Brass Man

10

The kiln smell, then the sound of a steam pump, told Anderson what lay ahead before he even saw the minerallier encampment, and rounding a butte beside which some spillage had cut an oily-looking channel, around which grew stunted sulerbanes, he and Tergal soon came in sight of industry.

‘You can see why they’re here,’ said Tergal. Anderson looked at him questioningly, and Tergal pointed up at the butte. ‘White and blue sand in separate layers.’

Anderson glanced up to where layers of pink and orange sand separated the white from the blue.

Tergal explained, ‘You find the two layers close together and they’ve normally reacted with each other. Then the trace elements turn to salts, and rain washes them out. The sands are worthless then.’

Anderson nodded, not wanting to disappoint the boy by explaining that he already knew all this.

By the channel a sand hog as old as Bonehead was lying in the sunshine, harnessed to a huge cart laden with coke. Next to this was parked a large powered vehicle with caterpillar treads, and two trailers attached behind—one flatbed and one container. Beyond the stream, the mineralliers had erected a scaffold up the side of the butte, so that they could get to the layers of sand which they lowered in separate buckets on a steam-driven chain. A short distance back from the butte, bonded-sand kilns and houses had been built, but even so Anderson knew this to be a temporary encampment—the mineralliers would stay only until the seams were worked out, though that could take them months or years. Between the houses they had erected a wooden frame on which sleer carapaces were drying—no doubt to be used as additional fuel. Workers were busy in the excavation in the butte, mining the sands or, down below, harrowing it to the kilns where others spread it on ceramic plates to fuse it into sheets. No one noticed their approach until a little girl spotted them, and went yelling into the encampment.

‘What would we do without them?’ Anderson asked, eyeing the solar triptych lying open on Bonehead’s back—its three cells charging up the batteries of the charge generator they had used during the night.

‘Mineralliers?’ Tergal asked.

‘No, solar cells. There are other ways of generating electricity, but none so easy and convenient as this.’ He gestured to a stack of boxes by one of the sandstone houses.

Beside this, a big black-haired woman was cutting sheets of opaque-white and translucent-blue glass, before polishing them. Next to her, a small monkey of a man was attaching small braided copper wires, painting something on one kind of glass, then sealing pieces of each kind together with sheets of glistening film he removed from a bucket beside him. Each complete photovoltaic cell he wrapped and carefully packed away. It was to the woman that the girl ran. The woman ceased working and walked out to meet Anderson and Tergal at the edge of the encampment.

‘A slow response, and I hardly expected a Rondure Knight to be sent,’ she said, looking Anderson up and down.

‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone else,’ said Anderson, unstrapping himself from his saddle as Bonehead went down on its crawler limbs.

‘You’re a weapons man?’

‘I am that,’ he replied, stepping down onto the sand.

The woman nodded. ‘We sent into Golgoth for a weapons man five days ago and he has yet to appear.’ She gazed about in irritation, eyed Tergal for a moment, then returned her attention to Anderson. ‘Are you taking commissions?’

Anderson shrugged. ‘Whenever available—a man has to eat.’

‘Then I have one for you for which I can pay in pfennigs, or new phocells if you’d prefer. Our man from Golgoth can suck on a sleer’s arse for all I care now.’

Tergal snorted, choked off his laughter. The woman stared at him estimatingly.

‘Your apprentice?’ she asked Anderson.

‘Of a kind,’ replied Anderson. ‘Tell me about this commission.’

Again the woman looked around. ‘It comes at night, and we’ve not minded when it only knocked a few things over as it searched our camp for food. But it’s getting bolder. Six nights ago it attacked one of our hogs and put a hole in its carapace.’ She gestured to a hog compound over the other side of the encampment in which more of the huge creatures rested like a scattering of laval domes in the sunshine. One of them, perhaps younger and more curious than its fellows, had its sensory head out from under its shell and high up in the air with its eye-palps extruded wide apart to observe proceedings. ‘Then five nights ago it tried to grind its way into one of our houses.’

‘Show me that,’ Anderson said.

The woman gestured for him to follow her, and led the way into the encampment. Tergal also dismounted, and led his hog by hooking his goad under the edge of its carapace skirt. Anderson stared pointedly at Bonehead until, with a long sigh, it heaved up onto its crawler limbs and followed as well. Glancing about as he walked in, he saw that this encampment must have been here—or was intended to be here—for some time, for the spill-channel issued from a standing hand pump. Therefore the mineralliers had drilled a borehole, and that was not something done for a short-term operation. Soon other workers were coming over to see what was going on. The monkey-like man walked beside Tergal, talking animatedly to him, but Anderson could not hear what their conversation concerned. By the time he reached the sandstone house, quite a crowd had gathered. He inspected the gouges in the soft stone, confirming what he had already guessed. Smiling, he glanced at Tergal before turning to the woman.

‘Do you know what did this?’ he asked.

‘We’d earlier hoped it was a second-stager, but what with the attack on a sand hog and now this…’ She shrugged.

‘Third,’ he said, and gestured to the deep puncture holes in the bonded sand. ‘That’s where it held on with its pincers while it worked on the wall with its carapace saws. Something must have distracted it, else it would have gone right through.’

‘Third!’ someone snorted. ‘He’s trying to bump the price up, Chandle.’

Anderson turned away and began to walk back to Bonehead.

‘Wait!’ the woman Chandle shouted. ‘And you, Dornick, shut your mouth.’

Anderson turned. ‘Thirty phocells—they’ll be useful for trade as I’m heading up onto the Plains.’

‘Bloody extortion!’

Anderson rounded on the man Dornick: a squat, bearded individual with cropped mouth tendrils and the underhand thumb-spurs that inevitably led his type into some technical trade. ‘Would you prefer to hunt it yourself?’

‘At that price—probably.’

‘Dornick,’ Chandle warned.

‘That’s days of work, that is. Days and days.’

Anderson noted that Chandle, though giving a warning, seemed disinclined to interfere and was waiting for his reply. He noted that some of these people carried metallier weapons, and perhaps that was making them overconfident. Really, he didn’t need this as, though he might manage to trade off a few phocells to nomads on the Plains, he had no real need for them. And as for money—he had accumulated plenty of that. But a sense of duty asserted itself. He glanced at the little girl standing beside Chandle. A third-stager would take only seconds to mince her into easily ingestible portions.

‘Days, you say.’ He turned and walked back to the wall of the house. ‘Dornick, I see you have a measuring wire on your belt. May I borrow it?’ Anderson held out his hand.

The man looked rebellious but, after a warning glare from Chandle, handed over the wire. Anderson unspooled it above his head, measuring the height of the damage to the wall.

‘There was no reason here for the creature to climb, so I would bet it chewed on this dwelling while keeping its forelimbs on the ground. So, when you find marks like this, there’s an easy calculation to apply.’ He wound the wire back into its spool. ‘The body length of a third-stager is nominally two and a half times the height of its mouthparts from the ground. These marks are over two metres high.’ Anderson observed how some faces had taken on a sickly hue. Dornick was mouthing the figures. ‘Five metres,’ Anderson told the man. ‘A third-stager of that length weighs five times a big man. And, incidentally, can run twice as fast.’

‘So you say,’ muttered Dornick.

Anderson handed back his wire. ‘I’ll bring you the body, and if it is less than five metres long I’ll waive my fee.’

‘You have a deal, Rondure Knight,’ said Chandle, stepping forward before Dornick could say any more.

The ECS doctors had erected a chainglass partition to prevent any air-transmission of infection, and it was an infection possible for even Fethan, with his flash-frozen bio-gridded brain and body of plastic and metal, to contract. Not that there had been any sign of the dying remains of the Jain mycelium—inside the outlinker — spreading through the air, but no one was taking any chances.

‘The girl will be next?’ he asked, scratching at his ginger beard.

The surgeon master, Gorlen, gave him a funny look. Fethan had noted that same look from many of those members of the hospital arm of ECS. It encompassed their amazement at finding a cyborg such as himself still existing—for those of his kind who had survived the process had long since transferred themselves to more durable Golem bodies—and their overpowering urge to take him apart to see how he ticked.

‘The girl is already undergoing surgery,’ Gorlen replied. ‘One of the nodes was pressing against her heart and there was a chance of arrest.’

‘She’ll survive?’ Fethan turned towards the man.

Gorlen nodded towards where Apis Coolant lay on a bed inside the quarantine booth, almost concealed by monitoring equipment. ‘She has as good a chance as him. The nanobots sent from the Jerusalem are breaking apart every last scrap of the mycelium and, unless I’ve missed something, he’ll be out of here in a day or so.’ The surgeon now picked up an aluminium box with carry strap from a nearby table.

‘So that’s the bugger, is it?’ Fethan asked.

‘That’s it—designed by Jerusalem itself.’

The man passed the box over, and Fethan, after inspecting the ouroboros motif on the lid—Jerusalem’s mark—hung it by its strap from his shoulder. He then turned and looked outside through the window to his right.

Dry flute grasses spread for as far as he could see, beyond where Polity machinery had churned the ground to black mud veined with the green of unearthed nematodes. Against aubergine skies, he saw another big carrier setting out for the mountains, surrounded by its swarm of robot probes. Most of the calloraptor bodies had been recovered, along with the landing craft Skellor had sent down to the surface, and all were now stored in the burnt-out Theocracy cylinder world Faith—which struck Fethan as somehow ironic. The huge research vessel Jerusalem was to pick up those items, only that was not now the case. Jerusalem had decided it was needed elsewhere. Perhaps that was a good thing for the people of Masada, for even the runcible-linked communication from that AI had apparently caused the Flint runcible AI to shit bricks. It had taken a mind such as that to design the nanobots; nothing less could have managed it.

‘I guess it was too good to be true,’ said Fethan, now seeing a group of Masadans coming in from the flute grasses. All of them wore bulky breather gear.

Moving up beside him, Gorlen asked, ‘What?’

‘The mycelium—enabling people to live out there, rebuilding their bodies, keeping them alive…’

‘We know it’s possible now. A lot of benefits will come from this technology.’

Fethan grunted, then turned to head away.

‘And you’ll be taking it to them?’ Gorlen asked.

‘So I’ve been instructed.’

‘Good luck.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

Heading for the tunnel leading to the shuttle landing-pad, Fethan abruptly turned aside and made for the airlock. Just one last time he wanted to hear the strange music from the flute grasses. Stepping outside he looked around. This place had been his home for many years while he worked here for ECS, fomenting rebellion against the ruling Theocracy, and he began to feel the wrench of departure. Turning to walk along the composite path laid down on the mud, he wondered, as ever, how true that feeling really was. His flash-frozen brain was as unchanging in content as it was in structure; and what he was, was as much crystal memory and emulation as existed in any Golem. Was he foolish to hold so stubbornly on to what little humanity remained to him? He turned and headed for the waiting shuttle. Once aboard, he tersely greeted the human monitor who was his pilot, strapped himself in, then set his internal timer and turned himself off… slept.

With seemingly no transition he then woke to a view of the moonlet Flint.

Well, why have I been woken? he asked through the wide-open channel in his internal comlink.

Runcible linked communication, the Flint AI told him.

Let’s have it then, he said.

There came a clatter of static, as of something small scrabbling out of the path of a juggernaut.

Something more is required.

Fethan paused as he felt the vastness of the mind poised beyond the link. He shivered and felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach—all emulation, but he still understood what was scaring the Flint runcible AI.

Jerusalem?

Evidently.

At this word, Fethan looked down at the box in his lap, then across at the pilot who was watching him. The ouroboros turned—swallowing its own tail endlessly — then Fethan felt a series of clicks as locks disengaged.

What do you want?

Playing your cards close to your chest is advisable; not having all your cards visible on the table is better still.

Quit buggering about and cut to the chase.

‘You okay?’ asked the pilot.

Fethan tapped a finger against his temple. ‘Having a little chat with one of our silicon friends.’

‘Oh… right… you’re the…’

‘Yeah, I’m a cyborg.’

The man returned to his piloting.

The research station Ruby Eye has just received a visit from friend Skellor and his brass killing-machine where, subverting a Cybercorp network, he obtained certain coordinates.

So that’ll be Cormac’s next stop—to try to pick up the trail.

Correct.

And there’s a runcible on Ruby Eye.

Correct.

Well, you want to get the nanobots to the Jack Ketch for trooper Thorn, so what’s all the subterfuge about?

Open the box.

Fethan sighed, then hinged back the lid. Inside he observed the kind of inert cylinder in which such active technologies were stored. But it took up only half the box. In the shock-packing next to it rested a small lozenge of memory crystal, ringed on its thinner edge with aug anchor and connection points.

Jerusalem went on: During our last communication, Jack informed me of how Cormac accumulates people, weapons—random elements—pieces to utilize in any future battle against Skellor. He does not know how he will use them. All is contingent. He creates a protean counter-agent to Skellor. Reaction being his forte rather than the hard-wiring of preparation.

Yawn…

Very well. The memory crystal matrix will fit into your stomach cavity—the one you used to carry ballot devices while undercover on Masada. You will place the crystal in there, where programmed nanofilament connection will commence.

I don’t need any more memory space.

As you well understand, it is not for you. Loading will take place when you step out of the Skaidon warp on Ruby Eye.

You know, I have the right to refuse this.

I would rather Cormac saw a familiar face and had no reason for suspicion.

What is your game?

I am providing Cormac with one more piece in his… game. One he will know nothing about and cannot reveal to Skellor in any way. The one that might kill Skellor, should all else fail.

Fethan reached down and ran his finger down the stick seam of his shirt. Internally he instructed disconnections. The pilot looked round just in time to see Fethan split his stomach, as if he had just given himself a Caesarean, to reveal a wet red cavity.

‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt.’

The pilot faced forwards again and said nothing. Fethan pulled the crystal out of its padding, pushed it inside himself until it rested against his ceramal spine, then up until it touched just below his chest case — which contained most of his essential being. Immediately he felt the aug anchors and other connections engaging, and withdrew his hand. Little flickers like those experienced by someone about to experience a migraine jagged across his vision. He smelt something at once familiar and mysterious. There came the sound of a distant shouting crowd… muttering close.

What will I be carrying? he asked.

A part of me that has long experience of searching virtual networks and dealing with problems there. Many AIs carry copies of it. Ruby Eye is one of them.

When, some hours later, Fethan stepped from the runcible on Ruby Eye and felt the uploading link connecting, he said aloud, ‘I am legion,’ then internally, I am also a fucking booby trap.

Soon a copy of the killer program which Ruby Eye had sent against Skellor was straining at its leash inside him.

Using gritty sand and seawater, Balsh cleaned his hands of clotted blood. He then dropped the bag into the shallow brine and one by one took out the etched sapphires, cleaned them, and transferred them to a less fouled container.

‘Did you get them all?’ Arian asked.

Balsh looked up. ‘Four point five million. The last few went down into his lungs and that’s what killed him.’

Arian nodded and turned back to watch his men filing down, loaded with loot, from Alston’s residence. He was grabbing as much as he could, but would also leave much behind. Others of his men, having dropped off their loads in the boat’s hold, were returning to the house dragging corpses up with them. Those corpses closest to the shore had gone into the sea, and pearl crab activity had consequently increased.

‘Took him a while to die,’ Balsh added. ‘He’d emptied his bowels, and managed to tear off most of his fingernails in the struggle. The Golem also managed to smash most of his teeth as it fed the sapphires inside him.’

Arian wondered just what had made the Golem kill the man like that. The instruction had been a simple, ‘Kill Alston, and any who try to prevent you doing so.’ There had been nothing about making the man eat his own money, nothing about piling up the dead into tangled sculptures, and nothing about methodically killing every other human on this island. Accessing the control module through his aug, he still got ‘objective achieved’, a grid reference showing the Golem’s location as unchanged, and some jumbled imagery of shapes moving about in the void. It made no sense.

‘Angel,’ Pelter stepped over to his sister as she returned with the looters, ‘is there anything else worth grabbing?’

‘Plenty,’ said Angelina. ‘But maybe it would be best to get out of here before some Polity sat-eye takes a close look.’

Arian nodded. ‘True. Are the charges set?’

‘Ready to burn,’ Angelina spat over the ignition code from her aug to Arian’s.

‘Then all that remains is for us to collect Mr Crane,’ he said.

Angelina stared at him as if he were quite insane. His people, bringing their load to the boat, stopped to hear what her response might be.

‘Let’s just leave him where he is,’ she suggested.

Arian shook his head. ‘A subverted and upgraded Golem Twenty-five? Leave it here with the corpses of Jesu knows how many of its victims? And believe me they would find those bodies.’ He looked around at the watching men. ‘We’re not ready for the kind of attention that would attract. You think the Polity agents and monitors crawling around Cheyne III are too many now? If they found this, we wouldn’t be able to move for them. They’d trace every scrap of DNA on this island and mind-ream everyone involved, innocent or otherwise. You really want that?’

There came a general muttering of dissent.

Arian went on, ‘So we collect Mr Crane and take him home with us.’

When the last of the men had returned, Arian sent out the code and observed the growing glow from the centre and other points of the island as each slow-burning thermoxite charge ignited. Alston’s house was burning, those grotesque sculptures were burning, but still there would be a great deal of evidence of massacre here. Arian just wanted to disguise precisely how Alston and his people had died. As they took the boat around to the other side of the island, flames were belching tens of metres into the sky. Mr Crane came meekly when called—a demon constrained by a spell—and stood utterly still while Balsh extended a hose from the boat to wash the Golem down. Then Crane went down into the hold.

‘I hope you’re not having second thoughts,’ Angelina said.

‘Oh no,’ said Arian. ‘We put him away.’

Angelina reached out and gripped his shoulder. ‘Arian, this is no defeat. We just regroup and move on. There’s that new arms supplier who says he can provide us with some serious hardware—the kind on which you only have to pull a trigger.’

Arian turned to her. ‘The silver-haired guy—the one you want to fuck?’

‘That’s him,’ Angelina replied. ‘We don’t need Polity killing-machines.’

Perhaps trying not to think about the horror they had just seen, Arian said, ‘Yes, he seems the kind of person we need. Perhaps through him things will change, get better.’

They did—but for whom, it was a matter of perspective.

A day later, they walked Crane down a stairway concealed below a statue of Arian’s father. In the dank room at the bottom, the firm instruction to ‘sit down’ was repeated and enforced in five-second cycles. Crane sat on the single chair and did not see where Arian placed the module—not that he could subvert the order to sit, within five seconds, nor had a mind to. Arian and his sister backed out of the door, followed by the two men bearing mini-grenade launchers. The door was locked and bolted and sealed and hidden… Mr Crane adjusted his vision to infrared, and in mouldering darkness sat watching the door.

— retroact ending… -

Darkness, filled with a grid of light, four-dimensional in reality and memory, two-dimensional in representation. The icons shifting in random but ever firmer pattern; some holding their place for a while, then moving on when combinations of the other pieces made that place untenable. A blue acorn turning in void, while a small rubber dog looks on in amusement. Blood and death across an endless virtual plain. Crane, brass hands clean of gore, moves a piece, finds a connection; then an infinity of possibilities dissolves and sanity takes one step closer.

— retroact ends -

In some of the time that anyone else would have spent in cold sleep, Skellor hardened and refined the structures inside him, tracked down errors and erased them, collated and organized the information stored in the crystal part of his mind, and discarded all he considered irrelevant. But more frequently now he was coming across anomalies growing in his Jain substructure. It was doing something, changing in a furtive manner, diverting resources to create nodes within its framework. Allowing one of these to develop for a little while, Skellor encountered multiple layers of complexity, internally referenced, beginning to attain physical independence almost like a tumour. He probed and he tested and he studied, but the object defied analysis. In the end, he had to burn it inside himself. And as he destroyed it, he felt a murmur of rebellion from the rest of the substructure.

‘You will have answers for me, Dragon,’ he said to the grey of U-space.

From behind came the clink-clink of small sounds as Mr Crane repositioned his toys. Skellor expelled smoke from his mouth and ignored those sounds as he repaired the damage the burn had inflicted. From his wrist he extruded a tentacle, which writhed through the air, groped across the console before him, and found a universal power point. With his other hand he picked up a pack of food concentrate from the container open beside him, and began to eat the lot without unwrapping it.

‘You know about this Jain, and I wonder if it was the reason for your reluctance to return to your masters,’ said Skellor, when he had consumed the concentrate.

With repairs made, and all the collation, organization and deletion up to date, he dropped himself to a low ebb similar to sleep, and closed his eyes for the memory of it. Mr Crane wore out a blue acorn, and wore grooves into the metal deck with his piece of thermocrystal carbon. Time passed. It does. Eventually lights flickered on the console, and one amber light came on and stayed on. Skellor opened his eyes, nodded his head once, and the Vulture rose out of underspace into the actinic light of a close sun, released a cloud of miniature detectors and U-space transceivers, then turned automatically into an arc that would take it to pre-programmed coordinates. Skellor felt some satisfaction in this, then more when his instruments detected similar devices beaming their reams of data down towards the planet the Vulture approached.

All satisfaction fled when he turned his attention inwards and detected another of those nodes growing inside himself. He bellowed, his mouth full of fire. He breathed smoke and red-hot patches showed in the tough material of his chest. And as he performed this cautery, the grublike ship he occupied descended from the night sky, leaving a vapour trail like a deletion across the distant swirls of interstellar dust and nascent stars.

‘You will have damned answers,’ he told the vista that opened out to him.

The Vulture decelerated over mountain chains, deserts and dusty plateaux. Telescoping compound eyes briefly noted the ship’s passage, dismissed this object as inedible and irrelevant, and returned to the lifetime pursuit of consumption, or the avoiding of it. Other eyes: blue sapphires positioned in the mouths of pseudopod cobra heads made the same observation but a different assessment, and their long snakish necks withdrew into the ground.

The ship overflew a city gleaming with light, and was observed there by Galilean metalliers who had been looking for such a thing for a long time, and in that city great excitement ensued. It planed over the Sand Towers and ahead, in his virtual vision, Skellor could see his final destination: a vast multicoloured point—the nexus of many streams of information. It was a microsecond before he realized that one of those streams was issuing from the Vulture itself.

‘What the hell?’ he asked, his speech infinitely slower than the probe he sent into the Vulture’s systems.

Well, I can’t say it’s been fun, but I’m out of here.

Skellor tried to find some link from that message to whatever it was that skulked in the systems of this little ship. Then he realized what it must be.

I killed you.

Wrong, bozo. Happy landings.

The Vulture AI must have struck a deal with Dragon, for Dragon had formed a wide-band link down which the AI was transmitting herself. Skellor sent kill programs in, but they found only emptiness, the AI sliding to a different location in silicon vastness as it continued escaping like water draining down a plughole. Skellor withdrew—the AI would not have communicated without the sure knowledge that it could escape him.

Happy landings?

Just as that parting shot fully impinged, the side thrusters of the Vulture came on at full power, then the fusion engine attempted ignition with half its injectors shut down and blew one side out of its chamber. Fire cut a hole through the back of the ship, severing vital power ducts to rear gravmotors. And, spiralling and tumbling, the Vulture fell towards the Sand Towers.

In less than a second Skellor regained control of the Vulture’s systems, shut off the side thrusters, and turned on the extinguishers in the back section of the ship. But half the AG was gone and the ship out of control. Making rapid calculations, Skellor input a program to the thrusters. They began firing, seemingly at random, but over long seconds the effects became evident. The ship stopped tumbling, then its corkscrewing course straightened, just in time for it to strike the side of a butte and glance off in an explosion of sand and fire. Directly ahead now there was nothing but a head-on smash into sandstone.

Twenty degrees to the right lay the only viable option: a canyon about a half-kilometre long. More calculation, thruster fire flipping the Vulture onto its back, secondary explosion of the fusion engine blowing the other half of its chamber. Chopping through the side of a butte, which slowly collapsed behind it, the Vulture entered the canyon upside down. Skellor turned it on thrusters, also using forward thrusters and what grav-planing he could manage, to slow the ship. At the last moment the ship turned. It hit side-on, throwing up a wave of dust and sand, churning up a trail a quarter of a kilometre long. Travelling at two hundred kilometres an hour, it hammered bottom first into the buttes at the end of the canyon, but rather than be buried in an avalanche of sandstone, remained where it was as the entire butte collapsed away from the ship like a felled tree.

The airlock opened onto the acrid taste of salty dust and Skellor climbed out to stand on the side of the Vulture. He looked about, then spat ash onto the hot metal he stood upon. Behind him, Crane hauled himself out and awaited instruction. The dust and the heat generated by the impact drew attention from all around. Nearby, the two-metre-long second-stage sleer had seen it all, and registered only prey. Skellor did not see the beast. Concentrating on his virtual vision of the tight-beamed lines of communication to and from Dragon’s location, he saw them all winking out like searchlights struck by enemy fire. From those transmitters built inside himself he attempted to open a line of communication between himself and the alien entity. It was immediately blocked.

‘So, you don’t want to talk to me,’ murmured Skellor, walking down the curve of the hull and dropping the last few metres to the ground. He turned to watch Crane follow him, and thought to himself that such words might be bravado. He was now down on a primitive planet with his ship wrecked, while the one he had come to see was unprepared to communicate. And he had just learned he had been carrying a spy with him all the time. It seemed optimistic to hope that Vulture had not managed to get information out to the Polity and its watchdog, ECS. So now, rather than go Dragon hunting, Skellor realized he must make repairs and give himself the option of escape. He looked Crane up and down.

‘I think I will have to send an envoy, though diplomacy is not exactly your forte.’

As Mr Crane brushed dust from his coat, Skellor observed the few rips there repairing themselves. Now, while the Golem straightened his hat, Skellor remembered, from recordings found on the Occam Razor, how Dragon had named Jain technology the enemy and, upon learning of its presence aboard that ship, had been eager to depart.

‘Perhaps Dragon won’t perceive you as so much of a threat as myself, if you are only a machine.’ He stepped forwards and reached out to press his hand against Crane’s chest. Crane did nothing more than blink his black eyes, then tilt his head to look down at the hand. Skellor connected to the mycelium he had installed inside the Golem, and began to look very closely at what it had wrought underneath that brass skin. Certainly, some sections of this mycelium were inaccessible to Skellor, just as they had been in the Separatist woman, Aphran, on the Occam Razor. Also, it had made unexpected changes inside the Golem that had vastly improved the efficiency of his workings. But the mycelium was inferior—a simple analogue of what lived in Skellor, what he was, in fact—and was as vulnerable to him as a spider web is to flame. Skellor encompassed all its transformations and made provision for them in the nanocite counteragent he had created, like a mirror image, the moment he resurrected Mr Crane. And the palm of his hand grew warm as that agent entered the brass killing-machine.

Skellor stepped back and watched on many levels. The mycelium inside Crane began dissolving at the point of contact, and that dissolution spread. Microscopic and macroscopic fibres withered. Memory-storage nodes no iarger than a grain of salt collapsed to dust. Independent nanomachines designed and created by the mycelium for specific purposes, the nanocites were hunted and brought down like wildebeest by a pack of hyenas. Then, when nothing but the hyenas remained, they too began to disintegrate. And Skellor’s vision then became only external. If he had expected any dramatic reaction from the obdurate Golem, he was disappointed. Crane stood there as unchanged as a prehistoric monument—until he raised his head. For a moment, Skellor thought he read petulance in that metal face, but surely that was unlikely.

‘Dragon,’ Skellor said, ‘no doubt you’ll decode this from the fragmented mind of this Golem. I have not come to attack you, but to learn from you. When you are ready, please open a link with me and I will communicate only verbally. I have much to gain from you, and you have much to gain from me.’

Skellor turned, sending the signal through the primitive control module Arian Pelter had used to get Crane on his way. The second-stage sleer, sneaking up through the dust cloud, he had detected some time earlier, and as a footnote to the message he instructed Crane to ‘Deal with that.’

Out of settling dust, the sleer came scuttling and sliding, its mouth cutlery rubbing together with a sound like an automatic hacksaw, with jets of lubricating fluid spraying from glands positioned beside its mouth. Skellor observed the creature analytically, then moved aside. Crane stepped forward and brought his boot down. Hard. The sleer, its head crushed to pulp, rattled its legs against the ground and expired with a sound like an unknotted balloon.

‘Interesting place,’ said Skellor, turning back to the Vulture.

Without looking round, Crane moved off.