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  ‘Stay sharp,’ he said, and noticed then that Cento and Gant had already drawn their weapons.

  When they were still a half kilometre from the chamber, Cormac suddenly felt a strange beating under his breastbone. This rhythm increased in frequency till, with a thrill through his entire body, it exceeded the range where he could feel it. A darkness then occluded the lights below and there came a sound as of a ton of scrap iron being rolled across the ice and stone. A shape filled the shaft and started to draw closer. It looked like a cross between a trapdoor spider and a tick, but made of polished chrome. It was huge, a nightmare, and it was coming fast.

  ‘Jesus!’ yelled Gant.

  ‘Hit it!’ yelled Cormac. It seemed more than likely that it was not coming to welcome them.

  Candent flashes filled the tunnel. Stone was blasted in molten droplets from the wall. Cormac saw one chrome leg drop away, then—as a growing cloud of CO2 vapour filled the shaft—the creature was on Gant and Cento.

  ‘Pull back!’

  The line Carn was attached to, which led to Cento, whipped to one side and Carn fell against the wall of the shaft. In the vapour there were more flashes and a sound like a compressor starting up.

  ‘They’re bouncing off! Jesus! Cento!’ came Gant’s yell. He came backwards out of the cloud, firing as he came, stripped-off filament cladding falling round his feet. Then came the creature, scrabbling for a grip on the walls of the shaft. Many of its legs were now missing and there were scores along its teardrop body, but it had legs still to spare and did not seem to notice the damage. Its triclaw mandibles opened and snapped shut around Gant, even while he was firing into its mouth. He yelled and swore.

  Cormac drew his shuriken. He sensed Aiden and Thorn at his back, and knew they were aiming their weapons. But there was no clear shot, and the creature dropped back down the shaft, holding on to the yelling Gant, his abseil-winder making a horrible penetrating shriek as the chain-cotton was wound out too fast. Cormac slapped his shuriken back into its holster.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  They moved on down the shaft to where Cento lay against the wall. His fingers were driven into the rock of the wall, their fleshy covering stripped back from the metal underneath. His head and one arm had been ripped away, and synthetic flesh had been peeled from him to expose his gleaming metal interior. He was completely still. Cormac turned to Aiden.

  ‘Are you getting anything?’

  ‘His safe-storage is secure,’ said Aiden.

  ‘OK, take his place on the line and secure him here. We have to get after Gant.’ He turned to Carn. ‘You wait here till we call you. If we don’t, get the hell out of here.’

  Cormac and Thorn went ahead into the settling CO2 vapour. Gant was still yelling, which must be a good sign. They jogged down the shaft, pulling against the friction setting as fast as they could. Meanwhile, Cormac punched in a particular attack program through the holster of his shuriken. It hummed contentedly as it drew full charge from the holster’s power supply.

  ‘We have to get it to release Gant,’ Cormac said over his shoulder to the grim-faced Thorn. ‘Once it’s done that, shuriken might be able to handle it.’

  ‘Gant said our weapons were bouncing off it,’ said Thorn.

  ‘Your light weapons . . . they bounced off the main body . . . but they damaged its legs and feelers . . .’

  Just at that moment Gant’s yelling abruptly ceased, and his line went slack ahead of them. A cloud of CO2 vapour gusted up the shaft. Cormac knew what that meant; Gant’s coldsuit had been breached. It was probably his blood that was turning the carbon-dioxide ice to vapour. He guessed that Thorn probably knew this as well. Cormac continued on, carefully, as the line ahead of him was now only partially clad.

  Soon they reached the area where the lights had been destroyed. Thorn shot two potassium flares past Cormac and the chamber below them was lit up with garish purple light.

  ‘It has no eyes,’ stated Thorn. ‘It uses sonar. You felt it?’

  Cormac nodded agreement. He had felt it all right. ‘It destroyed the lights while they were moving. It was probably put here to destroy anything that moves.’ He glanced back to see Aiden coming up behind them fast.

  In the glare from the flares they could see a gleaming arc of something. It seemed too large to be the creature’s torso. There was movement; a play of shadows. One of the flares went out. Thorn shot two more flares in as the three of them detached from their lines and dropped through the entrance. They landed on a curved metallic surface. It was frictionless and they slid to the floor. The creature charged, slipping on what remained of Gant. Thorn and Aiden began firing immediately, their weapons on full power. Cormac threw his shuriken, its chainglass blades out to their fullest extent. The creature slammed to a halt in a wall of fire, then the shuriken struck. There was a whining scream and a flare of sparks. A piece of the creature’s body fell away, the shuriken bounced off, hovered, struck again. A clump of legs shattered, and the creature fell to one side. The shuriken struck again, then again. CO2 vapour filled the chamber. Thorn and Aiden were firing blind. Cormac could hear the creature scrabbling to get away and the repetitive scream of each of the shuriken’s strikes. The scrabbling soon ceased. Thorn and Aiden put up their weapons.

  ‘Dead?’ wondered Thorn.

  ‘If it was ever alive,’ said Cormac.

  His shuriken continued to strike until he hit the recall. It came out of the fog, retracting its blades and shrugging away pieces of something green and frozen, like shards of emerald. Cormac held up his arm as if to a falcon, and it snicked itself away in its holster. About them the fog refroze and snowed from the air.

  The creature lay in pieces in a frozen green pool. Ignoring it, Thorn walked forwards amongst Gant. The soldier had been ripped to pieces. Cormac shook his head and stared down at a hand frozen to the floor before him.

  ‘A Tenkian,’ said Aiden at Cormac’s side.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cormac, watching Thorn. Thorn had found Gant’s head and pulled it from the floor with a disc of frozen blood attached to it.

  ‘I don’t hold out much hope for his recovery,’ Thorn said.

  The joke was macabre in the extreme. Thorn wandered off to the side of the chamber, still holding his comrade’s head.

  ‘He will be all right,’ said Aiden on the comunit’s personal mode. ‘Thorn knows the risks and is most philosophical about death. He will toast Gant on Hubris, then drink himself into a stupor. Then he will carry on. Gant would have done the same.’

  Cormac inspected the Golem Thirty and wondered if it had any actual feeling of sympathy, or was just good at emulating it. It was a question that had bothered humankind for a couple of centuries now.

  ‘Carn, you can come down now,’ he said, and then walked past the dismembered guardian towards the artefact they had come to see.

  It rested on the floor of the chamber like a gigantic droplet of mercury. In the light of the flares it glinted as if covered with frost. A closer inspection showed there was no frost on its surface. Cormac pushed his hand against it, and his hand slid to one side. It was frictionless, yet on inspection its surface revealed a fine crystalline structure and seemed it should have some roughness.

  Carn cautiously lowered himself into the chamber and slid to the floor down by the surface of the artefact, before detaching his line. He stared at the creature for a long while, shifted his gaze to Gant’s remains, and then quickly turned his attention to the unknown object. He removed a device like a copper limpet from his belt and placed it against the thing’s surface.

  ‘This is a metallurgical tester—or M-tester if you don’t like long words. We use them for spot analysis of hull metals and the like. Measures stresses, density changes, alloy configurations . . .’ He paused, glanced at Thorn who still held his friend’s head, then looked at a small display on the M-tester. He continued hurriedly. ‘Incredibly dense . . .’ He crouched down and examined where the curve of the object met the floor. ‘It mu
st be hollow.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ asked Cormac.

  ‘If it was solid it would weigh a few thousand tonnes. It would have sunk into this floor a lot deeper than it has, and—’ he inspected an instrument strapped to his arm ‘—I detect no AG emanations.’

  He placed the M-tester against the surface again, then took his shaking hand away. He caught the tester before it hit the floor.

  ‘Frictionless, but with only microgravity readings. Definitely hollow.’

  He removed a miniconsole from his belt and placed the M-tester into a hollow incorporated in it. He punched out a program, then removed the M-tester.

  ‘Aiden . . .’ Aiden stepped smartly forwards. ‘Hold this against the surface for thirty seconds. Do not let it move any more than one millimetre. It can’t correct for any more than that.’

  Aiden obliged, pushing the M-tester against the surface, then freezing into a stillness no man could match. Carn turned to Cormac. Cormac noted he was shivering, but not from the cold.

  ‘Hopefully we’ll be able to get a surface reading. This stuff’s too dense for us to scrape away a sample.’ He walked round the object, stopping every now and then to push his hand against it. Cormac glanced round and saw that Thorn had stood up. The soldier dropped his companion’s head to the ground and walked over. He had lapsed for a while, but to a Sparkind a dead man was just so much meat. They only buried the dead if there was a risk of infection.

  ‘I’m sorry, Thorn,’ said Cormac.

  Thorn put his hands on his hips and looked to one side for a moment before replying. ‘He had a hundred and sixty-three years. He knew the risks . . . I only ask that you let us stay with this to the end. I want to meet whoever or whatever left that creature here.’

  Cormac thought about that. Had it been left here? Or had it been here for its own purposes? Was there really a connection between this place and the runcible incident? There were still too few facts to go on.

  Aiden turned then, removing the M-tester from the object’s surface.

  ‘There’s a hole here,’ said Carn from the other side. They moved round to join him.

  In the gleaming surface was a hole about twenty centimetres across. It looked as if something had melted right through from the inside. Cormac noted that the material was eggshell-thin. Carn shone a light inside.

  ‘Nothing there,’ he said, and then he took the M-tester from Aiden. ‘Ah, we have a reading . . .’ He fell silent and stared at the device for a long while.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Cormac.

  ‘This can’t be right,’ said Carn.

  ‘What can’t?’ said Thorn with a touch of irritation.

  ‘The reading we . . . It’s adamantium . . .’

  ‘And?’ Cormac prompted.

  Carn looked up. ‘We can crystallize adamantium. It’s sometimes used for machine tools when field and beam technology can’t be used . . . As far as I know, it is theoretically impossible to shape it . . .’

  More questions . . . Who made this thing? What had been inside it? Where had its guardian come from? All Cormac knew was that this was alien. Dragon? Perhaps he would know soon.

  ‘OK, is there much more you can find out now?’

  ‘Need more equipment, really.’

  Cormac turned to Thorn. ‘Collect some pieces of that creature. We’ll take them back for Mika to analyse.’ He turned back to Carn as Thorn stepped away, unhooking a bag from his belt. ‘I’ll want you to put a team together and come straight back here.’

  ‘Chaline won’t like that. Her technicians are stretched pretty thin as it is.’

  ‘She’ll have to like it. That runcible is not coming down until one or two things are resolved.’

  A dragon is coming . . .

  Cormac looked at what had once been Gant. ‘He can be collected later, if necessary. Let’s get out of here.’

  Thorn looked once more at his friend’s remains, nodded briefly and turned away. There was no risk of infection. It was likely Gant had already found his tomb.

  With Carn and Cormac leading and Thorn and Aiden coming up behind, winding the lines in, they ascended the shaft. The continual peppery rattle of stripped-off cladding falling away accompanied them. Just up from the chamber they paused in their ascent so that Aiden could take up the shredded carcase of Cento and strap it to his back. Unlike Gant, Cento would live again, once his body was rebuilt. His mind rested untouched in an armoured box in his chest. Cormac regretted that the same could not be said for Gant. Medical technology could extend the life of man to an as yet undiscovered extent; it pushed back the borders of death, but death remained.

  As they approached the head of the shaft, hailstones the size of eyeballs rained down on them and rattled past. Crouched down with their arms over their heads, and with the partial protection of their suits, they waited this out. The hailstorm passed in half an hour. They stepped from the shaft into air of a sharp and almost painful clarity, then made their way to the shuttle across a thick carpet of hailstones. Cormac picked one up to study it. It was greenish grey in colour, and seemed to be laminated.

  ‘Sulphated water-ice and CO2 crystallized out in layers,’ said Carn, after glancing over his shoulder. ‘There’d be some pretty complex compounds in there too.’

  Cormac nodded, and watched the stone as the slight leakage of heat from his suit caused it to fluoresce, then he flicked it back onto the ground where it lay feebly emitting light amongst its dead companions. Numberless dead. What was one more in so many thousands? The answer, of course, was always the same: it was personal. He moved on.

  They were about to enter the shuttle when Aiden paused for a moment, as if listening. After this he unstrapped Cento and lowered him to the ground, before stepping away from the shuttle. The three humans watched him, but none of them felt inclined to pose a question.

  Aiden said nothing in return. He gazed up at the clearing sky and pointed.

  ‘Another ship?’ said Carn in puzzlement.

  It was small, a speck almost, seen from the surface, and the storms of the upper atmosphere occluded it somewhat, but Samarkand had acquired another moon. Cormac suspected it might be a kilometre wide, and made of flesh.

  He said, ‘One quarter, if that is relevant.’

  Dragon had arrived.

  18

  Artificial Intelligence: AI has been with us since the latter part of the twenty-first century. The difference between a plain computer and an AI is not in computing power, but in the development of an ego. By the 107th revision of the Turing Test, it was becoming evident that there would be no need for further revisions. By the time something becomes AI, it can breeze through one of these tests and does not need the status gained by passing one. When something is AI, it can normally look after itself.

  From Quince Guide, compiled by humans

  Starlit space—vacuum—with planets so distant they were indistinguishable from stars. Suddenly a wormish shape stabbed into existence, as of a laser punching through a block of perspex. Out of this, on contrails of spontaneously generated hydrogen atoms, came the trispherical shape of the Lyric. It tumbled as it came, and blue jets of flame quickly corrected that tumble. When the ship was falling into the system, a white sun blossomed on its centre plate as its ion drive ignited. The Lyric’s systems were not AI, so they had no appreciation of the poetry of it all. They simply decelerated the ship into the Mendax system in the Chirat cluster and made the few corrections required to line it up to intersect the orbit of the planet Viridian. Then they initiated the start-up sequence for the first cold coffin.

  Jarvellis sat up and coughed violently as soon as the lid opened. She was sure she had picked up something on that shitty damp world and that now, because her immune system was depressed after cold sleep, something was riding roughshod through her body. She swung her legs over the side and stood up, if a little unsteadily, then walked to the catering unit where a hot cup of chocolate awaited her. This had been her ritual over a thousan
d flights. It was only after she took her first sip that she remembered precisely what her cargo was this time. She swore and walked across to the console before the panoramic screen, and hit a control. A subscreen popped up in one corner, showing her Hold B.

  Six cold coffins were lined up in the central framework. Packing cases were strapped along the further wall. She felt a moment of panic, until she switched to another view. That panic receded when she saw Mr. Crane squatting with his back to one packing case. The android was covered in a hoar of frost and seemed to be sorting some objects on the floor before it. That was all right, then. Jarvellis sat naked in the flight-control chair and set her chocolate on the console. From under the console she pulled a diagnostic cuff and pulled it on, before taking up her drink again and continuing to sip. She considered the idea of waking all of them but John and, when they were up and about, opening the hold door. She dismissed the notion almost immediately. There was no guarantee that the sudden air loss would eject Crane, and anyway he still had that briefcase with him. When the cuff beeped she inspected the readout and swore again. She took the cuff back off and pressed it into place under the console. No way she could tell John, and she did not suppose it would help him to know she was pregnant by him. She sat back and stared through the screen at the distant sun, and then frowned when she knew she was procrastinating. Time to wake Pelter and his horrid crew. The lunatic wanted time to brief his men, and for them to prepare their weapons. But first there was something else . . .

  Jarvellis swung her chair round, stood up and moved to a locker on one side of the cabin. She palm-keyed it, and the door slid aside and a rack extruded. On the rack hung a bulky spacesuit. The suit was old and it had been a long time since she had used it. All external maintenance was done when the ship was on planet and, in the unlikely event that any might need doing whilst in transit, the Lyric had two hull-crawlers with manipulators more dextrous than human hands.

  The rack folded, opening out the suit like a split bread roll. The opening extended down the front, and down the fronts of the thighs. She slid one leg into one of the boot sections, then grabbed the rack, and hung there to get her other leg in. The rack folded back and the front of the suit sealed, thigh pads closing last. The helmet was a ribbed ball cowling of chainglass which, folded down, had the appearance of a thick transparent collar at the back of her neck. She stepped from the rack. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but it had occurred to her right from the start of this jaunt that Pelter now had the means to blast through the airlocks between himself and her. One hint that he might do that—bringing Mr. Crane with him—and she would disable the ship and get out through the lock here. John, she felt, would have to take care of himself. She had enough to worry about.