Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just kept going?’ Tergal asked. ‘Maybe the brass man . . .’

  Anderson frowned at him. ‘I fight my own battles.’ The knight turned once again to Arden. ‘Would the power from my fence batteries operate your holocapture device?’

  ‘It would,’ Arden replied, ‘but they would be drained very quickly. How long would you want it to operate for?’

  ‘Long enough to drain our pursuer.’

  ‘We could just keep running,’ Tergal suggested again.

  Thorn observed, ‘Feeding has distended its body and revealed gaps in its carapace. Using your carbine I could probably cause it some real damage.’

  Arden said, ‘That seems a shame, since they are rare, but it won’t stop coming after us, and perhaps it would be better to face it in daylight. I can run the holocaptures for long enough.’

  Tergal made no more suggestions. No one seemed to be listening to him. Then abruptly Anderson turned to him. ‘You can leave us, if that’s what you want.’

  Tergal took a ragged breath. ‘I might be frightened, but I’m not stupid.’

  As he laboured up from hydrogen seas, through storms and chemical maelstroms and acidic hurricanes that would have flayed a human in an eyeblink, Jack realized he was not going to make it. The King of Hearts was bearing down on him just as fast as it could. It had probably used less than ten per cent of its munitions and was also probably very pissed off –though for an attack ship AI that was a normal state of mind. Another scoop run to generate a beam sufficient to destroy the opposing ship was out of the question: the tidal forces exerted by the gas giant would rip apart Jack’s severely damaged structure before he managed a sufficient lase of the surrounding gas to strike at the King of Hearts. Perhaps, Jack idly pondered, now was the time to just turn everything off and let the planet take him. Surely that was preferable to giving King the satisfaction of frying him with masers?

  ‘Oh no you damned well don’t,’ snapped Aphran. ‘There’s two of us living in here.’

  ‘I’m open to suggestions,’ Jack said.

  ‘My first one would be that you don’t give up,’ she offered.

  With almost a desultory shrug, Jack began to inventory his weapons. He was still loaded for bear, but that was not the problem: his structure would not be able to bear much more of a load. A near miss with an imploder, or any other CTD for that matter, and he knew he would start to come apart like wet tissue paper. Nevertheless . . .

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t really going to give up. That was just an idle speculation. I do have a plan ready.’

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘Time and escape velocity. I just need to give King something to think about.’

  An hour later a pillar of flame ignited beside the Jack Ketch as the King of Hearts probed the gas giant’s atmosphere with a megajoule coloured laser, probably only to illuminate the whole area so as to precisely locate its prey.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Jack,’ King sent.

  Jack immediately changed course, but without losing height. This time a tower of incandescence exploded into existence, and the shock wave slapped against the Jack Ketch. Turning his carousels, Jack began selecting and firing missile after missile. Any other weapons were presently out of the question, as they required power from Jack’s own systems to fire, whereas he could launch the missiles under their own power (though in different circumstances he would have launched many of them by rail gun). The swarm rose out of the gas clouds, black in silhouette and poised on achingly bright white fusion flames: strange birds in this bizarre sky.

  But before they even made it out into open space masers and lasers began picking them off. Some dodged, putting cloud masses between themselves and their eventual target, but in the end they must come out and make themselves more vulnerable. Shooting fish in a barrel was the expression Jack dredged from his memory banks, feeling a bit like a whale. He sent the signal then for the remaining missiles to detonate long before they reached the King of Hearts.

  ‘Is this part of the plan?’ Aphran asked.

  ‘Have you no faith?’ Jack countered.

  ‘I did until I died.’

  Jack let that one lie.

  Above him, fires burned in the gas giant’s atmosphere, some of them nuclear and with the potential never to extinguish. These concealed Jack from King. Still climbing, Jack tracked the pattern of maser and laser strikes coming through this protective umbrella. Internally, throughout his ascent, he had reattached the ducts from his scoops to his fuel tanks and had been passively taking on hydrogen. Reaching an apex as the umbrella finally began to disperse, he slanted his course tangential to the gas giant, then injected the fuel into the aligned dropshaft he had used as a particle cannon. This time he had no mind to aim the photonic matter at any enemy, just to benefit from the thrust. Under huge acceleration, he shot out from underneath the umbrella, angled slightly down but building up towards escape velocity. He was minutes away from achieving that velocity when he detected small scanning drones in the surrounding area.

  ‘You know,’ sent King, ‘it’s frustrating possessing an Oedipus complex when you don’t have a mother. Probably as frustrating as you are going to find this.’

  The maser struck the connecting stanchion to Jack’s right-hand weapons nacelle, cut accurately back, and the nacelle tumbled away, trailing fire. The second strike cut away the other nacelle. Jack supposed his offspring was toying with him, and now knew the difference between himself and King. He himself would not have delayed. Whether King was holding back out of a reluctance to kill or some emulation of cruelty, that was moot. Jack cared not one whit –there was nothing usable in the nacelles now anyway.

  The next strike King calculated quite finely and Jack reckoned it was using the drones it had earlier dropped throughout the area for accurate triangulation –and as eyes through which to gloat. The maser cut right through Jack’s fusion chambers, and the ensuing explosion peeled open his rear section like a banana. He tumbled through cloud surrounded by his own wreckage. There would be no escape now –he just did not have the systems left to repair such damage in time. Jack awaited the final killing strike and sensed, in that moment, the USER going offline. It was no help to him, however –his U-space engines having been damaged and cannibalized. That King did not finally finish him off, he put down to whatever else was going on out there, or how irrelevant he had become.

  ‘Time we left,’ said Aphran, as they fell towards crushing oblivion.

  Jack laughed, surprised because his reaction was no emulation intended for the comfort of humans but arose from deep inside him. Then his laughter cut off as he felt Aphran’s machinations.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  The four heavily armoured telefactors clambered through a jungle of bracing struts, through masses of hardened crash foam like bracket fungi, and vine-like tangles of optics and cables. Ape-like, they approached an area of the Jack Ketch right behind the nose chamber, which Jack found rather sensitive. He tried to usurp control, found himself unable to. He then tried to summon other mechanisms to deal with the situation, but saw that Aphran had been busy there as well. She had burnt out all of the ship Golem and other robots.

  ‘We are going to die anyway,’ he said, ‘so why do you attack me?’

  ‘Because,’ Aphran replied, ‘you seem to have forgotten that you are not this ship. That’s probably a built-in perception to make you fight better.’

  With heavy cutting claws, the telefactors swiftly chopped through an armoured bulkhead. In the spherical chamber beyond, caught between two metal protuberances like the business ends of combustion engine valves, was compressed a carapace of black metal that partially wrapped a lozenge of crystal. Turning on their cutting lasers, the telefactors began slicing through the metal columns above and below this object. Jack immediately felt systems going offline, his control slipping away.

  ‘You are killing me . . . and yourself,’ he protested.

  Like a bal
loon collapsing, his awareness drew inward, until at length nothing remained to him but the vision of an armoured telefactor reaching for him with one huge crab claw. In that lensed awareness he felt Aphran’s presence.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Following the program Aphran had previously input, the telefactor picked up the mind of the attack ship and took it through the internal wreckage to what remained of the erstwhile dropshaft then particle cannon. There it coiled around the mind whilst another program took over the allotted task and, waiting until the tumble of the ship brought the shafts precisely to the correct angle, flipped a switch.

  Jack did not become photonic matter –there wasn’t enough power left for that –but he certainly achieved escape velocity. His body, the ship, fell.

  Still running, Cormac was within sight of the open when another of the hybrids lunged at him out of the shadows. This one was the same nightmare he had seen through Skellor’s network, and for a moment he could not quite comprehend that it was real. From the waist up she was a woman, but insectile chitinous body with too many legs from the waist down.

  ‘Back off!’ Cormac yelled, firing into the ground before her. Like all the others, she ignored this and continued to charge him. As her head bent forwards, out of her widening mouth a set of pincers oozed into view. She hissed at him. Cormac shot her twice in the forehead and prepared to shoot away her legs too, but she collapsed, as if unstrung, and he ran on.

  His head was aching horribly once again, and he felt thirsty and sick but dared not stop to rest, for that could cost another life. Thus far it had taken him three hours to reach the edge of the Sand Towers –meaning twelve lives –and used up two thin-gun clips. He wondered if to the lives of all those jumping from the city platform he should add those he had left lying in the dust behind him. Though partially human they might appear, they had not behaved like intelligent beings.

  There were fires in the city, he noticed, probably due to furnaces left unattended. But most of the structures there being metallic, hopefully would not last very long. Cormac zeroed in on the coordinates he now held in his gridlink. Far to his right he saw a lander lying tilted against a small hill and, recognizing its source, wondered if Cento and Fethan were still alive. His destination was not that lander, though –for it still lay ahead.

  As he ran, he reached into his pocket and pressed a couple more glucose tablets from a strip. These he popped into his mouth, washing them down with a sip of water from the tube at his collar. Skellor, he knew, might try to kill him, but maybe that would not happen right away. People were dying in the city right now. That he had no hesitation in giving himself up Cormac supposed the downside of both the responsibility and power of being an agent of Earth Central Security. Yes, he could balance the loss of life at Elysium against what had been the potential loss of life at Masada. In many situations he could be judge, jury and executioner. But when it came to value judgements about human life, he must make no exceptions and also strictly apply the same rules to himself. Under ECS law he would have been well within his rights to say screw the people here, they are not Polity. But his own law would not allow him that.

  Cormac ran on for another hour, the fatigue poisons accumulating in his body and pain growing like lead shot in his muscles. Since the Cheyne III AI had turned off his gridlink all those years ago, he had refused all other augmentations, preferring to be no more than the human he had been born. But even with that limitation, he was still, due to genetic manipulation, the best human possible, possessing the reserves and strengths of an Olympian. Now, with his gridlink functioning for no apparent reason and Jain fibres lacing his brain, such distinctions had become laughable.

  His feet thumping down on a spongy fungal layer covering the dunes, Cormac laboured up one final slope. Another hour had now passed during which, doubtless, other victims had jumped to their deaths. Breasting the slope, he gazed down on another ancient landing craft, raised up on its hydraulic feet with a ramp down and lights on inside it. Behind the craft, the sun was poised like a poison fruit on the horizon.

  ‘You can stop the killing now,’ he announced. He did not shout, did not think it would be necessary, for surely Skellor would hear him. His thin-gun at his side, Cormac headed down towards the craft.

  Skellor himself stepped into view, in the airlock, then walked down onto the dust.

  ‘You can stop the killing now,’ Cormac repeated.

  ‘No.’ Skellor grinned.

  Cormac had expected nothing else, but that did not excuse him from making the attempt. There was only one other way, then –four shots slammed into the bio-physicist’s chest. Burning deep, one blew pieces out of his back. Cormac could not decide if it was a grimace or a grin that twisted the man’s features before he stepped aside and . . . disappeared. Keeping his finger on the trigger, Cormac continued firing in the direction he felt sure his enemy had gone. The shots punched smoking lines down the side of the landing craft.

  Transferring his attention to the ground the agent noticed footprints, so fired again, glimpsed a flickering snarling image. When a red light displayed on his gun, he ejected the clip while simultaneously pulling another from his belt –his reloading so fast there was no pause in his fusillade. The footsteps suddenly disappeared.

  Cormac calculated, turned and aimed in a completely new direction, tracked across, and hit something. A second later the gun was snatched, smoking, from his hand, and he himself was hurled to the ground.

  Skellor reappeared, the gun in his hand. On his body various holes were slowly closing.

  ‘It’s an automatic program walking them off the edge –so killing me won’t stop it,’ he sneered.

  Cormac rolled to his feet, his hands held out at either side. ‘You have me now, so what do you get by killing them?’

  ‘To torment you, of course.’

  Cormac considered hurling himself at the biophysicist’s throat, but recognized the futility of the act. Any thought of running was futile too.

  ‘They will all die –like clockwork,’ Skellor added, unnecessarily.

  Calculation: Skellor could only torment him while he was conscious. Cormac hurled himself forwards, groping for Skellor’s throat. The hot barrel of his own thin-gun smacked against his temple, knocking him to the ground. He rolled upright, but Skellor was invisible once more. Something hit his head again, splitting his scalp so that a flap of skin lifted on the pulse of blood. Knuckles smashed into his nose –more blood, more pain –and more blows followed. When he felt he had taken enough, Cormac shut down his perceptile programs and allowed his consciousness to leave him.

  Burping dyspeptically, Vulture understood that sleers caused acid indigestion. Or perhaps the imminence of death did that? The little AI would not have minded Arden and her new companions coming here, but the droon was a different matter entirely. Vulture knew that Dragon would kill her, somehow, if she did not complete her task –the entity had probably written it into her avian wiring –so she must stay with this game. But now remaining here had also become a fatal option. All she could hope was that Arden and crew could deal with the unwelcome monster. She returned her attention to Crane as he reached out to make his next move.

  The random nature of Crane’s search for the right arrangement caused a bit of a problem. Again he was reaching towards the piece of crystal that Vulture had made the one stable point in the pattern. It was frustrating. Beyond Crane, she observed Arden and the rest dismounting and dispersing amid the surrounding ruination, while the Rondure Knight positioned his lance in its frame. His seemed like the best plan, but she wondered how he would persuade the skittish sand hog to charge at the droon, or how he would avoid being himself dissolved in the monster’s volatile saliva. Suddenly irritated beyond patience by her ridiculously fatal circumstances,Vulture gave a savage peck, her beak clonking on Mr Crane’s brass fingers.

  The Golem froze, and Vulture was sure she could see something flickering in his right eye. He withdrew h
is hand and raised his face to look at her directly. Vulture waited taut seconds, expecting to have her neck wrung, but Crane dipped his head again, bird-like, and there seemed a strange symmetry to that. Instead of reaching for the crystal, he reached for one of the acorns.

  Vulture ahem’d loudly and Crane’s hand wavered, dropped instead on the laser lighter, shifting that. Vulture edged forwards one of the miniature sand hogs with its rider, who used his lance to prod a blue acorn into a new position. Everything seemed to be working out okay –at least in the game.

  But Vulture decided to be sure. The little ship AI retreated to a small virtuality maintained by a draconic mechanism buried underneath the fossilized apek. Here a human would have perceived twelve oddly shaped fragments of crystal dancing around each other, sometimes meshing, sometimes parting, and another five fragments permanently joined into one lump. But Vulture, with the perception of an AI capable of guiding a ship through U-space, saw so much more. She saw acceptance of horror by something ostensibly incapable of causing it, she saw timelines aligning and disparate subminds feeding the yet evanescent concept of self. She saw an ego growing: tender, hollow growth ready to be filled with steel. Yes, it was working. Returning to strange reality,Vulture was surprised to see Mr Crane staring at her again. It was ridiculous really –he did not have what Vulture would call a mind –but she was sure he knew she was helping him.

  Arden had nothing but admiration for the Rondure Knight’s courage and wished their acquaintance might not be so brief. But very shortly the man was going to be dead, and she doubted the rest of them would long survive him. Trying to steady her shaking hands, Arden unwound the two feed wires from the holocap’s universal power supply. Being a rugged and utilitarian device, it had the facility to power itself from just about any electrical source. Arden had once even powered it (very briefly) from a piece of copper and a silver ring jammed into a citrus fruit, so there should be no problem with Anderson’s primitive battery.