Runcible Tales Read online

  Runcible Tales

  Contents:

  Always With You

  Blue Holes

  Dragon in the Flower

  The Gire and the Bibrat

  Walking John and Bird

  This isn’t my earliest collection - The Engineer published by Tanjen has that distinction (now republished as The Engineer Reconditioned by Wildside Press) - but it does contain some of my earliest stories. Here you see the Polity of my books slowly beginning to germinate. The immortal Horace Blegg puts in his enigmatic appearances while Dragon, that giant extra-galactic alien is being equally as enigmatic, people travel by runcible, the prador are out and about in a massive an almost impossible to destroy warship and there other hints of what is to come. I haven’t made many changes from the original - just tidied up some of the grammar and spelling. For example the dropshaft of my books is here called a gravity chute and apparently then I assumed ‘chute’ was ‘shoot’, so I guess I’ve learned something.

  Revisiting these stories has been interesting. They were written (I think) before I wrote the stories Spatterjay and Snairls from which the book The Skinner had its genesis. In that book humans are enslaved to the alien prador by dint of being infected by a virus that makes them physically indestructible and then being ‘cored and thralled’ - their brains and part of their spinal column removed to be replaced by a control unit. Here they are PU (Personal Unit) slaves - enslaved by a chunk of technology similar to the augmentations in my books and programmed to think the prador where allies while Polity forces were the rebels. There are other wrinkles here that I’ve lost in the books, like the weapons proscription via runcibles whereby armaments could not be transported from world to world. And the cyborgs … but they’ll be reappearing sometime soon…

  I hope you enjoy this little venture into the past of an imagined future!

  Neal Asher 3 rd August 2017

  ALWAYS WITH YOU

  Strobe-flash. An arc rod dragged too quickly across a rough surface. Out of it: a man rolling in black crabskin armour. It may have been a lucky shot. Webster did not know. He spun back and hit the wall of the corridor, slid down it, leaving bits of himself stuck to the scarred plastic. The man reappeared. He was a repro - a PU slave. Webster fired and part of the wall by the man disappeared. The last Webster saw of him was of an arm hitting the ceiling then falling to the floor.

  What damage?

  Fractured pelvis, multiple fractures of your hip-joint, severed artery-

  No need to go on. How much longer can you keep me moving?

  Another twenty minutes.

  Maybe it would be enough, maybe not. The nanomycelium holding him together was good but it could not perform miracles. Admittedly, without it he would have been dead or in shock by now. His right lung had collapsed and there was a fragment of metal lodged next to his spine, but twenty minutes? He tried to stand up.

  ‘Shit!’

  Sorry, neural blockers not ready yet. Rest a moment.

  Sure.

  He slumped back to the floor.

  If I only have twenty minutes I’ll have to move quickly.

  The whisper voice hissed disapproval.

  I know, it’s necessary though. They must not know what information has been taken.

  Your endorphin and adrenaline levels are very high.

  Take them higher if that’ll keep me going.

  You will pay, after.

  Better than dying now or the mission failing.

  You may die later.

  Yeah, so I’m really going to worry about that now.

  Webster stood, dropped his assault weapon and drew his flack pistol. His right leg was hanging like a useless pole, but leaning against the wall and getting what use out of it he could, he continued on. Bones grated in his hip and there was a foam of blood around his mouth.

  At the end of the corridor was an elliptical irised door ten metres wide. On reaching it he pressed a crystal into a code reader at its side. This was the moment when he found out if eight operatives had expended their lives to any purpose. The door irised open to expose a gravity chute wide enough to hold twenty men, but then it was not meant for men. He stepped out into space and was accelerated upwards without regard for his wounds. He heard things snapping and blood sprayed from the hole in his leg, but there was no pain, the doctor mycelium had seen to that.

  Above him, like a giant blank eye, another door irised and he was decelerated before it. Beyond, in a circular chamber, a lens shape revolved with a rattle of armoured legs. He raised his pistol and fired. Behind him the back of the grav chute disintegrated as if under the burn of a thermic lance. Webster kept on firing.

  Chitin and black blood shot in every direction as the flack shells exploded. The crablike Prador tried to back away but it had lost four of its ten legs, all from one side. Clinging to the edge of the irised opening Webster continued firing. Carapace opened to expose softly pulsating organs. One shell inside eviscerated the creature and hissing like a kettle it collapsed.

  Webster pulled himself from the chute and moved unsteadily into the control room. The Prador now lay in ruin with its three remaining legs shivering. Its claws and tertiary manipulators were gone, but its palp-eye still followed his movements. Webster paused by it and put two shells at close range into its brain-pan. It ceased to move.

  Irrational of you, Webster.

  Fich, when I want your opinion I’ll ask for it. In the meantime I’m busy.

  It was a medical observation. Your action then was dictated by the effects of your injuries.

  What price free will? But you`re wrong. What if that Prador had cerebral wiring? It could have watched everything I did and reported it.

  The doctor mycelium made no further comment and Webster surveyed the alien consoles around him. To his left was the one he required. He staggered to it and rested his hands on its crystalline surface. His vision blurred.

  Webster.

  ‘Yes ... yes, what now?’

  You were out for thirty seconds.

  Webster checked his inner clock. Fich, the nanomycelium AI that was his so very personal doctor, was correct.

  ‘Damn!... Can’t you prevent that?’

  No, else I would have.

  ‘Right, speak to me then.’

  That will not help. Incidentally, you are vocalizing.

  ‘I didn’t ask your opinion, and I know I’m speaking. Just tell me things.’

  While Webster ran his fingers over the facet controls, calling up a pictographic computer language on the hexagonal screen, Fich told him things.

  The reason for your blackout was an endocrine overload on your neural receptors. It was, in effect, similar to the black-outs severe alcoholics get. It may happen again, though this is less likely now I am making repairs to your liver.

  ‘What has my liver got to do with endocrine overload?’ Webster asked as he manipulated the controls.

  It is where, in the end, everything backs up. Endocrine overload is just one result of me being unable to clear poisons from your body fast enough with your liver damaged.

  Time for the virus.

  Virus?

  Yes, it scrambles their security system before attacking what is secured. There is a delay. During that I must remove what I was sent for.

  And that is?

  Specifications for certain hull metals.

  Then you must destroy this place?

  Yes ... as well you know.

  Webster shook his head then removed an inch cube of crystal from his belt pouch. This he inserted into a hole in the console. As if sinking into mud the cube disappeared. On the display all the pictographs shrank to a single white dot. Quickly Webster manipulated the controls. More pictographs appeared on the screen.

  ‘Got the bast
ard!’

  The cube resurfaced and Webster snatched it up. He moved to another console, slapped over some manual controls, drew his flack pistol, waited until lights came on under each control, then blasted the console to scrap.

  Time to be leaving, Fich.

  I am always with you.

  Balanced on a blue flame like a scalpel the grain-shaped escape pod arced out into void. Behind it the station peeled as the tidal forces, of the dead sun it orbited, took hold of it and with cruel slowness tore it apart. There were no spectacular explosions. The station, which was two kilometres in diameter, just distorted and pulled apart like something rotten. Few of the five hundred Prador and thousand reprogrammed personal unit slaves knew that they’d had a visitor. All they knew was terror and the cold dry taste of vacuum. In the escape pod Webster saw none of them. He lay unconscious on the floor with the small orange light of his underspace beacon blinking in time with the slow labored beat of his heart.

  He floated in urine colored amniotic fluid with tubes jammed into his every orifice. Hideous wounds under pale plastic. Outside the tank, with only a pair of dirty toweling shorts protecting him from the chill of the air, an ancient Japanese man sat on the metal floor, his weird eyes intent, unblinking. A door to one side slid open and a woman in a coverall stood silhouetted in the wedge of harsh light.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked.

  It was not the Japanese who replied.

  ‘He should be dead. He is being kept alive beyond my function while I repair him,’ replied the disembodied voice of Fich.

  The woman moved further into the room, looked round anxiously as the door slid shut. She was tall, athletic, her hair black and closely cropped, and her face of standard beauty if ever freed from its tension, its nascent hate. She handed the man a paper cup filled with coffee. He took it and sipped, his eyes not straying from the tank.

  ‘Another five hours and we’ll have a live one,’ he said, the first words he had spoken in three days. He looked at the woman. ‘Doesn’t that make thee happy?’

  Five hours later the woman returned. The Japanese man was gone - from the room, from the station, no one knew how.

  With a feeling of mild surprise that he was able to, Webster opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling lights.

  ‘Well, you’re alive,’ said the woman from beside his bed.

  ‘Thank you for your concern, Sheil,’ said Webster, his voice grating and weak.

  She came to you every day while you were in the tank.

  Probably looking for a plug to pull, was Webster’s silent reply. He smiled at Sheil while she looked at him without any affection.

  ‘Looks like the mission is on,’ he said. She frowned. He continued, ‘I imagine you’re looking forward to working with me rather than against me now?’ Sheil walked away without a word.

  The planet breaker was a wedge of exotic alloy ten kilometres long. It had a crew of five thousand Prador and ten thousand human PU slaves. It had hyperlight drive and could project particle beams capable of slicing moons in half from a hundred thousand kilometers away. It carried quark torpedoes in the terraton range. In the five solstan years it had been in human space it had depopulated six worlds and accounted for some thirty billion human beings. The Human Polity had nothing that could stand against it. Human technology had not been ship-based, the expansion of the human race across the galaxy being directly attributable to the runcible gates - direct matter transmission between worlds. The human race retreated before it, evacuating world after world as it wove its erratic course through the stars of the Quarrison drift.

  ‘So this is what it is all about,’ said Webster as he looked at the small cube of golden metal in the palm of his hand.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Helstoff. ‘Completely reflective to any laser of any spectrum we have. It’s superconductive at any temperature so particle beams and APWs just get sucked away. That bloody ship could crack two or three inhabited worlds before we could even raise it above room temperature. Their field technology keeps all our atomics away and it never gets close enough to a station for us to cross swords at any other level. The Mirabar station was sliced apart from seventy thousand kilometers out.’

  ‘They came close at Chocasta didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, there was that. They managed to gate a moonlet at it from hyperlight. It hit as photonic matter. The flash killed everything remaining on Chocasta. Did their work for them. That’s the reason we have this breathing space. The ship is laid up off a gas giant in the Chocasta system. Making repairs. Taking on fuel. Whatever. There are no visible signs of damage.’

  Webster put the cube down and picked up a vial no bigger than his thumbnail. He inspected the cloudy fluid it contained.

  ‘And this is it,’ he said. ‘This is what you’ll inject into Sheil?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Such was I at my inception, Fich told him.

  Webster carefully put the vial back down. It seemed a small thing upon which to bet the future of the human race.

  ‘It should have been me,’ he said.

  ‘Not possible,’ Helstoff told him. ‘Not with a Fich III inside you, and you know they cannot be removed.’

  That is not true.

  Yeah, but I’d like to be alive after.

  Webster strolled down the corridor with his thoughts cold and emotionlessly objective. It had been his idea originally, but then the cargo had been a contraterrene device. The idea had been shelved when it was discovered that no such device could get past the scans of the planet breaker. Now there was a new cargo to go aboard. A door slid open in the corridor and Sheil stepped through. And here it is, thought Webster.

  ‘Come for the show?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, unlike some on this station I will enjoy this.’

  Webster made to walk on, but she stopped him with a hand on his chest.

  ‘Why is it necessary for you to come?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No, to the ship.’

  Webster snorted.

  ‘Do you think I’m there to check up on you?’ He did not wait for her to reply. He did not expect her to. ‘I’m not. You hate me because I worked for Earth Central against the Separatists. We are both on the same side now.’

  ‘My home world cannot secede from the Polity now.’

  No, her home world was spreading out in a pretty asteroidal ring round her home sun, now.

  ‘You hate the Prador more than me,’ said Webster. ‘It’s why you volunteered. Why you were selected. You know our chances of walking away from this are remote to say the least.’

  ‘Why are you going then?’

  ‘My prime mission is to help you get to the metal of the hull. Only physical contact will work. I have a secondary data gathering mission. This is too good an opportunity to miss.’

  Sheil nodded and continued working. Webster walked along behind her. Tight assed bitch, he thought.

  You want to have intercourse with her.

  Get outa here.

  The room was filled with monitors and technicians in blue overalls. It was quiet, none of them felt like talking much about what they were going to do. Beyond the shimmer-shield, at one end of the room, the Prador was held immobile in its restraints, but for its stalked eyes, which were whipping from side to side in its agitation. Two more technicians in surgical body suits stood waiting.

  ‘There is no way of anaesthetizing it?’ asked Webster.

  Helstoff stepped up beside him scratching at his beard.

  ‘We only know enough about their physiology to do this. There are some things we could have tried, but there is a chance they might have killed it, and we only have this one.’

  ‘Let the bastard suffer,’ said Sheil.

  Webster glanced at her. She was staring at the Prador avidly.

  As they watched, Helstoff gave the signal and one of the surgical techs pulled down a vibroblade cutter on the end of a boom. The blade - a flame of dull glass - whined and went into the Prador’s carapa
ce. Fans sucked a spume of dust away as the blade moved automatically in a perfect circle. The vibration was muted. The bubbling scream that came from the Prador was not.

  When the cutter completed its circle the tech pulled the blade away then inserted a thin trepanning tool through the cut. She worked it around, then levered the circle out.

  ‘Life signs still at optimum,’ someone said.

  The Prador was still screaming.

  ‘Okay,’ said Helstoff, looking into a screen. ‘Maria, expose the secondary cortex.’

  Maria used something like a fish slice to shove a quivering bladder to the edge of the hole. She then lowered a surgical laser on its boom, and from it attached a clamp to the bottom of the hole.

  ‘Imaging,’ said Helstoff. Webster stepped back and looked at the screen. It showed the circle and the organs within. Lines were being traced round each organ, grids overlaid.

  ‘We’re on auto now. Step back Maria, the AI’s taking over.’

  As Maria stepped back the laser started flickering. Jets of smoke shot from the hole. On the screen Webster saw selected areas of the mess inside being burnt away. Abruptly the Prador stopped screaming.

  ‘It’s not in any pain now,’ said Sheil with relish.

  She is.

  And you are one.

  ‘Do you want to come in for a drink then?’ It was more of a challenge than a question.

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  Webster entered her cabin waiting for some sarcasm from Fich. It was not forthcoming. He slumped down at the end of an airform sofa and watched Sheil as she filled two tumblers with whisky. There was no asking what he wanted to drink. She was not prepared to be that civil.

  ‘They tell me it was your idea in the beginning?’

  ‘Yes, to use the Prador to get something aboard. We tried it with PU slaves but no joy. We lost one of the only two Prador shuttles we’ve ever captured. The hope is that they’ll be prepared to rescue one of their own.’