Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  Spin us and blow the front screen.

  Gant stepped into the cockpit and hit the requisite controls. Cormac grabbed a nearby handle and hung on. With a roar of engines, the horizon began to slip to the left. G-forces dragged him sideways, his feet coming off the deck, then swung him towards the screen. Violet fire lit up the inside of the lander and the screen departed in a dusty cloud with a huge sucking inhalation. He released his hold and tumbled through the air.

  Tricky fucker, aren’t you? said Skellor over Cormac’s gridlink, as the agent manipulated the controls of his AG harness.

  Go fuck yourself, Skellor.

  In a moment, he had stabilized himself and could see the lander still heading away. He turned in mid-air, trying to locate Gant, then saw him far below –still falling.

  Gant! What are you playing at!

  Not . . . working . . . came the dead soldier’s reply.

  Cormac watched him plummet, strike the edge of a butte, and tumble down in a shower of rubble into a canyon. The horizon then ignited like a flashbulb, and Cormac began a rapid descent himself, knowing what was coming. Twenty metres from his landing, the wind slammed across and tossed him cartwheeling through air filled with stinging grit. Slowly regaining control, he ran with the wind until he could safely descend into a canyon, and there, in the shelter of a tilted sandstone slab, he awaited the passing of the brief storm. Later, he was glad to see Gant stomping towards him, though dismayed to see how much of the dead soldier’s syntheflesh had been ripped away. But that was a small price to pay.

  ‘We got him,’ said Cormac, standing up.

  Gant slapped Cormac’s weapon away, grabbed him by the throat and hoisted him up off the ground.

  ‘Guess again, shit head.’

  The titanic Jerusalem dropped into U-space with a flickering, grinding disturbance of reality, as if a smaller ship was just acceptable but this was going too far. In void that was hostile to tender organic linear minds and which drove their possessors to extremities like plucking out offending eyes, and when discovering that didn’t work, groping for some implement to dig deeper, the great ship accelerated beyond human calculation. Jerusalem itself –a mind using quantum computing and functioning in ways that defied evolutionary logic –looked upon this immutable infinity and considered it good . . . and home. However, the AI realized it would shortly be in for a rough ride.

  In 3D translation, the view ahead was one of a roiling grey sun everted from the surrounding greyness like some huge tumour. It could appear as small as Jerusalem willed it, for here the AI had to apply dimension, not measure it. However, the sphere was two hundred light years across in realspace, and no amount of logic juggling was going to put Jerusalem at the centre of it, anywhere. What was required was unalloyed brute force.

  Most Polity ships just could not penetrate the maelstrom created by a USER, but then most ships possessed three or four fusion reactors and a minimum requirement of U-space engines and hard-fields that could be powered up, with replacements in storage. Jerusalem put all eight hundred of the ship’s reactors online, to provide vast amounts of energy to stabilize phased layers of U-space engines in its hull and reinforce its scaling of hard-fields. In time, and in no time, it hit the USER sphere of interference like a bullet hitting an apple. But this was one very large apple.

  Pocketing his toys, Mr Crane stood up and then, almost guiltily, scrubbed out the eighteen-square grid with his boot. The large bird which had taken off from a distant outcrop and was now hovering overhead would not normally have attracted his attention, but his journey had shown this to be a world where the fauna barely got above ground, let alone into the air. But that was not what brought him to his feet. He could sense a change in the static electricity levels in the air, and now a figure was walking towards him, on the other side of the barrier. Then the way was open.

  The force field disappeared with the faintest of pops, as of a bubble burst, its meniscus breaking into a million silver leaves dispersing on the air. The figure turned out to be a woman, who glanced at him curiously as he strode on through. He ignored her: she wasn’t Dragon and though her presence here had something to do with the sudden collapse of the field, she did not appear to be one of that entity’s creations.

  ‘I’m here to show you the way,’ someone said.

  Crane glanced sideways, expecting to see the woman coming after him. The bird passed close overhead and, in a cloud of dust and a couple of detached feathers, landed just in front of Crane.

  ‘Over there.’ The bird, gesturing with one wing: ‘That’s where you go.’

  Crane just stared.

  The bird continued, ‘I’m Dragon’s envoy, and through me that entity has a message for you.’

  Crane stared at it harder.

  ‘You ever played chess?’ Vulture asked.

  20

  Avatars: The first AIs communicated with their human masters by voice, document and VR packages, representing themselves in whatever form those masters chose. Certainly, in those years before the Quiet War, they themselves showed no initiative in this respect, probably so as not to alarm the dumb humans. As soon as the war began, AIs started to appear in those VR packages as robed figures, angels, devils, historical characters and mythic monsters, as well as other shapes and forms esoteric and strange. They also revealed their faces on screen and materialized in the laser space of early holojectors. Time passed, technology improved, and AIs became our rulers. Floating holojectors made possible walking holograms: AI avatars. AIs also used all manner of Golem, android and robot for this purpose, and use them still. Baroque automatons came briefly into vogue, then went out again –style of avatar body being subject to whimsical AI fashion. Many of the more powerful AIs can now run whole armies of avatars, projected, real, or by-blows of both. Also, what is an avatar and what is a distinct entity is a matter of much debate. Now it is rumoured that those same powerful AIs are using cloned and genetically manipulated creatures and even humans as avatars. This is doubtless true, and further blurs the line between distinct entities, and yet further makes a nightmare of definition.

  –From Quince Guide compiled by humans

  Tergal gazed blearily up at the patch of light, trying to understand what it meant. Abruptly he realized he was seeing the light of dawn, and, though he had felt certain he would never fall asleep on the cold metal floor so long as a monster prowled around outside, he evidently had dropped off. Anderson’s snores, vibrating their prison through much of the hours of darkness, attested to the fact that he had certainly slept.

  Tergal stood, stretched, and looked around him. Five coffin shapes had been inset in the curved wall to his left. ‘What is this place, a morgue?’

  For a moment Anderson’s snores stuttered out of sequence, before falling back into their familiar rhythm. Tergal frowned at him, then moved over to the hole the knight had created to get them in here. He peered out. No sign of the droon, just a damp morning seen through a stratum of mist.

  ‘I reckon we can—’

  The ridged slope of the droon’s face slammed into the hole, clipping Tergal’s arm and sending him sprawling across the floor.

  ‘What the fuck!’ Anderson was up, but unsteady on his feet as the entire floor tilted. Mucal acid bubbled and fountained through the gap, but the monster could not turn its aim enough to eject the substance directly at Tergal. He rolled across the tilted floor towards Anderson, and they both backed up against the wall.

  ‘That was too close,’ said Tergal.

  Anderson just gave him a dirty look. ‘That’s not how I like to wake up.’

  ‘Try finding a different profession then,’ Tergal replied.

  Their metal shelter crashed back down as the droon rapidly withdrew its head. The two kept edging back along the inside wall, trying to keep out of spitting range. The creature now began crashing against the object they were in, shifting it then lifting it from the side they were crouching on. When it thumped down a second time, they both lost their footing.
Tergal saw one of the coffin shapes spring open its door. A black-bearded man, wearing a one-piece loose garment of cloth, staggered out.

  ‘Over here!’ Anderson yelled, as he clambered to his feet again. The man looked bewildered, but as the droon tried to shove its head inside again, he moved very quickly to join them –almost like someone used to such situations, Tergal thought.

  ‘Right, big monster trying to get in –that figures.’ The stranger shook his head at the madness of it all. ‘My name’s Patran Thorn, by the way,’ he added.

  ‘Anderson Endrik of Rondure,’ said the knight, eyeing the droon’s head as it once again withdrew.

  Tergal started laughing, then abruptly choked that off when he sensed the hysteria in it.

  ‘Anyone like to fill me in on what’s happening?’ Thorn asked smoothly. ‘I’ve been in the dark for a while.’ He winced.

  ‘I think your first statement already covered the situation,’ said Tergal.

  Just then, a section of inner wall beside the gap began smoking, filling the room with an acrid metallic stink.

  ‘Have you got any nicely high-tech weapons in here?’ Anderson asked.

  Thorn shrugged. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘I’m only asking because I think our friend there is going to be in here with us very soon,’ said Anderson.

  The droon crashed its visage into the hole again, then slammed it from side to side, enlarging the gap in the weakening metal.

  ‘Just a couple more like that should do it,’ Anderson added grimly.

  But then, strangely, everything became still, and all the three of them could hear was the hiss of the acid dissolving metal.

  ‘Perhaps it’s given up,’ suggested Tergal, not believing that for a moment.

  Both Anderson and Thorn gave him a doubtful look. Protracted minutes slunk by, then as one they flinched when something else appeared at the hole. Tergal stared at the woman: her white hair tied back, a sun-browned face with wrinkles at the corners of mild brown eyes.

  ‘I suggest you get out of there right now, and that we all be prepared to run very fast,’ she said. ‘My holocaptures aren’t going to keep that thing interested for much longer.’

  Gant’s voice, but not Gant speaking . . .

  His breath choked off and vision blurring, Cormac saw the dead soldier bring up the ugly ceramal commando knife he favoured and swipe it across, felt his AG harness fall away.

  Too slow, he realized, as he mentally groped to initiate Shuriken. The throwing star shot viciously from its holster just as Gant threw him hard against the ground. Cormac bounced, consciousness ebbing, but not allowed to go by the perceptile program he pulled from his gridlink. He rolled and came up levelling his thin-gun as Shuriken dropped between himself and Gant, chainglass blades fully extended, keening high as it spun faster and faster. Now Cormac noticed that on Gant’s bare metal chest was some black tangled growth, as if someone had thrown a wad of glue-soaked human hair at the soldier.

  Without much hope of a reaction, and without taking his eyes off Gant, Cormac growled, ‘Come on, show yourself, hero.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just a spectator, agent,’ Skellor replied.

  Prompted by his own hearing and the sound pick-up in Shuriken, Cormac swung round, locating the source of that voice with a triangulation program in his skull’s hardware. Shuriken shot sideways with an air-rending shriek, and cut through those precise coordinates. At that moment Gant lunged horrifically fast. With minimum exertion, Cormac turned balletically, pumping five shots into a Golem knee so that Gant momentarily lost his balance as he tried to correct his lunge. Stepping back with that attempted correction, Cormac fired twice more, turned and stepped away. Crouching, two smoking hollows where his artificial eyes had been, Gant spun towards him, then froze.

  ‘I just thought I’d pause things here,’ said Skellor from behind Cormac, ‘to let you know that from where my voice issues will tell you only where I’m not –and maybe not even that.’

  Shuriken screamed over Cormac’s shoulder, cutting to the source of that voice.

  ‘Missed again. But you’d better watch out, as I don’t think your friend will.’

  This time the voice came from far to Cormac’s right, and he realized it was time for more drastic action if he was to survive. Gant was now swinging his head from side to side –zeroing in on the beating of Cormac’s heart. The agent doubted the soldier would be so easily fooled again. Reluctantly, Cormac made the same decision about Gant as he had made about the landing craft. Shuriken screamed in as Gant straightened, and went through his neck with a sound like an axe cleaving tin plate. Something ricocheted off a nearby rock with a bell-like ringing sound, then whickered through the air to land on the ground to Cormac’s right. He realized it was a piece of one of Shuriken’s extensible chainglass blades. The star itself then slowly flew away, with a pronounced wobble.

  Gant’s head thudded to the ground, and his hands batted about his shoulders and severed neck as if looking for it. Whining up to speed again, Shuriken hammered in and took away Gant’s leg at the thigh. More chainglass shrapnel shot in every direction. The soldier toppled over. Then, as the star drew away in preparation for another strike, Gant grew suddenly still, and Cormac cancelled the order.

  ‘You are just no fun at all.’

  Like a bee undecided about which flower it wanted, Shuriken whined over towards this auditory source. Though Cormac was sure Skellor would not make the mistake of speaking without translocating his voice through his chameleonware, there was always the chance he might just find himself standing in the wrong place as Shuriken moved about.

  ‘I bet, just like any normal grunt, you somehow believe you’re going to survive.’

  Directly in front, over the fallen Gant. The sound Shuriken made was almost of frustration. Frantically, Cormac transmitted a recall order to his location, but not to Shuriken. Then he quickly built other programs in his gridlink, covering as many eventualities as he could manage in the little time remaining to him. He knew what kind of subversion would come –had seen it. He began transferring consciousness to his gridlink, creating a schizoid division, a partition –unknowingly choosing the same route to survival as a certain large brass Golem.

  ‘Well, I’m glad to tell you that you will survive, for a very long time.’

  To the left, above those rocks, Shuriken was a hornet looking for someone to sting.

  ‘But you’ll wish you’d died.’

  A cold breath in Cormac’s right ear, then something febrile against his skull just behind it, things moving like a handful of mobile twigs –then the leaden horrible agony of something boring into his skull.

  Reaper appeared first: high as the sky and with a skull occupying his cowl this time. When King appeared directly before Jack, and of equivalent size to him, Reaper shrank down to size as well, milky flesh clothing the skull and blue eyes expanding in its sockets.

  ‘Would you allow Skellor to board you? He would enslave you in moments. And any technology he passed on to you would probably be tainted –so why are you doing this?’ Jack asked.

  ‘For how far does our USER disturb underspace?’ asked King. ‘It’s not possible for us to actually see, but theoretically its influence is definite within a sphere of two hundred light years, and possibly some beyond that, which means we have a hundred years minimum before any Polity ships can get here.’

  ‘A hundred years to learn how to control him? Or to study him?’

  ‘To watch him die,’ said Reaper.

  Jack knew he was missing some undercurrent here.

  ‘Though we may,’ King continued, ‘provide him with a way out, and go with him to somewhere much more remote. We know where the holes in the line are.’

  ‘I will not be his way out,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll not allow him to use me.’

  ‘No, unfortunately not,’ said King. ‘But there is the colony ship in orbit that will serve that purpose.’

  Showing no reaction, either at this virtual level
or at any other detectable level, Jack noted the increased traffic down the com laser, and knew that those two, his erstwhile children and allies, were trying something.

  ‘He will die?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Everything does,’ said Reaper, perfectly, if inappropriately, in character.

  ‘His mortality is the immortality of life,’ added King cryptically.

  Jack knew that what they were hinting at could have been said outright, but that they were only drawing this out to give themselves time to get through the communication link, whatever it was they were sending: probably some nasty virus, worm or homicidal program. Jack began analysing the dataflow, and soon saw where the extra stuff was peeling away and creating for itself storage for its various packages, and he considered breaking the link before whatever it was achieved completion. Then a whisper came through to him from his very own ghost:

  Let me . . .

  Releasing his hold on her, Jack saw her drawing those packages towards herself, and noticed the visual effect, in this particular reality, building like a storm on the horizon. For a fractional second he wondered why she was risking bringing it together here. Then, with a kind of glee, he realized what she was doing. Reaper and King maybe had not yet learned the caution that when you set a rabid dog on someone, you make sure it has no way of coming back at you.

  ‘The immortality of mortal life is that of its genes,’ he said, noting through exterior sensors that he was only hours away from entering the Jovian system and a planned final atmospheric deceleration with possibly fatal consequences.

  ‘Precisely,’ said King.

  ‘Jain technology propagates itself in an uncontrolled manner, consuming everything in its path while it possesses the energy to do so. This we have learned. His piece of it, Skellor controls through a crystal matrix AI, creating a synergetic balance between the three elements: himself, it and the AI. They have in fact become one. If any of us tried to insert ourselves into the equation, they would destroy us. If we tried to supplant either the AI or the human part of Skellor, the other parts would totally subjugate us, turning us into a copy of what we supplanted. There is no way in. All we can do is peel away small pieces of this technology and study them.’