Owning the Future: Short Stories by Neal Asher

Author:Neal Asher [Asher, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Neal Asher
Published: 2018-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

THE OTHER GUN

As the bathysphere landed I fought to regain my humanity, even though my latest communication with the Client had been some hours ago. Talking to that entity was always a bizarre and confusing experience, and one I never wanted to get used to. Every time, afterwards, I felt like a new occupant of my old and battered body. I blinked, remembering the lack of eyelids, held up my hand to clench and unclench it and remembered a lack of fingers, or at least fingers like these, then, with the bathysphere settling, reached out and pressed a thumb against the door control.

The twenty foot wide circular door thumped away from me, releasing from its seals to allow in a waft of vapour and a smell like rotting vegetables, turned its inner locking ring to unlock then slowly hinged down, first exposing a yellow sky bruised with brown clouds.

‘Don’t take anything for granted,’ I said to my companion.

‘I never do,’ sighed Harriet, her voice as always surprisingly gentle from such a large mouth full of so many teeth.

I glanced at her and wondered how the people of this colony would react to her. Harriet was a Mesozoic era dinosaur, a troodon in the style of those dinosaurs from one of the paleo-history fashions when feathers were out and colourful skin was back in. She was jade on her upper surfaces, mustard yellow below and her back mackerel patterned with hints of navy blue. To add to her gaudy appearance, she had painted her claws gold, wore a variety of silver and gold bangles, and neck rings. It gladdened me that in recent years she’d lost interest in applying eye-shadow. She now stood up on her toes and extended her long neck to raise her sharp reptilian head, which was first at a level with mine, to peer over the door at the landscape lying beyond, and blinked bright slot-pupil eyes.

‘Tasty,’ she said, which was often her response to heavily muscled humans. She then clicked her fore-claws in frustration and ducked back down. This probably meant the humans concerned were armed.

The door finally came down to rest on boggy ground mounded with heather-like plants and nodular mosses, stabbed through here and there with black reeds. The colony raft sat about a mile beyond, a structure a mile wide and bearing some resemblance to an ancient aircraft carrier. Members of the Frobishers, who were the family I had come to trade with, stood between the bathysphere door and the vehicle they’d come over in – a swamp car with cage wheels. Four heavies clad in quilted body suits and rain capes stood out there, three of them carrying light laser carbines and a fourth holding something that looked suspiciously like a proton weapon. Before these stood a woman, clad much the same as them but studying an ancient computer tablet. This must be the woman I had come to see, scourge of the Cleaver family and a character with growing off-world interests.

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