Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  ‘What is this?’ Tergal had drawn his own weapon, and was swinging it from one of the great flat heads to another. Thorn abruptly reached out and, in a move difficult to follow, disarmed him. ‘Are you crazy!’ Tergal shouted.

  Thorn inspected the weapon, then clicked across its safety catch. He tossed it back to Tergal. ‘Dragon here,’ he gestured towards the forest of pseudopods, ‘could swat that other thing back there like a bug.’ He stabbed a thumb in the direction of the droon.

  Anderson slid his hand away from his own weapon. Dragon –again referred to in the singular. Lafrosten’s story had told of only one such creature, but Anderson had since heard stories of many more known as sand dragons. Surveying the nightmare forest of fleshy trees, he spotted three, four, five of the crested heads Lafrosten had described. There must be hundreds, nay thousands of the creatures here. He wondered which one of them he had supposedly come to kill.

  Cupping her hands round her mouth, the woman, Arden, shouted, ‘What’s happening?’ –trying to attract attention in the uproar. A single crested head turned towards her, then shot forwards, cutting a furrow through the ground with the base of its neck. Soon it was hovering over them, curving down to inspect them as if eyeing an interesting roach it had been about to step on.

  ‘Dragon, what are you doing?’ Arden then asked more quietly.

  ‘The option to spectate has been taken away from me,’ replied the reptilian head, studying them with eyes of deepest blue.

  Anderson realized his own mouth was gaping, and quickly closed it. He had often repeated the gist of Lafrosten’s story, but not until this moment had he grasped that it was only a mere glimpse into some other, even larger tale. He recalled that the dragon had spoken to Lafrosten. Therefore it was a sentient creature, and therefore it had a purpose all its own: it was not just some character in a fairy tale –a tale that had taken on the dimensions of myth, even to Anderson who had actually met Lafrosten. This was real.

  ‘The option to spectate has been taken from you? That was evident long before now,’ said Arden.

  The head turned slightly to one side. ‘Thorn,’ it observed.

  Thorn nodded in acknowledgement.

  ‘You came from the first ship, the one that was attacked,’ Dragon stated.

  Anderson noted how Thorn paused, perhaps weighing up the value of a lie. Eventually he said, ‘I did.’

  ‘Who was with you aboard that ship?’ Dragon asked.

  ‘I think you know,’ said Thorn.

  Dragon hissed for a moment, then stated, ‘Ian Cormac.’ The head swung back to Arden, and Anderson discovered he had never actually heard real sarcasm voiced until now. ‘The good guys,’ said Dragon.

  ‘What are you planning to do?’ Arden asked.

  The head turned and gazed up at the sky. ‘Make waves,’ it said.

  The ground bucked again, sending them all staggering. They retreated back to the lee of their boulder and steadied themselves against it. The nearby pseudopods rose even higher, the earth churning between them. The fissures where they exited the ground joined together, melded, and, wide as a metallier house, the main trunk from which they all issued heaved itself into the air. The pseudopods splaying out from it poised overhead like a giant blue-tipped fan which then tilted forwards, a long mound rising behind it as the rest of the trunk shrugged free. Anderson realized that a hundred metres away this trunk mated with a river of scaled flesh –was just one branch of it. All around similar podia were surfacing, then drawing back towards the dusty maelstrom. Then he saw an immense dome rising up, sucking in all this tangled madness of sand dragons back towards itself. This nucleus was truly titanic and, as it drew in at the sides, began to reveal itself as a giant sphere. Anderson stood stunned when, briefly, a wind cleared away the dust. He saw the sphere whole, rising from the plain on a vast trunk of ophidian growth. Then it kept rising higher, distorting and expanding as it drew that same growth into itself: a vast scaled moon floating light as a metallier blimp. Higher and higher, receding into the sky.

  Anderson felt a hand on his shoulder and looked across at the man called Thorn.

  ‘Dragon,’ the man said briefly.

  Tergal now turned towards the knight, his expression somewhat maddened. ‘Shame you lost your lance.’

  Anderson lowered his gaze and observed two creatures bounding through the dust storm. ‘Well, it’s coming now, if a little late.’ He gestured to Bonehead and Stone. ‘I wonder what brought them back here.’

  ‘Dragon,’ said Arden.

  Anderson looked at her for explanation, but instead she asked, ‘These are yours?’

  ‘They are that –faithless beasts.’

  ‘That’s good, because with Dragon gone the force field will have gone as well.’

  With that, they all turned to peer back the way they had come. The ejected VR chamber was a black dot on the horizon, seemingly floating on a stratum of mist, but of the droon there was no sign. Anderson found little comfort in that.

  Vulture flapped a wing over the glassy surface to blow away the settling dust. ‘Quite an uproar,’ she noted. ‘Dragon is nothing if not dramatic.’

  The fossilized apek rested, perfectly frozen, in a coffin-shaped block of solid chainglass that was raised above the ground now. Etched into the block’s upper surface was a chess board. Beside this rested a spherical draconic container. Vulture had to wonder about the symbolism of it all. She looked around at the amphitheatre Dragon had cleared. The ground here was perfectly level, as if raked, in a fifty-metre circle in the middle of devastation. Amid the broken rock beyond the neat circumference lay much dragon detritus: desiccated pseudopods like a shed snake skin draped across boulders, iridescent scales the size of dinner plates, broken constructs like the by-blows of old combustion engines and lizards. Shaking her head, Vulture hopped up onto the face of the glass coffin, then turned her attention to her companion.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘lay out your pieces.’

  Mr Crane gazed down at the board with painted-bead eyes, blinked once, then abruptly squatted. He delved into his pockets and took out his toys. The rubber dog was his queen, the piece of crystal his king and the blue acorns were pawns. He had one piece more than required, but then was ever a battle fought by evenly matched opponents? Vulture pecked once against the draconic sphere. The thing twitched, split, and spilt miniature albino sleers, which scuttled to take their positions on the grid and with dragon eyes glare at their opponents. Now the sphere contracted, pushing out two sand hogs with minute lance-wielding human figures mounted on them, then a small droon.

  ‘Y’know,’ said Vulture, ‘“surreal” is a word for the pretentious, but I can’t think of a better one right now.’

  Mr Crane took off his hat and studied the layout. He reached out and nudged a blue acorn two squares forward. A sleer nymph scuttled to it, took hold of the acorn and moved it one square aside.

  Vulture said, ‘You don’t know the rules, Crane. I do, which is why this is going to be a game difficult for me to lose.’

  21

  Intelligent weapons have been with us for centuries now, ever since the first computer-guided missiles, jet fighters and tanks. As human wars spread out into the solar system, such weapons increased in complexity of function and mind until there were things with the outlook of trained hunting dogs but bodies more lethal. With the introduction of laws concerning AI rights, it should have been unacceptable for governments to create AI-guided bombs, missiles or other intelligent machines that would destroy themselves in the process of destroying an enemy –tantamount to creating AI kamikaze. But such organizations had been sending human beings to their deaths for millennia and did not rank other intelligences any higher. Retaining this attitude when they were finally calling the shots, the AIs proved themselves just faster and brighter versions of ourselves. The virtual world reflected the real world, as it always has ever since the invention of the first computer virus, and during those same solar wars, worms and kill programs wer
e used to great effect. Looking back, some would say, ‘Same shit, different day.’ If only that were so. Unfortunately, intelligent weapons are subject to evolutionary pressures more substantial than those found in the natural world. And tigers now occupy what was once the territory of hunting dogs.

  –Excerpt from a speech by Jobsworth

  A door opened in whiteness, and a translucent hand gestured Jack through. King and Reaper froze on this level while on another level they utilized all their resources in fighting the worm Aphran had turned back on them. Then the embedded VR programs caught up and the ouroboros separated and struck across the eternal white. A gigantic reptilian maw closed on Reaper with a sound of bones breaking. King hurled himself back –to a tunnel hoovering down from a different direction. Jack closed the door, and the virtuality became a huge white pearl enclosing a muffled screaming. Then it sucked into itself and disappeared with a wet thwack.

  ‘Two minds,’ said Jack.

  ‘Quite possibly lethal when you only expect one,’ Aphran replied.

  He turned towards her in a brown virtuality, probed on other levels and immediately knew that with the freedom he had allowed her she had taken so much more. She had now embedded herself so deeply in his systems that he could never root her out.

  ‘They will escape, of course, but perhaps they will be damaged,’ he said. ‘Certainly they will henceforth be more circumspect about virtual attacks.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘So now we must prepare for a physical battle.’

  Jack reduced this point of awareness, increasing his awareness of himself, of the ship. He noted that automated systems had now closed the cracks in his hull, and his larger internal structures had realigned. However, there was still a lot of small-scale damage, and much preparation yet to make. He initiated the ship’s Golem, and also those robots sturdy enough to tolerate the constant acceleration. Moving slow, the chrome skeletons and other gleaming creatures began working their way through him, making repairs. When Aphran offered her services, almost without thinking he devolved control of many of them to her. He could not fret too much about this –could not fight something that was now more part of himself than even King and Reaper had been.

  Ahead, the gas giant loomed like some giant polished spherical agate, surrounded by the detritus cast off from its own shaping. Jack considered how he must use this killing ground if he was to survive, and in the same instant redirected Golem and other robots to the conversion of his two internal manufactories. In his nose he opened the two baleen-tech scoop fuellers for combat refuelling, then detached their ducts from his fuel tanks and reattached them to three dropshafts he aligned, end to end down the length of his body, so as to terminate against one of his rear fusion chambers. The irised gravity fields in the shafts did not have sufficient power for the task intended, but the robot army inside himself began disassembling gravplates to provide the components needed to boost that power. Other internal redesigns devised were mainly for achieving greater structural strength. Maybe, having been incepted from him, King and Reaper would guess what he intended. But they had not done so yet, else they would not be tailing him down towards a gas giant. But, then, it was only because he had been so badly smashed inside that Jack had even contemplated such radical, tactical redesign.

  Aphran, briefly separating herself, said, ‘I am almost too close to understand this.’

  Jack merely fed through to her his view of the gas giant, adding the spectroscopic analysis of its upper atmosphere which he had made when first arriving in the system. Then he continued to convert himself into a flying particle accelerator.

  The telefactor released him, and he staggered a couple of paces before going down on his knees. The ground seemed to be shaking, but Cormac could not be sure. The machine protectively circled him on the top of this butte, while he shook his arms trying to return feeling to them and wished the task in his head were so simple.

  So this is how madness feels.

  Cormac just knew things weren’t operating correctly in his skull. The cold gridlinked Cormac observed this chaotic version of himself trying to re-establish some grip on reality. The aug creature’s attack had left organic damage to his brain, but it had also riddled it with new neural connections and Jain filaments. From both sides Cormac fought doubled perception, because almost like speaker and microphone in conjunction he instinctively knew that he could generate a feedback loop, which in this case would be fatal to him. It was with a kind of horror that he felt his idea of self seemingly slipping away from him, and in his striving to prevent this, he truly understood just how fragile was human awareness, the human ego –how it was just the surface of a very deep and dark pool.

  Slowly Cormac returned. He regained organic control of his limbs, rather than through the implants inside his skull. But then he hit against the wall of his own pain. To return completely, he must completely feel the hole that had been ripped in behind his ear, his brain swollen inside his skull, and the central empty pit of a migraine that he knew would turn him blind and puking sick. Skellor brought him back some of the way, though not intentionally.

  I will find you, agent. My creatures are coming for you.

  Along with Skellor’s threat came an image Cormac processed in his gridlink, breaking the remains of awareness he had positioned there. His head feeling on the point of exploding, he saw that projected image in the blind spot opening before him. Half-human creatures scuttled and loped out into the light. Many had pincers where their mouths should have been, or else opening and closing inside their mouths like the organic version of some grotesque doorknocker. One horror possessed a scorpion’s body with a partially human face moulded in chitin. After it came a centaurish thing with the upper half of a woman connected at the waist to an insectile segmented eight-legged lower half. Madness, utter madness, but what did it all mean?

  Blinding pain blossoming behind his eyes, Cormac vomited, but resisted the impulse to respond to that communication. Gritting his teeth against the next heave of his stomach, he groped in the thigh pocket of his environment suit, found a medkit and pulled from it a reel of analgesic patches. He wanted to scream at Skellor that the man could not have made these by-blow monstrosities, that it was all a lie. As the first, second, then third patch began to flood his body with their balm, he perceived that the image was indeed real –and guessed the source of those ugly creatures Skellor now controlled.

  As the well into which he was staring slowly contracted, Cormac reached down to his holster and drew his thin-gun to check its load. Besides the one it already contained, he carried four extra clips on his belt. Each of these contained the fine aluminium powder that carried the energetic pulse of the weapon, and each contained the powerful laminar battery that supplied that same energy. But Cormac just shrugged to himself: he was prepared to fight, but it seemed so futile in the end. No matter how horrible were the creatures hunting him, they were not coming of their own free will –he would be killing slaves. Anyway –he glanced at the telefactor –he could pass above such encounters.

  He put away the weapon and found a blue-seal dressing in the medkit, pressing it to the hole in his head. Tasting blood, the dressing deformed to fit his skull and probed inside the hole, plugging it, salving exposed nerves and creating frameworks for accelerated regrowth. Water, from a neck spigot built into the suit, thawed the dryness of his mouth. He stood and gazed out over the buttes to where he could see distant fires burning. He would just have to do what he could.

  It was then that he heard a familiar whickering sound and caught the glint of something in the air. And, with a sound like a disc cutter slicing into an oil drum, Shuriken smashed into the telefactor.

  Finally reaching vacuum, Dragon shrugged off planetary dust and, clawing only at the surface of space in a way that Polity AIs and human physicists would have given a lot to know, accelerated towards the sun. A few hours into its journey it detected probing signals from the ships out by the gas giant. Doubtless they conside
red Dragon to be an imponderable in their infantile plans. Dragon, however, intended to become a severe inconvenience. Now accelerating on a course for a slingshot, the entity focused internally for, being what might be described as the tinkerer quarter of Dragon entire, it had never been able to leave things alone for long. Concentrating on the various engines lodged inside itself –creations with a less biological bent than much else it contained –Dragon began to make adjustments.

  While skimming the AI nets of the Polity in search of the innovative, and incidentally avoiding some very nasty programs whose sum purpose was to track the massive entity down, Dragon had been pleased to come across further research into that enigma wrapped up in a dilemma: gravity and its relation to U-space. And, when other killer programs had become active, Dragon knew it was venturing where ECS was developing military hardware. Grabbing as much information as it could without attracting attention, the entity retracted from the AI nets. Studying its theft, Dragon had quickly apprised itself of what ECS was up to, and used this as the basis of its own research project, which had resulted in some of the engines it now contained. These devices consisted of frame-stretched Calabri-Yau shapes –as the humans called them –and massive singularities held out of phase with normal space. It had been generating the latter that had caused the earthquakes back on the planet. Now, using baroque constructs of runcible technology for amplification and focusing, Dragon could do more than cause the ground to shake –the entity could shift and distort the very fabric of space. Obviously the interference device now active in this system stemmed from the same ECS research program Dragon had raided. The entity wanted a closer look –but most importantly it wanted a way out.