Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  Mika looked across at Susan James and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s a research station in orbit around a red dwarf. Been there for fifty years –long-term study,’ she explained.

  Susan was a standard-format human; in appearance almost a female version of Ian Cormac, though certainly not as deadly. Mika turned her attention to D’nissan, the low-temperature ophidapt man from Ganymede. His visor was down in the neck ring of his hotsuit, and he was drinking what looked like a raspberry coolie through a straw –a drink that would have been hot to him. His pronouncements were usually concise and apposite, which was why, when the situation warranted it, he was Jerusalem’s chief researcher, but he didn’t have anything to say just then.

  ‘To get Skellor,’ Mika said.

  ‘It’d be great to get hold of the source of the Jain tech we’ve been studying,’ said Colver. ‘I’m sure there are controlling mechanisms we haven’t seen yet.’

  Now D’nissan observed coolly, ‘That’s like studying venom, then wishing to get hold of a snake.’

  Mika thought that a bit rich, coming from a man with diamond-scaled skin and fangs.

  He looked at her directly. ‘Of course we haven’t seen it all, because what we have got is just a . . . cutting. If it were rooted and allowed to grow, we then perhaps would.’

  ‘Yeah, but Skellor . . . he direct-interfaced with a crystal matrix AI . . .’ said Colver, apropos of nothing.

  ‘I would like to see Jain technology operating,’ said Mika.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ Colver asked, interrupting D’nissan, who had been about to speak. ‘We’re going to see that.’

  Mika stared at D’nissan.

  ‘The asteroid,’ he explained, ‘it would have had to be destroyed by imploder anyway. So why not use it to grow some of our specimen?’

  ‘In red sunlight,’ Mika suggested.

  ‘Precisely,’ said D’nissan.

  Mika was not sure how to react. This was what she had wanted, but she was also aware that they were playing with something substantially more dangerous than fire.

  In the invisible grid, Crane shifted a blue acorn to a position adjacent to the lion’s tooth, then moved the coin ring adjacent to the piece of crystal. The rubber dog remained constant beside the laser lighter. This elicited a fragmented image of the same grid occupied by the shells of penny oysters, the interstices of which dying pearl crabs were exploring. Blood dripped from his fingers onto the crushed-shell beach, black in the silver moonlight.

  –retroact 10 –

  ‘Did they all get in his way?’ Angelina asked, looking at the corpses scattered across the sand.

  ‘Apparently so,’ said Arian. Three of his men moved ahead, spreading out as they stepped into the creosote bushes, while the other eight split into two groups of four, to head in either direction along the beach.

  ‘Two more here,’ said one of the men, pushing aside a bush with the barrel of his pulse-rifle. Angelina moved up beside Arian as her brother gazed down at the mess. The tangle of blood, bones and torn flesh seemed only identifiable as human because there was clothing mixed in there as well.

  ‘Two?’ she asked.

  ‘Well I count two heads,’ the man replied.

  Angelina did not like this at all. With Alston dead they could have just moved in and taken over his operation, perhaps having to pay the man’s people over the odds for a while until they got things under control. But there had been no reaction to their approach of the island. The scanners aboard the boat had detected very few heat signatures, and those few detected were fading. It was beginning to look as if no operation remained here.

  They moved on through silvery moonlight, and it was only fifty metres inland before they found the next corpse. This man was impaled on the snapped branch of a tree, his feet dangling two metres from the ground, where his blood had pooled.

  ‘Where exactly is he?’ Angelina asked. ‘We wouldn’t want him to make a mistake about us.’

  ‘On the other side of the island, on the beach. He’s not moving and all I’m getting is “objective achieved” and some weird images. He won’t move.’

  ‘Perhaps we should just turn around and leave him here?’

  Arian lowered his hand from his platinum aug and stared at her. ‘I think it may be the second link to his control module from my aug. We need a direct optic link to get the bandwidth, and some military programming. Someone like Sylac could do the job.’

  Angelina could hear the doubt in his voice. Personally she had no wish to see herself, or her brother, under Sylac’s knives, since the surgery he performed might not render the intended result. The surgeon was a law unto himself and considered the human body a testing ground, or even a playground. Nor did she want either of them to be more closely connected to the scrambled insane mind of the Golem, no matter how much more control they might thus obtain. And the idea of putting that kind of power into the hands of one of their employees would be sheer madness. Already she was beginning to see that Mr Crane was like a black-market pulse-gun from one of the less reputable dealers on Huma –it might work, but was just as likely to blow up in your face. When she saw the mound, she felt her thoughts confirmed.

  ‘Why the fuck did he do that?’ asked Arian.

  Counting heads, they found the knotted mound of corpses consisted of maybe eight people –it was difficult to be sure. Stepping closer to see if she recognized any of the faces, Angelina felt her foot sink, and abruptly stepped back. Her boot pulled out with a slurp, and she saw that the blood had turned the ground into a quagmire. She had killed, she had seen horrible death, and been hard and unaffected by it. But this made her gorge rise. One of their men stepped off to one side, leant against a rock, and spewed briefly before turning back.

  ‘Up to his house?’ he asked, after wiping vomit from his lips.

  ‘Yes . . . to his house,’ Arian replied. Abruptly he reached up and initiated the comunit button on his collar. ‘Falen, Balsh –don’t go round to the other side of the island. Just get back to the boat.’ He tilted his head as he listened to their reply, then said, ‘You needn’t bother –I don’t think there’s anyone left alive here.’

  In the moonlight the corpses on the hillside were macabre sculptures: clawed hands frozen while groping for mercy, jags of white bone pointing to the sky, and an eyeless head propped on a rock, gazing into infinity. More of the same occupied Alston’s fortified home, but what struck Angelina more than anything was the lack of pulse-gun burns on the walls. The slaughter here had been quick and absolute. She was also surprised at just how intact Alston himself was, sitting behind his desk there with something gleaming in his mouth.

  ‘No one else must get their hands on him,’ said Arian, staring at the corpse.

  Angelina realized her brother was referring to the Golem.

  ‘We’ll just hide him away somewhere secure, just . . . keep him ready.’

  So, Arian was beginning to see straight.

  ‘It’s not like we’ll need him for every operation.’

  Angelina kept her mouth closed and her face expressionless.

  ‘We can handle most problems ourselves.’

  ‘Where do we put him?’ Angelina asked him.

  ‘Where such things should always be kept,’ Arian told her. ‘In a cellar.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Angelina would have preferred that place to be the caldera of a volcano.

  –retroact ends –

  10

  The evolutionary forces detailed long ago by Darwin, and only elaborated on ever since, are universal, and required for life. The other requirements were thought to be matter and energy, though doubt has now been cast on the former. All life, therefore, lives by rules already discussed ad nauseam by others. Suffice to say that there are doves and hawks in every ecosystem. And some of the hawks are monstrous. Looking into the natural history of our own planet it can be seen that we ascended during a particularly peaceful time, and that most of the monsters w
ere in our past. We missed the dinosaurs by sixty million years. Close call –they were bad enough. However, even Tyrannosaurus rex would have had problems with some of the alien creatures we have since discovered: the fauna of Masada with its hooders, heroynes, siluroynes, and the positively weird gabbleduck. How would dinosaurs have fared there? What about the thrake –a grade-three sentience but still armoured like a tank? What about the horrifying leeches of that far out-Polity planet Spatterjay? What else is out there –what have we yet to find?

  –From How It Is by Gordon

  The kiln smell, then the sound of a steam pump, told Anderson what lay ahead before he even saw the minerallier encampment, and rounding a butte beside which some spillage had cut an oily-looking channel, around which grew stunted sulerbanes, he and Tergal soon came in sight of industry.

  ‘You can see why they’re here,’ said Tergal. Anderson looked at him questioningly, and Tergal pointed up at the butte. ‘White and blue sand in separate layers.’

  Anderson glanced up to where layers of pink and orange sand separated the white from the blue.

  Tergal explained, ‘You find the two layers close together and they’ve normally reacted with each other. Then the trace elements turn to salts, and rain washes them out. The sands are worthless then.’

  Anderson nodded, not wanting to disappoint the boy by explaining that he already knew all this.

  By the channel a sand hog as old as Bonehead was lying in the sunshine, harnessed to a huge cart laden with coke. Next to this was parked a large powered vehicle with caterpillar treads, and two trailers attached behind –one flatbed and one container. Beyond the stream, the mineralliers had erected a scaffold up the side of the butte, so that they could get to the layers of sand which they lowered in separate buckets on a steam-driven chain. A short distance back from the butte, bonded-sand kilns and houses had been built, but even so Anderson knew this to be a temporary encampment –the mineralliers would stay only until the seams were worked out, though that could take them months or years. Between the houses they had erected a wooden frame on which sleer carapaces were drying –no doubt to be used as additional fuel. Workers were busy in the excavation in the butte, mining the sands or, down below, barrowing it to the kilns where others spread it on ceramic plates to fuse it into sheets. No one noticed their approach until a little girl spotted them, and went yelling into the encampment.

  ‘What would we do without them?’ Anderson asked, eyeing the solar triptych lying open on Bonehead’s back –its three cells charging up the batteries of the charge generator they had used during the night.

  ‘Mineralliers?’ Tergal asked.

  ‘No, solar cells. There are other ways of generating electricity, but none so easy and convenient as this.’ He gestured to a stack of boxes by one of the sandstone houses.

  Beside this, a big black-haired woman was cutting sheets of opaque-white and translucent-blue glass, before polishing them. Next to her, a small monkey of a man was attaching small braided copper wires, painting something on one kind of glass, then sealing pieces of each kind together with sheets of glistening film he removed from a bucket beside him. Each complete photovoltaic cell he wrapped and carefully packed away. It was to the woman that the girl ran. The woman ceased working and walked out to meet Anderson and Tergal at the edge of the encampment.

  ‘A slow response, and I hardly expected a Rondure Knight to be sent,’ she said, looking Anderson up and down.

  ‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone else,’ said Anderson, unstrapping himself from his saddle as Bone-head went down on its crawler limbs.

  ‘You’re a weapons man?’

  ‘I am that,’ he replied, stepping down onto the sand.

  The woman nodded. ‘We sent into Golgoth for a weapons man five days ago and he has yet to appear.’ She gazed about in irritation, eyed Tergal for a moment, then returned her attention to Anderson. ‘Are you taking commissions?’

  Anderson shrugged. ‘Whenever available –a man has to eat.’

  ‘Then I have one for you for which I can pay in pfennigs, or new phocells if you’d prefer. Our man from Golgoth can suck on a sleer’s arse for all I care now.’

  Tergal snorted, choked off his laughter. The woman stared at him estimatingly.

  ‘Your apprentice?’ she asked Anderson.

  ‘Of a kind,’ replied Anderson. ‘Tell me about this commission.’

  Again the woman looked around. ‘It comes at night, and we’ve not minded when it only knocked a few things over as it searched our camp for food. But it’s getting bolder. Six nights ago it attacked one of our hogs and put a hole in its carapace.’ She gestured to a hog compound over the other side of the encampment in which more of the huge creatures rested like a scattering of laval domes in the sunshine. One of them, perhaps younger and more curious than its fellows, had its sensory head out from under its shell and high up in the air with its eye-palps extruded wide apart to observe proceedings. ‘Then five nights ago it tried to grind its way into one of our houses.’

  ‘Show me that,’ Anderson said.

  The woman gestured for him to follow her, and led the way into the encampment. Tergal also dismounted, and led his hog by hooking his goad under the edge of its carapace skirt. Anderson stared pointedly at Bonehead until, with a long sigh, it heaved up onto its crawler limbs and followed as well. Glancing about as he walked in, he saw that this encampment must have been here –or was intended to be here –for some time, for the spill-channel issued from a standing hand pump. Therefore the mineralliers had drilled a borehole, and that was not something done for a short-term operation. Soon other workers were coming over to see what was going on. The monkey-like man walked beside Tergal, talking animatedly to him, but Anderson could not hear what their conversation concerned. By the time he reached the sandstone house, quite a crowd had gathered. He inspected the gouges in the soft stone, confirming what he had already guessed. Smiling, he glanced at Tergal before turning to the woman.

  ‘Do you know what did this?’ he asked.

  ‘We’d earlier hoped it was a second-stager, but what with the attack on a sand hog and now this . . .’ She shrugged.

  ‘Third,’ he said, and gestured to the deep puncture holes in the bonded sand. ‘That’s where it held on with its pincers while it worked on the wall with its carapace saws. Something must have distracted it, else it would have gone right through.’

  ‘Third!’ someone snorted. ‘He’s trying to bump the price up, Chandle.’

  Anderson turned away and began to walk back to Bonehead.

  ‘Wait!’ the woman Chandle shouted. ‘And you, Dornick, shut your mouth.’

  Anderson turned. ‘Thirty phocells –they’ll be useful for trade as I’m heading up onto the Plains.’

  ‘Bloody extortion!’

  Anderson rounded on the man Dornick: a squat, bearded individual with cropped mouth tendrils and the underhand thumb-spurs that inevitably led his type into some technical trade. ‘Would you prefer to hunt it yourself?’

  ‘At that price –probably.’

  ‘Dornick,’ Chandle warned.

  ‘That’s days of work, that is. Days and days.’

  Anderson noted that Chandle, though giving a warning, seemed disinclined to interfere and was waiting for his reply. He noted that some of these people carried metallier weapons, and perhaps that was making them overconfident. Really, he didn’t need this as, though he might manage to trade off a few phocells to nomads on the Plains, he had no real need for them. And as for money –he had accumulated plenty of that. But a sense of duty asserted itself. He glanced at the little girl standing beside Chandle. A third-stager would take only seconds to mince her into easily ingestible portions.

  ‘Days, you say.’ He turned and walked back to the wall of the house. ‘Dornick, I see you have a measuring wire on your belt. May I borrow it?’ Anderson held out his hand.

  The man looked rebellious but, after a warning glare from Chandle, handed over the wire
. Anderson unspooled it above his head, measuring the height of the damage to the wall.

  ‘There was no reason here for the creature to climb, so I would bet it chewed on this dwelling while keeping its forelimbs on the ground. So, when you find marks like this, there’s an easy calculation to apply.’ He wound the wire back into its spool. ‘The body length of a third-stager is nominally two and a half times the height of its mouthparts from the ground. These marks are over two metres high.’ Anderson observed how some faces had taken on a sickly hue. Dornick was mouthing the figures. ‘Five metres,’ Anderson told the man. ‘A third-stager of that length weighs five times a big man. And, incidentally, can run twice as fast.’

  ‘So you say,’ muttered Dornick.

  Anderson handed back his wire. ‘I’ll bring you the body, and if it is less than five metres long I’ll waive my fee.’

  ‘You have a deal, Rondure Knight,’ said Chandle, stepping forward before Dornick could say any more.

  The ECS doctors had erected a chainglass partition to prevent any air-transmission of infection, and it was an infection possible for even Fethan, with his flash-frozen bio-gridded brain and body of plastic and metal, to contract. Not that there had been any sign of the dying remains of the Jain mycelium –inside the outlinker –spreading through the air, but no one was taking any chances.

  ‘The girl will be next?’ he asked, scratching at his ginger beard.

  The surgeon master, Gorlen, gave him a funny look. Fethan had noted that same look from many of those members of the hospital arm of ECS. It encompassed their amazement at finding a cyborg such as himself still existing –for those of his kind who had survived the process had long since transferred themselves to more durable Golem bodies –and their overpowering urge to take him apart to see how he ticked.

  ‘The girl is already undergoing surgery,’ Gorlen replied. ‘One of the nodes was pressing against her heart and there was a chance of arrest.’