Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  Cormac had never seen such a gathering of forces, though he was aware that it was the kind of thing that occurred when Polity AIs went up against some threat that was just too fast for a human solution. Tuning into the information traffic, he managed to fathom only some of what was being said –the numerous AIs out there communicating too fast for him, even with the assistance of his gridlink. Then the virtual image flickered, and he became aware of his own body, apparently standing in vacuum two kilometres out from the Jack Ketch.

  ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Horace Blegg was standing beside him.

  ‘Make such a dramatic entrance. If you have something to say there are more conventional channels of communication, even for Earth Central’s avatar.’

  ‘You still believe that?’

  ‘What I believe is irrelevant, as you’re never going to tell me.’ Cormac waved a hand towards the latest U-space tug preparing to depart. ‘Will this work?’

  ‘Given time. If Skellor gets away from this volume of space now, then we won’t be able to stop him. In one month, realtime, eighty per cent of the area needed to be covered, will be covered, and if he runs into an area of USER function he’ll be knocked out of underspace and easy prey for the attack ships.’

  ‘Are you forgetting he uses advanced chameleonware?’

  ‘No, located in U-space and knocked out of it, we’ll know where he has come out in realspace, and he won’t be able to get far on fusion drive alone.’

  ‘They still won’t be able to see him.’

  ‘They will after a few teratonne EM emitter bombs have been exploded near his exit point –all his ship systems would be fried.’

  Cormac nodded. ‘So he’ll be in a trap and, presumably, one month from now you’ll begin closing the noose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the Jerusalem is here why?’

  ‘To pick up whatever pieces are left and put them safely away.’

  They were both silent for a while as they observed the hive of activity. Scanning the AI babble, Cormac realized that what he was seeing here was not the whole of it: other ships were heading into the area from other locations, and there was also a runcible traffic of troops: human, Golem, the new war drones he had first seen on Masada, and something unexpected. Linking through to Ruby Eye, then subverting the link so it dropped to the attention of one of that AI’s subminds, then overloading that mind with some of the traffic he had been attempting to fathom, he managed to take control of a camera system inside the station itself. There he observed heavily armed and armoured troops stepping through the Skaidon warp: reptilian troops with a reverse-kneed gait, toadish faces and sharp white teeth.

  ‘Why dracomen?’ he asked.

  ‘A trial –they will make formidable allies,’ Blegg replied –just as the submind realized what was going on, and ejected Cormac from the camera system.

  Cormac turned to the man. ‘You seem to have everything in hand. Perhaps there is no need for me to go on looking for Skellor?’

  ‘There is,’ Blegg replied. ‘You are most able for this task, Ian Cormac.’

  ‘Don’t you have ships to spare for that?’

  The view suddenly changed, coming close up on the Grim Reaper, the King of Hearts and Excalibur. ‘These will cover a sector each, and should they find evidence of Skellor’s presence, you will be immediately summoned to deal with him. In the Jack Ketch you will search that sector calculated his most likely destination.’

  ECS had covered all bets, it seemed. Eventually, Cormac asked, ‘How is it I can now gridlink, even though my link is not on?’

  ‘The brain is a wonderful thing. In the days when people suffered strokes, parts of it took over the function of those parts destroyed, so that a human unable to speak could speak again.’

  ‘Yeah, but my gridlink was never an organic part of my mind.’

  ‘Which is why you are so unusual. Be aware, Ian Cormac, that your mind will soon discover other parts that were never of itself.’

  Cormac snorted, trying to think of a suitably sneering reply –but Blegg was already gone. Later, when the Jack Ketch dropped into underspace, it was for Cormac like stepping from a bellowing crowd into cloistered silence and a refuge from chaos.

  In a virtual space, a somewhere that was nowhere, three figures materialized. One of these was a smooth metallic head, eyeless and huge relative to the other two. Another was a mermaid served on a platter, smoking a cigar. And Horace Blegg.

  ‘It all seems excessively elaborate,’ said Ruby Eye.

  ‘How so?’ asked Blegg.

  ‘Why send anything in before we’ve closed it all off, and when we have done so, why not just send in kill ships? Skellor might have survived the Elysium mirrors, but he would not survive a planetary imploder.’

  Blegg turned to Jerusalem and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘The question,’ said the AI, ‘is do we maintain our partnership with the human race, and allow it time to gain parity?’

  ‘You’ve lost me there,’ said Ruby Eye.

  Blegg explained: ‘At present Cormac is the hunting dog that we hunters send in after the bear. He may flush it out. It may chase out after him. Or it may come out with him hanging bloody in its jaws. But it will come out.’

  ‘Zoom!’ said Ruby Eye, passing a hand over the top of her head.

  Jerusalem said, ‘Our friend here has failed to add that we know the exact location of the bear, and haven’t told Cormac.’

  ‘You’ve got precise coordinates?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Then why . . .? Oh.’

  ‘You catch on quick,’ said Blegg. ‘During this hunt Cormac may learn not to be the dog any more, and we may thus learn something about our fellow hunters.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ruby Eye, ‘the cracks are showing already.’

  Jerusalem replied, ‘The cracks have always been there, but without sufficient stress to extend them. For us AIs, what appears to be our philanthropy is merely noblesse oblige.’

  Trying as hard as he could to stretch his measuring wire, Dornik had been unable to make the sleer measure under five metres, so had grumped his way back to the sand-face to yell at the diggers. The creature was in fact over five metres long without its head, and Chandle herself thought it a kill well worth the thirty phocells the knight collected before going on his way. But most of Dornik’s annoyance really stemmed from the advent of the earlier storm, for they all knew that the burgeoning growth would soon cause things to become quite hectic in the canyons, and that their stay here was now limited anyway.

  Pacing around the dead monster, Chandle studied it closely, occasionally prodding at it with a poker she had brought over from the kilns. Seeing a third-stager this close was a sobering reminder. The last one she had seen had been a year ago, and then only in the distance through the screen of the cargo carrier. A weapons man out of Golgoth had hunted that one down for them, just as similar men dealt with the second-stagers that were the more usual pests. Certainly, the new weapons could kill creatures like this with admirable efficiency, but Chandle wondered just how she would feel about facing one alone in a canyon, with whatever armament.

  Coming to the severed head, she shoved at it with her boot, then jumped back when the big pincers eased open reflexively. Then she looked around to make sure none of the other metalliers had witnessed her sudden fright. Nerves in the creature –and in her. No way was it still alive: it had been gutted and its head torn off. Turning away from the beast, she suddenly saw a figure standing next to her, as if he had just appeared out of thin air, and with her skin still creeping she yelped and raised the poker. But it was only a man.

  ‘Where the hell did you come from?’ she snarled.

  He just stood there staring, and now she saw he was quite strange. On first inspection he appeared to be a metallier –without the lip tendrils or the beige skin of the bulk of Cull’s population, and also without wrist spurs or secondary thumbs. Bu
t on closer inspection she saw that his eyes held a metallic hue, and his skin displayed a mottling as of things moving underneath it. Suddenly she wondered if she might be safer with a live sleer squatting beside her.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  Still he did not reply, nor do anything more than just stare at her.

  ‘Look, I haven’t got all day to stand here chatting.’ Chandle backed away and glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone else had noticed this new arrival.

  Abruptly the man stepped forwards, stooping to take hold of one of the sleer’s pincers, and picked up the head as if it weighed absolutely nothing. With his other hand he probed into its neck region, pulled out a piece of translucent flesh, then dropped the head.

  ‘The city,’ he said, pointing in the general direction of Golgoth. ‘I saw it on my way in. What level of technology there?’ Now he popped the flesh into his mouth, as if sampling a new delicacy. He tilted his head, his jaw moving as he savoured it.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  He glanced over at the transporter, surveyed the minerallier encampment, his gaze resting on the kilns before swinging back down to the handgun at Chandle’s hip –a weapon she had forgotten about until that moment.

  ‘I see . . . Primitive but usable. You can obtain high furnace temperatures, and manufacture steel.’

  Chandle reached down and drew her gun.

  ‘And bullets,’ she warned.

  He made a snorting sound, something like laughter, but it soon turned into a hacking. He lifted his hand to his mouth and coughed something up. Chandle stared with horror at the miniature sleer wriggling in slime on his palm.

  ‘Interesting.’

  Chandle pulled the trigger, but no shot issued from the barrel, and the weird man just disappeared. That was the thing with metallier weapons: they could kill, but when it came to doing so the one holding the weapon needed to remember about things like safety catches.

  ‘Lucky,’ a voice hissed in her ear. ‘Had you shot me, I would have made you eat that little toy of yours.’

  And something cold moved away.

  13

  There was a time when the death penalty for murder was considered barbarous. It was argued that it was not a deterrent, but judicial murder, that made those who sanctioned it as bad as, if not worse than, those they passed sentence upon. And what if you got it wrong, executed the wrong person? Views like this had been espoused by gutless governments frightened of responsibility, or by people unable to face up to hard facts. A hanged murderer will never kill again. The death penalty is a response to a crime, not a crime in itself. Yes, you may in error put innocents to death. However, their number would not be a fraction of one per cent of those innocents killed by murderers allowed back into society by softer regimes. It is all rather simple really, and the urge to understand and rehabilitate such criminals is merely the product of cowardice. Now, of course, it’s even simpler: you commit murder and you are mind-wiped; you commit other crimes repeatedly and you are adjusted, re-educated; and if that doesn’t work, you are then mind-wiped, and someone in storage gets to inhabit your body. Our view now has a more evolutionary aspect: these are the laws; if you break them, these are the penalties. No excuses. We will be tough on the causes of crime: criminals.

  –Excerpt from a speech by Jobsworth

  They led him out of darkness, but it was no transition. Arian Pelter could look through his eyes, control his movements directly, or indirectly by programs instantly fashioned in the man’s military aug. But the cycle of travelling from place to place, slaughter to slaughter, would have been banal if it were not so horrific. In fractured memory, Crane remembered men in uniform dying, men rendered limb from limb, and one surviving just because he possessed a pair of antique binoculars. Later, another survived because he possessed a beautiful Tenkian blade. There was a rainy place, and a Golem he had fought and destroyed there. Another place, a battle, and two Golem tougher even than he, ripping him to pieces, and sending him where nothing hurt any more. And back, and again . . . and one of those Golem again, traded for a piece of crystal. And on still, but with shape-forming, ill-understood possibilities, if only he could take the time . . .

  On spotting the two creatures waiting in the canyon, Mr Crane halted and watched. He was not to know how unusual it was to see intact second-stage sleers together, only the trysts of their mating segments, for such animals were usually savagely territorial. Nor did he know that the albino form was rarer than his own tears, and ones with sapphire compound eyes rarer still. All he did know was that he had been ordered to a particular location, and that while under orders he could not stop to place in sequence –and resequence –his collection of ersatz deaths.

  He also guessed that these creatures were probably going to attack him whatever he did, and so, without any more ado, Crane once again advanced.

  One of the second-stagers abruptly turned aside, scampered smoothly over the new ground cover, mounted a sandstone boulder, and froze there. The other one, grating its mandibular saws together in a spray of lubricant, came scuttling towards Crane. The Golem recognized it as an only slightly larger version of the one he had stepped on outside Skellor’s ship, so expected no serious problems. As it got closer, he stooped down, and in doing so spotted an intricate fossil right in front of him. As the sleer closed in for attack Crane just shoved his hand under its head and flipped it over on its back –and then he picked up the fossil. The sleer –the independently revolving sections of its body easily getting it to its feet –attacked again. Crane prepared himself to stamp on it, but some other imperative operated. He grabbed it by its carapace saws, and hauled it up squirming in front of him, then, one by one, began to pull off all its legs. Leaving it behind him, still alive, he pocketed the fossil –while the other sleer came down off its rock and quickly and prudently headed away.

  –retroact 12 –

  The Golem Twenty-five possessed no name yet, and though his nascent intelligence was huge and the uploaded information available to him encyclopedic, he just could not make choices. This was annoying. Perhaps it was the perpetual interference of his diagnostic and repair programs, tracking down every fault caused by the EM shock that had felled him; or perhaps it was the perpetual busy handshaking and reformatting of his software. When he groped for consciousness, the wholeness of mind began to degrade. When he opened his eyes his vision doubled, as two temporary subminds separately controlled each of his eyes half a second out of phase. It took the intervention of the submind claiming the territory of his atomic clock to get things in order.

  ‘Stalek, it moved.’

  ‘Of course it moved, vacuum brain. It’s waking up.’

  Briefly, the Golem achieved wholeness through his diagnostic programs, and with great precision viewed his surroundings. He was in a box of a room with bare brick walls, three metres high by seven wide to his left and right, and eight point three metres wide in front and presumably behind. The door directly ahead was close-grained wood –probably from one of the thousands of varieties of oaks prevalent on many worlds (a list scrolled down in what might once have been the Golem’s superego). Trying to stand, the Golem met resistance and, looking down, noted thick ceramal clamps binding his arms and legs to a chair of a similar material. He raised his head and focused his attention on the two men.

  He knew which was which because he had located the source of each voice while his diagnostic and repair programs acted as mediators amid the bickering crowd inside his head. The first to have spoken was an aviapt: an adaptation the Golem understood, from his reference library, to be quite uncommon. The man’s eyes were those of a hawk, his face beaked, and small feathers layered his skin. Adaptation technology not being sufficiently advanced to enable a man to fly in Earthlike gravity, he did not have wings. This bird man was operating a Cleanviro auto-assembler and machiner in an area divided off by benches laden with equipment. From what the Golem could see of the touch console and screen inset in this bathysp
here-like machine, the man was powder-compressing and case-hardening ceramal components.

  Stalek was of a more standard appearance: a melting-pot human with just a hint more of the oriental than was usual. Unlike the bird man, who was clad in a padded shipsuit, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, long coat and fingerless gloves. Only on noting this attire did the Golem think to check the temperature in the room, and found that it would be cold for humans.

  ‘Am restrained,’ the Golem said, then coughed three times and closed its right eye.

  ‘It spoke,’ said the aviapt.

  Stalek looked at the bird man as if studying a particularly fascinating variety of stupidity, then with a puzzled frown turned to the console and screen on the table before him. The small rubber dog attached to the upper edge of the screen seemed the only one in this room who had attention to spare for the Golem. Embarrassed, the bird man focused again on Cleanviro.

  ‘Repeat: why am . . . restrained?’

  After a short delay, Stalek lifted his gloved hands up from the console and gazed across at the Golem. ‘You are restrained, Mr Longshanks, because if unrestrained you would attempt to return to your masters at Cybercorp. And we don’t really want you going back there.’

  The Golem abandoned the conversation to a recalled Turing analogue, its own weird conception of self wandering around in the confusion of its skull.

  ‘I must return. I have my indenture to Cybercorp to work out before I can become a free Golem and choose where to be and what to do.’

  ‘Listen, machine, I’m not going to get into any pointless debate. We are going to make a few alterations to you, then your new owners will come and collect you.’

  ‘I am the property of Cybercorp and will not work for anyone else.’

  Stalek grinned nastily. ‘You will when I’ve finished with you. You will actually commit murder for your new owners.’

  ‘I am incapable of taking human life.’