The Voyage of the Sable Keech

1

Ambel listened to the wind in the sail and wondered if the rhinoworm steaks the creature had just eaten might be on the turn. The veined pink sheets of the living sail’s wings were spread in the spars of the Treader, stiffened by its spines and ropes of muscle. It gripped wood with numerous spidery claws at the ends of these spines, and its neck was wound once around the mast, its crocodilian head poised a couple of metres above the deck. It looked contemplative as it turned the mast on the static spar, thus turning the other two masts via mechanisms in the body of the ship. Or perhaps that look was dyspepsia?

‘You all right there, sail?’ he asked.

The sail turned its demonic red eyes towards him. ‘I’m fine,’ it grated. ‘And the name is Gale… catcher?’ It shook its head. Obviously it still could not grasp the new name issued to it by the Boss. But then, barring the Boss himself, it had, like all the other sails, borne for many years the name Windcatcher. Centuries ago these huge batlike creatures of this world had possessed enough intelligence to learn human language and make themselves useful to humans by actually taking the place of fabric sails on ocean-going ships, thus benefiting from food supplied by the humans, but the concept of names ever evaded them. Now, one very intelligent sail was changing all that. Their wages had changed too.

‘Don’t seem right,’ Peck muttered from just behind Ambel’s left shoulder.

‘I think I warned you, Peck,’ said Ambel mildly.

‘Sorry,’ said the ship’s mechanic.

Ambel glanced at him. The man’s appearance was unchanged: bald head, weird green eyes the hue of the sky above them, the long hide coat he preferred, and filthy canvas trousers, but in other ways he just got stranger as he got older. His latest odd habit was to quietly creep up behind people to abruptly issue his gripes. It was annoying for many, which was why Ambel had given him a warning earlier. The Captain himself was past such little irritations. You don’t recover from being a stripped fish and still allow someone like Peck to get under your skin, so to speak.

‘Go and grease your ratchets,’ Ambel added, then returned his attention to the sail. ‘Your name, if you recollect, is Galegrabber.’

The sail blinked at him, and mumbled in a decidedly Peckish way.

Ambel let that go. ‘How far to Olian’s, do you think?’ he asked instead.

The sail lifted its head higher, until it was almost past its own body, peered into the distance for a while, then returned to Ambel’s level.

‘Twenty-two point six five kilometres.’

Ambel eyed the creature then turned to head back to his cabin. Could not remember its own name, yet Galegrabber had a mind like a computer when it came to anything involving figures. But then maybe the small black aug attached behind its ear hole was configured for that. Ambel opened his cabin door and stepped inside.

After they had dragged the Treader out of the jungle on the Skinner’s Island, where it had been thrown by the massive explosion intended to kill all the Old Captains—being witnesses to the Prador Ebulan’s long-ago crimes—it had taken Ambel a few years to lose the creepy feeling he got every time he entered his own cabin. His sea chest was still there against the wall, a little battered but intact. However, that chest no longer contained anything nasty. The living Skinner’s head, which once resided in a box inside the chest, was dead along with the rest of the monster the erstwhile pirate Jay Hoop had become.

Ambel sighed and dropped into his reinforced chair. So many events back then, but already they were being buried under the trammelling years. It was the understanding that this was always the way of things that he tried to impart to Erlin, to help her through her crisis of ennui—something all those who might live forever faced at about their two hundredth year. He hoped to have succeeded, hoped she would not kill herself out of boredom. He still loved her, though considered her rather impetuous and inclined to drama. Youngsters.

Her recent expedition was a further sign of what Ambel considered her immaturity. He had dropped her off on an island where ostensibly she intended to study some of the local homicidal molluscs, but really she ‘needed to think’. Maybe she intended to kill herself, but if that was her intention Ambel would not stop her—he didn’t have the right—and probably could not anyway if her intention was serious. He would find out soon enough. After making a deposit at Olian’s, he was going back for her. She had been on that island for about a year, so her supplies of dome-grown food must be running out, and he didn’t want to risk her turning into another skinner. Shaking his head he turned to his charts.

An hour later there came a recognizably tuneful knock at his cabin door.

‘What is it, Sprout?’ he asked.

There was a pause while Sprout, not the sharpest gut-knife in the box, tried to figure out how Ambel knew who was knocking. Then the man said, ‘Comin’ up on the island now, Captain.’

Ambel stepped back out of his cabin, glanced at Sprout—a short thickset man with dyed purple hair tied in a ponytail; lip ring, nose ring and ring in his left ear all joined by a chain; and wearing a long brown leather coat over his canvas Hooper clothing. Sprout also wore an aug, which accounted for his facial mutilations and the dye job. He had found the look on some historical site, and been much attracted to it. He was not the only one either: body piercing was becoming quite the fashion amongst the younger Hoopers. Ambel felt that wasn’t healthy for a people whose relationship with pain was questionable at best. He now turned his attention to Olian Tay’s island.

Some years ago the approach here had been difficult because of the packetworm reefs surrounding it. Now channels had been cut through many of them, large bubble-metal jetties extended from the beaches and smaller pearwood jetties branched off from those. Many Hooper ships and boats were moored here and, as the Treader drew in, Hoopers waved and called from their decks. Ambel smelt the tobacco smoke before he spotted Captain Sprage on the deck of the Vengeance, chair tilted back and pipe firmly clamped in his mouth. Sprage nodded and Ambel raised a hand. They had a history together, but then so did most Old Captains, most of them having lived for over five centuries in this same area of the same world. Ambel saw a new Captain, Lember, who at one time had been Sprage’s bosun. He saw Cormarel and Tranbit. The first of these Captains was unnaturally tall and long-limbed due to a lack of dome-grown food in his past, resulting in a near skinnerlike transformation, and the last, a squat wide man with red skin in which the blue leech scars seemed to gleam like silver. Utterly different in appearance, yet the firmest of friends. Many other Hoopers unloaded cargoes, loaded supplies, chatted, worked on their ships, sat on the jetties fishing for boxies and swearing at their bait, or gathered in groups to crack open barrels of sea-cane rum. Ambel smelt roasting glister, and heard the thumping of hammer whelks trying to escape the cauldrons in which they were being boiled. He eyed someone searing turbul steaks on a hotplate, then caught the eye-watering stench of someone emptying a slops bucket over a ship’s side.

And the Treader drew in to dock.

The gleaming metal nautilus, three metres in diameter, its grasping tentacles neatly folded and its head withdrawn inside, was a drone shell. A bubble-metal framework held it upright, and it had been carefully wrapped in translucent shockfoam sheeting. Studying the spaceship’s manifest, Captain Ron wondered why anyone had bothered with the wrapping, since the damned thing was made of a highly advanced ceramal and diamond fibre composite, and plated with nanochain chromium. Working with a sledgehammer for the next decade, Ron would hardly manage to scratch its surface, and the Old Captain could do more damage with his fists than any normal human could do with such a hammer.

‘Who’s it for?’ he asked casually.

‘The Warden,’ Forlam replied.

‘Ah… figures,’ said Ron.

Ron was built like a piece of earth-moving equipment: slabs of muscle shifted underneath his silk shirt, his hands were like spades, his legs pillars, and he stood solid as a boulder. Unlike Ron, Forlam possessed a head of hair, and was wiry. He was as tough as seasoned oak, and wore the expression of someone perpetually on the edge of needing cerebral adjustment or confinement to an asylum. Both men bore a slight blue tint to their skins. Both men were covered with circular scars, though in Ron’s case there were so many that he appeared mottled, almost scaly.

‘Not our most unusual cargo,’ Forlam added.

Ron eyed him. ‘We have a usual cargo?’

Forlam gave a wincing shrug.

Since Ron had taken on the Captaincy of the Gurnard they had visited many worlds inside and outside the Polity, and hauled everything from components for the Cassius Dyson sphere to genfactored replacement bodies in the shape of mythical beasts. Ron’s particular favourite had been the live cargo of a creature called a ‘gabbleduck’, which had been restrained by composite chains equally as strong as the material in this drone shell, to prevent it breaking free and eating the crew. All it had done though was sit in the hold: a huge pyramid of flesh with too many arms, topped with a domed head wrapped in a tiara of greenish eyes and sporting a large duck bill, eating the food provided and speaking nonsense that always seemed on the edge of making sense. Ron knew there was a lot more oddities for him to see and other interesting cargoes to haul, but it felt good to be going home. He moved on down the hold with Forlam trailing behind him.

‘What else have we got here?’ he asked, eyeing his notescreen manifest.

‘A really big lump of wood,’ replied Forlam. ‘I think you’ll know what it is as soon as you see it.’

‘I’ll be buggered,’ Ron later said, while eyeing the huge ship’s keel they had transported to Spatterjay.

By all Polity definitions Taylor Bloc knew he was an AI: the memcording of the man running entirely in crystal. That cyber mechanisms moved his dead and chemically preserved body was irrelevant for definition. But he retained his flesh, his skeleton, and his own peculiar belief in resurrection. Bloc’s beliefs ran contrary to those of others and, as always, they were trying to thwart him. He was angry, he was always angry.

In the embarkation lounge on Coram, the moon of Spatterjay, he walked jerkily around a bumbling beetle-bot that was meticulously polishing the floor, and stepped into a private conferencing booth, where he removed his mask and slid back his hood.

‘I must speak to the Warden,’ he said succinctly, as soon as he saw that the privacy field had come on.

‘Hello, dead man,’ said a submind.

Bloc was momentarily taken aback. After a pause he went on, ‘I said, I want to speak to the Warden.’

‘Can do, but I warn you he’s not the soul of patience nowadays—not that he ever was.’

‘Okay, I’ve got it now, Seven. What do you want, Bloc?’

‘I’ve been informed that my cargo is not to be delivered to its intended destination.’

‘Yeah, no shit?’ replied a bored voice.

‘That is breach of contract.’

‘Spatterjay is not a Polity world, reif. You don’t talk to me, you talk to the Boss.’

‘Boss?’ Bloc paused, then continued regardless, ‘The agreement was that we would lay the keel on Chel—the Embassy Island.’ He blinked and his spectacle irrigator started working. He shut it down and his constant internal diagnosticer immediately threw up the message in his visual cortex: IRRIG @@#* SHUT??DOWN. Such corruptions were the inevitable result of the additional hardware his dead body now contained, but still it took him a moment to register what the Warden said next.

‘What?’

‘I said: have you got that in writing?’ the Warden repeated.

‘I can send you the package right now.’

‘I mean, have you got that in writing on paper signed by both parties?’

‘Paper?’

‘That’s how it’s done down on the surface. Now, why don’t you get yourself and your friends down there—you’re stinking up my base.’

Bloc took a step back. No AI had ever spoken to him like that before, though admittedly his experience of them was deliberately limited, as there were certain things about himself, and his companions, best kept secret from the artificial intelligences that ruled the Human Polity.

‘I am not… stinking,’ he said carefully. ‘My anosmic receptors are the most advanced, and I would have detected—’

‘Too late, Blocky boy. Old Sniper ain’t got much of an attention span.’

‘Sniper?’

The conferencing booth shut down and the privacy field turned off. Bloc stepped out backwards, then turned to his two companions. ‘We have to speak to the “Boss” apparently,’ he said.

Aesop replied, ‘That means we have to go down to the surface and take a ride on a ferry.’

‘Ferry?’ Bloc repeated.

‘No antigravity transport is allowed on the surface,’ Aesop continued. He and Bones remained securely masked and hooded, as Bloc had decided that to be best. Although he felt their kind should not have to hide themselves from the rest of humanity, the appearance of his two reified companions tended to draw more unwanted attention than even he himself.

‘No AG transport,’ Bloc repeated stupidly.

Aesop and Bones obeyed orders and provided information when it was lacking, but they were never solicitous in such service. Aesop said flatly, ‘If you recollect, that is why we chose to build a ship, for the mass transportation of reifications and amniotic tanks. It is also to be a monument to the Arisen One, and yourself of course.’

IRRIG. WARN: CELLULAR DAMAGE IMMINENT

Bloc turned his irrigator back on. He eyed his two companions through the spray, and his mind started working properly again.

‘Thank you, Aesop, I recollect precisely,’ he said, and began leading the way to where the planetary shuttles docked. He showed no sign of his earlier confusion, and now showed none of his present chagrin, which was easy enough when you were dead. But something was wrong. That glitch with his irrigator warning was a familiar one, but his memory lapse was something new, for Bloc’s memory had been perfect for two hundred years, ever since Bones and Aesop had murdered him back on his home world.

As the door to the coldsleep coffin crumped open before him, and as the feeling began painfully returning to his limbs, Janer told himself, ‘Never again.’

The mind had not wanted him to come here via the runcible for three good reasons. Something he was carrying came under the weapons proscription—which prevented travellers carrying arms above a certain power level through that same matter transmitter. Secondly, the ruler of Spatterjay might object to him coming here with hornets, and so block him. And, lastly, the mind did not want any Polity AIs nosing in on its business, since this was a private matter between hive minds.

‘You brought them buggers back with you?’ said a familiar voice.

‘Ron? Captain Ron?’

Establishing control over his limbs, Janer took a shaky step from the cold coffin. Cryogenic Storage was a chamber ringed with upright coffins similar to his own. The Old Captain was stooping over one of the cryocases stacked haphazardly in the centre of the room. He appeared little different to how Janer remembered him: bald-headed, leech-scarred and massive. He stood upright and grinned.

‘What the hell are you doing aboard?’ Janer asked.

‘I’m the Captain.’

‘I know that, but why are you aboard this old lugger?’

‘I’m the Captain of this old lugger.’

As far as Janer understood it, captaining a sailing vessel on the surface of Spatterjay did not qualify one to run a spaceship. Numerous questions came to mind, but all he managed was, ‘Uh?’

‘Been looking around for a few years,’ Ron added unhelpfully.

Janer turned to a nearby dispenser and took from it a disposable coverall. He then punched in for a hot coffee before donning the garment. This gave him time to get his thoughts in order. After sipping coffee he couched his question.

‘How come you have the know-how to run one of these?’ He gestured about him with the cup, spilling coffee.

‘Oh, I learnt all this stuff years ago, just never had the money to buy passage off-planet. But things have changed under the Boss, and now Hoopers can afford more than their next sack of dome-grown grub.’

Years ago.

Of course, that was it about the Old Captains: they were old. Ron had lived on Spatterjay for a very long time. Knowledge had always been accessible to him, if the means of employing it had not, since this world had been visited by space travellers for long before the runcible was set up here over two centuries ago. How much knowledge could you pack into your skull over such a period of time? Maybe, to Ron, the complexities of space travel were not too much of a bother. Then Janer remembered something else: Ron had fought in the Prador War. Perhaps he had known how to run spaceships even before coming here, the best part of a thousand years ago.

‘You’ve been on a trade route between here and somewhere else?’ Janer asked.

‘Nah, more of a circuit.’ He beckoned to Janer. ‘Come on.’

‘And it’s brought you back here?’

‘No, lad. I arranged it like that.’

‘Why?’

Ron glanced at him. ‘I want to go home. Still got a mug down there with my name on it, and I got a ten-year thirst on me.’

Janer felt his head twinge almost warningly. He remembered drinking sea-cane rum—well, remembered starting to drink it. After a certain point things had become rather fuzzy.

He paused at the door, gesturing back to the cryocases. ‘The hornets…’

‘They’ll be fine. I’ll bring ‘em down with the cargo I have to deliver. And you can come down with me too. You’re our only human passenger.’

Janer didn’t respond to the slight query in the Captain’s voice.

Ron added, ‘Don’t get many passengers, not inside the runcible network.’

Janer didn’t rise to that either.

Only when Erlin moved the underwater remote eye, for a better view of the colony, was it attacked by leeches that had soon forgotten the device was no source of meat, so she was glad to have found this rocky marine peak to which it could cling with its three sharp legs. Not that leeches could damage the device, but when they swarmed they did tend to block her view of the ostensible reason for her being here.

The whelks were all of a similar size and bore near-identical shell markings. Each spiral shell was about half a metre from base to tip, pyramidal, and glittering with whorls of iridescence. Sitting in the mouth of her temporary home—it was Polity technology: the kind that could be inflated in minutes and, when ballasted, stood as solid and impenetrable as a stone house—Erlin gazed at the image on her fold-up screen, remaining perplexed and fed up. These molluscs were neither frog nor hammer whelks, and were actually quite boring. Her gaze wandered from the screen. Boredom, if she was to acquire that ‘long habit of living’ to which Ambel often referred, was something she must avoid. She felt the black pit of ennui at her core, robbing her of volition and threatening to spill out. With almost a physical wrench she forced her attention back to the screen.

She had expected to move the eye, following the whelks’ migration around the island or deeper into the ocean, but they remained exactly in the same location. She had expected to see a lot more activity than this. Other whelk species were always hunting for food or trying very hard not to become food, and even though they were the sexually immature version of a larger deep-sea whelk, they manoeuvred in elaborate social pecking orders. The only sign of movement from these creatures was when small leeches, glisters or prill came too close. Then they snapped out squidlike tentacles to drag those creatures down and eat them. That was all they did: fed and sat and grew. She closed down the screen. The damned things had done nothing else for a whole year, which was why Erlin had tried to occupy herself with other studies on the island.

When she had arrived, the leech population was low and no individual leech longer than her finger. It seemed some event had denuded the island of anything larger than this prior to her arrival. Now those fingerlings were about the size of her arm, though there were fewer of them, and they fed upon small heirodonts creeping through the vegetation (she could hear their screams in the night). There had once been big heirodonts here, too—their bones were mounded on the beach, so obviously the same event that had cleared this place of bigger leeches had done for them as well, though why their bones were piled up she did not know. It frustrated her that she could not put together all the pieces of the puzzle: the leeches, the bones, the shattered peartrunk trees on either side of a lane of destruction driven over the middle of the island. Maybe some kind of storm? Maybe some kind of outside interference by humans, or even by the Warden? Whatever, she certainly intended to solve at least one puzzle before Ambel returned for her. And to do so she only needed to risk her life.

Erlin did not like invasive studies, but it was time for her to discover what was going on with that colony of whelks. Her various scans had been inconclusive, but then her equipment here was limited. She needed one of those creatures here, on the surgical table she had erected in her abode, so she could dissect it to divine the function of its parts. She opened up the screen again.

The camera had moved. It had been doing that a lot lately. Maybe an earth tremor, though she had felt none, or maybe it was malfunctioning. Making adjustments she brought the colony back into view. It seemed closer now, which was ridiculous. She closed up the screen, stood and, stepping back inside, placed the device on a rough table she had fashioned from peartrunk wood. From her sea chest she removed her diving suit and donned it. The thing was heavy—two layers of monofilament fabric sandwiching ceramal chain mail—but it was what you needed if you ever wanted to take a swim here and remain intact. Her haemolung breather would give her three hours underwater before its cells of artificial haemoglobin became overloaded. More than enough time, now she had resolved the difficulty in getting one of the creatures ashore. To that end she had made some additions to her harpoon gun. Now, when the barbed point penetrated shell and delivered the specially tailored nerve agent, airbags would inflate on the haft, dragging the chosen whelk to the surface. Then all she had to do was drag it ashore. Picking up her equipment she headed off.

The beach here was stony, consisting of agates, rounded nodules of rose quartz and bullets of chert. At the tide line she donned the haemolung, mask and flippers, took up her harpoon gun and, without more ado, entered the waves. Immediately leeches started to thud into her, their grinding tubular mouthparts trying to penetrate her suit. She ignored them, kept going till submerged. In a short while the attacks ceased; each nearby leech having ascertained that she must be a large crustacean like a glister.

Ten metres out, the bottom dropped sharply. She sculled slowly down into the murk, soon locating the peak to which her camera eye clung. Circling this she spotted an iridescent gleam to the gutlike rolls of stone which she had not noticed before. Soon she was above the whelks—out of tentacle range. Something shifted, a current shoved her sideways. Earth tremor? No, just the current. She aimed down at one of the whelks and fired. The harpoon chopped into its shell and the airbags expanded. Trailing a cloud of yellow ichor the creature rose to the surface with its tentacles clenched up inside it, the nerve agent having done its work. Erlin rose with it and swam quickly ashore, towing it behind by the harpoon’s monofilament. After detaching the harpoon’s barb, she rolled the creature through the shallows to the beach. A momentary pang of guilt touched her, but she dismissed it. These were primitive molluscs of a kind she had been eating, nicely broiled and dunked in spiced vinegar, for years.

Once ashore she stooped and picked up the mollusc, acknowledging to herself that without the changes the Spatterjay virus had wrought in her body, the creature would be too heavy to manage. Back in her abode she dumped it on the surgical table, then began removing her gear. From the sea she heard a huge splash, and peering out observed a disturbance in the water above the colony. Glisters probably—on tasting the ichor in the water. Returning to the table she placed a camera eye over it before getting to work. She used her vibroscalpel to slice from tip to base around the shell, then her Hooper muscles to pull the two halves apart. The shell, she saw, was surprisingly thin. The creature inside was octupoidal, and opening it up she saw it also possessed much the same anatomy as a frog whelk. Another huge splash from outside. Erlin stepped over and flipped up her screen, but it showed nothing but underwater murk. She returned to her dissection.

The creature seemed ill-formed—soft and immature—and she could not find its nascent sexual organs. That was very odd as, being this size, it should at least be approaching adulthood. Perhaps she had stumbled on an aberrant colony of mutants. Or perhaps these were whelks affected by some agent, some pollutant. It had happened on Earth a long time ago: creatures similar to this changing their sexual characteristics because of pollution by human birth-control chemicals or antifouling paints on boats. Some there now were also genfactored to grow simply as meat and so did not require sex organs. But here the process could not have been initiated by humans; there just were not enough of them, and their society was not sufficiently industrialized to affect their environment. Maybe some connection with whatever had happened here on this island? Erlin allowed her attention to stray back to her screen, and for a moment just could not fathom what she was seeing. Then the view came clear. She was now looking at her own dwelling, viewed from a point out at sea and some metres above the water.

Erlin stepped to the doorway and gaped. A year of navel-gazing had obviously rotted her brain. The tip of an enormous pyramidal spiral shell was now two metres above the waves, her camera eye still clinging in place on its tip. Of course, frog and hammer whelks were adolescent by the time they reached the size of the one on the table, which it now appeared was the juvenile of a very different and much larger species. She had not been studying a colony, but a brood of creatures that were a magnitude larger than the oldest whelk of the other kind.

And now the mother whelk was coming ashore after one of her missing offspring.