Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  –retroact ends –

  The Jain-tech worm had taken several microseconds to subvert the telefactors and track back to the exterior input centre. Jerusalem took a considerably shorter time to recognize that this tardiness was not some subterfuge to put a victim off guard but because, without a guiding intelligence, the attack was slower. This fact, and because Jerusalem did not want certain conclusions further delayed, had for the present saved the lives of the scientists still working inside Exterior Input. Had the worm been as fast as Jerusalem knew was possible with Jain tech, the AI would have had to fusion-incinerate that particular area of itself, rather than take the time to eject the centre. Now the sealed chamber, like a section of a great iron nautilus, tumbled away trailing severed optics and ducts, while Jerusalem watched it through many eyes –some of them the sights of missile launchers, lasers and particle beam projectors.

  In fact, the worm’s promulgation through the tele-factor systems had not been so much an attack as a tentative probe –for attack would presuppose a guiding intelligence. The technology was searching for new directions in which to grow, rather like a creeping vine. Jerusalem toyed with this comparison, considering how Jain tech, like a fig vine, could strangle its host. But, no, it was more of a plague technology. The AI then amused itself by making statistical comparisons between the extrapolated spread of Jain tech on Earth and other historical plagues on the same planet. Should this particular Pandora affliction get out of control, the one most closely resembling it might be the flu epidemic that World War I soldiers brought back with them from the trenches. Then, again, that comparison was not so close either. Piqued, Jerusalem instead turned the bulk of its attention inward.

  The bridge pod of the Occam Razor was still rendering up reams of information, but there were subtle differences between the Jain tech there and that seeded on the asteroid. Still working by analogy, Jerusalem felt these were the differences between wild and cultivated plants (the latter representing the tech in the bridge pod). Or perhaps wild and trained animals? Certainly, the tech in the pod had appeared more purposeful in its growth, guided first by Skellor and then by the Aphran entity. It was purposeful under Aphran’s control still, though very slow now at the low temperature Jerusalem held it.

  But, analogies aside, all the information was there, and this recent ejection of Exterior Input had delayed Asselis Mika –and those the AI had deliberately assembled around her –from reaching certain conclusions. Jerusalem allowed itself a silicon sigh and, despite being aware that impatience was one step towards singularity, which would be both nirvana and death to it, wished that the humans, haimans and lesser AIs would just get a move on and work it all out.

  The force-field wall behind her now, Arden pulled a melon-shaped object out of her backpack and depressed a control on the end of it before tossing it on the ground. Stretching out spines with a wrinkled material connecting them, the object spread, pulled the material taut, and began to bulge upward into a dome. The spine ends then stabbed down into the earth or sought out rock crevices. Within a minute the ground tent Dragon had created for her was secure. The thing was always warm to the touch, and inside it was white and like a reptile’s gullet. It was a living thing and she remembered how, when first receiving it, she had taken a long time to pluck up the courage to sleep inside it, fearing it might one day decide she would provide more nutrients than the ground into which it rooted.

  Sitting down before the tent, Arden took out some other scaly packages. One was a flask that provided hot coffee and, so long as she kept it topped up with water, it would continue providing for a number of days. Once the coffee started to taste a little rank, it was time to drop the flask down the nearest hole for one of Dragon’s pseudopods to retrieve. A second package’s only function was to keep fresh the sandwiches she had made earlier, though the bread and the fillings had been provided by other draconic biomachines.

  She ate her ham sandwiches and drank hot coffee while the sun grew bloated and orange on the horizon. Then, deciding the light was just about right, she took out her holocap, turned it on, and listened to the whine as its small u-charger topped up its lithium batteries. Eventually the ready light came on, and she pulled out the device’s monocle and tossed it away from her. The little glassy object began to spin and make a whining sound as it rose ten metres into the air. Arden folded up a miniscreen from the main device and, using a small pointer detached from the side of it, began scrolling down her alphabetically arranged menu. Shortly, she came to ‘sleer 1–5 transform’ and selected it. Below the spinning monocle, like something invisible being pumped full of dye, a first-stage sleer appeared, then began to grow. Observing this, Arden again contemplated building in something that showed the creature shedding its carapace or encysting, and each subsequent growth spurt, but the holocap’s memory space was beginning to get a little crowded.

  The ten-legged sleer expanded and transformed to its second stage: the body segment behind its head rode up and melded into its head, with the legs attached to it turning into carapace saws; compound eyes simultaneously sprouted above its mouth; and a vicious ovipositor extruded from the creature’s back end. It continued to grow, its legs getting longer, raising it higher off the ground, and its carapace darkening. Transforming to the third stage, it took its new forelegs off the ground, and they too rode up beside the nightmare head, shedding complex toes and turning into pincers. Now it was left with only six feet on the ground, and it was also becoming more angular, and darker, like something fashioned of wrought iron. By the fourth stage it had become a black, hard-shelled monster. Watching this turn into the fifth stage, Arden opined to herself that now, walking on two legs, it was like the worst of all monsters.

  Then she cancelled the image and called up one she had recently captured of the droon. And as night descended, she continued spending happy hours watching such nightmares dance around her campsite.

  At sunset, Anderson began to get anxious. They had not seen any of the signs of the roadhouse Laforge had described to them, and had not yet reached the end of the vegetative area. And because of this he knew that night-time activity would be frenetic, and that he and Tergal would not be getting much sleep. Also, the speed at which everything was growing meant that by morning the trail left by that brass man would be erased, and probably he would be much further ahead of them anyway, for Anderson did not reckon he stopped to rest during the hours of darkness.

  ‘Best we set ourselves a camp for the night,’ he finally conceded.

  Tergal looked about dubiously, but it would be dark in less than an hour and there was no guarantee they would find anywhere better within that time.

  Quickly they dismounted, trampled down an area of vegetation, and set up their camp. After eating biscuits and preserved sand oysters, they took turns on watch, though neither of them got much sleep, such was the lethal activity all around them.

  At midnight, with Ogygian sliding above them like an indifferent steel angel, a quake loosened one of the electric fence’s posts, and a second-stager managed to knock it over. Anderson abruptly discovered how effective was his metallier carbine. It juddered in his hand, flash-blinding him in the night, the whole clip from it cutting the sleer in half from mouth to tail. It had not been his intention to fire on automatic, but in the frantic scramble there had been no time to check.

  ‘I think it’s dead,’ said Tergal.

  Anderson stood blinking after-images from his eyes, his weapon empty. As his vision finally cleared, he saw that Tergal held his automatic pointing straight at his, Anderson’s, face. There was a certain inevitability about this, since Anderson could not be forever on his guard. After a significant pause, Tergal lowered the weapon and holstered it, then went to heave the sleer off the fence and set the post back up. Something significant had changed, and now there was trust between them. Nevertheless, both he and Tergal were tired and miserable come dawn, and set out in desultory silence.

  For most of the morning Anderson did not d
etect the brass man’s trail, and felt sure that in this tangle of canyons it was permanently lost. This sank him into a blacker mood. Then, with a smacking sound, Bonehead abruptly extruded its feeding head and began emitting a low grunting. A wild sand hog, smaller even than Tergal’s mount, was now setting up the same racket as Bonehead, and leapt high into the air, then fled ahead of them with something white clutched underneath it. Neither Anderson nor Tergal tried to divert their mounts from investigating the rest of the white remains.

  ‘Kilnsman Gyrol, that Golgoth policeman, said something about strange creatures out this way,’ said the knight.

  The young sand hog had snatched the two-legged breeder segments, which were easily torn away from the rest of this albino sleer with its sapphire eyes, now pinned to the ground with one of its own torn-off pincers.

  ‘Our brass friend did this?’ suggested Tergal.

  As their two mounts eased out their combined sensory and feeding heads to feast on this carrion, Anderson replied, ‘Certainly looks that way. Just as it would seem he is also heading for the Plains. So there’s no need for me to find his trail –I’m sure we’ll meet again.’

  And, as if this statement suddenly cleared a black cloud, he looked up and saw one of the signs Laforge had mentioned, carved into the face of the nearest butte.

  He pointed to it. ‘Anyway, no hurry now, and we do need to rest after last night.’

  Tergal glanced up, puzzled for a moment, then grinning.

  Following the directions given by each of the signs, the two travellers eventually came upon a concrete road running between the buttes, then the metallier village called Grit with its station and roadhouse. Against a sandstone cliff face, globular houses were raised up on frameworks above hog corrals, warehouses and enclosures for domesticated rock lice. Here there were cars like they had earlier seen in the city, but not so many, perhaps because the concrete road ended within sight of this place. Soon they had left Stone and Bonehead in a corral, munching on nicely stinking carrion, and were walking through a market towards the roadhouse’s access stair.

  ‘Busy place.’ Tergal was eyeing a stall displaying sand oysters, dried gulper meat, sulerbane pods and trays of writhing cliff eels.

  Pointing to the far end of the road, where men were shovelling sand and cement into the rumbling drums of mixers, Anderson explained, ‘For the road crews,’ then gestured to treaded vehicles like the one owned by the mineralliers they had encountered, ‘and the mineralliers. Lot of useful ores to be found in the area, I hear.’

  After dumping their gear in rooms paid for with some of Anderson’s newly acquired phocells, they wandered out to a busy bar and cafeteria, which opened on one side onto a balcony overlooking the village.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Anderson, spotting Unger Salbec enjoying a meal inside. He quickly backed out of the room. ‘This could get complicated.’

  ‘Tell the local kilnsmen,’ advised Tergal belligerently, then suddenly looked confused.

  ‘I’ll be going back to my room now,’ said Anderson, amused. How righteous the boy was becoming, after having promised never to thieve again. But he did not know the full story, and Anderson had always valued prudence.

  The re-entry pod was soon glowing red-hot, as it arced into atmosphere at twenty thousand kilometres per hour. Slowed to its terminal velocity by increasing air density, it punched through cloud cover, leaving a vapour trail scar, and used up all its small supply of hydrogen fuel in one decelerating burn. Then it blew its back hatch, releasing a monomer drogue to slow its descent further. Fifty kilometres above the ground the outer shell separated and spun away, taking the drogue with it, whereupon the telefactor it had contained descended on AG.

  Planing on the gravity field, it fled across sandy flatlands. This barren landscape soon became broken up like a diseased skin, by gulches, arroyos and canyons in ever-greater complexity, until soon there were more of these than there was of the plain itself, and the tele-factor was flying over a landscape clustered with sandstone buttes. Directed by its controlling intelligence, the machine finally descended into a long canyon to hover over a long straight scar in the ground. Its dishes whirling and other sensors extruded and functioning at one hundred per cent, it followed the course of this track to where it ended just before heaped sandstone rubble. Nothing else was visible to any of those sensors, in any spectrum, until the machine was nearly upon the pile of stone. Then, all at once, the maggot-shaped survey ship, the Vulture, suddenly became visible. The telefactor halted, backed up and, observing the ship fade seemingly out of existence at the chameleonware field’s interface, it advanced again.

  The airlock was no problem for the little machine, as Jack had amply provided it with just about every safe-breaking tool known to man –and some unknown. With the outer door now open, it entered the lock and began drilling through the inner door. Soon it had extracted a ten-centimetre circle of sandwiched hull-composite, insulation and ceramal. Discarding this, it then extruded a sensor through the hole and into the ship, scanning its interior. A minute later, it rose back out of the lock, then out of the canyon, and at maximum speed hurtled back towards the plain.

  The space around the planet was scattered with such vast numbers of U-space transceivers and detection devices that one had even been picked up by the Jack Ketch’s collision detector, and destroyed by autolaser as the ship surfaced from underspace. So Jack knew any attempt at concealment would be wasted, and immediately went into close orbit of the inhabited planet. Within minutes, he spotted the signs of a crash-landing, and now, after sending a telefactor to check, knew that Skellor was not aboard the Vulture, or anywhere in its vicinity. Nor could any link be made with the little ship’s AI, so it was probably dead.

  Had Skellor been aboard, Jack’s subsequent actions would have diverged only a little, in that he would not have waited for the telefactor to get safely out of the way. The AI even considered delaying until Cormac was out of cold sleep, but calculated that the agent’s orders would not conflict. The Vulture, though damaged, still offered someone of Skellor’s capabilities a possible escape route: its own AI was not present; and there were the products of dangerous Jain technology aboard. End of discussion.

  An imploder missile was out of the question: such weapons were only suitable to use against objects in vacuum, where there was no material medium to carry the resultant shockwave further. Even the smallest such missile available in the Jack Ketch’s arsenal could level a square kilometre, cause massive ground-winds, kill thousands of the humans scattered throughout the surrounding area, and probably even flip over that platform city nearby. No, not good: Earth Central would not be pleased at such a disregard for human life, even if the humans concerned were not members of the Polity. Searching through his weapons carousels, Jack selected precisely what was required and, as Cormac and his fellow humans blearily recovered from thaw-up, spat from one of his nacelles a small black missile carrying a slow-burn CTD warhead, which would provide a controlled reaction hotter than the surface of a sun.

  Standing on the remaining rickety section of amanis bonded-fibre scaffold, Chandle peered into and through the butte. They had mined out every last scrap of the blue sand, which was rarer than the white, and now the butte was sliced clean through, the many tonnes of sandstone above the slice supported by amanis poles and trusses. In her parents’ time, mining like this had always been the most efficient way, but now, with the quakes, it was becoming increasingly risky. Not for the first time she decided she must find some other method –or some other profession.

  The blue sand itself they loaded into the coke trailer, with a tarpaulin pulled over it –having earlier stacked the coke in one of the now cold kilns, though Chandle did not hold out much hope that it would still be here should they ever return to this spot. The finished phocells went in boxes on the flatbed trailer. In all it had been a tiring few months, and the increased sleer activity and vegetative growth in the canyons provided a welcome excuse to finish for most of them, t
hough of course Dornik was already muttering about some workers’ percentages being too high. Chandle, after her creepy encounter only a few days before, was glad to get away –she wanted to be where there were always lots of people around her, and to get back to practical concerns. Ghosts wandering among the Sand Towers were not much to her liking.

  ‘Shall I do it now?’ asked Dornik.

  Chandle nodded, and watched him duck inside the mine workings to set fire to the encampment rubbish they had jammed in there. As the pile began to smoke, then the constant breeze dragged the flames horizontally through the exposed workings, he and Chandle scrambled down the scaffolding and rejoined the rest of the mineralliers on the ground. Together, they all heaved on the scaffold until it crashed over on its side, then they quickly dragged it clear of the butte, and stood back to watch the conflagration. For safety’s sake, mineralliers had always collapsed their used mine workings because the amanis beams would become worm-chewed within a season, leaving them a possible death trap. Though Chandle wondered if there was any need for that now: after the first worms got into the wood, a quake would surely finish the job. With a furnace glow in the slice cut through the butte, eventually something began to crackle, then the top layers of sandstone slammed down to crush the burning wood, effectively snuffing out the fire.

  ‘Get that scaffolding disassembled and loaded,’ Dornik instructed, and soon this was done and they were on their way: the steam-driven cargo carrier chuffing ahead on its caterpillar tracks, towing mobile quarters and the flatbed trailer, then three big old sand hogs following behind, hauling three more trailers.

  ‘Be nice to get to Grit before full dark.’ Chandle peered up at the open sky from the passenger seat while Dornik drove the carrier. Briefly she wondered about the straight line of cloud she could see, picked out clearly by the setting sun. But never having seen a vapour trail before, she dismissed it from her thoughts.