Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  ‘It has, in the last ten minutes, reduced in diameter by two per cent,’ Jerusalem told them, ‘and its internal structure is changing.’

  D’nissan turned to Mika. ‘Did we do the right thing to let this off the leash?’

  ‘Come on,’ Colver interrupted. ‘It wasn’t ever on a leash to begin with.’

  ‘Oh, I think it was.’ D’nissan turned back to the screens. ‘Skellor controlled it initially with his crystal matrix AI, and the recorded personality Aphran controlled what remained in the bridge pod after he departed, else it would have spread like this. Now it is acting as is its nature to act.’

  Still watching, Mika saw that the planetoid was indeed slowly collapsing. ‘These structural changes . . .’ she said.

  Jerusalem informed her, ‘Energy and resources are being directed to many singular points inside it, sacrificial to the rest of it. It is making something and destroying itself in the process.’

  Two screens now changed to show blurred scans, which Mika stared at without comprehension for a moment before suddenly it hit home.

  ‘It’s growing those nodules my medical mycelia started to grow,’ she said.

  ‘So it would appear,’ Jerusalem replied.

  Mika stared long and hard. She shivered, the skin on her back prickling. Her mouth felt dry. ‘You know,’ she continued, ‘on Masada I blamed myself –and have been doing so ever since. I allowed perceived guilt to blind me: my fault that Apis, Eldene and Thorn would die.’

  D’nissan turned to her. ‘Is this relevant?’

  Mika nodded. ‘I was searching for a mistake I’d made which was causing the mycelia to malfunction and become cancerous, when in reality I’d made no mistake at all. The blueprint for growing those nodules was there all the time, quiescent until started by some sort of chemical clock.’

  Colver and James turned to listen in. D’nissan then asked, ‘So what are we dealing with here?’

  ‘Seeds, and possibly something more than that.’ She paused in thought for a moment. ‘The mycelium I extrapolated and engineered from the sample I possessed was not complete, and reached this stage of its life too quickly. The seeds it produced were sterile.’

  Colver raised a frigid eyebrow, then looked around. Everyone had felt the slight lurch and seen systems adjusting: the Jerusalem was moving.

  Mika continued as if not noticing. ‘On Masada, just after the dracomen first came, I described them as a race rather than just biological machines because they had gained the ability to breed. Ian Cormac contested that by saying there is little distinction between evolved life and made life. He was right. This,’ she waved a hand at the screens, ‘like dracomen, can breed, though its reproductive method is something like that of an annual plant.’

  ‘Lots of little baby mycelia then?’ asked Colver.

  D’nissan interjected, ‘You said “breed”. This seems little more than Von Neuman reproduction –as with all nanomachines.’

  ‘Oh, I know what I said.’

  ‘Then some kind of cross-pollination between separate mycelia? Until we did this there’s been only the one Skellor controls.’

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘The word “breed” implies something more than just reproduction,’ D’nissan pointed out.

  ‘Yes, it does.’ Mika hesitated. She could not empirically prove her theory, but felt it to be true. She should not be afraid; she must venture this. Turning to Colver she said, ‘You opined that it is parasitic on technical civilizations because they spread it around, and once wiping them out, it shuts down.’ Colver nodded. She went on, ‘I think it goes further than that. The mycelia are breeding with us. Their breeding partner is a civilization and they’ll take from it everything they can utilize, destroying that civilization then seeding –those seeds remaining dormant until found by another intelligent species.’

  All the screens now flicked to a retreating view of the collapsing planetoid.

  ‘Jerusalem, what’s happening?’ D’nissan asked.

  ‘Mika’s seeds are rapidly approaching maturity,’ Jerusalem replied, ‘as are those structures inside the planetoid that look suspiciously like some form of organic rail launching system. There are already objections to what I am about to do, but I consider it a sensible precaution.’

  A black line, subliminal in its brevity, cut towards the planetoid, then all the screens blanked. When they came back on again, a ball of fire was collapsing in on itself, strange geometric patterns running in waves across its surface, dissolving and reforming. Again the screens blanked on a secondary fusion explosion. This time when they cleared, streamers of white fire were burning themselves out to leave a gaseous lambency above the red dwarf star.

  The Ogygian had a long cylindrical body around which the landing craft were docked, a front sphere that had previously contained colonists and cargo, and a dart-like tail.

  The crew’s quarters were in that tail, which was a thickening of the ship’s body with, extending from it at ninety degrees, three long, evenly spaced teardrop-section pillars holding out from the ship itself the lozenges of the U-space engine nacelles. The wider cylinder at the juncture of those three pillars contained an octagonal tube, usually spun up to simulate gravity. Around the forward end of the cylinder ran a ring-shaped screen, girdling the narrower body of the ship, and accessible to the eight segments into which the inner octagonal tube was divided. Seven of those segments were living quarters and recreation areas for the crew. One segment was the control bridge, which also still contained the captain.

  What remained of the man sat in a control throne positioned in a horseshoe of consoles before a section of the quartz screen which looked out along the body of the ship towards the front sphere. Behind him, running down either side of the room, were control consoles for navigation, repair systems, the reactor, ion drive, main ship’s computer and the complicated U-space engine controls. The captain’s throne was stained, and the surrounding area coated in places, with a waxy substance –the result of his long slow decay right here. Cento, Fethan noticed, had seemed loath to touch the greasy controls, prodding at them with the barrel of his APW before reluctantly putting the weapon aside and getting down to work. It was a fastidiousness Fethan had never before seen in a Golem.

  Moving back from the images of the bloated lunatic jabbering away to himself, as Cento speed-read the captain’s log, Fethan sat in the chair before the main computer and studied the console and screens. After a moment, he inspected the row of small round holes that took the carbon rods, which were at that time the favoured form of portable memory. Plugged into one of these was the optic cable from a small palmtop Cento had brought aboard. Its screen was now indicating that the device had downloaded everything from the ship’s computer. Fethan detached the cable and allowed the palmtop to wind it back into itself. Now he stripped off a glove and, after sending an internal signal, twisted the end of his right forefinger and detached its syntheflesh covering.

  Are you sure this will work?

  The thing prowling tigerish inside him snarled something, then pulled itself into focus for simple human communication.

  A snare is positioned in hope, not expectation.

  I didn’t mean that. I meant are you sure you’ll be able to download through my nerve channels? I’d have thought the bandwidth too narrow.

  I compress myself for transference.

  Fethan inserted the metal end of his forefinger into the same hole from which he had detached the optic cable. He felt the kill program routing through: sliding via a hundred channels into the software of his mind, and springboarding into his artificial nervous system. His shoulder and his arm began to ache. That had to be psychosomatic because he had not felt pain in more years than he cared to remember. And slowly Jerusalem’s hunter-killer program loaded into the colony ship’s computer, erasing old data and programs, inserting itself wherever it could find room, to wait in the dark like a trapdoor spider.

  When it was over, Fethan realized he had closed
his eyes. He opened them, withdrew his finger from the socket, and noted that the metal of his finger end had grown hot enough to discolour. He blew on it until it was cool enough for him to slip on and click its syntheflesh cover back into place. It would have been nice, he felt, if that had been the full extent of his involvement.

  All done now? he asked.

  All done, replied the kill program still inside him.

  Some time before, Fethan had foolishly hoped that he might only have to do something like this once. But in an age when humans could be copied and transcribed, loading copies of a kill program from himself was child’s play, though perhaps not a game anyone would want their children to get involved in. He then turned to see Cento standing watching him.

  ‘Do you have a suitable explanation for this suspicious behaviour?’ asked the Golem.

  ‘Jerusalem . . . and that’s all the explanation I can give, so . . .’ Fethan brought his finger up to his lips.

  Cento grunted, then turned to peer at one of the other consoles –Reactor Control. Fethan glanced over and saw that the previously dead console was now alight. Then abruptly all the consoles in the bridge began springing to life, and even the lighting hemispheres in the ceiling flickered on.

  ‘Seems to have saved us some work,’ said Cento.

  Now they heard a low rumbling, and the stars began to swing across the quartz screen.

  ‘Attitude control,’ said Fethan. ‘Probably just an automatic system.’

  The view continued to swing from black space to cerulean sky up above the arc of the planet. Here it steadied and held station.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Cento.

  Fethan stood up and followed the direction of the Golem’s gaze out to the horizon where distantly he saw the Jack Ketch leaving orbit, then a blast of bright ruby light.

  ‘I think things just got a little more complicated,’ Cento added.

  The sun spread fingers of light down between the buttes, probing shadows then squashing them down behind rocks, shooing away creatures that preferred the dark. But it was some time before it braved the narrow canyon and started to brush shadows away from the carnage there.

  Sleer nymphs had come out to feed upon the remains of a creature like only one in many millions of them might one day become, though this particular albino, with its sapphire eyes, hailed from a very different source. They had dragged heavy pieces of carapace about while winnowing them of flesh. Smaller blobs of meat they had sucked up straight from the ground, along with some of the sand where the internal juices had fallen thickest. Travelling to and from their burrows, they had scrambled over the other figure lying in the canyon, giving it as much heed as they would a rock. But now they were safely deep in cool darkness digesting their feast.

  The shadows drew back to the sleer burrows, exposing first some lace-up boots, then trousers with rips in them revealing a brassy glitter, a coat, one brass hand clutching the wide brim of a hat, then it fell on Mr Crane’s open black eyes. But in that blackness other light reacted like a glitter of fairy dust, and the Golem abruptly lurched upright.

  For Crane, who never required sleep, those hours of utter stasis had been something like it, for during that period his having encountered Dragon had negated Skellor’s orders to him. Now, the weight of a few photons had upset that balance, and once again he was at his master’s behest, which now seemed to possess even less force to overcome the convoluted reasoning within his fragmented mind. He stood, brushed down his clothing, then inspected the hole punched through the front of his coat. Where the pseudopod had struck him, it had deformed the metal of his chest into concentric circles. After a thoughtful pause, he turned his attention to his hat. Knocking the dust off it, he jammed it on his head and set forth again. It seemed almost inevitable, as the greenery grew sparse around him and the buttes melded together to begin forming into a plain, that something would come to block his progress.

  The other fourth-stage sleer now stood in the centre of the narrow canyon, utterly still and sideways on to him. The Golem did not halt but continued marching towards it, calculating from where he might jump to mount it while scanning around for an escape route should it charge him. Strangely, the sleer did not turn as he drew closer, though its attitude seemed rigidly hostile: its tail curled up in a striking position, its pincers, saws and clubs all open wide and ready.

  Then, when Crane was only three metres away and preparing to leap, a mass of white mucus hit the sleer’s head, splashing all down the length of its body. The creature immediately began to shake and hiss like a boiling kettle. From where the white slime sank away into its joints, acrid steam began issuing first, then a thin black fluid bubbled out and trickled to the ground. The sleer tried to move, but as it did so, began to fall apart. Pincers and saws thudded to the ground, the end of its tail fell off. As it turned its head, that too detached, then all at once it separated at every joint, collapsing into a steaming heap.

  Mr Crane peered down at the back of his own hand, where a drop of the white mucus had splashed. Already the stuff was eating its way through the outer layer of brass, exposing superconductor fibres, and it even seemed to be making headway into his ceramal armour. It suddenly occurred to Crane that here was a design flaw: he could resist the heat and impact of standard Polity weapons but against chemical ablation his defences were clearly far from adequate. Looking up, he observed a complex foot come crumping down on the canyon floor. His gaze tracked up an armoured leg to the monster now stepping down from the nearby butte. A nightmare head –whose sloping front rose steeply in folds stepped like a ziggurat –swung towards him, tilted for a moment, then straightened itself as if coming to a decision. Crane dived to one side just in time to avoid a stream of mucus ejected from the mouth, which was positioned above four black-button targeting eyes ranged along the lowest fold of the creature’s visage. Where this projectile hit the ground, it smoked and bubbled, even dissolving sand.

  Crane came up into a run, sprinting past the droon, but its segmented tail lashed round into the canyon before him. He then turned and ran in the other direction, a line of acid shearing the canyon floor behind him.

  ‘Ho, Bonehead! Ho! Ho!’ bellowed some lunatic.

  Crane then heard the stuttering of automatic weapons; saw the droon jerk back with fragments of carapace splintering away from it. The lunatic himself was hammering towards him, perched on the back of a creature resembling the offspring of an ostrich and a hog. To one side, Crane saw a two-fingered armoured claw unfolding from the monstrous droon towards the newcomer, saw pieces splintering away from that claw under fire from a figure up on another butte. Crane ran forwards and leapt, slapping at the rim of carapace with the flat of his hand, and catching on behind the rider’s saddle.

  ‘Not too healthy round here!’ Anderson Endrik shouted to him.

  Mr Crane was not to know that sand hogs rarely moved so fast, or that they ever had such reason to be frightened. The hog just kept on accelerating, its carapace jutting forwards, tucking its porcine compound head away for safety. It stepped on ridges and falls of rubble, dodged another stream of acid, scrambled up a near-vertical slope till it almost achieved flight. Higher and higher it went, following an almost suicidal course. Then it was out of shadow into milky sunlight and a frigid breeze, and on the plain it really opened up. When the droon reared its head up out of the canyon, it observed, with the two distance eyes at the top of its tiered head, only a retreating dust cloud which was soon joined by another approaching from the side. Even though hurting and extremely annoyed, it returned to suck up its partially digested meal of sleer. Later it stepped up onto the plain, and set off to sniff along a trail of sand-hog terror pheromones.

  The rescue somehow gave shape to Crane’s nebulous imperative for survival, and also thus became one of the driving forces to his sanity. Memory was for him equally as much now as then –time being a protean concept needing agreement between the parts of him. Therefore, now dismounted from Bonehead, he still followed Skellor’s
instruction, striding across the dusty plain towards Dragon, and he strode up the slope of the Cheyne III seabed to . . . carry out his orders. But a crisis had been reached, for what ensued when he reached that beach and the island beyond could not be consciously observed by those parts of his mind simply carrying out Skellor’s orders. Such a level of awareness would not begin pulling his mind together –towards sanity –but towards a place only a killer called Serban Kline had visited. And when memory of what happened on that island surfaced, Crane must destroy himself again and suffer only as a machine intelligence can suffer: breaking himself again to escape it, to preserve yet the chance of him one day being whole. This was something he had already done –many times.

  Drifting above the planet whilst molecule by molecule he assembled replicas of certain items that could be viewed in the Tower of London back on Earth, Jack considered the slow single-channel methodology of human affairs and, unlike some of his kind, he did not find it contemptible. It seemed to him that those AIs who swiftly became impatient with humans and their ways were the ones themselves most like humans. King, Reaper, and quite possibly Sword, had not managed to attain the breadth of vision possessed by the likes of Jerusalem, or Earth Central (obviously), or one hundred per cent of the runcible AIs and planetary governors. Maybe it was simple immaturity? Though they were identical in appearance to Jack in all but colour, their minds had derived their inception from him only ten years previously. Jack himself had been around for twenty years longer than that –which was millennia in AI terms. Would he himself, twenty years ago, have held the same naive views? In the end that was where his theory fell down: he had always possessed that same breadth of vision, and still could not understand how AIs incepted from himself did not have it too. But then a parent is often inclined to disappointment with its offspring.

  Speak of the devil . . .

  Jack picked up the U-space signatures microseconds before the arrival of the ships, but even then did not react quickly enough. The AI had received no warning of any imminent arrival, so this could not be anything approved by the interdiction fleet. Fusion engines igniting, he began peeling away from the treacly tug of gravity and sent his own U-space package towards the Polity, warning that something was amiss, and relaying similar U-space warnings to Cormac and Cento. But then in underspace a storm rolled around the inverted well of the sun and bounced his messages out into real-space, where they dissipated.