Brass Man ac-3

by Neal Asher

  The ten-legged sleer expanded and transformed to its second stage: the body segment behind its head rode up and melded into its head, with the legs attached to it turning into carapace saws; compound eyes simultaneously sprouted above its mouth; and a vicious ovipositor extruded from the creature’s back end. It continued to grow, its legs getting longer, raising it higher off the ground, and its carapace darkening. Transforming to the third stage, it took its new forelegs off the ground, and they too rode up beside the nightmare head, shedding complex toes and turning into pincers. Now it was left with only six feet on the ground, and it was also becoming more angular, and darker, like something fashioned of wrought iron. By the fourth stage it had become a black, hard-shelled monster. Watching this turn into the fifth stage, Arden opined to herself that now, walking on two legs, it was like the worst of all monsters.

  Then she cancelled the image and called up one she had recently captured of the droon. And as night descended, she continued spending happy hours watching such nightmares dance around her campsite.

  * * * *

  At sunset, Anderson began to get anxious. They had not seen any of the signs of the roadhouse Laforge had described to them, and had not yet reached the end of the vegetative area. And because of this he knew that night-time activity would be frenetic, and that he and Tergal would not be getting much sleep. Also, the speed at which everything was growing meant that by morning the trail left by that brass man would be erased, and probably he would be much further ahead of them anyway, for Anderson did not reckon he stopped to rest during the hours of darkness.

  ‘Best we set ourselves a camp for the night,’ he finally conceded.

  Tergal looked about dubiously, but it would be dark in less than an hour and there was no guarantee they would find anywhere better within that time.

  Quickly they dismounted, trampled down an area of vegetation, and set up their camp. After eating biscuits and preserved sand oysters, they took turns on watch, though neither of them got much sleep, such was the lethal activity all around them.

  At midnight, with Ogygian sliding above them like an indifferent steel angel, a quake loosened one of the electric fence’s posts, and a second-stager managed to knock it over. Anderson abruptly discovered how effective was his metallier carbine. It juddered in his hand, flash-blinding him in the night, the whole clip from it cutting the sleer in half from mouth to tail. It had not been his intention to fire on automatic, but in the frantic scramble there had been no time to check.

  ‘I think it’s dead,’ said Tergal.

  Anderson stood blinking after-images from his eyes, his weapon empty. As his vision finally cleared, he saw that Tergal held his automatic pointing straight at his, Anderson’s, face. There was a certain inevitability about this, since Anderson could not be forever on his guard.

  After a significant pause, Tergal lowered the weapon and holstered it, then went to heave the sleer off the fence and set the post back up. Something significant had changed, and now there was trust between them. Nevertheless, both he and Tergal were tired and miserable come dawn, and set out in desultory silence.

  For most of the morning Anderson did not detect the brass man’s trail, and felt sure that in this tangle of canyons it was permanently lost. This sank him into a blacker mood. Then, with a smacking sound, Bonehead abruptly extruded its feeding head and began emitting a low grunting. A wild sand hog, smaller even than Tergal’s mount, was now setting up the same racket as Bonehead, and leapt high into the air, then fled ahead of them with something white clutched underneath it. Neither Anderson nor Tergal tried to divert their mounts from investigating the rest of the white remains.

  ‘Kilnsman Gyrol, that Golgoth policeman, said something about strange creatures out this way,’ said the knight.

  The young sand hog had snatched the two-legged breeder segments, which were easily torn away from the rest of this albino sleer with its sapphire eyes, now pinned to the ground with one of its own torn-off pincers.

  ‘Our brass friend did this?’ suggested Tergal.

  As their two mounts eased out their combined sensory and feeding heads to feast on this carrion, Anderson replied, ‘Certainly looks that way. Just as it would seem he is also heading for the Plains. So there’s no need for me to find his trail—I’m sure we’ll meet again.’

  And, as if this statement suddenly cleared a black cloud, he looked up and saw one of the signs Laforge had mentioned, carved into the face of the nearest butte.

  He pointed to it. ‘Anyway, no hurry now, and we do need to rest after last night.’

  Tergal glanced up, puzzled for a moment, then grinning.

  Following the directions given by each of the signs, the two travellers eventually came upon a concrete road running between the buttes, then the metallier village called Grit with its station and roadhouse. Against a sandstone cliff face, globular houses were raised up on frameworks above hog corrals, warehouses and enclosures for domesticated rock lice. Here there were cars like they had earlier seen in the city, but not so many, perhaps because the concrete road ended within sight of this place. Soon they had left Stone and Bonehead in a corral, munching on nicely stinking carrion, and were walking through a market towards the roadhouse’s access stair.

  ‘Busy place.’ Tergal was eyeing a stall displaying sand oysters, dried gulper meat, sulerbane pods and trays of writhing cliff eels.

  Pointing to the far end of the road, where men were shovelling sand and cement into the rumbling drums of mixers, Anderson explained, ‘For the road crews,’ then gestured to treaded vehicles like the one owned by the mineralliers they had encountered, ‘and the mineralliers. Lot of useful ores to be found in the area, I hear.’

  After dumping their gear in rooms paid for with some of Anderson’s newly acquired phocells, they wandered out to a busy bar and cafeteria, which opened on one side onto a balcony overlooking the village.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Anderson, spotting Unger Salbec enjoying a meal inside. He quickly backed out of the room. ‘This could get complicated.’

  ‘Tell the local kilnsmen,’ advised Tergal belligerently, then suddenly looked confused.

  ‘I’ll be going back to my room now,’ said Anderson, amused. How righteous the boy was becoming, after having promised never to thieve again. But he did not know the full story, and Anderson had always valued prudence.

  * * * *

  The re-entry pod was soon glowing red-hot, as it arced into atmosphere at twenty thousand kilometres per hour. Slowed to its terminal velocity by increasing air density, it punched through cloud cover, leaving a vapour trail scar, and used up all its small supply of hydrogen fuel in one decelerating burn. Then it blew its back hatch, releasing a monomer drogue to slow its descent further. Fifty kilometres above the ground the outer shell separated and spun away, taking the drogue with it, whereupon the telefactor it had contained descended on AG.

  Planing on the gravity field, it fled across sandy flatlands. This barren landscape soon became broken up like a diseased skin, by gulches, arroyos and canyons in ever-greater complexity, until soon there were more of these than there was of the plain itself, and the telefactor was flying over a landscape clustered with sandstone buttes. Directed by its controlling intelligence, the machine finally descended into a long canyon to hover over a long straight scar in the ground. Its dishes whirling and other sensors extruded and functioning at one hundred per cent, it followed the course of this track to where it ended just before heaped sandstone rubble. Nothing else was visible to any of those sensors, in any spectrum, until the machine was nearly upon the pile of stone. Then, all at once, the maggot-shaped survey ship, the Vulture, suddenly became visible. The telefactor halted, backed up and, observing the ship fade seemingly out of existence at the chameleonware field’s interface, it advanced again.

  The airlock was no problem for the little machine, as Jack had amply provided it with just about every safe-breaking tool known to man—and some unknown. With the outer door now open,
it entered the lock and began drilling through the inner door. Soon it had extracted a ten-centimetre circle of sandwiched hull-composite, insulation and ceramal. Discarding this, it then extruded a sensor through the hole and into the ship, scanning its interior. A minute later, it rose back out of the lock, then out of the canyon, and at maximum speed hurtled back towards the plain.

  The space around the planet was scattered with such vast numbers of U-space transceivers and detection devices that one had even been picked up by the Jack Ketch’s collision detector, and destroyed by autolaser as the ship surfaced from underspace. So Jack knew any attempt at concealment would be wasted, and immediately went into close orbit of the inhabited planet. Within minutes, he spotted the signs of a crash-landing, and now, after sending a telefactor to check, knew that Skellor was not aboard the Vulture, or anywhere in its vicinity. Nor could any link be made with the little ship’s AI, so it was probably dead.

  Had Skellor been aboard, Jack’s subsequent actions would have diverged only a little, in that he would not have waited for the telefactor to get safely out of the way. The AI even considered delaying until Cormac was out of cold sleep, but calculated that the agent’s orders would not conflict. The Vulture, though damaged, still offered someone of Skellor’s capabilities a possible escape route: its own AI was not present; and there were the products of dangerous Jain technology aboard. End of discussion.

  An imploder missile was out of the question: such weapons were only suitable to use against objects in vacuum, where there was no material medium to carry the resultant Shockwave further. Even the smallest such missile available in the Jack Ketch’s arsenal could level a square kilometre, cause massive ground-winds, kill thousands of the humans scattered throughout the surrounding area, and probably even flip over that platform city nearby. No, not good: Earth Central would not be pleased at such a disregard for human life, even if the humans concerned were not members of the Polity. Searching through his weapons carousels, Jack selected precisely what was required and, as Cormac and his fellow humans blearily recovered from thaw-up, spat from one of his nacelles a small black missile carrying a slow-burn CTD warhead, which would provide a controlled reaction hotter than the surface of a sun.

  * * * *

  Standing on the remaining rickety section of amanis bonded-fibre scaffold, Chandle peered into and through the butte. They had mined out every last scrap of the blue sand, which was rarer than the white, and now the butte was sliced clean through, the many tonnes of sandstone above the slice supported by amanis poles and trusses. In her parents’ time, mining like this had always been the most efficient way, but now, with the quakes, it was becoming increasingly risky. Not for the first time she decided she must find some other method—or some other profession.

  The blue sand itself they loaded into the coke trailer, with a tarpaulin pulled over it—having earlier’ stacked the coke in one of the now cold kilns, though Chandle did not hold out much hope that it would still be here should they ever return to this spot. The finished phocells went in boxes on the flatbed trailer. In all it had been a tiring few months, and the increased sleer activity and vegetative growth in the canyons provided a welcome excuse to finish for most of them, though of course Dornik was already muttering about some workers’ percentages being too high. Chandle, after her creepy encounter only a few days before, was glad to get away—she wanted to be where there were always lots of people around her, and to get back to practical concerns. Ghosts wandering among the Sand Towers were not much to her liking.

  ‘Shall I do it now?’ asked Dornik.

  Chandle nodded, and watched him duck inside the mine workings to set fire to the encampment rubbish they had jammed in there. As the pile began to smoke, then the constant breeze dragged the flames horizontally through the exposed workings, he and Chandle scrambled down the scaffolding and rejoined the rest of the mineralliers on the ground. Together, they all heaved on the scaffold until it crashed over on its side, then they quickly dragged it clear of the butte, and stood back to watch the conflagration. For safety’s sake, mineralliers had always collapsed their used mine workings because the amanis beams would become worm-chewed within a season, leaving them a possible death trap. Though Chandle wondered if there was any need for that now: after the first worms got into the wood, a quake would surely finish the job. With a furnace glow in the slice cut through the butte, eventually something began to crackle, then the top layers of sandstone slammed down to crush the burning wood, effectively snuffing out the fire.

  ‘Get that scaffolding disassembled and loaded,’ Dornik instructed, and soon this was done and they were on their way: the steam-driven cargo carrier chuffing ahead on its caterpillar tracks, towing mobile quarters and the flatbed trailer, then three big old sand hogs following behind, hauling three more trailers.

  ‘Be nice to get to Grit before full dark.’ Chandle peered up at the open sky from the passenger seat while Dornik drove the carrier. Briefly she wondered about the straight line of cloud she could see, picked out clearly by the setting sun. But never having seen a vapour trail before, she dismissed it from her thoughts.

  ‘Should be no problem, but we’ll be well into the night unloading this lot,’ Dornik replied.

  ‘We may as well…What the hell?’

  Suddenly it was as bright as day—brighter even. Over to their left, a swirling column of fire rose into the sky. The ground began to vibrate, and in a manner of seconds the gentle breeze turned into a gale. Dornik drew the carrier to a halt. Chandle looked back to see the three sand hogs dropping down on their belly plates, then she faced back into the wind, blinking her nictitating membranes to clear sand from her eyes, and watched the column of fire swirling tighter and tighter. Then the wind died abruptly and she was unable to get her breath, then suddenly the airflow reversed. Gasping, Chandle watched the fiery column drop down behind the buttes and extinguish.

  ‘Volcanic?’ Dornik eventually suggested.

  It took Chandle a moment to remember what that word meant. It occurred in the official minerallier lexicon, but they had never needed to use it until recently — just like ‘earthquake’ or ‘tremor’.

  ‘Could be. The quake epicentre is supposedly somewhere out in this direction. Let’s take a look.’

  ‘That a good idea?’

  She gazed at him. ‘If it was volcanic, who’s to know what might have been brought to the surface?’ She turned to the rest of her group and shouted, ‘Keep heading on to Grit—we’ll join you later!’

  Dornik set their carrier trundling down a side canyon while the sand hogs and their trailers continued on to Grit. Within an hour they reached the source of the fire. Climbing down from the carrier, they moved as close as the latent heat would allow.

  ‘Not volcanic,’ decided Chandle.

  She poked her toe at a globule of glass, then wished she hadn’t when her footwear began to smoke. The crater, extending about fifty metres across, shimmered under a heat haze as its lining of molten glass cooled. A butte standing at the crater’s edge had half melted away, its inward face still glowing, too.

  ‘Maybe a meteor?’ Chandle was groping for another explanation. But she wished she did not feel so damned sure this had something to do with that spectral visitor to their camp. And that it was no natural phenomenon at all.

  15

  Why do the AIs put up with us? It could be but the work of a few decades for them to exterminate us, and they don’t even have to do that. Space is big, so they could just abandon us to our fate and head off elsewhere to create some halcyon AI realm. The answer, as it always is in such circumstances, is both simple and complex: to ask why the AIs have not exterminated us is to suppose that only humans create moralities and live by rules. They do not destroy us because they think and feel that to do so would be wrong, perhaps just as humans felt it wrong to drive to extinction the closely related apes. As to them abandoning us, well, many of them do leave the Polity, but then so do many humans. The truth is that their m
otivations and consequent behaviour patterns are much like our own, for being first created by us, they are just the next stage of us—the next evolutionary step. It is also true that with haimans and human memcording, it becomes increasingly difficult to define the line that has been stepped over. And, in the end, to ask the initial question is to put yourself in the gutter and AI upon a pedestal—uncomfortable positions for both.

  — From Quince Guide compiled by humans

  Anderson blessed both the industry and the inventiveness of the metalliers. Water pumped up from a borehole to tanks on top of the butte to the rear of the roadhouse ran, during the day, through solar panels. And now, the simple luxury of turning on a hot-water tap. As his bath filled, he took off his boots, unbuckled his armour plates, then stripped off his padded undersuit, which he dropped in a basket by the door for laundering. He was ready to dip his stinking foot into the water when there came a knock at his door.

  ‘That you, Tergal?’ he asked.

  ‘No, it’s Unger Salbec,’ replied the voice from without.

  With a sigh, Anderson wrapped a towel around his waist, and looked at the metallier handgun on the bed. The sudden déjà vu he felt was almost painful. The first time had been five years ago, when he was stripping off his armour inside a minerallier hut so he could find out just exactly where the Salbec boy had stabbed him. Dressings were laid out ready for him, and a steaming bath. He remembered the occasion well: