Brass Man (46 page)

At this the man glanced around at his fellows. Then, noticing the rider approaching on his strange beast, he called out to him, ‘Has it been sent?’

‘It has,’ replied the rider, ‘and Tanaquil is coming.’

The uniformed man turned back. ‘This criminal you are hunting, how dangerous is he?’

‘Very,’ Cormac replied, briefly.

The man chewed that over for a long moment before saying, ‘We were warned to look out for strangers approaching the city—and that a dangerous individual was coming. Perhaps we are both after the same person, but you’ll understand why I must take you into custody.’

The barrel of his weapon now bore fully on Cormac.

Tell me now that you’ve got armour under that environment suit,
sent Gant.

Ihave—it’s actually a combat suit and can fling up a chainglass visor before my face. Thank you for your concern, but I’m not stupid.

No, just overconfident sometimes.

‘Certainly we’ll come into custody. Tell me, who is this Tanaquil?’

‘We sent a telegraph message to Golgoth, informing them of your presence,’ the man replied. ‘Chief Metallier Tanaquil is our ruler.’

It seemed that things were going well. Almost without thinking, Cormac sent, through his gridlink, the order to close the door of the lander. The door’s sudden closing elicited a nervous response, bringing the other five weapons to bear on both Cormac and Gant.

Bit edgy, these guys,
sent Gant.

Seems so.

It would have been fine if he had not closed the door like that, Cormac thought later. On such little things could rest the difference between life and death. When an enormous brightness lit the horizon, someone heavy on the trigger exerted just that extra bit of pressure. Even then, things might have continued okay, for one shot slammed into Gant’s thigh and two others into the lander’s hull.

‘Cease fire!’ the leader of these men shouted and, when it seemed his men obeyed, he began to move towards Gant. But then the sound of the titanic explosion caught up with its flash, and all the men opened up with their weapons in response.

Cormac staggered back, feeling the missile impacts on his body armour and seeing one bullet become deformed against the chainglass visor that had shot up from his neck ring in time. He flung his arm out to retain balance, and that was enough for Shuriken. The throwing star screamed from its holster, arced around and, with two loud cracks, knocked automatic weapons spinning through the air, bent or chopped halfway through. Then Gant, holes punched through his syntheflesh covering but otherwise unharmed, shot forwards and tore the weapon from another man’s grip. By then Shuriken had disarmed the final two men. One of them sat on the ground, swearing in disbelief, clutching his wrist and gaping at a hand now lacking three fingers.

Jack, what the fuck was that? Jack? Jack?

Cormac glanced down at the leader of this trigger-happy bunch. The man was on his knees, clutching at his chest, blood soaking through the front of his uniform.

‘Gant,’ Cormac nodded back towards the lander, ‘get him inside.’

Cormac then looked over at the strange little village towards which people were now fleeing, including the rider of that outlandish beast, and noted the telegraph wires running along parallel to the concrete road. He really needed to speak with this Chief Metallier Tanaquil, but didn’t want the man warned off. So he called up a menu on his Shuriken holster, intending to riffle through the thousands of attack programs to find the one he wanted, but then, feeling vaguely foolish, he lowered his arm. Through his gridlink, in a matter of seconds, he created the precise program necessary and input it. Instead of hovering above, humming viciously while flexing its chainglass blades, Shuriken streaked away to sever the telegraph wires.

Now Cormac wanted to know who was detonating nuclear weapons, and why he could no longer contact the
Jack Ketch.
For by his estimation it seemed likely that the shit had just hit the fan, and that he was in completely the wrong place—and that Skellor was now already off-planet.

He could never have been more right—and wrong.

* * * *

In the back of his mind Thorn could hear the crowded chatter of the language crib loading to this mind—yet another one to add to the many he had loaded and perhaps later to add to those he had forgotten or erased. He knew that some linguists loaded new languages as often as possible, cramming their heads with thousands of them, and thousands more overspilled into augmentations. Such experts could usually, after hearing only a few sentences of an unfamiliar human tongue, extrapolate the rest of it. They were also devilishly good at word puzzles, often resolving them in more ways than the quizmaster intended. Thorn, however, preferred to keep room in his head for acquiring skills more pertinent to his occupation, which was why—while the crib chattered in his mind—he reloaded his old automatic handgun by touch in the pitch dark.

Movement to his right. Flinching at the loud clicking of the automatic’s slide as he pulled it back, Thorn quickly stepped to one side and dropped to a crouch. Four shots thundered hollowly in the maze, but they were behind him so he missed locating them by any muzzle flash. Concentrating then on what he was receiving through his echo-location mask, he tried to reacquire a feel of the corridor’s junction before him. Unfortunately the shots had scrambled the touch data, so the mental image he was creating, by swinging his head from side to side, kept shifting—its corners blurring and multiplying off to either side of him.

Then he sensed three images: organic, curved, soaking up sonar. Three images of a man moved around three sharp corners, which in turn were drifting to one side. Thorn raised his gun until the mask was picking it up too, but in three locations, then moved it across until it lined up with the figure—and fired.

The man slammed back against the shifting corner, slid down, then began scrambling away to one side. Thorn tracked him, fired again, and again, until the figure scrambled no more.

Then everything froze.

Two attack ships, the
Grim Reaper
and the
King of Hearts,
have entered the system with a USER. I am under attack, and have jettisoned the VR chamber you occupy.

A white line cut down through the dark, and pulled it aside like curtains. Thorn could no longer feel the mask on his face, and the automatic turned to fog in his hand. Suddenly he found himself standing on a white plain—and before him stood Jack Ketch. The hangman lifted up his briefcase and inspected it.

‘You’re being attacked?’ Thorn asked, bewildered. He knew those names—weren’t they Polity ships?

Jack lowered his briefcase and focused on Thorn. ‘Yes, I am. It is unfortunate, but maybe certain AIs would prefer partnership with a parasitic technology rather than with what they deem a parasitic human race.’

‘Why did you eject me?’ Thorn enquired.

‘The method I have by now used to escape would have turned you into a pool of jelly in the bottom of this VR booth you occupy.’ Jack held up an illusory hand as Thorn was about to ask more. ‘What speaks to you now is only a program, and has limited answers. You have reached that limit.’

The hangman blinked out of existence, and the black curtains drew back across. Abruptly, Thorn’s hand filled with the handle of his automatic.

‘Jack? Jack?’

Movement to his right.

What?

Four shots crashed in the dark. One slammed into his shoulder blade and another into the base of his spine. Thorn went down feeling the shock and trauma he had added to this VR program he was running. The addition was to increase his motivation to learn this nightwork technique. He lay there bleeding, gasping, dying. Managing to turn his head, and despite what the shots had done to his mask’s sensitivity, he zoned the man standing over him. Then another shot crashed through his mask and took him into a second virtual darkness, briefly, then back to standing in a corridor in which lights were flickering.

‘End program,’ he said succinctly.

The lights continued to flicker, then died, as the program continued. Thorn put on his echo-location mask, and drew his automatic from its holster. It became a familiar action.

* * * *

Some time after the
Jack Ketch’s
departure, the systems within the
Ogygian
began to shut down, just as fast as they had come on, and Fethan could not understand why. Lifting his hands from the computer console with which he had been trying to set up a com line down to the surface, Cento said, ‘I can’t do anything. It’s shutting down from inside, which it shouldn’t be able to do.’ He gazed at Fethan expectantly.

Fethan looked around inside the bridge. There was an evident intercom system which probably had some connection to the computer, for the broadcast of automatic and emergency messages. There were security cameras everywhere, he knew that, and sensors. So the thing he had fed into the computer was probably viewing them right then, and listening in.

‘I don’t even know what to call you but, whatever you are, can you explain what you are doing?’

The intercom crackled, and a voice Fethan recognized as that of the long-dead captain spoke up: ‘I have no name. I am a weapon.’

Fethan shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

The voice continued, ‘A message laser is presently aimed at this ship, and someone on the surface is running test programs through the ship’s system. If I had left things powered up, then whoever is firing the laser would have known that someone is aboard, or has been aboard.’

‘Skellor?’ Cento wondered.

‘Most likely. The computer contained a record of previous contacts, but none this sophisticated. Now, the sender has slanted the test programs to one objective: finding serviceable shuttles attached to the hull. I surmise that the sender will then instruct shuttles to launch and call them to the surface. I will give you adequate warning.’

‘Why?’ asked Fethan, then silently cursed himself as all kinds of fool.

‘So the two of you can board. The laser is being fired directly from the platform city, and a shuttle will not be able to land there. Any coordinates given, I will suborn slightly so that the one you occupy lands somewhere that gives you time to disembark and get into hiding.’

Cento stated the obvious: ‘We go down with the shuttle.’

‘Precisely,’ replied the killer program. ‘If it is Skellor who has summoned the shuttle, you will not want to be aboard this ship when he arrives here.’

Fethan hefted his APW. ‘I’d have thought, for our purposes,
here
is precisely where we want to be. We could burn his shuttle before it got a chance to dock.’

Cento turned towards him. ‘And if that shuttle is concealed by his chameleonware?’

‘It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’

‘But is it a risk you need to take? Your hunter/killer program is here waiting for him to connect with this ship’s computer. This area of space is USER-blockaded.’ Cento held up his own weapon. ‘I would have thought your experiences on Masada, with creatures like the hooders, would have taught you not to have so much confidence in a weapon—or are you just anxious to waste your life?’

A number of things occurred to Fethan just then. He had lived a long time and wasn’t that anxious to die just yet, and yes he was putting too much faith in a weapon, but most importantly he had never told Cento what he himself had put into the ship’s computer. He could only surmise that the Golem and the
Jerusalem
program had been in contact with each other.

‘So we go to the surface?’

‘We go,’ Cento agreed.

The final deciding factor was that, in the ECS hierarchy, Cento outranked him, and in the end could probably drag even Fethan off this ship.

‘So this is what you want?’ Fethan stared up into one of the security cameras.

‘It is for what I am designed.’

Fethan briefly wondered about the morality of creating sentient programs that were quite prepared to go kamikaze to achieve their ends.

* * * *

It had come from one of the two attacking ships, as they arrived, then spilled from the memory space of one of Skellor’s sensors into another. He had been about to blow them, thinking this some sort of viral attack, when the package defined its own parameters and waited. He downloaded it to himself and, hardly allowing it to touch him in any way, diverted it to one of the citizens wiping her mind first to make room for the incoming information. It was lucky that he did do this, for then a midnight wave passed through U-space and that dimension effectively disappeared. Skellor felt a cold sweat break out on his skin, and he instantly suppressed that human reaction. He had heard not even a rumour of this kind of technology, and that scared him.

Stepping back from the message laser and telescope, both now encased in coralline Jain substructure like some part of a shipwreck, Skellor turned to his human storage vessel, one of Stollar’s young female assistants, and using what remained of her mind as an arena, opened the package like a man lifting the top of a beehive with a broom handle. Quickly he read the external code and saw that this was a VR package, and realized where he was supposed to insert himself. He extended a virtual simulacrum, and pressed ‘play’.