by Neal Asher
‘Do you have payment?’ asked the heavy who had spoken before.
Stalek peered at the man. This was where things got a little problematic. He indicated a box by his own feet. ‘Half a million in etched sapphires, and two ten-kilotonne-yield CTDs. I’m afraid that will have to be it. I couldn’t lay my hands on any APWs at this short notice.’
The man grunted, obviously satisfied with that. Stalek wasn’t surprised. They were probably glad to get anything at all for this item it had taken them so much effort and such loss of life to acquire –this thing that had turned out to be useless to them.
The cylinder arrived with the third man. Stalek wandered over and peered inside as the top half section of it split and hinged open. The Golem Twenty-five lay there utterly motionless, catatonic –as it had been since talking to itself non-stop for two days, then apparently trying to smash its way out of its prison with its head. The Jovians had assumed that their EM pulse had wrecked its mind. Stalek knew better. Something odd must have happened to it at the programming stage and, as unlikely as it seemed, Cybercorp had produced a dud.
‘Let’s see the money,’ said the one who had brought the cylinder down the ramp.
A woman, Stalek saw, and attractive. Shame. He turned his attention to the box he had brought, waved a hand at it. ‘It’s all there.’ He pointedly did not look towards the ship, having just glimpsed the black shape hopping up onto the ramp and scuttling inside it.
The woman squatted down, turned the simple lock on the case and flipped back the lid. She gazed in puzzlement at what seemed to be a coil of ribbed oxygen pipe.
‘Joden? Joden!’
The screaming from inside the ship was abrupt and harsh –agonized. From the box, the pipe uncoiled, whip-fast, opening gleaming pincers at its end which it snapped closed on the woman’s throat. She gargled and thrashed, blood bubbling out of her punctured suit. Meanwhile, Stalek had calmly removed two small spheres from his suit pocket. He tossed them towards the two men as one of them brought his weapon to bear, while the other did not seem to know what to do: open fire or help the woman. The spheres shot forwards, turned briefly incandescent, punched through two environment suits. Stalek stepped back as pulse-gun fire slammed into the front of his own suit, but the laminated armour made nothing of the ionized gas hits, and an inlaid superconducting mesh took away the heat. The spheres did precisely what they were supposed to do: exploding and flinging needles of pure potassium through the two men’s bodies, the metal igniting and burning fiercely in contact with moisture.
Their suits, Stalek noted, were quite good quality, for while the men boiled and burned inside, the only sign was a jet of oily steam from each of the holes the spheres had made upon entry –that and the way the two thrashed about and screamed a lot. When it was finally over, Stalek looked pointedly at Falco, who was studying the pulse-gun scars on the front of his suit, ahem’d and pointed to the still floating cylinder. Falco walked over and closed it up, then, grabbing the towing handle, pulled it after his boss. Stalek paused once to look back. He would come out to check there was nothing more of value inside this ship before he sold it on to his contact up in Port Lock. When the fires started, later in the season, they would incinerate all other evidence –not that anyone would be looking. Shaking his head, Stalek felt a degree of bewilderment. How ever had such amateurs managed to steal a Golem Twenty-five from right outside Cybercorp?
–retroact ends –
The Sand Towers, the wind-carved buttes exposing their layers of coloured sands recounting the ages of Cull, extended as far as he could see to his left and right, and tens of kilometres beyond towards the plains. Raising his family monocular to his eyes, Anderson Endrik now inspected the Overcity of Golgoth, spread across its great steel platform high up on the Towers, then the lower city crouching in the foothills. The entire city was a product of metallier industry, and the centre of the closer, lower section bore the appearance of giant iron lichen holding the spheres and ellipses of its denizens’ metal houses. Sprawled all around it were long low steel mills and factories interspersed with chimneys belching smoke. Anderson had heard much about this place: that old technologies were being resurrected in pursuit of the dream of re-establishing the downed communication link with Earth, of interstellar travel, and of rejoining the human empire. Anderson raised his monocular to the sky to observe Ogygian –the ship that had brought his own ancestors here –a sphere connected by a narrow body to the triple nacelles of the U-space engines, glinting like green quicksilver in the turquoise firmament. Then he lowered his monocular to let it hang by its strap and, tapping his goad against the back of its sensory head, urged his sand hog mount into motion.
‘Are all the rumours true, or just bullshit?’ wondered Tergal.
Anderson glanced aside at his young companion. Tergal was skinny and tall, his head topped by the wide-brimmed hat of a gully trader, with long dark hair spilling from under it down his back. He wore a leather jerkin, canvas trousers and sandals, and armed himself only with a punch axe and heavy crossbow. The boy’s sand hog, Stone, was also young, perhaps only the age of one human lifetime, for it still bore the red flush of youth and, as Anderson had noticed when the hog had first folded out its feeding head from underneath itself, it still possessed all its blunt white teeth. Seated in the saddle glued to the creature’s long teardrop-shaped carapace, Tergal was a metre lower than Anderson. The rough ride the young hog gave him also threw him continually from side to side.
Anderson’s own hog, Bonehead, was mature, and twice the bulk of Stone. The ears on its sensory head Anderson had trimmed back to stubs, and it was missing a few teeth. Its gait, however, up on its two powerful hind legs, was smooth. He remembered searching old records about why their mounts were so named. One reference to ‘hog’ had its meaning as something greedy, which certainly applied to Bonehead. When he discovered that hog also meant pig, he realized the true reason for the naming. When the creatures’ sensory and feeding heads were meshed, the composite head which resulted looked very much like that of a domestic pig portrayed in a very old picture. The carapace body, when viewed from the side, was also comparable, as was the pinkish coloration of sand hogs. Of course the similarity fell apart when these creatures rose up on their muscular hind limbs, or parted their composite heads on separate necks.
‘Ah, I think much truth can be weaned from the sand slide of rumour. Doubtless much old technology has been recovered or relearned –but surpassed?’ Anderson shook his head.
‘But they have advanced . . . you’ll grant that?’ The boy gestured to the city.
‘I’ll grant you that, though it could have been inferred before even seeing this place.’
‘How?’
Anderson eyed the youth. ‘Gully traders becoming wealthy by transporting coal and metal ores here?’ he suggested.
Tergal glanced at him. ‘I don’t know much about that. My mother was a trader by birth, but my stepfather is a minerallier. I know our mining was confined to shallow pits until the metalliers started wanting more coal and ores. My stepfather used to make a living from single-handedly mining gems. Now he employs hundreds of immigrants from Dalure, and even Rondure, and his mines extend right underneath the mountains. But does increased demand equate to advancement? It might well be just because their population has increased.’
Anderson grinned. ‘That’s one clue, but there are others.’ He reached into his belt pouch and took out a small cloth bag closed with a drawstring. Opening this, he shook out a handful of shell cases into his palm. ‘These tell us a lot. I found them scattered in a gully traders’ campsite, and I dug the metal slugs they propelled from the remains of a sleer. I’ve yet to see the weapon that uses them, but by their size I would guess the explosive is somewhat more efficient than my black powder.’ Anderson nodded to where he holstered his fusile muzzle-loader beside his saddle. ‘I’d guess they’re smokeless and that the weapon even has the facility for fast repetition of fire.’
‘What l
eads you to that assumption?’ Tergal asked archly.
‘They’re uniform, so probably not the product of individual skill. We’ve always known how repeating weapons function but just haven’t possessed the materials technology and industrial infrastructure to manufacture them –something like that takes time, effort and considerable organization to build. But having reached such a level of expertise, why not make the best weapons of that kind that you can?’
‘And?’ Tergal asked.
Anderson weighed the shell cases, as if in judgement, then slipped them back into his bag and placed it in his belt pouch. ‘Impressive weapons, certainly mass-produced, but not a product of the technology our kind first arrived here with. Do you think that if they had surpassed the old technologies, the metalliers would still be producing something so primitive? Where are the pulse-guns and the beam weapons, then?’
‘Yes –I see.’ The boy shrugged.
‘Course, I could be talking complete bollocks,’ Anderson added.
Tergal muttered something foul and, causing static sparks to flare, whacked his goad against his mount’s sensory head, and it reared, nearly unseating him as it pulled ahead. Anderson watched the boy a moment longer, then turned his attention to the eye-palp Bonehead extruded from its upper porcine sensory head and turned to observe him disapprovingly. He shrugged and placed his fingers against his lips to signal his own silence, and Bonehead sucked the eye-palp back into its skull, looking forwards. Anderson decided he wouldn’t needle the boy further.
It had always been his intention to make this final leg of his journey to the Plains alone, but the youth, joining Anderson’s camp one night, seemed disinclined to go away. Anderson had yet to fathom the boy’s history, but certainly it contained theft and quite possibly murder. Anderson suspected the boy balanced on a cusp –attracted by the kudos of travelling with Anderson but undecided about whether or not to rob him. Anderson would let him make his choice, and let him suffer the consequences of the same. At least, while the boy decided, he was not harming anyone. But mostly Anderson was glad of the company and of a willing audience to his many enthusiasms.
The concrete road winding towards Golgoth, the City of Skulls (named so because of the similarity many of the houses bore to those items), soon reached an intersection in the foothills and thereafter became much wider. Surveying his surroundings, Anderson observed further signs of technological advance. In the distance, he saw electricity pylons, and supposed it was true the metalliers had repaired the old power station in Bravence. Hereabouts the sand was only prevented from turning into shifting desert by the white and yellow plates of what was called egg lichen, though why it was called that Anderson had no idea –eggs were something he had only seen under a microscope, and had nothing to do with lichen. However, here there were also wide expanses levelled into fields producing cereals and root vegetables, irrigation frames being mounted over the latter, and occasional sprawls of glasshouses, usually as an adjunct to the occasional lone metallier dwelling, which consisted of anodized sheet aluminium nailed over wooden frames.
Much closer to the city, they passed through a small village, and he was fascinated by some vehicles parked at the side of the road. Obviously these did not require sand hogs to pull them. He was tempted to stop and make an inspection, to find out what kind of engines were used –electric, combustion, steam turbine –as that would certainly give him a true idea of metallier advancement. But he guessed he would soon be seeing more of such vehicles –a supposition soon proved true when they finally forced him and Tergal off the road.
‘Tergal, I reckon I’ll stop for the night before entering the city.’ Anderson gestured to a roadhouse a short distance ahead. ‘Will you join me?’
‘I thought you were eager to see Golgoth?’ the boy asked.
‘Eager yes, but not terminally so. I’d like to have some idea of what we’ll be riding into –and such information we should be able to obtain here.’
‘Then I’ll join you,’ Tergal replied.
The roadhouse, though fashioned of gleaming lacquered alloys and sheets of glass, did have what were recognizable as hog corrals around the back, though they were much smaller than the parking area for powered vehicles between it and the road. Anderson urged his hog across the lichen-bound dunes directly towards the corrals, his hog’s divided rear feet pulling up tufts of the yellow and white lichen as it strode along. Tergal hesitated, then turned his own mount to follow. As they drew close, a metallier strolled out towards them. He was recognizable as such by his long snake-leather coat, facial tattoos and sand goggles, for metalliers did not possess nictitating membranes like real humans. Drawing his hog to a halt, Anderson immediately observed the weapon the man had resting across his shoulder. It was all blued metal, half the length of Anderson’s fusile, and bore a long rectangular protrusion from the side, which he guessed to be a magazine. This was what Anderson had come for.
‘Where would you like us to put our mounts?’ he asked.
‘Any corral will do,’ the man replied, gesturing with his weapon. ‘There’s carrion in the far shed, if you want to feed them. Fifteen pfennigs a night.’
‘Fifteen!’ Tergal exclaimed, as his hog settled down onto its four short forelegs.
‘Unfortunate, I know,’ the man said, ‘but at that I make little profit.’
‘And how much for a room in this place?’ Anderson asked, undoing his lap strap as Bonehead also settled onto its crawler limbs.
‘Ten –costs more for hogs because they’re rare around here now. I keep thinking of closing the corrals, but then another one like you comes along, and I don’t.’ The man eyed him, and Anderson supposed what attracted the curious look was his attire. He guessed that not many people in so advanced a society dressed in armour fashioned from chitin and black bone, but then, with the weapons they possessed, he supposed not many of them needed to.
‘You’re a Rondure Knight,’ the man said. ‘Are you on your trial?’
Anderson took up his pack from behind his saddle, stood up, and walked to the edge of his hog’s carapace, from where he dropped to the ground.
‘That I am,’ he replied.
Walking over to the nearest corral, he pulled the steel draw bolt and opened the gate. Bonehead, seeing the opportunity for food and sleep, required no urging and, still on its crawler limbs, slid past into the corral. Tergal led his own younger hog by hooking his goad under its carapace’s skirt. Anderson walked over to the feed shed, opened the door and stepped back to allow a swarm of warple bugs to scuttle for cover. Breathing only through his mouth, he could almost taste the stench. He reached in, grabbed a carapace rim, and dragged out the suppurating carcass of a rock crawler. Joining him, Tergal grabbed the other side, kicking the door closed behind him, and they heaved the carcass over the rail into the corral. Both hogs moved in, sensory heads swinging up from underneath their bodies, then their feeding heads also swung up to engage with an audible crunch below the first heads. The younger hog gave Anderson’s precedence, but there would be enough there for both of them.
‘What’s your name?’ Anderson asked, as they returned to the metallier.
The man held out his hand. ‘Laforge.’
Anderson shook his hand, replying, ‘I’m Anderson Endrik and my companion is Dound Tergal.’
Tergal gave a half-hearted wave, but showed no inclination to take the man’s hand.
‘Where do we go?’ Anderson asked the metallier.
‘I’ll show you.’ The man turned and led the way. ‘The refectory is open all the time, so you should be able to get a meal.’
‘Not at these damned prices,’ Tergal muttered as they followed.
They entered the roadhouse through metal doors inset with rough green glass filled with bubbles.
‘A room each?’ Laforge asked them.
‘One will do,’ Anderson replied, glancing at Tergal for confirmation before holding out the ten-pfennig note he had pulled from his belt pouch.
‘
Tell me, where did you obtain that weapon?’ he asked, as Laforge pocketed the note.
The man turned, selecting a key rod from the bunch hanging on his belt as he led them to the nearest door.
‘In the city. Central manufacturing produces them, but every metallier shop carries a stock.’ He glanced round. ‘If you’re interested, I know the best place to go.’
‘I’m interested. I take it sand hogs are not usual transport in the city itself?’
‘Not really –but I’m going in tomorrow morning. My brother runs just the establishment you require on Second Level. You may find cheaper, but you won’t find better.’ He opened the door.
The room was a five-metre box with a single window set high up, and they walked in over the suction of a sand grid by the door. There was a carpet and four bunks. In an alcove to their right were a washbasin, a toilet, and even a roll of paper towelling. Anderson was surprised at the luxury –he had expected the price to pay for only the four protective walls.
Laforge detached a key rod and held it out to the knight. ‘This opens your door and turns on the water supply.’ He gestured to the alcove. ‘As I said, the refectory is open.’ He closed the door on his way out.
‘A little more than we expected,’ Anderson suggested.
‘I’ve been in worse places, I suppose,’ Tergal allowed. He turned to Anderson. ‘I didn’t know you were coming here for weapons.’
‘How long have you travelled with me?’
‘Two days.’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me. Just as there’s a lot I don’t know about you.’
‘I know now you’re a Rondure Knight who is on his trial.’
‘But not what that trial is.’
Tergal waited.
Anderson went on, ‘I need the best weapons I can find, because I am heading to the Plains, where I intend to kill a dragon.’
4
A quarter century after the creation of the first AI, and after cloned whole-body swapping had been going on for fifty years, people finally realized the legal system required a severe upgrade. Legally, it was still possible to end up on a murder charge for turning off the life-support of a human vegetable, yet no such laws applied to AI or even to some animals whose intelligence was demonstrably higher than that of many humans. Having human DNA should not immediately grant an individual inalienable rights. Rights, it was decided, and equivalent responsibilities, should be given to ‘citizens’, and only those above a certain level of intelligence could become citizens. Protests did result when some humans failed to qualify, whilst all AIs and some particularly bright pigs did, but I am not discussing that today. I’m here to talk about a particular corollary that can be traced back to these legal changes.
