Free The Skinner by Neal Asher Page B

‘do the leeches die?’
    ‘Yes and no. They’re preyed upon too, and as easy to kill as anything else here, but they don’t actually die of old age. When fertilized, they divide into segments, which then
collapse into a large encystment, or egg. That egg will attach itself to the bottom of a sargassum, and out of it will eventually hatch thousands of cute baby leeches.’
    ‘Nice. What about the males?’
    ‘No males, really. The leeches are hermaphroditic . . . sort of.’
    ‘Same immortality as all life.’
    ‘Yes, it is that.’ Erlin nodded, lost to her own thoughts. Janer saw that she had now gone away from him and, thinking of nothing else to ask, he quickly returned to his cabin for
his gun, deciding right then that he would be very careful here. It was apparent to him that this was a place where recklessness could soon get you dead.
    On the great monolith of stone surrounded by empty ocean, Sniper reached out with one triple-jointed arm, clasped the bishop in his precision claw, and moved it halfway across
the board. Keeping one palp-eye on the game he turned his other to the three objects that lay on a sheet of slightly putrescent skin spread on the rock beside the board. One of these objects was an
explosive slave collar with Prador glyphs etched into its dull grey surface. A brief ultrasound scan revealed the information that the film of planar explosive inside it was still active even after
all this time. This meant that at the antiquities sale on Coram this item would fetch over a thousand New Carth shillings. The two other objects were even more interesting and of greater value, as
slave collars had already been found in their hundreds over on the Skinner’s Island. One of them, Sniper recognized as a very early nerve-inducer, despite the fact that most of its ceramal
casing had corroded away. The other was a mass of corrosion which the war drone had identified, after scanning, as a projectile gun. This last item, despite its terrible condition, would fetch a
mint, as it was likely a weapon carried by either Hoop himself or one of his comrades. Sniper hunkered down on his six crustacean legs and returned both eyes to the game as his opponent made a
move.
    ‘How much you want for them?’ the war drone asked as he registered a possible danger to his queen in eight further moves.
    Sniper’s opponent lowered to the stone the foot-talon he had used to move his knight, and blinked at Sniper with demonic red eyes. The sail, with his pink-skinned wings wadded into an
intricacy of folds and spines that bore some resemblance to a monk’s habit and some to the excess of Elizabethan clothing, and with his long neck hooked like a question mark as he observed
the board, grinned his crocodilian grin and exposed a kilo of ivory.
    ‘Two thousand, and you fit the augmentation for me here ,’ he said.
    Sniper, who had the appearance of giant crayfish fashioned of polished aluminium, tilted his armoured head in acknowledgement.
    ‘There’s the alignment program – I wrote it myself. And that, Cheater, will cost you,’ said Sniper.
    Windcheater turned his head and eyed Sniper suspiciously as the war drone made his next move.
    ‘You didn’t tell me about that,’ the sail accused.
    Sniper raised his head and stared at the sail. Below the war drone’s angled-back antennae and cluster of sensory bristles, two mirrored tubes shifted apart, coming to point sideways now
and leaving a matt square tube centred on the sail opposite. This was the nearest the drone could come to a grin, having in place of a mouth an antiphoton weapon – and the business ends of a
rail-gun and a missile launcher.
    ‘Musta slipped my mind,’ Sniper said.
    ‘Why do I need this alignment program?’ Windcheater asked, his talons rattling his impatience and splintering up flakes of the stone.
    ‘Your brain ain’t exactly human-shaped. Put the aug on you now and the nanonic fibres’ll turn your head to mush looking for the