Hours? As soon as he reached the down-tube into the snairl body he realised it must have been some time.
The floor was drying, tacky, as he stepped out of the tube, and he wondered about that until he heard the rustling of air pumps — something previously disguised by the living sounds of the snairl. They were not biotech and would run until clogged with decaying flesh. A biolight lay nearby, its legs waving weakly in the air, and its tick-mouth gaping and clicking hungrily. The air smelt of death. Janer carefully stepped around the biolight, but he need not have worried; it was too weak to get at him and would never have got through his monofilament clothing. He peered down the corridor artery at the other biolights there and one fell while he watched. They would all be hungry. He pulled the hood and mask from the neck-pocket of his overall, and put on the gloves. They would go for exposed body: his eyes and mouth. He would just have to be very careful.
Janer found the first of the crew shortly after crushing under his foot the third biolight to drop on him. As he crushed it, its juices spread in a glowing pool and Janer left bright footprints behind him. He noticed then a change in the quantity and spectrum of the lighting.
The man had crawled away from his partner with five biolights attached to his back. Their glow was reddish, their energy drawn from near to human blood. The man had left a thick slime trail that was now skinned over. The woman was curled in a corner with a biolight attached to the side of her head. As he turned to her the biolight fell away, leaving a bloody hole, and tried to drag itself towards him. He stood on it and it burst with a wet pop. The woman turned her head, opened her mouth with a dry click and tried to open her crusted eyes. He stooped down by her and caught hold of her.
“Dead,” she rasped, her last breath hissing out foul in his face. He let her go and ran, something of what the hivemind had said coming back to him — the geneticists made both. He remembered then that he had never seen crew eating, never seen much in the way of personal effects… They are like us — all one. They were dying now their host was dead, like the biolights. The door ripped like wet paper as he pulled it aside. Eller blinked at him from her place on the floor in the ropes of slime. A pot of water rested to one side of her. She had cleaned her face and her eyes, but her eyes were dull, drying out.
“Eller… this… ”
“Janer,” she said and smiled, shifted. Her body had grown long, gaps as wide as his arm between the segments, there her heart, beating slowly, there her intestine, drawn taut. He knelt beside her and she managed to get a hand up to his shoulder. She shifted again.
“Kiss me… just once more,” she said.
Janer was leaning forward when he heard the low buzzing. Distorted speech came through his link, but he could not make it out. He turned his head slightly as the hornet darted in. Eller made a horrible sound, somewhere between a groan and a hiss, jerked her hand away, her mouth opening wide at the pain as the hornet launched itself from her arm. It had stung her. Janer wanted to crush it at once, then he saw her mouth; her white tongue open at the end like a flower, rasping teeth wet inside it. More buzzing, more glittery shapes in the room. Five hornets hovered between him and Eller, darted at him, and because he could no longer hear their speech his fear returned and he stumbled back. Eller tried to crawl towards him and he realised, like the biolights, and shuddered in horror. The hornets drove him out into the corridor. The walls were cracking and liquefying now. The death stink had turned to something else, now. Stumbling ahead of the insects he was numb to thought. They drove him to the Upper Shell. The floor was cool against his cheek. The hornet, standing on the side of his neck and working with the cellular structure behind his ear, finished its task and flew from him.
“We were unaware of the danger,” the mind told him.
“It’s wrong, that they should die like that.”
“They all lived for as long as the snairl. Though they could feed on other things after its death they would not long survive it. The chemistry is too complex. They are one being, like ourselves.”
“Is all this what you came to learn?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“The shell does not decay. The body below will drop soon and the shell will need to be counterweighted. We came for the salvage. Here we can be safe.”
Janer, his shoulder against the crystal wall of the spire, could see them. The cloud was vast and grey, and moved with purpose. He could feel the presence of many minds — a million hives. The hornets were coming to their new home.
ABOUT “SPATTERJAY”
Spatterjay is the planet where all the action takes place in The Skinner, and all the characters and events here will be familiar to readers of that book This story is in fact a precursor, whereas from Snairls I only snatched Janer and his hornets. Again it was a story published in Grotesque (issue 8 ’95) and suitably so, though not enough so to justify changing the title to ‘Splatterjay’. It is a story whose genesis was in a nightmare of long blue and bony hands reaching out of dense jungle to grab someone, and of trout in a stream, which weren’t. It spent a number of years in a folder, in the form of a few scribbled lines, then grew out of some free-association writing I was doing to limber up my brain one day. Acorns and all that.
SPATTERJAY
Sweating green blood, a lung bird wheezed from the tree tops, its flaccid wings groping for the clouds. Ambel tucked his trumpet-mouthed blunderbuss under his arm and despondently watched its limping progress.
“Suitable protein,” suggested Jane.
“There isn’t any. Would you eat that?” asked Peck.
“Depends on how hungry I got.”
“I guess we could make a stew.”
Ambel made no comment on this, but he closed up his blunderbuss and aimed. The weapon flashed and banged, sparkles of still-burning powder gouting through the air. A cloud of acrid smoke obscured view for a moment, then they saw the bird falling into the trees, bits breaking away from its ill-made body.
“Let’s go,” said Peck.
They trotted through the knee-high putrephallus weeds, their masks pulled up over their mouths and noses. The pear-trunk trees shivered as they passed. By the time they reached the area where the bird had fallen it was gone. They caught a glimpse of something huge and glistening dragging the squawking and flapping mess into the deep dingle.
“Bastard,” said Peck, turning to Ambel. Ambel shook his head as he squatted down and thumped another paper cartridge down into the barrel of his buss.
Jane lifted her mask, winced at the smell wafting off the weeds then said, “Leech. A big one. Best leave it alone.”
“Can you eat leeches?” asked Peck. He always got a bit weird when he hadn’t had enough to eat. Ambel shook his head.