The Engineer Reconditioned by Neal Asher

additions.
    "It is a singun," said Rhys, his usually happy demeanour at once very serious.
    "You see?" said Chapra to Abaron.
    "But ... I didn't think such things existed."
    "They do. One shot from that will have the effect of turning our friend inside out through a pin hole in space." She observed Abaron's confused expression and explained. "For about a second it generates a singularity in its target. Our friend there would be reduced to sludge."
    "Wouldn't an energy weapon have been better?" asked Abaron.
    Judd said, "There is a high probability that the creature can generate defences against energy weapons. We have no known defence against the singun."
    Chapra decided not to point out to Abaron that use of 'we'.
    "It's all rather moot," she said. "The Jain has shown no signs of hostility."
    "The Jain has placed a container upon the jetty," said Box.
    "Let's go see what it wants now," said Chapra, and they trooped back into the lock. Soon they were out on the jetty. The container was at the furthest end.
    "What the hell is that?" wondered Chapra as she strode towards the container. Showing great fortitude, Abaron strode at her side. Inside the container was a coil of something fleshy. They halted at the container and stood over it.
    "It looks like something alive," said Abaron, crushing the dread in him under the cool analytic scientist.
    "It certainly — "
    The coil snapped straight out of the container, cobra fast. It hit Abaron's arm, hung there for a moment as it recoiled, then snapped out into the water. Abaron yelled, staggered back, and sat down.
    "Oh," he said, then looked down at his shoulder where blood was spreading between the layers of his environment suit. "It bit me." In a moment Judd lifted him up and all but carried him to the door. Chapra followed. In the lock Abaron's legs gave way and he looked more bewildered than scared.
    "It's just shock," Chapra told him, but she could not put from her mind visions of an ancient celluloid film she had in her collection; of the contents of an egg shooting out and attaching to a man's face, and the consequences of that.
    Box looked upon the world with all its superbly precise senses and analysed it with a mind that made the mind of any god humans had imagined appear that of an infant throwing a tantrum, and it found the world beautiful. The eye of the beholder. Box could find beauty in anything because it could look at things in so many thousands of different ways. Many philosophers in the human polity now posited that humans were not created by gods, that in fact the complete reverse applied.
    At the poles of the world the temperature was the same as at Earth's equator, but at two atmospheres pressure. At its equator the environment was about as inviting to a human as the inside of a pressure cooker. The place swarmed with life much like that in the isolation chamber, but with one important exception. There were great and complex ecosystems here, but no outpost of any star-spanning civilization, and no discernible remnants, but then little might survive five million years in such hostile conditions. There were no Jain, not a trace.
    Very cool and very factual Abaron said, "There are no toxins in me, there is no disgusting alien embryo waiting to burst out of my stomach in a messy spray. There is, in fact, nothing alien to my body inside me barring the two doughnuts I ate half an hour ago and the cup of coffee I washed them down with." Chapra smiled. The attack, rather than feeding his fear, had destroyed it. Irrational fear could never long survive harsh realities.
    "What happened then?"
    "This." Abaron peeled back the dressing on his arm to show the wound. A perfect circle of skin a centimetre wide and few millimetres deep had been excised from his biceps.
    "What do you think?"
    "I think the Jain took a sample. It is as curious about us as we are about it. Only its curiosity must have a greater urgency because it is entirely dependent on us and has no idea what we