Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  They were now walking down a shadowy canyon between looming buttes, Gyrol’s men keeping the beams of their torches trained on creatures clinging to the walls. Some of these, Tanaquil noted, were pure sleers –others were different, distorted. He saw one that bore four legs and dragged behind it a long bloated tail; then, stepping rapidly away from them into a darker cave, something that walked upright like a man.

  ‘This is it,’ said Tanaquil, when they finally came to a wall of sandstone into which many metre-wide burrows had been bored. They halted, waited. From within the burrows came a rasping, slithing movement, and deep inside could be seen glints of blue light. Out of the central burrow slowly emerged a pterodactyl head, which reared up above them on a long ribbed neck. Tanaquil caught Gyrol’s arm as he made to draw his handgun.

  ‘Fucking sand dragon,’ said Gyrol, who was shaking.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Tanaquil. ‘But, unlike the ones up on the plain, this one has always helped us.’

  Now, from other burrows, emerged cobra heads, each with a single sapphire eye where the mouth should have been. These too reared high, casting about the area a dim electric-blue light.

  ‘Metallier Tanaquil,’ said the first head.

  ‘Why was I summoned?’ asked Tanaquil.

  ‘Because.’

  Tanaquil had read all his family’s secret transcripts of conversations like this. Always they were oblique, Delphic, and sometimes utterly pointless. He was about to demand that this conversation not be so, when the head continued: ‘There is danger.’

  ‘There’s always danger,’ Tanaquil observed. ‘Does this have something to do with the spacecraft we saw?’

  ‘One has come,’ said the dragon.

  ‘In that ship? Yes, I saw that.’

  ‘You must flee.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You must all abandon your city and flee. He is in the Sand Towers and he will come. Go north, and come to me on the Plains, that way.’

  ‘Oh great!’ interjected Gyrol. ‘Go to the Plains and get fucked over by all the sand dragons there.’

  The head turned towards the policeman. ‘We are all Dragon.’

  Tanaquil could not believe what he was hearing. ‘Abandon all this –when we’re so close?What is this one that we should fear it? We ’ve got weapons up in the Overcity that could turn most of the Sand Towers to dust.’

  Now the cobra heads began withdrawing.

  ‘I have warned you, and I can protect you. Flee or die –your choice.’

  The pterodactyl head began to withdraw too.

  ‘Wait! You’ve got to tell me more!’

  The head paused and fixed Tanaquil with its smaller sapphire eyes.‘He is one man, and he commands a technology that could turn you all into slaves. You cannot fight him, so flee.’

  The head withdrew into sandstone, suddenly gone.

  Only later, as they returned, did Gyrol ask, ‘What did it mean, “We are all Dragon”?’

  Tanaquil had no answer for him.

  Every time the asteroid swung the Jain sample back into the red dwarf’s light, that sample digested more minerals and metals, and it grew. Already it was five metres across and one metre deep into the rock. Encircling it on the surface, and moving back with it using stick-pad feet, three telefactors transmitted data back to the Jerusalem. Through a nanoscope, that one telefactor held poised over the edge of the mycelium, Mika watched. But now, rather than be confined to her work station, she had joined Colver, D’nissan, James and fifty other scientists in one of the Jerusalem’s exterior input centres. Though she was glad of the company and of how they bounced ideas about in such proximity and in such an atmosphere, she was aware that this was just another form of quarantine. And because Exterior Input was isolated from Jerusalem’s full processing power, she could not use VR tools, and sorely missed them too.

  ‘I could direct a telefactor from my own work station,’ she had pointed out.

  ‘As could all the others,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘However, all this spreading of signals could be unhealthy. I will allow information to leave Exterior Input only when it has been checked for viral subversion.’

  ‘Slightly paranoid,’ she suggested. ‘You allow study of the mycelium on the bridge pod to be conducted from separate research cells.’

  ‘The bridge pod is being kept at minus two hundred Celsius, in near absolute vacuum, and its only energy input is from the instruments used to study it. Even then, the mycelium perpetually tries to grow outside the boundaries laid down for it, and to subvert any equipment in close proximity. All samples from it are kept at minus two-twenty for contained study, and if there is any kind of subversion evident from them, they can be ejected from the ship in less than a second.’

  Mika did not ask how much of the surrounding area Jerusalem might eject as well. She was aware of how self-contained was each research cell. Subversion from a Jain sample probably meant the whole cell would end up outside the ship.

  ‘Okay,’ she had replied. Perhaps it would be safer to conduct research outside her own work area. Surely, Jerusalem would not eject the whole exterior input centre? She looked around. No one here wore any kind of augmentation, which showed just how seriously Jerusalem took the possibility of viral or nanomechanical subversion. Jerusalem would not allow human custom or protest to influence it, and here, in this situation, must be prepared to think the unthinkable.

  ‘Wow,’ said Colver from beside her. ‘I’m getting fast outgrowth down fault AFN three four two.’

  ‘That means the mycelium probably now has some kind of radiation detector,’ said D’nissan. The man was in the deep-scanning sphere, its interior adjusted to his environmental requirements, the scanning equipment directly linked into his nervous system.

  ‘Why’s that?’ Colver asked.

  ‘Check your geoscan. Fault three four two is its quickest route to a deposit of pitchblende. It’s going after the uranium and radium.’

  ‘Then it can plan, think by itself –it’s sentient.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said D’nissan. ‘This could be no more than the biologically programmed response of a tree root. Though I’ll allow that there is greater complexity in this mycelium than there is in you, Colver.’

  Colver winked at Mika. ‘He reckons his brain works better than mine because it operates at a lower temperature. I think he resented me asking him to blow on my coffee.’

  ‘I heard that, Colver,’ said D’nissan.

  Mika enjoyed the repartee –it reminded her of many such occasions with Gant and Thorn. Here, though, were the same as people whose motivations she fully understood, because they were her own. Then, observing a structure disassembling a quartz crystal into microscopic flakes and conveying them into the rest of the mycelium, she said, ‘It uses everything.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ said Susan James. ‘There appear to be no waste products. It just incorporates all materials it comes into contact with and continues to grow.’ She took her face out of her viewer and looked around at the rest of them. ‘All it requires is energy and materials, which fact begs certain questions.’

  ‘Those being?’ D’nissan asked her from within his sphere.

  James explained, ‘The total archaeological finds relating to the Jain wouldn’t fill a barrel, yet here is something that has the potential to occupy every environmental niche in the galaxy. Why have we seen so little of it? Why aren’t we overrun –and why haven’t we been overrun for the last five million years, from when the earliest Jain artefacts have been dated?’

  ‘Perhaps the Jain themselves, if they were a distinct race, shut down their own technology, wiped it out, and perhaps now only some bits they missed are just coming to light,’ suggested D’nissan.

  ‘Rogue technology?’ wondered Colver.

  Mika thought it time for an interjection of her own. ‘Perhaps it’s something that goes in cycles, like a plague, or even plants within their season. When conditions are right for it, it grows and spreads until it has use
d up all available resources, then goes dormant again?’

  James disagreed: ‘But, as we can see, everything is a potential resource to it, so it would have to use up everything.’

  Speculatively, D’nissan added, ‘It could have been around for even longer than we thought. Perhaps there never was a distinct space-borne race to attribute it to, and those artefacts we classify as coming from the Jain, the Atheter or the Csorians are all that’s left of the same technology that destroyed their civilizations.’

  Jerusalem then interjected, ‘We have found no older remains of this technology than those we already attribute to the Jain. The most likely explanation is that this is the product of a distinct space-borne race to which we gave that name. Your theories fit but, as James has opined, a reason is needed for the technology being “seasonal” –why it does not just continue growing and spreading while there is still energy left in the suns.’

  ‘Conditions right for it, as Mika said,’ said Colver. They all turned to look at him. He grinned and went on, ‘Meaning us.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s parasitic and, even though it can eat rocks, rocks don’t move. Maybe Mika is right: it goes dormant, but maybe it only does that because it’s killed all the hosts it can use to spread it around. So having wiped out one space-borne civilization it shuts down and waits for the next.’

  None of them had an answer to that. The silence stretched taut until D’nissan announced, ‘It’s just reached the pitchblende.’

  Along with the rest of them, Mika immediately turned her attention to the main screens showing cameras feed from the telefactors, as well as from the many pinhead cameras positioned all over the asteroid and in the surrounding space. It happened in a matter of seconds. The mycelium had just been steadily increasing in size, its growth much like that of a dot of penicillin, then suddenly it extruded a pseudopod which opened out into a star of smaller tentacles, and grabbed a telefactor. Half a second after that, a klaxon began sounding, warning of viral subversion.

  The woman, Arden, walked to the edge of the precipice and reluctantly raised her binoculars. She was always reluctant to use the toys Dragon provided for her. The binoculars were warm, scaly, and sucked against the orbits of her eyes with an eager kiss. She supposed it was foolish not to trust the entity in such small matters, since it had saved her life when the tribe, finally deciding she was too old to keep up, had left her behind under one of the funerary dolmens with a bottle of sleer poison and the intricately fashioned bone inhaler with which to take it. The unibiotic that Dragon gave her had cleared up the infection that had been plaguing her for some years, and soon she was back to her accustomed health.

  A smear of darker colour lay between the Sand Towers because of the storm. Seeds that had lain in the sand for months were instantly germinating. Arden knew that in a short time those canyons receiving the benefit of such moisture would be choked with chaotic plant growth, and crawling with the things coming to feed on it.

  The droon, lured down from the Plains by this expected bounty, had climbed to the top of a sandstone butte to survey its new territory. Squatting like this, with its four legs folded underneath its secondary thorax, its tail coiled around it, and its four manipulators clenched close against its primary thorax as it swung its great ziggurat head slowly from side to side, it seemed contemplative. But she knew it was looking for prey. Something that weighed over four tonnes, and even in this squatting position topped five metres, needed a lot of food. The binoculars came away with a sucking squelch and, without turning, Arden knew that she was not alone.

  ‘Did you tell them?’ she asked.

  ‘I told them,’ Dragon replied.

  ‘And the reaction?’

  ‘As expected.’

  ‘They’ll not abandon their city nor their project, then.’

  Arden turned and gazed up at the pterodactyl head looming over her, then tracked the long ribbed neck that curved down to one of the many burrows riddling the plain. She felt suddenly old, which was unsurprising because she was a damned sight older than even the nomad tribe she had joined twenty years before had ever supposed.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.

  ‘I have warned them. Now I must defend myself. Skellor believes he has come here for information, but Skellor does not know his own purpose.’

  ‘You could tell the Polity he’s here? If what you say about him is true, then they’ll definitely come.’

  ‘A Polity ship could kill two birds with one stone, probably from orbit with a planet-breaker. No, I deal with my own problems.’

  ‘Yet you helped the metalliers build up their technology. You told them where to find the ores they needed, and about the deep layers of coal. You filled in missing knowledge so they could complete their plan to get back in control of Ogygian, and then contact the Polity themselves.’

  ‘I would be gone by then.’

  ‘And, of course, some merit points for helping out this human colony wouldn’t go amiss?’ Arden observed.

  ‘All of me is not well regarded.’

  Arden nodded to herself. ‘Of course, human regard for you would be increased if your regard for humans was more evident.’

  ‘I abandoned the experiment.’

  Arden let it go. Sometimes Dragon was the ultimate sophisticate, sometimes seemingly as naive as a child. Upon arriving here, it had immediately begun recombinant experiments with humans and the local fauna. Had it been trying to create its own particular version of the dracomen? Arden didn’t know. Ostensibly, Dragon had ceased such experimentation at Arden’s request, but she suspected an underlying lack of contrition. Dragon, she guessed, had found another interest, for it was about then that the earthquakes had begun.

  ‘You know my own personal regard for you could be increased substantially,’ she said, playing the same tune she had played for a long time.

  ‘Your ship is five thousand kilometres from here. It would take you many months to reach it.’

  ‘If you let me go.’

  ‘You may go.’

  Arden was stunned. Dragon had instantly known of her arrival on Cull and, by the many methods available to it, had watched her leisurely exploration of the planet over twenty years. Only when, five years ago, the Plains nomads abandoned her to die had Dragon revealed itself. Then, having saved her life, it had not so much forbidden her to leave this plain under which it concealed itself as just made it nigh impossible for her to do so. Now, You may go –just like that. She repeated her thoughts to him.

  ‘And you may stay,’ was all the reply he gave.

  Arden guessed that, with the shit about to hit the fan, Dragon no longer cared about the possibility of her telling the Polity it was located here, though she had promised not to do so. Probably, the outer universe now impinging here, in the form of this Skellor creature, had made Dragon decide it might be time to leave. Confused about her own feelings, she turned back to gaze out across the Sand Towers. Almost without thinking, she unhitched the pack from her back, opened it and took out the one item of Polity technology she had retained all those years.

  The holographic capture device –a squat ten-centimetre-diameter cylinder, with its inset controls –had been old even when she had acquired it, but she preferred it just as in ancient times some people preferred cameras using photo-active plastic films instead of digital imaging. She removed, from one end of the recorder, its monocle, which she pushed into her right eye. Gazing through a fluorescent grid towards the squatting droon and manipulating a cursor control on the holocap, she acquired the creature for recording, then took out the monocle and tossed it into the air, whereupon it sped away on miniature AG to fly a circuit of the droon to record its every sharp edge. Now, beyond that creature, she observed something else flying towards them.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dragon, ‘our friend returns.’

  Soon the flying creature was more clearly visible. It was a bird: a vulture. Coming to circle above them, it slowly descended, then came in to land beside the dragon burrow.
Both Arden and Dragon turned to regard it.

  ‘His ship’s hidden by chameleonware, and now he’s heading on foot towards a minerallier encampment,’ said the bird.

  ‘You’re safe yet,’ Arden observed to Dragon.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vulture, ‘but there is a rather large metal-skin Golem heading this way.’

  ‘It will only come so far as I allow it,’ said Dragon, swinging its head to peer out towards the Sand Towers.

  A U-space tug, shaped like the engine and one carriage of a huge monorail, accelerated away from Ruby Eye, towing on long braided-monofilament cables an object that, though substantially larger, resembled a World War I sea mine, even down to its detonating buttons. When it dropped into underspace, it did so with unusual effect: a hole opening before it and snapping closed behind its spherical cargo, ripples spreading out through space from that point. Then, as the ripples settled, another ship followed . . . then another.

  Cormac realized it would be some hours before they were all gone. There were over five hundred underspace interference emitters, or USERs, being towed into position around an area of space containing six planetary systems and numerous lone stars. The devices, containing artificially generated singularities, were heavy, hence the need for tugs capable of repositioning moons.

  Avoiding the interference patterns the USERS created even in this somnolent state, other ships were ready to depart the space around Ruby Eye by a more roundabout route. Cormac observed three ships similar to the Jack Ketch, but the Grim Reaper, King of Hearts and Excalibur were coloured green, blue and violet respectively. Also present were two sister ships of the Occam Razor –not so fast or deadly as the more modern warships, and no doubt present because their AIs wanted to be in at the kill; swarms of smaller attack ships; three eta-class research vessels to act as bases; and the formidable Jerusalem, now in orbit around the red dwarf –apparently just diverted from its journey to Masada where, until recent events, it was supposed to have remained for some time.