The Engineer ReConditioned Part 4

"Why do you want to destroy a Polity science vessel? Surely there are better military targets?"

"That does not concern you."

Kellor pretended to think about it then nod reluctant agreement. He had noted and filed the edge to Conard's voice. That edge had not been there at the beginning. Something had changed and the mission had acquired greater urgency. If the Separatists were becoming desperate to destroy that vessel then it carried something of huge potential value. With his back to the General, Keller allowed himself a cold little smile and glanced to the squat muscular bulk of his first officer. Jurens returned his look then nodded back to Conard. Kellor turned to watch.

The General strode over to a group of four of his soldiers who had come aboard the Samurai in the first Junger. One of these was either ill or drunk and his fellows were attempting to support him. As the General approached they quickly stepped away. Conard did not hesitate. He kicked the soldier in his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es then kicked his feet away from under him. As the man lay on the deck groaning Conard reached down and pulled something from his neck and tossed it aside. Jurens stepped up beside Kellor.

"H-patch," he said. "Confederation soldiers like to stay stoned so's they don't have to think about what they're being ordered to do. a.r.s.eholes."

The General, just to drive the point home, began systematically kicking in the soldier's ribs. The man probably couldn't feel it. Jurens spat on the deck and turned away. Kellor followed his first officer from the hold. He too, as a young mercenary, had suffered such officers as Conard.

PART THREE.

Alexion Smith looked neither old nor young. There was nothing fas.h.i.+onable nor particularly unfas.h.i.+onable about his appearance. He had short blond hair, a thin non-descript face set as a background for calm green eyes, and wore a ribbed and neatly patched environment suit. He looked ... utilitarian. From years of a.s.sociation Chapra knew that this was because such things as fas.h.i.+on just held no interest for him. His love was for things long dead and buried: ancient ruins and ancient bones, preferably alien ruins and alien bones. He sat now at ease in a deep armchair in a projection that occupied the air over the consoles in the control room. Behind him was a window through which could be seen a barren landscape below a sky half-filled with a red-giant sun. Weird birds drifted in charcoal silhouette.

"Alex, it's nice to see you," said Chapra as she dropped into her swivel chair. Abaron took a seat in the background.

"It is nice to see you, Chapra, though I wouldn't recognise you. I take it you got fed up with the grey hair and sagging t.i.ts?"

Chapra grinned at the sound of a sharply indrawn breath behind her. "I did. I find that in this form it is easier for me to get what I want. Appearance is all even in this cosmetic age. What is it, Alex? What's given you priority over half a million other callers?"

Alexion looked out his window for a moment before returning his attention to Chapra.

"I was fascinated by your discovery out there, Chapra, and supposing that the escape pod is five million years old I considered that discovery within my remit. I've been watching and paying attention ... picking up on every sc.r.a.p of information ... The evidence is mostly mythological, philological ... you know as well as I that you can excavate languages and stories as well as ruins - "

"What's your point, Alex?"

Alexion looked at her very directly, "Based on the construction of the escape pod - remains of one exactly the same were found in the Csorian time vault - and based on the machine it ... uses - the shape of that machine was etched into the walls of the same vault and no-one knew what it was until now - and based on thousands of other fragments of information collated by AI, there is an eighty-three per cent probability that the creature you have there is ... Jain."

Chapra s.h.i.+vered and heard Abaron curse. She immediately wanted to object; but the Jain died out millions of years ago, they're just dust and legends and racial memories of G.o.ds ...

Alexion went on, "In the Sarian mythos the Jain were the great sorcerers, the transformers. Their houses were said to be black water-filled boxes built in the equatorial deserts. Their symbol was the triangle. And if that is not enough, the world to which you are heading, has been posited for over a century as likely a Jain home world."

"Okay, I'm convinced," said Chapra. "But how is this to affect what I am doing here?"

"The s.h.i.+p AI there, Box, is loading every Jain study, every relevant piece of information. It might help."

"Is that it?" Chapra was beginning to feel a vague disappointment.

"They moved suns, Chapra. There are those who theorise that here we are in the backwoods of a civilization that still exists. I guess my message is: for all our sakes, don't f.u.c.k up. Ciao." Alexion flickered out of existence.

Chapra turned to Abaron. "This changes nothing," she said.

Abaron nodded, but he looked scared again.

The Jain - this was how both Abaron and Chapra referred to it now, it was better than 'the creature' - took the containers from the jetty to its machine. Chapra smiled to herself. Perhaps they might never be able to speak to each other, but they understood each other. When she and Judd had collected them the containers held samples of what the Jain wanted in quant.i.ty. One of them contained a sample of only a few atoms inside a small vacuum sphere of gla.s.s. The Jain's requirements had stretched from the prosaic to the exotic. It had wanted iron, it had wanted tantalum, and it had wanted a metallic element only theorised until then. Making a few ounces of the stuff had stretched the main onboard laboratory and required five Golem to come out of stasis to a.s.sist.

"You note it only requires elements," said Chapra.

"Confirmation that it can build all the molecules it wants, so long as it has the atoms," said Abaron. He was being very correct and very logical, very in control.

"I wonder though ... "

"What?"

"That metal, the Jainite, and the niobium ... I've checked. There was nothing like that in the isolation chamber, nor in the tanks."

"They could have been present in the escape pod."

"No. I had Box check back on every scan. We were thorough."

"What are you saying then?"

"We missed something, or with that machine the Jain is able to synthesise atoms, even if in minute quant.i.ties."

"It's Jain," said Abaron, as if that was all the answer required.

Some hours later the Jain manufactured something else.

"The device is a scanner," said Box. "It scanned the entire s.h.i.+p with some kind of neutron burst."

"That's not possible," said Abaron.

"It's Jain," said Chapra, relis.h.i.+ng the moment.

The device the Jain had built was about the size of a human head and looked like the b.a.s.t.a.r.d offspring of a whelk and the insides of an old valve radio. After using it the Jain saved one small component then fed the rest of it back into its bigger machine, its creation machine. Afterwards it fed in one of the large crustaceans. Then it came to the jetty and left something squatting there.

"This I have to see," said Chapra, hurrying on her way. She glimpsed Abaron licking his dry lips as he reluctantly followed her. In minutes both of them were in hotsuits and walking out on the jetty. Judd strode behind them.

"It's the crustacean. It's been altered," said Abaron, then he stepped rapidly back when the beast lifted its armoured belly up off the jetty and, walking on four armoured limbs, began to come towards them bull terrier fas.h.i.+on. After a moment Chapra moved back as well. The beast squatted down a couple of metres in front of them, waiting.

"Look at its back," said Abaron.

Chapra did so and there saw a triangle of ridged and pocked flesh. It was the negative of the end of the Jain's tentacles, she saw this at once.

Judd said, "This was one of the crustaceans. It has been stripped of its digestive system and now has a small organic power cell. Its sensorium has been upgraded to eighty per cent of received spectra and there are additions to its primitive brain. Its blood is heated by metallic heating elements."

"It's a probe," said Chapra. "I bet the additions to its brain are memory."

"Cannot be determined," said Judd.

"All right, I bet there are direct links between those additions and that triangle on its back."

After a pause Judd said, "There are."

Chapra turned to Abaron and tried not to notice that he had pressed himself up against the door.

"I'll bet the intention is for it to wander around the s.h.i.+p then come back here. Once back here the Jain probably plugs in and reads off all the information it has gathered."

"That seems likely," said Abaron, a quaver in his voice.

"Okay, let's see," said Chapra, and she hit the door control. The beast got up again, advanced to the door, and through. They followed it into the lock, opened the next door into the s.h.i.+p. Beyond this door awaited the Golem named Rhys, who in appearance was an Australian aborigine.

"Rhys will accompany our little guest on its tour around the s.h.i.+p," said Box.

The beast moved off down the corridor, clicks and buzzes coming from a sensorium that was a ma.s.s of complex spikes, facets, brushes, and dimpled plates, all s.h.i.+fting and swivelling.

"Is this a good idea?" said Abaron, and Chapra wondered how he had restrained himself for so long.

"I think everything is under control, and won't be allowed to get out of control ... what is that on your belt, Rhys?"

Rhys glanced back and tapped a hand on the gun holstered at his hip. In appearance it was a Luger made out of chrome, but with a few strange additions.

"It is a singun," said Rhys, his usually happy demeanour at once very serious.

"You see?" said Chapra to Abaron.

"But ... I didn't think such things existed."

"They do. One shot from that will have the effect of turning our friend inside out through a pin hole in s.p.a.ce." She observed Abaron's confused expression and explained. "For about a second it generates a singularity in its target. Our friend there would be reduced to sludge."

"Wouldn't an energy weapon have been better?" asked Abaron.

Judd said, "There is a high probability that the creature can generate defences against energy weapons. We have no known defence against the singun."

Chapra decided not to point out to Abaron that use of 'we'.

"It's all rather moot," she said. "The Jain has shown no signs of hostility."

"The Jain has placed a container upon the jetty," said Box.

"Let's go see what it wants now," said Chapra, and they trooped back into the lock. Soon they were out on the jetty. The container was at the furthest end.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?" wondered Chapra as she strode towards the container. Showing great fort.i.tude, Abaron strode at her side. Inside the container was a coil of something fleshy. They halted at the container and stood over it.

"It looks like something alive," said Abaron, crus.h.i.+ng the dread in him under the cool a.n.a.lytic scientist.

"It certainly - "

The coil snapped straight out of the container, cobra fast. It hit Abaron's arm, hung there for a moment as it recoiled, then snapped out into the water. Abaron yelled, staggered back, and sat down.

"Oh," he said, then looked down at his shoulder where blood was spreading between the layers of his environment suit. "It bit me." In a moment Judd lifted him up and all but carried him to the door. Chapra followed. In the lock Abaron's legs gave way and he looked more bewildered than scared.

"It's just shock," Chapra told him, but she could not put from her mind visions of an ancient celluloid film she had in her collection; of the contents of an egg shooting out and attaching to a man's face, and the consequences of that.

Box looked upon the world with all its superbly precise senses and a.n.a.lysed it with a mind that made the mind of any G.o.d humans had imagined appear that of an infant throwing a tantrum, and it found the world beautiful. The eye of the beholder. Box could find beauty in anything because it could look at things in so many thousands of different ways. Many philosophers in the human polity now posited that humans were not created by G.o.ds, that in fact the complete reverse applied.

At the poles of the world the temperature was the same as at Earth's equator, but at two atmospheres pressure. At its equator the environment was about as inviting to a human as the inside of a pressure cooker. The place swarmed with life much like that in the isolation chamber, but with one important exception. There were great and complex ecosystems here, but no outpost of any star-spanning civilization, and no discernible remnants, but then little might survive five million years in such hostile conditions. There were no Jain, not a trace.

Very cool and very factual Abaron said, "There are no toxins in me, there is no disgusting alien embryo waiting to burst out of my stomach in a messy spray. There is, in fact, nothing alien to my body inside me barring the two doughnuts I ate half an hour ago and the cup of coffee I washed them down with."

Chapra smiled. The attack, rather than feeding his fear, had destroyed it. Irrational fear could never long survive harsh realities.

"What happened then?"

"This." Abaron peeled back the dressing on his arm to show the wound. A perfect circle of skin a centimetre wide and few millimetres deep had been excised from his biceps.

"What do you think?"

"I think the Jain took a sample. It is as curious about us as we are about it. Only its curiosity must have a greater urgency because it is entirely dependent on us and has no idea what we might want of it."

"What do you think it might learn?"

"Everything it is possible to learn from my DNA. Being able to build and alter DNA to the extent it does it must be able to decode it down to the atomic level."

"I think you're right," said Chapra. She thought a lot else but wasn't going to spoil his moment.

"Box," said Abaron. "What happened after the ... worm ... bit me?"

"It swam very fast to the inside of the Jain's machine. The Jain is now wrapped around its machine. There is much nanomechanical activity."

"There," said Abaron to Chapra.

Just then the door to the medlab hissed open and in walked the Jain's probe beast, closely followed by Rhys.

Box said, "There was an ultrasound communication between this probe and the Jain six minutes after the sample was taken from your arm."

The beast squatted on the floor, facing towards Abaron, who sat on the edge of the examination couch.

"It is scanning you," said Box, then, "Your graft is ready."

"Perhaps it has come to see this," said Abaron as he lay back on the couch. The doctor, which was a close relation to the PSR but deliberately less threatening in appearance, gripped Abaron's arm above and below his biceps. What might be described as its head came down against the muscle. It quickly gobbled up the dressing. In a glare of sterilizing ultraviolet it pressed a circle of skin into place with a flattened white egg on the end of one many jointed arm. The egg had the words 'Cell Weld Inc.' printed on it. It hummed mildly. The probe beast got up, turned, and left the room.

"It's satisfied you're all right," said Chapra.

When Abaron had nothing to say to that Box said, "You may be interested to know that prior to coming here the probe beast, as you call it, was in an observation blister, looking at the stars, and seeing our arrival at system DF678.98 and the world with the name Haden. It is now returning to the isolation chamber."

"We have to see this," said Abaron. He inspected his arm as the doctor took the cell welder from his arm. There was no sign of a wound.

"The world?" asked Chapra.