Brass Man (19 page)

‘Fucking A,’ said Gant.

Just then a shape appeared, apparently turning above them in vacuum: a ring, composed of a jade-green serpent swallowing its tail:
ouroboros.
This acted as a frame for something that appeared first as a distant silver dot, then grew to fill the frame and finally came through to block it from view: an androgynous face, bald and metallic, with shadowed hollows rather than eyes. This was a projection, not something actually outside the ship. Thorn and Gant fell silent to observe.

Cormac looked up. ‘Jerusalem?’

‘The same,’ the face replied.

Without any more ado, Cormac said, ‘I went to Masada specifically to collect Mika, since I require her expertise.’

The face tilted as if its unseen body had shrugged. ‘Certain other factors have come into play, Ian Cormac, not least my own requirement of her taking precedence.’

Cormac grimaced. ‘I was given carte blanche by Earth Central, which presumably you have been allowed to override, and presumably for the best of reasons, so I’m not going to argue the point. I would just like an explanation.’

‘Simply put,’ the AI replied, ‘we have decided that understanding Jain technology is more important than apprehending one criminal who happens to employ it. Skellor is certainly dangerous—any Separatist with a gun is dangerous. Do you go after said Separatist or do you go after the arms trade? The answer is simply that you go after both, but that the latter must necessarily take precedence.’

‘A very elastic analogy,’ said Cormac tightly.

‘There are the other factors I mentioned.’

‘Do go on.’

Jerusalem continued, ‘Asselis Mika will shortly undergo major surgery, without which she will die. Once I have carried this out, I will place her either on life-support or in cold-sleep suspension, whilst one of my subminds removes stray, regrowing, and possibly mutating Jain filaments. Were she aboard the
Jack Ketch,
the same scenario would apply: she would have been useless to you.’

Hearing this, Thorn wondered if his insistence on not going with Mika but boarding the
Jack Ketch
had been such a bright idea.

‘But then she’s useless to you as well,’ said Cormac.

‘For a period of five to ten days, by which time I will have designed and nanofactured robotic T-cells capable of hunting down and destroying all remaining Jain structures inside her. Obviously, Jack could employ such nanobots. But your search for Skellor—debouching from Viridian—is most likely to be either on the Line or out-Polity altogether?’

Looking uncomfortable, Cormac nodded.

Relentlessly Jerusalem continued, ‘Then the likelihood of my being able to convey some medium containing those nanobots to you is remote, as that would have to be done through the runcible network.’

‘Yeah, okay.’

‘It is also well to remember one other point: Asselis Mika herself believes she will be more usefully employed aboard me.’

Cormac remained silent, his look of annoyance fading to blankness as he folded his arms.

‘Thank you for your explanation,’ he said coldly.

The head nodded once, then slowly receded, and winked out. Briefly the ouroboros reappeared, like a call sign, then it too faded.

After a pause, Cormac turned to Thorn. ‘You heard the prognosis for Mika, so the same probably applies to you a few days down the line.’

Thorn straightened up, trying not to wince at a stabbing pain at the base of his spine. ‘I heard it.’

‘You can take a shuttle across to the
Jerusalem.’

Thorn snorted. ‘What would I do aboard a ship like that? I’d rather be in cold sleep here.’

Cormac nodded, then turned to the ship’s avatar. ‘Jack, take us under.’

Immediately the stars and the blackness folded into a deep grey, and Thorn still experienced a frisson at that strange tugging feeling that told him they were on their way.

‘And while we’re here, Jack,’ Cormac continued, ‘let’s see what our dead Separatist has to say.’

Despite his pain, Thorn had been fascinated to learn that this ship possessed its own ghost. He stared as a line of distortion cut through the air outside the drawing room. With a clicking, whickering sound, the automaton Jack shut down, its head bowing and the glint dying behind its glasses. It must have been too much trouble for the AI to maintain simultaneously both the automaton and the projection of Aphran that now appeared.

This was not the woman of whom Thorn had seen images. That woman had been contemptuous, angry, frustrated at no longer being able to fight ... in other words, human. This Aphran was something else entirely.

She was naked but, naked or otherwise, Thorn doubted her bones had originally been visible through translucent flesh. She was colourless, her hair long and pale, whereas Thorn distinctly remembered it being brown; her skin was white as milk, whereas before it had carried a slightly Asiatic hue; and her eyes were a demonic, pupil-less black. Thorn could only wonder if this was the result of some strange kind of vanity, for surely, appearing this way, she could be whatever she wanted. Also, the woman was drifting, like a corpse in deep water, her hair and arms pulled back and forth as if by wayward currents. There was a sound too, like delicate wind chimes or a tittering giggle, and a distant moaning.

‘Hello, Aphran.’ Cormac walked over to the edge of the carpet.

She turned and focused on the agent, though Thorn knew that this was all illusion—the woman would be seeing him through the camera eyes Jack allowed her. Thorn glanced at Gant, then stepped away from the lamp post to stand at Cormac’s shoulder. Curiosity was growing inside him, as thick and heavy as the Jain nodes that were already there.

‘Hello, agent,’ Aphran replied.

Cormac seemed at a loss. He parted his hands as if to encompass that same loss, then brought them together and got straight down to business.

‘You told me Skellor is hunting dragons,’ he said. ‘But I think I can safely assume that we’re not talking about the winged and fire-breathing kind?’

‘Dragons and brass men,’ Aphran replied, and tilted her head back as if laughing, or as if in pain. Thorn saw then that the woman did possess some colour—the inside of her mouth was bright red.

‘Well, I know about the brass man. He collected what was left of Mr Crane on Viridian only a short time ago, and that’s where we are now heading, in the hope of picking up his trail. Do you know where he’s going next?’

‘Dragons.’

Cormac appeared to be chewing on something bitter. ‘But where will he find them?’

‘Give me substance,’ said Aphran.

Cormac slowly nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll do that when I think you’re no longer holding anything back. My other option is to let Jack take your mind apart piecemeal, in order to find what I want. Though after taking that course I’m not sure I’d bother asking him to put it back together again.’

‘Cruel,’ hissed Aphran.

‘You are merely a dispensable recording, but more pertinently you are a criminal under sentence of death.’

Thorn absorbed that. Not so long ago the guilt of a cerebral recording was a murky legal debating point. Now all recordings of murderers, made after the murder was committed, came under the same sentence.

‘I have paid.’ In saying this, Aphran changed—aged a hundred, a thousand years in a few seconds, became something twisted, with flames issuing all around her.

Ignoring this display, Cormac asked, ‘Why did Skellor want a smashed metalskin Golem?’

‘Pleases him ... angry when I mocked him ... burnt me.’

Aphran’s illusory form was growing young again -the flames dying away in the air around her.

‘From what I’ve seen, I don’t doubt he has the ability to rebuild Mr Crane. But because it
pleases
him?’

‘It pleases him. Please him. Love him.’

‘Do you know where he is heading from Viridian?’

Thorn now observed Aphran grow old again, then in a moment young.

‘Completion . . . the symmetry . . . aesthetically pleasing.’

‘Answer the question: where is he going? Where is the Dragon sphere he is hunting?’

‘I love you I love you I love you . . .’ Aphran was oscillating between extreme age and pubescence, and a halo of flame remained surrounding her.

Cormac turned to Thorn and Gant. ‘Is there anything either of
you
would like to ask? Maybe you might get some sense out of her.’

Gant spoke up: ‘What did he do to you?’

Aphran was now floating a metre from the floor. Her gaze swung down towards him.

‘Skellor,’ she hissed. Something then snapped inside her and she tilted her head back, opening her red mouth wide. A cycling wail issued from her, and she began to slide back away from them. Abruptly this movement accelerated, and she hurtled along above the deck and disappeared through the invisible wall.

‘Maybe some other question would have been better,’ suggested Thorn.

‘She said she’d
paid,’
said Gant, looking directly at Cormac.

Coldly analytical, Cormac said, ‘Yes, I see. What would it be possible to do to a person if you could control the function of that person’s body at a nanoscopic level? Nerves, skin, bone and flesh could be rebuilt even as they were being destroyed.’

Thorn added, ‘She said he burnt her. I wonder for how long.’ He winced, pain not being something he could distance himself from right then.

Cormac turned and stared at the wall—at grey void. ‘Jack, should we erase her?’

‘That is your decision, but I would advise against it,’ the disembodied voice of the AI replied. ‘She has suffered but, with time and effort, can be restored. She may possess much knowledge about Skellor, and much insight.’

‘Without Mika,’ said the agent, ‘that might be something we’ll need desperately.’

* * * *

‘Well, if you fully understand the danger, then I cannot dissuade you,’ said Anderson, knowing that the sister of a killer coming after him had only increased Tergal’s fascination. It was harmless enough: the danger Unger Salbec represented held no threat for the boy.

Golgoth was to the right of them now and ahead numerous trails tangled into the Sand Towers. This was not the usual route taken away from the city—which lay on the other side—but Anderson hoped thus to avoid encountering Salbec’s sister. He had intended to depart from the lower city directly underneath the platform, but Laforge had advised him against that because apparently the area of the Towers lying below the Overcity was swarming with nasty creatures—some of them possibly human. Here, but for the occasional sulerbane plants standing, with their woody frills and brackets, like petrified dwarfs in ragged clothing, the ground was barren. The coloured sand eroded from the layers had been trampled by the passage of many feet into a mixture of nondescript grey.

Raising his monocular, Anderson turned aside and studied the Overcity of Golgoth. Its two-kilometre-wide platform, as well as resting on the buttes themselves, was supported by steel pillars and arching trusses. In the shade thus engendered, there was movement amid scattered bulbous dwellings made of bonded sand. The Overcity, with its rectilinear towers, domes and spires, resembled an Earth city that Anderson had once seen in an ancient picture. He panned his monocular around to face the buttes directly ahead. He could distinguish falls certainly caused by the recent quakes and, above them, could just make out the occasional sinister shape of a sleer skittering across the high faces of sandstone, or in and out of the caves bored into it. The creatures were small, but it would be best to keep safely to the centre of the paths.

‘Have you ever had to kill a third-stage sleer?’ he suddenly asked.

‘They don’t have a third stage,’ Tergal replied.

‘Ah, they are rare where you come from, but not so rare where we are going.’ Anderson pointed. ‘Those are all first-stage—little more than nymphs. They’re cave hunters mostly, and for that purpose possess a feeding head with grinding mandibles with extensible antlers, ten legs attached in pairs on independently rotating body segments, and though quite capable of killing a man, they never grow larger than a metre in length. Also, like their adult kin they possess the ability to split themselves in two, but there’s no necessity for that as they are not breeders.’

‘I know what they are,’ said Tergal, giving Anderson a puzzled glance.

Anderson continued regardless. ‘After about two years, they encyst in the sand and transform to the second stage. The front segment folds up and melds into the feeding head, the two legs attached turning into carapace saws for dealing with larger prey outside the sand caves—prey they can now see because they simultaneously gain a nice triad of compound eyes. They also grow an ovipositor drill which they can use to inject paralytic. And at this stage they grow to about two metres in length.’

Tergal grunted, then shifted about in his saddle. He asked, ‘What’s an ovipositor?’

‘It is the egg-laying tube protruding from the rear of an adult sleer.’

Tergal turned to him. ‘There, you see: “adult sleer”, so why do you talk of a third stage?’

‘Because there
is
one.’ Anderson considered all he had learned during this journeying, and all he knew about sleers and their life cycles. One day he would write a book about it all, to add to the collection kept in the Rondure library—but not yet, not while there was still so much to see. He continued enthusiastically, ‘The second-stage creature, as you are aware, splits itself for mating: each half moving on four legs. The rear section can then go off to mate with the rear sections of other sleers, while the feeding or hunting end continues about its business—the two sections still communicating by low-frequency bio-radio. Once rejoined after mating, the whole creature lays eggs in a cave or burrow in which it will dump paralysed prey. Nymphs—first-stage sleers—then hatch out and feed on this preserved food. After many years, and for reasons I’ve not yet fathomed, a second-stager again encysts, and transforms into the third stage. These lay eggs in a similar manner, but out of them hatch second-stage sleers.’