leeches he
had missed, then began plucking gourds and tossing them into the first barrel.

Need . . .

‘Shaddup! Buggering shaddup!’

The stalk of the sea-cane Peck sliced up with single panga blows so each fragrant section fell into the second barrel. The ribbed red-and-green skin of the cane stalk was only a thin sheath
covering a gooey yellow honeycomb that smelt strongly of aniseed. Peck scooped up the tangled top and tossed it back over the side, before quickly snatching up the grappling hook and casting it out
into the water again.
It’s a coward
, he thought, as he yanked in another cane.
It’s only this loud when the Captain ain’t aboard.
But today the whispering was
particularly strong. He’d never known it as persistent as this before. But this time he would resist. It was only when he had dealt with the second sea-cane, which had nicely filled both
barrels, that he remembered that Ambel kept the salt-yeast in his cabin. Then the whisper became even more intense, even more
eager.
With elaborate care, Peck returned the rope and grappling
hook to the locker before clinging tight to the rail again. He clung there for as long as he could, but a horrible fascination eventually turned him round to stare towards the Captain’s
cabin. After a moment he walked to the door and – out of Pland’s view – he ducked inside.

The pain
. The pain had been transcendent. It had taken Peck somewhere he had never before been. There had been a terrible understanding in it, too. It had been given to him so he might
understand, yet he had failed. Peck stood over the sea-chest with his sweat dripping on to the ornately carved wood. Here, concealed in this box, was something that all Hoopers – with their
ambivalent relationship with pain – could not but fear and worship at the same time.

I mustn’t . . .

It was so
hungry
, and if he fed it, the whispering would stop. Peck abruptly turned from the cabin and ran out on to the deck. For a moment he stood there gasping, hoping it would just
cease. That subtle voice suggested untold pleasure and pain so intermingled they were indistinguishable. He had to silence it, so if food would do the trick, then food it must be. He reached into
the barrel where they kept the sail’s feed and pulled out the last, rather putrid rhinoworm steak. He headed back into the Captain’s cabin and opened the chest.

It was there in the box; moving about in the box. Peck studied the secured lock and felt a strange relief.

I tried . . .

Then the lock clicked.

Oh bugger.

Gliding on thermals rising from banks of sun-heated coral, Windcheater observed the motorized dinghy as it hurtled for the shore, the wake of a chasing rhino-worm close behind
it. Steam and explosions of water blew from around that wake as the figure crouched in the back of the dinghy tried to hit the pursuing worm with a high-intensity laser. Windcheater recognized this
because only recently he had been scanning, with wonder and no little dismay, a weapon-dealer’s site.

‘They’re bounty hunters. Batian killers. I already know about them,’ said the Warden, as the sail tried to describe what he was seeing – he hadn’t yet quite
mastered transferring images across from his visual cortex.

Windcheater banked, riding out of the thermal and away from the island. Hadn’t there been something about Batians on that weapons site? The sail resisted the impulse to go back to the
place as he had more than enough to chew on concerning humankind. As he flew on, he auged through to any easily accessible information about his own kind, and was surprised to find how much and how
little was known.

Polity experts knew that sails fed from the surface of the sea, taking rhinoworms, glisters, prill from the back of leeches – and sometimes leeches themselves. The speculation that they
took to the ships for an easier food supply and a less hazardous existence was, of course, entirely wrong. Strange how the humans tried to classify the behaviour of any other species as relating
only to ‘animal’ traits. Windcheater was completely certain that he and his kin had taken to the ships out of curiosity. It was much more difficult working as a ship sail for just a few
steaks than snatching a whole worm from the sea and devouring it on the wing. Silly, arrogant humans.

The information section concerning sail mating was of huge interest to Windcheater. He had known for a long time that humans were divided into two sexes, and how all
that
operated –
he had often been aboard a ship during one of the frequent Hooper meets, though why it was necessary to consume prodigious quantities of sea-cane rum and boiled hammer whelks before the sexual act,
he had never been able to fathom. What he had not been aware of was that his own kind had
four
sexes. Anyway, during the mating season, he had never really had much chance to think about the
mechanisms that drove him to such exhausting madness. Three males required to fertilize one female egg, and that egg then encysted and stuck, in its cocoon, on the side of the Big Flint. Hence,
what a human far in the past had described as ‘that rock-top orgy’.

Windcheater flew on, heading for the horizon of Spatterjay, and all the new horizons he was now discovering. He was but a speck by the time the Batians beached their dinghy in a spray of sand
and opened fire en masse on the rhinoworm that reared out of the sea behind them.

The worm dropped, flaming, back into the sea, writhed there for a moment as if still intent on coming on to the beach after them, and then grew still. Shib let out a shuddering
breath, then quickly wiped at the sweat that was stinging his eyes.

‘Great idea using an inflatable dinghy to get out here. Real classic, that one,’ he snarled.

‘Shut up, Shib,’ said Svan, as she watched the leeches surfacing to take apart the laser-cooked rhino-worm. ‘You know what would happen if we used AG here. The Warden would be
up our asses with a thermite grenade about two seconds later.’

‘Yeah, but—’

Svan made a chopping motion with her hand. ‘Enough. You either handle it or you don’t.’

Shib shut up. He knew Svan wasn’t suggesting he could pay back the deposit and go home. Employment contracts with first-rankers like her either ended with a large payout or in a rather
terminal manner. He nodded when she gestured towards the boat, then slung his carbine from his shoulder and headed over to the vessel. Upon reaching it, he immediately clicked on the little rotary
pump. Joining him, Dime hauled out their packs and tossed them on to the pebbled beach. Shib detached and collapsed the telescopic outboard, and then he and Dime stood back as the dinghy quickly
collapsed and shrivelled. The rolled-up dinghy was no wider than a man’s wrist, and with its motor locked beside it, formed a pack that could be tucked under an arm. Dime carried this to the
head of the beach and slid it under a spread of sheetlike leaves growing there. Soon all four of them had loaded up their packs and were heading along the beach.

‘Why here?’ Tors asked after a moment.

‘A location easy to find – and our client has business here,’ Svan replied.

Half listening to the conversation, Shib kept his eyes on the dingle. A hideous bird-thing observed him from the branches of a tree with a hugely globular trunk. He had thought the creature dead
and decaying until it had moved to follow their progress with its glistening eye-pits. He suppressed his immediate inclination to burn it from its branch. No doubt Svan would take that as one push
too many.

‘Do you have any further information on this client?’ Tors asked.

‘Same one as has had the bounty up on Sable Keech for the last three centuries. No way of tracing the transaction without collecting, and no one has managed that yet.’

‘I don’t get how he’s lasted so long,’ said Dime, with an apologetic glance to Shib.

‘Organization, speed, luck and, thus far, seven centuries of experience. Anyway, Keech doesn’t often put himself in a position where he can be hit. Normally he operates on Polity
worlds well within AI surveillance, and spends most of his time searching through Polity databases. Not easy to get him there. When he does come somewhere like this, he’s normally well
covered. It’s surprising that he’s here alone. Maybe he’s getting careless,’ said Svan.

‘Or maybe he’s just had enough,’ said Tors.

Svan shrugged and gestured to a path cutting into the dingle opposite a jetty. ‘This looks like it,’ she said.

As they turned into the path, Shib could feel the hairs prickling on the back of his neck. He had been in some hostile places before, some where he’d had to go suited and armoured, and
some where nothing less than a fully motorized exoskeleton would do, but here he felt things were wrong right from the start. This was a casually brutal place. In the Hooper town, he’d caught
the tail-end of some sort of fight, and even he had been surprised at how easily Hoopers bore hideous injury. Then there had been the rush to head for where Keech had headed, then of course Nolan .
. . He peered round at the surrounding dingle and gripped his carbine tighter. From the dingle floor, spined frog-things regarded him with glinting blue eyes, and the foliage above bore oozing
fruit of a long and slimy variety. Was there
anywhere
here where you could let your guard down?

‘This is the place. We secure it and wait for her here,’ Svan said.

‘Her?’ asked Shib, flicking his gaze forward. Ahead of them a tower sprouted from the ground, and around it the churned earth was clear of vegetation, as if the tower itself had
sucked all goodness from it. Shib wondered where the resident ogre was.

Svan did not elaborate. Instead she turned to them.

‘Dime, take out the autogun, and any dishes on the roof. Tors, I want you to blow the door. You cover him, Shib, and hit any autos around the door.’

‘How many people here?’ Shib asked.

‘Just one old woman. We’re to hold her and wait. Our client should be along soon. Right, we go
now
.’

Dime dropped a targeting visor down over his eyes, raised his carbine, and fired four short pulses in rapid succession. As he fired, Shib and Tors ran for the door. On the roof of Olian
Tay’s residence, the satellite dishes on the pylon flared and sagged. The autogun, which had swung their way at the last moment, disappeared with a flat crack and flare, out of which black
fragments dropped to the denuded ground. Tors hit the door and slapped a small disk against the locking mechanism, while Shib covered him. They both swung themselves either side of the entrance as
the small mine blew and sent the buckled door crashing inside the building. Then they were in.

Svan walked across the clearing, carefully scanning her surroundings. She watched as Dime ran around behind the structure, and she listened as sharp cracking sounds and low detonations issued
from inside. The only noise she sensed came from Shib and Tors. This place was deserted. Either Olian Tay had struck lucky, or someone had warned her. As Svan entered the building, Dime moved in
behind her. Tors stood in the central living room, doors broken open all around, while Shib was coming down a spiral staircase to one side. She glanced at them and they both shook their heads.

Svan peered up at the ceiling. ‘House computer, where is Olian Tay?’

‘Olian Tay, Olian Tay, is over the hills and far away!’ The voice was that of a woman, and Svan had no doubt to whom it belonged. She made a sharp hand signal to Dime, who quickly
pulled an instrument from his belt and held it up.

‘Where are you?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Tay. ‘You want me to tell you that just so’s you can deliver the flowers my lover has sent.’

‘You could say that, but don’t you really want to know why we are here?’

‘That’s the way, keep me talking so’s your friend can trace a signal. Not too bright that, considering you destroyed the radio dish.’

‘You’re somewhere close, then,’ said Svan, making another sharp gesture. Shib and Tors made to duck out of the room and search, but Tay’s next reply stopped them in their
tracks.

‘Wrong, this signal is coming through a landline to a pylon on the east of the island. Right now I’m sitting in the Mackay lounge on Coram. Oh, by the way, there’s enough
explosives underneath my house to launch you four out this way as well, so I suggest you listen very carefully to me.’