Brass Man

by Neal Asher

  This was why Dragon had found itself unable to conceal certain facts for very long. The essence of the transmission, after the initial fencing, had been: ‘Tell me everything, and fast’ –along with the blueprint of one of the Jerusalem’s internal chambers and an overview of the equipment that could be used there. Dragon was left in no doubt that the ship could encompass, immobilize, then dismantle it to see how it ticked.

  That the Jerusalem had dropped into U-space upon learning about the Ogygian was less than reassuring. It meant the AI certainly knew that Dragon would not be escaping and could be dealt with at leisure. The thought of such an AI gaining access to Skellor was frightening. The thought of it obtaining certain items that Skellor would soon be shedding, like a dandelion scattering its seeds in the breeze, was enough to give even a dragon nightmares. But Dragon had no power to affect those events, though one such item, close by, it had aimed to put in safer hands.

  Still on course for Cull, the entity linked through to the flying lizard, which had coiled up to sleep in a sulerbane leaf, the recent stress of expected extinction having obviously exhausted it. Receiving instruction, the creature reared up, shook itself and flew over to the carapace remains of Skellor’s last meal on Cull, landed and looked to where the golden egg had fallen. Dragon was so amused it decided to let the lizard live despite its near contact with Jain technology. Where the egg had lain in the dust, now rested a blue acorn.

  Dragon wondered what the brass man would make of his new toy.

  Others might wonder at the entity’s definition of ‘safer hands’.

  Epilogue

  Fethan stooped down by the dismembered Golem and thought, with morbid humour, I don’t hold out much hope for his recovery. But in this case that might not be true. Gant may have been missing one leg and his head, but memory crystal should contain his essential being inside his Golem chest. However, Jain growth marred that chest, and the Golem had shut down. What this growth might portend was why Fethan and Thorn had insisted on searching alone, and why they had allowed Tanaquil and the boy Tergal to return to Golgoth in the blimp. Fethan contemplated that. The Chief Metallier’s cry of anger on realizing that the colony ship Ogygian no longer occupied the sky had been heart-wrenching – seeing that his one contact with that human civilization he craved to return to had taken his wife and his dreams. Perhaps he might dream new dreams? Certainly the Polity was not finished with this world.

  ‘Are you getting anything?’ Thorn asked.

  Fethan shook his head. ‘I haven’t tried yet.’ Now he did attempt to make contact through Gant’s internal radio – perhaps the dead soldier’s only remaining link to the outside world. But, as before, he found there something vicious that made him jerk away. It was like placing his hand in a dark burrow and hearing some animal snarl. Viral subversion then tracked his signal back – alien Jain code. He shut down his transceiver and isolated it, killing the power to his primary decoder as well.

  ‘I don’t think he’s in there,’ he said.

  ‘We have to be sure,’ Thorn said.

  Fethan shrugged. He liked Gant and had no wish for him to be irrevocably dead, but he had not known the man or the machine for as long as Thorn had. Reluctantly he sent an internal signal and detached the syntheflesh covering of his fingertip. Then, studying Gant’s neck, he discounted all the severed optics. Selecting instead a small duct containing hair-thin superconducting filaments, he pressed his fingertip against the break. Through nerve linkages in his fingertip, the kill program made connections and found its way through to the Golem’s crystal storage. The program did not transcribe this time, as it only needed to look. Fethan felt an ache growing in his right shoulder and arm. Psychosomatic it might be, but it still bothered him. Finally the program made its assessment:

  Your friend is gone. There is nothing recognizably human in here, only Jain code and its need to survive and spread.

  At that moment the Golem’s hands came up, tracked up Fethan’s arm by touch and closed on his throat. But this availed it nothing, for the old cyborg’s throat was hard. He caught both wrists and pushed the groping hands away, propelling himself rapidly backwards.

  ‘Gant is gone,’ he said.

  With a metallic crunching, the Golem body folded back on itself, then arched up and thrust itself towards Fethan. This, more than anything, confirmed the program’s diagnosis: for the Jain inside was forcing the Golem body into something tripodal, something with no physical relation at all to the human race. Thorn immediately swung Fethan’s APW to bear and opened fire. The three-limbed beast bounced in red flame. Syntheflesh burning away, it hopped and bounced like a spider in a lighter flame. Thorn hit it again, and again. Limbs came away until eventually it was still. Thorn then approached the broken torso and, drawing a knife he had acquired aboard the blimp, probed inside and at last levered out the lozenge of Gant’s erstwhile mind.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Fethan asked.

  Thorn did not reply. He placed the mind on a rock, brought the butt of his weapon hard down on it. Then, perhaps remembering Mr Crane, he ground the fragments to dust and scattered it.

  ‘We’ll leave the rest for the clear-up crews,’ said Thorn. ‘They’ll be all over this place soon. Let’s head back to the city.’

  Yes, thought Fethan, realizing he would not himself be leaving any time soon. Tanaquil would be needing some help during the time to come.

  The sun was setting in a greenish explosion, and occasional stars beginning to brave the firmament. His armour stripped off and hanging, along with his other belongings, on temporary pegs epoxied to the side of Bonehead’s carapace, Anderson Endrik trudged towards a new horizon. His legs were aching from this unaccustomed exercise, but he would get used to it – it wasn’t as if he was old or anything. He had just gone a few rounds with one of the fiercest creatures on this planet. However, he was averse to stopping again, no matter how entitled he was to rest. It was difficult pretending not to notice how, each time he did stop, the sand hog extruded its sensory head to observe him and tapped a little tattoo on the ground with the tip of one crawler limb.

  The devastation of broken rock on the draconic plateau was far behind, which was annoying as it now took him a little while to spot a suitable rock on which to sit. When he did see one, he sank down with a sigh – his back towards Bonehead – then used a cloth to mop the sweat from his bald pate.

  It was a shame about Tergal leaving. Once over his criminal tendencies, the boy had shown promise. But Tergal had claimed he still had issues to resolve with his stepfather and mother. This was good as it meant the boy was back on track, and Anderson was not going to stand in his way even though he felt the youth’s departure was only partially about that. Tergal had lost his sense of fun while the droon had hunted them, and then lost heart when it had killed Stone. Anderson guessed that, travelling by blimp,Tergal and the others would be halfway back to Golgoth by now. Had Anderson chosen to accompany them, he himself could have been perhaps a quarter of the way back towards Bravence. He had not so chosen.

  After taking a sip from his water bottle, Anderson asked of his travelling companion, ‘How far, again?’

  Seated on her rucksack, Arden glanced across at him. ‘Five thousand kilometres.’

  ‘And then you’ll take this ship up, and go to this Polity?’

  ‘Certainly, unless I encounter somewhere more interesting before I reach it.’ Arden shrugged.

  ‘Room for a sand hog on this ship?’

  ‘I’m sure we can manage something – that’s if Bone-head wants to come.’

  ‘Well, he can decide when we get there, and that’ll be a while yet.’ Anderson stared up at the sky and saw that it was not only ribbons of cloud and the odd star that occupied it now.

  ‘And you?’ Arden asked.

  Anderson heaved himself to his feet, pointed above his head. ‘Oh, I’ve already decided. My world just got a lot larger.’

  Tanaquil carefully read the lengthy report from Stollar. A g
reat deal of advanced technology had become available to them from the landing craft: computing power, components they were yet unable to manufacture and systems they could directly copy rather than reconstruct from ancient schematics. Five craft were quite probably still operational, though it would take them some time to learn how to operate them, and perhaps one more could be constructed from the other damaged ones. But in the end, to what purpose now? Ogygian was gone, a dream had been destroyed . . .

  Jeelan is dead.

  Tanaquil rested his face in his palms. Now, maybe, that dream was no longer needed. Two citizens from this Human Polity were out there somewhere in the Sand Towers, and that Polity now knew about this world. Stollar was quite enthusiastic about this, but Tanaquil could find no enthusiasm inside himself, no room for hope. Perhaps that was because he resented Stollar, who had miraculously survived a fall similar to the one that had killed Jeelan. He took his hands away from his face before reaching out, turning on his desk lamp, then opening another report. His eyes remained dry.

  Gyrol had organized a guard for those burying the dead because sleer activity had meanwhile increased tenfold. A great deal of wreckage had been cleared from the spot where a lander had crashed into the lower city, and those that required shelter had been housed in warehouses in the industrial district. Medical teams were working night and day to disinfect and sew shut the head wounds nearly every citizen bore. They would recover, regroup, and then . . . and then.

  The Human Polity?

  Tanaquil shook his head as if to dispel shadows. Everything was black: depression constricted his mind and sapped his strength, his will. The excitement that was now displacing shock in the likes of Stollar and Gyrol seemed utterly inaccessible to him. He would just do his job, keep going. There wasn’t anything else. Then a knock at his door broke his reverie.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Stollar and Gyrol,’ replied Stollar, some tension clear in his voice.

  ‘Come in.’

  The two men entered, Stollar resting heavily on a cane, Gyrol still in his kilnsman gear and lugging one of the small telescopes and a tripod from Stollar’s tower.

  Stollar looked around the dark room, focused on the shutters pulled across the windows and the closed balcony doors. He glanced meaningfully at Gyrol as he pointed at these.

  ‘What is it? I’ve got a lot to do,’ said Tanaquil.

  ‘You haven’t seen – no, obviously not. Perhaps we should step out onto your balcony,’ Stollar replied.

  Tanaquil didn’t want them here, he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, but something in both of their expressions pulled him to his feet. Stollar moved over to the balcony doors, unlatched and pulled them open. Perhaps some new collapse in the lower city? Tanaquil dared not think otherwise. He stepped out into the dark after the old man, Gyrol following close behind and stepping to one side to set up the telescope. Tanaquil surveyed his city, seeing only the fires being fed by those horrible grey lice-things.

  ‘Look up, Chief Metallier,’ said Stollar.

  Tanaquil did as instructed – a telescope was hardly required. Bright leviathans filled the sky, immense ships that would have dwarfed Ogygian. One vast ship, almost like a steel moon, hung clearly in view. Smaller ships were jetting in between. Other ships, smaller still but seeming large because they loomed so close, were coming down. Tanaquil gaped, felt the blackness around him dispersing under the impact of this vision, something breaking in his chest. He bowed his head and felt it coming, felt Stollar’s hand momentarily on his shoulder before he and Gyrol returned inside to give him space. He moved forwards and rested his hands on the rail as grief heaved out of him. He did not know how long this lasted. One of the ships, a thing consisting of four spheres mounted at the end of star arms, drifted over the city, its correction jet flames stabbing out. Tanaquil reached up and touched the tears pouring down his face, then wiped them away. The pain was still there – he doubted it would ever go away completely. He returned inside to where Stollar and Gyrol waited.

  ‘Our world is going to change drastically,’ he said, ‘but we will not allow that change to swamp us, to erase what we have done or what we are. We have work to do, so let’s begin.’

  It was virtuality, illusion, for no projector could get close, and what point would there be in projecting holograms to that place anyway? But there was a point to this; Jack felt there was a point. Perhaps he was too much of an aesthete. Perhaps there was too much conceit in this, and just maybe Dragon owned that same conceit as much as himself and Aphran.

  Whatever, Jack and the erstwhile Separatist walked on the surface of the brown dwarf. Dragon, who had rescued them just before they departed the Cull system but seemed reluctant to give them up to Jerusalem or any of the other Polity AIs patrolling this still-enclosed sector of space, seemed not to be present at all – granting them this illusory space and a definite moment of satisfaction.

  ‘He makes a pretty pattern,’ said Aphran, eyeing the silvery spirals and ellipses inlaid in the super-dense surface.

  ‘He does that. And it is a pattern that is changing.’

  ‘What?’ Aphran looked up.

  Jack pointed. ‘Those ellipses are compressed Jain nodes. They won’t change, apparently, unless removed from this environment. They require a host and a motivating will. The rest is him still trying to survive, still trying to return himself to order.’

  ‘He’s alive? He thinks?’

  ‘In a sense, and slowly.’

  ‘Will he get away from here?’

  Jack allowed himself a hangman’s smile. ‘Not in the lifetime of this universe.’

  A golden egg clasped in one brass hand, Mr Crane walked the dusty plateaux, shady canyons and ragged mountain chains of Cull. Like a knight who slew a dragon, he slid from cold reality into bar yarn, and very quickly into legend. Those who saw that tall striding figure, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and with the bottom of his long ragged coat flapping about his lace-up boots, often agreed that a flying creature accompanied him – one much like some seen in the spaceport being built just outside Golgoth. Perhaps they thought this extra touch added veracity to their assertion that they had actually seen Mr Crane. Others pretended to believe these witnesses with the same patronizing kindness with which they believed those who claimed to have seen the Inconstant Sea.

  What they had seen was real, sort of, in a sense . . .