Brass Man ac-3 Page 3

  Standing on the shell of a huge tricone revealed at the top of a mound of debris flung up by the impact of the Dragon sphere that had fallen here, Mika gazed out across the plain of mud now covering some of that creature’s remains. Coming towards her, moving birdlike on the mat of rhizomes that had quickly spread across the bared surface, came the rest of Dragon: dracomen—Dragon’s children—formed from the body of that dying alien entity.

  They ran towards her with seeming urgency, but then they ran everywhere like that. There were twenty of them in this party, and Mika noticed that two were small but with lanky legs. Children, for these new dracomen were able to breed. This in itself should be enough to frighten the rulers of the Polity: dracomen first being biological machines made by Dragon to serve that entity’s own obscure purposes.

  Dragon, when originally discovered on the planet Aster Colora, had consisted of four conjoined spheres each a kilometre across. After delivering an obscure warning to the human race, it apparently destroyed itself. Only later had they learnt how it had fled, breaking into four distinct spheres as it went. And later still they learnt it was an organic probe sent by an alien race, and had malfunctioned. Ian Cormac destroyed one sphere in punishment for the human catastrophe it later caused, on a planet called Samarkand, while trying to evade its alien Makers. Another had both destroyed and transformed itself here. Two remained: their purposes still obscure, possibly dangerous, and their abilities unplumbed.

  As the party drew closer, Mika jumped down from the tricone, recognizing only Scar, one of the original dracomen, by his weapons harness and… his scar. He slowed to a walk to mount the slope up towards her. Beyond him, she noticed that four of his fellows were carrying the body of a grazer slung from two poles. This creature, with its multitude of limbs and many-eyed head, looked the offspring of a kangaroo and a lobster. It was one she did not recognize, but dracomen were bringing in all sorts of new species to feed their growing population.

  ‘Polity?’ said Scar, as he reached her.

  ‘The last I heard, the quarantine has been lifted at Elysium, but still remains in force here. It seems unlikely to be lifted any time soon.’

  ‘Danger?’ asked Scar.

  ‘No. The most likely decision will be to declare this world below the technological threshold for membership, and leave you all to make your own way,’ said Mika, assuming that Polity personnel such as herself would be lifted from the surface, if only for the purposes of study.

  ‘Not below any threshold,’ said Scar, as his companions lugged the dead grazer past.

  Mika eyed the prey, her hand straying to her console. She wanted to get samples before it went through a few hundred reptilian digestive tracts—such an urge was almost instinctive for the Life-coven woman. Turning to look where the group was heading, she thought that perhaps Scar was right. Maybe no one down here possessed spacecraft, but there was complex technology aplenty around them.

  After the rebellion here against the governing Theocracy, the humans were rebuilding their agricultural base, but now somewhat differently. They produced plascrete to cast into raft fields, in which to grow new crops, or even into crop rafts for the ocean. Also, in the caverns under the mountains, they were building factories to meet the demands of a population suddenly free of the Theocracy yoke. They had established a financial system based on the Polity’s, in which they expected shortly to be included. Aerofans, the main form of transport on this boggy world, were a must-have item for many people who had yet to see anything of their world beyond those same caverns or the cities. The factories were continuously turning out breather gear to replace the parasitic life-shortening scoles—products of biotechnology previously inflicted on agricultural workers to enable them to labour outside. People were doing things—building something. Other people, distinguished by scaled hides, bird legs and sharp teeth, were building as well.

  The dracomen encampment looked like a mass of huge flattened puffballs spread throughout the flute grasses. These dwellings, Mika knew, the dracomen wove from flute grass itself, bonded and stiffened by a resin in their saliva. Upon testing a sample of this substance, she discovered it to be similar to a tough ceramoplastic normally used in the construction of space habitats. When she finally managed to question Scar about this material, he simply pointed out that this was not commonly a product of dracoman saliva; they produced it just for this purpose. The dracomen, generally, did not need factories—they themselves were factories. The most dramatic example of this was the weapon they used for hunting. Their organic rifle used a muscular spasm of its body to spit poisonous darts that actually grew inside it. The rifle also had to be fed, and Mika had seen this weapon hatched from dracomen eggs. They made other complex items similarly: gestated inside themselves, laid as eggs, then hatched out. Dracomen therefore did not need to develop a biotechnology—they were a biotechnology.

  Returning to the encampment, Mika saw Thorn and Gant coming out towards her. It was Gant, the uploaded soldier, who mostly communicated with the Polity ships above, via a transceiver built into his tough Golem body.

  She had seen neither of these two for a month now—they had been working for Lellan on some project to plant radio beacons in hooders—one of the planet’s lethal native predators—to give advance warning of where the creatures were, so people could quickly get out of their way. Gant she had spoken to by radio only a few days previously, when he had told her about the quarantine ending at Elysium. Thorn, she noted, wore breather gear and wondered why—for, with the mycelium operating inside him, he did not need such cumbersome equipment.

  ‘We need to talk,’ said Thorn abruptly, as soon as he and Gant got close. ‘That includes you,’ he added to Scar, as the dracoman moved to follow his compatriots.

  Scar halted, bared his teeth, then gestured for them to follow him. He led the way between the bulbous walls of dracoman buildings, on pathways of the same woven composite, which rested on top of the rhizome mat. Eventually he brought them to his home: a flattened sphere ten metres across, with a simple circular door set half a metre off the ground. The door opened when he pushed against it—its hinges composed of a dry muscle that was contracted by an electric charge. The door, Mika knew, would not have opened for anyone else, other dracomen included.

  Just inside, a small antechamber provided low footbaths and various utensils—fashioned from local materials—for the purpose of preventing mud getting any further inside his residence. With meticulous care, Scar cleaned his clawed feet, then waited until Mika, Thorn and Gant had removed their footwear before he opened the inner door.

  Light permeated the structure from outside, complemented by bioluminescent strips inlaid in a grid across the ceiling and down the curving walls. Glass panels inset in the level floor gave glimpses of sealed terrariums and aquariums in which all sorts of curious creatures swam, hopped, slithered or just sat motionless. Mika knew about the creatures—some wild and some manufactured—but had yet to fathom how the dracomen made the fiat sheets of chainglass.

  Scar dropped himself onto one of the woven saddlelike arrangements that served dracomen as chairs. Mika and Gant sat on an oval couch that Mika thought might be used for sleeping on, though she had never seen a dracoman sleep. Thorn, meanwhile, paced the transparent floor.

  ‘What is it?’ Mika finally managed to force a question.

  After detaching the compressed-paper mask covering his mouth and nose, Thorn gave her a penetrating look. ‘Apis—his mycelium isn’t working properly any more. You need to come.’

  Mika chewed that one over, then groped to phrase another question. ‘How… what is the evidence?’

  ‘Eldene found him collapsed out by the spaceport. He’d fainted, and the doctor who tended him diagnosed oxygen starvation. He now has to use breather gear.’ He gestured to the pack on his own back. ‘It hasn’t happened to me, but I’m taking no chances.’ He glanced at Gant. ‘I don’t yet have any memplant to save me.’

  Mika nodded. Gant had died on Samarka
nd. What stood before them now was a memcording of the soldier, running in a Golem chassis. A debate was still running about whether such were genuinely alive.

  ‘Will you come?’ Thorn asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking pointedly at Scar. She then winced and ventured a further question: ‘Is there something else?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Gant said, rounding on the dracoman. ‘EC’s decision on Scar and his kind. It seems that no blame for Dragon’s actions will be attached to you and your people. You are free to do what you want, though I suspect that there will be pressure on you to join the Polity.’

  Mika felt a brief surge of joy at that—the EC decision had been hanging over them like a guillotine ever since the ships had arrived—but Thorn’s news tempered her happiness. What was happening with the mycelia? She had no idea how she might go about removing the alien technology, and acutely aware that it might change sufficiently to kill them or, perhaps worse, change them.

  * * * *

  From where he lay, underneath the wasp-eyed scanning head of the diagnosticer he had cobbled together to try to find out why his gridlink had spontaneously operated, Cormac gazed across the room. Above the counter cluttered with the pieces of dismembered autodoc, a screen flickered on, showing the belt of asteroids lit from one side by the glare of the sun. A small trisection transport appeared in one corner of the screen and, turning slowly, screwed its way across the view on three fusion flames. It was halfway to the belt itself when a black hawkish ship hurtled in behind it. The screen polarized over the glare that followed and, when it returned to full clarity, an asteroid in the belt ahead of the fleeing ship had disappeared.

  ‘A shot across the bows,’ Cormac guessed, as he watched the ship turn and head rapidly back towards Elysium. ‘Why are you showing me this, Jack?’

  ‘That was a real-time image,’ the AI replied.

  Cormac frowned, not liking what this implied. ‘Why not just grab him?’

  ‘No contact allowed with the barrier ships.’

  Cormac sighed and laid his head back. ‘And the weapon used? I don’t think I saw anything like that before.’

  ‘Combined CTD and gravity-imploder missile,’ the AI replied.

  ‘I see—the imploder to prevent the smallest fragment of debris being blasted away, so that the CTD burns everything down to an atomic level, if not below that.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Right, so now you’ll tell me why ECS is chasing ships back to Elysium.’

  ‘Total quarantine of the Elysium system has just been reinstated. The Elysium AI has shut down the runcible. Debris has been detected on an asteroid, previously discounted because out of the range of blast scatter from the Occam Razor, and moving in an elliptical orbit that took it outside of the search area. Polity capital ships are returning to surround the system.’

  ‘You’ll be rejoining them?’ Cormac asked, sitting up and pushing away the scanning head.

  ‘EC has reapplied previous restrictions: no one who had any physical contact with Jain technology or any of its products is going anywhere. Because I have you aboard, I myself am now not one of the guards but the guarded.’

  ‘And this comes direct from Earth Central itself?’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘Tell me, has senility long been an AI problem?’

  ‘Amusing, but missing the point,’ said Jack. ‘EC knows it is impossible to suppress such a technological juggernaut, but this is a case of attempting to slow it down a little so we can move some people out of the way. Your associate Mika is, as you have told us, already obtaining substantial benefits from Jain tech, and no doubt scraps of it will be picked up all around this area. But consider what would happen if someone were to find, for example, one of those creatures Skellor used to attack you on Masada, and handed it over to some well-organized Separatist enclave.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, I’ve heard this spiel before. But we’re talking about one stray asteroid that we missed. I’ve been okayed as clean, as has most of Elysium.’

  ‘The order is not open to question—total interdiction.’

  Cormac remembered what that meant.

  He nodded and swung his legs from the surgical bench, noting as he did so the readout on the diagnosticer’s screen, informing him that his gridlink was still offline and impossible to use unless reinstated by a high-level AI. But speculation about that he put to the back of his mind—something was happening at last, and he had been bored out of his skull during that latter half of the quarantine period.

  ‘This asteroid, is it going to be obliterated like that one you just showed me, or do we take a look?’

  ‘We take a look.’

  ‘We… as in you and me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cormac couldn’t help grinning as he felt the vibration of the Jack Ketch’s fusion drives igniting. Heading for the door to this long-unused surgical facility, he lost his footing outside as he stepped into a corridor in which the gravplates were not operating.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Jack, slowly powering the plates back up so that Cormac settled back down to the floor.

  ‘See, you’re as excited about this as me.’

  Now, with the gravity stabilized, Cormac noticed how the corridor had changed. When he had come aboard this ship, the cabins and corridors were new and skeletal, the Jack Ketch not often having had to provide for human passengers. Now his boots came down on pale blue carpet decorated with a nicely repeating pattern of nooses. The spill from spotlights, mounted in ornate brackets, lit the corridor, though their main targets were portraits spaced along walls bearing the uneven look of old plaster.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Cormac.

  ‘Glad you like it,’ replied the AI.

  ‘To make us poor humans feel more comfortable?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Cormac studied one of the portraits, vaguely identifying it as of some very early premillennial cosmonaut, then he broke into a trot towards his destination. The corridor terminated against a dropshaft slanting up at forty-five degrees, and glaringly of the present time. Locating the touch-plate set in an ormolu moulding beside the slanting entrance, Cormac input coordinates, then reached out a hand to check that the gravity field was operating before he stepped inside the shaft. The irised field wafted him in a direction that was now up, and he soon stepped out into what was called the bridge of the ship, though the vessel was not controlled from there. Jack was pilot, navigator and captain, and controlled the ship from wherever his AI mind was located deep inside it.

  This chamber occupied the upper level of the ship’s nose. The ceiling, curving down to meet the floor ahead of Cormac, was not visible, for a VR projector created the illusion that there was no ceiling at all and that he was walking out onto a platform open to vacuum. This platform, it seemed, possessed a low stone wall to prevent the unwary from stepping off the edge into the abyss. There were no instruments for humans to use, nor any need for them, though Jack could easily project a virtual console here. In the centre of this was what Cormac now mentally referred to as the drawing room.

  Below a free-floating crystal chandelier, which might have been merely a projection or the real thing, club chairs, a drinks cabinet, coffee table and other items of premillennial comfort were arranged on a large rug, at the corners of which incongruously stood Victorian cast-iron street lamps giving off a soft gaslight. These were all items from Jack’s collection, replicas all, but almost to the molecular level. Now, Cormac saw that off to one side the AI had added something else.

  ‘Is that for my comfort as well?’ asked Cormac.

  The wooden framework towered against the stars, no doubt perfect in every detail, mechanically sound, its trapdoor oiled.

  ‘It is here because I find it aesthetically pleasing,’ Jack told him.

  Cormac turned to the localized sound of the AI’s voice.

  Seated in one of the club chairs, the hangman looked like a bank manager or a stockbroker from sometime before the twenty-fi
rst century. His antique suit was pinstriped and tight on his thin body, his face white and skull-like. The brim of the bowler hat he never removed was pulled low on his forehead, shading his eyes, so that when the light caught the lenses of his spectacles, they glittered in shadow like something insectile. His overfull briefcase, no doubt containing execution orders and probably a coiled rope, stood beside his chair. Cormac suspected he wore sock suspenders and Y-fronts—for every detail of the hangman was meticulous—just like the mind this ancient automaton represented.

  ‘Your idea of aesthetics is a little worrying,’ Cormac observed. ‘I take it that this is not just any old gallows.’

  ‘No,’ said Jack, ‘it’s the Nuremberg one.’

  Cormac fell silent as he allowed himself to absorb that. Using as an avatar an automaton from an age two centuries ago, rather than a holographic projection, was another strange facet of this AI. But he preferred that to Jack’s attraction to devices of execution. Stepping onto the drawing room rug Cormac decided this was a subject best dropped, and instead asked, ‘How long will it take us to get to this asteroid?’

  ‘It will be ten minutes.’ With a clinking ticking of gears and levers, Jack stood, turning to face Cormac. ‘This is a matter of some urgency, so I’m going to drop into U-space.’

  Cormac strolled across the rug, then out across the black glass floor leading towards the nose of the Jack Ketch. Here he gazed over the ersatz stone wall into vacuum. From below and to his right, the sun heated his face as if he had just peeked over a wall beyond which a bonfire burned. Its glare filtered, he was able to look directly at it, and there observed, flung up from its vast infernal plains, an arching lariat of fire that could have swallowed worlds. Curving up from his left, then ahead and up high, before being attenuated to nothing by distance, the asteroid belt seemed an artefact, having been shepherded into neat rings by the larger chunks remaining from whatever cataclysm had shattered the planets of this system. Then the VR feed blanked to infinite grey depth, and Cormac felt that shift into the ineffable as the ship dropped into underspace. He realized he was seeing a representation less real than the one before. No human could experience underspace unshielded.