Brass Man

23

Tanaquil wanted to rage at the strange oldster because he saw Fethan as part of Jeelan’s death and the current metallier disaster. Did this now also mean that Tanaquil’s dream was dead, that the entire metallier dream was dead? Would he ever get to stand on the bridge of the Ogygian?

He wanted to reject the alien—the interfering outside. But Tanaquil had been well educated and was harshly intelligent and, believing the man’s claim to have caused the demise of the horrible enslaving creatures, he could not allow anger to triumph over reason. So only one task remained.

A short walk from where so many broken corpses lay scattered brought him to an abandoned metallier house. He searched the storage areas underneath it and found a couple of spades. Without question, the old man took the one Tanaquil passed him. In silence, they returned to the charnel house and began to dig. Out of the drifting smoke walked a skinny youth with blond hair, who gaped at his surroundings with raw and horrified eyes.

‘Sir, what do we do now?’

Tanaquil wanted to scream at him—just scream wordlessly.

‘Bury them,’ he growled.

Other people arrived, some to help dig and others carrying weapons to guard against the things shifting in the dark of the Undercity, no doubt lured by the smell of fresh meat. Tanaquil gave no more than that initial instruction. That those who had not heard it carried out his orders anyway he reckoned was due to some residue of that enslaving bond they had all recently felt. The corpses must also be buried or burnt before nightfall, else the place would be crawling with sleers. For Tanaquil the task was endless horror. His head ached horribly, and a liquid kept seeping out of the hole behind his ear. But he wanted Jeelan in the ground, safe from hard mandibles, and a fast closure so that he could again rule his people. It was cold, but otherwise… he would just fail.

To begin with, he just dug in a nightmare fugue, then he began to realize how the older man wielded his shovel with almost impossible ease, excavating huge clumps of the sandy earth and heaving them aside. Fethan paused and shrugged when he noted Tanaquil’s scrutiny.

‘Used to dig drainage sluices on Masada,’ he explained.

Tanaquil nodded, not really understanding. He could push his own blade only half its length into the ground, then had to strain to lever up half a spadeful of earth. Fethan could shove the blade of his tool fully into the soil, as easily as if into a pie, and each time the spade’s solid metal handle flexed alarmingly.

‘You talked often with Dragon?’ Fethan suddenly asked.

‘No.’

‘Did you ever go to the plain?’

Tanaquil shook his head. He could not speak, and was grateful when Fethan pressed him for nothing more. Together, in silence, they completed the task, then together they laid Jeelan in the hole they had prepared. Her skin was now cold. Tanaquil scrambled from the grave on his hands and knees, and puked acid bile.

‘I’ll finish off for you,’ said Fethan.

‘No,’ insisted Tanaquil, returning to work. He scooped a spadeful of sandy earth down onto Jeelan’s naked body, once, twice, then staggered away. He couldn’t breathe down here. He could not live in this shadow.

The world seemed to go away for a while. Past him flashed a chaos of twisted metal, stairs, people shouting questions at him, as he ran. The blimp tower eventually provided refuge and, with no one around, he tried to release that lock inside himself. But again the tears would not come. Instead, he just grew calm and cold, knowing that this was something he could never get over. He did not want to live; didn’t have the will to die.

‘Tell me about Dragon,’ a voice intruded.

Fethan had walked quietly out onto the platform beside which was moored the remaining blimp, perhaps holding back somewhat because Tanaquil was sprawled by a pillar right next to the edge.

‘He took the Undercity as his own, right from the beginning,’ said Tanaquil, not even knowing why he was explaining. ‘That was thirty years and four Chief Metalliers ago.’

‘About right,’ said Fethan, studying the blimp. ‘The four spheres separated over fifty years ago, solstan.’ He turned to Tanaquil. ‘That’s the mean time of the Human Polity—something you need as a standard when you ship out between the stars, shedding decades like dandruff.’

Now Tanaquil felt angry because the man had stirred his curiosity. ‘Spheres? Solstan? Human Polity?’

‘Dragon’s original form was one of four conjoined and living spheres, each about a kilometre in diameter. They were one being, which then broke into four. One of those four came here.’

Tanaquil remembered visions from his time of nightmares. He pointed out over the Sand Towers towards the plain. ‘I saw it rise up and leave us. Dragon is gone.’

Fethan was abruptly up beside him. ‘Perhaps we should go and see.’ He gestured to the blimp.

There was more here than an interest in Dragon, Tanaquil thought. ‘Why would you want to see?’

‘I won’t lie to you. While you have been here I’ve spoken to your people, wandered your city… There’s someone I need to find, and that person does not seem to be here. That being the case he is maybe out that way.’ Fethan nodded towards the plain. ‘He’ll always be where the action is.’

‘I cannot leave my people.’

‘They know you need time. I’ve spoken to some of them.’

Tanaquil could not summon the energy to argue, and there was something attractive about climbing into the blimp cabin and just sailing away. Perhaps stepping out into the air when the blimp was high was the only way to release the leaden lock in his chest.

One day, Anderson decided, he might ask Unger Salbec why Bonehead had not fled after the death of Stone when earlier it had panicked and fled, and why it was now prepared to carry him into battle against the droon. He suspected the answer related to sentience. A creature that could come to understand human language was not an animal, and probably possessed motivations equally as complex as those of any human. Possibly Bonehead was embarrassed by its earlier behaviour. Whatever, Bonehead remained steady beneath him, its eyestalks spread like a rifle sight below his lance, which he pointed towards the droon as it stepped delicately into the arena he had chosen. Anderson now studied his opponent.

The creature stood upright on two chitinous legs, which possessed an extra joint and terminated in feet that were a complex tangle of mismatched digits and hooks. Its tail, counterbalancing its extended upper torso, was ribbed with carapace and square in section, the corners everting so that each of them was sharp as a blade. Halfway down, the tail divided, its twin ends jointed like extra limbs. Carapace also ribbed its upper body, and custard-yellow flesh bulged between ribs, forced out by the distension of its over-full guts. Below its primary arms, it possessed two other sets of limbs that served as either arms or legs. Its primary arms ended in large two-fingered hands. Rows of hooks ran up its forearms to two further digits at its elbows. Its neck, extending from a sloping collar of armour, curved back on itself swanlike underneath its ziggurat head. Four black targeting eyes ran along the lower fold of this head. Six mouths, starting with the largest at the bottom, stepped up its sloping visage to its two distance eyes—slightly protruding and crablike—set at the very top of its head. When it opened its mouths to expose their bright orange interiors its head stretched half its own height again. Then the head snapped down, only the top mouth staying open, and the creature made a coughing hacking sound. It expelled only a mist of acid now, though. Anderson knocked his goad against Bonehead’s carapace and the sand hog began to move forward on its crawler limbs.

Straight into some of that custard flesh, bulging from its torso, seemed the best target to Anderson. He knew from his studies that the droon possessed insides similar to a sleer’s; its brain being a wormlike organ extending all the way down the length of its body, which obviously made it very difficult to kill with just a head shot. As with sleers, then, his way to kill it was by causing as much internal damage as he could, there being no one particular spot on its body he could target to bring it down.

‘Ho, Bonehead! Ho!’

The sand hog went up on to its main limbs and accelerated, and it seemed to Anderson that only then did the droon become truly aware of their impending attack. Its head stretched again, and it coughed another fog of acid. Then, like a wrestler preparing to meet an opponent, it extended its arms out to either side.

‘Ho! Ho!’

The knight centred his lance perfectly on target. If he did not kill it with this charge, then he would certainly be doing it some serious damage. But, of course, the resolution of a knightly trial was never simple.

At the last moment the droon brought both its two-fingered hands in and down on Bonehead’s carapace. The sand hog juddered to a halt, its momentum driving the droon back five metres, the monster’s feet cutting furrows in the ground. Anderson slammed against his saddle straps, the saddle itself cracking alarmingly beneath him. The point of his lance went into custard flesh, but not very far at all. Recovering quickly, Anderson leant forward, trying to push it further in, but it was like trying to push a knife into a tree. The droon bellowed, hauled back, nearly snatching the lance from Anderson’s hands because he did not have its back eye over its peg. He clung on grimly, though, pieces of yellow flesh and a squirt of clear fluid following the lance tip out. Then with one hand the droon slapped the lance aside, its head working like upright bellows as it tried to spit acid it did not contain. The air was full of burning droplets.

‘Turn to the right! Turn!’ Anderson shouted at Bonehead, dropping any pretence that his goad had any effect on where the hog went. Bonehead had meanwhile attacked low with its feeding head, grabbing one of the droon’s secondary limbs. The hog released this, then pushed away, but the droon grabbed its back end as Bonehead tried to leap away. Then Thorn and Tergal began firing, their shots either thunking into custard flesh or ricocheting off carapace. Anderson was away then, levelling his lance again as Bonehead ran a circuit of the arena, following his thought even before he voiced it.

The droon turned on the two men, looming above them, pumping its head and bellowing. It could not see Anderson coming in from the side. He levelled his lance point at an exposed area between the two intermediate limbs.

‘Yaaah!’

There came a cracking, ripping sound as two metres of lance penetrated the droon’s body. Then, below the knight, everything dropped away. The next thing he knew he was hanging from the lance, still strapped in his saddle, which had torn away from Bonehead’s back.

‘Shit,’ he said succinctly. He tried to reach down to undo his straps, lost his grip on the lance and crashed to the ground. Something smashed hard into the back of his helmet, and little bright lights chased across his vision. Also winded, he still scrabbled for the straps, but could not seem to find them—was falling into a black tunnel. The droon loomed over him, horrible gasping sounds issuing from it, and a different coloured liquid oozing from its six mouths. No matter—it would not need its acid to finish him off now.

Then suddenly the creature turned away. As he slid into unconsciousness, Anderson glanced aside and saw himself, mounted on Bonehead, charging the droon. Unconsciousness was a welcome escape from this confusion.

It was like gazing at the world through a darkened lens: a fish-eye vision of whirling stars, a glimpse of the wrecked telefactor and the occasional retreating view of the gas giant. Beside him, entangled with him in the world that could be virtually huge but was in reality a twenty-centimetre lozenge of crystal bound in black metal, Aphran also watched.

‘Like a good captain I would have gone down with my ship,’ Jack observed.

‘Not quite the same, but perhaps you now understand the psychology.’

‘I was humanized, utterly interfaced with my body, accepting it as part of myself and its destruction as my destruction. Interesting. I see that it makes for more efficient attack ships—that investment in the weapon used.’

‘The ship itself being the weapon,’ Aphran added.

‘You do realize that though you have managed our survival, utterly disconnected like this our resources are limited, and we have some choices to make.’

‘What choices?’

‘We can remain conscious at the present level of function for about ten years then go into permanent storage, or we can go into permanent storage right now for twenty years.’

‘So long. So little.’

‘The limit of the microtoks originally employed to run me while I was transferred from the factory to the ship body, which incidentally is now sinking in liquid hydrogen.’

‘You have contact?’

‘No, just a good grasp of physics. The only extraneous link we have is through the pinhead camera that was attached up at the moment of my inception—the purpose of which was to make me aware that there is an outside world.’

‘We could spend those ten years in a virtual world,’ Aphran suggested.

‘Such an existence does not interest me.’

‘Then let us go to permanent storage now. I don’t think I could keep this same conversation going for ten years.’

‘Then goodnight.’

Blackness.

The hunter/killer program had waited until he was deeply connected into the systems of the ship, Skellor knew, and now it was coming at him in a flood, plunging data tentacles into his mind, one after another, so he had time only to defend himself. With too much ease, the attack translated into a VR scenario. Here it seemed he grasped the situation more completely as he gained iconic control over his responses. It became almost like some computer game, but a very real one in which he could actually die. The computer system, in the virtuality, became a planetoid of slightly disconnected blocks shot through with tunnels and holes, floating in albescent space. Inside this, Skellor was Kali, armed with swords and axes, shifting blocks and seeking a way-out. The kill program—one serpent and sometimes many, sprouting like the necks of Hydra from within the planetoid—patrolled these tunnels, attacking him where it could, its attacks increasing in ferocity the nearer he got to the surface of the planetoid or to gaining some control of its structure.

Slowly Skellor began to identify which collections of blocks represented which ship systems, and the virtuality allowed him to see that every one of these now had its own place for the serpent. He also saw that the deeper into the system he retreated, the easier things became for him—the less assiduously the program attacked him. Closing up the collection of blocks that was the balance control for the primitive hard-field shielding of the ship in U-space and shutting down any access for the program, he realized that unless the same program had resources available he had yet to detect, it would not be able to kill him nor keep him confined for long. He could only assume that some other plan was in the offing.

Before he could plumb that, the program attacked again. Four serpents speared out of the blockish informational darkness. Two of them came for Skellor, and two of them went for the structure he had rearranged. The data stream of one attacker he cut off near its source with a just-prepared virus. In the virtuality, his axe went through its neck, the gaping head fell away and the body retreated like a severed air hose. His second blow fell on the neck of his other attacker just as it closed its jaws on his arm, punching its fangs into his pseudoflesh. The neck bent like a cable being struck, but remained undamaged—this data stream having adapted to the virus. His arm immediately began to change colour, as killing data began to load.

Even as he adapted the virus, he used it swiftly on himself and cut away his poisoned arm. On the back swing, he took off the second serpent’s head before turning to the other two, who seemed busily intent on wrecking his work. Now, knowing the degree of adaptation his viruses needed, he sprouted more axes from his fists and attacked, chopping and hacking in a frenzy. Then, when bleeding segments were drifting all about him, he asked himself why this attack had been so strong.

Skellor stepped away from the virtual vision of his battle and opened his comprehension to an utterly informational level. He realized that the kill programs’ defences were strongest around the hard-field generators, the reactor and the balanced U-space engines of this ship. It wanted to keep him here in orbit of Cull. That being the case, he now made it his prime objective to get away. He probed, tentatively, into the start-up routines for the U-space engines. The reaction he got, like poking a stick into a nest of vipers, confirmed his suspicions. Now, in the virtuality and not limiting himself by human perception, he began gathering his weapons. Turning towards those closely guarded systems, he hurled himself forward thousand-armed, viruses and informational bacilli propagating around him, layered attack programs like swarms of bees, a growing mass then a wall of every informational weapon at his disposal falling on that nest of serpents.

In a virtual age, he slew the guardians. In real computer time of microseconds, he swamped and subsumed engine control. His diagnostic search informed him of slight misalignments in both engines and hard-fields. It would hurt him, but he would survive—as he had before. The fusion reactor started easily; someone had used it recently. No matter. When enough power was available, he started the fusion engines of the ship. He had no control of navigation, but the ship had been tangential to the planet. Accelerating, burning up rusty water from its fuel tanks as it drove up to ram-scoop speeds, the ship left orbit. One fusion chamber sputtered as the water started to run out, then the ram-scoop fields opened out and began funnelling in hydrogen and other spacial matter to use as fuel.

Then, achieving sufficient speed relative to the fabric of space, like a speedboat ready to move up onto its hydrofoils, the Ogygian engaged its U-space engines and dropped out of realspace.

Dragged back against one wall of the bridge, the long-dead captain’s skull still clutched in his right hand and the Jain exoskeleton now rooting into the metalwork around him, Cormac wondered what new torture this was. But agony twisted Skellor’s features, and Cormac’s mind screamed at the flashes of grey infinity beyond the screen—all his human perception could make of under-space. Some instinct made him try to grasp more. He opened up programming space in his gridlink to carry the load, but his mind just kept sliding off. Desperation grew in him, as if his survival depended on his cognizance of this dimension.

With augmentation, it was possible for him to comprehend more than he could with his normally evolved human mind. With heightened perception, Cormac could visualize five dimensions: see a tesseract and observe a Kline bottle pouring into itself. But this was more dimensions than that, and none at all. U-space contained the potential for dimension. It was the infinity of a singularity, and the eternal instant. To human perception, it was things and states that were mutually exclusive. It was impossible… impossible for a human to encompass. But Cormac knew that he must encompass it or completely lose one of the bulwarks of his mind. And so, naturally, as he strove for comprehension, he moved further away from his own humanity.

With a feeling of good riddance, Dragon watched first the Ogygian then the King of Hearts drop into under-space. It being evident that this entire system and probably others were enclosed in a USER trap, the entity felt sure that neither Skellor nor the rogue AI ship would be going far, and that maybe the Polity would survive, just so long as others of its members could resist temptation.

Temptation…

There was a saying attributed to a nineteenth-century human character who seemed famous more for his sexual proclivities than his ability with a pen… or quill.

Dragon knew the dangers of Jain technology, but the option for control of it from its nascent stage… Polity AIs must be aware of this aspect of the technology, and Dragon understood why some of them had gone rogue in pursuit of it.

I can resist anything but temptation.

Ah…

Dragon also quickly came to understand something else. It was certain that the higher Polity AIs had worked out quite some time ago how Jain technology operated. Hence this scenario: the trap had not only been for Skellor, but for those AIs that did not show the requisite self-control. The entity did not like the idea that the same trap might have intentionally included itself but had to admit that possibility. Whatever, on the surface of Cull was an item that could create another Skellor or, utilized by Polity AIs or Dragon itself, something even worse. Dragon felt the Jain node would be safer… elsewhere. Still working to repair its U-space engines, to shorten the hours-long trip to the planet to minutes, it then detected a U-space signature. Observing the scale of what was coming through, Dragon felt a sinking sensation in its many thousands of stomachs.

‘Now where are you going?’ Jerusalem asked.

Strangely, AIs that ran Golem bodies were more patient than those which controlled spaceships and runcibles, and whose understanding of time and the universe was immense. Cento waited, utterly still, utterly forbearing, as the hours slogged on past. Only a few hundred metres away from him, down at the bottom of the engine pier in the captain’s bridge, the Jerusalem hunter/killer program had immobilized Skellor. Maybe, if he took his APW down there, he could use it to convert the biophysicist to so much ash. But maybe wasn’t good enough. That particular maybe was only the contingency plan.

‘You still have him contained?’ he asked, though in reality the question contained no human words.

The program responded in the same computer language, ‘He is contained. Be prepared for your action.’

The kill program made all the calculations in Ogygian’s computer before presenting the idea to Cento. It did this only minutes after Skellor began using the message laser. Cento was dubious of the accuracy of the program’s results. It was no ship or runcible AI, in fact was not designated AI at all (though Cento admitted to himself that was probably for reasons of expediency), and the computer on the Ogygian was primitive. However, when the program showed him the scale of the target and its intentions, Cento had to agree.

Skellor, no matter what capabilities he possessed, would not be getting away from there. Cento, having now to do the one tiling of which the program was incapable—all its actions being on an informational level only — would not be leaving either. But the Golem, being AI and of AI origin, and also being backed up in Earth Central, did not view personal destruction in the same way as did a human, or haiman, whatever Fethan thought himself.

‘There is something else,’ the program then interjected.

‘And that is?’

‘The Skellor has brought a hostage aboard with him.’

‘That is unfortunate,’ said Cento, ‘but it does not impinge upon the plan. The loss of one or two lives, even a few hundred lives, is a small enough price to pay to be rid of Skellor.’

‘The hostage is Ian Cormac’

Cento experienced spontaneous emotion, something he had not felt since seeing Ulriss die and then finding the incinerated corpses of Shayden and Hourne. First, he felt surprise that the agent had allowed Skellor to capture him at all, then he felt sadness. Cormac did not back himself up, and even if he was memplanted, that technology would not survive what was to come. The agent would die irretrievably.

‘That makes no difference.’

The program fell silent, returning that small sliver of its awareness to the chaos of its virtual battle to keep Skellor contained, and unaware of the subtle control it exerted over the ship’s helm. Many hours later, precisely to the calculated second of ship time, Cento pointed his APW at the superconducting cables leading to the U-space engine above him, triggered the weapon, and drew violet fire across. The blast threw him back. The side of the support pier blasted out into U-space, the blobs of molten metal creating strange kaleidoscope effects as they departed the ship. Above him the engine stuttered out something weird that impinged even on Cento’s Golem consciousness as, briefly, the s-con ducts carried proton energy back into it before flaring like burning magnesium. Then, suddenly, black and starlit space bled into the gap as the Ogygian resurfaced. Cento closed an arm around a bubble-metal I-beam as something pulled hard at him for a moment, released its hold, then pulled again.

Tidal forces, he surmised.

Weakened by the APW blast the pier twisted above him. He felt its wrenching scream through the metal he clutched, observed the beam itself twisting. Then that force tugged again, and the U-space nacelle, along with much of the pier above him, tore away from the ship. Cento observed its slow departure, then turned his attention to where he calculated their destination would be. The brown dwarf seemed a vast wooden sphere looming at them out of the dark; the Ogygian was already being dragged down towards it, already being torn apart by its tidal forces. Cento headed down towards the bridge. Now, to make sure, he would also carry through the contingency plan. It would be a pointless though satisfying exercise, for in a few hours Skellor, the ship and all detached debris, Cento and Ian Cormac, would constitute a very thin film on the dead sun below.

Somehow the barrier had remained: a shimmering silk meniscus between Mr Crane and everything real. Yet, strangely, by this separation he could view the world and his worlds and discern what was now and what was then. The surreal battle between a knight mounted on a giant crustacean and the ziggurat-headed droon was real and was now. Briefly, it reflected on the etched game board, before the vulture brought her players back to order with a sharp peck and a lengthy swallowing. Crane moved the piece of crystal and gazed up at the sea’s surface. It was fantastically bright up there, almost as bright as revelation. Inside his head he felt something turn and clunk into place with all the positivity of a ship going into a docking clamp. Tearing off the aviapt’s head had not been a particularly moral act, nor had Crane’s killing of Stalek been particularly nice, but for what they had done to him—and likely done to others—they deserved death. Also they had been outside the Polity, and Crane had been under instruction…

In some part of himself, Crane recognized the mealy-mouthed dissimulation of a coward. Though ordered through the Pelters’ control unit to kill those two, he had not needed to be quite so bloody. He reached down to move a blue acorn. A beak intervened and he instead moved the scent bottle. Taut excitement filled him, and imminence—that was the only way the various parts of his mind could see it. Something of all his parts was poised on the edge of the real, waiting to come into focus.

The sea’s surface drew no closer—he knew he was not ready for that. But some bright structure like a vast glassy plankton turned in electric depths and presented itself to another mass of the same. It keyed in, locked into place, took on the same spectral pulsation as all the rest. Mr Crane stared down at one brass hand. It was utterly real, and utterly right there and then. Folding in his thumb, he saw himself tearing people apart on Cheyne III. Those were Arian Pelter’s orders, and the man had been nested close in Crane’s mind, his control through a military aug all but absolute. How could the Golem have done otherwise?

Lies lies lies …

Crane folded in a finger, remembered killing policemen, then killing one of Arian’s allies. But one of those policemen had survived. Out of an impossible situation, Mr Crane had allowed someone to live. The antique binoculars he had taken in place of the life now replaced by the scent bottle he had just moved. Hadn’t he saved so many lives? But counting the deaths he soon ran out of fingers.

The little knight, mounted on a miniature sand hog, charged the lion’s tooth, and, prodding it with his lance, moved it to a new position. Two bright structures mated with a satisfying click and the gratifying alignment of the last turn on a Rubik’s cube.

What Crane had done… He could have done nothing else.

Crane could have done nothing else.

Rising, nemesis from the sea, Mr Crane was angry. He raged at a life denied him, howled inside at the Serban Kline they wanted him to be, was rabid because there was nothing inside or out to prevent him killing. But there was justification. The people on this island had done those horrific things to Semper. They had unmade a human being piece by piece, scream by scream, and left him to marine crucifixion for Crane to find. Oh, how they would pay.

The man on the shore—a bloody rag—gone, others the same. Crane walked slowly through silver moonlight, glints like pearl crabs at the corners of his eyes. Alston was at the centre of the island and Crane was told to go to him, to kill him, but also to kill any who stood in his way. No one had said how he should go to Alston. No one had said he should walk a straight course. Crane walked a spiral, killing as he went and leaving hellish art behind him, till coming to the final poetry of making Alston’s fortune utterly the man’s own.

We had no choice.

You could have shut down completely, abandoned any chance at sentience, not been so good a tool for them to employ. You put your survival above that of many many others.

We are unusual?

There was nothing now to prevent wholeness, only will and choice. Mr Crane could be complete in that moment or, with the horror of memory swamping him, could rest, cease to be. Choice: the machine was there, but yet to be powered up. Internally, he watched a tall brass man in a wide-brimmed hat throw across the final circuit breaker. The image, his ego, flipped a salute to him before being sucked into the machine. From that moment on, Crane was wholly and utterly himself.

‘Ah,’ said Vulture, stepping back a little. ‘I see you’re with us, but I wonder just what is with us.’

Mr Crane began picking up his toys and returning them to his pockets. The battle nearby was over, and here the battle was over too. He paused; he did not need these toys. But then again that did not mean he could not have them. As he contemplated this concept, his hands worked before him without conscious volition. While he was methodically attempting to stack the blue acorns, a flying lizard landed in the middle of the board, scattering both the acorns and other remaining pieces.

‘A message, I suspect,’ said Vulture.

Crane held out his palm and the lizard scuttled onto it. He raised the creature up to his face, listened to its chittering, and recognized the flashing in its eyes as a direct visual transference of code. Eventually he tossed the lizard into the air and watched it fly away. Then his hand snapped out, faster than any snake, and closed around Vulture’s neck.

‘I chose,’ said Mr Crane.

He released his hold. Vulture was unharmed.

Mr Crane stood, put on his hat and tilted it rakishly. He paused for a moment, examining the board before him, then swept up the remaining pieces and deposited them in his pocket.

‘I choose,’ he said, as he walked away.