Neal Asher - Adaptogenic

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 47.24KB 19 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Neal%20Asher%20-%20Adaptogenic.txt

Adaptogenic - a novelette by Neal Asher

Adaptogenic

a novelette by Neal Asher

Another murder-louse made its scuttling charge, its trilobite body holding

level as a pointer on me as its multitude of legs found purchase on the

weed-slippery rocks. I watched the creature with a crawling sensation in

my guts as it reached the perimeter. There was always the horrible

suspicion that this time one might make it, that this time I'd end up as a

paralysed egg-carrier or diced by those grinding mandibles. But no, with

admirable and re-assuring efficiency the Tenkian strobed from its tripod

and the louse became a messy explosion of legs, carapace, and pink ichor.

This is, of course, adding to my problems. Every louse the autogun

splatters means more food to attract more lice. They are coming with

greater frequency now. Soon I'll have to move the crate to a cleaner area,

try to find somewhere to hide it, where it won't be swept away. There's

enough power left in the gun's batteries for it to follow on its

impellers... A cleaner area... In a day or so all areas on this side of

the planet will be swept clean. I face choices; the lice, drowning, or

ceasing to be human. Why the hell am I worrying about the crate? I really

wish I'd missed that auction.

"Good morning Mr Chel," said the two and a half metre tall two hundred

kilo monster who worked as security guard for Darkander. I gave Jane a

look of long-suffering and stood still while I was scanned for comlinks or

any of the other equipment Darkander considered an unfair advantage.

"You are clean, Mr Chel."

My chip card was next and the monster took it from me between a finger and

thumb like the grab on a cometary mining ship. After a moment he returned

it.

"Your credit is good, Mr Chel."

After she too had been checked out Jane joined me. I smiled mild approval

at her cool.

"Is it always like that?" she asked, tucking her card into one of the many

pockets of her coverall.

"Always. No extra information access. No comlinks and no AIs. Darkander is

very strict about it."

"Isn't that a bit discriminating?"

"Some free AIs once took him to court on those grounds. They lost out on a

protection of antiquities law about two centuries old. He then pointed out

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Neal%20Asher%20-%20Adaptogenic.txt (1 of 19)8-12-2006 23:21:10

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Neal%20Asher%20-%20Adaptogenic.txt

to them that should they bring another action and win he would be forced

to close down. They left him alone. Anyway, what do you think?"

Darkander's is an anachronism. It is a huge scan-shielded warehouse where

all manner of items are stacked haphazardly and sold by lot. There is no

computer bidding, no microsecond business transactions. Starting from lot

one everything comes under Darkander's wooden hammer. It is a place for

human experts with a relish for competition, an eye for bargains and

deals, and a dislike of paying taxes. People like Jason Chel. Me.

"Now, I'm not going to point anything out to you, as I'm often watched.

Anything that takes your interest mark on the list, then come back to me

when you've finished. I'll tell you how high to go."

Jane smiled then swayed off amongst the chaos of goods. As I watched her

go I felt a degree of discomfort. I'd promised her this visit some time

ago, when I'd been drunk, and had since tried very hard to get out of it.

Well, now she was here. Hopefully she wouldn't cause too much harm. I

slowly followed her in and allowed my gaze to wander casually to the

objects I was after. There was a box of what looked like pre-runcible

tiles, probably from the belly of a shuttle, a Thakework sculpture of

Orbonnai skulls, something that looked like the shell of a mollusc -- I

hadn't a clue what it was, but was prepared to risk a few credits on it --

and finally there was the Golem Six android, which after my cursory

inspection the day before I felt sure had the mind of a three or four.

This last item was the one I really wanted. Made before the twenty third

revision of the Turing test these Golem were much in demand. Of course,

now the auction was starting I did not look too closely at it, I instead

showed a great deal of interest in some chainglass blades which were quite

obviously faked to look like Tenkian's.

The bidding started off with the usual lack of alacrity as Jane rejoined

me.

"Let me see," I took the note screen from her and studied the items she

had marked. To my annoyance I noted she had marked the tiles. "I think

we'll have a cup of coffee. These-" I tapped the stylus against the lot

number of the tiles. "Won't be up for a while, and they are the first on

your... list."

I had decided to be generous.

We sat sipping our way through a cup of coffee each as the auction

progressed. At the lot before the tiles we sauntered out. As soon as this

was sold we moved into Darkander's view. The short bald-headed man who was

reputed to be a multimillionaire flicked a glance in my direction and

tried to start the bidding at five hundred. I caught hold of Jane's arm

before she could raise it. The figure Darkander suggested dropped in

fifties until it was fifty, then started to rise again in twenty fives.

Jane began to bid and as she did so I looked to see who she was bidding

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Neal%20Asher%20-%20Adaptogenic.txt (2 of 19)8-12-2006 23:21:10

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Neal Asher - Adaptogenic.pdf

共19页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Neal Asher - Adaptogenic

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: