The Host

  — by Neal Asher —

  Something hit on the way in. Ivebek Cloon felt the weird distortion of the ship surfacing from U-space, which to him was like the hangover from a neuro-enhancer packed into a couple of seconds. A resounding crash ensued, along with the sensation of someone trying to drag the world away, like a rug from under his feet. Grav went off and he floated up from his bed, turning over, then it came back on hard and deposited him on his face, mostly on his nose. He lay there gasping, wiped away blood and pinched his nostrils closed, stood up and stared at the door, which had opened. He tried using his aug to talk to the AI, Mobius Clean, but, as ever, it didn’t bother replying. Just so long as he remained intact and alive was all that mattered to it—it knew that a little damage wasn’t worthy of note. He tested his nose with his fingers, the pain fading under his touch, the bleeding already stopped.

  Ivebek grimaced. He still healed unnaturally quickly—faster even than someone running a military nanosuite—and still it took several impacts or stresses to damage him, and still he did not know why. He peered at the smear of blood on the floor. His nose should be broken now, his face swelling, yet all he had was a little blood on his fingers. After a moment, he returned his attention to the door.

  He had no way of escaping his situation. If the door was open that probably meant it really didn’t matter if he wandered about. Maybe it hadn’t been locked all this time—he had never thought to try the damned thing. He stepped out, looked up and down the corridor and noted smoke toward the rear of the ship, and headed towards it. Even as he reached it, fan filtration began droning loudly and a breeze whipped it away. The smell of burning led him through a bulkhead door, then another and another. Finally, he came opposite an inspection window and peered inside, recognizing the U-space drive, only it didn’t look like a drive anymore, just scrap.

  “You are at the wrong end of the ship,” said a voice via his aug. “Head to the bridge and strap yourself into the acceleration chair there. This is going to be rough.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some automated defense,” Clean replied, though it sounded doubtful.

  “Why rough?”

  “Grav engines are at minimal function. I am holding them together.”

  “Are we landing somewhere?”

  “Do as instructed.” That ended with an emphatic click—conversation over.

  Ivebek turned around and headed to the front of the ship. The standard bridge contained two acceleration chairs before consoles and a slanted screen revealing starlit space but nothing else of note. He sat down and strapped himself in, assessing what he had learned from his brief exchange with the AI. They were landing, but it seemed someone might not want them to. That Clean, knowing Ivebek’s ruggedness, wanted him strapped in told him the landing would be rough. He tried to relax and, as ever, returned to the memory—his key to understanding all that was happening to him.

  The desert had been hot, almost beyond the insulation and cooling capacity of his armored suit. Organic toxins filled the air but it contained enough oxygen to sustain him, just so long as the filters held up. He’d found the entrance in the side of a sandstone butte—a tunnel of nacreous mother-of-pearl delving inside, as if erosion had revealed a giant mollusk from some ancient sea here. He walked inside, checking his weapons as he did so. Light amplification through his HUD created the illusion of a bright place as he moved into darkness. Then . . . nothing.

  It seemed such a small and inconsequential fragment of memory, but it had kept him alive. When Earth Central Security grabbed him on the Polity side of the Graveyard—that borderland lying between the human Polity and the alien prador—he was sure that would be the end for him. He’d committed theft and murder in the Polity while smuggling alien artifacts—Jain stuff supposedly, but he wasn’t so sure that was true, but it paid. He’d done worse in the Graveyard, hooking up with a crew selling cored and thralled humans to the prador. He had been a career criminal with more than enough marks against him to warrant a death sentence.

  They’d questioned him, of course, first in a tiled cell. The agent concerned got all old fashioned on his arse with brass knuckles and a shock stick, then became puzzled and intrigued by how he absorbed damage. Perhaps that was why he had not executed him then and there, but passed him on. Aboard the ECS stealth ship they’d scanned him intensely, then used an interrogation aug to observe his mental responses to questioning and copy memories out of his mind. After that he had expected them to give him a short tour of an airlock, but it seemed something didn’t add up.

  “Here,” the woman had said, placing a pulse gun on the table before him.

  He’d stared at the thing. He should pick it up, shoot her, and do all he could to escape, though that seemed unlikely. What had he got to lose? He picked up the gun, pointed it at the wall, and triggered it. It surprised the hell out of him when it actually fired, and he dropped it like a poisonous insect.

  “I thought so,” she said. “Something’s fucked with your mind as well as your body.”

  He sat there baffled when she took the gun away again and left.

  The stealth ship docked at an outlink station and troops carted him inside to deposit him in a garden, on a synthetic stone seat. They took off the manacles and left. He didn’t have a clue what was happening until the thing rose out of a pond swimming with multicolored fish. It looked like a crinoid six feet across, rippling feather tendrils attached to a central point.

  “I am to examine you,” the forensic AI explained.

  He ran of course, but had nowhere to go. The thing descended on him and grabbed him to begin its examination. A thousand worms seemed to writhe over his skin, then it abruptly released him and he thumped on his back in the grass. It retreated. He lay there feeling strangely heavy and solid, as if after a particularly hard workout, and that feeling had stayed with him since.

  “They scanned you in the ship and found you impenetrable,” it said. “You are also impenetrable to me.” It sounded affronted. “You are opaque—a form of chameleonware has been inlaid in your skin. Can you explain this?”

  He wanted to, he really wanted to. He knew what forensic AIs did to people like him. In pursuit of answers this thing could take him apart both physically and mentally and, if not satisfied with the results, put him back together and do it again. Painkillers, apparently, were not an option during this process, pain in fact being a necessary encouragement.

  When he could find no reply it came at him again. He fought it this time, but its tendrils had as much give as braided towing cables. It inserted nanofibers into the interrogation aug still attached to his head. He felt all his memories rising for examination and then that memory. The AI simply dropped him again, backed off and folded into a ball just a few feet across. It stayed that way long enough for him to search the garden for a way out, drink from the pool, and wonder what those fish would taste like raw. Then it unfolded.

  “We are going on a journey,” it told him.

  And here he was. It did tell him a little of the circumstances. He had encountered an alien and that was integral in his memory of mother-of-pearl tunnels. It had tampered with his body and mind, altering it in ways the AI could not parse, though some of the results were plain: as well as unusual physical ruggedness he was no longer a killer—he possessed empathy. The AI had decided not to continue its examination because that memory would be of interest to her. He had no idea who she was, and the AI had not considered it worthwhile to tell him.

  The ship shuddered and the star field began to swing to the right. A sun slid into view, the reactive screen damping its glare, then a world. He gazed down upon the yellow and white swirls of cloud over pastel terrain and could see no sign of oceans. The seat kicked him in the back as fusion flung the ship forward. Acceleration ramped up and up, and that he was feeling it confirmed problems with internal grav too. He felt himself sinking deeper and deeper into the seat, his arms turning to lead and an invisible stone coming to rest on his chest, and somehow it slid inside him—a solid core. Then he blacked out.

  Ivebek regained consciousness to the roar of atmosphere over the hull. Misty claws of cloud reared up to grab at the ship. Piss yellow rain hit the screen and slid off its frictionless coating. Sun glare, a green-tinted yellow, briefly blinded him. The ship dipped into thicker cloud, snow swirling in view, then through—the cloud a gray-green ceiling above. He could just make out the features of mountain chains, valleys, and perhaps rivers. Lower still, with the ship shuddering alarmingly, he felt sure he could see jungles or forests, but with little green in them. With some time yet to pass before landing, or crash, he decided to try something.

  “Almanac data,” he stated.

  To one side, in the laminate of the screen, a long menu scrolled up with an arrow blinking beside the first entry. He lowered his gaze to the third entry, the arrow tracking his vision, and blinked deliberately. The aug connection flashed up in his visual cortex and he permitted it, then enabled a full download while speed-reading the introduction to a world designated X349. Until that moment he had not known the interrogation aug would respond like a standard version. A lot had been redacted from the data presented while, on occasion, a warning appeared telling him to avoid this proscribed destination.

  Now he could see actual jungle down there, mainly purple and blue with minor swirls of green. The ship turned, flinging him from side to side, and now he had a view to the rear up toward the rumpled quilt of cloud, just before deceleration sank him into his chair again. This more tha n anything else told him how many drive systems were down—the AI forced to use the main fusion drive to decelerate. The pressure pushed him close to blackout then came off with another turn. Again he saw ahead, now low down over the vast jungle. The ship began hitting the treetops, then debris covered the screen as it sank lower and deceleration flung him against the straps. The ship vibrated so hard it felt like the muscles were being shrugged from his bones. A steady roar grew in volume until it hurt his ears, crescendoed with a crash that nearly put him through the floor, then another and another. The roar diminished, and finally the ship hit earth and stayed there, deceleration still forcing him against the straps, but then finally coming off with a thump. The debris slid from the screen and he gazed out at a blast field—jungle leveled and burning all around. He swallowed dryly, reached down, and undid the straps.

  “Return to your cabin,” said the AI, via his aug.

  * * *

  Ivebek paced in his cabin—a ten-foot box with the minimum of facilities—listening to the creaks and groans of settling metal and a susurration that sounded like wind. His body felt tighter and harder after the buffeting in the bridge, while he felt as if he had pulled a muscle in his torso, and the nag wasn’t going away. He sat on the bed to read the almanac download again. He was gazing at the gap, where any information about intelligent life or previous civilizations on X349 had been redacted, when he felt it.

  Someone was calling him and he felt an odd déjà vu, a nostalgia, as if this might be his mother summoning him in from playing in the ducts of the arcology where he grew up. This lasted for just a short time, but it seemed the wrong key to his mind. Next he felt hunger and thirst that would be relieved if he just got up and went over there. He turned his head, gazing at the wall of the cabin. He got up and went to his fabricator and input his needs, returned to the bed with a tray of printed pork and black beans and a beaker of blue banyan juice. These quelled the feelings only a little, but enough for a change of approach. He now felt withdrawal from the many addictive substances he had tried pulling at him, trying to get him to head to some destination where all his needs would be satisfied.

  “There’s something in my mind,” he said.

  “It is her, calling you,” replied Mobius Clean.

  He pondered that for a long moment and realized he did not agree. It felt far too personal, intimate even. But perhaps that was how, whatever this was, operated. He suspected something like an induction warfare beam had been pointed at him. It wasn’t telepathy, couldn’t be that since Polity science had long ago disproved it . . . unless of course the AIs were lying.

  “What the hell does this female want with me?” he asked.

  Instead of answering the question, the AI said, “We are some distance from the site. You are to proceed alone. It will be necessary for you to defend yourself.”

  A hatch opened in the wall and he gaped disbelievingly at what it revealed. His armored suit lay there, and his weapons. Rising from the bed, he walked over and peered down at it, noting as he did so that the gravity of this world sat just above Earth normal. He took the suit out and put it on, linking into its systems via his aug. He holstered his sidearm—a pulse gun—picked up his Brabeck Multigun, and jacked the combined optic, power feed and ammo tube into his pack, which he pulled onto his back. He then stood there checking diagnostics in his HUD, along with ammo and power levels. Everything had been topped up. He felt the urge then to never get out of this suit until he was either free or dead, but then acknowledged it likely Clean had put in some way of shutting it down. The weapons, he realized, were irrelevant, since he could no longer use them against others.

  “Come outside,” Clean told him.

  The suit gave him a little bit of assist in the higher gravity, but he cancelled it since he’d gone long enough without exercise. The nag in his torso was now a dull ache as he headed to the cabin door and it opened ahead of him. Remembering how he had come aboard he went to the hold, found the airlock standing open and the ramp to the outside down on smoking ground. The hold had been packed with equipment when he boarded, but appeared half empty.

  Reaching the bottom of the ramp, he gazed back along the length of the ship to where a large section of armor had been debonded at the back end to open access. That was quick. A grav-sled he had originally seen in the hold stood beside this, the equipment piled on it swiftly disappearing as black spider mechs with clawed forelimbs and dodecahedral bodies carted it into the open section. He walked over and gazed inside, recognizing the compartment for the ship’s U-space drive. It was much changed in there now.

  When he had peered through the interior inspection window the drive had been a blackened and twisted wreck. The two cylinders of complex technology supported in the middle of the compartment by glassy struts had been mashed as if giant hands had reached in and twisted them like someone wringing out a cloth. Most of the struts had been shattered, optics charred, s-con broken. Somehow braided meta-material had been turned into chunks not dissimilar to wood charcoal. Now the cylinders were straight, some of the struts back in place, coils of optics hung around the walls, and spider mechs were clearing out debris and stringing new s-con. This had all happened in less than an hour.

  “I thought this kind of a repair of a U-space drive was supposed to be impossible without heavy infrastructure,” he commented. “Where are the vastly precise machines, intense energy sources, and gravity presses?”

  “Now you know better.”

  Wrapped around the drive cylinders, Mobius Clean bore the appearance of a tangled mobile sea fern, working so fast its limbs were a blur to the human eye, while the packed technology of the cylinders deformed, shifted, and changed shape.

  “You could have likewise taken me apart and examined me,” he stated dully. “I still don’t really know why you stopped.”

  “It was necessary,” was all Clean supplied.

  Or had the AI stopped? Sure, that’s what he remembered, but the AI could have taken him apart and, putting him back together, implanted any memories it chose. Probably some way of tracing him would remain, some way of seizing control of him, some way of manipulating him. Polity AIs lied, manipulated, bent things to the shape they required, and the truth of that lay before him now.

  Throughout the history of U-space travel the AIs established the myth that U-space engines could only be built in AI-controlled facilities using hugely complex and energy-hungry machines, and that some components could only be forged on the surfaces of brown dwarfs. The resulting engines, because of the complex interdimensional math involved, and the mental gymnastics in dealing with a continuum supposedly without conventional time or dimensions, required an AI to run them. All lies. The prador made such drives without AI and ran them with the transplanted and flash-frozen ganglions of their children, while here before him the forensic AI was practically rebuilding a drive that anywhere else would have been consigned to recycling.

  Now Clean pulled away from the drive and rolled out of the hole in the side of the ship, coming to rest before him.

  “I just scanned you to try and confirm what I have been told,” said the AI. “Apparently you are capable of breathing the atmosphere here and are immune to the viruses, microfauna and allergens of this world, so have no requirement for a suit. I, however, pointed out that unsuited you would be vulnerable to the macrofauna here. She agreed that this was the case.”

  “And who is ‘she’?” he asked

  Disregarding his question, yet again, Clean continued, “Whether you wish to open your suit to the air here is a matter for your own discretion.”

  “Who is ‘she’ Clean? Why am I here?”

  “You are here because your life is forfeit and an entity with which we wish to open larger communication showed an interest in you. You will go to her and what she does with you is of little matter to us. You may even survive it, in which case, bearing in mind that your propensity to kill has been removed, you may return to the Polity as a free citizen.”

  “Entity? Some sort of alien?”

  “Of a kind, according to a fragment of memory in your mind, you encountered before.”

  “That memory.”

 

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