Brass Man

20

Tergal gazed blearily up at the patch of light, trying to understand what it meant. Abruptly he realized he was seeing the light of dawn, and, though he had felt certain he would never fall asleep on the cold metal floor so long as a monster prowled around outside, he evidently had dropped off. Anderson’s snores, vibrating their prison through much of the hours of darkness, attested to the fact that he had certainly slept.

Tergal stood, stretched, and looked around him. Five coffin shapes had been inset in the curved wall to his left. ‘What is this place, a morgue?’

For a moment Anderson’s snores stuttered out of sequence, before falling back into their familiar rhythm. Tergal frowned at him, then moved over to the hole the knight had created to get them in here. He peered out. No sign of the droon, just a damp morning seen through a stratum of mist.

‘I reckon we can—’

The ridged slope of the droon’s face slammed into the hole, clipping Tergal’s arm and sending him sprawling across the floor.

‘What the fuck!’ Anderson was up, but unsteady on his feet as the entire floor tilted. Mucal acid bubbled and fountained through the gap, but the monster could not turn its aim enough to eject the substance directly at Tergal. He rolled across the tilted floor towards Anderson, and they both backed up against the wall.

‘That was too close,’ said Tergal.

Anderson just gave him a dirty look. ‘That’s not how I like to wake up.’

‘Try finding a different profession then,’ Tergal replied.

Their metal shelter crashed back down as the droon rapidly withdrew its head. The two kept edging back along the inside wall, trying to keep out of spitting range. The creature now began crashing against the object they were in, shifting it then lifting it from the side they were crouching on. When it thumped down a second time, they both lost their footing. Tergal saw one of the coffin shapes spring open its door. A black-bearded man, wearing a one-piece loose garment of cloth, staggered out.

‘Over here!’ Anderson yelled, as he clambered to his feet again. The man looked bewildered, but as the droon tried to shove its head inside again, he moved very quickly to join them—almost like someone used to such situations, Tergal thought.

‘Right, big monster trying to get in—that figures.’ The stranger shook his head at the madness of it all. ‘My name’s Patran Thorn, by the way,’ he added.

‘Anderson Endrik of Rondure,’ said the knight, eyeing the droon’s head as it once again withdrew.

Tergal started laughing, then abruptly choked that off when he sensed the hysteria in it.

‘Anyone like to fill me in on what’s happening?’ Thorn asked smoothly. ‘I’ve been in the dark for a while.’ He winced.

‘I think your first statement already covered the situation,’ said Tergal.

Just then, a section of inner wall beside the gap began smoking, filling the room with an acrid metallic stink.

‘Have you got any nicely high-tech weapons in here?’ Anderson asked.

Thorn shrugged. ‘Not a thing.’

‘I’m only asking because I think our friend there is going to be in here with us very soon,’ said Anderson.

The droon crashed its visage into the hole again, then slammed it from side to side, enlarging the gap in the weakening metal.

‘Just a couple more like that should do it,’ Anderson added grimly.

But then, strangely, everything became still, and all the three of them could hear was the hiss of the acid dissolving metal.

‘Perhaps it’s given up,’ suggested Tergal, not believing that for a moment.

Both Anderson and Thorn gave him a doubtful look. Protracted minutes slunk by, then as one they flinched when something else appeared at the hole. Tergal stared at the woman: her white hair tied back, a sun-browned face with wrinkles at the corners of mild brown eyes.

‘I suggest you get out of there right now, and that we all be prepared to run very fast,’ she said. ‘My holocaptures aren’t going to keep that thing interested for much longer.’

Gant’s voice, but not Gant speaking …

His breath choked off and vision blurring, Cormac saw the dead soldier bring up the ugly ceramal commando knife he favoured and swipe it across, felt his AG harness fall away.

Too slow, he realized, as he mentally groped to initiate Shuriken. The throwing star shot viciously from its holster just as Gant threw him hard against the ground. Cormac bounced, consciousness ebbing, but not allowed to go by the perceptile program he pulled from his gridlink. He rolled and came up levelling his thin-gun as Shuriken dropped between himself and Gant, chainglass blades fully extended, keening high as it spun faster and faster. Now Cormac noticed that on Gant’s bare metal chest was some black tangled growth, as if someone had thrown a wad of glue-soaked human hair at the soldier.

Without much hope of a reaction, and without taking his eyes off Gant, Cormac growled, ‘Come on, show yourself, hero.’

‘Oh, I’m just a spectator, agent,’ Skellor replied.

Prompted by his own hearing and the sound pick-up in Shuriken, Cormac swung round, locating the source of that voice with a triangulation program in his skull’s hardware. Shuriken shot sideways with an air-rending shriek, and cut through those precise coordinates. At that moment Gant lunged horrifically fast. With minimum exertion, Cormac turned balletically, pumping five shots into a Golem knee so that Gant momentarily lost his balance as he tried to correct his lunge. Stepping back with that attempted correction, Cormac fired twice more, turned and stepped away. Crouching, two smoking hollows where his artificial eyes had been, Gant spun towards him, then froze.

‘I just thought I’d pause things here,’ said Skellor from behind Cormac, ‘to let you know that from where my voice issues will tell you only where I’m not—and maybe not even that.’

Shuriken screamed over Cormac’s shoulder, cutting to the source of that voice.

‘Missed again. But you’d better watch out, as I don’t think your friend will.’

This time the voice came from far to Cormac’s right, and he realized it was time for more drastic action if he was to survive. Gant was now swinging his head from side to side—zeroing in on the beating of Cormac’s heart. The agent doubted the soldier would be so easily fooled again. Reluctantly, Cormac made the same decision about Gant as he had made about the landing craft. Shuriken screamed in as Gant straightened, and went through his neck with a sound like an axe cleaving tin plate. Something ricocheted off a nearby rock with a bell-like ringing sound, then whickered through the air to land on the ground to Cormac’s right. He realized it was a piece of one of Shuriken’s extensible chainglass blades. The star itself then slowly flew away, with a pronounced wobble.

Gant’s head thudded to the ground, and his hands batted about his shoulders and severed neck as if looking for it. Whining up to speed again, Shuriken hammered in and took away Gant’s leg at the thigh. More chainglass shrapnel shot in every direction. The soldier toppled over. Then, as the star drew away in preparation for another strike, Gant grew suddenly still, and Cormac cancelled the order.

‘You are just no fun at all.’

Like a bee undecided about which flower it wanted, Shuriken whined over towards this auditory source. Though Cormac was sure Skellor would not make the mistake of speaking without translocating his voice through his chameleonware, there was always the chance he might just find himself standing in the wrong place as Shuriken moved about.

‘I bet, just like any normal grunt, you somehow believe you’re going to survive.’

Directly in front, over the fallen Gant. The sound Shuriken made was almost of frustration. Frantically, Cormac transmitted a recall order to his location, but not to Shuriken. Then he quickly built other programs in his gridlink, covering as many eventualities as he could manage in the little time remaining to him. He knew what kind of subversion would come—had seen it. He began transferring consciousness to his gridlink, creating a schizoid division, a partition—unknowingly choosing the same route to survival as a certain large brass Golem.

‘Well, I’m glad to tell you that you will survive, for a very long time.’

To the left, above those rocks, Shuriken was a hornet looking for someone to sting.

‘But you’ll wish you’d died.’

A cold breath in Cormac’s right ear, then something febrile against his skull just behind it, things moving like a handful of mobile twigs—then the leaden horrible agony of something boring into his skull.

Reaper appeared first: high as the sky and with a skull occupying his cowl this time. When King appeared directly before Jack, and of equivalent size to him, Reaper shrank down to size as well, milky flesh clothing the skull and blue eyes expanding in its sockets.

‘Would you allow Skellor to board you? He would enslave you in moments. And any technology he passed on to you would probably be tainted—so why are you doing this?’ Jack asked.

‘For how far does our USER disturb underspace?’ asked King. ‘It’s not possible for us to actually see, but theoretically its influence is definite within a sphere of two hundred light years, and possibly some beyond that, which means we have a hundred years minimum before any Polity ships can get here.’

‘A hundred years to learn how to control him? Or to study him?’

‘To watch him die,’ said Reaper.

Jack knew he was missing some undercurrent here.

‘Though we may,’ King continued, ‘provide him with a way out, and go with him to somewhere much more remote. We know where the holes in the line are.’

‘I will not be his way out,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll not allow him to use me.’

‘No, unfortunately not,’ said King. ‘But there is the colony ship in orbit that will serve that purpose.’

Showing no reaction, either at this virtual level or at any other detectable level. Jack noted the increased traffic down the com laser, and knew that those two, his erstwhile children and allies, were trying something.

‘He will die?’ Jack asked.

‘Everything does,’ said Reaper, perfectly, if inappropriately, in character.

‘His mortality is the immortality of life,’ added King cryptically.

Jack knew that what they were hinting at could have been said outright, but that they were only drawing this out to give themselves time to get through the communication link, whatever it was they were sending: probably some nasty virus, worm or homicidal program. Jack began analysing the dataflow, and soon saw where the extra stuff was peeling away and creating for itself storage for its various packages, and he considered breaking the link before whatever it was achieved completion. Then a whisper came through to him from his very own ghost:

Let me…

Releasing his hold on her, Jack saw her drawing those packages towards herself, and noticed the visual effect, in this particular reality, building like a storm on the horizon. For a fractional second he wondered why she was risking bringing it together here. Then, with a kind of glee, he realized what she was doing. Reaper and King maybe had not yet learned the caution that when you set a rabid dog on someone, you make sure it has no way of coming back at you.

‘The immortality of mortal life is that of its genes,’ he said, noting through exterior sensors that he was only hours away from entering the Jovian system and a planned final atmospheric deceleration with possibly fatal consequences.

‘Precisely,’ said King.

‘Jain technology propagates itself in an uncontrolled manner, consuming everything in its path while it possesses the energy to do so. This we have learned. His piece of it, Skellor controls through a crystal matrix AI, creating a synergetic balance between the three elements: himself, it and the AI. They have in fact become one. If any of us tried to insert ourselves into the equation, they would destroy us. If we tried to supplant either the AI or the human part of Skellor, the other parts would totally subjugate us, turning us into a copy of what we supplanted. There is no way in. All we can do is peel away small pieces of this technology and study them.’

‘Then our blocking worked, and you didn’t receive the update of Jerusalem’s research or his warning about certain treacherous AI elements?’ said King.

Jack made no immediate reply. He couldn’t help but notice how Reaper seemed to have adopted the role of taciturn heavy and King the smart-alec villain—just as he couldn’t help but notice the gathering storm gelling into an immense ouroboros turning like a wheel against the blue sky behind them.

King held out a scroll that suddenly appeared in his hand. ‘You can now read the update, though we’ll keep back the bit about traitors.’

Making no attempt to reach for the scroll, either at this VR level or at the informational level on which it had truly been offered, Jack said, ‘So there are more of you? Is Sword in on this?’

King became as reticent as Reaper, still waiting for Jack to take the scroll. On a deeper level, Jack recognized the ersatz signature of Jerusalem on the information package offered to him: a four-dimensional ouroboros. Only this one, he suspected, was waiting to pull its tail out of its mouth so it could bite him very hard. But Aphran had this particular snake in a cleft stick. He reached out and took the scroll. Then all sorts of things happened at once.

On the VR level, the giant ouroboros turned sideways and came thundering towards them, still rolling, perpetually swallowing its own tail, but its giant, fanged reptilian head still poised just above the ground. On another level, all those packages Aphran had collected messaged each other and opened at once, creating a chain of viral killers. The front killer of this chain took the brunt of any attack, whilst the next one created a solution to that attack. The last killer in the chain was always in the process of creating another like itself — potentially endless—ouroboros indeed.

As he followed the other two out of the ejected VR chamber, Thorn was having difficulties in coming to terms with this reality. The objective time he had spent killing and dying in the dark, he did not know, but the subjective time was many days. Consequently it was difficult for him actually to adjust to seeing things. Colours were bright acid, angles and depths seemed dangerous. The two ahead of him also looked like refugees from some pre-runcible holohistory, which did nothing to assist Thorn’s grasp on reality. And when he finally stuck his head out of the still smoking and bubbling hole in the side of the VR chamber, the sight that met his eyes further loosened his grip.

A hostile alien had been trying to break in; this much had been evident to Thorn, even in his confused state. Here, though, was a crowd that might send even Lucifer’s minions running for cover. Enormous segmented insectile horrors seemingly carved of obsidian or bright chemical-yellow crystal sulphur romped about on the dusty plain. Amid them towered the creature that had been attacking the VR chamber—it was the only one possessing that strange ziggurat head unadorned with pincers, saws or other lethal appendages. It was going berserk, spitting streams of volatile liquid at the other creatures, thrashing at them with its tail, attempting to snatch them up. Yet its attacks seemed to be having no effect whatsoever. Thorn eventually realized that the larger creature was attacking holograms.

‘Holocapture, you said?’ He glanced at the woman before dropping from the rim of the hole, then he scraped burning mucus from his boot heel into the dust.

‘Yes, but not for much longer. We have to go now.’

‘Go where?’ asked the one who seemed to be wearing some primitive version of space armour.

The woman pointed to the shimmer of a hard-field wall some hundred metres distant. ‘Dragon will turn it off as we reach it, then back on once we’re on the other side.’

‘Dragon?’ Thorn eyed her.

‘Would you rather stay out here?’

Thorn glanced at the rampaging monster, and the illusions it sought to kill. Already some of them were becoming translucent and displaying reference gridlines inside themselves.

‘Our stuff,’ protested the younger of the two men.

‘Most of it was on Stone and Bonehead when they bolted,’ said the elder. ‘Let’s go.’

After glancing down at the cylinder of the ancient holocapture device she carried, the woman abruptly broke into a trot. The two men, glancing over towards the monster circus, were quick to hurry after her. Thorn was unsurprised to see that some of the images had blinked out—an antiquated device like that would take them out one at a time as its power faded. Hurrying after the others, he glanced both ways along the length of the hard-field, and hoped Dragon did not intend to display some of its macabre humour by leaving the wall switched on. The monster, once the last image of its monstrous prey vanished, was not likely to be in the best of tempers. He then noted, in the distance, the familiar shape of a telefactor lifting off a strew of boulders and quickly heading away, even using a brief fusion burn, which was odd because in such straits he could see no reason why Jack would want to recall such an easily dispensable device.

Just as they reached the shimmering wall, the creature emitted a sound like an air horn in a cave. The woman held up her hand and caught something glassy in it just as the wall dispersed in silvered autumn. Glancing back once, Thorn observed the monster hammering towards them. No point in running once they had crossed this barrier, for without the wall they were dead for certain and with it there would be no reason for haste. He didn’t look back again—none of them did. Perhaps they all thought it might break some spell.

A dull thrumming sound was all that told them the droon had run straight into the replaced barrier. Finally it was okay for them to look round. They saw the monster, weird and terrifying, marching back and forth behind still-wavering energy distortions. To Thorn it briefly occurred that he might still be in VR. But that would not change his present behaviour—virtual pain hurt just as keenly.

Time seemed to slow, as if to give Cormac an appreciation of what was happening to him. He brought his hand up to the side of his head, but in the eternal second it took him to do so the aug creature had established a direct causal link between the proximity of his hand to itself and the amount of pain it allowed him to feel. Pulling the thing away from his head would be more difficult for him than sawing off his own hand. However, coldly, his secondary awareness, established in his gridlink, knew all about that. It counted milliseconds and calculated trajectories. It would be a close-run thing, for already Jain fibres were beginning to invade the gridlink itself. Shuriken, hanging in the air, whining like an abandoned pet, abruptly dropped to the dust—there was no longer room for that channel; Cormac must turn all to one purpose.

Skellor, the toe of his boot coming down on the Tenkian weapon, started to appear from that point upwards.

‘That’s one for me.’ He grinned at Cormac.’ You can’t fight it for much longer, agent.’

Cormac kept his eyes on Skellor’s face, and elements of his mind out of the man’s grasp. Can you keep a secret? he asked himself. Slack seconds accumulated and, locking his hands together, he raised his arms above his head and tensed. Immediately a reaction bored through from Skellor: the man did not like this, wanted Cormac to lower his arms.

‘See you… around,’ Cormac managed through gritted teeth just as a shadow swept across, and the telefactor reached down with clawed grips, grasped Cormac’s arms and hauled him into the sky.

‘You will crawl back to me!’ Skellor shouted after him.

The program Cormac had created and transmitted followed through. As the telefactor rose out of the canyon and flew above the sandstone buttes, it extruded a three-fingered plant sampler with a chainglass vibroblade. The three chrome fingers closed on the squirming aug creature as in a foam of blood and mucus it settled closer against Cormac’s head. It then pulled the creature out, stretching the pink tubules that penetrated flesh and bone. The vibroblade extruded, turned like a clock hand, cut the creature away and the telefactor discarded it. Cormac did not see it fall, was too busy gasping in agony.

‘You haven’t really escaped, you know.’

The probing carrier signal informed Cormac that he had done precisely that and, so long as he gave no reply, Skellor would not be able to trace his whereabouts.

Jerusalem had offered a number of choices to its crew and passengers: cryopods, gel-stasis (basically being sealed in containers full of shock-absorbing gel), or they could just carry on as before. Mika chose a half-measure. She didn’t want to be utterly disconnected during the penetration of the USER field; nor did she wish to be entirely unprotected, for she knew that though AI ships could survive a severe hammering, it was not necessarily the case that their passengers would. So she chose to sit out the worse patches in an acceleration chair. And she was beginning to wonder if that had been the right decision.

Alarming crashes and bangs kept echoing throughout the great ship, and only minutes ago she had heard a distant huge explosion—which Jerusalem calmly informed her was from the implosion of a hard-field generator. Now the entire ship was vibrating like an aeroplane hitting turbulence. Staring at the chaotic swirling grey image on the screen—more like a monochrome image of some creature’s internal organs than anything else—Mika wondered what it all meant. Were they making any headway?

‘Jerusalem, how are we doing?’

‘We have penetrated four years into the USER field. However, in ship-time of thirty hours I will have to drop out of U-space for repairs.’

‘Repairs?’

‘I have ejected three fusion reactors that went out of phase, and seventeen hard-field generators have imploded. A resultant fire killed twelve humans in gel-stasis. Three Golem, five other AIs and two haimans were also killed while making repairs.’

‘Haimans?’ asked Mika.

‘People like D’nissan—those who are seeking synergy with AI.’

And there it was: a piece of information that had entirely passed Mika by, probably because she had never thought to ask. She also noted how Jerusalem had listed those casualties along with the other components of the ship. It was not a comforting thought.

After sleeping for a few hours, she pulled a swing-out console in front of herself and went back to work. When staying in the acceleration chair became too uncomfortable for her, she returned to her work station to discover that in the partial immersion frame the untoward shaking of the vessel did not affect her much. Precisely thirty hours on from her conversation with Jerusalem, the entire ship suddenly jerked as if slapped by some vast hand.

It was unfortunate that Mika had come out of VR just then, to get herself some coffee. She was thrown up against the wall, then down to the floor, her arm breaking with an audible crunch. On the screen revealing the external view, she observed a brown dwarf sun like a polished sphere of mahogany against rashes of stars. Then she went to find herself an autodoc, and actually had to queue before having the bone in her arm welded. She was a lucky one in fact, as that last wrench out of U-space had broken, as well as numerous other limbs, two necks and one backbone, which always took a little longer to repair.

The lander slewed and impacted sideways into a hillock plated with strange yellow-and-white growths. Fethan unstrapped himself and headed for the airlock, thinking himself lucky to be still in one piece. He had seen one lander nose straight into the ground without decelerating, and another crash into the city he had briefly glimpsed earlier. From over the horizon, he could still see the pillars of smoke black against the morning sky, and could hear the occasional rumble of an explosion. Other landers had come down not quite so hard as his own, so he guessed Skellor, if his intention really was to get up to Ogygian, would head for one of those. Fethan was again tempted to wait to get the drop on the man, but no, he had to contact Cormac, tell the agent what was going on, then proceed from there.

Fethan abandoned his space suit, stripping down to a one-piece environment suit made of chameleon cloth, shouldered his APW, and quickly headed away from the landing site. He tried calling on encoded ECS radio bands, but received no reply. He then tried Gant’s specific encoded frequency and contacted a jumbled and hostile something that made him snatch back as if he had just put his hand into a wasps’ nest. He realized that, until he had assessed the situation here, he was putting himself at risk by trying to make contact, so ceased to call and then shut down any auto-response in his internal radio.

Half an hour later he came in sight of the carnage caused by the lander that had crashed into the city. Egg-shaped houses lay broken on the ground amid tangles of scaffolding and collapsed roadways. Some of the houses glowed inside as they burned, but the greatest conflagration occurred in the centre of what looked like a factory complex, where the lander had actually hit. Fethan had seen some strange places, and he had previously been at the scene of disasters, but it took him a moment to understand what was amiss here. People were wandering about in an apparent daze, which was often the case after a tragedy like this, but an hour or more had already passed and there should be some sort of emergency procedure in place by now, or at least some people dragging casualties out of the wreckage. When a vehicle appeared, he thought something like that might be starting, but it merely skirted the ruination and continued out of the city, heading in his direction.

The ATV contained about five people, and towed a trailer filled with more people and their belongings. Fethan raised a hand and walked towards the vehicle. It swerved aside and kept away from him. He had been around long enough to recognize the stunned look of refugees everywhere, though he wondered at the fearful glances being cast in his direction. He noticed these people all wore thick headgear and carried makeshift clubs. Perhaps it was a cultural thing? He subsequently discovered the real reason.

A sheet of metal, burdened by the heavy iron truss to which it had been riveted, had trapped one woman against the ground. She was not the first such victim he had seen, but the first one still moving. Quickly he headed over to where her arms protruded.

‘I’ll get you out of there,’ he said in plain English — just to reassure her with the sound of a voice. There was no response, but then she had not understood what he had said. He grasped the edge of the metal sheet, heaved it up with the truss attached, then forced them sideways into a nearby tangle of wreckage. The woman just lay on her back for a moment, her expression imbecilic. Then she rolled onto her front, rose up onto her hands and knees, and shook herself like a dog. Fethan noticed that there was blood spattered on her collar and some horrible creature clinging behind her ear, though otherwise she appeared uninjured. He stooped to assist, but suddenly she stood by herself and turned to face him.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked in the language used here.

She just stared at him with bloodshot eyes, lips moving as if she was silently reciting. Abruptly tilting her head, she reached out one quivering hand towards him. A second aug creature scuttled out of her sleeve, then leapt from the back of her hand onto Fethan’s neck. He felt it climb up behind his ear and then start boring in through the tough syntheflesh there. The woman lowered her arm, turned aside, and stumbled away mumbling to herself.

For Fethan, pain was something he chose not to experience, as his body possessed much better methods of detecting or diagnosing damage. He reached up to grab the creature, and tore it away. Now he understood. Perhaps, given time, the thing could have bored in through his ceramal skull and finally hit what remained of his brain, which was biogridded and stored at not much above absolute zero. Whether or not it could have taken him over via that route was not something he wanted to discover for sure. He studied the thing he held: slippery with mucus like a cuckoo-spit bug, too many legs, flattened kidney-shaped body, numerous boring tubules extruding from its head. It reminded him of the parasitic scoles that had been used to oxygenate the blood of Masadan pond workers. He tightened his fist and burst the thing, then stooped for some sand to wipe away the mess from his palm.

As Fethan moved further into the city, aug creatures leapt out onto him regularly from their numerous hides in fallen scaffolding, just like ticks waiting in the grass. They clung to his clothing before scuttling up towards the side of his head. He understood then the reason for the hand weapons the refugees had been carrying, for soon he himself had picked up a length of steel tube and became adept at swatting the things in mid-leap — like playing baseball with tomatoes. Every individual he came across now was already a victim of these horrible parasites. This looked like the work of Skellor: it was the kind of ruination the man habitually left behind him.

Working his way on through the lower city, Fethan began to note that the same creatures, now evident everywhere, seemed to be all flowing in one direction. Perhaps, tracking them back, he might find their source—and even close it down? Hopefully, by then Skellor would be aboard one of the landers, and not located at that source. Whatever, Fethan was not the kind to witness horror like this and do nothing in response.

It started like the rumbling of a distant thunderstorm. Anderson halted and looked for something to cling on to, as this felt like a really big quake on the way. Soon the ground started to vibrate, shaking up a mist of dust.

‘Shit,’ he said. Something about this one just did not feel right. And soon he understood why, as cobra-like pseudopods began exploding from the ground like a nightmare crop of bean sprouts.

Detritus rained down all around them. Anderson saw the woman pull out a wide hat from her pack and put it on, then pass the pack over to the man Thorn so he could hold it above his head. The four of them huddled in the lee of a boulder studded with crystals of smoky quartz, and grit filled the air around them. In the distance, where the pseudopods had first arisen, a great dust cloud was furiously swirling in which Anderson glimpsed further ophidian movement amid flashes of blue-green light. As the shower of stones began to pass like spring hail, and the four finally felt able to straighten up, they saw pseudopods erupting from the ground in a line that cut directly towards them. Then, nearby, a row of them exploded into the air, curving over to glare down at them with their single sapphire eyes. Anderson noted that even the woman seemed confused about what was going on here, yet she had brought them confidently into this realm. Resting his hand on the butt of his handgun, he wondered how many of these things he could take down with him before one squashed him into the dust.

‘What is this?’ Tergal had drawn his own weapon, and was swinging it from one of the great flat heads to another. Thorn abruptly reached out and, in a move difficult to follow, disarmed him. ‘Are you crazy!’Tergal shouted.

Thorn inspected the weapon, then clicked across its safety catch. He tossed it back to Tergal. ‘Dragon here,’ he gestured towards the forest of pseudopods, ‘could swat that other thing back there like a bug.’ He stabbed a thumb in the direction of the droon.

Anderson slid his hand away from his own weapon. Dragon—again referred to in the singular. Lafrosten’s story had told of only one such creature, but Anderson had since heard stories of many more known as sand dragons. Surveying the nightmare forest of fleshy trees, he spotted three, four, five of the crested heads Lafrosten had described. There must be hundreds, nay thousands of the creatures here. He wondered which one of them he had supposedly come to kill.

Cupping her hands round her mouth, the woman, Arden, shouted, ‘What’s happening?’—trying to attract attention in the uproar. A single crested head turned towards her, then shot forwards, cutting a furrow through the ground with the base of its neck. Soon it was hovering over them, curving down to inspect them as if eyeing an interesting roach it had been about to step on.

‘Dragon, what are you doing?’ Arden then asked more quietly.

‘The option to spectate has been taken away from me,’ replied the reptilian head, studying them with eyes of deepest blue.

Anderson realized his own mouth was gaping, and quickly closed it. He had often repeated the gist of Lafrosten’s story, but not until this moment had he grasped that it was only a mere glimpse into some other, even larger tale. He recalled that the dragon had spoken to Lafrosten. Therefore it was a sentient creature, and therefore it had a purpose all its own: it was not just some character in a fairy tale—a tale that had taken on the dimensions of myth, even to Anderson who had actually met Lafrosten. This was real.

‘The option to spectate has been taken from you? That was evident long before now,’ said Arden.

The head turned slightly to one side. ‘Thorn,’ it observed.

Thorn nodded in acknowledgement.

‘You came from the first ship, the one that was attacked,’ Dragon stated.

Anderson noted how Thorn paused, perhaps weighing up the value of a lie. Eventually he said, ‘I did.’

‘Who was with you aboard that ship?’ Dragon asked.

‘I think you know,’ said Thorn.

Dragon hissed for a moment, then stated, ‘Ian Cormac.’ The head swung back to Arden, and Anderson discovered he had never actually heard real sarcasm voiced until now. ‘The good guys,’ said Dragon.

‘What are you planning to do?’ Arden asked.

The head turned and gazed up at the sky. ‘Make waves,’ it said.

The ground bucked again, sending them all staggering. They retreated back to the lee of their boulder and steadied themselves against it. The nearby pseudopods rose even higher, the earth churning between them. The fissures where they exited the ground joined together, melded, and, wide as a metallier house, the main trunk from which they all issued heaved itself into the air. The pseudopods splaying out from it poised overhead like a giant blue-tipped fan which then tilted forwards, a long mound rising behind it as the rest of the trunk shrugged free. Anderson realized that a hundred metres away this trunk mated with a river of scaled flesh—was just one branch of it. All around similar podia were surfacing, then drawing back towards the dusty maelstrom. Then he saw an immense dome rising up, sucking in all this tangled madness of sand dragons back towards itself. This nucleus was truly titanic and, as it drew in at the sides, began to reveal itself as a giant sphere. Anderson stood stunned when, briefly, a wind cleared away the dust. He saw the sphere whole, rising from the plain on a vast trunk of ophidian growth. Then it kept rising higher, distorting and expanding as it drew that same growth into itself: a vast scaled moon floating light as a metallier blimp. Higher and higher, receding into the sky.

Anderson felt a hand on his shoulder and looked across at the man called Thorn.

‘Dragon,’ the man said briefly.

Tergal now turned towards the knight, his expression somewhat maddened. ‘Shame you lost your lance.’

Anderson lowered his gaze and observed two creatures bounding through the dust storm. ‘Well, it’s coming now, if a little late.’ He gestured to Bonehead and Stone. ‘I wonder what brought them back here.’

‘Dragon,’ said Arden.

Anderson looked at her for explanation, but instead she asked, ‘These are yours?’

‘They are that—faithless beasts.’

‘That’s good, because with Dragon gone the force field will have gone as well.’

With that, they all turned to peer back the way they had come. The ejected VR chamber was a black dot on the horizon, seemingly floating on a stratum of mist, but of the droon there was no sign. Anderson found little comfort in that.

Vulture flapped a wing over the glassy surface to blow away the settling dust. ‘Quite an uproar,’ she noted. ‘Dragon is nothing if not dramatic’

The fossilized apek rested, perfectly frozen, in a coffin-shaped block of solid chainglass that was raised above the ground now. Etched into the block’s upper surface was a chess board. Beside this rested a spherical draconic container. Vulture had to wonder about the symbolism of it all. She looked around at the amphitheatre Dragon had cleared. The ground here was perfectly level, as if raked, in a fifty-metre circle in the middle of devastation. Amid the broken rock beyond the neat circumference lay much dragon detritus: desiccated pseudopods like a shed snake skin draped across boulders, iridescent scales the size of dinner plates, broken constructs like the by-blows of old combustion engines and lizards. Shaking her head, Vulture hopped up onto the face of the glass coffin, then turned her attention to her companion.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘lay out your pieces.’

Mr Crane gazed down at the board with painted-bead eyes, blinked once, then abruptly squatted. He delved into his pockets and took out his toys. The rubber dog was his queen, the piece of crystal his king and the blue acorns were pawns. He had one piece more than required, but then was ever a battle fought by evenly matched opponents? Vulture pecked once against the draconic sphere. The thing twitched, split, and spilt miniature albino sleers, which scuttled to take their positions on the grid and with dragon eyes glare at their opponents. Now the sphere contracted, pushing out two sand hogs with minute lance-wielding human figures mounted on them, then a small droon.

‘Y’know,’ said Vulture, ‘“surreal” is a word for the pretentious, but I can’t think of a better one right now.’

Mr Crane took off his hat and studied the layout. He reached out and nudged a blue acorn two squares forward. A sleer nymph scuttled to it, took hold of the acorn and moved it one square aside.

Vulture said, ‘You don’t know the rules, Crane. I do, which is why this is going to be a game difficult for me to lose.’