Brass Man (24 page)

‘Touch of bother?’ Gant enquired.

* * * *

The four guarding the corridor were ensconced behind an APW cannon. Skellor did not even need to scan to know they were in constant communication with their fellows—their terrified expressions told that tale. As he stepped past the cannon—and over the woman crouching down connecting a large energy canister to the weapon—he noted the one over by the wall stare in his direction, his expression puzzled. But then the man returned his attention to the proximity grenade he was setting. Skellor moved on, glad not to have to kill these four, for that would alert Nalen, who was still fleeing towards the runcible.

Past the men, Skellor accelerated to a speed that only Mr Crane or a Polity Golem could match. He wanted to intercept Nalen as soon as possible—did not want him to get within the defences of the runcible Al; did not want that level of confrontation yet. It occurred to him to wonder what the AI’s reaction would be to the commotion behind. Certainly there would be a reaction of some kind.

A dropshaft, disabled, then up the ladder, just touching on the rungs in nil gee, changing course with a hand slapping against the exit portal, bending metal, then into another corridor opening out into an arboretum similar to the one below. Ahead, a gleam in his virtual vision, at the centre of an unstable web of light. In the real world he saw a man spherically fat running as energetically as the two guards alongside him. There was a doubling of image: yes, the man
was
fat, but scales did not really cover him—that was illusion. Closer, and Skellor began to feel the link that dropped away from this man and this station and out into space. He slammed into Nalen’s back and, looping an arm around the man’s greasy neck, dragged him down the corridor. Slapping the flat of his hand against Nalen’s aug, which appeared utterly fused to his head, he transmitted the virus down penetrating Jain filaments. Nalen began to shriek.

Skellor glanced back and saw the two guards, weapons drawn, staring about themselves in bewilderment, for to their eyes their charge had simply disappeared. Then both of them jerked as, through Nalen, the virus hit their augs. One staggered back against the wall and slid down to the floor, blood bubbling from his ear. The other shrieked, clawed at his aug and managed to tear it from his head like a reptilian scab. Still shrieking he ran towards the sabotaged dropshaft.

No matter—Skellor had control now.

Crane had killed many of them, and many more were fleeing. Gazing through the eyes of those on the run, Skellor saw ECS uniforms. Nalen’s people were going down all around, under fire from riot guns. Golem were bringing down others, and easily securing them in ankle and wrist cuffs. Skellor had not expected ECS to react so quickly. He immediately realized that the AI must have been aware of the Dracocorp network, and been preparing to deal with it. He had very little time.

Nalen’s mind was a gibbering thing that yielded easily to his control, for his aug had softened it to receive commands through the U-space link. Skellor shrugged himself into that mind, as if into someone else’s clothing. Tracing that branch of the network generating outside the station, he was surprised to find, orbiting the red dwarf, a U-space transmitter, and thought that so prosaic. The virus opening the way for him, he soon found himself groping mentally through alien software that was somehow familiar to him, familiar to that
alien
side of
him.
He was there; the coordinates were
his.
Then the communications laser pulse slammed into the transmitter, viral programs propagating from it, and snatching at that last vital information but failing to take it.

Dropping Nalen, Skellor staggered back. It was suddenly all so horribly clear to him. In his arrogance, he had assumed the Polity would not try this route, so busy were they tracing Dragon through Dracocorp. How very stupid he had been.

Crane, back to the ship—fast.

He sensed the Golem’s immediate response just before the viral probe came in through a biotech aug on the other side of the station, opening the way, and something utterly vicious snarled its way into the network he now controlled. This he had encountered before: a hunter-killer AI program had been poised to take this network at its moment of maturity. He himself had taken it perhaps only months away from that time. ECS must have known about Nalen and his people for a long time, but had given them sufficient leash to get a lead on one of the Dragon spheres. Skellor, as he staggered away from the fat man who now seemed to have deflated on the floor, felt real fear.

What are you? was the essence of the program’s question as it swung towards him in the network. Skellor ran for the dropshaft and leapt into it.

Located.

The dropshaft came on and tried to kill him, slamming immediately to a constant four gees. He reached out and caught the lip of the floor below, the force with which his arms hit buckling the floor plates, the composite out of which his bones were now fashioned bending and splintering. In the subliminal flash of agony, his defence lost coherence and a viral spear tried to impale his mind. He took it and slid aside, leaving another mind to take the brunt. Grav in the dropshaft abruptly reversed, slamming him up against the upper rim of the exit portal. The sound of Nalen’s impaled mind dying was a retreating piggish squeal. Bonding his hands against the ceiling with Jain filaments, Skellor dragged himself out of the shaft’s gravity field and dropped to the floor. Hitting, he accelerated as fast as he could, feeling the floor plates fluxing behind him as the program compensated for his inhuman speed. Then one went nil below him, and the next soared up to four gees. He came down on one knee and one foot, kneecap taking the brunt and shattering, but got no reaction from the human nervous system he had disconnected from cerebral activity. This battle worked both ways, however: Skellor linked back, through the probe into the Dracocorp network, and let that take all the pain his human body felt as it shattered and rebuilt. With a gargantuan hiss something retracted, and all the gravplates in the corridor returned to one gee.

Feel pain, do you?
he asked of the shapeless nightmare.

He was in the arboretum now, retracing his course -dodging between ECS troops and Golem alike, with his ‘ware still functioning.

How about this?

Still linked to his attacker, he reached out to all those still-conscious points in the network. Slammed into their aug control programs and gave them something he had himself recorded on the
Occam Razor
while he had tortured the Separatist woman, Aphran. The hoarse voice of agony echoed throughout the station as, one after the other, people wearing biotech augs fell, believing someone was peeling off their skins with red-hot scalpels. For a moment Skellor thought the feedback into the attacking program was killing it, but then he saw that the program was changing to link into the screamers and give them succour. So altruistic were Polity AIs, so kind to the poor soft-bodied creatures, that Skellor and Crane both broke apart like ripe fruit.

Skellor, we have ever let humans deal with human threats, Ruby Eye told him, but in your case we may make an exception. Go away from here now—a battle between us would denude this station of life, and I see no purpose in that when we can kill you somewhere more remote.

Crane awaited him on the
Vulture.
The Golem was now seated playing with new toys. Skellor ignored him and, through the Jain structures he had grown inside the ship, immediately put all systems online.

Runcible AI. If you fire any weapons on me, I’ll turn this ship round and fly it into your station, initiating U-space jump before the engines are ready. I don’t suppose even you would survive that.

Go away, creature.

With a blast of fusion flame, he accelerated the
Vulture
down from the station towards the red dwarf, initiating the ship’s newly installed chameleonware. He knew that, in this situation, hiding was not enough, as the AI knew where the
Vulture
had been docked, and could fill nearby space with lethal munitions and a cage of discharges from energy weapons. But there came nothing from the station: no missiles, no laser beams, not even a parting taunt as he dropped the little ship into U-space. And somehow that was more frightening.

* * * *

No matter how much shielding a ship used, passengers always felt the transition from U-space to realspace—or the reverse. Why this was so, no one had explained, though Mika felt sure some would attribute it to the belief that humans were more than mere material substance—an idea she found objectionable. Climbing out of her bed in the quarters Jerusalem had recently provided for her, she gazed up at a screen that was always set for external view, and observed starlit space rather than any planetary system. The
Jerusalem
was no longer in U-space.

‘Jerusalem, what’s happening?’ she asked.

There was a pause before the AI replied, ‘So it begins.’

‘Pardon.’

‘We will not be going to Masada. We will now be going to a sector of space in which the source of so much of what we study has been located.’

‘Skellor’s been found.’

‘Not precisely, but we may close him in our grasp.’

Abruptly Mika felt that sensation of transition again and, looking up, saw her screen showing the bland grey representation of U-space. Normally, while a ship was under, its human passengers and crew would go into cold sleep, but aboard the
Jerusalem
there
was an urgency to learn all about that
thing
that might kill the Polity. Having slept four hours, which was ample for Mika, she showered, dressed, and immediately went out into the main corridor and headed for the refectory. Though machines in her own quarters could supply all her nutritional needs, she always took her meals elsewhere. In the refectory, like-minded people bounced ideas about and did quite a lot of the planning and more imaginative work there. Entering the large room, with its scattering of tables and chairs, she saw that Susan James, D’nissan and Prator Colver were all seated around one table and, after making her selection from one of the food dispensers, Mika collected her tray and went over to join them.

The man, Colver, was Life-coven like herself: a stocky ginger-haired individual who was prone to sudden enthusiasms and who had long ago learned how to ask questions. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked as she sat down. ‘We’re going to
Ruby Eye.’

Mika looked across at Susan James and raised an eyebrow.

‘It’s a research station in orbit around a red dwarf. Been there for fifty years—long-term study,’ she explained.

Susan was a standard-format human; in appearance almost a female version of Ian Cormac, though certainly not as deadly. Mika turned her attention to D’nissan, the low-temperature ophidapt man from Ganymede. His visor was down in the neck ring of his hotsuit, and he was drinking what looked like a raspberry coolie through a straw—a drink that would have been hot to him. His pronouncements were usually concise and apposite, which was why, when the situation warranted it, he was Jerusalem’s chief researcher, but he didn’t have anything to say just then.

‘To get Skellor,’ Mika said.

‘It’d be great to get hold of the source of the Jain tech we’ve been studying,’ said Colver. ‘I’m sure there are controlling mechanisms we haven’t seen yet.’

Now D’nissan observed coolly, ‘That’s like studying venom, then wishing to get hold of a snake.’

Mika thought that a bit rich, coming from a man with diamond-scaled skin and fangs.

He looked at her directly. ‘Of course we haven’t seen it all, because what we
have
got is just a . . . cutting. If it were rooted and allowed to grow, we then perhaps would.’

‘Yeah, but Skellor ... he direct-interfaced with a crystal matrix AI . . .’ said Colver, apropos of nothing.

‘I would like to see Jain technology operating,’ said Mika.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ Colver asked, interrupting D’nissan, who had been about to speak. ‘We’re going to see that.’

Mika stared at D’nissan.

‘The asteroid,’ he explained, ‘it would have had to be destroyed by imploder anyway. So why not use it to grow some of our specimen?’

‘In red sunlight,’ Mika suggested.

‘Precisely,’ said D’nissan.

Mika was not sure how to react. This was what she had wanted, but she was also aware that they were playing with something substantially more dangerous than fire.

* * * *

In the invisible grid, Crane shifted a blue acorn to a position adjacent to the lion’s tooth, then moved the coin ring adjacent to the piece of crystal. The rubber dog remained constant beside the laser lighter. This elicited a fragmented image of the same grid occupied by the shells of penny oysters, the interstices of which dying pearl crabs were exploring. Blood dripped from his fingers onto the crushed-shell beach, black in the silver moonlight.

* * * *

- retroact 10 -

‘Did they all get in his way?’ Angelina asked, looking at the corpses scattered across the sand.

‘Apparently so,’ said Arian. Three of his men moved ahead, spreading out as they stepped into the creosote bushes, while the other eight split into two groups of four, to head in either direction along the beach.

‘Two more here,’ said one of the men, pushing aside a bush with the barrel of his pulse-rifle. Angelina moved up beside Arian as her brother gazed down at the mess. The tangle of blood, bones and torn flesh seemed only identifiable as human because there was clothing mixed in there as well.