Brass Man ac-3

by Neal Asher

  ‘The hostage is Ian Cormac’

  Cento experienced spontaneous emotion, something he had not felt since seeing Ulriss die and then finding the incinerated corpses of Shayden and Hourne. First, he felt surprise that the agent had allowed Skellor to capture him at all, then he felt sadness. Cormac did not back himself up, and even if he was memplanted, that technology would not survive what was to come. The agent would die irretrievably.

  ‘That makes no difference.’

  The program fell silent, returning that small sliver of its awareness to the chaos of its virtual battle to keep Skellor contained, and unaware of the subtle control it exerted over the ship’s helm. Many hours later, precisely to the calculated second of ship time, Cento pointed his APW at the superconducting cables leading to the U-space engine above him, triggered the weapon, and drew violet fire across. The blast threw him back. The side of the support pier blasted out into U-space, the blobs of molten metal creating strange kaleidoscope effects as they departed the ship. Above him the engine stuttered out something weird that impinged even on Cento’s Golem consciousness as, briefly, the s-con ducts carried proton energy back into it before flaring like burning magnesium. Then, suddenly, black and starlit space bled into the gap as the Ogygian resurfaced. Cento closed an arm around a bubble-metal I-beam as something pulled hard at him for a moment, released its hold, then pulled again.

  Tidal forces, he surmised.

  Weakened by the APW blast the pier twisted above him. He felt its wrenching scream through the metal he clutched, observed the beam itself twisting. Then that force tugged again, and the U-space nacelle, along with much of the pier above him, tore away from the ship. Cento observed its slow departure, then turned his attention to where he calculated their destination would be. The brown dwarf seemed a vast wooden sphere looming at them out of the dark; the Ogygian was already being dragged down towards it, already being torn apart by its tidal forces. Cento headed down towards the bridge. Now, to make sure, he would also carry through the contingency plan. It would be a pointless though satisfying exercise, for in a few hours Skellor, the ship and all detached debris, Cento and Ian Cormac, would constitute a very thin film on the dead sun below.

  * * * *

  Somehow the barrier had remained: a shimmering silk meniscus between Mr Crane and everything real. Yet, strangely, by this separation he could view the world and his worlds and discern what was now and what was then. The surreal battle between a knight mounted on a giant crustacean and the ziggurat-headed droon was real and was now. Briefly, it reflected on the etched game board, before the vulture brought her players back to order with a sharp peck and a lengthy swallowing. Crane moved the piece of crystal and gazed up at the sea’s surface. It was fantastically bright up there, almost as bright as revelation. Inside his head he felt something turn and clunk into place with all the positivity of a ship going into a docking clamp. Tearing off the aviapt’s head had not been a particularly moral act, nor had Crane’s killing of Stalek been particularly nice, but for what they had done to him—and likely done to others—they deserved death. Also they had been outside the Polity, and Crane had been under instruction…

  In some part of himself, Crane recognized the mealy-mouthed dissimulation of a coward. Though ordered through the Pelters’ control unit to kill those two, he had not needed to be quite so bloody. He reached down to move a blue acorn. A beak intervened and he instead moved the scent bottle. Taut excitement filled him, and imminence—that was the only way the various parts of his mind could see it. Something of all his parts was poised on the edge of the real, waiting to come into focus.

  The sea’s surface drew no closer—he knew he was not ready for that. But some bright structure like a vast glassy plankton turned in electric depths and presented itself to another mass of the same. It keyed in, locked into place, took on the same spectral pulsation as all the rest. Mr Crane stared down at one brass hand. It was utterly real, and utterly right there and then. Folding in his thumb, he saw himself tearing people apart on Cheyne III. Those were Arian Pelter’s orders, and the man had been nested close in Crane’s mind, his control through a military aug all but absolute. How could the Golem have done otherwise?

  Lies lies lies …

  Crane folded in a finger, remembered killing policemen, then killing one of Arian’s allies. But one of those policemen had survived. Out of an impossible situation, Mr Crane had allowed someone to live. The antique binoculars he had taken in place of the life now replaced by the scent bottle he had just moved. Hadn’t he saved so many lives? But counting the deaths he soon ran out of fingers.

  The little knight, mounted on a miniature sand hog, charged the lion’s tooth, and, prodding it with his lance, moved it to a new position. Two bright structures mated with a satisfying click and the gratifying alignment of the last turn on a Rubik’s cube.

  What Crane had done… He could have done nothing else.

  Crane could have done nothing else.

  Rising, nemesis from the sea, Mr Crane was angry. He raged at a life denied him, howled inside at the Serban Kline they wanted him to be, was rabid because there was nothing inside or out to prevent him killing. But there was justification. The people on this island had done those horrific things to Semper. They had unmade a human being piece by piece, scream by scream, and left him to marine crucifixion for Crane to find. Oh, how they would pay.

  The man on the shore—a bloody rag—gone, others the same. Crane walked slowly through silver moonlight, glints like pearl crabs at the corners of his eyes. Alston was at the centre of the island and Crane was told to go to him, to kill him, but also to kill any who stood in his way. No one had said how he should go to Alston. No one had said he should walk a straight course. Crane walked a spiral, killing as he went and leaving hellish art behind him, till coming to the final poetry of making Alston’s fortune utterly the man’s own.

  We had no choice.

  You could have shut down completely, abandoned any chance at sentience, not been so good a tool for them to employ. You put your survival above that of many many others.

  We are unusual?

  There was nothing now to prevent wholeness, only will and choice. Mr Crane could be complete in that moment or, with the horror of memory swamping him, could rest, cease to be. Choice: the machine was there, but yet to be powered up. Internally, he watched a tall brass man in a wide-brimmed hat throw across the final circuit breaker. The image, his ego, flipped a salute to him before being sucked into the machine. From that moment on, Crane was wholly and utterly himself.

  ‘Ah,’ said Vulture, stepping back a little. ‘I see you’re with us, but I wonder just what is with us.’

  Mr Crane began picking up his toys and returning them to his pockets. The battle nearby was over, and here the battle was over too. He paused; he did not need these toys. But then again that did not mean he could not have them. As he contemplated this concept, his hands worked before him without conscious volition. While he was methodically attempting to stack the blue acorns, a flying lizard landed in the middle of the board, scattering both the acorns and other remaining pieces.

  ‘A message, I suspect,’ said Vulture.

  Crane held out his palm and the lizard scuttled onto it. He raised the creature up to his face, listened to its chittering, and recognized the flashing in its eyes as a direct visual transference of code. Eventually he tossed the lizard into the air and watched it fly away. Then his hand snapped out, faster than any snake, and closed around Vulture’s neck.

  ‘I chose,’ said Mr Crane.

  He released his hold. Vulture was unharmed.

  Mr Crane stood, put on his hat and tilted it rakishly. He paused for a moment, examining the board before him, then swept up the remaining pieces and deposited them in his pocket.

  ‘I choose,’ he said, as he walked away.

  24

  What is death when doctors can repair your body at a cellular level, and maintain your life though your body be so badl
y damaged it is not recognizable as human? What is it when you can record or copy your mind? What is it when machines can regrow your body from a single cell, or build it from materials of your choice, fashioned to your highest or lowest fantasy? What is it when you can change bodies at will?… Ridiculous question, really, because nothing has changed. Death remains that place from which no one returns. Ever.

  — From How It Is by Gordon

  The virtuality Mika had created was an aseptic milky plateau bounded by a cliff, beyond which was a contracted view of the system they now occupied. Seemingly only a few kilometres out from the cliff edge hovered Dragon. She reached up and took hold of an apple-sized model of that entity, and moved it closer to herself. The full-sized version then drew in with alarming realism until it was only a few hundred metres from the plateau’s edge. She turned the model, thus bringing into view on the other version a great trench burned into its flesh, then pulled it right up to the edge of the cliff. A writhing mass of pseudopods inside the trench was drawing layers of flesh across. For a moment she listened in on the opaque conversation between Jerusalem and the entity.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Jerusalem asked.

  ‘I return.’

  ‘To the planet?’

  ‘Not by choice.’

  ‘By choices made at Samarkand and Masada.’

  ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’

  ‘Part of yourself.’

  ‘Separate.’

  ‘To employ Occam’s razor?’

  ‘Funny Polity AI.’

  As the conversation continued, Mika tuned it out. The words she heard were only the surface of an exchange, a communication that went very much deeper. Perhaps only D’nissan with his recent augmentations might be the one to plumb it entirely.

  ‘How was it damaged?’ she asked.

  ‘Tracking directly back along its course.’ Jerusalem’s iconic head appeared beside her—the AI had never disguised the fact that it was capable of conducting a thousand conversations all at once—‘I have detected the debris of an attack ship, though I am yet to determine which one. Also there is a USER singularity eating out the centre of a giant planet nearby. Dragon has just informed me that it destroyed both the USER and the ship guarding it… Ah, the ship was the Excalibur. Other debris in the system would appear to be the remains of the Grim Reaper.’

  ‘What about the Jack Ketch?’

  ‘I will inform you when I know more.’

  Mika stared at Dragon for a while longer, then turned away. Returning to her immediate research, she eyed the molecule floating before her like an asteroid composed of snooker balls. This was her third. Thus far, the research staff on the Jerusalem had studied over ten thousand such structures to learn their function. Another year working at the same rate and they might even pass one per cent of the total. But Mika knew the rate was bound to change. D’nissan, working with some shipboard AIs and Jerusalem itself, was now decoding the programming languages of the Jain, and already new methods, new approaches were being found. It reminded Mika of the well-documented human genome project back in the twentieth century. Back then, the scientists had predicted the project would take decades but, new computer technologies becoming available, those same scientists had very quickly mapped the structure of human DNA. On the Jerusalem, though, they had the advantage that their work was synergetic: the more they learnt about Jain technology, the more tools it provided them to learn with.

  This particular molecule, like those she had already studied, was an engine of multiple function. It self-propagated like a virus, but did not necessarily destroy the cells it invaded. It was small enough to need to suborn little of the cellular machinery for reproduction, and its offspring caused little damage leaving the reproductive cell. However, outside the cell, its function multiplied. It could destroy other cells, cause accelerated division in other cells and make nerve cells signal repeatedly. The molecule was also programmable: its function could be changed once it plugged into other unidentified molecules. Mika realized it was thus just one mote of that part of the technology Skellor used to subjugate human beings.

  An hour later, the Jerusalem abruptly dropped into U-space.

  ‘It seems the party has moved on,’ Jerusalem said.

  Mika did not suppose the AI meant the drinks and canapés kind.

  * * * *

  They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it was both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento was a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour.

  The blast threw Skellor past Cormac, slamming him up against the quartz screen of the ship like a black iron statue. The screen disintegrated and Skellor disappeared. For a moment Cormac thought the bio-physicist had been blown clear of the ship, but there had been insufficient air left to do that, and anyway Cormac’s torn vision of reality showed him flat laser shadows now clinging to the outside hull, above the screen.

  ‘Foolish. Trying to kill me, he freed me,’ came over the link Cormac had with the biophysicist, then, after a pause, followed a howl of rage. Cormac pushed down the link, tried to see what Skellor was seeing, could not fathom the vast curving horizon.

  ‘Why is he so angry?’ he mouthed to Cento, as the Golem came before him.

  Cento replied through the comunit of Cormac’s environment suit: ‘Because he is going to die, and there’s no way he can avoid it. It’s as inevitable as gravity.’

  Cormac understood now. He saw all the curves, saw the mountain, the eversion the brown dwarf star created in U-space.

  ‘We are all going to die?’ he suggested.

  Just then, something half-seen shot in through the front screen, arrowed through the bridge, and slammed into Cento. The APW flew from the Golem’s hand, bounced from a wall and, turning slowly end over end, headed slowly towards outer space. Skellor, a blackened atomy whorled and distorted around nodular growths in his body, now tore at the Golem.

  Cormac could do nothing to help Cento although he fought against the enclosing structure. When he felt the wash of tidal forces through his body, he knew that in very little time that same wash would intensify sufficiently to shatter the Jain structure, but by then the tidal forces would have compressed and stretched his body to a sludge of splintered bone and ruptured flesh inside it. It occurred to him, with crazy logic, that such damage to himself was required as payment for the pain he had already suffered. On another level it occurred to him that he was not entirely rational at that moment.

  Skellor, he saw, was not attempting to subvert Cento as he had with Gant. Perhaps he had lost the ability. More likely he had lost the inclination. Extinction looming as close as that vast brown horizon, the man wanted vengeance, wanted the satisfaction of smashing something. But, in the end, none of it mattered. Cormac ceased to struggle. The brown dwarf possessed its own huge inevitability. Then, as the hole where the front screen had been veered away from the dwarf, he spotted another ship through the opening, dark against the further stars, and two lines curving down from it like hooks. The Ogygian jerked once, twice, then suddenly Cormac was heavy inside the Jain structure—being crammed over to one side.

  Grappling claws.

  Loose objects inside the bridge dropped to the floor, then slid hard sideways. Cormac tracked the APW, caught in the rim of the screen hole, his thin-gun down on the floor by the nearby console—useless to him. Through the screen gap he observed the colonist sphere located at the further end of the craft swing round and down towards the vast brown plain. Then came a vibration through the ship, as of a giant electric saw operating. Blinding inc
andescence flooded in: a small percentage of lased light refracting from metal vapour. Most of the front end of the vessel was now falling away, severed by a powerful laser.

  Cento and Skellor slammed into the wall. The Golem was down to metal, and Skellor had even torn some of that away. Long pink lesions cut into Skellor’s blackened carapace, golden nodules showed in these like some strange scar tissue.

  Cormac suddenly felt Skellor’s glee, and picked up the subsequent exchange: Thank you, my liege, Skellor uttered sarcastically over the ether.

  You will undoubtedly thank me, came the reply.

  Cormac wondered at this madness. It was a foolish move on the part of the AI attack ship to rescue himself and Cento at the risk of allowing Skellor also to go free. His thought encountered amusement. He saw Skellor push Cento to arm’s length, then spin him around and slam him hard into the wall. He recognized that the Golem was now failing.

  Skellor whispered to him: ‘The King of Hearts doesn’t work for the Polity any more.’

  It was too much: to choose a moral death, then to accept an inevitable one, and then to have both taken away. If only he could strike even the smallest blow. But he could do nothing—was ineffectual. Then, in that moment of extremity, Cormac saw the way. Wasn’t it laughably obvious? Aboard the Jack Ketch Thorn had not hallucinated—had actually seen Cormac move in that way. And Horace Blegg had been correct as well: ‘… your mind will soon find other parts that were never of itself

  Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three metres to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.