Brass Man (7 page)

Recovering somewhat, Semper dragged himself away from Crane before standing up. The Golem, as if nothing noteworthy had occurred, turned to the folding chair on which its clothing had been draped, picked up his hat and placed it carefully on his head. After standing utterly still for a second, he then took up the ragged trousers and put them on. Another pause, then the long coat. Watching him then don the big lace-up boots was almost comical.
Almost.

Semper, who had now moved to stand beside Stanton, said, ‘Sooner or later, that fucking thing is going to kill one of us.’

‘You are so right—it certainly is,’ said a voice from behind them.

Semper whirled, groping for his weapon. Stanton didn’t bother—he’d already heard Arian Pelter walking up the aisle, between crates containing dark-otter bone.

‘Alston,’ said Stanton. ‘On his island.’ He turned. Alston was also part of the criminal organization supporting the Separatist cause. He was a part Arian Pelter wanted rid of. Stanton studied his boss.

Arian Pelter, Stanton felt, was just as pretty as his sister with his violet eyes, long blond hair and perfectly symmetrical features. Today he was dressed in an expensive white suit and a shirt that perfectly matched the shade of his eyes. He also wore a matching set of platinum New Tiffany jewellery: a single teardrop earring on the opposite side of his head to a matching aug, bracelets on each wrist, and rings on the fore- and mid-fingers of each hand. However, despite this foppish appearance, he was just as ugly on the inside as his sister, and just as dangerous. Stanton was certain it was Alston’s contempt for the Pelter vanity, rather than the man’s skimming cash from the otter-bone trade, that had made Arian decide he had become a liability. Unfortunately, out on his island, Alston was well protected.

‘Dear sister,’ Arian acknowledged, as Angelina walked over, ‘so this is our new acquisition.’ He walked forwards, Semper and Stanton parting before him, then following as he headed over to inspect Mr Crane. He paced one circuit of the Golem, then turned to Angelina. ‘Have you tried him with weapons?’

‘Not yet. We’ve only just put on his skin,’ she replied.

Arian turned to Semper. ‘Your weapon.’

Semper was reluctant, but he handed over his pulse-gun. Arian took it and held it out to Mr Crane. ‘Now ...’ He looked around, then pointed to two crates standing one on top of the other on the further side of the warehouse. ‘Mr Crane, I want you to take this weapon and destroy the top one of those two crates.’ He held out the gun.

The weapon looked silly, toylike, in Crane’s big hand. With a darting motion, he dipped his head to inspect it. He then turned to face the crates, holding the weapon out to one side as if not sure quite what to do with it. There came a crunching sound and the brief flash of a laminar battery discharging. Pieces of Semper’s gun fell about the Golem’s feet as he abruptly lurched into motion. With long strides he ate up the ground between himself and the crates. Reaching them, he picked up the top one and just closed his hands on it, smashing the compressed-paper boards and the golden bones inside. Another abrupt movement scattered the debris all about him. He turned and strode back, stopping before Pelter to await further instructions.

Tapping his beringed forefinger against his aug, Arian said, ‘Well, he followed the instructions precisely, but not quite in the expected manner.’

About then, Stanton started to feel it was time for him to collect the money owed to him and depart. He did not want to be around when Mr Crane took literally one of Arian’s psycho ‘Kill them all’ orders. If the Separatists here on Cheyne III wanted to play catch with greased axes, he’d leave them to their game.

- retroact ends -

* * * *

As he drove his spade into the ground, Marlen kept half an eye on what the man was doing, but he was not entirely certain of what happened next. The skull broke like egg shell in the man’s hands. Then, retrieving something small and black from inside it, he discarded the bony remnants as he turned away. When he walked back over to watch his two slaves work, Marlen saw that he now held nothing, and could not shake the impression that the man had put the black object in his mouth and swallowed it.

* * * *

3

The difference between hotsuits and coldsuits has been a source of sometimes lethal confusion. Does a hotsuit keep you hot, or prevent you from getting hot; and is a coldsuit refrigerated? The rule of thumb I apply is to just remember that the suit’s internal temperature remains constant, so the ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ applies to the temperature outside it. Attempts were made to get everyone using ‘envirosuit’ with given temperature ranges, e.g. envirosuit 150-250K (Kelvin). This would have been much better because many suits do not function outside certain ranges and can even be damaged if exposed to temperatures outside them. People have frequently purchased inappropriate coldsuits for cold environments. The envirosuit example quoted, having been raised above 250K, will not then insulate below 200K. Equally, a hotsuit capable of keeping a human alive in temperatures above the melting point of steel will be destroyed by ordinary room temperature (which begs the question of how a human gets in and out of such a suit, but I won’t go there just yet). Of course, nothing so logical as the envirosuit nomenclature caught on: human language, go figure.

-
From
How It Is
by Gordon

The flare momentarily blacked out the virtual view from the bridge of the
Jack Ketch.
When that view returned, a stray rock half the size of the ship itself had disappeared.

‘I didn’t know you had imploder missiles aboard as well,’ Cormac commented, after placing his brandy glass down on the pedestal table beside his club chair.

‘No, you didn’t,’ said Jack unhelpfully.

The automaton sat in its usual chair a few paces away, thin-fingered hands flat on his thighs, immobile.

‘What other weaponry do you possess?’

‘Probably more than you can think of.’

‘APWs? Lasers?’

‘Yes and yes, though I’ll add that the former is just one variety of particle beam out of the twelve I possess; and that of the latter I possess the facility to lase light across the spectrum. I also possess masers and tasers, carousels containing missiles that can be tailored to specific purposes, from carrying surveying instrumentation to gigatonne CTDs.’

Cormac smiled to himself. Once you got a warship started on the subject of its armament, there was no stopping it.
I am what I am,
he thought.

‘Though the imploder missiles are a recent addition, they are not the most powerful weapons I carry. The larger CTDs obviously have a greater yield, but are messy and inelegant. I do carry singularity generators energized by the power surge of a fission warhead. Of course these must not be used unless in dire need—because of the one in two hundred million chance of thus generating a permanent black hole.’

As Jack went on to enumerate the various purposes to which he could tailor his missiles, Cormac gazed out at the scenery.

The giant research vessel
Jerusalem
was poised outside the asteroid field—too large to enter it without sustaining damage. Cormac had never really taken notice of the industry in the Polity directed towards acquiring and researching Jain artefacts, but now, seeing the
Jerusalem,
he gained some intimation of its extent, for this was the giant ship’s sum purpose. It was a sphere five kilometres in diameter, with a thick band around its equator containing everything from legions of robotic probes up to U-space tugs and grabships, like the one presently departing it. The sphere itself contained whole communities of research scientists, AI and human, all working under the aegis of Jerusalem itself—a sector-class AI some regarded as a demigod—and much of the work carried out inside its colossal structure was classified. Its AI, rather than being based around a crystal matrix, used etched-atom processors, which meant that those regarding it as a demigod might not be so far wrong, and furthermore it possessed the power of intercession, in
any
situation, second only to Earth Central itself.

Entering the asteroid belt, the grabship had closed its claw over one mountain of stone protruding from the asteroid and was now beginning to drag the mass out. Calling up the required views, Cormac observed a vast hold of the research vessel opening like a Titan’s mouth. With the asteroid on board, the ship was then to travel to Masada, whereupon those thousands of researchers inside it would begin their work. Not until they had wrung every last scrap of knowledge from the bridge pod, and then the Masadan system, and not until they rendered safe every Jain artefact, would that ship return to Polity space. The
Jack Ketch
hung over the location of the bridge pod, guarding against any further stray lumps of rock. Cormac hoped this would not be a lengthy task.

‘Jack,’ he interrupted, just as the AI was telling him about slow-burn CTDs that could melt their way down to a planet’s core, ‘How much longer until she’s uploaded?’

‘I am not actually uploading
her,
but a copy. I cannot give a precise period because the process is dependent on what I have to filter. This is not something we can hurry—I for one have no wish to end up going the way of Occam.’

That might sound like a philosophy, but in fact referred to the fact of the
Occam Razor’s
AI
suiciding rather than allow Skellor to control it.

‘Rough estimate, then.’

‘Three hours.’

Cormac rubbed at his cheek and yawned. ‘Then I’m for bed. The moment she’s ready I want you to jump back to
Elysium.’

‘You have always had EC’s authority,’ Jack noted.

‘You disapprove?’

‘Not of the carte blanche agents such as yourself have always possessed, but of allowing someone aboard me who contains active Jain technology inside them.’

‘Aphran—or Thorn and Mika?’

‘All of them.’

‘You surprise me.’

‘How would you feel about being the observer locked in a room with, for example, someone with a genetically proactive plague?’

‘I guess I wouldn’t be so happy.’

‘Me neither. I may be AI, but I do have feelings, you know.’

Cormac grinned—he was beginning to like this AI. ‘Well, Aphran has told us Skellor hunts dragons. I want Asselis Mika with me because she’s the nearest thing we have to an expert in both dragon and Jain technology. Perhaps she might be able to give us some lead on where those two remaining Dragon spheres went. And I want Thorn simply because he deserves to be here.’

‘As you will.’

After eight hours fiat out on his bed, Cormac returned to a bridge lit by the gloaming of underspace, and with two additions: a guillotine over to one side, to balance the gallows, and the illusory form of Aphran—the Separatist leader who had once employed Skellor and who had been killed by him. There was no time to interrogate the spectre, though, because within minutes the U-space grey was displaced by a close view of
Elysium.
Such questioning would have to wait for the next journey in the
Jack Ketch,
when it began its pursuit.

* * * *

The nerve shunt in his neck and the paralytic she had injected through the probes should have prevented the Outlinker from feeling anything, or even moving, but he was writhing, fighting against the clamps that secured him to the table so that they creaked alarmingly, and his face was clenched in agony. It had to be the mycelium—it was bypassing the shunt, and maybe even his nervous system, so as to control his body directly. Mika hoped that in this process it had not restored his consciousness. But as she directed the four grasping claws once again into his torso—into a ribcage opened out like the wings of a macabre butterfly and the clamped-open gut cavity—he opened his eyes and glared at her. There seemed no other option but to do it quickly now, and never mind how brutal she must now be. The claws closed on the writhing mass clinging to his spine, and through the telefactor gloves she wore she initiated the secondary incisions. With brutal efficiency, the autodoc cut through muscle and bone from the lower end of the main incision down each of his thighs, sealing veins, capillaries and arteries as it went.

Usually operations conducted by a surgical robot were bloodless, but with something this major, bleeding was inevitable. Sucking heads hissed over exposed flesh, taking away blood, which rather than cleaning and reinjecting she was replacing with an artificial substitute. It seemed the safest course—his blood was probably loaded with Jain nanomachines. Now she directed incisions across the shoulders and down both his biceps, and also up into his neck. Into all of these secondary incisions she directed wide-focus laser scalpels rather than chainglass ones, as she had found that the mycelium healed straight mechanical cuts made into itself almost immediately. In his thigh she saw the clumped filaments shrivelling away and, despite the vacuum nozzle behind each of the laser scalpels, she smelt burning flesh.

‘Now, you bastard!’ she said, flicking the sweat on her forehead to one side and sending the instruction to the robot to retract its four claws. Servomotors whined and, with a wet tearing sound, the trunk of Jain filaments, wound around the plum-sized dark nodules it had been growing, began to come up. In his biceps, she saw the severed clumps pulling in towards his torso and disappearing at the end of the incision. Those in his thighs tore up with the main mass. This mycelium, a fibrous blue-grey mass, something like a tree branch, tore up and away, but no tree branch writhed like a hooked ragworm to escape. Following its program, the surgical robot swung aside, bowed and deposited the thing in a chainglass vessel reserved for this purpose, slamming the lid closed on it as a door is closed on a hornet ejected from a house. It then swung back to Apis.