Brass Man (35 page)

‘Stilt spider,’ Anderson observed. ‘Quite slow, but a bastard when you’re camping at night—steps straight over the camp wires and’ll suck you dry easy as it does rock crawlers.’

Tergal glanced at the knight and noticed how he wasn’t paying much attention to the distant creature, but was studying the ground just ahead of Bonehead.

‘You’re following that brass man,’ he said. ‘Is that such a good idea?’

Anderson looked up. ‘Aren’t you curious?’

‘Yeah, I guess . . . Who do you think he was?’

Anderson directed his attention to a trail that the fresh growth was making indistinct. ‘Not so much a case of who as what. I’d say he is a machine—“android” was the old word—probably left over from colonization time. He could have been wandering around Cull for centuries, recharging himself from sunlight and maybe repairing himself with the skill of a metallier—who can say?’

Tergal’s instinct was to tell Anderson he was talking rubbish. But he had seen a man, apparently made of brass, twist off a half-tonne sleer’s head as if taking the top off a bottle of quavit. Trying to sit back and fit such an event neatly into the pattern of everyday life was not easy.

‘Maybe he was a metallier in some sort of armour?’ he suggested.

‘Strong fella, then,’ opined Anderson. And of course the suggestion had been ridiculous.

At midday they halted to eat oatmeal biscuits and brew amanis tea. Tergal noted that the young sulerbane plants were now standing higher than his ankles, and their ground leaves, trapping the moisture in the canyon floor, were beginning to overlap each other. Finishing their tea quickly when a swarm of snapper beetles, attracted by the heat of their stove, veered towards them, they continued their journey. Later they came upon the remains of an albino second-stage sleer, its legs pulled off and scattered about it. Anderson stopped to study it, before letting Bonehead and Stone share it between them.

‘First one of those I’ve ever seen,’ commented Anderson. ‘Must be an inbred colony about here. I’ve heard about such things among Earth stock, but never native animals.’

But Tergal could see the knight doubted his own explanation.

* * * *

Skellor climbed the tumbled edge of a butte to reach its flat top, for a better view of what lay ahead. After studying the city spread before him on its platform, he wished then he had taken apart the mind of the woman he had earlier encountered. It was only a passing regret, for it was not as if he desperately needed knowledge of such a primitive society. There were no killer AIs or Polity agents here, so such an edge was not necessary for his very survival. But, he decided, eyeing the guns casting a shadow below, perhaps it would be prudent to so deal with the next human he encountered.

Back down from the butte, he was soon heading into deep shadow below the city. Scanning around with infrared vision, he observed a chimera produced by no natural evolution. The man-thing, with its pincer mouth and chitinous hide, came leaping out of one of the bulbous nests. He backhanded it to the ground, then held it down with his foot.

‘Now what are you?’ he asked.

The creature tried to snap at his ankle, and from its armoured mouth issued hissing, gulping sounds that might have been words. Skellor pressed his full weight on his leg and the ribcage under his foot collapsed with a dull crunch. As the creature expired, Skellor dipped a finger in leaking orange blood and put it in his mouth. Having already recorded the base chromosome format of the creature back at that encampment, he quickly analysed the substance in his mouth, and was unsurprised to identify that same chromosome containing additional human DNA. Glancing up at the platform and remembering what he had already seen of the technology here, he knew this creature did not result from any recombination experiment carried out by humans.

‘Well, Dragon, what
have
you been doing?’

Thereafter Skellor used chameleonware to avoid the most persistent attackers, and killed only those bearing some form he found particularly interesting, gathering data each time to store in the vastness of that crystal part of his own crossbred brain. Some hours later, he came to a steel wall, and was annoyed to find no access from here to the city above. Now, walking alongside the wall, he planned his next moves.

Neither the woman nor any others in that little encampment had worn Dracocorp augs, which came as a surprise to him. This planet being the hideaway of one of the Dragon spheres, he had expected to find all of the human population under that entity’s control. But then he realized Dragon did not need such devices to control a primitive population so easily to hand. Skellor, however, did need some comparable method of enslavement if he was to usurp this society and twist it to his own purpose: that being the manufacture of components to repair his ship.

Luckily, like the chromosome patterns he had started filing away, he had also stored much else. For conscious inspection, he called up the blueprints of the Dracocorp aug and adjusted them to its state when virally subverted to his control, and made some minor adjustments, since he didn’t want everyone here brain-burnt moronic. There was also the matter of distribution, but that would be easy—the sleer chromosomes offered him an easy means.

And as Skellor walked back out into daylight, where he found uniformed soldiers setting up barricades and mounting weapons, he hacked and spat something horrible into his palm.

* * * *

In bright white flashes, each of the telefactors disappeared—the glare from each explosion so intense it left black polarized dots on the screens. Jerusalem had just destroyed all but the visual link of the pinhead cameras to itself. The skin on her back crawling, Mika dropped her gaze to the screen that had been showing her a nanoscope view from one of the ‘factors. Either that screen should now be blank, or show the research programs she had been running in parallel. But what it showed was no code she knew: blockish pictographs, like odd-shaped circuit boards, revolved and fitted into each other, shifting diagonally across the screen.

‘Whatever it is, it’s in,’ she said.

Just then, there sounded loud clangs from all around Exterior Input, and Mika noticed that emergency door irises had closed on all exits.

‘Er . . . what was that?’ Colver asked in dismay.

Susan James grimaced at him. ‘Clamps disengaging. You didn’t feel the acceleration because the gravplates in here would have automatically compensated.’ The woman nicked a control to one of the pinhead cameras and her screen immediately displayed an external view of the
Jerusalem
with the exterior input centre, like the smallest fleck against the vastness of the ship, now departing it.

‘Shit,’ said Colver.

Though she had speculated that Jerusalem might do this, Mika had never quite believed it. She stared at the screen, wondering if the AI was currently selecting an imploder missile from some carousel inside the ship, prior to ramming it into a launch tube. Then all the screens went blank.

‘D’nissan?’ Colver turned towards the sphere.

‘I disconnected from the pinheads. Whatever got to us did it through the telefactor, but it could leap from us to the cameras, and I don’t want to lose them as well.’ Abruptly the door on the side of the sphere popped open and D’nissan stepped out in a gust of cold. He was wearing a reflective hotsuit, frigid air also gusting out from it around his unmasked face. He pointed a remote control back at the sphere and operated it. Things hissed and crackled in the frigid interior, and there arose a smell of fried optics.

‘Took it completely,’ he said to Mika, then turned and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Jerusalem?’

‘Still here. I am maintaining simple voice transmission and reception only. Any image link has too high a bandwidth.’

‘Okay,’ said D’nissan, ‘it’s a waste of a lot of data, but I recommend full system burn. It subverted everything in the deep scanning sphere, then tried some sort of optical link into me.’

‘Agreed,’ Jerusalem concurred.

Nodding, D’nissan pressed out a sequence on the remote control he held. All through the centre screens flickered out and consoles went offline, with the same sizzling and burnt-circuitry smell as had issued from the scanning sphere. But clearly not everything went off. For a moment D’nissan stared at his remote control, then dropped it onto the floor and stamped on it.

‘Harrison,’ he turned and strode across to a catadapt man working on the far side of the centre, ‘trash those nano-assemblers right now, or they’ll be pumping out Jain mycelium within minutes.’

The catadapt did not hesitate. He picked up the chair he’d been sitting on, and proceeded to smash the two delicate machines with it.

‘Okay everybody,’ continued D’nissan, halting in the middle of the room, ‘we won’t be going back unless this thing is controlled or destroyed. I want all computer systems, all memory storage, anything with enough room to take code, isolated totally. This means that all optics, s-cons, in- and out-circuit emitters must be cut. When we’ve finished, everything must be powered down. I’ll want nothing in here functioning but us.’

Mika gazed at the console she had been using. It was still on, and its screen still scrolled that alien code. She felt a kind of pain when she thought of all the data she would be losing, but then realized it was probably all gone by now anyway—eaten by the virus infecting the whole system here. She reached inside her jacket and pulled out the thin-gun Thorn had given her, and which, infected by his militaristic paranoia, she had carried ever since. She then put five pulses of ionized aluminium into the console, blowing away the touch panels and frying everything inside it.

Colver whistled. ‘I don’t think that’s standard issue aboard
Jerusalem?
he said.

‘If anyone is still having problems,’ D’nissan said, ‘it seems Asselis Mika has the tool for the job.’

Laughter greeted this, just before the gravplates went off.

‘It’s fighting back,’ said Susan James.

* * * *

Kilnsman Plaqueast watched the blimps departing from Overcity on an aerial search of the Sand Towers, their powerful searchlights stabbing down into shadowy canyons as they searched for the ship many had seen fly over Golgoth. He muttered and swore to himself about the high-and-mighty and their damned equivocal orders.
‘Erect barricades all around the city, and detain anyone suspicious, as somebody very dangerous and maybe possessing unknown technology might be trying to get in.’
For one thing, just about every citizen of Golgoth was suspicious, but he supposed the order applied only to those coming in from outside. But if he was meant to detain people bearing unknown dangerous technology, hell, how was he supposed to recognize that, and what degree of force should he apply?

Plumping himself down on a rock with his assault rifle across his lap, Plaqueast watched his fellows laying out the portable barricades and setting up the big belt-driven cannon. Already two mineralliers, caught wandering in from the buttes pushing barrows full of those malachite nodules women in Overcity were mad for lately as jewellery, were sitting in the temporary compound with their wrists bound behind their backs and gunny sacks pulled over their heads. Seemed a bit daft to him—their only crime was to go out collecting without sufficient back-up, thinking themselves invulnerable with the new weapons they carried. Already a substantial number of opportunistic collectors like themselves had disappeared amid the Sand Towers, no doubt down a sleer’s digestive tract or under one of the many recent earthquake collapses.

Then, Plaqueast noticed something very strange. The ground was being disturbed by a regular line of indentations heading towards him, yet it was not shaking. Abruptly he realized that he was seeing a series of footprints crushing down the sulerbane sprouts, and he jumped down off his rock bringing his weapon to bear. Then something knocked his rifle spinning away, grabbed his jacket and hoisted him into the air. Suddenly he could actually see the man who had hold of him, and knew he was in trouble, so started yelling. He saw his fellows turning towards him, but could not fathom their puzzled expressions: seeming unable to see him, they were now staring around in confusion. His assailant thumped him in the gut, knocking all the fight out of him, then hit him hard in the face, stunning him, before he slung him over one shoulder and marched away.

‘Over . . . here . . .’ Plaqueast wheezed, seeing his fellows stepping out from the barricade, but his capturer just walked up to it, squeezed through a couple of sections, and returned to the shadows of the Undercity.

As breath slowly returned, he began to struggle again, but to no effect. Out of sight of the barricade, the attacker slung him down on the ground below a wall of crumbling sandstone. He then held out a hand on which rested a flat, tick-like thing, its short legs stirring in a foam of slime, then tilted his palm so the little horror dropped onto Plaqueast’s shirt front. He tried desperately to brush it away, but there was a sudden pain in his wrist and paralysis spreading through him in a wave from that point of contact. Then he could only lie terrified as the thing crawled up his shirt, arrived hot on his neck, then attached itself behind his ear and ground agonizingly into his flesh. But there the horror did not end, for something was inside his head, taking his mind apart, ripping away identity, abrading consciousness. Through streaming eyes he saw his capturer had squatted on his heels to watch—and realized he was watching in some other way as well.