Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  ‘It is asking for direct current of a defined wattage. This, I gather, is what it was seeking from my telefactor.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Eight point three watts made available to the power outlet below the optic plug. I estimate that this could stimulate growth in the structure, but that the risk would be no more than it is at present. The entity is thoroughly aware of my precautions.’

  ‘Then give it what it wants and let’s see what we get.’

  Cormac returned his attention to the unit as another arm swung out, holding a simple bayonet power plug uncoiling two power cables from the body of the unit itself. Another arm reached out, and the spidery eight-fingered hand it terminated in closed on the Jain structure and pulled. The woody substance shattered –frangible as charcoal –exposing the power socket. The unit now abruptly stabbed the plug into place. Lights again lit in broken optics all around the interior of the pod. Over com, Cormac heard a whispery hissing, as of a zephyr in woodland, then the tinkling of a rill bubbling down some rocky course –but this second sound became that of fading laughter.

  ‘What is that?’

  Jack did not reply, and Cormac wondered just how many seconds remained before the AI detonated the CTD. Then there was movement over by the row of command chairs, specifically where the Jain structure seemed to have gone crazy, spiralling up from the deck like fig vines that have strangled a tree, and blackened towards its interior by fire.

  Illusion . . . those optics?

  But no, the ghost stepped out into view like a tree sprite departing her home. She was naked, nymphean, and as she moved Cormac could see the skeleton inside her translucent form –moving out of consonance, as if always a little behind. Perhaps it was because of this that he did not instantly recognize her.

  ‘Jack, speak to me.’

  ‘My apologies. I was fascinated by the way all the broken optics in there are being utilized to create this holographic image. I have also just received a message from the new Warden of Elysium.’

  Cormac’s suit blower was operating noisily. ‘What message?’

  ‘Obviously, after seeing those anchor points in the rock of the asteroid, it was essential to determine what ship was their source. We have contacted all but one of the ships working the belt asteroids. That one should have returned some time ago, but has been out of contact. It’s a survey ship called the Vulture.’

  ‘That figures,’ said Cormac, his main attention focused on the spectre in the bridge pod. He went on, ‘So, Aphran, what’s Skellor up to now?’

  The breathy voice coming over com replied, ‘Hunting dragons.’

  His breathing ragged and his body feeling as if someone had worked him over with a baseball bat, Apis studied the woman he had come to love and wondered at the change that bonding process had wrought in him. Standing with her arms folded and her back against the counter running around the inner wall of this surgical facility, Eldene was by no means a female that an Outlinker should find attractive. The huge improvement in nutrition for her, as for all the pond workers of Masada since their emancipation, had softened the lines of hard muscle built by constant toil, filled out her hips and breasts, and blunted the sharpness of her features, though she still carried little in the way of fat. However, to Outlinker perception, she was grotesquely over-muscled. That perception meant little to him now, as if his own adaptation to living on the planet’s surface had changed him psychologically as well as physically. Even amid the pain and debilitating fatigue, looking at Eldene –at those wonderful green eyes framed by her crop of black hair, that fulsome figure and her strong, tricky hands –Apis wanted to make love to her. One more, and possibly last, time. He turned away.

  For some time he had sensed the stunted, imperfect growth inside him. That the mycelium was killing him he was certain, and now perhaps he would know how and why. As she returned from her analysis of the data gathered by the probes piercing him like needles stabbed into a grub, Mika looked grim.

  ‘What’s it doing, then?’ he asked, his gaze wandering from her How am I going to tell him this expression to the robot poised over him, like a chrome cobra head but with an underside of complex insectile manipulators and surgical tools. Not for the first time he felt a shudder at the resemblance this device bore to the hooder he and Eldene had seen devour the First Commander of the Theocracy –only a hooder’s cutlery served instead the purpose of dissecting its food to be sure the predator did not ingest any poison. That there had been none existing in Dorth had not dissuaded it from this meticulous and lengthy task.

  Studying her laptop, Mika replied, ‘It’s forming nodes inside you, but I don’t know why –possibly because what it’s making is as incomplete as it is itself. In doing this it uses more of the available resources, and so has shut down some of its other functions.’

  Apis shook his head. ‘Like enabling me to survive outside.’

  ‘Yes, like that . . . It’s moved from mutualism to parasitism.’

  ‘Like something alive, then,’ said Apis, knowing such comments unnerved Mika.

  She gave him an unreadable look but did not reply.

  ‘What about the pain?’ Apis asked.

  ‘That comes from where the growing nodes are trapping your nerves.’

  Now Eldene, who throughout the investigative procedure had remained silent, spoke up. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  The expression on the Life-coven woman’s face was now readable: embarrassment and pity. She returned her attention to the screen of her laptop.

  ‘You now possess sufficient physical growth to sustain you in this gravity, and that will not go away. I can attempt to save you by surgery.’

  ‘What do you mean, “attempt”?’ Eldene asked, her voice rising.

  Before Mika could reply to that, Apis said, ‘It’s a mycelium –that would be like trying to remove cobwebs from jelly.’

  ‘Not quite, since its filaments are tough and not so easy to snap, which should make them easier to remove. Previously I would have considered such an operation impossible, as the mycelium grew evenly throughout your body. But now it’s drawn its main mass into your torso, with trunks extending into your limbs and head. I estimate that I could remove over ninety per cent of it.’

  ‘You still haven’t explained what you mean by “attempt”,’ Eldene insisted.

  Mika turned to her. ‘The mycelium will work to close any cuts I make. It will actually fight the surgery. It will also fight against having itself removed –attempting all the time to return to its . . . home. And even should I manage to remove the main mass, remaining filaments –those reaching into his extremities –might die and cause massive blood poisoning as they break down. Or they might stay alive and grow into a new, complete mycelium. They might even stay alive and become something else.’

  ‘What alternatives are there?’ Eldene asked.

  Mika did not reply, and Eldene bowed her head, knowing the unspoken answer. Apis felt a sudden surge of self-pity, and the need to get out of there, to live whatever time he might have left as fully as possible, but he stamped down on it hard. At least, should he die under the knife, he might provide Mika with enough information to save those others who faced the same prospect: Mika herself and Thorn –but foremost to him, Eldene.

  ‘Can you start now?’ he asked.

  Mika nodded.

  Apis turned to Eldene. ‘I’d rather you left now.’

  She looked hurt, but he doubted she would relish the prospect of seeing him open like a gutted fish on this table any more than he relished the prospect of being that way. Mika then tapped out something on her console, and Apis felt a cold spreading through him from where the probes penetrated his flesh. As his consciousness faded, he saw Eldene turning to go. The surgical robot bowed like a geisha, and opened out its glittering tableware.

  The man halted and studied their surroundings, and Marlen found himself slavishly tracking the man’s gaze.

  The chequer trees had shed their square
leaves, which now lay like badly applied gilding over the mossy ground, or else caught in layered clumps on spiky sedges. Fallen from the adapted oaks, the blue acorns that punctuated these surfaces like discarded half-sucked sweets were being nibbled at by creatures like birth-defect rabbits, hopping and bouncing as if ever on the point of coming apart. Marlen noted the old damage to the trees, and the occasional lumps of metal protruding from the ground. There had been a battle here between agents of ECS, accompanied by Viridian soldiers, and the Separatist Arian Pelter –this had been one of the first bits of information the man had ripped from Marlen’s mind. Glancing at his accomplice in their recent disastrous robbery attempt, Marlen saw that Inther was drooling. What the man had done to them both through their biotech augs must have damaged Inther’s brain. Marlen returned his attention to their captor.

  He appeared perfectly ordinary: stocky, brown-haired and dressed in a cheap environment suit –not noticeable. But closer inspection revealed that he sank deeper into the soft ground than he should, and that his gaze held a silvery shimmer as if lizard-scales were moving in the sclera of his eyes. What was he, then? Both Marlen and Inther were big men, and boosted too, yet he had tossed them about as if they massed no more than origami sculptures before . . . doing what he did.

  The man turned on a scanner. Marlen glimpsed on its screen a translucent image of the ground, in which were buried stones, wood, jags of metal and more macabre objects.

  The man pointed to a sunken area. ‘Dig there,’ he ordered. Marlen and Inther could only obey –the biotech augs behind their ears were grey, as if seared, and something was poised inside their skulls like a reel of fishhooks.

  The two men took up their spades and picks, and immediately set to work. Marlen concentrated on the task in hand –was unable to concentrate on much else. He didn’t slack; didn’t stop to rest until his muscles were burning from lactic overload, and then he didn’t rest for long. He and Inther were a metre down into the soft ground when Marlen’s spade sheared up a layer of decaying fabric, exposing rib bones and an intricate line of vertebrae. Marlen noted that long-tailed slugs, the undertakers of Viridian, had eaten away all the flesh and skin, and that a nest of them was balled up in the skeleton’s ribcage. They were skinned over with hardened slime while they made the slow transformation to the next stage of their life cycle: a hard-shelled chrysalis that burrowed to the surface to protrude like a tubeworm, its end opening to release the flying adult form of the creature. He poked at this ball with the edge of his spade, fracturing the coating to reveal slithing movement.

  ‘I want the skull,’ said their captor.

  Inther dug at one end of the spine, and Marlen at the other. Marlen hit the pelvis, then turned as Inther unearthed the skull, took hold of it in his big hand and twisted it away from some remaining tendon, before passing it up out of the hole.

  ‘Okay, now dig over there, where I’ve marked out.’ As he scrambled from the hole and over to another sunken area –marked out by four twigs shoved into the ground –Marlen glanced at the skull. Its previous owner had obviously been into cerebral augmentation in a big way. Behind where the ear would have been, a grey bean-shaped military aug was still attached by its bone anchors. Extending from this, a square-sectioned pipe lay alongside the temple curving round to enter the left eye socket –some sort of optic link. It was also obvious how this individual had died since, perfectly positioned in the centre of the forehead, was a neat hole ringed by blackened bone –someone had shot this person through the head with a pulse-gun.

  ‘Oh Arian,’ the man said, ‘Mr Crane was so wasted on you.’

  –retroact 3 –

  The acrid smell of molten and seared plastic filled the room as Semper welded up the final seals of the covering. Syntheskin was not an option, as firstly it was difficult to obtain, and secondly it was quite thick; layering Mr Crane with it would only make him bulkier and therefore even more noticeable. Stanton thought the whole humanizing process laughable. The Golem was over two metres tall, possessed huge skull-crushing hands and didn’t really move like a person –there was an odd, jerky, sometimes birdlike tendency to his every gesture which somehow hinted at a frightening instability. Now, with his skin-tone plastic covering, Stanton thought he looked even worse. It was like making a crocodile walk upright and wear a suit –some horror from a child’s fairy tale.

  ‘Okay,’ said Semper, ‘you can put your clothes back on.’

  Crane, who until then had been standing motionless while Semper worked, abruptly looked down at himself. Negligently he reached down, pinched at the skin over his chest, and tore a piece away.

  ‘Leave that!’ Semper reached out and slapped the Golem’s hand as if berating a naughty child. The next moment the Golem held him suspended off the floor by his neck.

  ‘Put him down!’ Angelina Pelter yelled. ‘Put. Him. Down!’

  She rose from where she had been sitting on one of the packing cases stacked along a wall of the warehouse and, discarding her laptop, rushed over. Mr Crane’s hand snapped open and Semper collapsed to the ground, hacking and gagging. Stanton looked down at his pulse-gun, then returned it to his shoulder holster. There had been no real purpose in him drawing the weapon and, upon studying the file he had taken from Stalek’s computer, he discovered that even the sticky mine he had earlier placed on Crane would have no more effect than to briefly knock the Golem off its feet. Really, if they lost control of Crane and he decided to kill them, their only option was to run just as fast as they could, and hope the wrecked AI inside that brass body would soon find some other distraction.

  Recovering somewhat, Semper dragged himself away from Crane before standing up. The Golem, as if nothing noteworthy had occurred, turned to the folding chair on which its clothing had been draped, picked up his hat and placed it carefully on his head. After standing utterly still for a second, he then took up the ragged trousers and put them on. Another pause, then the long coat. Watching him then don the big lace-up boots was almost comical. Almost.

  Semper, who had now moved to stand beside Stanton, said, ‘Sooner or later, that fucking thing is going to kill one of us.’

  ‘You are so right –it certainly is,’ said a voice from behind them.

  Semper whirled, groping for his weapon. Stanton didn’t bother –he’d already heard Arian Pelter walking up the aisle, between crates containing dark-otter bone.

  ‘Alston,’ said Stanton. ‘On his island.’ He turned. Alston was also part of the criminal organization supporting the Separatist cause. He was a part Arian Pelter wanted rid of. Stanton studied his boss.

  Arian Pelter, Stanton felt, was just as pretty as his sister with his violet eyes, long blond hair and perfectly symmetrical features. Today he was dressed in an expensive white suit and a shirt that perfectly matched the shade of his eyes. He also wore a matching set of platinum New Tiffany jewellery: a single teardrop earring on the opposite side of his head to a matching aug, bracelets on each wrist, and rings on the fore- and mid-fingers of each hand. However, despite this foppish appearance, he was just as ugly on the inside as his sister, and just as dangerous. Stanton was certain it was Alston’s contempt for the Pelter vanity, rather than the man’s skimming cash from the otter-bone trade, that had made Arian decide he had become a liability. Unfortunately, out on his island, Alston was well protected.

  ‘Dear sister,’ Arian acknowledged, as Angelina walked over, ‘so this is our new acquisition.’ He walked forwards, Semper and Stanton parting before him, then following as he headed over to inspect Mr Crane. He paced one circuit of the Golem, then turned to Angelina. ‘Have you tried him with weapons?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ve only just put on his skin,’ she replied.

  Arian turned to Semper. ‘Your weapon.’

  Semper was reluctant, but he handed over his pulse-gun. Arian took it and held it out to Mr Crane. ‘Now . . .’ He looked around, then pointed to two crates standing one on top of the other on the further side of the warehouse. ‘Mr Cra
ne, I want you to take this weapon and destroy the top one of those two crates.’ He held out the gun.

  The weapon looked silly, toylike, in Crane’s big hand. With a darting motion, he dipped his head to inspect it. He then turned to face the crates, holding the weapon out to one side as if not sure quite what to do with it. There came a crunching sound and the brief flash of a laminar battery discharging. Pieces of Semper’s gun fell about the Golem’s feet as he abruptly lurched into motion. With long strides he ate up the ground between himself and the crates. Reaching them, he picked up the top one and just closed his hands on it, smashing the compressed-paper boards and the golden bones inside. Another abrupt movement scattered the debris all about him. He turned and strode back, stopping before Pelter to await further instructions.

  Tapping his beringed forefinger against his aug, Arian said, ‘Well, he followed the instructions precisely, but not quite in the expected manner.’

  About then, Stanton started to feel it was time for him to collect the money owed to him and depart. He did not want to be around when Mr Crane took literally one of Arian’s psycho ‘Kill them all’ orders. If the Separatists here on Cheyne III wanted to play catch with greased axes, he’d leave them to their game.

  –retroact ends –

  As he drove his spade into the ground, Marlen kept half an eye on what the man was doing, but he was not entirely certain of what happened next. The skull broke like egg shell in the man’s hands. Then, retrieving something small and black from inside it, he discarded the bony remnants as he turned away. When he walked back over to watch his two slaves work, Marlen saw that he now held nothing, and could not shake the impression that the man had put the black object in his mouth and swallowed it.

  3

  The difference between hotsuits and coldsuits has been a source of sometimes lethal confusion. Does a hotsuit keep you hot, or prevent you from getting hot; and is a coldsuit refrigerated? The rule of thumb I apply is to just remember that the suit’s internal temperature remains constant, so the ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ applies to the temperature outside it. Attempts were made to get everyone using ‘envirosuit’ with given temperature ranges, e.g. envirosuit 150–250K (Kelvin). This would have been much better because many suits do not function outside certain ranges and can even be damaged if exposed to temperatures outside them. People have frequently purchased inappropriate coldsuits for cold environments. The envirosuit example quoted, having been raised above 250K, will not then insulate below 200K. Equally, a hotsuit capable of keeping a human alive in temperatures above the melting point of steel will be destroyed by ordinary room temperature (which begs the question of how a human gets in and out of such a suit, but I won’t go there just yet). Of course, nothing so logical as the envirosuit nomenclature caught on: human language, go figure.