The Skinner (30 page)

Windcheater thought about it. Maybe there might be an angle here. Maybe there would be some chance to add to his Norverbank account. He’d have to keep an eye on the situation.

*

Keech floated in a warm comfortable place, and considered what he must do next. In the morning he’d go and check that lead in Klader. He was sure he was close to Rimsc
now. The old pirate had been clever in leaving a number of false leads, but Keech felt he was getting to the end of them now, after using the new search program Francis Cojan had sent him. As he
contemplated what he would do to Rimsc when he found him, a coldly analytical part of himself was saying that Rimsc was dead, that he, Monitor Keech, was dead. There was also the feeling that a
long time had elapsed. His thoughts, such as they were, seemed to have been broken in two; as if separated over that time.

N-FACT MESSAGE: EPIDERMAL GROWTH 65% COMPLETE
.

What was that? It seemed to come from that cold part of himself. He tried to move and encountered resistance. His body moved, but it was not moving how he wanted it to move. What this all meant
was too painful to contemplate, so he concentrated on the task in hand.

The man in Klader claimed he had seen Rimsc and knew where he now was. The man’s information would cost, but that did not matter to Keech: he would have readily paid for it himself if he
had not had ECS funding. Rimsc had to die for the things he had done – just as
all
of them had to die.

N-FACT MESSAGE: HEART RESTART.

A sudden thumping drowned out all coherent thought. It was his heart, of course, yet something was telling him that he hadn’t heard it in a long while. He felt sick now, and there was a
huge pressure growing in his head. A sudden swirling all about him made him aware that he was submerged in some kind of fluid.
I’m in a tank, I’m injured
, he told himself. But
surely that was wrong? He was dead. He knew he was dead.

Suddenly the fluid was draining away from all around him. As it went, he found himself lying at the bottom of a slimy hollow in a tangle of tubes. He stared up at the two faces hovering above
him and he could feel the machinery attached to his body. This wasn’t right. Who were these people?

ERROR MESSAGE: PHYSICAL RESISTANCE TO CYB-PLANT.

DISCONNECT.

Keech tried to ask them who they were, and what was going on. A colder part of himself already knew, and it tried to tell him as fluid jetted from his lungs and from his mouth. He felt he was
drowning, and started to struggle

You are the reification Sable Keech. You have been dead for seven hundred years.

Keech gave a liquid gasp, and the sound he next made was more of a croak than a scream. The cold part of himself acknowledged that there was only one thing to do.

MEMPLANT MESSAGE: FULL DOWNLOAD TO ORGANIC BRAIN.

The memories began to return. As they returned, Keech could no longer fight: he was paralysed. A door opened before him and he walked into the apartment, drawing his EC-issue thin-gun. The stink
he recognized from Spatterjay: the almost savoury smell of charred flesh. He only recognized his contact because the man was still wearing the bright green shirt he was wearing when he’d left
the com message. The face itself wasn’t recognizable, as there was no face. Whoever had done this had obviously taken pleasure in it: they’d tied the man to the chair and done it
slowly. This much was evident by the way the man had torn off his own nails by clawing at the chair arms.

Keech moved on into the room, then checked all the doors leading off from it. Nothing he could do here now; he’d come back with the forensic team and go through this room at microscopic
level. But he didn’t need the evidence they’d find to know who had been here earlier. He stepped out of the apartment and closed the door behind him, as well as he could, the lock being
broken. Holstering his thin-gun he moved to the elevator, stepped inside, and descended the twenty floors to street level. Outside the building, one of those heavy rains that seemed to fall only in
Klader was shining the hydrocar streets and running streams past the pavements. Keech folded up his collar and headed for his battered police hydrocar. Would this be another dead end, in more ways
than one?

His answer stepped out of the alley next to his car.

‘Sable Keech,’ the man sneered.

He was short, thin-faced, and bald-headed, the heavy coat he wore not concealing the fact that he possessed a physique that appeared boosted. But it wasn’t boosted, not in the usual sense.
Keech didn’t bother to respond with words. He pulled his gun and fired, and Alphed Rimsc went over backwards, with a smoking hole through his middle. Keech walked over, his thin-gun down at
his side. Just like that: got him.

Rimsc sat up and smiled, and casually lifted the gun he had been holding all the time. There was a flash, but Keech heard no sound. Something smashed into his side and spun him around. Next
thing he knew, he was sitting on the pavement in the rain, broken, and unable to move his hand to retrieve his gun that had fallen next to him. The virus: the damned virus. Keech managed to find
the strength to tilt his head and glare upwards at Rimsc. The man was still smiling as he narrowed the aperture on his heavy pulse-gun. Last thing: the snout of the weapon cold against
Keech’s head, a blow, blackness. That was all for a while.

Out of blackness, Keech woke to the grey. He was not alive and he knew precisely what had happened. He had prepared for this: he was now a reif.
I am dead.
The years of searching came
back to him: the killings and the questionings, the terrible purpose that was empty of feeling. He had hunted down Hoop’s crew with the tenacity of a mining machine digging into a cliff.
Rimsc first – it had been a simple thing to rig his suit once he had located him. There had been no restraining morality then as Keech had not considered himself a monitor any more. Killing
Corbel Frane had been a high point. In between there had been lesser kills; many of those who had worked for the Eight, and those sent by Frane and perhaps by Hoop himself. So many of them, and so
many years. Keech wanted to cry and felt the circuit that activated his eye irrigator becoming live, then going off again. The years of it all continued to download into his newly repaired and
activated brain.

In the darkness, Windcheater observed Ambel unsteadily leaving his cabin. All but the helmsman, Boris, were back below decks. When Ambel walked over to Windcheater’s food
barrel and methodically pulled out steak after steak and munched them down, the sail considered, then rejected, the idea of complaining. He just watched as Boris spotted the Captain then, with a
lantern hung from his belt, climbed down from the forecabin and walked across.

‘You better now, Captain?’ Boris asked.

Ambel wiped purple blood from round his mouth before replying. ‘Bad memories,’ he said.

‘Happens like that sometimes. Got shot with a vis gun ’bout twenty years back. The wound healed in a day but I was real nasty for months after.’

Ambel just looked at him and waited for him to continue – as he did.

‘It was on account of me first wife shooting me with one, ye see.’

Ambel nodded. ‘You remember it all?’ he asked.

‘Mostly,’ said Boris.

‘I don’t. I’ve got a piece missing as long as you’re old, and I don’t want it back. I know what it is, but I don’t
want
it.’ Ambel looked very
closely at Boris. ‘There’s bits, though. Bits keep coming back.’

‘How’d you lose it?’ Boris asked.

‘Lost it in the sea, Boris. In the sea.’

Windcheater blinked and remained utterly still. Unlike most human conversations, this one he did not understand at all. He recognized the expression of disbelieving horror on the
helmsman’s face, and understood that the man had not shuddered because of being cold. But beyond that . . .

After a long silence Ambel said, ‘In the morning we’ll be at the atolls, and there we’ll refine us some sprine. With that, I’ll free meself of one of those bits. Time the
Skinner went to his locker for good.’ He took another steak out of the barrel and began eating it.

‘You shoulda done that long ago. Don’t know why you didn’t. You know it whispers in the night?’ said Boris.

‘I know. Does it to Peck, mainly. Makes him all skittery.’

‘That don’t take much.’

‘Yeah.’

They both eyed each other knowingly, then Boris nodded and turned to walk away, swinging his lantern in the night. Its light glinted on the open eyes of Windcheater as the sail watched Ambel
move to the rail.

‘What was that all about?’ the sail queried through his aug.

‘Memory loss through intense pain,’ replied the Warden.

‘Oh, so glad I asked,’ said Windcheater.

‘It’s interesting that you chose
this
ship,’ the Warden told the sail. ‘Why
did
you choose this ship?’

‘It happened to be in the area,’ said Windcheater. ‘And you wanted me to look out for anything unusual in this area.’

‘And what have you found?’ the Warden asked.

Windcheater, with his long understanding of human language, was not immune to sarcasm. ‘Well, I’ve found the ship with Jay Hoop on board, and I’ve found a molly carp with a big
lump of scrap metal inside.’

‘I heard that!’ interjected Sniper.

‘Yes, I know you’re here,’ said the Warden. ‘Is that molly carp well?’

‘Think it might have a bit of a stomach upset. Reckon it ate something that disagreed with it, and I don’t mean me,’ replied the war drone.

The Warden was silent for a moment, then, ‘You, Sniper, will stay with this ship and keep watch. When you’re free, I may have further instructions for you. You, Windcheater, will
leave this ship in the morning and fly to Olian Tay’s island. By then Captain Sprage’s ship will have arrived. You’ll join it and keep watch. I’ll want constant
reports.’

‘What’s happening?’ asked Sniper, unable to keep the frustration out of his communication.

‘The exploding Prador vessel was a cover for the arrival of Rebecca Frisk. Where she is now I have only a rough idea. The Old Captains, who are aware of her presence, are gathering for a
Convocation.’

Sniper hissed excitedly, ‘Frisk here?’

‘Yes, she is here.’

‘She won’t be alone,’ said the war drone.

‘She is not,’ said the Warden, and withdrew contact.

‘Come on, you damned haddock! I want out of here!’

Windcheater turned his attention to where Captain Ambel had focused his. There was a disturbance in the sea, and white water glinting in the dark, as the molly carp swirled and rolled and
thrashed its tail against the waves.

The pinioned sail kept mouthing obscenities, until Shib cut its tongue out. That made it thrash about so much that he had to put a couple of more staples through its neck and
into the mast to keep it secured. He was the right one to do it: he had been very vocal in his dislike of this place and its fauna. Without ceremony, the three Batians then dropped the body of
their deceased comrade over the side. Dead, he was as much rubbish as the rest of the human debris scattered over the deck. Frisk watched the corpse dragged down as countless leeches attached
themselves to it – and then she went to see how Svan was getting on.

‘How much longer!’ she shouted down into the aft hatch. There was no reply so she climbed down to have a look. Svan was crouching in the rear of the ship, over the open casing of the
motor she had just bolted to the keel. There were twists of wood shavings all over the floor where she had bored the bolt holes, together with those holes required for the intake pipe and outlet
jets. Two pipes went straight through a bulkhead to the bow of the ship; Frisk assumed they were for braking.

‘Fucking Prador diagnostics,’ Svan snarled.

‘What is it?’ Frisk asked.

‘This whole motor is just a pain,’ Svan said.

‘Will that be a problem?’

Svan closed the casing and locked it into place. ‘Shouldn’t be unless it goes wrong. But I don’t see why it has to be so complicated. This ship isn’t exactly
high-tech.’

Frisk stepped out of Svan’s way as she began to unreel a length of optic cable from the motor. She followed the Batian as she climbed the ladder on to the deck, across this, then up the
next ladder to the cabin-deck. Here, Svan plugged the cable into a throttle-lever attached to the helm.

‘Is all this really necessary?’ Svan asked.

‘Not completely,’ Frisk replied. ‘It’s just the way I want to do things.’ She took a device from her belt and peered at its small screen. She nodded at the
coordinates displayed there, then quickly put the device back on her belt when her hand began to shake. She forced a grin.

‘Why not just take your Prador’s ship straight there and blow them out of the water?’ Shib asked Frisk, coming up on to the deck. She stared at him and her grin collapsed. Was
he really that stupid?

‘Because if the Warden detects a Prador war-craft moving about down here, we just might never be able to get away,’ she said. ‘So, Ebulan will have taken his ship down deep and
out of sight.’

Svan glared at Shib, then turned back to Frisk. ‘I see your point there,’ said the mercenary, ‘but why not use one of the little transports?’ Frisk appeared confused for
a moment. Svan went on, ‘Why all this?’ she asked, gesturing at the helm.