Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  Tanaquil wanted to rage at the strange oldster because he saw Fethan as part of Jeelan’s death and the current metallier disaster. Did this now also mean that Tanaquil’s dream was dead, that the entire metallier dream was dead? Would he ever get to stand on the bridge of the Ogygian?

  He wanted to reject the alien –the interfering outside. But Tanaquil had been well educated and was harshly intelligent and, believing the man’s claim to have caused the demise of the horrible enslaving creatures, he could not allow anger to triumph over reason. So only one task remained.

  A short walk from where so many broken corpses lay scattered brought him to an abandoned metallier house. He searched the storage areas underneath it and found a couple of spades. Without question, the old man took the one Tanaquil passed him. In silence, they returned to the charnel house and began to dig. Out of the drifting smoke walked a skinny youth with blond hair, who gaped at his surroundings with raw and horrified eyes.

  ‘Sir, what do we do now?’

  Tanaquil wanted to scream at him –just scream wordlessly.

  ‘Bury them,’ he growled.

  Other people arrived, some to help dig and others carrying weapons to guard against the things shifting in the dark of the Undercity, no doubt lured by the smell of fresh meat. Tanaquil gave no more than that initial instruction. That those who had not heard it carried out his orders anyway he reckoned was due to some residue of that enslaving bond they had all recently felt. The corpses must also be buried or burnt before nightfall, else the place would be crawling with sleers. For Tanaquil the task was endless horror. His head ached horribly, and a liquid kept seeping out of the hole behind his ear. But he wanted Jeelan in the ground, safe from hard mandibles, and a fast closure so that he could again rule his people. It was cold, but otherwise . . . he would just fail.

  To begin with, he just dug in a nightmare fugue, then he began to realize how the older man wielded his shovel with almost impossible ease, excavating huge clumps of the sandy earth and heaving them aside. Fethan paused and shrugged when he noted Tanaquil’s scrutiny.

  ‘Used to dig drainage sluices on Masada,’ he explained.

  Tanaquil nodded, not really understanding. He could push his own blade only half its length into the ground, then had to strain to lever up half a spadeful of earth. Fethan could shove the blade of his tool fully into the soil, as easily as if into a pie, and each time the spade’s solid metal handle flexed alarmingly.

  ‘You talked often with Dragon?’ Fethan suddenly asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever go to the plain?’

  Tanaquil shook his head. He could not speak, and was grateful when Fethan pressed him for nothing more. Together, in silence, they completed the task, then together they laid Jeelan in the hole they had prepared. Her skin was now cold. Tanaquil scrambled from the grave on his hands and knees, and puked acid bile.

  ‘I’ll finish off for you,’ said Fethan.

  ‘No,’ insisted Tanaquil, returning to work. He scooped a spadeful of sandy earth down onto Jeelan’s naked body, once, twice, then staggered away. He couldn’t breathe down here. He could not live in this shadow.

  The world seemed to go away for a while. Past him flashed a chaos of twisted metal, stairs, people shouting questions at him, as he ran. The blimp tower eventually provided refuge and, with no one around, he tried to release that lock inside himself. But again the tears would not come. Instead, he just grew calm and cold, knowing that this was something he could never get over. He did not want to live; didn’t have the will to die.

  ‘Tell me about Dragon,’ a voice intruded.

  Fethan had walked quietly out onto the platform beside which was moored the remaining blimp, perhaps holding back somewhat because Tanaquil was sprawled by a pillar right next to the edge.

  ‘He took the Undercity as his own, right from the beginning,’ said Tanaquil, not even knowing why he was explaining. ‘That was thirty years and four Chief Metalliers ago.’

  ‘About right,’ said Fethan, studying the blimp. ‘The four spheres separated over fifty years ago, solstan.’ He turned to Tanaquil. ‘That’s the mean time of the Human Polity –something you need as a standard when you ship out between the stars, shedding decades like dandruff.’

  Now Tanaquil felt angry because the man had stirred his curiosity. ‘Spheres? Solstan? Human Polity?’

  ‘Dragon’s original form was one of four conjoined and living spheres, each about a kilometre in diameter. They were one being, which then broke into four. One of those four came here.’

  Tanaquil remembered visions from his time of nightmares. He pointed out over the Sand Towers towards the plain. ‘I saw it rise up and leave us. Dragon is gone.’

  Fethan was abruptly up beside him. ‘Perhaps we should go and see.’ He gestured to the blimp.

  There was more here than an interest in Dragon, Tanaquil thought. ‘Why would you want to see?’

  ‘I won’t lie to you. While you have been here I’ve spoken to your people, wandered your city . . . There’s someone I need to find, and that person does not seem to be here. That being the case he is maybe out that way.’ Fethan nodded towards the plain. ‘He’ll always be where the action is.’

  ‘I cannot leave my people.’

  ‘They know you need time. I’ve spoken to some of them.’

  Tanaquil could not summon the energy to argue, and there was something attractive about climbing into the blimp cabin and just sailing away. Perhaps stepping out into the air when the blimp was high was the only way to release the leaden lock in his chest.

  One day, Anderson decided, he might ask Unger Salbec why Bonehead had not fled after the death of Stone when earlier it had panicked and fled, and why it was now prepared to carry him into battle against the droon. He suspected the answer related to sentience. A creature that could come to understand human language was not an animal, and probably possessed motivations equally as complex as those of any human. Possibly Bonehead was embarrassed by its earlier behaviour. Whatever, Bonehead remained steady beneath him, its eyestalks spread like a rifle sight below his lance, which he pointed towards the droon as it stepped delicately into the arena he had chosen. Anderson now studied his opponent.

  The creature stood upright on two chitinous legs, which possessed an extra joint and terminated in feet that were a complex tangle of mismatched digits and hooks. Its tail, counterbalancing its extended upper torso, was ribbed with carapace and square in section, the corners everting so that each of them was sharp as a blade. Halfway down, the tail divided, its twin ends jointed like extra limbs. Carapace also ribbed its upper body, and custard-yellow flesh bulged between ribs, forced out by the distension of its over-full guts. Below its primary arms, it possessed two other sets of limbs that served as either arms or legs. Its primary arms ended in large two-fingered hands. Rows of hooks ran up its forearms to two further digits at its elbows. Its neck, extending from a sloping collar of armour, curved back on itself swanlike underneath its ziggurat head. Four black targeting eyes ran along the lower fold of this head. Six mouths, starting with the largest at the bottom, stepped up its sloping visage to its two distance eyes –slightly protruding and crablike –set at the very top of its head. When it opened its mouths to expose their bright orange interiors its head stretched half its own height again. Then the head snapped down, only the top mouth staying open, and the creature made a coughing hacking sound. It expelled only a mist of acid now, though. Anderson knocked his goad against Bonehead’s carapace and the sand hog began to move forward on its crawler limbs.

  Straight into some of that custard flesh, bulging from its torso, seemed the best target to Anderson. He knew from his studies that the droon possessed insides similar to a sleer’s; its brain being a wormlike organ extending all the way down the length of its body, which obviously made it very difficult to kill with just a head shot. As with sleers, then, his way to kill it was by causing as much internal damage as he could, there being no one partic
ular spot on its body he could target to bring it down.

  ‘Ho, Bonehead! Ho!’

  The sand hog went up on to its main limbs and accelerated, and it seemed to Anderson that only then did the droon become truly aware of their impending attack. Its head stretched again, and it coughed another fog of acid. Then, like a wrestler preparing to meet an opponent, it extended its arms out to either side.

  ‘Ho! Ho!’

  The knight centred his lance perfectly on target. If he did not kill it with this charge, then he would certainly be doing it some serious damage. But, of course, the resolution of a knightly trial was never simple.

  At the last moment the droon brought both its two-fingered hands in and down on Bonehead’s carapace. The sand hog juddered to a halt, its momentum driving the droon back five metres, the monster’s feet cutting furrows in the ground. Anderson slammed against his saddle straps, the saddle itself cracking alarmingly beneath him. The point of his lance went into custard flesh, but not very far at all. Recovering quickly, Anderson leant forward, trying to push it further in, but it was like trying to push a knife into a tree. The droon bellowed, hauled back, nearly snatching the lance from Anderson’s hands because he did not have its back eye over its peg. He clung on grimly, though, pieces of yellow flesh and a squirt of clear fluid following the lance tip out. Then with one hand the droon slapped the lance aside, its head working like upright bellows as it tried to spit acid it did not contain. The air was full of burning droplets.

  ‘Turn to the right! Turn!’ Anderson shouted at Bonehead, dropping any pretence that his goad had any effect on where the hog went. Bonehead had meanwhile attacked low with its feeding head, grabbing one of the droon’s secondary limbs. The hog released this, then pushed away, but the droon grabbed its back end as Bonehead tried to leap away. Then Thorn and Tergal began firing, their shots either thunking into custard flesh or ricocheting off carapace. Anderson was away then, levelling his lance again as Bonehead ran a circuit of the arena, following his thought even before he voiced it.

  The droon turned on the two men, looming above them, pumping its head and bellowing. It could not see Anderson coming in from the side. He levelled his lance point at an exposed area between the two intermediate limbs.

  ‘Yaaah!’

  There came a cracking, ripping sound as two metres of lance penetrated the droon’s body. Then, below the knight, everything dropped away. The next thing he knew he was hanging from the lance, still strapped in his saddle, which had torn away from Bonehead’s back.

  ‘Shit,’ he said succinctly. He tried to reach down to undo his straps, lost his grip on the lance and crashed to the ground. Something smashed hard into the back of his helmet, and little bright lights chased across his vision. Also winded, he still scrabbled for the straps, but could not seem to find them –was falling into a black tunnel. The droon loomed over him, horrible gasping sounds issuing from it, and a different coloured liquid oozing from its six mouths. No matter –it would not need its acid to finish him off now.

  Then suddenly the creature turned away. As he slid into unconsciousness, Anderson glanced aside and saw himself, mounted on Bonehead, charging the droon. Unconsciousness was a welcome escape from this confusion.

  It was like gazing at the world through a darkened lens: a fish-eye vision of whirling stars, a glimpse of the wrecked telefactor and the occasional retreating view of the gas giant. Beside him, entangled with him in the world that could be virtually huge but was in reality a twenty-centimetre lozenge of crystal bound in black metal, Aphran also watched.

  ‘Like a good captain I would have gone down with my ship,’ Jack observed.

  ‘Not quite the same, but perhaps you now understand the psychology.’

  ‘I was humanized, utterly interfaced with my body, accepting it as part of myself and its destruction as my destruction. Interesting. I see that it makes for more efficient attack ships –that investment in the weapon used.’

  ‘The ship itself being the weapon,’ Aphran added.

  ‘You do realize that though you have managed our survival, utterly disconnected like this our resources are limited, and we have some choices to make.’

  ‘What choices?’

  ‘We can remain conscious at the present level of function for about ten years then go into permanent storage, or we can go into permanent storage right now for twenty years.’

  ‘So long. So little.’

  ‘The limit of the microtoks originally employed to run me while I was transferred from the factory to the ship body, which incidentally is now sinking in liquid hydrogen.’

  ‘You have contact?’

  ‘No, just a good grasp of physics. The only extraneous link we have is through the pinhead camera that was attached up at the moment of my inception –the purpose of which was to make me aware that there is an outside world.’

  ‘We could spend those ten years in a virtual world,’ Aphran suggested.

  ‘Such an existence does not interest me.’

  ‘Then let us go to permanent storage now. I don’t think I could keep this same conversation going for ten years.’

  ‘Then goodnight.’

  Blackness.

  The hunter/killer program had waited until he was deeply connected into the systems of the ship, Skellor knew, and now it was coming at him in a flood, plunging data tentacles into his mind, one after another, so he had time only to defend himself. With too much ease, the attack translated into a VR scenario. Here it seemed he grasped the situation more completely as he gained iconic control over his responses. It became almost like some computer game, but a very real one in which he could actually die. The computer system, in the virtuality, became a planetoid of slightly disconnected blocks shot through with tunnels and holes, floating in albescent space. Inside this, Skellor was Kali, armed with swords and axes, shifting blocks and seeking a way out. The kill program –one serpent and sometimes many, sprouting like the necks of Hydra from within the planetoid –patrolled these tunnels, attacking him where it could, its attacks increasing in ferocity the nearer he got to the surface of the planetoid or to gaining some control of its structure.

  Slowly Skellor began to identify which collections of blocks represented which ship systems, and the virtuality allowed him to see that every one of these now had its own place for the serpent. He also saw that the deeper into the system he retreated, the easier things became for him –the less assiduously the program attacked him. Closing up the collection of blocks that was the balance control for the primitive hard-field shielding of the ship in U-space and shutting down any access for the program, he realized that unless the same program had resources available he had yet to detect, it would not be able to kill him nor keep him confined for long. He could only assume that some other plan was in the offing.

  Before he could plumb that, the program attacked again. Four serpents speared out of the blockish informational darkness. Two of them came for Skellor, and two of them went for the structure he had rearranged. The data stream of one attacker he cut off near its source with a just-prepared virus. In the virtuality, his axe went through its neck, the gaping head fell away and the body retreated like a severed air hose. His second blow fell on the neck of his other attacker just as it closed its jaws on his arm, punching its fangs into his pseudoflesh. The neck bent like a cable being struck, but remained undamaged –this data stream having adapted to the virus. His arm immediately began to change colour, as killing data began to load.

  Even as he adapted the virus, he used it swiftly on himself and cut away his poisoned arm. On the back swing, he took off the second serpent’s head before turning to the other two, who seemed busily intent on wrecking his work. Now, knowing the degree of adaptation his viruses needed, he sprouted more axes from his fists and attacked, chopping and hacking in a frenzy. Then, when bleeding segments were drifting all about him, he asked himself why this attack had been so strong.

  Skellor stepped away from the virtual vision of his battl
e and opened his comprehension to an utterly informational level. He realized that the kill programs’ defences were strongest around the hard-field generators, the reactor and the balanced U-space engines of this ship. It wanted to keep him here in orbit of Cull. That being the case, he now made it his prime objective to get away. He probed, tentatively, into the start-up routines for the U-space engines. The reaction he got, like poking a stick into a nest of vipers, confirmed his suspicions. Now, in the virtuality and not limiting himself by human perception, he began gathering his weapons. Turning towards those closely guarded systems, he hurled himself forward thousand-armed, viruses and informational bacilli propagating around him, layered attack programs like swarms of bees, a growing mass then a wall of every informational weapon at his disposal falling on that nest of serpents.

  In a virtual age, he slew the guardians. In real computer time of microseconds, he swamped and subsumed engine control. His diagnostic search informed him of slight misalignments in both engines and hard-fields. It would hurt him, but he would survive –as he had before. The fusion reactor started easily; someone had used it recently. No matter. When enough power was available, he started the fusion engines of the ship. He had no control of navigation, but the ship had been tangential to the planet. Accelerating, burning up rusty water from its fuel tanks as it drove up to ram-scoop speeds, the ship left orbit. One fusion chamber sputtered as the water started to run out, then the ram-scoop fields opened out and began funnelling in hydrogen and other spacial matter to use as fuel.

  Then, achieving sufficient speed relative to the fabric of space, like a speedboat ready to move up onto its hydrofoils, the Ogygian engaged its U-space engines and dropped out of realspace.

  Dragged back against one wall of the bridge, the long-dead captain’s skull still clutched in his right hand and the Jain exoskeleton now rooting into the metalwork around him, Cormac wondered what new torture this was. But agony twisted Skellor’s features, and Cormac’s mind screamed at the flashes of grey infinity beyond the screen –all his human perception could make of underspace. Some instinct made him try to grasp more. He opened up programming space in his gridlink to carry the load, but his mind just kept sliding off. Desperation grew in him, as if his survival depended on his cognizance of this dimension.