Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  In less than a second Skellor regained control of the Vulture’s systems, shut off the side thrusters, and turned on the extinguishers in the back section of the ship. But half the AG was gone and the ship out of control. Making rapid calculations, Skellor input a program to the thrusters. They began firing, seemingly at random, but over long seconds the effects became evident. The ship stopped tumbling, then its corkscrewing course straightened, just in time for it to strike the side of a butte and glance off in an explosion of sand and fire. Directly ahead now there was nothing but a head-on smash into sandstone.

  Twenty degrees to the right lay the only viable option: a canyon about a half-kilometre long. More calculation, thruster fire flipping the Vulture onto its back, secondary explosion of the fusion engine blowing the other half of its chamber. Chopping through the side of a butte, which slowly collapsed behind it, the Vulture entered the canyon upside down. Skellor turned it on thrusters, also using forward thrusters and what grav-planing he could manage, to slow the ship. At the last moment the ship turned. It hit side-on, throwing up a wave of dust and sand, churning up a trail a quarter of a kilometre long. Travelling at two hundred kilometres an hour, it hammered bottom first into the buttes at the end of the canyon, but rather than be buried in an avalanche of sandstone, remained where it was as the entire butte collapsed away from the ship like a felled tree.

  The airlock opened onto the acrid taste of salty dust and Skellor climbed out to stand on the side of the Vulture. He looked about, then spat ash onto the hot metal he stood upon. Behind him, Crane hauled himself out and awaited instruction. The dust and the heat generated by the impact drew attention from all around. Nearby, the two-metre-long second-stage sleer had seen it all, and registered only prey. Skellor did not see the beast. Concentrating on his virtual vision of the tight-beamed lines of communication to and from Dragon’s location, he saw them all winking out like searchlights struck by enemy fire. From those transmitters built inside himself he attempted to open a line of communication between himself and the alien entity. It was immediately blocked.

  ‘So, you don’t want to talk to me,’ murmured Skellor, walking down the curve of the hull and dropping the last few metres to the ground. He turned to watch Crane follow him, and thought to himself that such words might be bravado. He was now down on a primitive planet with his ship wrecked, while the one he had come to see was unprepared to communicate. And he had just learned he had been carrying a spy with him all the time. It seemed optimistic to hope that Vulture had not managed to get information out to the Polity and its watchdog, ECS. So now, rather than go Dragon hunting, Skellor realized he must make repairs and give himself the option of escape. He looked Crane up and down.

  ‘I think I will have to send an envoy, though diplomacy is not exactly your forte.’

  As Mr Crane brushed dust from his coat, Skellor observed the few rips there repairing themselves. Now, while the Golem straightened his hat, Skellor remembered, from recordings found on the Occam Razor, how Dragon had named Jain technology the enemy and, upon learning of its presence aboard that ship, had been eager to depart.

  ‘Perhaps Dragon won’t perceive you as so much of a threat as myself, if you are only a machine.’ He stepped forwards and reached out to press his hand against Crane’s chest. Crane did nothing more than blink his black eyes, then tilt his head to look down at the hand. Skellor connected to the mycelium he had installed inside the Golem, and began to look very closely at what it had wrought underneath that brass skin. Certainly, some sections of this mycelium were inaccessible to Skellor, just as they had been in the Separatist woman, Aphran, on the Occam Razor. Also, it had made unexpected changes inside the Golem that had vastly improved the efficiency of his workings. But the mycelium was inferior –a simple analogue of what lived in Skellor, what he was, in fact –and was as vulnerable to him as a spider web is to flame. Skellor encompassed all its transformations and made provision for them in the nanocite counteragent he had created, like a mirror image, the moment he resurrected Mr Crane. And the palm of his hand grew warm as that agent entered the brass killing-machine.

  Skellor stepped back and watched on many levels. The mycelium inside Crane began dissolving at the point of contact, and that dissolution spread. Microscopic and macroscopic fibres withered. Memory-storage nodes no larger than a grain of salt collapsed to dust. Independent nanomachines designed and created by the mycelium for specific purposes, the nanocites were hunted and brought down like wildebeest by a pack of hyenas. Then, when nothing but the hyenas remained, they too began to disintegrate. And Skellor’s vision then became only external. If he had expected any dramatic reaction from the obdurate Golem, he was disappointed. Crane stood there as unchanged as a prehistoric monument –until he raised his head. For a moment, Skellor thought he read petulance in that metal face, but surely that was unlikely.

  ‘Dragon,’ Skellor said, ‘no doubt you’ll decode this from the fragmented mind of this Golem. I have not come to attack you, but to learn from you. When you are ready, please open a link with me and I will communicate only verbally. I have much to gain from you, and you have much to gain from me.’

  Skellor turned, sending the signal through the primitive control module Arian Pelter had used to get Crane on his way. The second-stage sleer, sneaking up through the dust cloud, he had detected some time earlier, and as a footnote to the message he instructed Crane to ‘Deal with that.’

  Out of settling dust, the sleer came scuttling and sliding, its mouth cutlery rubbing together with a sound like an automatic hacksaw, with jets of lubricating fluid spraying from glands positioned beside its mouth. Skellor observed the creature analytically, then moved aside. Crane stepped forward and brought his boot down. Hard. The sleer, its head crushed to pulp, rattled its legs against the ground and expired with a sound like an unknotted balloon.

  ‘Interesting place,’ said Skellor, turning back to the Vulture.

  Without looking round, Crane moved off.

  11

  The Quiet War: This is often how the AI takeover is described, and even using ‘war’ seems overly dramatic. It was more a slow usurpation of human political and military power, while humans were busy using that power against each other. It wasn’t even very stealthy. Analogies have been drawn with someone moving a gun out of the reach of a lunatic while that person is ranting and bellowing at someone else. And so it was. AIs, long used in the many corporate, national and religious conflicts, took over all communication networks and the computer control of weapons systems. Most importantly, they already controlled the enclosed human environments scattered throughout the solar system. Also establishing themselves as corporate entities, they soon accrued vast wealth with which to employ human mercenary armies. National leaders in the solar system, ordering this launch or that attack, found their orders either just did not arrive, or caused nil response. Those same people, ordering the destruction of the AIs, found themselves weaponless, in environments utterly out of their control, and up against superior forces and, on the whole, public opinion. It had not taken the general population, for whom it was a long-established tradition to look upon their human leaders with contempt, very long to realize that the AIs were better at running everything. And it is very difficult to motivate people to revolution when they are extremely comfortable and well off.

  –From Quince Guide compiled by humans

  The asteroid, with the bridge pod now separate, Jerusalem scoured down to the molecular level. Keeping it in quarantine had become a pointless exercise, and the object only a hindrance until now. The Jerusalem surfaced from U-space like an iron moon coming out of shadow, blood red in the light of the dwarf star. This little-acknowledged system was busy now, and all around ships were appearing with similar alacrity to the Jerusalem, but they were closing in on the research station, Ruby Eye, while the big research vessel itself fell into orbit around the red dwarf. Here, the doors to one of its massive holds opened and the great ship decelerated. Free from restrai
nt now, the asteroid from the belt proximate to Elysium slid smoothly out into space. The Jerusalem then turned, leaving the great rock hovering in black silhouette over the sun, revolving gently as it took the course of its slow orbit.

  Something then spat from the Jerusalem: a chainglass sphere two metres in diameter, coin-shaped debonders attached to its poles. It headed straight towards the asteroid and then, ten metres from impact, the de-bonders found the ends of the long silicate molecules making up the glass, and set them unravelling. The sphere became opaque, fuzzy, and when it hit the rocky surface, it disappeared in a cloud of white dust. What it contained, looking like the dirt-clogged root system of a tree, bounced once, seemed to shift as it came down again, and stuck. As the asteroid turned into the harsh heat and light of the sun, the object on its surface stretched as if waking from a long sleep, and began to grow.

  They halted out of sight of the minerallier encampment and Anderson began to ready his equipment. Watching the knight assembling his lance, Tergal wondered if he himself might have done better to stay behind. He guessed it was all about the level of damage a weapon could inflict. Bullets from Anderson’s fusile might just penetrate hard carapace, but were just as likely to bounce off.

  ‘Not a profession I’d choose,’ said Anderson, gesturing back to the encampment with his thumb.

  ‘Why?’ asked Tergal, eyeing the lance.

  ‘Dangerous job now, what with all the quakes.’

  Tergal choked back his laughter. When he was finally able to speak he asked, ‘Why don’t you use your carbine? On the automatic setting it should do enough damage.’

  ‘But would you bet your life on that?’ Anderson asked. ‘I’ll want to at least bring down a second-stager with it before countenancing something like this.’

  The lance screwed together in four sections, each a metre long. Tergal studied the framework Anderson had erected beside his saddle on Bonehead’s back –the frame’s feet mated into socket plates that had been both glued and riveted into place –and then turned his attention to the final section of lance Anderson picked up.

  ‘Nasty,’ he said.

  ‘Obviously the point is for penetration,’ said the knight, running a sharpening stone along the edges of the ten-centimetre triangular-section point. ‘These blade hooks run in a spiral.’ He now began sharpening the forward and outer edges of the blades spiralling back along the rest of the section from its point. From the rear of each of these axe-head pieces of steel protruded sharp barbs. ‘As it penetrates the lance screws itself into the creature, right down into its rear breeding segment. What finally kills it is when it tries to pull away.’

  ‘The barbs rip out its insides,’ Tergal observed. ‘But surely the point might glance off its armour?’

  ‘Not if you hit it in the mouth,’ Anderson explained.

  He screwed the final section into place and picked up the lance in one hand. ‘Here.’ He held it out to Tergal, who took it in both hands, then upon discovering how light it was, held it in one hand only.

  ‘Plaited fibres from the stalks of amanis plants, bonded in epoxy,’ Anderson explained. ‘Very light, and stronger than any wood. The metalliers manufacture some alloys just as light, but they don’t have the same strength.’

  ‘And if it breaks?’ Tergal asked.

  ‘It broke only once, at one of the screw points, but by then most of it was inside the third-stager I’d impaled. The creature managed to saw off the stub protruding from its mouth as it died. It didn’t attack again –just stood there trying to figure out what was wrong with itself. Sleers are not as bright as sand hogs.’

  Anderson took the lance back and, with it resting across his shoulder, climbed up onto Bonehead’s back. Once seated, he put the lance down with its eyed butt dropping over an iron pin and resting back against a pad in the framework, its weight supported by rests protruding ahead of him. His carbine now rested in a makeshift holster on the opposite side of his saddle from his fusile. While Anderson was doing up his lap straps, Bonehead turned on his crawler limbs to face down the canyon to which Chandle had directed them, then rose up onto his hind limbs.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ said Anderson, as Tergal stepped up onto Stone.

  Plumping himself in his saddle Tergal replied, ‘I know, and don’t think I didn’t consider staying back there, but I’d never forgive myself for not seeing this.’

  Anderson nodded, picked up his goad, and tapped it against the shell extending in front of him. The hog reluctantly folded its sensory head out and up, opened out its eye-palps to observe him for a second, before swivelling them forwards as it set out. Tergal glanced at the obvious trail they were following. Anderson had already told him the third-stager would not be far away, as they did not require wide territories in which to find something to eat. Within an hour, they came upon the remains of one of its meals.

  ‘Sand gulper,’ Tergal observed, as they passed the scattering of carapace. Little enough remained for identification of the creature, though Tergal did recognize the chitinous shovel it used to scoop up the sand it passed through its throat sieves and the big flat forefeet it used for digging. The predator had sawn all the main sections of carapace into pieces no larger than a man’s torso so that it could munch out every soft part with ease. As far as Tergal was concerned, even creatures like this were best avoided, yet what they were going after just ate them up. It occurred to him that his education first as a gully trader’s child and a minerallier, then as a traveller and thief, had been sadly lacking. That had only concerned the dangers he might face travelling between the settled areas in the more heavily populated human areas of Cull. Until now the greatest alien danger had been from what he had known as adult sleers, and he’d thought little of any other creatures his parents had mentioned.

  ‘Ah, this might make things a little more interesting,’ said Anderson abruptly, breaking Tergal’s introspection.

  Cold winds whipped down the canyon, hazing the air with sand. Tergal looked up to their right, where Anderson was pointing. Over the buttes a line of darkness was rising, boiling along its edge.

  ‘Should we turn back?’ Tergal asked. ‘You don’t want to be facing this thing in a downpour.’

  ‘A little late for that.’ The knight now pointed ahead and to their left.

  Tergal felt something tighten in the pit of his stomach. The third-stager was black against a vertical sandstone cliff, swinging its awful head from side to side, its huge pincers gleaming sharp as obsidian, and its jointed carapace saws scrabbling at the stone, sending pieces of it tumbling down the face of the butte. Tergal suddenly realized that his nice new handgun, his crossbow and his punch axe were woefully inadequate should this monster get past the knight. He watched it move along parallel to the ground, its antlers coiling in and out, then abruptly turn and come half falling, half running down the sandstone face. It landed on its belly in a cloud of dust, came up high with its legs at full extension, and curled its tail segments up over its head, its ovipositor drill visibly revolving.

  ‘Ho, Bonehead, let’s take this fucker!’

  Anderson lifted his lance from its rests and its rear peg, and directed it ahead between his sand hog’s raised eye-palps. Bonehead folded out its tail plate as a counterbalance, and broke into a loping run. Tergal did not need to tap his goad behind Stone’s head to make it halt. It had already done so and, making small bubbling sounds, was beginning to back up. In that moment Tergal doubted the sanity of the knight –anyone who looked for this sort of action had to be five legs short of a desert ride. It also occurred to him that anyone thinking of robbing such a man was of questionable sanity too. Just then, something clattered against Stone’s carapace, leaving a chalky smear, then again and again. Hailstones the size of eyeballs were soon rattling and smacking down, bouncing down the faces of the buttes, shattering on exposed rocks. Tergal pulled the chinstrap down from his hat and secured it, took his chitin-armoured gauntlets from his belt and pulled them on. He did not halt St
one as it withdrew its sensory head and continued retreating.

  ‘Ho! Ho!’

  Anderson was bouncing up and down in his saddle as if this might make Bonehead go faster. The old sand hog was kicking up clouds of dust as it accelerated, its feeding head now extruding underneath its sensory head and clunking into place. The monstrous sleer accelerated also, oblivious to the white rain shattering on its own carapace. It made no sound, no hissing challenge; just opened out its pincers wide enough to encompass three men, and levelled its tail.

  ‘Lunatic,’ Tergal whispered. But he saw that, despite any unevenness in the ground or in Bonehead’s gait, the lance remained utterly level and true. Then they struck.

  The lance went perfectly between pincers and saws, the point passed into the creature’s gape without touching the sides, the barb blades smashing one of its mandibles. In it went, and Tergal saw Anderson briefly relax his grip to allow the lance to spin, its butt pushed back against the pad, the spiralling blades screwing it inside the attacking monster. The impact put Bonehead down on his tail-plate and lifted the sleer off the ground, its tail cracking up and down. Coming down, it now whipped its head from side to side, trying to free itself as Anderson re-engaged the eye-butt at the back of his lance.

  Then, through the hailstorm,Tergal heard the knight shouting at Bonehead, and saw the old hog slowly and methodically start backing up, both its own heads now safely stowed. The sleer was fighting to pull away as well, then abruptly something gave. The lance tore out a ragged mess of the creature’s guts and vital organs, and dragged them through the sand. The sleer froze where it was, its pincers opening and closing as yellow ichor dribbled from its mouth. It began quivering, and its head abruptly bowed until its pincers jammed against the ground. Then it became utterly still.