Brass Man (30 page)

* * * *

If anything, Vulture found herself more surprised than Skellor at the method of her escape. The soft invasive link from Dragon, established the moment they had surfaced from U-space, had not been noticed by the AI until Skellor brought the ship into orbit around Cull. And then had come the offer: a new home for Vulture herself in exchange for the attempt on Skellor’s life. Vulture wondered if the body she now found herself in was a punishment, due to the failure of that attempt, or a sample of draconic humour.

Perched on an earthen tower thrown up by some termite equivalent on this world, Vulture tilted her beaked head and inspected her talons. She then extended one wing and began to groom its shabby feathers. Strangely, in the last hour she had been wearing this form of a turkey vulture she had felt more free than at any time while she had occupied a system-spanning survey ship. It was as if somehow Dragon had been able to more closely link mind and body. Or perhaps it was because Skellor had disconnected her for so long from her original body. Whatever the reasoning, Vulture now had wings.

* * * *

Tying ropes to the huge sleer as hailstones bounced off his own back like blunt crossbow bolts was not what Tergal considered the most pleasurable of tasks. He also found that it wasn’t just the cold making his hands shake—big man-eating monsters, which were supposedly dead due to having been eviscerated yet still occasionally spasmed and made little hissing sounds, tended to make him nervous.

‘That secure?’ Anderson asked him from the back of Stone. It had been necessary to use the younger sand hog for this as, after his previous exertions and because of the pounding hail, Bonehead had plumped down on his belly plates, pulling in his two heads, and resolutely refused to move.

‘Yeah, that should do it,’ Tergal replied.

Anderson flicked his goad at Stone’s head and the hog set off on crawler legs towards the shelter they had erected further down, on the far side of the canyon. As the knight had pointed out, there would be no payment without a corpse for the mineralliers to measure, and abandoning such a corpse for any length of time, even in a storm like this, would mean they would return with only empty pieces of carapace. Adverse conditions such as these did little to dampen the hunger of the more rapacious denizens of Cull.

At first the corpse either stuck to the ground or retained enough life stubbornly to hold its position, then with a cracking sound it began to slide over the icy ballbearing surface. Stumbling on that same surface, Tergal ran to catch up with Stone, grabbed the edge of its shell, then hauled himself up beside the saddle.

Anderson glanced down at him, then stabbed a thumb backwards. ‘I thought you’d be riding on chummy there.’

‘And you can bugger the anus of a three-day-dead rock crawler,’ said Tergal succinctly.

Anderson gaped at him with mock outrage. ‘Is this the language taught to young mineralliers nowadays?’

Tergal demonstrated some more of his learning as they approached the shelter, pulling the sleer so that it lay only a few metres out in the canyon. Tergal went back to cut the rope, rather than untie it from those huge pincers, and Stone quickly scuttled over beside Bonehead, to put the old sand hog between itself and the corpse, before settling down and sucking in its own heads. The two men then quickly ducked under the waxed-cloth shelter where, with still shaking hands, Tergal unpacked and lit a small oil-burning stove.

He gestured at the nearby monster. ‘What do you mean you “didn’t get it all”?’

‘The lance normally pulls out a man’s weight in offal. You usually get whole organs rather than bits of them.’

Tergal eyed the sleer. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’ve spent ten years doing this sort of thing.’

‘On the whole,’ said Anderson, digging greasy meat cakes out of a beetle-box with his knife and slapping them down on the stove’s hotplate. ‘But it’s not always been as dangerous as it might seem. You only get one of those bastards’—he gestured to the sleer—‘about twice a year, and the pay-off is usually good.’

‘Some people might consider it lunacy,’ Tergal observed.

‘It’s a living.’ He eyed Tergal very directly. ‘And it’s honest.’

Ah...

Tergal dropped his hand to his handgun, not quite sure what the knight was going to do. Suddenly the greasy point of Anderson’s knife was directly below Tergal’s ear. The youth swallowed drily and moved his hand away from his weapon. He had not even seen the knight move.

‘How many people have you already robbed and killed?’ Anderson asked conversationally.

‘I’ve killed no one,’ said Tergal, knowing at once that his life was in the balance.

‘The jade—and the sand hog?’ Anderson gestured.

Tergal did not even think to lie. ‘I stole them from my stepfather.’

‘Tell me.’ Anderson sat back, withdrawing the knife.

Tergal detailed his story, while keeping his hand carefully away from his gun. The meat cakes now sizzling, Anderson casually took some bread rolls out of a bag, split them with his knife, and began to spread them with pepper paste from a small pot. As Tergal fell silent the knight said, ‘Tea would be good.’

Tergal took out a kettle and filled it with hailstones. He placed it on the stove after Anderson had shoved the meat cakes inside the rolls.

‘Always makes me hungry—the danger,’ he commented.

‘Lunacy,’ said Tergal, trying to find some earlier humour.

Anderson looked up. ‘So how many other people have you robbed?’

‘I’ve stolen from merchant caravans I travelled with.’

‘So with me you would have been graduating. I would have been your first one-to-one victim?’

Tergal lowered his head. ‘I’ll head back when this storm’s finished.’

‘You’ll stay with me until I say otherwise,’ said Anderson. Abruptly he looked up and peered through the storm. ‘Talking of lunacy.’

With his long coat and wide-brimmed hat, the figure tramping up the canyon looked like a gully trader. But he was alone in the storm, on foot, and seemingly without any pack. Tergal studied this individual, wondering what seemed odd about him. Then he realized the man was excessively tall.

‘Hey! You! Get over here out of this damned storm!’ Anderson shouted.

The man halted abruptly, his head flicking round towards them in a decidedly strange manner. He hesitated for a long moment, then turned and came striding towards them, pulling his hat down low. By the sleer he paused for a long, slow inspection, then suddenly came on again. As this strange apparition drew closer, Tergal suddenly wished Anderson had kept his mouth shut. The man ducked down into the opening of their shelter, almost blotting out all of their view. He then squatted by the stove, keeping his head down so that his face was not visible. As he reached out his hands to warm them, Tergal saw that he seemed to be wearing gloves fashioned of brass. He glanced across at Anderson, saw the knight was staring at those hands but seemingly disinclined to say anything further.

‘Are you lost?’ Tergal nervously addressed the figure. ‘Where’s your hog, or the train you’re with?’

No reply.

Tergal again glanced across at Anderson, who was now staring with a worried frown at their new companion. Behind this frightening individual, a hiss issued from the sleer.

‘Don’t fret, just nervous reaction,’ said Anderson woodenly.

Tergal noticed how the knight was resting his hand on the butt of his own new handgun, and decided to keep talking. ‘Where are you from? Are you from that minerallier encampment back there?’

Still no reply.

Tergal then noted how the metal gloves were intricately jointed. They had to be a product of the metalliers. They glinted now, as the sun suddenly broke from behind the back edge of iron cloud.

‘You’ve come from Golgoth?’ he persisted, his nervousness making him gabble.

The sunlight was harsh and bright after the storm’s darkness, and now Tergal saw the glint of metal underneath that wide hat, too. He remembered legends of strange creatures wandering the wilderness, of unholy spectres unable to find rest after violent deaths, and banshees howling on the storm wind.

‘Why don’t you speak?’

The sunlight was suddenly hot, and steam began rising from damp stone surfaces, from sand, sulerbane leaves and the back of the dead sleer. Tergal supposed it was this heating that caused the sleer to hiss again. But when, with a rippling heave, it pulled itself up onto its feet, he realized he was mistaken.

‘Oh bugger,’ said Anderson.

Tergal couldn’t agree more—that comment defined his entire present circumstances. He was transparent to the knight, who knew him for the scum he was. The sleer was clearly not so dead as either of them would wish. And now their storm-visitor had just raised his head to show merciless black eyes set in a face of brass.

Anderson leant over and grabbed up his new carbine, while Tergal drew his handgun as the sleer turned towards them scattering showers of melting hailstones in every direction. The brass man looked over his shoulder at the creature, as Tergal dived one way out of the shelter and Anderson the other. Tergal levelled his weapon, but was reluctant to fire it, as that might draw the sleer upon him. He was also not sure what should be his primary target. Anderson perhaps held back for the same reason.

The sleer was now rocking its head from side to side, as if dizzy or confused. The brass man stood and turned in one swift movement, and in four huge, rapid strides was standing before the creature, which snapped forwards, its pincers closing on his torso with a solid clunk. But he reached down, pushed those pincers apart as easily as opening a door, and shoved the sleer backwards, its feet skidding on and then tearing up the ground. He next turned the pincers like a steering wheel, one, then two full turns, till with a loud snapping crackle the sleer’s head came off. Behind it, the body just collapsed. The brass man held the heavy head to one side, in one hand, its pincers still opening and closing spasmodically; then, as if suddenly losing interest, he discarded it and strode off down the canyon without looking back.

Tergal gaped at the departing figure, then turned to stare at Anderson. The knight stared back at him without expression. Tergal carefully reholstered his weapon and the two of them returned to their temporary camp. There were a thousand questions for them to ask, and a thousand discussions they might now have, but right then neither of them felt like saying a word.

* * * *

Reconnecting himself to the systems originally occupied by the
Vulture’s AI,
Skellor assessed the damage to the ship. Structural cracking and distortion were minimal, for the hull was a tough composite manufactured to take the impacts inevitable while surveying asteroid fields, but the fusion chamber and all its injectors were a charred and radioactive ruin. He soon realized that, with half the chamber’s substance blown away into atmosphere, he needed to obtain materials to rebuild it. Pressing his hand down on the console, he extruded from his body a Jain filament to track back through the ship’s optics to find what remained of the chamber’s sensors.

Thickening the filament into substructure, to carry more material from his body and more information back to it, he then divided it at its end and began sampling and measuring. He needed silicon, which surrounded the ship in abundance, but also rare metals. He could not rebuild the chamber in situ, for its
inner
layer needed to be pressure-cast at temperatures more often found on the surface of a sun, and subsequent layers consisted of nanofactured chain molecules. After absorbing all measurements and all parameters, building an exact virtual representation of the item in his mind, he began to withdraw. Soon, he stepped back from the console, headed for the airlock, and back outside.

The earlier storm had cleared the dust from the air and, even as the hailstones were still melting, Skellor saw shoots of blue-green plants spearing up from the canyon floor, while yellow nodes of other growth were appearing on the multicoloured layers of the sandstone buttes. But this though was of passing interest, he concentrated on other aspects of this place. He reached down and scooped up a handful of wet sand, clenched it tight, and injected Jain filaments to analyse it. The handful did contain some of the trace elements and metals he required, mainly in the form of salts and oxides. Assuming all the sand in this area was of the same constituents, he calculated just how long it would take him to find in it enough of what he required.

But that wasn’t the biggest problem: concentrating all his resources on obtaining these materials in the quickest time, he would need to root himself here and, given the possibility that ECS might arrive at any moment, he would then be a sitting duck. There was also little in the way of fuel for him to power a furnace. The ship’s little reactor could provide some, but the logistics of that were nightmarish. He needed help, willingly given or otherwise.

Skellor turned and looked back at the
Vulture,
then, from one of the many devices built inside his body, sent a signal to the first addition he had made to the little ship. All around it the air rippled, and starting from its upper edge a deeper distortion—like a cut into reality -slowly traversed down the ship, erasing it utterly. Best, he thought, to use the ship’s reactor to power the chameleonware generator. Now, where to go?