The Skinner (56 page)

‘Nothing much wrong,’ muttered Ron, then, looking up at Ambel, ‘What are
you
waiting for?’

Ambel turned to Anne. ‘Get everyone to cover. Boris and Roach should be back soon. When they arrive, go and find Peck and Forlam. Wherever they are, wait there with them,’ he said.
Then he turned to Janer and indicated the laser carbine. ‘You come with me.’

Janer gave a terse nod, then followed the Captain into the dingle.

Svan halted at the edge of a wide clearing, resting her weapon on the ground, then quickly unclipped the section of hot armour on her side. Underneath, her clothing was charred
and it crumbled when she touched it. However, the burn on her skin wasn’t as bad as she had expected. She took a spray from the medpack on her belt to deaden the pain, coating it with
synthiskin. The armour section felt hard and brittle, but she clipped it back into place anyway. What now, she wondered; what the hell do I do now?

She stood and took a drink from her water bottle, before moving on through the dingle. Her satlink position finder rendered her the information that she was located on one of the Segre Islands,
and showed her as a little dot near the centre of that island. Beyond telling her that, it was useless to her and she had little clue as to where she was and where she must go next. She’d
lost sight of Frisk almost immediately, and cursed herself for letting the woman continue to carry a laser with its power pack disconnected. Frisk had been their only chance to get away, and now
she was on the run, unarmed, with a half-crazed monitor with an APW in pursuit. Svan did not rate Frisk’s chances very highly. So what must she now do? She had no idea which direction the
madwoman had taken, just as she had no idea where Shib had gone. Though, in his case, she did not really want to know: if she ever saw him again he was dead.

Svan decided to keep moving, her best option seeming to head downhill towards the coast. Her first priority was to get off this island, and then off this damned planet with all its weird people
and weirder animals. She moved fast, aware of sounds in the dingle around her, and determined to survive. After an hour, she heard the first screams, and recognized them as Shib’s. She would
not have bothered changing direction to help him, but the screams came from straight ahead of her, where the dingle thickened.

Svan was heading into deeper shade, where the trees were tall and debris lay thick on the ground heaped in thick drifts spotted with orange fungi. She noticed the tracks of some kind of large
animal and some of the tall stalk-trunks had clearly been gnawed on. Animals didn’t worry her, but the cause of those screams did. Eventually, Svan saw a white shape hanging in a peartrunk
tree ahead of her, and immediately knew what it was.

Shib had stopped screaming by the time she reached him, though he was groaning and gasping, occasionally weeping. Someone had suspended him naked by his feet from the branches of a peartrunk
tree. Runnels of blood crisscrossed his body, and below him crawled the sated leeches that had fed and dropped away. Attached to him there were four still feeding. His feet had been totally
stripped, but from his ankles downward the bloody holes cut into him grew increasingly disperse. He’d lost so much blood and flesh, yet he still remained conscious. Svan wondered if those who
had done this to him had known that suspending someone upside-down prevented them from fainting and that, with his strength, Shib would probably lose half his flesh before he died. She watched as a
leech fell from him, setting him into a slow turn. He looked at her with his remaining eye.

‘Svan,’ he whispered.

There was such pleading in the single word that Svan aimed her weapon at his head for a long moment, then slowly swung it away. Another leech was already making its questing way down his leg,
and Shib started gasping again. She knew, from long experience in such matters, that in a moment he would start screaming again. If she intervened and stopped his screams, that would forewarn
anyone ahead of her presence, so, without further acknowledgement, she walked away.

Shib’s renewed torment soon echoed through the dingle. Svan paused for just a moment before moving determinedly on. The next scream sent her into a trot, then a run, convinced that she
wasn’t running from him and what was happening to him: she had to move fast, just get out of here. Suddenly, ahead of her, she spotted three figures. They turned as she approached, one of
them raising Shib’s weapon.

In one smooth motion, Svan dropped to her knees and aimed.

‘Drop it! Now!’ she shouted.

The one called Roach tossed the weapon to the ground while Svan stared at him in disbelief, trying to comprehend how the hell he’d got here. Keeping all three of them in her sights, she
stood and slowly advanced. The other one, with the moustache, she also recognized from the ship Frisk had torched. The third one, who was leaning on a stick and didn’t look so good, she did
not recognize.

‘You,’ she gestured at him. ‘Who are you?’

‘Bugger you,’ was his only reply.

Svan considered wasting him right there, but she desperately needed to get off this island, and for that she needed help. She moved closer. Suddenly the ground erupted in front of her in a
purple flash. As the blast flung her back, she felt her grip on consciousness slipping, and fought it. Burning debris rained down while she rolled and tried to stand. The flat of a hand slapped her
back to the ground and her weapon was tugged from her grasp as easily as from a child. After a moment she was hauled to her feet and suspended in front of the bulky shape of Drum.

‘Where is she?’ demanded Drum, then flung her to the ground again. In her struggle to sit upright, Svan backed into someone else. Hearing a hiss, she turned and gaped in horror at
the man right behind her.

‘Giss a kiss, girlsy,’ said Forlam, waving his leech tongue at her.

Frisk was just ahead of him, yet managing to stay frustratingly out of reach. Keech tried firing his APW, but it dropped into cutting mode and spat out a purple bar only a
metre from its snout. As she dodged behind a stand of putrephallus, his second shot went on full power and blew up a wall of burning vegetation. Lung birds dropped squawking and burning from the
sky.

‘Frisk!’ bellowed Keech as he ran on after the swiftly retreating silhouette. Glancing down at the displays on his APW he saw that the remaining charge was very low, but
couldn’t even be sure if that reading was accurate. Best to save his shots, so he ran even harder. It felt good. It felt good to run and to feel anger. With surprise he realized he
hadn’t enjoyed himself so much for . . . seven hundred years.

Ahead, the ground began to drop away again. Keech realized he had passed the highest point of the island and that from now on, on the way down, the dingle would begin to thicken again. He
couldn’t afford to let her get there. He just could not let her get away. The prospect of chasing her around this entire sector for the next couple of centuries filled him with total dismay.
It had to end now!
Today
.

Suddenly he spotted her clear ahead of him, and couldn’t resist firing. The APW emitted a stuttering pulse, a sure sign of it reaching the end of its charge. But he dared not stop to
change canisters now. He might lose her. He could lose her at any moment. He saw her glance back. She must be well aware what that disperse emission from an APW signified.

‘You’ll have to do better than that, Keech!’ she shouted.

He fired yet again, damning himself as he did so, but unable to do otherwise. This time there was light, but no fire, no damage.

Suddenly Frisk was running towards him, screaming, her face twisted with hate. He continued to aim his APW at her, its trigger depressed. Spurts of fire started her clothing smouldering, but the
weapon put out nothing effective. He dropped it to pull out his pulse-gun. His first shot slammed into her left bicep, gouging a chunk of muscle and spraying fragments behind. His second shot caved
in her stomach and bowed her almost double, but did not slow her. There was no third shot, for by then she had slammed into him like a collapsing wall.

Keech went down with Frisk on top of him, the pulse-gun spinning away. She hammered a fist into his face – once, twice. He felt his cheekbone break, and aug contacts discharge under his
skin. Then she was off him, and hauling him to his feet. She was
strong
, strong as an Old Captain. Keech found himself airborne, then lost all his breath as he slammed into a tree trunk.
Leeches started falling about him.

‘This body,’ croaked Frisk, ‘is all old Hooper.’ She pressed down on the mess he had made of her arm, then made a horrible groaning sound. As she slowly paced towards
him, Keech was struggling to recover his breath and to beat away leeches that were oozing towards him. He’d need a lot more than his slowly returning heavy-worlder strength to defeat her.

‘I should have done this myself long ago. I should never have left it to hired killers,’ she sneered. ‘First I think I’ll tear your arms off.’

Keech began breathing slowly and evenly. He recalled she had always been a talker, had always loved going into detail about how she was going to kill her victim. Anticipation was a large part of
the pleasure for her. She came to loom over him, then bent and grabbed the front of his overall to haul him to his feet. In one quick motion, he brought both his hands to her throat and, as he
closed them with all his strength, she laughed in his face.

‘I know it’s not enough,’ he said. ‘You may kill me now, but the machine that is me will keep working after I am dead. So go ahead and tear my arms off.’

Slow realization dawned on her as he initiated the cybermotors in his fingers and completely relinquished his mental control of them.

His fingers began to close on her hard Hooper neck.

Even with its wavering unbalanced gait, the Skinner easily stayed ahead of them. They only gained on it when it fell, or when it needed to shove its way through thickening
dingle, but wherever there was open ground it quickly pulled ahead again. Ambel just kept going at the same dogged pace, though Janer was beginning to find the chase exhausting. He had reached the
stage where he felt he must soon quit, when the Skinner began to stumble and show signs of slowing.

‘Now we have you, my lad,’ growled Ambel.

The Skinner suddenly fell forwards in a rocky open space, sprawled out like something dead washed up by the tide. They quickly moved in and, with grim purpose, Ambel approached it holding his
machete to his side. Janer stood back and watched with morbid fascination as the machete whistled down.

Thunk
. A diseased leg jerked away. On the backstroke, he took off the Skinner’s remaining hand. Janer stared at the head: the hate-filled black eyes and gaping mouth. There was no
sign on it of the yellow that denoted sprine poisoning, and it had nearly detached itself from the body.

‘Ambel!’ he yelled in warning, then began firing.

Ambel turned and hurled his machete. It struck rocks with a ringing clash that sent sparks skittering into the air. Janer set those same rocks smoking as he pressed the trigger down and kept on
firing. Thumping between the rocks like a pig escaping the slaughterman, the head moved quickly into cover. They ran to the spot where it had disappeared, and stared down at a dark hole cut deep
into the ground. Janer crouched forward, pushed the snout of his carbine into the cavity, and pulled back on the trigger. Nothing at all happened. He stepped away and peered at the carbine’s
display. Empty.

‘Bugger,’ said Ambel.

They continued to gaze into the hole, and Janer even thought he caught the glint of eyes looking back out.

‘We could bury it in there,’ Janer suggested.

Ambel shook his head. ‘It’d only dig its way out again. Just one thing for it.’ With the power of a machine he stooped, gripped rock, and broke it away from the edge of the
hole, then reached down for more. There was a tenacity in the Captain Janer found a little difficult to comprehend.

‘Why wasn’t the sprine killing the head too?’ he asked.

‘Had never fully connected itself. I wounded the body,’ said Ambel, still relentlessly pulling away rock. Janer watched him a while longer, then removed his own backpack, extracting
from it the hexagonal box. He couldn’t help feeling a certain inevitability about this moment.

‘I have a way we can kill it,’ he said. ‘All I need is a crystal of sprine.’

‘
At last
,’ breathed the Hive mind.

Ebulan reached out with rigid control, and Pilot touched and manipulated the various complex controls to start AG and warm the thrusters. Through another blank, the Prador put
the weapons console online and checked the loads. All readings were optimum. The rear nacelles contained a hundred and forty-four missiles fitted with CTDs, as well as cluster and planar
explosives. There were four defence lasers and two giga-joule particle beams. Even the old rail-guns were in perfect order, and had carousels full of ceramo-carbide missiles that could be fired at
half the speed of light.

Meanwhile other blanks were running on the slave programs loaded into their thrall units, maintaining the ship, or standing ready to replace Pilot or the blank seated at the weapons console, all
ready and equipped with hull patches and fire retardants, should the ship be hit.

The Prador destroyer rose out of the trench spilling an accumulation of silt and broken shell from its upper surfaces. It rose past heirodonts pausing in the depths for one brief respite in
their painful lives, till finally it came up underneath an island of sargassum. As it rose it hauled up tonnes of seaweed with it, so that leeches and prill cascaded about it in organic rain. For a
short while the hull matched the colour and texture of the floating mass of seaweed, then a line of fire traversed the ship, from its sensor arrays to its rear thrusters. Weed exploded from the
armoured hull and fell flaming into the sea. Clouds of superheated steam were blasted away, then recondensed in an expanding cloud as the destroyer began to move. As it tilted, the sea below it
flattened, then three evenly spaced thrusters blasted ribbed blue flames, and with a crash the destroyer accelerated into the sky.