Brass Man ac-3

by Neal Asher

  ‘Skellor… technical ability? He could easily build an arm to mirror the one Crane already possesses.’

  ‘Yes, he could but, underneath all that ugly Jain technology and his crystal matrix AI, there is one thing about Skellor that must not be forgotten.’

  ‘What one thing must not be forgotten?’

  ‘That he is a complete bastard.’

  ‘Query: weakness?’

  ‘It was before—couldn’t resist the urge to gloat. Now, what are Thorn and Gant doing right now, and why the fuck am I talking to one of your subminds, anyway?’

  After a long pause, Jack’s more familiar voice replied, ‘Sorry about that—otherwise occupied. Gant is waiting outside Medical. Unfortunately, while you were sleeping Thorn collapsed and is now undergoing surgery to remove his mycelium.’

  Cormac began pulling on his clothes. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you because to do so would achieve nothing of value. I suspect Gant had other concerns to occupy him—like resuscitating his friend, then carrying him to Medical.’

  No need to get tetchy, Cormac replied over his gridlink, as he stepped to his cabin door. Then, as he headed for the dropshaft, he accessed Jack at a lower level, to try for a visual link to wherever the surgery was taking place.

  Ah, I was apprised of this new ability of yours.

  Cormac grunted, as almost with physical force the AI rebuffed his attempt.

  I just want to know what’s going on.

  Over the intercom, Jack replied, ‘ Patran Thorn has shown some need for privacy in this matter and he shall have it. If security was of any concern, or this procedure had any bearing on the mission in hand, you would be given full access.’

  Reaching the dropshaft, Cormac hesitated over the control. It surprised him just how worried he was about Thorn, and with what urgency he wanted to be at the man’s side. But he clamped down on that. In truth, he was in the best hands—if hands they were.

  Out loud, Cormac said, ‘Okay, keep me apprised, but tell Gant I want him on the bridge. Now, are you running that trace?’

  ‘I am. It will probably be some minutes before we receive a reply.’

  ‘Instantaneous communication?’

  ‘Only when you instantly know precisely what to say.’

  Cormac snorted and set the control of the shaft to take him to the bridge. When he finally stepped out of the shaft, it was below a sky only lightly dusted with stars, and with Gant charging along behind him.

  ‘What is it?’ Gant asked.

  Cormac studied him. The soldier’s mind was human, but directly recorded into a crystal matrix inside a Golem body, and Cormac wondered just how real was the worry evident in his expression. But then the same doubt could be applied to any genuine living human’s expression of emotion. In all cases it was what you did that counted, not what was going on in your mind.

  ‘How is he?’ he asked.

  Gant shook his head. ‘Alive—but he’ll be going into cold sleep soon.’

  ‘You’ll get him back.’

  Now expressionless, Gant said, ‘Why have we dropped out of U-space?’

  ‘Symmetry,’ said Cormac tersely. ‘Skellor has gone after Crane’s missing arm—the arm Cento now possesses.’

  ‘Arrogant… and stupid.’

  ‘He would perhaps consider himself as being utterly capable and in control.’ Cormac turned to scan the bridge. As if in response to this, Jack’s automaton stood up from its chair with that cog-grinding clockwork sound and its eyes glittering. ‘Jack, I’d like to talk to Aphran again.’

  The AI didn’t reply. Instead, the automaton just slumped, its eyes going out. A line then cut down beside Cormac, and the young Aphran folded out of the air.

  ‘Does Skellor know you’re still… existing?’ he asked her bluntly.

  ‘I told him about the light—when it was too late.’

  ‘So he does?’

  Aphran just hung there, not reacting to that.

  Cormac bit back his frustration. ‘Okay, leave that. Was he aware just how much you know of his plans?’

  ‘He did not know how close I was to him, and when he ejected the bridge pod of the Occam Razor, he thought to leave me behind. I hid from him, but stayed close. Close in the dark.’

  Cormac turned to Gant, who was staring off to one side of the drawing room where something new had appeared. Glancing over, Cormac saw that Jack had now added an electric chair to his collection here. He grimaced. ‘Let’s try to ignore the distractions.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Gant, pulling his attention back.

  Cormac paused, then went on, ‘Assume Skellor doesn’t know about her. When he departed on the Vulture, he would have known we would find the bridge pod and realize he was still alive. But to his mind we’d have no idea of his destination or intentions, and our chances of finding him would be minimal. He will think that all he has to avoid is a general search for him across a massive and ever-increasing volume of space.’

  Gant said, ‘He probably thinks that we’ll assume he’s fled.’

  ‘Quite. So he’ll believe he’s got plenty of time on his hands, and much room in which to manoeuvre—that’s why he feels he can play. In his own estimation he is a very powerful being who can travel at will, without risk of discovery, inside and outside the Polity. He’ll never consider himself the subject of direct pursuit.’

  ‘And we don’t want him to learn that, because then he might run and hide.’

  ‘I have now received information concerning Cento,’ Jack suddenly piped up.

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ said Cormac, eyeing Aphran who now appeared as if just this brief interrogation had worn her down to the bone.

  ‘The Golem was sent on a simple mission to confirm the discovery of an ancient artefact, and has been out of contact ever since—though this is not unusual, as no provision was made for a communication link to be maintained. The sector AI has since failed to establish contact with the carrier shell.’

  ‘Carrier shell?’ said Gant.

  Jack continued, ‘A landing vessel inside a U-space carrier was sent out to the location of the artefact. Both are the private property of an archaeological foundation; both are over two hundred years old and sub-AI. The landing vessel, as well as not possessing U-space engines, does not possess a U-space transmitter.’

  ‘Jack,’ said Cormac, ‘forget Viridian and take us there. I think that’s where we’ll find a fresher trail.’ Now he looked across at the electric chair: ‘And, Jack, you need to get out more.’

  * * * *

  Streaks of magma, across the hull of the survey ship, radiated in vacuum as they cooled. The carrier shell, hanging in space before it like a huge iron nut—with the hole through its centre shaped to the wedge of the survey ship rather than threaded for some giant bolt—had cooled already. Cento supposed he had expected something like this, and analytically he studied the hole punched through the side of the shell, and the radial splashes of molten metal all around it. Either Skellor’s ship carried kinetic weapons, or the man had grappled some piece of debris in this system and flung it at the shell. How he had achieved this did not matter. The result was all that was important right now: all its systems were down and it seemed likely that the craft would never again be used to transport ships through U-space. Nevertheless, Cento steered the little ship into the docking hole. Three of the ten automatic clamps engaged, and the ship was then lined up to the airlock and the fuelling and recharging systems, but the ship’s arrival initiated no further activity. Cento unstrapped and propelled himself into the back of the vessel. At least now he did not have gravity to fight.

  The airlock of the little vessel mated with that of the carrier shell but the shell door, even though running on an independent power supply, would not open. Whatever system it ran on was intelligent enough to recognize that the ship contained no air, yet not bright enough to figure that its only occupant had no need to breathe. Restraining what emulation of frustration he could achieve
, Cento returned to the cockpit and switched the computer back on. Through its screen it obligingly informed him that there was no air in the ship, but that a number of options were available to him.

  ‘Stupid machine,’ he mouthed in vacuum, and instructed the computer to repressurize the vessel. Then he returned to the airlock, to wait out the long minutes before the carrier lock opened. He swore aloud when the door still refused to open, this time because there was no air inside the carrier shell itself, and went to find what tools he might require. Three hours later, he finally got through the door.

  Fire had scoured the inside of the shell, blasted around the ring-shaped transit tubes by the explosive impact. Propelling himself three quarters of the way round, he eventually found where the object had struck, and peered into the well the impact had drilled through the station. Skellor’s shooting had been admirably accurate. Whatever the object, it had cut right through one of the three balanced U-space engines and taken out the main fusion generator. In one respect, Cento considered himself lucky: at least the generator had merely failed rather than detonated—had that been the case there would be no shell here at all. He propelled himself across the cavity and into the transit tube beyond. Coming at last to the place he was seeking—a simple sliding door—he drove the blade of his hand with such force at the thin lamination of metal and insulation that it punched through without any reaction propelling him away. In a minute, he had torn a hole large enough to climb through.

  The room contained a console, holojector and camera, as well as optic feeds leading to the outside of the shell. Nothing seemed damaged here, though he had no idea what condition the exterior emitter was in. Reaching down, he tore away the tattered remains of his hotsuit, then his similarly damaged syntheskin. Groping inside his gut, he found a shielded power cable, tracked it up into his chest and unplugged it. His vision dimmed and his movements slowed, but not enough to prevent him plugging the cable into the universal adaptor underneath the console. Immediately the device’s displays lit.

  With slow precision, he pressed the touch sequence for a diagnostic check, and soon found the U-space transmitter to be in perfect working order. Using the keyboard, he typed out the message he wanted to send, and the all-important coordinates. Now it was time to send—and to sleep. He instructed the device to transmit continuously until it received an acknowledgement. He had time only to reach out and clamp his hand shut on the handle beside the console before his artificial consciousness left him—the transmitter using up the bulk of his own power output.

  * * * *

  The quarantine pod Mika had occupied, along with all its equipment, had been destroyed in one of Jerusalem’s fusion furnaces, then the surrounding area had been scanned down to the molecular level and classified at ‘contamination level 5’. She already knew that anything coming into contact with Jain technology could never be classified as clean. She now occupied a work station where she studied, by proxy, the mycelium on the bridge pod, which the AI was holding at not much above absolute zero.

  ‘There is stuff here,’ she gazed at a screen, ‘that could probably be called picotech. In fact much of it can only be extrapolated, as we haven’t the instruments to study it directly.’

  ‘That is not so unfeasible—my own etched-atom processors come under that classification,’ replied the disembodied voice of Jerusalem.

  Mika nodded, then walked over to the partial VR immersion frame, which was her main tool of study. She backed into the frame and it closed about her arms and legs, gloved her hands and closed its cowl down over her face. The immersion here was partial because it did not engage all her senses, only her sight, her hearing and the touch of her hands. She would go to total immersion if she ever needed to smell Jain-tech—or have sex with it.

  In VR, she suddenly occupied a vast plenum below a flat white sky. Beside her floated the multicoloured cubes, tetrahedrons, spheres and other Euclidian solids of her main controls. She reached out, touched one face of a heptahedron, and broke it into a rainbow of pyramids. Taking hold of the blue one, she said, ‘Image.’

  Immediately the nanoscope view she had been earlier studying on a screen spread out before her like a mountain range. Manipulating the icon she held, then a sphere she selected out of the air, she transplanted a single large molecule and expanded it hugely before her, whilst wiping out the original view. ‘Just on the molecular level this alone will take me days of processing time to work out, and having done that I’ll only know what it can do by itself, not how it interacts with the billions of others that make up this mycelium.’

  ‘Yes, it’s like studying DNA.’

  Mika glanced at the silver eyeless head which Jerusalem favoured as a representation of itself. She continued, ‘Worse than that. At least with DNA you know that its function remains at the molecular level — nothing smaller than that.’

  Jerusalem paused before replying. ‘There are those who would disagree with you concerning DNA, but that’s moot. You did manage to ascertain the purpose of a chain of these molecules, and from them create the mycelium that kept Apis Coolant and yourself alive.’

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent guesstimation of its overall purpose, and in the end I got it wrong anyway.’

  ‘Nevertheless…’

  Mika gazed up at the huge edifice: each atom was something she could take in her hand. She turned a small virtual control and revolved the giant molecule. For some people she supposed that the complexity of the task ahead would be intimidating, but despite her words she only felt excitement at the prospect. Already she had spoken to other researchers on the Jerusalem, and discovered that they felt much the same. And there were thousands of them aboard, each studying one small facet of Jain technology, one piece of the 3D jigsaw, while Jerusalem itself put it all together.

  Selecting a red coin with an ouroboros on its face, Mika started a program designed by the AI, which ran a virtual analysis of the molecule. Dropping down like a net, a cubic grid of glowing lines now enclosed it. The program selected some cubes and detached the atomic structures they enclosed from the main body, and turned them in mid-air, spitting formulae and reams of data like glyph-written insect wings. Beside her, flat screens rose out of the virtual floor and began displaying the results as they came through. Selecting from an arc of coloured coins bearing Life-coven icons, she began running those results through her own programs, then back again and around. Testing scenarios and a vast range of environmental parameters, she began to plumb the theoretical function of the molecule. Sometimes her theories collapsed under virtual tests, sometimes they survived.

  A wizard surrounded by visible spells and conjured jewels, she worked faster and narrowed her focus. She saw that, in an oxidizing atmosphere, part of the atomic structure—in the same manner as a pigment such as haemoglobin—collected oxygen. It then acted as a catalyst, using the oxygen to burn the molecule into any solid substance it touched. Hours later she realized that the metallic atoms in the molecule caused an ionization process in some substances, complementing the burning process. Simply put, a visible quantity of this compound would act like a potent ever-active acid. But even that wasn’t enough, it seemed. Mika started to get excited when she saw what it did to carbon: forming it into buckytubes as it ate its destructive course. This was already familiar to her from Polity nanotechnology.

  ‘The drilling head, and the cable layer.’ she stated abruptly.

  Jerusalem, having silently disappeared from beside her, now reappeared. ‘Part of it, yes. D’nissan, Colver and James are each working on other parts.’ With that, three other greatly enlarged molecules appeared high up, like lumpish moons. ‘The molecule you are studying will not, for example, work in vacuum. D’nissan has discovered a molecule that uses nanoscopic ionization entirely, it being fed electric current from the main body of the Jain structure, whilst Colver has found a metallobuckytube that drills mechanically.’ As the AI spoke, each function it described appeared briefly in VR representation to one side, then faded; Jerus
alem thus signifying that her fellows’ research results were available to her should she require them.

  ‘What about James?’ Mika asked distractedly, then suddenly realizing what she had said, was delighted at how naturally the question had slid from her tongue.

  ‘Susan James has found a molecular structure similar to yours, but which lays angstrom-width optical tubes inside larger buckytubes of doped carbon, which itself acts as a superconductor.’

  ‘Hell,’ said Mika, staring with fascination at the view of said molecule in action.

  ‘Indeed,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘Even so, due to this research, Polity science has probably advanced in just the last hour as much as it would have done in ten years without it.’

  ‘You know,’ said Mika, realizing she had only ascertained the function of about ten per cent of her molecule, ‘we could learn a lot more, and much quicker, if we could study this in action.’

  ‘That is a very dangerous course.’

  ‘Yes, it is, but we can isolate the technology from the media it requires to spread and, if that fails, you’ve got ships out there with imploder missiles…’

  ‘This has already been discussed,’ said Jerusalem.

  ‘And a conclusion was come to,’ Mika stated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dammit! What was the conclusion?’

  Jerusalem replied, ‘That unless we learn quickly, we die quickly.’

  * * * *

  Gravfields of four gees, the maximum the dropshaft could attain, tried to snatch them from the ladder. Crane closed his hands with enough force to crush the metal rungs, his coat sagging about him and his hat stretching low over his forehead. Skellor gripped hard as each wave swept past them, then continued to climb once it was past, treacly fibres snapping from each hand as he released it from where he had bound himself to the ladder. From below came the screams of those who—not warned through the Dracocorp network—had stepped unthinkingly into the shaft. Further below, impacted human debris accumulated.