After he was killed in an AGC accident on Klader, his grieving wife had cryo-stored Tarsic’s body. Her conversion to what was then the Cult of Anubis Arisen occurred some years later. She then paid for a download from his frozen brain to crystal, and subsequently his reification. Her own reification, after death by suicide—her being anxious to become a full member of the Cult—had proved unsuccessful. Tarsic then immediately looked into getting himself installed in a Golem chassis, but discovered just how much of a bitch his wife had been. A deferred debt was awaiting him, and the moment he ceased to be a reification that debt became due and would result in his utter bankruptcy. So in his Golem chassis he would have ended up indentured to the Cult for years—a group which had since come to look upon him with contempt, for he was perhaps unique in remaining a reification out of financial motives. It surprised him when Aesop, assistant to Taylor Bloc himself, who had bought out the Cult when it effectively collapsed as a going concern, had approached him.
Tarsic turned, as he proceeded, to check that Beric and Sline were still with him. Just about all the reifs here regularly went down to see the ship being built, just as worshippers would have once ventured forth to observe the construction of a cathedral—the feeling was much the same. Tarsic and his companions had already been there a couple of times. However, it was not so usual for reifs to venture out during the night, as that was when the big leeches were most active. The guards would be suspicious, as they were of any unusual activity. As the three approached the gates, one of the two Batian guards stepped forwards.
‘Strange to see you out after dark. Shouldn’t you be in shutdown mode or’—the female guard paused to say the next word with distaste—‘cleansing?’
‘Our night vision is good,’ Tarsic replied. ‘And we’ve concluded that we prefer to view the construction in a less religious atmosphere.’
The woman smiled. ‘Not a Kladite then?’
Tarsic held his hands out from his sides, ‘Do I look like one of those fanatics? Where’s my Kervox breastplate and skirted helmet, and my permanent link to the wise words of Taylor Bloc?’
‘Well, you might be in disguise,’ she suggested.
‘You’re auged.’ Tarsic raised a shaky finger and pointed to the white bone-effect aug behind her right ear. ‘They’ll certainly have some kind of record on me. My name is Tarsic Alleas Smith…’
The woman tilted her head. After a moment she nodded. ‘I see. Years working off a debt to the Cult, then to Taylor Bloc… and you’re known as a troublemaker amongst reifs. You’ll do.’ She signalled to her companion to open the gate for them.
When the three were some distance from the compound, heading down the path leading to the ship’s construction site, Beric opined, ‘She’d think differently if she knew precisely where we are going.’
Tarsic agreed. It was all about the balance of power here. With the Batians being armed, Taylor Bloc could not augment his own forces without the mercenaries finding out and perhaps doing something drastic. But Bloc had prepared. Apparently the Kladites here, and the weapons Shive had put under guard, were merely a decoy. Down there, in a crate to which Tarsic now held the computerized key, were fifty armed reifs awaiting their moment.
Soon they came in sight of the sailing ship and the glinting movement of Golem working in the moonlight. There was no electric lighting—the Golem needed none. It would be nice, Tarsic thought, if Bloc could get them on his side. They were neutral however; here under contract from Cybercorp to perform their singular task. Tarsic led the way to the left, away from the ship, through the ankle-deep sawdust. Soon the crates loomed out of the dark, like an infant city with its power cut. He followed a map lit on the small screen of the key and eventually came to the crate indicated. He eyed the looming bubble-metal wall before him and tracked round, locating the seal clips.
‘Let’s get it open,’ he said.
Beric and Sline moved forwards, taking crowbars from under their jackets. Beric began levering off the clips down one edge, while Sline used them on the other edge as a ladder to the crate’s top. The pieces of sprung metal cracked and spanged out into the night. These had been pressed into place on the end of the crate to keep up the pressure on its seals while it was in transit in a lower-cost unpressurized cargo hold. Every time a clip went, Tarsic expected someone to come running. No one came.
‘All done?’ he asked, when his two companions stepped away from the crate.
‘They’re moving about in there,’ said Beric.
‘I thought they’d be in shutdown,’ added Sline.
‘They were shut down, so Aesop told me, but they recently woke. That’s why we are here now.’ Tarsic pointed the key at the crate and sent over the unlocking code.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Sline. ‘Why lock them in a crate with no way of getting themselves out?’
With a hiss of equalizing pressures, the end of the crate jerked open and began to come down like a ramp. It was utterly dark inside. Tarsic had expected light. He considered Sline’s question and realized he possessed no easy answers. But, being so happy over the promise of new cleansing units for the three of them and a confirmed reservation on the ship’s first voyage, he had not thought to question.
The crate end settled on the ground with a dull whump, stirring up a small storm of sawdust. The darkness within it seemed packed with thick loops of something that shifted with a sound as of rocks grinding together. He realized he was seeing something segmented, maybe two metres thick, crammed into this box in coils. One loop of it began to unravel out of shadow, then something horrible exploded out then up into the night like a demonic jack-in-a-box. Tarsic gazed up into an open cowl of armour plates containing two vertical rows of hot red eyes. Glassy limbs and other sharp appendages ground and clattered together before those eyes like scythes being sharpened. Tarsic stumbled backwards, not comprehending what he was seeing. Sline made a strange keening sound as the terrible hood drenched him in its shadow, then came down like a cupped hand, slamming him to the earth and trapping him underneath. A ripping tearing sucking and disgorging ensued.
‘That hooder must be very hungry,’ said Beric, his tone utterly flat. ‘They normally feed a lot slower than that.’
‘Hooder?’ said Tarsic, still backing up.
Beric turned to him wearily. ‘There’s no point running—and we’re lucky that we feel no pain.’
The creature reared again, dripping reif balm and scattering the now clean bones and various metallic additions that had enabled Sline to survive long after his own death. Beric bowed his head as it slid above him, the rest of the long armoured body uncoiling from its prison, then came down on him like an immense fly swat. Tarsic turned and ran, trying not to hear the horrible gobbling sounds, but he too was quickly smashed down and trapped in hot red shadow, surrounded by a thousand ever-shifting knives. As they closed on him and began cutting, error messages started to burn his night vision. He shut the messages off. Eventually, as the hooder severed his power cables, he went into shutdown knowing now that all hope of the resurrection of his human body was gone. He had just watched it disappear piece by piece into a thousand hungry little mouths.
5
Glister:
glisters bear a striking resemblance to lobsters, though with more fins and other adaptations to oceanic life, even though, like many of Spatterjay’s sea creatures, they do venture ashore. They travel in pods of between three and twenty: one dominant female and the rest of them males. Adolescent males remain solitary, but on becoming adult and therefore sexually active, they are recruited by a female to her pod. The theory has yet to be proven that this mating behaviour developed due to there being some viral infection in male glisters—the female ejecting any infected male seed, and only allowing virus-free matings to fertilize her eggs. Like lobsters, glister females attach their eggs to their under-carapace until they hatch. One hundred and forty varieties of glister have been catalogued, some no larger than a prawn and others up to three metres long. They are obviously successful as a species—fossilized glister shell is a sought-after gem on the planet — but individually their lives are usually short and brutal. Hoopers relish their meat and, because a glister contains psychoactive chemicals in its mouth and brainpan, they usually roast the animal alive, as the only other way to effectively kill it is to smash in its skull, which releases these same chemicals into its flesh. Sometimes Hoopers do deliberately kill glisters by breaking open the head, usually as a precursor to some orgiastic celebration. However, the greatest predator of glisters is by far the molly carp —