The Skinner (11 page)

As soon as the smell from the sargassum reached the crew, there was an immediate relaxing of the tension. The smell of rotting vegetation was strong, but not half so strong as the smell of
putrefying flesh. The prill that had not already fed were in the process of devouring a large carcass lying tangled in the decaying weed. Ambel stood up to get a better look, and saw the body of a
huge crustacean, something like a lobster, but with more fins and adaptations to oceangoing life. Its shell had the beautiful iridescence of mother-of-pearl.

‘Glister,’ said Peck, stating the obvious.

‘That shell’d fetch a skind or two,’ said Pland.

‘Nearly as much as a pearl,’ said Peck, giving Ambel a look.

‘You want to go get it?’ asked Anne.

Everybody laughed.

‘All right lads, back to your stations,’ said Ambel. He looked at the sail. ‘You too.’ The sail unfurled its wings and grasped the spars. The light wind belled it and it
turned the rig of the ship in consonance with Boris’s spinning of the helm, and the mast chains and cogs clunked below. Ambel went on, ‘Peck and Pland on the harpoons and ropes. You
take the nest, Anne. ’Nother couple of hours and we’ll be out of this and heading for the feeding grounds, I reckon.’ Ambel carefully eased down the hammer on his ’buss and
lowered its butt to the deck. The weapon, which weighed half as much as a man, probably had more firepower than Boris’s deck cannon. Anne moved to the sail’s head as it came down to the
deck. She stepped on to it, grasping the creature’s neck in her right hand, and it lifted her towards the crow’s nest.

‘Feeding grounds, I’ll be buggered,’ said Boris, mimicking Peck’s tone to perfection. As she rose past him, Anne laughed then holstered her automatic.

‘Look at it this way,’ said Ambel, addressing them all after hearing the comment. ‘We get a good haul and we won’t have to go out during all the ice season. It’ll
be sea-cane rum and Dome grub for a six-month.’

‘More like crawling ashore a stripped fish,’ muttered Peck.

Ambel looked at him. ‘Skin feeling a bit loose is it, Peck?’ he asked.

Peck swore at him, but the other senior crew laughed anew. Junior crew were puzzled by this exchange, so Ambel assumed they had yet to hear Peck’s story. He smiled to himself. It was
always like this before a hunt. The lads would thank him afterwards. When had things ever gone wrong, he tried to ask himself without irony.

The
Treader
continued on its course, its sail turning to catch the best of the wind and muttering about feeding times, and the yellow and brown islands of sargassum slowly sliding behind
it.

Skin feeling a bit loose
, thought Peck, and the thought made him itch. He scratched himself whilst gazing back from the rail towards Ambel, as the Captain ducked into
his cabin to put away his blunderbuss.
He
didn’t know, in fact none of them knew what it was like. He glanced at the fabric foresail and saw that it had snagged part of the way down
its slide.

‘That needs sorting,’ he said to the junior who was helping him, and indicated the jammed sail. The woman nodded to him and headed for the mast, taking up a hammer from one of the
tool lockers as she went. She quickly climbed the mast and hammered at the slide mechanism until the lower spar dropped into place, pulling the sail taut. Peck lowered his gaze to the cabin again
and felt the overpowering need to reveal what had been hidden, something that the Skinner had been about to reveal to him.

Come.

He could feel the call in the marrow of his bones and in the heart of everything he was. What would it be like to be . . . like that? What secrets were hidden?

‘Those harpoons won’t sharpen ’emselves, Peck,’ said Pland, in the process of coiling up one of the harpoon lines as he strolled past. Peck glanced at his fellow crewman
and wondered if he felt it too.

‘Pland, do you—’

‘Peck! Those harpoons won’t sharpen themselves!’ bellowed Ambel as he stepped out of the forecabin.

Pland grinned at Peck and went to untangle another line. Peck squatted by the rail where the harpoons were racked.

‘Buggering leech hunt,’ he muttered to himself. The hold was nearly full of barrels of pickling turbul meat, and they had four full barrels of amberclams which would spoil if they
weren’t back in port within the week. But Ambel always wanted that bit extra before the bergs started sliding down from the north. Admittedly, they often did well, and because of this were
often in the chair at the Baitman. Their ‘luck’ had even once enabled them to afford a laser, but with the rocky exchange rate of the skind, they had been unable to afford replacement
power packs for it, so had swapped it for a deck cannon.
Luck
. Peck snorted – how many times had he seen Ambel do that pearl trick? Anne and Pland had only been with the Captain for
the last thirty years, so they were not yet wise to his ways. Still grumbling, Peck reached into the pocket of his long coat and took out his sharpening stone. The harpoon blades weren’t that
blunt, so there was no point unscrewing them to give them a proper going over. Peck ran the back of his hand along one razor edge until it bit in and there was a brief spurt of blood. Hardly need
sharpening at all.

Come . . .

Tay was still lying on her couch when Keech walked in and stood before her. He glanced at one of the chairs opposite her but did not sit until she waved him to it with an
irritated gesture.

‘They’re self-cleaning,’ she said.

Keech blinked as his irrigator worked on his eye. It had been his experience that often people did not like a walking corpse sitting on their furniture.

‘Information,’ she said. ‘I only trade in information.’ She closed her eyes.

‘I don’t know what I can give you,’ said Keech.

‘You know why I know your name,’ she muttered. ‘Give me something unrecorded. Give me something about the eight that I don’t know.’

Keech was silent for a long while. Eventually he said, ‘Aphed Rimsc killed me and threw my body into the Klader sewers. It took a week for them to find me, and six months of court actions
after that before they acted on my will and handed me over to the cult. Do you want to hear about that?’

‘Thoroughly documented. You’d signed up as a member of the cult of Anubis Arisen some years before. Limitations of mortality, I suspect. There was a legal suit brought to try and
prevent your reification, but the cult backed you all the way. I also know that same suit was brought by Rimsc himself,’ said Tay. She had less of a blue tinge to her skin now.

Keech went on, ‘Rimsc died when the seal on his spacesuit failed outside the Klader space habitat. His body wasn’t reclaimed because the resulting blowout flung him towards Klader.
He burnt up in atmosphere before anyone could get to him.’ Tay opened her eyes and waited. Keech continued, ‘What is not known is why his suit seals failed. They failed because they
were eaten away from the inside, just as he was eaten away inside the same spacesuit. Somebody put a pressure-activated vessel of diatomic acid in his oxygen supply. When his oxygen got below a
certain level, the vessel opened and flooded his suit with acid vapour. It must have been a very unpleasant death, especially for a Hooper.’

Tay sat up. ‘There were rumours about it, but nothing was confirmed. You’d been reified by then hadn’t you?’ she said.

‘Four days,’ said Keech.

Tay smiled. ‘What do you want to know then?’ she asked.

Keech moved over to one of the armchairs and sat. He steepled his bony fingers before his face and regarded Tay with his single blue eye, as his irrigator sprayed, moistening the eye. His face
was immobile.

‘I know about Rimsc, Corbel Frane, the Talsca twins, Gosk Balem, and David Grenant. I don’t know what happened to Rebecca Frisk or to Hoop himself. For two hundred years I’ve
been chasing rumours and myths. When they don’t come to nothing, they lead back here. Tell me what
you
know.’

Tay looked up to the ceiling. ‘House computer, make a copy of the Rebecca Frisk file to crystal.’

The computer on the desk beeped and a small crystal popped up out of the touch-console. Keech glanced across the room at it. His face twitched and his eye irrigator began working double
time.

‘You know it was her and Hoop who started out together. From what I’ve been able to put together they started as art thieves on Earth. From such little acorns . . .’ explained
Tay.

Keech continued to stare at the crystal. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

Tay said, ‘Frisk walked into the ECS building in Geneva on Earth and told them who she was. When this was confirmed she requested a mind wipe, which she was duly given. After that they
gave her a basic overlay personality and she was sent back here. The Friends of Cojan snatched her halfway and fed her into a zinc smelter.’

Keech sat back. ‘The Friends are still about? They helped me trace Rimsc.’

‘No, they are not still about. This was three hundred years ago. ECS kept a lid on it, but I’m surprised you didn’t know about it. You were an ECS monitor before you were
killed. Surely you had contacts?’

‘I never bothered much about her. She was the least of them. What about Hoop?’

‘No . . . Now I want something more from you. Tell me about Corbel Frane.’

‘I found him on Viridian, in a castle he had occupied for five hundred years,’ said Keech. ‘He was a living legend there, and it was difficult for me to get to him. The first
time I managed to get through his defences I cut him in half with an industrial shear. His staff sewed him back together again and he was walking within one solstan year. I didn’t make the
same mistake again. I used Junger mercenaries to assault his castle and when he escaped, I pursued him to the summit of mount Ember. Even an old Hooper cannot survive immersion in magma.’

Tay nodded. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘You realize I’m recording this meeting.’

‘I didn’t think otherwise.’

‘It doesn’t bother you?’

‘There is no statute of limitations on the things they did, and I am still officially an Earth Central Security monitor. They were all under sentence of death, whether physical or mental.
Now, what do you know about Hoop?’

Tay abruptly stood and went to the wall cabinet. She removed another bottle of the substance she had drunk earlier. This time she filled a glass before returning to the sofa with it.

‘Holodrama and VR has them as lovable rogues and dashing pirates. Time will do that to even the most heinous of villains,’ said Tay as she collected her thoughts.

‘You’re telling me this? Hoop and his crew were murderers and thieves. They used this world as their base and the immortality the virus here conferred on them, enabled them to
terrorize this whole sector for two centuries. They stole and they killed, and they sold humans to the Prador cored,’ said Keech. His words were flat, without inflexion.

Tay looked at him carefully. ‘You were on the mission that came here at the end of the war, weren’t you?’ she asked.

‘I was. And the things we witnessed here have made me what I am. I will not rest until they are
all
dead. I will not stop.’

‘So there’s only Hoop for you to get. What happens when you do get him – when you’ve killed him?’

Keech looked down at the lozenge of metal on its chain around his neck. ‘Option one is that I die completely,’ he said. ‘I am exploring other options.’

‘That is a changer nanofactory?’ said Tay, pointing at the lozenge.

‘It is. Tell me more about Hoop.’

‘The mission you were on drove Hoop and his crew from here and scattered them. With their wealth and the experience of a couple of centuries of life, they established themselves in niches
across this sector. The Talsca twins and David Grenant were hunted down and killed by the Friends of Cojan. It’s believed they were lowered feet-first into boiling water.’ Tay stopped
talking when she saw Keech nodding.

‘I can confirm part of that,’ Keech said. ‘I knew Francis Cojan quite well. He kept a holocording of the event that he showed me. But I only saw the Talsca twins on that
recording. It took them a long time to die and they died hard.’

‘I see . . . Gosk Balem returned here and died in the sea. Hoopers who were the direct descendants of slaves the Eight kept here, or were original slaves themselves, threw him into a leech
swarm in Nort sea. That one is well documented. Frane and Rimsc were the ones you tracked down. Frisk and Hoop fled from the sector and lived on a world in Prador space for fifty years. That comes
from Frisk. She left him there and just went and handed herself over to ECS. Attack of conscience? There seems no other explanation.’

‘And Hoop? What about Hoop?’

Tay looked at him very directly.

‘Hoop is here,’ she said.

Keech said nothing. He moved not at all.

Tay went on, ‘A hundred and sixty-three years ago a craft was detected by the Warden. It went into orbit and attempted a sea landing. It was a very old craft. Unfortunately the Segre
atolls got in its way and it crashed. The wreckage was found to be that of the Prador landing craft Hoop favoured – the craft he called
Bucephalus
. There was blood in the craft and it
was Hoop’s. There was no trace of Hoop himself.’

‘It is not certain that he is still here then,’ said Keech.

‘It is. No spacecraft have come to Spatterjay since. The only way out is through the runcible gate on Coram, and the Warden monitors that. Humans might forget criminal activity. AIs forget
nothing.’

‘He could be dead, then?’

‘He might have been injured enough to bleed, which
is
unusual for an old Hooper, but he
is
the oldest Hooper in existence, perhaps a thousand years. What do you
think?’

‘Rumours?’

‘I’ve heard a few. Some have it that he is operating as a ship captain. Others have it that he went native and became something . . . horrible. Have you heard the legend of the
Skinner?’

Keech gave a slow nod, remembering the thing in Tay’s museum.

‘The Skinner is a creature that lives on an island and traps any ship Hoopers who land. It seems the one goal in life of this creature is to strip Hoopers of their skins and leave them to
suffer in agony for months. The story goes that a lone Captain and an off-worlder went to the island and beheaded the creature, and that this Captain is now said to carry the living head of the
Skinner in a box on board his ship. This way the Skinner can never pull itself back together sufficiently to cause the pain it once did. Its living body alone would just be that of an animal. This
all happened at the Segre Islands, which have for some time been known as the Skinner’s Islands.’