by Neal Asher
Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and fired five times. One shot punched a hole through Skellor’s forehead, the next four hit him in the face, snapping his head back each time and forcing him against the wall. Skellor flickered, but his chameleon-ware would not function and, as Cormac realized, with his own perception so changed it would not matter if it did—Cormac would still see the hole in existence the man occupied. He fired two more shots into the man’s chest, targeted his knees as he tried to spring, blew apart a hand that reached back to press against the wall.
Beside Skellor, Cento unpeeled himself from metal, scissored his legs around the biophysicist’s waist and clamped them there. The Golem then tore away wall panels to reveal an I-beam, which he embraced.
‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.
Cormac loaded another clip and, backing towards where Cento had blown out the screen, continued to pump shots into Skellor. He had to move fast: the Golem would not hold Skellor for long. The clip now empty, Cormac slapped the weapon down against a stick patch at his belt and dived through the missing screen, snagging up the APW as he went. Outside, he glanced down past the truncated ship to where the rest of it continued to fall towards the dwarf star, accompanied in its descent by the ripped-away engine pier and nacelle. Both these objects he could see were distorting, rippling. He found steps, hauled himself up along the curving hull and saw one grapple clenched hard on wreckage where the pier had torn away, the other closed on the next nacelle.
The cables were woven monofilament, hugely strong, but few materials could withstand a concentrated proton blast. High above he saw the attack ship: blades of fusion engine flame cutting down from it to his left. He needed to hit both cables quickly, before that ship fried him. Hopefully that would be enough, because if King of Hearts was like the Jack Ketch, the two grapples—one from each of its weapons nacelles—were all it would have ready. And by the time it readied some more, what remained of the Ogygian would be beyond its reach.
Cormac stepped across to the nearest grapple, climbed up onto it, and sat down with his legs on either side of the massive cable. Should the attack ship fire at him now, it stood a good chance of destroying its own cable—a fact which might make it hesitate for long enough. Cormac aimed at the other cable, with the APW setting at its highest, and pulled the trigger. The beam transformed his target into a white-hot bar, then it just dissolved in violet fire. Ogygian tilted underneath him as he brought the weapon to bear on the cable right next to him, then suddenly he was weightless and instinctively clinging on. The second grapple had torn away, holding wreckage like a fistful of hair grasped from someone narrowly escaped. Ogygian dropped away down an invisible lift shaft to hell. Above, the cable slackened in a long arc through space, then began to straighten out again. Cormac clung on for all he was worth. When the cable tautened, about ten gees compacted his spine down onto the grapple. The APW became too heavy to hold and tore from his grasp. He felt his vertebrae cracking and things ripping inside him, but still he clung on. Thoughts he had briefly entertained of taking action against the ship should the cable be reeled in, died then.
When the acceleration finally ceased, he coughed, spattering his visor with blood. But when he looked down he was satisfied to see no sign of the Ogygian. The cable did then reel him in until he was only twenty metres from the lethal ship’s left-hand weapons nacelle. Ports were opening before him, annihilation a breath away.
‘Now that has really pissed me off,’ the King of Hearts’ AI informed him.
* * * *
Consciousness crept up on him and inserted itself into his perception. Coming out of black nothingness, Anderson slowly realized he was awake. He was lying in the lee of a slab, which was a conglomerate of fossilized worms and bivalve shells the shape of kidneys. He reached up to ensure his skull was in one piece, found a wadded blanket supporting his head. Warily he rolled to one side, wincing as his body informed him of its injuries, and sat upright to look around.
Bonehead was a dome nearby—everything utterly retracted. Looking at the hog’s damaged shell where the saddle and lance framework had been torn away, Anderson thought he would need to make a lot of repairs with epoxy—and should not ride the hog for some time, until the shell had healed internally. Now he turned his attention to where the others stood beside what it took him a moment to identify as the fallen droon, his lance still impaling it. He stood up a little unsteadily and walked over, noting that the brass man was gone.
‘You’re recovered.’ Tergal spotted him first.
Anderson wondered about the tone of resentment he sensed, and recognized that Tergal had not found these latest adventures to his liking.
‘As best as can be expected,’ Anderson replied.
Arden and Thorn now turned towards him, too. He gazed past them to where the vulture perched on the wide deflated head of the droon. During his reading, in the library of Rondure, he had never come across the word ‘vulture’, but he recognized this creature as an uglier version of some pictures he had seen of things called ‘birds’.
‘The conquering hero returns,’ said the vulture.
Anderson did recollect reading how some birds were good mimics, but that did not sound like mimicry to him. In fact it sounded very like Unger Salbec. He winced at this reminder—another complication to add to the What now? malaise he seemed to be suffering.
‘Tergal told me your trial has lasted twenty years.’ Arden studied him with some amusement. ‘And you also told me our friend here would be dragon enough.’ She pushed a foot against one sprawled-out limb, which looked like a twisted and torn I-beam projecting from the wreckage of some collapsed building. Anderson stepped back a pace, remembering one particular third-stage sleer in a hailstorm.
‘It’s enough,’ said Anderson.
‘So you’ll return to Rondure?’ she asked.
Anderson shrugged. If he returned anywhere, it would be to Bravence, where Unger Salbec awaited him. But he was not the kind of person who returned anywhere. He glanced at Tergal. ‘What do you think?’
Tergal shook his head. ‘I have debts to repay, if you’ll allow me.’
Anderson nodded, turned to Thorn. ‘What about you?’
‘That remains to be decided,’ said Thorn. He studied the weapon he held, pulled out the empty clip and stared inside it almost accusingly, before slapping it back into place. He then pointed over Anderson’s shoulder.
They all turned to watch the blimp approach.
* * * *
In utter frustration, Skellor withdrew from Cento. It was like the Occam Razor—that AI burn. But he had encountered no other Golem possessing the ability to destroy its own mind. He supposed Cento had prepared himself for this—having assessed the dangers Jain tech represented to one of his kind. Skellor pushed the Golem away. No matter—he really, really had more important concerns.
The brown dwarf’s tidal swathe was hitting with metronomic regularity, splitting and tearing apart Ogygian all around him. Bound together by internally generated diamond fibres and with what remained of his human nervous system shut down, Skellor tried to bend with the flow, distorted, the fibres snapping inside him, other structures breaking. But he rebuilt them, bound himself together with more fibres, and concentrated all his resources on constructing inside his torso the gravitic generator that would power him to survival.
The agent probably thought he had won—thought that this was the end of Skellor. But Skellor was more than mere human: he could survive this, would survive this.
The temperature was rising. Already some materials inside the ship were beginning to vaporize. The continuous grinding, twisting and flexing of the ship’s structure and the rippling of its hull were generating most of the heat. Bubble-metal I-beams, taking on a cherry glow, stretched like toffee and twisted apart, the inert gases used to foam their metal bleeding away into vacuum. Behind Skellor, the hull separated like wet cardboard, and underneath him the floor bowed alarmingly, then began to slew awa
y. Everything, bar himself and one other item, was coming apart as if utterly rotten. That the Golem chassis retained its shape was testament to Polity materials technology. But even that would not survive the impact to come.
The next gravity wave hit hard and lasted longer, shattering what remained of the ship across a kilometre of space. Pieces of it were now incandescent—boiling into vacuum. Skellor retained his own shape — reinforced it from inside using structural force fields powered by his internal gravitic generator. But something was wrong. That wave had nearly ripped him in two, yet with the theorized output of the generator, it should not have. And he would need everything the generator could give him, as there was much worse to come. He ran a diagnostic on the machine, but found it was functioning at optimum. Separate from his internal diagnostics, he probed inside it with nanoptic fibres, and located the node growing right in the centre of it. He opened the generator, forced the node out, closed the generator and had it up to forty per cent of function when the next wave hit.
Skellor screamed, mostly in rage and frustration — now a piece of diamond-sewn meat stretched out over four metres of nothing. Tidal forces had shredded the remains of the ship, the bulk of it now a falling arc of metallic vapour. Skellor was the largest single chunk remaining, the second-largest being an eyeless Golem skull. He slowly drew himself back together, high above an endless brown plain; became a black human doll full of whorls and knots. Witch-fingered. Much of his substance had been torn away or had boiled into vacuum, and his mind was losing cohesion. Before it went completely, simple physics impinged: he could not survive this; how had he ever thought he could survive this?
Some hours later a fibrous mass containing Jain eggs, which so far had managed to retain their shape, hit the surface. Half that mass turned to energy. All that remained was a baroque silver pattern across the dun surface.
* * * *
Through tunnelling vision Cormac watched as out of an elliptical port on the side of the nacelle, at the end of a jointed arm, extruded a close-quarters laser. This device looked something like a premillennial machine-gun, though rather than belt-fed with ammunition, it was fed by thick, ribbed power cables. But it served the same purpose, normally being used against smaller opponents who had actually managed to get close to the ship’s hull. It was precisely the weapon required to remove Cormac from the grapple, probably in pieces. He spat blood and looked aside, still seeing into the tear in his perception. Perhaps he could step inside the ship, cause damage… something? No, the whole idea was laughable now. He had done it; he had shifted himself through U-space by an act of will, but right then he had no idea of how he had done it. And what could he do inside the ship, injured and weak as he was? Reality was himself suspended in vacuum with a laser pointed at him and death imminent. Then, through that same tear in vision, something surfaced distantly, something huge.
‘I see,’ said King.
The laser powered up, a hot glow emitting from its sooty workings. It turned on its arm and fired. The cable glowed red, white, blue-white, then the centre of that light exploded into globules of molten carbon. Once again Cormac was weightless as the grapple and a short piece of the cable he was clinging to began to fall back towards the brown dwarf. The laser folded away, all ports closed, and the attack ship receded above him.
‘You saw that I did not gain access to Skellor—or to Jain technology,’ King sent.
‘So,’ Cormac managed.
‘Tell Jerusalem that.’
As he fell, Cormac faded; even the perceptile programs he had been using were not managing to keep him conscious. He saw a vision of curving steel, thought himself near impact with the dwarf star, but realized that was wrong. If he was that close, he would not see a curve to the horizon—would probably see nothing at all.
Then something titanic engulfed him, and claws, three-fingered and gleaming, closed on his upper arms. As they separated him from the cable, things ripped inside his body. Blood exploded from his mouth, and something hard entered his neck. After a numb hiatus, which he read in his gridlink as having lasted seven minutes, came bright aseptic light.
‘This may take some time,’ said the voice of Asselis Mika. ‘I don’t think there’s an unbroken bone in his body.’
Another voice, the resonant iceberg tip of vast intellect, noted, ‘The inside of his head is not much better.’
The lights went out again.
* * * *
When humans referred to something called a ‘cold sweat’, Dragon had formerly known what it meant only on an intellectual level. Now the entity understood what it meant on a visceral level. In its dealings with the Polity, it had always purposely encountered lesser entities than itself. This was why it had always kept away from the larger-capacity runcible AIs—sector AIs—and tried not to operate within twenty light-years of any place in which Earth Central had shown the slightest interest. Jerusalem was precisely the kind of Polity AI that Dragon had therefore always avoided. Now the entity was reminded why, for Jerusalem possessed the sheer mental power to beat Dragon at its own games whilst also inhabiting a ship body possessing the physical size and power to render it unnecessary for it to play such games.
This was why Dragon had found itself unable to conceal certain facts for very long. The essence of the transmission, after the initial fencing, had been: ‘Tell me everything, and fast’—along with the blueprint of one of the Jerusalem’s internal chambers and an overview of the equipment that could be used there. Dragon was left in no doubt that the ship could encompass, immobilize, then dismantle it to see how it ticked.
That the Jerusalem had dropped into U-space upon learning about the Ogygian was less than reassuring. It meant the AI certainly knew that Dragon would not be escaping and could be dealt with at leisure. The thought of such an AI gaining access to Skellor was frightening. The thought of it obtaining certain items that Skellor would soon be shedding, like a dandelion scattering its seeds in the breeze, was enough to give even a dragon nightmares. But Dragon had no power to affect those events, though one such item, close by, it had aimed to put in safer hands.
Still on course for Cull, the entity linked through to the flying lizard, which had coiled up to sleep in a sulerbane leaf, the recent stress of expected extinction having obviously exhausted it. Receiving instruction, the creature reared up, shook itself and flew over to the carapace remains of Skellor’s last meal on Cull, landed and looked to where the golden egg had fallen. Dragon was so amused it decided to let the lizard live despite its near contact with Jain technology. Where the egg had lain in the dust, now rested a blue acorn.
Dragon wondered what the brass man would make of his new toy.
Others might wonder at the entity’s definition of ‘safer hands’.
Epilogue
Fethan stooped down by the dismembered Golem and thought, with morbid humour, I don’t hold out much hope for his recovery. But in this case that might not be true. Gant may have been missing one leg and his head, but memory crystal should contain his essential being inside his Golem chest. However, Jain growth marred that chest, and the Golem had shut down. What this growth might portend was why Fethan and Thorn had insisted on searching alone, and why they had allowed Tanaquil and the boy Tergal to return to Golgoth in the blimp. Fethan contemplated that. The Chief Metallier’s cry of anger on reading that the colony ship Ogygian no longer occupied the sky had been heart-wrenching — seeing that his one contact with that human civilization he craved to return to had taken his wife and his dreams. Perhaps he might dream new dreams? Certainly the Polity was not finished with this world.
‘Are you getting anything?’ Thorn asked.
Fethan shook his head. ‘I haven’t tried yet.’ Now he did attempt to make contact through Gant’s internal radio—perhaps the dead soldier’s only remaining link to the outside world. But, as before, he found there something vicious that made him jerk away. It was like placing his hand in a dark burrow and hearing some animal snarl. Viral subversion then trac
ked his signal back—alien Jain code. He shut down his transceiver and isolated it, killing the power to his primary decoder as well.
‘I don’t think he’s in there,’ he said.
‘We have to be sure,’ Thorn said.
Fethan shrugged. He liked Gant and had no wish for him to be irrevocably dead, but he had not known the man or the machine for as long as Thorn had. Reluctantly he sent an internal signal and detached the syntheflesh covering of his fingertip. Then, studying Gant’s neck, he discounted all the severed optics. Selecting instead a small duct containing hair-thin superconducting filaments, he pressed his fingertip against the break. Through nerve linkages in his fingertip, the kill program made connections and found its way through to the Golem’s crystal storage. The program did not transcribe this time, as it only needed to look. Fethan felt an ache growing in his right shoulder and arm. Psychosomatic it might be, but it still bothered him. Finally the program made its assessment:
Your friend is gone. There is nothing recognizably human in here, only Jain code and its need to survive and spread.
At that moment the Golem’s hands came up, tracked up Fethan’s arm by touch and closed on his throat. But this availed it nothing, for the old cyborg’s throat was hard. He caught both wrists and pushed the groping hands away, propelling himself rapidly backwards.
‘Gant is gone,’ he said.
With a metallic crunching, the Golem body folded back on itself, then arched up and thrust itself towards Fethan. This, more than anything, confirmed the program’s diagnosis: for the Jain inside was forcing the Golem body into something tripodal, something with no physical relation at all to the human race. Thorn immediately swung Fethan’s APW to bear and opened fire. The three-limbed beast bounced in red flame. Syntheflesh burning away, it hopped and bounced like a spider in a lighter flame. Thorn hit it again, and again. Limbs came away until eventually it was still. Thorn then approached the broken torso and, drawing a knife he had acquired aboard the blimp, probed inside and at last levered out the lozenge of Gant’s erstwhile mind.
