Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  She eyed Thorn, who was crouching behind a nearby boulder draped with a flat and slightly putrescent pseudopod that Dragon had discarded. He was checking the action of the carbine Anderson had given him. Off to her other side, Tergal clutched both handguns. As well as an expression of fear, he also wore his gauntlets, wide-brimmed hat and thick coat. This extra clothing might protect him somewhat from acid splashes, but would not help if the monster went after him exclusively.

  She then glanced behind to where Anderson had mounted his old sand hog and couched his lance. He had told her, only a little while ago, how he had come here on a knightly quest to kill a dragon. A test –a trial. He then quipped that the droon would suffice, and having dispatched it he would consider his trial over.

  The holocap read the new power source, adjusted itself accordingly and powered up. Arden detached the monocle, and for the first time looked up and ahead. The droon was a hundred metres away, closing the gap between them by three metres with every stride. Arden placed the monocle in her eye, gridded the creature, taking in the surrounding area as a projection stage, then removed the monocle and tossed it away from her. Hopefully, no droon acid would hit the monocle itself, because then it would all be over, as it was the last one she possessed. With a mosquito whine, the device shot out over the droon and hovered, invisible. Going to her menu, Arden selected a second-stage sleer and projected it onto a boulder to the droon’s left.

  The monster spun, ejecting a sheet of white mucus straight at the projection. Arden made the second-stager leap about a little before shutting the thing off. The droon stooped low, its head darting from side to side as it tried to locate its prey. It reached down with one many-jointed arm, hooking underneath a rim of stone with a paw like a battered mass of scrap metal, and flipped the boulder over. Then it bellowed in frustration and randomly spat acid all about itself.

  ‘Seems rather irritated,’ Thorn observed.

  ‘I’ve studied them for a while and they possess only two states,’ Arden said, ‘irritated, as you put it, or motionless.’

  ‘And when are they motionless?’ Tergal asked.

  Arden glanced at him. ‘Usually after they’ve fed.’

  ‘And why isn’t this one motionless, then?’

  Arden shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s unusually irritated.’

  She now made another second-stager appear, this one on a rock to the monster’s other side. The droon ejected another sheet of mucus, which passed through the hologram and drenched the rock below it. Again the prey danced about a bit, then disappeared. Arden gave the monster quite a chase with a third-stager, leaving behind a trail of boiling smoke and steam. Onto the illusory apek it emptied gallons of vitriol, but the image of itself only seemed to confuse it. Then, as it seemed to be now spitting dry, she conjured a fourth-stager to draw it round to the rim of the arena, to finally face Anderson.

  Thorn and Tergal stood up and circled round, ready to act as picadors. Meanwhile Arden recalled the projection monocle and caught it in her hand. Projected images would now only confuse the issue, and might even put Anderson off his stroke. Unless . . . Arden brought the monocle up to her eye and once again cast up a grid.

  The Jerusalem was a vast and cavernous ship full of echoes and, as she returned to her research area and quarters, Mika heard a constant din of distant industry. Skinless Golem were apparent everywhere inside the great ship, and also outside on its hull. Other more esoteric robots scuttled along walls and ceilings, like an infestation of chrome deathwatch beetle.

  These were the more visible robots. Mika had also seen ones no bigger than ants repairing delicate circuitry, millipede plumbers only momentarily visible in the breaks in pipes or ducts they were fixing, also roving crab drones floating on personal AG and muttering to themselves, and the glittering fungal movement of Polity nanotech at work repairing stress fractures in structural members. Mika herself had just put in a long shift in Medical –repairing humans and haimans –and her own arm still ached. Now her shift was over, and it was at last time for her to do her own thing.

  With the door closed behind her, she was immediately into her partial-immersion frame, then standing on a virtual plain. Manipulating some floating icons, she called up diverse views and the results of sampling tests transmitted by some of Jerusalem’s drones. Translucent pillars of data appeared all around her, scrolling her requirements around themselves.

  The worms living in the icy moonlet that now turned in her virtual sky created burrows similar to those delved by Dragon. Breaking open one icon, she caused a segment of the moon to disappear, and like a huge worm-eaten cheese it dropped closer for her inspection.

  Even though information about these creatures was already on file, through a transmission made by the Jack Ketch, Mika still found them fascinating. There was one aspect of them that was plainly similar to Dragon as it had once been on Aster Colora, where the human race had first encountered it: there seemed to be no supporting ecology for them. Mika could only hypothesize that the ecology of which they were a product had been destroyed or was somewhere far from here, and that begged many critical questions. Their lone survival made it unlikely they were just the primitive helminth survivors of some natural cataclysm or had been transported accidentally, therefore they must be very like Dragon in another respect. They must be the product of an ecology in the same way that a Golem android was the product of Earth’s. It was certain that they had not evolved naturally to their present state.

  ‘Fascinating, isn’t it,’ interjected Jerusalem, appearing beside her.

  ‘What is?’ Mika asked.

  ‘Life. But then what is life? Those worms grinding their way through spongy rock –are they life? Is Jain technology life? Am I?’

  Ah, philosophy. Mika didn’t bother to venture a reply.

  Jerusalem went on relentlessly: ‘In terms of evolved life, those worms are neither one thing nor the other. They have evolved, yes, but prior to that minor change they were not the direct product of insensate evolution.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  The floating metal head tilted, and a long helical molecule arched across the sky like some strange species of rainbow. ‘You have not yet noted the regularity of their genetic blueprint, the lack of equivalents to alleles and parasitic DNA?’

  ‘Yes, I saw that.’ Mika repressed her annoyance. She had discovered something, but it was irritating to learn Jerusalem had found it long before her.

  ‘And what is your assessment?’

  Mika replied, ‘A manufactured organism of some kind, probably intended for mining.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ the AI agreed. ‘They accumulate rare metals inside their bodies for no purpose related to their own survival.’ Mika winced –she had missed that aspect. ‘And they procreate only when those metals have reached an internal saturation level that interferes with their tunnelling efficiency.’

  ‘They could be Jain tech,’ Mika offered.

  ‘They are not Jain in themselves, being simple mechanisms with only one purpose. However, someone using Jain technology could have made them. Some of the tunnels in that moon are over half a million years old. Perhaps the Atheter, or the Csorians?’

  Mika considered that. There had been no finds classified as Jain artefacts any younger than five million years of age –that was, she acknowledged to herself, excepting products directly attributable to Skellor. Perhaps unknown aliens had left these worms here, but if so where were they themselves now? Perhaps this was all that remained of yet another race which had stumbled upon Jain technology.

  ‘We should set up a research . . .’ The words died in her mouth when she felt that drag into the ineffable as the Jerusalem dropped into U-space. She braced herself for any turbulence, surprised Jerusalem had given no warning.

  ‘The illegal USER has ceased to function,’ Jerusalem informed her, before she could ask.

  Something prodded him to consciousness and, as he surfaced, Cormac could feel Jain tech all around his mind, like a hostile
encircling army wielding a forest of edged and pointed weapons. Sharp steel hedged him in –he was poised on the brink of annihilation. Opening his eyes, he found himself bound into the co-pilot’s chair by hard Jain substructure. He could not move his head for the structure bound that too –and penetrated it.

  ‘Obviously you don’t have a quick death in mind for me?’ he suggested.

  The lander was still under acceleration, and an indigo sky liberally dotted with stars filled the viewing screen. Skellor, leaning forward with one hand resting on the pilot’s console, glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t even know that I’ll kill you at all. Maybe I’ll rewire you so that you’re in constant agony, or I could subvert you like was done to Mr Crane –turn you against your masters. Maybe I’ll do both.’

  ‘Oh, you are so spoilt for choices –it must be such a trial for you.’

  Agony speared from the base of Cormac’s skull and down his spine. He arched against his restraints, too ravaged by the pain to even scream. It went on and on . . . and his consciousness refused to leave him. He began to break: thought processes now operating in his gridlink because they were unable to function in his organic brain. He realized there, with arctic precision, that this was how Aphran had carried on; understood this separation. Then, after an age, the pain stopped. Cormac gasped for air, spat blood from where he had bitten through the tip of his tongue, wished he could wipe the tears from his eyes.

  ‘You see,’ said Skellor, ‘with the Jain substructure supporting your body, I can do that to you for hours without you going into shock or losing consciousness, or retreating from reality. Of course, if I rewired your brain and body, I could do so much more.’

  Cormac became weightless in his Jain carapace, and slowly black space scrubbed away the indigo seen through the screen. Eventually the colony ship became visible, and Cormac could feel the lander decelerating to dock. Skellor would now have to move him from the lander to the main ship; perhaps he could do something then. The horror –he understood –of occupying the moral high ground, by being prepared to pay so heavy a price, was that this did not except you from actually paying. He knew that, given time, Skellor could destroy that same morality: could turn him into a whimpering thing who would obey the man’s every whim, could turn him into the complete negative of everything he was, and could make him suffer endlessly. Briefly, through the bulwarks of his mind, Cormac glimpsed a void where all that he amounted to meant nothing.

  But he then decided that he must continue to function as if that void could never exist –he must remain an ECS agent to the last.

  Skellor’s mental link to him was very close: he could feel thoughts and memories bleeding over, could feel that the man needed little excuse to cause Cormac pain. He decided to be sparing with sarcasm so as not to provoke the man. He also routed the bleed-over from Skellor’s mind into his gridlink and stored it.

  ‘What are your intentions, other than causing me pain?’ he asked.

  Skellor glanced sideways, and Cormac observed dark movement under the apparently human skin of the man’s face. Whorls of scar tissue now filled the holes Cormac had drilled with his thin-gun into Skellor’s body. Those holes penetrated what appeared to be baroque leathery armour which Cormac realized was actually part of the man. One hole at Skellor’s waist seemed to have become cancerous: scar tissue having welled up and spilled over, setting in a fungal growth containing small egg-shaped nodules. Cormac wondered if this meant Skellor was not entirely in control of the Jain technology, though it seemed more likely that the man just did not care how he looked.

  ‘My intentions,’ Skellor repeated, the question seeming to momentarily confuse him. ‘Perhaps you should try to guess them.’

  Without even thinking about it, Cormac found himself flexing his muscles rhythmically against the hard structure that bound him, just as he would have worked against any conventional bonds. He considered stopping doing this, but didn’t –had to try every possibility.

  ‘I don’t know enough. I don’t know why you came here in search of Dragon. I don’t know if your main motivation is survival or aggression, or if it is something else now utterly alien to me.’

  ‘Suppose it is aggression, what should I do?’

  ‘I don’t think I should give you any ideas you might not have had already.’

  The renewed pain slammed him about, writhing against the entrapping structure. He had freedom to scream. Locked his jaw against it. Eyes open wide, he saw the world with startling clarity: like a blind man achieving vision whilst being burnt at the stake. An age passed, and then another.

  ‘Answer the question.’ Skellor’s voice came out of some dislocated reality.

  It took some seconds for Cormac to realize that the pain was gone, and to reassume control of his organic brain, emerging from those places he had retreated to within his gridlink. Briefly he experienced one of his captor’s memories: a market stall on a world undergoing terraforming, a plastic box containing pieces he recognized as Jain tech, and something else –an egg . . . Cormac dismissed this memory to storage. It was no help to him now.

  ‘I would attack . . .’ he began, then paused as he lost the thread for a moment. ‘You should attack using manufactured viruses, disease, plague, biological warfare. You have the capability to create something to kill people faster than boosted immune systems, autodocs or AI-manufactured counteragents can prevent it. You could also send the virtual versions of all of these against AI.’

  Cormac felt no guilt in saying this to Skellor. If the man had not already thought of these methods of attack, then he had been severely overestimated. And anyway, the Polity had been preparing for as well as countering such attacks from Separatist organizations for centuries now.

  ‘But how would I distribute such plagues? I could never get such things past the biofilters and scanners of the runcible network.’

  ‘You have a ship.’

  The colony ship now appeared as a curved metal horizon viewed through the front screen of the lander and, even as the pain hit again, Cormac heard the hiss and whine of hydraulics, felt the lander judder, and heard docking clamps thump home.

  ‘So I should personally visit each world in turn for the purpose of biological and virtual attack?’ Skellor detached his hand from the console, pushing himself up and away from it. ‘Just how many worlds do you think I’d manage to attack before I ended up with ECS sitting on top of me?’

  Cormac closed his eyes. It felt to him as if someone was sequentially smacking each of his vertebrae in turn with a hammer. He writhed and fought, then suddenly, unbelievably, the Jain substructure binding him began to loosen and move. Hope surged in him as the pain also faded. Then he saw Skellor grinning at him.

  ‘Come with me,’ said the biophysicist.

  Cormac pushed out of the chair, the substructure moving plastically around him like an alien exoskeleton. He turned and propelled himself after Skellor towards the airlock. He had not wanted to move or to obey; it was the structure itself moving him –an exoskeleton controlled from elsewhere. In the lock he stood immobile whilst Skellor subverted the door’s controls. He then wondered why Skellor had used this method to control him, and not simply attached another of those aug insects.

  Hearing his thoughts, Skellor said, ‘Your body is just a machine that I can rebuild any time I like. Your mind I have decided to keep sacrosanct for now. If I destroy it, how can it appreciate its own suffering?’

  The man was lying, Cormac realized that in an instant, but it was knowledge that availed him nothing. The airlock opened and they propelled themselves out of it into the body of the ship. Cormac’s first breath was a dry gasp from the inside of a rusting pipe. In seconds, he was gasping for oxygen. Nevertheless, perpetually on the point of suffocation, he followed Skellor up into the control bridge.

  ‘Of course I won’t allow your body to die for the present, as I don’t want to take the trouble to rebuild it,’ Skellor told him. ‘You’ll not suffocate, though that�
��s how it feels.’

  On the bridge, Skellor impelled Cormac to clean the captain’s chair of the dead man’s sticky remains. Still gasping, he carried out his grim task, glimpsing Skellor inspect the cancerous scar tissue at his own waist. The biophysicist then looked up in irritation and allowed Cormac more freedom. Cormac immediately pulled up the hood of his environment suit, closed the visor, and breathed real air. Skellor had obviously tired of that game. Stacking bones and dried-out skin to one side, the agent observed Skellor remove his thin-gun from some hidden pocket and place it on a nearby console –another more subtle torture. Then the rogue bio-physicist pressed his hand down on the main computer console. After a hiatus, he tilted his head back and issued a sound somewhere between a scream and a snarl.

  23

  It has ever been an instinct to abhor the different and hate the alien, and like many of those human drives stemming directly from ‘selfish genes’ it is one easily controlled or even banished. Human history is littered with hideous crimes, decades of strife and near-genocides because of such drives. It should be different now. Planetary national borders are nonexistent, most people are of evidently mixed race, and they can change their racial appearance and sex at will, or even simply cease to be human. One would suppose this has rendered reasons for hate impotent. Not so. Catadapts will detest rodapts, who in turn are hostile to ophidapts, for no more reason than reflecting a pale imitation of terran predator–prey cycles. Many humans consider AIs an abomination, and many loathe them –as the superior,or rulers,have always been loathed. Pure-bred humans can find haimans repugnant, and haimans can consider pure humans primitive animals. To dispense with these hatreds, we need not to want them. Unfortunately, people cherish their bigotry, misanthropy and animosities, and they don them like well-worn and well-loved clothes.

  –From How It Is by Gordon