The Skinner

  ‘Will you let us have weapons at least?’ Frisk asked.

  While Vrell considered the matter, it was Speaker who replied.

  ‘She and her mercenaries may indeed take weapons ashore. They will not be able to get back through your defences.’

  ‘Ebulan! What is this? What are you doing? I thought we were friends,’ cried Frisk.

  ‘You wax sentimental, human. You have been an inefficient tool I tolerated only because there was no easy replacement for you. You became a living proof of what I achieved during the war with your kind and a demonstration of the source of my power. I brought you here to serve another purpose, even though you had become an embarrassment to me and a danger to my political ambitions. As Vrell has stated: You no longer serve that purpose.’

  Rebecca Frisk stared expressionlessly at Speaker, and then turned to the rope ladder leading down to the ship’s boat. One of the blanks filled a rucksack with a selection of weapons and tossed it over to the Batians. Svan picked up the sack with a glare at the heavily armed blanks. With a final look of hatred flung at Vrell, she followed Frisk down the ladder. Shib went after her with a similar expression.

  ‘Isn’t it dangerous to let them live?’ asked Vrell, as he watched the boat being rowed ashore by the male Batian.

  ‘Not really,’ said Speaker. ‘And it pleases me for things to end this way.’

  ‘I do not understand, Father,’ said Vrell.

  ‘I do in fact retain some feeling for Rebecca Frisk and find in myself a reluctance to kill her, as would be logical – here and now. So it pleases me that she is going ashore, since I know that it will please her to hunt these allies of Sable Keech. It also pleases me that humans will be running around killing other humans; that there will be so much irrelevant drama. In the end they will all die: the Old Captains, Gosk Balem, Hoop and our dear Rebecca too.’

  ‘They may try to seize this ship,’ warned Vrell.

  ‘The weapons they now have are not sufficient to the task. You are safe where you are, and you are sure to complete your mission successfully. You will be remembered,’ said Ebulan.

  ‘Thank you, Father,’ said Vrell.

  ‘The Convocation – that was the reason, nothing else,’ said Svan.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Frisk, eyeing the weapon Svan held trained on her while Shib rowed them ashore.

  ‘Of course you don’t. For too long you’ve thought the world revolved around you. Ebulan has his own agenda, and you’ve been incidental to it all along. I had that figured as soon as Vrell came on board. Ebulan brought you here because only the presence of someone as notorious as you would be considered important enough to bring all the Old Captains together in Convocation. Coincidentally Gosk Balem was also discovered still to be alive, and a Convocation already called. That probably happened even before Ebulan’s agents finished spreading the news that you were on-planet.’

  ‘Ebulan wouldn’t do that,’ said Frisk, just for form’s sake. She eased herself into an apparently more comfortable position – one that put her hand closer to Svan’s weapon. As Svan backed away and slowly shook her head, Frisk showed her teeth in what might have been a grin.

  ‘Ebulan, like all Prador, thinks of humans merely as prosthetic limbs,’ added Svan dryly.

  ‘Why does Ebulan want a Convocation?’ asked Frisk. ‘What can the Old Captains, those old humans, possibly do for him?’

  ‘They can die,’ said Svan. ‘The Prador is severing all his prior connections with your coring trade in a permanent manner. I find it surprising that he let you live like this, considering that you are one of the strongest connections. Perhaps that Vrell creature will be sent ashore to mop up the last of us, once it’s finished wiping out the Convocation fleet, and once we’ve meanwhile finished killing each other.’

  ‘Great, so where do we go from here, then?’ asked Frisk, a sneer in her voice. She shifted closer again, testing Svan’s tolerance, pushing it.

  Svan leant back and fired. Frisk jerked back as the beam scorched the side of her face, then reached up to probe the burn with her forefinger. Svan watched her, the flat snout of the QC laser directed at her eyes. Frisk glared back, then carefully settled down where she was, and didn’t try to get nearer again.

  ‘I’m not sure where we go from here,’ said Svan, as if nothing had just happened. ‘The Warden knows about all three of us so there’s no way for us to get off-planet via the runcible. If we handed you over, however, I imagine the Warden might be inclined to be lenient. The only alternative seems to be to stay here, and I do not like that alternative. The Warden would hunt us down. It’d hunt us for the rest of our lives. It would just put a submind on the task, making it that mind’s one purpose of existence. Wardens can be very patient about things like that.’

  ‘There is another way,’ said Frisk, ‘if you dare to trust me.’

  Svan said nothing and waited. Frisk went on.

  ‘Off-planet I have billions of credit units in numerous accounts, all easily accessible. I have agents and whole organizations under my control. All I need do is get to a net access point and send a few coded transmissions. I could have a ship here in a matter of months,’ she said.

  ‘Burn her,’ said Shib. ‘She’ll do us at her first opportunity.’

  ‘I’m thinking about it,’ said Svan.

  Frisk said, ‘You both know how lenient the Warden would be. These Polity border AIs don’t always stick to the rules. Its “leniency” would probably consist of giving you a choice between slow mind-wipe, the furnace, or being handed over to the Old Captains.’

  ‘Burn her,’ Shib repeated as he brought the rowing boat up against the beach.

  Svan said nothing while Shib pulled the oars in, stood and, with the rucksack of weapons slung over his shoulder, hopped over the bow on to the sand. Svan slowly stood and backed away from Frisk. The mercenary felt her way with her feet and did not stumble once. She too stepped out on the sand while Frisk remained seated in the boat. If it came to the worst, Frisk reckoned on diving over the side as her only option.

  ‘Come ashore,’ ordered Svan, as if reading her mind.

  Frisk hesitated, then quickly followed the mercenaries on to the sand. Svan flicked a glance at the ship beached further down the shore.

  ‘You can’t keep me at gunpoint all the time,’ said Frisk.

  Svan said, ‘Ebulan upset your nerve linkages deliberately with the intention of making you behave irrationally. You were set up as a target, like a wounded animal. But it was a miscalculation that jeopardized his primary mission. The drugs you now possess should stabilize you.’ Svan could not help resorting to sarcasm: ‘Are you stable enough to understand you are unlikely to get away from here on your own?’

  ‘That bastard crab,’ said Frisk, glaring back out to the ship they had left before returning her attention to Svan. ‘I’m stable enough – stable enough to offer you the same fee for your hire as I did before. Do we have a deal?’

  Svan glanced round at Shib, who now held a laser in his hand.

  ‘Give her a weapon,’ she said.

  Shib reached in the sack and took out one of the short black shell-projectors they’d brought along specifically for Hoopers. He pointed this weapon casually to one side as he tossed Frisk the laser.

  ‘I’m sure you won’t be needing much more than that,’ he said.

  She caught the weapon and held it aimed at the ground for a moment. After that hesitation, she slid it into her belt and glanced towards the beached vessel.

  ‘What now?’ asked Svan.

  ‘We get Jay,’ said Frisk.

  ‘Is that entirely necessary?’ asked Svan.

  Frisk turned back to her. ‘That’s part of the contract. We go after Jay and those hunting him. There’s clearly Old Captains in their group who must have pulled this ship ashore. Them we don’t kill. We bring them back here to relaunch this ship, then we head back for the Dome.’

  Shib looked askance at the ship and snorted.

  ?
??You got any better ideas, mercenary?’ snapped Frisk.

  ‘We have no better ideas,’ admitted Svan. She nodded towards the path cut into the dingle. ‘They should be easy enough to track.’

  Frisk stared at the two of them for a moment, then abruptly turned and headed for the path, the two mercenaries lagging behind her. Shib attracted Svan’s attention, pointed at his weapon, and made a twisting motion with his hand. Svan gave him a smile he did not notice, for by then he was too busy watching the dingle.

  Forlam was white and as unmoving as a corpse. He wore the expression of the brain-damaged, and the dressing made from Janer’s heat-sheet was stretched tight across the hideous injury under his rib cage. His trousers were stained with blood, and other substances. What now? Janer wondered. How does the man live with half his guts missing from his body? While watching Anne and Pland strap the drained crewman to Ron’s back, he put this question to Erlin.

  ‘He’ll live,’ she explained. ‘The question is whether or not he’ll be human, though. He might become something like . . . something like the Skinner’s body – like the Skinner himself.’

  ‘What about nutrients, liquid? . . . How can any body heal with half its internal organs missing?’ Janer persisted.

  ‘In Hoopers internal organs can grow and heal much more quickly than damaged or missing limbs. The Spatterjay virus alters DNA to optimize survival. An arm is unnecessary, a digestive system is necessary. Think of that monster we just saw. In survival terms the most essential item missing from it wasn’t the brain, it was the mouth – so it grew a mouth,’ she said.

  ‘Surely a brain is necessary, and what about the senses located in the head – hearing, smell and sight?’ said Janer.

  ‘It’ll have the same senses of a leech: heat and vibration. As for a brain, it’ll have some rudimentary ganglion at the top of its spine. That it was standing upright tells me it has grown an inner ear, and that it could continue to use its limbs tells me that same ganglion may even be as complex as an insect’s brain. It’s likely that such alterations required less energy than converting a basically human body into the body of a leech.’

  ‘That can happen, then?’ Janer asked, ignoring the filthy comment that came over his Hive link at Erlin’s reference to ‘an insect’s brain’.

  ‘Oh yes, the virus optimizes survival, optimizes flesh growth: the leech’s harvest. This isn’t necessarily what’s best for humans, though. Flatworms are better survivors than us humans,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s nice to know,’ said Janer, thinking he really didn’t want to know any more. Erlin continued remorselessly as they followed the others away from the overnight camp.

  ‘The worst thing is when a human mind ends up in the body of a leech. That didn’t happen to Ambel, probably because he was fed upon too much to build up the energy to make that change; and when Sprage hauled him up out of the sea, he was fed Dome-grown food to prevent it. When the transformation does start to happen, and can’t be prevented, Hoopers feed the victim sprine. For all of them it’s their greatest fear: to end up being only able to feel vibration, heat, pain or hunger.’

  ‘Could there be many of them about?’ Janer asked, thinking with horror of the huge leech he’d burned during the night.

  ‘There could,’ said Erlin, offering no comfort.

  As they stomped on, deeper into the dingle, Janer began to notice pronounced changes in the flora and fauna. The swollen trunks of the peartrunk trees were larger, and they often had large splits running through them, so that they seemed more like barred cages than solid trees. The leeches in their branches were dark red rather than the usual brown of coastal or seagoing leeches, and here the frogmoles were absent. After a time, Ambel no longer needed to use Ron’s machete, as the growth of foliage became steadily higher. The large flat leaves that grew at ground level near the coast now sprouted at the top of thorny trunks standing five metres tall. It was dark here and the ground was coated with soggy rolls of leaf and brittle white twigs. Fungi were scattered amidst this like droplets of orange blood. Now the leeches falling from above were not their worst problem; it was the leeches lurking in the fallen foliage that oozed towards one’s ankle if standing in one spot for too long.

  When Ambel suddenly called a halt, Janer thought this a foolish place to choose, until he realized they were pausing only to allow another denizen of the dingle to pass.

  Through the shady trunks came a huffing squeal and something huge moved painfully into view. To Janer it looked like a lizard made in the shape of a buffalo, but with some extreme differences to either creature. It did not have hooves or claws, but huge flat pads; the horns on its head were repeated in rows along its neck, and it had no tail. Janer mistook it as being four-limbed until he spotted the mandible limbs folded under its three-cornered mouth. Its tough hide was heavily pocked and Janer realized that the circular marks he had assumed were scales, were in fact healed leech scars.

  The creature lumbered on past, flinging only a glance at them with its single double-pupilled eye. At the shoulder, it stood twice the height of a man and seemed a formidable creature. That it was a vegetarian, was evident when it halted by one of the thorny trunks and ground a lump out of it with its serrated mandibles. The vibration this caused had leeches falling on to it out of the tree. They immediately attached themselves and bored into its back. It grunted on finishing the mouthful it was chewing, then turning its head each way it used its mandibles to pull off any leeches it could reach. It then champed another mouthful – and more leeches fell.

  ‘We’ll go round,’ said Ambel.

  ‘Is that thing dangerous?’ asked Janer, his carbine held in readiness.

  ‘No, but they are,’ said Pland, pointing to the leeches wriggling on the ground or oozing back up the tree trunks.

  ‘What is it?’ Janer asked Erlin, as they gave the huge creature and the rain of leeches it was causing a wide berth.

  ‘Its name? I think it’s called a tree pig or something.’

  ‘Wood pig,’ Pland corrected her.

  She nodded and went on, ‘It’s one of the heirodonts. There’s thousands of different kinds – some no bigger than a pin head. That’s one of the largest types you’ll find on land. It’s rumoured there are oceanic ones that grow larger, but that’s never been proven,’ she said.

  ‘Does it have any predators?’ asked Janer, wondering about some of the sounds he’d heard in the night.

  ‘There’s only two predators here on land: us’ – she pointed up into the foliage – ‘and them.’

  ‘Why only two?’

  ‘The leeches and the virus evolved together. There may have been other land predators at one time, but the leeches left no room for them. I’d guess that the leeches took to the sea only a few million years ago, so that’s why you find other predators there. Give this place another couple of million years and there’ll be nothing in it but vegetation, herbivores and leeches.’

  ‘A grim prospect.’

  ‘It’s life,’ said Erlin simply.

  In time, the vegetation began to thin and sprouted closer to ground level again. Janer saw Pland pointing at something, and it took him a moment to distinguish, amid the surrounding trunks, what he was indicating. It was an octagonal metal post, half a metre wide and higher than a man, its surface thick with grey corrosion.

  ‘We’re closer than I thought,’ said Ron.

  Janer glanced at him, then at Forlam who was now showing some interest, and staring at the metal post. ‘Perimeter,’ the crewman managed to utter.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Janer, puzzled.

  ‘Slave post,’ said Ambel.

  Janer was still none the wiser, but he saw Erlin nodding in understanding. Before he could ask her what Ambel was talking about, the Captain led them out of the dingle, and she had moved back to escort Forlam.

  They came out on to the crest of a hill sloping down to a valley. Below them, a river rumbled between red-brown boulders. On the other side of this stood
structures built of the same stone: tall many-windowed buildings sprawled like a disjointed medieval fort. Crenellated walls stretched between them and there were signs, under thick vegetation, of what had once been a moat. To one side the ground had been levelled, and the vegetation there was having trouble getting a hold on the glassy surface. A wrecked landing craft of very old design stood decaying on that same surface.

  Janer moved up beside Ambel and stared.

  ‘Hoophold,’ said the Captain.

  ‘And those posts?’ Janer queried, gesturing behind with his thumb.

  ‘The posts broadcast a signal to activate the explosive collars his captives and slaves wore. Here was where he kept them imprisoned, then cored them, and from here he shipped them out to the Prador,’ Ambel explained.

  ‘You think that . . . the Skinner has come back here?’ Janer said.

  ‘I don’t have to think,’ said Ambel, and pointed.

  Squatting on a merlon of the nearest stretch of wall was something that could have been taken for a gargoyle – until it shifted its position and briefly opened its stubby wings. The head of Spatterjay Hoop was watching them approach.

  It all came down to Prador politics, the Warden realized now. It continued observing through the many eyes of the enforcer drones below, and saw the ships of the Convocation fleet moving towards the Skinner’s Island, and far ahead of them the ship Frisk had siezed. Of course: Ebulan wanted all living witnesses dead so he could claw back power in the Third Kingdom. One large explosion, when that fleet reached the island, and all the Prador’s problems, here at least, would be solved.

  ‘SM Twelve, I want four enforcers to get between the main fleet and that ship. If it shows any sign of moving from its present location I want it destroyed.’

  Accessing Windcheater’s server took a little while longer, as the sail was deep into studying a political history of Earth and obviously quite fascinated. Though it might cause Windcheater a headache, the Warden broke the sail’s connection and linked in.