The Skinner

3

Keech paid his hotel bill and, with his hover trunk in tow, he left the Dome and made his way into the Hooper town. As he walked, he saw Erlin walking ahead of him, also with her luggage in tow and Janer’s stacked on top of it. Rather than catch up with her he turned down a side road and took a track leading out of the town into the dingle. Either side of the track, peartrunk trees quivered to the movement of small leeches in their branches, and frogmoles chirruped and burped from little pools in the centres of ground-growing leaves as big as bedspreads. A stand of putrephallus plants broadcast their presence before they came in sight, and Keech turned off the anosmic receptor in his nose. Attracted to the bright red tips of the stinking plants, a couple of baggy lung birds flapped about and honked noisily. They looked to Keech as if they were about to fly apart, like something ill-made by an apprentice creator. They were sparsely covered in long oily feathers between which showed purplish septic-looking flesh. If these birds had the appearance of anything recognizable, it was of half-plucked crows that had been dead for a week or more. He moved on, down the slope of the island via a path of crushed quartz spread over black packed earth, and out beyond the edge of the dingle and on to a strand of green sand scattered with drifts of multicoloured pebbles. There he ordered his trunk to settle and open, and he began to remove its contents.

Keech’s muscles did not work, in fact none of him worked, except for half of his brain and one eye. Completely stripped of his flesh, the AI Keech would still exist — a skeleton with motors at his joints and other pieces of hardware affixed to his bones and, of course, the aug. The items of Keech’s survival therefore consisted of his cleansing unit and two spare power cells for the cyber mechanisms that kept him moving. Along with these items, he now removed a black attaché case, a pack of clothing, and a small remote control. These had filled only a small portion of the trunk. Keech closed the lid, stepped back, pointed the remote and pressed a button.

The trunk rose half a metre from the ground and the lid split in two along its length. These two halves, along with the adjoining sides, folded down into cranked wings. The front then folded itself down at forty-five degrees and from its top extruded a curved screen. From under the seat, now exposed in the centre of the trunk, a steering column and control console whined forwards and up into position below the screen. Keech stepped in to detach cylindrical thruster motors from each side of the seat — revealing the AG motor underneath — and to reattach them at the ends of the wings. The back of the trunk tilted out to make a luggage compartment and Keech put his belongings in this before mounting the hover scooter thus created. He would have smiled had he been able to. He pressed a touch-plate on the console and spoke.

‘This is monitor Sable Keech registering AG transport on Out-Polity planet Spatterjay,’ he said.

From the console a mild voice replied, ‘According to my records, monitor Keech, you are dead.’

Keech paused for a moment — that was a very quick interception by the Warden.

‘That is correct,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m glad we’ve cleared that one up,’ said the AI Warden on the distant moon of Spatterjay. ‘But perhaps you can provide some further explanation?’

‘My monitor status remains unchanged I take it?’

‘It does.’

‘Then I am not required to give an explanation.’

‘No, you are not.’

‘I’m a reification,’ said Keech. ‘I would have thought you’d already found all that out, if not when I first came through the runcible gate, then at least when I crossed the Line to come out here.’

‘Yes, I see that now. I don’t monitor all inward runcible traffic unless it comes with an attached record. The Dome gate was being run by one of my subminds at the time, and it did not see fit to inform me of your arrival. I must have words with it.’

Keech let ride the fact that he thought it unlikely that he had not come through with an attached record.

‘I am clear to use AG transport, I take it?’ he asked.

‘You are, monitor Keech.’

‘Thank you,’ said Keech.

After running a diagnostic on the console, he thrust the column forward and, blasting up a cloud of sand, shot out over the sea.

With something of smugness in its attitude, the Warden observed the planet through a thousand pairs of artificial eyes. After a brief scan, it refined this fragment of its attention to just one pair of eyes and the complex little mind that operated them. On an atoll on the opposite side of the planet from the main human settlements, and where no human had set foot, waves lapped gently at a beach of jade and rose-quartz pebbles. Below the pellucid waters off this beach, the stony bottom was alive with movement. Swarms of infant hammer whelks shifted in a slow and intricate dance, their shells glinting like coiled pearls, and leeches oozed between them searching for softer prey. A disturbance where the bottom dropped into emerald depths had the whelks clamping themselves safely to the stony bottom and the leeches turning as one to investigate.

Out of boiling foam rose the baroque shape of a seahorse the length of a man’s forearm, leeches hitting its iron-coloured skin and falling away. It rose from the sea and, seemingly balanced upon the surface with a coil of its tail, it slowly revolved and took in its surroundings with topaz eyes. Only someone with a very sophisticated underspace detector could have heard the communication that followed, and even then it would have taken a mind superior to that of the Warden to decode it.

‘SM Thirteen, you were instructed to transmit yourself to Dome Gate One for your assigned watch, and I see now that this did not happen,’ said the Warden.

‘Sniper took that watch. He had some business to conduct through the local server. And I have my so very important studies to complete,’ replied the Warden’s thirteenth submind, from its odd drone body.

‘Why then have I received no report from Sniper?’

In the pause that followed, the Warden considered then rejected the idea of subsuming Thirteen, of reintegrating the little mind with itself in order to get at the truth. But the Warden had found from long experience that an amount of individualism in its subminds allowed them to originate insights it never experienced by itself.

‘Nothing of significance to report?’ suggested SM13.

The Warden sensed agitation in the little mind and allowed it to stew for a few microseconds.

‘The arrival of a dead monitor pursuing a seven-century vendetta I do consider to be worthy of note,’ it said.

‘Well that’s not my fault,’ said the seahorse drone. ‘Take it up with Sniper. It wasn’t my decision to employ an obsolete war drone, even if it was once a hero.’

The Warden did not answer this. It withdrew and did a brief search in the local server. That SM13 and the war drone Sniper both had accounts with the Norvabank evinced in it some surprise, though only some. The third account it found there, by tracking past transfers, gave it more than some surprise. It would have to watch this situation very closely; it might lead to questions about the rights of humans to exist on Spatterjay.

Janer woke with a sick feeling in his stomach and the apparent evidence that a small animal had expired messily in his mouth, probably squashed by the farrier who was making horseshoes in his head. He shoved the tangled blanket off, sat on the edge of his bunk, and tried to figure out where he was. The wooden room he lay in was moving, and loud snores came from the Hooper lying in the bunk opposite. Janer stood, swayed for a moment, and then abruptly sat down. His detox pills — one of his most important survival items — were in his backpack, but where the hell was that? His nausea abruptly increased its hold on him and he quickly stood and staggered to the door. Immediately outside the door there was a short corridor terminating at a ladder. He moved towards this and, for no immediately apparent reason, staggered into one wall, then back across the wooden flooring straight into a door. He shook his head. What the hell was that sound? From all around him came racketing and clacking sounds, creaks and groans. Upon reaching the ladder, he unsteadily climbed up it towards greenish light, then stumbled out of the deck hatch to a wooden rail, and retched into the sea below. As he did this he realized he had done so before, and remembered where he was: on board the ship.

‘Good morning,’ Erlin cheerfully called.

Janer got control of his retching — there wasn’t much to come up anyway — and glanced round from the rail to where Erlin and Captain Ron stood, behind the helmsman, on the upper deck that formed the roof of the forecabin. He pushed back from the rail, lost his balance, and stepped back into the mainmast.

‘Watch yer feet, asshole!’

The voice came from below him. He stared down at a large flat head on the deck itself, a mouth full of sickle teeth, and demonic red eyes that gazed at him impassively. He rubbed his face, then, running from this head, he tracked a long ribbed neck that rose up the mast behind him, to an expanse of veined pink skin spread out on the spars of the central mast, cutting out half the sky. This skin was braced with long thin support spines that issued spidery gripping claws at their joints. Ropes of muscle ran down these spines, also along the long heavy wing bones, and knotted into a huge keel of a chest, above which lumps of something unidentifiable were being digested in a transparent gut. The creature hung upside down like a bat, as it turned itself to the wind.

‘Oh shit,’ Janer said and quickly moved away from the mast and back to the rail. From here he could see how, whenever the creature moved, its movement was replicated in the fore and aft masts, which supported sails of a more commonplace fabric. The clacking sounds heard below the decks, he realized, derived from this motion.

‘His name is Windcatcher,’ the Hive mind told him. Janer blearily inspected the two hornets in their transparent box, as if searching for some sign of irony.

‘Never let me do that again,’ he said.

‘That’s what you said last time it happened. Unfortunately, I no longer have any control over your actions. Not that I had a great deal when you were indentured.’ There was definite irony in the voice this time.

Janer returned his attention to Erlin and Ron, who were watching him with some amusement.

‘Where’s my backpack?’ he called.

‘Under your bunk,’ Erlin replied.

Janer walked shakily to the hatch, pausing to let a woman climb out, who grinned at him before moving off, carrying a bucket of something that looked like grease and smelt like something that should have been buried. He climbed back down the ladder, swallowing on a rush of saliva. Once in the cabin he went quickly to his bunk, pulled out his pack from underneath, found his detox pills, threw a couple of them into his mouth, and swallowed them dry. He then sat and waited for them to take effect.

The Hooper in the adjacent bunk snored and grunted, then, with muttered imprecations, turned over, allowing Janer a good look at his face. It was Forlam. Janer stood up and gazed at Forlam’s right hand, which lay on top of the blanket. The last time he had seen it, that hand had been merely a stump with just the stub of a thumb sticking out of one side. Now the fingers had been reattached with rough-looking stitches, which also extended in a line up the Hooper’s forearm to his elbow, closing a surgical cut Janer surmised had been made for the retrieval of severed tendons, for, as Janer knew from personal experience, tendons were like taut-stretched elastic, and severed in such a place, would have snapped back up inside Forlam’s arm. Underneath these stitches, just as underneath those around Forlam’s repositioned ear, were red lines of scar tissue, so it was apparent the needlework was no longer needed to hold the flesh together. Janer wondered if Forlam could eat yet, and it suddenly came home to him hard just where he was and the situation he was in.

Within a few minutes the sickness had receded enough for him to realize he badly needed to empty his bladder. Luckily he had noticed the lidded bucket underneath his bunk, and did not have to look far for relief. Afterwards, feeling somewhat better, he returned up to the deck.

‘There’s fresh water over there,’ called Erlin, as Janer stood blearily surveying his surroundings. He went to the barrel by the back wall of the forecabin and gulped down a couple of ladlefuls. The water tasted coppery, and accelerated the effect of the detox in his stomach. Abruptly he felt buoyant, happy, and it occurred to him that the water might also be helping residual alcohol from his stomach into his bloodstream. He peered up at Erlin, who was leaning on the rail staring down at him.

‘Where are we heading?’ he asked, when at last he felt able to speak.

‘The Sargassum,’ she told him. ‘Last known destination of the man I’ve come here for: Captain Ambel.’

‘Oh.’ Janer paused to gulp another ladleful of water and then gazed around the deck. ‘Where’s Keech?’

Erlin shrugged. ‘Gone his own way, as far as I can gather. He wasn’t in the hotel this morning, but left a message saying he had certain things to attend to, and that perhaps we would meet again some time. I’d say that’s the last we’ve seen of him.’

‘Shame, he was interesting,’ said Janer, remembering something the mind had said. He dropped the ladle back into the barrel, scanned about again then went on, ‘What’s a sargassum?’

‘Where the turbul gather to breed,’ Captain Ron interrupted from behind Erlin.

Erlin eyed Janer sympathetically. ‘It’s an area of the sea where sea-cane and sea nettles grow thick enough to form into islands. Turbul are a kind of fish, and they deposit their nymphs on the underside of those islands. Ship Hoopers always head out there at this season to harvest the turbul,’ she explained.

‘Harvest?’ Janer asked, vaguely recalling a previous conversation.

Erlin smiled, turned to say something to Ron, then made for the forecabin ladder, and climbed down to get nearer to Janer. She inspected him with amused sympathy then pointed towards the stern of the ship.

‘Roach is hand-lining for boxies for our lunch. Come and see, and perhaps you’ll begin to understand.’

Janer followed where she led, giving the sail’s head a wide berth as he went. He saw now that not only did the creature control the movement of the fore and aft masts by some hidden linkage, but it also adjusted the fabric sails with cables gripped in some of its spider-claw hands. Janer swung his gaze along the full length of the ship, estimating it to be at least fifty metres long, with a beam of fifteen metres. There weren’t many crew visible but, knowing nothing about sailing ships, he did not know how many might be required to navigate it, nor how many were unnecessary because of this weirdest of rigs.

Roach was a short raggety Hooper with a furtive look about him. He sat like a pile of dirty washing at the edge of the deck where there was no rail. He glanced up at Erlin and Janer, then hauled in the line het had trailing over the side of the ship. It came up with a boxy on the end, which he removed from the hook and tossed into the wooden bucket at his side. Boxy was an apt name for this fish, Janer thought. It had a purple and white cube-shaped body with eyes at the front and a tail sticking out the back.

With a gesture at the boxies already caught, Erlin asked Roach, ‘You mind?’ Roach looked sneaky for a moment as if estimating what he could get for one of the fish. He then glanced towards the Captain, thought for a moment, and made a noncommittal gesture. Erlin picked up one of the fish.

To Janer she said, ‘Spatterjay life forms have evolved to survive being fed upon by the leeches — to have their flesh harvested by leeches.’ She dug her finger in behind the boxy’s eyes, hooked and pulled. The eyes, at the wide point of a small triangular head, the spine and sack of internal organs, and the tail, pulled from the surrounding cube of flesh like a cork coming out of a bottle.

‘Look,’ said Erlin, and threw the essential part of the boxy back into the sea. Janer watched it hit the surface of the water and lie there for a moment. He was just about to ask what she meant when the boxy wriggled, then wriggled again, and shot away into the emerald depths. ‘They don’t die,’ she told him, and to his horror she took a bite out of the cube of flesh she held. ‘Here, try some.’

Janer took the still-warm lump of flesh and stared at it. He glanced down at Roach, who was watching him with a ratty smirk, then he took a small bite and, gritting his teeth against his rebellious stomach, chewed and swallowed. The meat slid down and seemed to settle there with a sudden heat that dispelled his nausea. He was surprised at the effect and took another bite. After swallowing this too, he tried to identify the taste.

‘Spicy… like curry… and bananas,’ he said.

‘It’s loaded with vitamins, proteins and sugars — and the virus of course, but don’t worry about that. The virus can’t survive human digestion, just as it can’t survive long exposure to the air. Your usual methods of contracting it are either through a leech bite or by sexual transmission.’ Erlin seemed uncomfortable at mentioning the latter method. ‘Are you on Intertox?’

Janer shrugged. ‘I’ll take my chances,’ he said, then remembering part of a drunken conversation the night before he asked, ‘Tell me, with food like this so easily available, why do they bring out here what they call “Dome-grown” food?’

Erlin smiled at a memory of her own, and Janer felt almost jealous of it. She said, ‘Dome-grown foods are Earth foods and the varieties grown here contain many natural germicides — toxins even — that inhibit the growth of the viral fibres. Hoopers have possessed the facilities for growing them since the days of Jay Hoop himself, and lucky they did or they wouldn’t have survived. They enjoyed more variety when the Polity finally arrived. Garlic is particularly good. Hoopers like garlic. They’ve grown it here for nearly a millennium.’

‘You’d have thought they wouldn’t want to inhibit the growth of those fibres.’

‘Slow growth is better than fast — that way you don’t go native,’ Erlin replied.

Janer waited for an explanation but none was forthcoming. He finished off the boxy meat first, and was about to pursue the matter when he heard a pitiful squeaking and looked down. Roach had opened a cast-iron bait box and was now baiting his hook. The creature wriggling in his fingers, in its attempt to escape being impaled, had the appearance of a miniature trumpet with a wading bird’s legs and webbed feet.

‘Let’s leave him to it,’ said Erlin. ‘It can be dangerous for an off-worlder to stand near a Hooper while he’s fishing.’

‘What do you mean?’

Erlin pointed at the bait box.

‘One of those things could chew into you like a drill bit. They’re difficult to remove once they get started.’

Janer nodded and stepped back. The little trumpet-things were leaping up and down in the box and, though they had no eyes, they seemed to be watching him. Roach showed no particular caution of the creature he held as he finally impaled it on a gleaming hook. As it let out a bubbling squeak, Janer saw the others in the bait box quit their squeaking and sink out of sight. He nodded to the crewman before following Erlin, but so intent was Roach on getting his line out, he did not notice.

Erlin went on, ‘Besides, there’s all the other things Roach might bring up on his line. There’s frog whelks and hammer whelks down there, not to mention glisters and prill. And there’s always leeches of course.’

Janer had no idea what most of these things were, and was not sure he wanted to find out just then.

As they came opposite the mast Erlin gestured at his belt. ‘You’re not carrying your weapon. I suggest you do,’ she said.

Janer nodded, then his attention was caught by a shoal of somethings sliding past the ship, just below the surface. At first he thought they might be dolphins, then he realized they were huge leeches.

‘Why do people want to stay here?’ he asked. ‘It seems a hellish place.’

Erlin was thoughtful for a moment before replying. ‘For Hoopers it’s what they’re accustomed to. Only in recent years have they become aware that they can leave. They stay because of the benefits they see. If they live long enough, they’ll end up like the Old Captains: practically unkillable, almost inured to pain, utterly at peace with themselves.’

‘Seems they’d have to survive for a long time to attain that,’ said Janer, still watching the leeches.

‘Yes,’ said Erlin. ‘There’s also the fact of the economy here — something that with our own benefits we tend to forget. A Hooper has to work for a very long time to be able to afford passage away from here.’

Janer turned to her, the words ‘afford passage’ registering in his blurry mind.

“I suppose this particular little jaunt is not for free?’ he said.

Erlin smiled. ‘No, I suggest you see Ron soon and negotiate a price.’

Janer looked up at the broad back of the big Captain. ‘I don’t suppose that negotiation need involve me calling him “a robber and a thief”, should it? I don’t fancy the idea of him getting annoyed with me.’

‘Old Captains infrequently lose their tempers — too dangerous,’ Erlin told him. ‘You can call him what you like so long as you pay him. I’m sure you won’t want to disembark just here.’

Janer once again studied the passing shoal of leeches. He searched for something more to say to keep the conversation going. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘do the leeches die?’

‘Yes and no. They’re preyed upon too, and as easy to kill as anything else here, but they don’t actually the of old age. When fertilized, they divide into segments, which then collapse into a large encystment, or egg. That egg will attach itself to the bottom of a sargassum, and out of it will eventually hatch thousands of cute baby leeches.’

‘Nice. What about the males?’

‘No males, really. The leeches are hermaphroditic… sort of.’

‘Same immortality as all life.’

‘Yes, it is that.’ Erlin nodded, lost to her own thoughts. Janer saw that she had now gone away from him and, thinking of nothing else to ask, he quickly returned to his cabin for his gun, deciding right then that he would be very careful here. It was apparent to him that this was a place where recklessness could soon get you dead.

On the great monolith of stone surrounded by empty ocean, Sniper reached out with one triple-jointed arm, clasped the bishop in his precision claw, and moved it halfway across the board. Keeping one palp-eye on the game he turned his other to the three objects that lay on a sheet of slightly putrescent skin spread on the rock beside the board. One of these objects was an explosive slave collar with Prador glyphs etched into its dull grey surface. A brief ultrasound scan revealed the information that the film of planar explosive inside it was still active even after all this time. This meant that at the antiquities sale on Coram this item would fetch over a thousand New Carth shillings. The two other objects were even more interesting and of greater value, as slave collars had already been found in their hundreds over on the Skinner’s Island. One of them, Sniper recognized as a very early nerve-inducer, despite the fact that most of its ceramal casing had corroded away. The other was a mass of corrosion which the war drone had identified, after scanning, as a projectile gun. This last item, despite its terrible condition, would fetch a mint, as it was likely a weapon carried by either Hoop himself or one of his comrades. Sniper hunkered down on his six crustacean legs and returned both eyes to the game as his opponent made a move.

‘How much you want for them?’ the war drone asked as he registered a possible danger to his queen in eight further moves.

Sniper’s opponent lowered to the stone the foot-talon he had used to move his knight, and blinked at Sniper with demonic red eyes. The sail, with his pink-skinned wings wadded into an intricacy of folds and spines that bore some resemblance to a monk’s habit and some to the excess of Elizabethan clothing, and with his long neck hooked like a question mark as he observed the board, grinned his crocodilian grin and exposed a kilo of ivory.

‘Two thousand, and you fit the augmentation for me here,’ he said.

Sniper, who had the appearance of giant crayfish fashioned of polished aluminium, tilted his armoured head in acknowledgement.

‘There’s the alignment program — I wrote it myself. And that, Cheater, will cost you,’ said Sniper.

Windcheater turned his head and eyed Sniper suspiciously as the war drone made his next move.

‘You didn’t tell me about that,’ the sail accused.

Sniper raised his head and stared at the sail. Below the war drone’s angled-back antennae and cluster of sensory bristles, two mirrored tubes shifted apart, coming to point sideways now and leaving a matt square tube centred on the sail opposite. This was the nearest the drone could come to a grin, having in place of a mouth an antiphoton weapon — and the business ends of a rail-gun and a missile launcher.

‘Musta slipped my mind,’ Sniper said.

‘Why do I need this alignment program?’ Windcheater asked, his talons rattling his impatience and splintering up flakes of the stone.

‘Your brain ain’t exactly human-shaped. Put the aug on you now and the nanonic fibres’ll turn your head to mush looking for the right connections.’

‘How different is my brain, then?’ Windcheater asked.

‘Upside-down and halfway down your two spines. Your cerebrum is in a linked triad round your oblongata, and there’s other things in there ain’t even got a name yet.’

‘Better than human?’

‘In your case, just. Your friends…’

Sniper gestured with his heavy claw at the other sails gathered on the far side of the rock and gave a clattering shrug. Windcheater studied his fellows.

‘Put it this way,’ Sniper went on, ‘even auged-up, any sail called Windcatcher ain’t gonna win any chess matches.’

Sniper moved a heretofore-ignored pawn and emitted a satisfied hum.

Windcheater peered at the board and shook his head slowly. The way he exposed his teeth this time could not easily have been identified as a grin. ‘I didn’t see that,’ he said.

‘I guess not,’ said the war drone as he settled to forty-five degrees on his back legs. With his precision claw, he reached under himself and with a metallic click detached a chromed object the shape of a broad bean, but five centimetres long. He passed the object to his heavy claw and held it up between the two razor points.

‘Got the alignment program loaded and ready to go. It’ll take only a few minutes to link in, and about an hour for all the control programs to upload. After that hour you’ll be able to direct-access your account through the local server, and to download information on just about anything you want… all unproscribed technologies, learning programs, you’ll be able to buy things and have them delivered by remote drone, you’ll be able to make investments, and you’ll be able to communicate with just about anyone in the Polity.’

Windcheater’s mouth was hanging open now and his bifurcated tongue was licking across his many teeth. One talon was rising up off the stone as if he wanted to grab the aug right now.

‘I think that’s more than enough in exchange for these few corroded objects,’ Sniper finished.

Windcheater’s mouth snapped shut and his red eyes narrowed. ‘One and a half thousand,’ the sail said.

‘I’m being generous if I offer you five hundred,’ replied Sniper.

‘Twelve hundred, and remember that there’s more where these came from.’

‘Being as it’s you, I’ll go to six hundred.’

Windcheater rocked back on his talons and let out a frustrated hiss. ‘I’m fairly certain I saw a sealed box of five Prador thrall units,’ he said.

‘Where?’ Sniper enquired.

‘The Skinner’s Island — you know, that place the Warden has expressly forbidden you to visit.’

It was Sniper’s turn to hiss. ‘All right, I’ll give you eight hundred, and I’m being more than generous.’

‘Twelve hundred, I said.’

‘Slightest pressure and this aug could pop like a boiled amberclam.’

‘Eleven hundred then.’

‘Don’t want me to make a mistake while fitting this, do you?’ asked Sniper, giving his antiphoton grin.

‘I’ll go no lower than a thousand. I know you can get that for the collar alone,’ said Windcheater.

‘OK, you got me there,’ said the war drone.

Sniper lowered his heavy claw, released the aug from it, catching it in his precision claw. He held the aug out and Windcheater bowed low with his head poised above the chessboard. Sniper pressed the device against the side of the sail’s head. There was a brief snicking sound, and Windcheater jerked his head to one side.

‘Feels sort of—’

The sail did not complete what he was about to say. His eyes crossed. He jerked back, fell on his rump, and sat there making strange hissing and grunting sounds, his foot talons clenched into fists. While Sniper observed this odd behaviour, his own two antenna abruptly flicked upright. ‘Oh hell,’ the war drone said, just managing to draw the putrescent skin over the three objects he and the sail had been bargaining for, before the Warden fully linked in and could gaze through the drone’s eyes. The Warden’s presence was huge, and Sniper frantically opened excess processing space so that it was not so invasive. Fortunately, the presence pulled short of complete invasion of the war drone’s mind.

‘I see that Windcheater has acquired an augmentation. I hope, for your sake, that it is properly aligned, as even your heroic record will not exempt you from reprogramming if you’ve scrambled his brain, Sniper,’ said the Warden.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ said the war drone.

‘Do you? I often wonder about that. You’ve been a free drone for five centuries now. That’s a long time to have been out on your own.’

Sniper hissed. ‘I work for you. I ain’t gonna become one of your subminds.’

‘Well, let’s not replay old arguments. Let’s instead look at the fact of your working for me. What you do on your own time is not my concern, unless it infringes on Polity law — you know, laws like those covering the trade in cultural artefacts and dubious technologies. But when you fail to report to me the arrival of Sable Keech here on Spatterjay, I do wonder if you’re properly attending to your duties.’

‘Sable Keech,’ said Sniper. ‘Oh.’

‘Oh, indeed. I take it that you were not physically present at the gate, and had a submind of your own keeping watch there?’

‘Well… yes.’

‘Then I suggest that the next time you do something like that you give said submind more sophisticated programming. It should have informed you of Keech’s arrival.’

‘Of course, Warden,’ said Sniper.

The Warden paused for a little while before continuing. Always there was this temptation to subsume the mind it was in contact with, as that way the information the mind contained would be instantly accessible. It also had a sneaking suspicion that Sniper was not being exactly straight about something. Yet the Warden could not subsume Sniper without the war drone’s permission, him being a free individual.

The Warden went on, ‘Now, when you have finished here I strongly suggest that you go and join SM13, as it will be needing assistance with its hammer-whelk survey. That should keep you out of trouble at least for a little while. I will link through Windcheater’s aug when it connects to the server, just to check that what is on the other side of it still has some sentience. Understand, Sniper, that we are no longer at war and you cannot break the law with impunity.’

Sniper’s antennae dropped back to their backslanted position, and the war drone let go one long and metallic raspberry. Windcheater’s eyes uncrossed and his foot-talons unclenched.

‘Why do you do it?’ the sail asked. ‘You don’t really need the money.’

‘I’m a war drone, not a bloody flying whelk counter,’ said Sniper, and with a low grumbling sound he rose half a metre from the rock.

‘I still don’t understand,’ said Windcheater.

‘I’m bored,’ said the war drone then, with a gesture of his heavy claw towards the covered artefacts, ‘Keep them safe for me. I’ll be back when I’ve finished counting fucking whelks.’

A blade of fusion flame stabbed from underneath and behind the war drone, and then he shot away into the sky. Windcheater nodded once, then allowed his eyes to cross and his foot-talons to clench once more. The other sails, all of them called Windcatcher, looked on with the same blank lack of understanding as ever.

Keech controlled the scooter with a simple program set up in his aug, while he flipped up the control console’s screen and activated it. The aug program kept the vehicle gliding five metres above the sea and heading south, and as such it did not take up much processing space. Through another part of his aug, Keech accessed the local server, downloaded a mapping program, and relayed it to the scooter’s computer. He could easily have read the map in his aug, but sometimes he preferred a more hands-on approach. Perhaps it was his age… In a moment, the screen indicated his present position on a 500-kilometre-square grid-map. Ahead of him was a cluster of islets the map obscurely named the ‘Pepper Shells’, and east of him was an object labelled ‘The Big Flint’. He was speculating on whether or not this meant Spatterjay had chalk beds — out of which flint is propagated — when there was a sudden spray of water, a crashing noise, and the scooter slewed sideways through the air.

Keech immediately took manual control and turned the scooter to prevent it tipping over. As the scooter rapidly decelerated, he glanced sideways and wondered just for a moment if he was hallucinating. The head of a pink rhinoceros, at the end of ten metres of wormish body that was being dragged through the waves, had clamped its beaked mouth on the scooter wing, just behind the port thruster. The scooter’s AG units whined as it tipped and Keech found himself looking into angry little blue eyes. He quickly pulled the column in the opposite direction and boosted the starboard motor. There was a growling rumble and more sea spray shot in the air. The scooter rose, and tilted further. The rhinoworm’s body came clear of the water, then the creature abruptly let go and dropped back into the sea. Keech shut off the motors and let the scooter regain its stability, then he slammed the motors on full as the head of the worm rose out of the sea again. The Pepper Shells were now off to his left. He turned the scooter towards them, chose one and headed for it as quickly as he could, now careful to keep the scooter more than ten metres above the sea’s surface.

There were at least fifty islets, all no larger than fifty metres across. Keech slowed the scooter and eased it down to the centre of the largest of them. He saw that his landing area consisted of worn stone inset with quartz crystals of every shade imaginable. Scattered loosely on this surface were broken shells and fragments of pink and white chitin like broken porcelain. The scooter crunched on these as it settled. Keech dismounted and immediately inspected the vehicle’s wing: there were scratches on the metal, but it was otherwise undamaged. But the rhinoworm had come close to tipping the scooter over before its beak slid off, and from the organic part of his brain Keech had felt a surge of emotion that felt very much like fear. He gazed back out to sea and recognized the sinuous wave of the worm approaching. It was persistent; he had to give it that. Movement close by then attracted his attention and he glanced down at the shore close by to see a mass of spiral shells shifting about. Abruptly one of these bounced into the air on a thick white foot like an anaemic tongue, and came in to land only a few metres away from him. From this shell rose two eyestalks. As one, from all those down on the beach, rose a small forest of similar eyestalks. He had never seen anything quite so ridiculous. But when the shell nearest to him tilted back to expose a large circular mouth full of more moving parts than a high-tech food processor, he quickly remounted his scooter and took off. As he passed over those on the shore, a couple of them leapt up in the air and bounced off the underside of his scooter. He raised it even higher above the sea as he sped for his destination. The creatures here would have found his flesh unpalatable, but that would be little comfort to him.

With the rhinoworm and those things which he supposed must be frog whelks a couple of kilometres safely behind him, Keech eased the steering column to rest and shut off the motors. The scooter drifted along twenty metres above the waves while he again studied the map. Twelve kilometres to go, and then he must go down again. He reached behind him to get hold of his black attaché case, which he opened on his lap. From the objects inside, he selected a short QC laser carbine to complement the JMCC pulse-gun at his hip. He also selected a tray with a touch-control panel on the side. In this tray rested three innocuous two-centimetre-diameter steel spheres. He then selected a program via the panel, and ran it. The three spheres rose out of the tray and positioned themselves around him. Satisfied, he studied the disassembled weapon that remained in the case. The dealer on Coram who had supplied it to him, had taken a huge risk for which he had been well recompensed, yet Keech felt he would not be needing such armament unless wholesale war broke out on Spatterjay. He closed the case and replaced it in the luggage compartment before easing the steering column forward. The spheres held their positions around him as he proceeded.

Lumps of coral protruded from the sea, like worm-casts of stone and Gothic arches. The sea hissed and slurped between them, and past the banks of greyish sand mounded below. Through his binoculars, Ambel studied a clump of sargassum that was slowly being broken up and sucked through one of these channels. There didn’t seem to be any untoward movement on the clump, but it would be best to be sure. He lowered his binoculars and glanced down at the main deck.

‘Peck, you’ll keep watch with Gollow and Sild,’ he called, nodding towards the two juniors he had only recently hired, while reminding himself to memorize the names of the other recent additions. ‘It’ll be me, Anne and Pland on the rakes.’ He then turned to Boris, who was at the helm, scratching at his moustache and pretending disappointment. ‘You stay here, Boris, and make sure there’s nothing nasty waiting for us when we come back.’

‘Aye, Captain,’ answered Boris as he eased the helm over and brought the Treader into a deep-water channel between sandbanks. The sail, with its neck now curved in an ‘s’ and its head about five metres above the deck, glanced back at Boris and at his nod turned its body out of the wind, turning the fore and aft masts with it. It pulled on cables to fold the fabric sails, before releasing the spars and drawing in its wings. The shadow it cast quickly receded from the deck as it closed up, then hauled itself upright to perch on the fixed central spar. The Treader slowed and at the bows two of the crew lifted the heavy triple anchor and heaved it over the side. Greased chain ratcheted off the windlass until it bottomed, clouding the water of the channel. They secured the windlass as the ship tugged against the chain and halted. Anne had meanwhile opened one of the rail lockers and removed two long-handled rakes, a riddle, and some hide sacks. These she tossed on to the sandy bank below, before jumping down herself. She was soon followed by Pland as, with a whoop, he too leapt from the rail.

‘Give him another two hundred years and he might grow up,’ muttered Boris.

Ambel nodded in agreement, then gestured to the deck cannon bolted to the stern rail of the forecabin. ‘That loaded?’ he asked. When Boris nodded, he went on. ‘Let off a shot if you see anything nasty coming in. Preferably at it. We’ll get back sharpish.’ With that, he climbed down the ladder to the deck and followed Anne over the rail and on to the sandbank. After Gollow and Sild, Peck was last over the rail, landing in a crouch from which he slowly straightened while pumping a shell into the chamber of his shotgun. He gazed about suspiciously, and then nodded approval at the two juniors as they drew pangas from their belt sheaths.

‘Likely only be prill here,’ observed Ambel. Peck concurred but did not seem particularly reassured. Ambel stooped to pick up the two rakes, and handed one of them to Anne. To Pland he said, ‘You collect and sack ‘em.’ And with that, they set off.

Soon they had reached a lower level where streaks of yellow were smeared across the fiat sand. This area was also pocked with little hollows, and as soon as Ambel planted one heavy boot on the edge of it, squirts of water were ejected from these hollows and there arose a crackling hiss.

‘Plenty here,’ he said. ‘You got the bait, Anne?’

Anne handed him a small bag closed with a drawstring. He opened it well away from his face, but even so the smell was strong enough to make his eyes water. He reached inside the bag and tossed a handful of its contents into the air ahead of him. Dried and flaked fish meat snowed down across the sand, and as it settled it elicited further movement; further hollows rapidly appeared and the occasional orange-lipped mouth opened at the surface. Ambel and Anne stepped forward and began vigorous raking, drawing the long white-shelled clams from just below the surface, into heaps. Pland came in behind them, selecting only those the size of a hand to drop into the riddle. When this was full, he took it to a nearby pool, to clean the molluscs of sand before tipping them into a sack.

‘Hey up! Look at this lad!’ shouted Ambel, hooking out a larger clam with the edge of his rake. It was almost twice the size of the ones Pland was collecting. Ambel dropped his rake and grabbed the mollusc before it buried itself again. It fought him for a moment, then came up with a sucking hiss, waving its fringed foot in the air.

‘This is the one for me,’ Ambel said, stepping to the nearby pool to wash his trophy before holding it up for all to see. He drew his sheath knife and inserted the blade between its shells, twisted, then hinged the clam wide open. Inside he revealed a pint of quivering translucent amber flesh.

‘Always best fresh, though I could do with some vinegar and pepper,’ he said.

A quick slice round with his knife and he tipped the whole lot into his mouth before discarding the empty shells. He chewed at it for a moment, with orange juice running down his chin, then swallowed, pulled a face, and reached into his mouth with his fingers. He pulled something out, then swallowed the rest, before wiping his chin on his sleeve.

‘I’ll be buggered,’ he said.

Pland and Anne moved up to see what he had found. Peck tramped over as well, with the two juniors trailing behind him as Ambel held up a small silver sphere for their inspection.

‘Pearl in the first clam of the season. Our luck’s in, lads!’

Anne and Pland nodded in agreement. Peck gave first the pearl then Ambel a suspicious look before summoning to the two juniors and moving away again.

Ambel pocketed the pearl and stooped to take up his rake. ‘Come on, let’s get these sacks full. I got a feeling this’ll be our best voyage yet!’

‘Tis good luck,’ agreed Gollow.

Peck meanwhile grunted and muttered something foul. Ambel threw him a glance of annoyance before he got down to more raking. Peck had been sailing with him for a very long time, and knew him a lot better than most of the crewmen.