‘I am clear to use AG transport, I take it?’ he asked.
‘You are, monitor Keech.’
‘Thank you,’ said Keech.
After running a diagnostic on the console, he thrust the column forward and, blasting up a cloud of sand, shot out over the sea.
With something of smugness in its attitude, the Warden observed the planet through a thousand pairs of artificial eyes. After a brief scan, it refined this fragment of its attention to just one pair of eyes and the complex little mind that operated them. On an atoll on the opposite side of the planet from the main human settlements, and where no human had set foot, waves lapped gently at a beach of jade and rose-quartz pebbles. Below the pellucid waters off this beach, the stony bottom was alive with movement. Swarms of infant hammer whelks shifted in a slow and intricate dance, their shells glinting like coiled pearls, and leeches oozed between them searching for softer prey. A disturbance where the bottom dropped into emerald depths had the whelks clamping themselves safely to the stony bottom and the leeches turning as one to investigate.
Out of boiling foam rose the baroque shape of a seahorse the length of a man’s forearm, leeches hitting its iron-coloured skin and falling away. It rose from the sea and, seemingly balanced upon the surface with a coil of its tail, it slowly revolved and took in its surroundings with topaz eyes. Only someone with a very sophisticated underspace detector could have heard the communication that followed, and even then it would have taken a mind superior to that of the Warden to decode it.
‘SM Thirteen, you were instructed to transmit yourself to Dome Gate One for your assigned watch, and I see now that this did not happen,’ said the Warden.
‘Sniper took that watch. He had some business to conduct through the local server. And I have my so very important studies to complete,’ replied the Warden’s thirteenth submind, from its odd drone body.
‘Why then have I received no report from Sniper?’
In the pause that followed, the Warden considered then rejected the idea of subsuming Thirteen, of reintegrating the little mind with itself in order to get at the truth. But the Warden had found from long experience that an amount of individualism in its subminds allowed them to originate insights it never experienced by itself.
‘Nothing of significance to report?’ suggested SM13.
The Warden sensed agitation in the little mind and allowed it to stew for a few microseconds.
‘The arrival of a dead monitor pursuing a seven-century vendetta I do consider to be worthy of note,’ it said.
‘Well that’s not my fault,’ said the seahorse drone. ‘Take it up with Sniper. It wasn’t my decision to employ an obsolete war drone, even if it was once a hero.’
The Warden did not answer this. It withdrew and did a brief search in the local server. That SM13 and the war drone Sniper both had accounts with the Norvabank evinced in it some surprise, though only some. The third account it found there, by tracking past transfers, gave it more than some surprise. It would have to watch this situation very closely; it might lead to questions about the rights of humans to exist on Spatterjay.
Janer woke with a sick feeling in his stomach and the apparent evidence that a small animal had expired messily in his mouth, probably squashed by the farrier who was making horseshoes in his head. He shoved the tangled blanket off, sat on the edge of his bunk, and tried to figure out where he was. The wooden room he lay in was moving, and loud snores came from the Hooper lying in the bunk opposite. Janer stood, swayed for a moment, and then abruptly sat down. His detox pills — one of his most important survival items — were in his backpack, but where the hell was that? His nausea abruptly increased its hold on him and he quickly stood and staggered to the door. Immediately outside the door there was a short corridor terminating at a ladder. He moved towards this and, for no immediately apparent reason, staggered into one wall, then back across the wooden flooring straight into a door. He shook his head. What the hell was that sound? From all around him came racketing and clacking sounds, creaks and groans. Upon reaching the ladder, he unsteadily climbed up it towards greenish light, then stumbled out of the deck hatch to a wooden rail, and retched into the sea below. As he did this he realized he had done so before, and remembered where he was: on board the ship.
‘Good morning,’ Erlin cheerfully called.
Janer got control of his retching — there wasn’t much to come up anyway — and glanced round from the rail to where Erlin and Captain Ron stood, behind the helmsman, on the upper deck that formed the roof of the forecabin. He pushed back from the rail, lost his balance, and stepped back into the mainmast.
‘Watch yer feet, asshole!’
The voice came from below him. He stared down at a large flat head on the deck itself, a mouth full of sickle teeth, and demonic red eyes that gazed at him impassively. He rubbed his face, then, running from this head, he tracked a long ribbed neck that rose up the mast behind him, to an expanse of veined pink skin spread out on the spars of the central mast, cutting out half the sky. This skin was braced with long thin support spines that issued spidery gripping claws at their joints. Ropes of muscle ran down these spines, also along the long heavy wing bones, and knotted into a huge keel of a chest, above which lumps of something unidentifiable were being digested in a transparent gut. The creature hung upside down like a bat, as it turned itself to the wind.
‘Oh shit,’ Janer said and quickly moved away from the mast and back to the rail. From here he could see how, whenever the creature moved, its movement was replicated in the fore and aft masts, which supported sails of a more commonplace fabric. The clacking sounds heard below the decks, he realized, derived from this motion.
‘His name is Windcatcher,’ the Hive mind told him. Janer blearily inspected the two hornets in their transparent box, as if searching for some sign of irony.
‘Never let me do that again,’ he said.
‘That’s what you said last time it happened. Unfortunately, I no longer have any control over your actions. Not that I had a great deal when you were indentured.’ There was definite irony in the voice this time.
Janer returned his attention to Erlin and Ron, who were watching him with some amusement.
‘Where’s my backpack?’ he called.
‘Under your bunk,’ Erlin replied.
Janer walked shakily to the hatch, pausing to let a woman climb out, who grinned at him before moving off, carrying a bucket of something that looked like grease and smelt like something that should have been buried. He climbed back down the ladder, swallowing on a rush of saliva. Once in the cabin he went quickly to his bunk, pulled out his pack from underneath, found his detox pills, threw a couple of them into his mouth, and swallowed them dry. He then sat and waited for them to take effect.
The Hooper in the adjacent bunk snored and grunted, then, with muttered imprecations, turned over, allowing Janer a good look at his face. It was Forlam. Janer stood up and gazed at Forlam’s right hand, which lay on top of the blanket. The last time he had seen it, that hand had been merely a stump with just the stub of a thumb sticking out of one side. Now the fingers had been reattached with rough-looking stitches, which also extended in a line up the Hooper’s forearm to his elbow, closing a surgical cut Janer surmised had been made for the retrieval of severed tendons, for, as Janer knew from personal experience, tendons were like taut-stretched elastic, and severed in such a place, would have snapped back up inside Forlam’s arm. Underneath these stitches, just as underneath those around Forlam’s repositioned ear, were red lines of scar tissue, so it was apparent the needlework was no longer needed to hold the flesh together. Janer wondered if Forlam could eat yet, and it suddenly came home to him hard just where he was and the situation he was in.