Brass Man ac-3

by Neal Asher

  ‘A strange name, and a very brief answer to my question,’ the woman had said, gesturing to the window and towards the lander outside.

  ‘I am from what is called the Polity, and am here hunting the same person as these fellows.’ Cormac indicated the two guards.

  ‘You’re a policeman from Earth?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Damn.

  A second signal keyed in from a telefactor lying tilted on a mountain slope. Even though the machine was half blinded, Cormac still saw a vision of hell: molten rock and glowing embers, fires consuming seared vegetation in a deep valley and throwing up columns of black smoke. Then a third signal keyed in from one high in the air over endless desert, and a fourth from a ‘factor slowly tracking through tumbled stone ruins. He shunted all they were sending to storage and awaited the fifth signal—from the telefactor investigating the nearby city—but it stubbornly refused to come. He returned his attention to the woman, who sat there seemingly at a loss as to how to continue after his affirmation.

  He enquired, ‘Kilnsman Astier questioned you about any unusual people you might have seen. You said you did see someone, but were apparently reticent about exactly what you saw. Could you describe this individual to me?’

  ‘I’m not even sure he was real… things I saw… but now…’ She gestured towards the window again.

  ‘Tell me it all,’ said Cormac. ‘Leave nothing out — and be assured there’s not much I won’t believe.’

  Chandle then told him about her encounter with a man who could make himself invisible: what he said, how he looked, when it occurred. As she went on to talk about the explosions in the Sand Towers, he held up his hand. ‘I know about that. Can you tell me any more about this man?’

  She shook her head. ‘He just disappeared—heading towards the city.’

  As Cormac stood from the table, Chandle asked, ‘What is he?’

  ‘Something horrible,’ Cormac replied.

  Heading towards the city.

  As he left the roadhouse Cormac looked up as a shadow drew across him, and observed the first of two blimps descending between him and the lander. He picked up his pace, speculating that the blimps had to be hydrogen-filled, as he doubted they possessed the technical capacity here to refine that quantity of helium. In his gridlink, he skimmed an overview of that sort of primitive technology, and discovered he was right. Drawing closer, he saw the armed metalliers stepping out of the suspended cabin, noted their raggedy look — and the objects clinging behind their ears.

  Idiot!

  It was like a slap to him when he recollected exactly why his gridlink had been deactivated not so many years ago: it interfered with his functioning as an agent of Earth Central, crippled his humanity and his ability to assess human situations. And like an addict coming back to his favourite drug, he had taken to it again oh so quickly, and had so quickly forgotten. The telefactor at the city was not functioning. Skellor had gone there: a man more ruthless than any AI and possessing a technology capable of turning people into mere extensions of himself. Cormac broke into a run, circling the figures now disembarking from the balloon’s cabin and flinging Shuriken up as a guard between himself and them.

  Gant! He’s here! he sent to the Golem.

  Gant was into the lander and then out again in a flash, a pulse-rifle up and aimed. Weapons fire slammed into him, knocking him back staggering. He returned fire, killing several metalliers running towards him. Of those coming towards Cormac, one spun round, his body cut cleanly in half at the waist, and another toppled with his head separating on a fountain of blood. Shuriken was whickering in sharp mechanical delight. The other blimp was drawing overhead and Cormac ran in its shadow. He reached inside his coat and drew his thin-gun, for its shots burned whereas Shuriken only cut. Suddenly a cloud of light erupted, washing heat across him, flinging people along the ground. Gant had acted on the idea before Cormac did, and the first balloon was now explosively on fire. Shielding his face, Cormac reached the lander and ducked through the door. He recalled Shuriken, and it flashed inside to thrum above him just before Gant too dived through the door. Cormac palmed the lock plate as Gant leapt into the pilot’s chair.

  ‘Get us out of here!’

  The lander began to rise, tilting to miss the second blimp. Cormac ignored the sound of small-arms fire, because it could cause no damage, but he felt a sinking sensation when something heavy hit the hull.

  ‘We’ve got a passenger,’ observed Gant leadenly.

  * * * *

  Ten of the twelve landers departed Ogygian, the remaining two being unable to break away from the frozen docking clamps. Fethan shaded his eyes, more out of long-acquired habit than from any need to protect them, just as a second lander detonated far ahead and to his right. Clinically he then observed the remains of an ion-drive nacelle go gyrating past, and listened to the patter of other debris against the hull.

  Cento? he queried.

  It had been the Golem’s idea that they go down in separate landers, so spreading the odds that one of them might reach the surface intact and survive to tell the tale.

  No, I wasn’t in that one, the Golem replied over their internal radio link. They could not use the ship-to-ship communicators because that would have alerted Skellor to their presence. Just as, much to Fethan’s chagrin, neither of them could interfere with the landers’ automatic systems to make corrections. Though if it was a choice between that and dying in a conflagration because the vessel hit atmosphere at the wrong angle, then interfere he would.

  Any clue where we’re going to put down? he asked.

  Too far out to calculate vectors, but I’d guess the target is that city and that, once we’re close enough, a landing program will cut in and bring us down in the flatlands right before it. Certainly, no auto-program would attempt a landing in the terrain lying behind it.

  If those programs work.

  Fethan sat back, feeling the perished synthetic padding of the seat cracking and breaking as he shifted against the frayed strap holding him in place, and wondered what they would do once they did reach the surface. Maybe by bearding Skellor up here Fethan and Cento would have been risking their lives pointlessly, but merely surviving to tell ECS what had occurred here Fethan did not like either. Maybe he was mostly ceramoplastics and metals, but that did not make him just a damned recording machine. He thought then about the other, even larger, battles.

  Ships—ECS ships—had entered the system, employed a USER, then proceeded to attack the Jack Ketch. Instinctively he felt that these attacking ships had to be renegades, but he could not even be sure of that. Maybe Jack had somehow stepped over the line, and ECS had sent these ships to destroy him? Fethan suspected the chances of actually arresting a warship were remote. Whatever, that was a conflict completely beyond his own capabilities, one in which the ships would employ moon-fragmenting and AI-mind-bending weapons in some huge lethal ballet where nanosecond decisions vitally counted. Down on the surface there was perhaps some other conflict in the offing? Skellor was probably still in the city, operating the message laser, and Cormac was almost certainly closing in on him. The agent needed to know everything Fethan now knew.

  We’ll have to go into the city to see if we can link up with Cormac and Gant. Maybe we’ll be able to deal with Skellor before it comes to the kill program back at the ship springing its trap.

  Perhaps it would be better to pull back and let Skellor come. The interference to Cento’s signal, as much as the actual words, told Fethan he had been duped.

  You’re still aboard Ogygian, aren’t you? he said.

  More distant now, Cento replied, My feelings are all emulation, but still I feel the need for vengeance. Skellor must pay for… ayden, Hou… and … ss.

  Who?

  … burnt them… them all… no … be so cruel.

  What are you talking about?

  Cento spoke more, but Fethan understood none of it, as the transmission now broke up completely.

  *
* * *

  The thing about watching watchers, Vulture felt, was that no one had invented a greater exercise in futility. She was bored out of her avian skull and beginning to do the most ridiculous things to keep herself entertained. Baiting sleer nymphs out from under the rubble pile located on the opposite side of the outcrop to where the telefactor rested had not been the brightest idea, but at least she had only lost a few feathers. The current game was one recalled from her inception memory banks, and was another pointless exercise almost Zen-like in its futility. Having drawn out the grid on the flat surface of the slab using a piece of natural chalk with an attractive greenish tint deriving from local copper compounds, Vulture picked up a pebble in her beak, tossed it ahead of her, and proceeded with her game of hopscotch. Within a few minutes she was wondering about making the whole thing more interesting by using a sleer nymph rather than a stone. It was then that a shadow drew across her.

  ‘If your tunnels extend all the way out here,’ she grumbled, ‘then why am I out here watching that lump of fucking scrap? One of your pseudopods could have done it as easily.’

  The Dragon head above was not very forthcoming. It tilted for a moment to inspect the hopscotch grid, before returning its attention to Vulture. ‘You like games.’

  ‘The alternative was twiddling my thumbs.’ Vulture stretched out her wings and gave a loose-jointed shrug.

  ‘I have a new game for you to play. Win it and you die, lose it and someone else begins to live.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all just plus points for me then,’ said the ex-ship’s AI acerbically.

  ‘Do what I want and I will consider all debts repaid, and you will then be free.’

  Vulture wondered for the nth time about just flying away, but was not so stupid as to be fooled by her apparent freedom—no doubt there was some sneaky little program sitting inside her, ready to press in the point of a dagger when she did not choose to cooperate.

  ‘How about if I say screw you?’ she asked, just to be sure.

  Dragon tilted this one head, milky saliva dripping from one side of its mouth. ‘Then I take back the flesh you have borrowed, even though it has no thumbs.’

  ‘Okay.’ Vulture hopped back along the length of her grid; one talon, two talons, then a beat of her wings to carry her up on top of the rock she frequented in order to check that the telefactor had not moved. ‘Tell me about it.’

  Dragon described a game—a kind of three-dimensional chess and Rubik’s cube all in one—and how Vulture must play it. The description came across in no human language or machine code previously known to Vulture, but she understood it, was fascinated, and a little horrified by what it all implied for an AI like herself. It meant there was a hell for her kind.

  ‘But why?’ Vulture eventually asked. ‘Why not just destroy the damned machine?’

  ‘Because I can,’ Dragon replied cryptically.

  * * * *

  Cormac held up his arm and, with merely thought, recalled Shuriken to its holster. Okay, he’d found the snake in the woodpile; now the trick was to pull its fangs without it biting him, blindfolded. ‘Set it on auto—the direction we’re going.’

  Gant did as instructed, then scrambled from his seat.

  Cormac stepped over to a plastic box secured along one wall and opened it. Inside, neatly packed, was equipment he might need. He quickly found two APW carbines and tossed one to Gant.

  ‘Narrow focus, and try not to hit anything that’s keeping us in the air.’

  Gant adjusted the weapon accordingly and peered at the ceiling.

  Cormac placed his own carbine at his feet and from the box removed a smaller brushed-aluminium case. He opened that to reveal the three innocuous-looking cylinders of CTDs. Taking one out he studied its detonator: a programming miniconsole and a single touchpad. Pressing his thumb against the pad, he got ‘Ribonucleic coding …’ on a little screen, then ‘Accepted’ and the miniconsole activated. Just then, violet light ignited inside the landers as Gant punched holes through the ceiling where silvery filaments were growing in the metal. The lander filled with smoke and with flares of disintegrating metal.

  Cormac dredged calm from deep inside himself. Setting the CTD for timed detonation, he gave it one minute and shoved it under a folded environment suit. He then took out two AG harnesses.

  ‘Here, put it on.’ He tossed one harness to Gant, then took up a carbine. Just then came the whoomph of the door seals disengaging. Instead of using the carbine, Cormac drew his thin-gun and fired at the locking mechanism, turning delicate components into a bubbling mess. Then, on narrow focus, he used the carbine to punch holes randomly around the door.

  ‘Now, that’s not fair,’ came a familiar voice from the com console.

  He’s into the system, Cormac sent to Gant.

  Get your harness on, Gant sent back.

  Cormac quickly obliged. Something was now worming through the holes in the roof: a woody member jointed like an insect’s leg. As he again took up his carbine, Cormac saw something else scuttle for cover across the floor.

  Spin us and blow the front screen.

  Gant stepped into the cockpit and hit the requisite controls. Cormac grabbed a nearby handle and hung on. With a roar of engines, the horizon began to slip to the left. G-forces dragged him sideways, his feet coming off the deck, then swung him towards the screen. Violet fire lit up the inside of the lander and the screen departed in a dusty cloud with a huge sucking inhalation. He released his hold and tumbled through the air.

  Tricky fucker, aren’t you? said Skellor over Cormac’s gridlink, as the agent manipulated the controls of his AG harness.

  Go fuck yourself, Skellor.

  In a moment, he had stabilized himself and could see the lander still heading away. He turned in mid-air, trying to locate Gant, then saw him far below—still falling.

  Gant! What are you playing at!

  Not… working… came the dead soldier’s reply.

  Cormac watched him plummet, strike the edge of a butte, and tumble down in a shower of rubble into a canyon. The horizon then ignited like a flashbulb, and Cormac began a rapid descent himself, knowing what was coming. Twenty metres from his landing, the wind slammed across and tossed him cartwheeling through air filled with stinging grit. Slowly regaining control, he ran with the wind until he could safely descend into a canyon, and there, in the shelter of a tilted sandstone slab, he awaited the passing of the brief storm. Later, he was glad to see Gant stomping towards him, though dismayed to see how much of the dead soldier’s syntheflesh had been ripped away. But that was a small price to pay.

  ‘We got him,’ said Cormac, standing up.

  Gant slapped Cormac’s weapon away, grabbed him by the throat and hoisted him up off the ground.

  ‘Guess again, shit head.’

  * * * *

  The titanic Jerusalem dropped into U-space with a nickering, grinding disturbance of reality, as if a smaller ship was just acceptable but this was going too far. In void that was hostile to tender organic linear minds and which drove their possessors to extremities like plucking out offending eyes, and when discovering that didn’t work, groping for some implement to dig deeper, the great ship accelerated beyond human calculation. Jerusalem itself- a mind using quantum computing and functioning in ways that defied evolutionary logic — looked upon this immutable infinity and considered it good… and home. However, the AI realized it would shortly be in for a rough ride.

  In 3D translation, the view ahead was one of a roiling grey sun everted from the surrounding greyness like some huge tumour. It could appear as small as Jerusalem willed it, for here the AI had to apply dimension, not measure it. However, the sphere was two hundred light years across in realspace, and no amount of logic juggling was going to put Jerusalem at the centre of it, anywhere. What was required was unalloyed brute force.

  Most Polity ships just could not penetrate the maelstrom created by a USER, but then most ships possessed three or four fusion reactors and a minimum requir
ement of U-space engines and hard-fields that could be powered up, with replacements in storage. Jerusalem put all eight hundred of the ship’s reactors online, to provide vast amounts of energy to stabilize phased layers of U-space engines in its hull and reinforce its scaling of hard-fields. In time, and in no time, it hit the USER sphere of interference like a bullet hitting an apple. But this was one very large apple.

  * * * *

  Pocketing his toys, Mr Crane stood up and then, almost guiltily, scrubbed out the eighteen-square grid with his boot. The large bird which had taken off from a distant outcrop and was now hovering overhead would not normally have attracted his attention, but his journey had shown this to be a world where the fauna barely got above ground, let alone into the air. But that was not what brought him to his feet. He could sense a change in the static electricity levels in the air, and now a figure was walking towards him, on the other side of the barrier. Then the way was open.

  The force field disappeared with the faintest of pops, as of a bubble burst, its meniscus breaking into a million silver leaves dispersing on the air. The figure turned out to be a woman, who glanced at him curiously as he strode on through. He ignored her: she wasn’t Dragon and though her presence here had something to do with the sudden collapse of the field, she did not appear to be one of that entity’s creations.

  ‘I’m here to show you the way,’ someone said.

  Crane glanced sideways, expecting to see the woman coming after him. The bird passed close overhead and, in a cloud of dust and a couple of detached feathers, landed just in front of Crane.

  ‘Over there.’ The bird, gesturing with one wing: ‘That’s where you go.’

  Crane just stared.