‘You carrying violence?’ Brett ignored the question. His disc gun was still bonded to the back of his suit and he had a laser at his hip. Shooting was imminent when he got free. His neunonics would replay the way back to the others. ‘I’m your only friend here young ’un. Don’t worry. They don’t know where you are. Mind blind in here. I killed it, whipped up a little disease right here, just small enough for them not to notice.’
Brett wondered how good the dolphin was at reading human expressions as he stared at the grotesque human mouth under the dolphin’s main mouth. It just would not stop talking, the ancient common accompanied by a clicking noise.
‘They call me Zadok. They say I wasn’t grown right, that the template was fucked, but they need the likes of me. All sorts of disease alchemy. I can heal as well as hurt. Put a disease in my tool though, so there’d be no more of me.’
Brilliant, Brett thought. He appeared to have been kidnapped by a disease-spreading mutant dolphin bearing a grudge against their hosts.
‘They don’t have anything good for you here. They just want to get out of the dark and spread, like a disease. Everyone has to be the same, like. They are no friends to you and yours.’
‘Can you let me go?’ Brett asked.
‘If I let you go, you going to behave? Because I think you’re carrying some violence with you and I can’t get hurt before I tell you what you’re into here.’
Brett just nodded. The dolphin shifted him around in the coils of his tentacles so he could examine him with one crusty eye.
‘You got any bottled fun on you, boy? You are a boy, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Brett answered, trying to shift, the coils of tentacle tightening around him as he tried.
‘Yes to bottled fun or orifice fun?’
‘I’m a boy, man. I’m male. I don’t know what bottle fun is.’
‘See, they cut me off from the drug nipples, no more mother’s milk for me and I’m not an endorphin drinker, otherwise I could just suck it out of you. You wouldn’t like that though. It’s not fair, is it?’
‘Yes, I have drugs,’ Brett managed between gritted teeth. He kept to himself that they were part of his internal systems. He did not like the idea of being torn apart by some junkie dolphin looking for a fix. A thought occurred to Brett: ‘If they don’t wish us well then how come they let you live?’
‘Told you. They need me for maintenance. You, you’re just spare parts, some new information, maybe a top-up on the old gene pool, but most importantly you’re a key to this smoking red prison. I’ll be honest. I’d like to see the ocean that my ancestors saw. I ’members it up here.’ He tapped his skull with a tentacle. ‘But it’s far more important to fuck them. Ruin it for them. Just like they fucked me. They took my tool; they can all die.’ The little chamber of dead meat resonated with obvious anger and bitterness. Brett grunted as the tentacles started to tighten around him.
‘Drugs,’ he managed.
‘Oh sorry,’ Zadok said much more brightly and loosened his grip.
‘Where are your drugs?’
‘They’re in one of the suit’s internal pouches. You’ll have to let me out so I can get to them,’ Brett said in what he felt sure was a cunning manner. ‘No violence,’ he further reassured Zadok.
Zadok eyed him with what Brett assumed was cetacean suspicion, but he felt the tentacles loosen round him.
‘That’s good. Just a little something to take the edge off. I’ve got a lot to tell you, boy.’
Brett stood up among the serpentine uncoiling tentacles and wondered if they were looking for him. The bonded disc gun came off the back of his suit as soon as he touched the weapon. His neunonics sent the safety code to the gun instantaneously. Brett also sent the command to switch the weapon to pump action because he thought it was cooler.
The butt of the weapon was snug against his shoulder. Zadok saw what was happening but obviously did not have the soft machine enhanced reaction augmentations that Brett did. The dolphin was only just starting to move when both barrels of the disc gun went off. To Brett it was like everything was happening in slow motion. The butt of the weapon contracted, cushioning the recoil as solid-state shot turned into razor-sharp, electromagnetically propelled spinning discs. Zadok’s flesh spread itself across the diseased chamber. Brett worked the pump mechanism on the weapon, chambering another two rounds from the tubular magazines under the side-by-side barrels. He fired again, just to be on the safe side. There was another display of dead flesh.
‘Fuck yeah!’ Brett said, trying not to dance a little. ‘That’s what you get!’ Then he remembered where he was. He looked around the chamber for further threats, expecting more junkie, mutant dolphins but finding none.
Brett held the visor in place as he sent the signal to his suit and it grew out of his neck to cover his head the rest of the suit attached itself. He tried the interface again but got nothing. He reviewed the journey to the chamber in the memory of his neunonics. He was reasonably sure he could find his way back.
Brett rose out of the pool with the disc gun ready, scanning from side to side. This was the way the tac program in his neunonics told him to do it; more to the point it was the way he had done it in immersions. Playing legionnaire for fun.
Brett was now sure he was lost. He was not sure how as the recorder facility on the route finder application in his neunonics should have taken him back to the main chamber.
He rose, dripping, into a large chamber with a gently curving roof. The chamber was formed of what looked like thick, smooth, rubbery, but not unpleasantly so, skin. It reminded Brett of Zadok’s skin if Zadok hadn’t looked diseased and crusty. He retracted part of his spacesuit, which dragged the visor off his face and up onto his head.
The chamber was dimly lit. A warm wind blew though it and he could hear the sound of water gently lapping against the walls. It gave Brett a dimly remembered sense of well-being.
Then he saw the growths in the wall. He waded through the shallow water towards them. Drawn by curiosity, his sense of well-being bled off him the closer he got.
At first Brett thought it was some kind of organic waste sack or tube. Then he realised it was a massive distended pregnant belly, not unlike the ones on the few fetishist weirdos he had seen go in for natural births. Only this one ended in a biomechanical vaginal orifice. Brett followed the tube up. It was part of something that had once been very clearly human – more human than Ezard and his friends in the main chamber.
He/she, gender did not matter, was merged with the flesh of the chamber. No eyes, no ears, these were extraneous – why would it need them? Instead of a mouth there was a translucent tube. Matter could be seen moving sluggishly down it. This was not pregnancy. This was flesh as a material, storage, an incubator. Somehow Brett knew that the Mother and the Father were the ship. He knew that the passengers and crew were raw material. Their minds were only of use as inspiration. All over Known Space, human flesh was used as a raw material in more base ways – labour, sex, sustenance – but this had nothing to do with humanity. To Brett this was abomination. He looked around, his eyes brightening the darkness and magnifying what he saw. The abomination was repeated on either side of the chamber many times. Through the gloom he could see more chambers.
The plop it made sliding out of the closest stomach’s orifice was almost comical. Brett’s features contorted as he looked down at the utterly inhuman thing uncurling in the water in front of him. Even the flesh sculptors on Cyst could not have invented such a departure from humanity using the same basic material. Humanoid disgust overwhelmed Brett as for the first time he was confronted by something that, although hybridised, was genuinely alien and not just another uplifted animal like himself.