Brass Man

3

The flare momentarily blacked out the virtual view from the bridge of the Jack Ketch. When that view returned, a stray rock half the size of the ship itself had disappeared.

‘I didn’t know you had imploder missiles aboard as well,’ Cormac commented, after placing his brandy glass down on the pedestal table beside his club chair.

‘No, you didn’t,’ said Jack unhelpfully.

The automaton sat in its usual chair a few paces away, thin-fingered hands flat on his thighs, immobile.

‘What other weaponry do you possess?’

‘Probably more than you can think of.’

‘APWs? Lasers?’

‘Yes and yes, though I’ll add that the former is just one variety of particle beam out of the twelve I possess; and that of the latter I possess the facility to lase light across the spectrum. I also possess masers and tasers, carousels containing missiles that can be tailored to specific purposes, from carrying surveying instrumentation to gigatonne CTDs.’

Cormac smiled to himself. Once you got a warship started on the subject of its armament, there was no stopping it. I am what I am, he thought.

‘Though the imploder missiles are a recent addition, they are not the most powerful weapons I carry. The larger CTDs obviously have a greater yield, but are messy and inelegant. I do carry singularity generators energized by the power surge of a fission warhead. Of course these must not be used unless in dire need—because of the one in two hundred million chance of thus generating a permanent black hole.’

As Jack went on to enumerate the various purposes to which he could tailor his missiles, Cormac gazed out at the scenery.

The giant research vessel Jerusalem was poised outside the asteroid field—too large to enter it without sustaining damage. Cormac had never really taken notice of the industry in the Polity directed towards acquiring and researching Jain artefacts, but now, seeing the Jerusalem, he gained some intimation of its extent, for this was the giant ship’s sum purpose. It was a sphere five kilometres in diameter, with a thick band around its equator containing everything from legions of robotic probes up to U-space tugs and grabships, like the one presently departing it. The sphere itself contained whole communities of research scientists, AI and human, all working under the aegis of Jerusalem itself—a sector-class AI some regarded as a demigod—and much of the work carried out inside its colossal structure was classified. Its AI, rather than being based around a crystal matrix, used etched-atom processors, which meant that those regarding it as a demigod might not be so far wrong, and furthermore it possessed the power of intercession, in any situation, second only to Earth Central itself.

Entering the asteroid belt, the grabship had closed its claw over one mountain of stone protruding from the asteroid and was now beginning to drag the mass out. Calling up the required views, Cormac observed a vast hold of the research vessel opening like a Titan’s mouth. With the asteroid on board, the ship was then to travel to Masada, whereupon those thousands of researchers inside it would begin their work. Not until they had wrung every last scrap of knowledge from the bridge pod, and then the Masadan system, and not until they rendered safe every Jain artefact, would that ship return to Polity space. The Jack Ketch hung over the location of the bridge pod, guarding against any further stray lumps of rock. Cormac hoped this would not be a lengthy task.

‘Jack,’ he interrupted, just as the AI was telling him about slow-burn CTDs that could melt their way down to a planet’s core, ‘How much longer until she’s uploaded?’

‘I am not actually uploading her, but a copy. I cannot give a precise period because the process is dependent on what I have to filter. This is not something we can hurry—I for one have no wish to end up going the way of Occam.’

That might sound like a philosophy, but in fact referred to the fact of the Occam Razor’s AI suiciding rather than allow Skellor to control it.

‘Rough estimate, then.’

‘Three hours.’

Cormac rubbed at his cheek and yawned. ‘Then I’m for bed. The moment she’s ready I want you to jump back to Elysium.’

‘You have always had EC’s authority,’ Jack noted.

‘You disapprove?’

‘Not of the carte blanche agents such as yourself have always possessed, but of allowing someone aboard me who contains active Jain technology inside them.’

‘Aphran—or Thorn and Mika?’

‘All of them.’

‘You surprise me.’

‘How would you feel about being the observer locked in a room with, for example, someone with a genetically proactive plague?’

‘I guess I wouldn’t be so happy.’

‘Me neither. I may be AI, but I do have feelings, you know.’

Cormac grinned—he was beginning to like this AI. ‘Well, Aphran has told us Skellor hunts dragons. I want Asselis Mika with me because she’s the nearest thing we have to an expert in both dragon and Jain technology. Perhaps she might be able to give us some lead on where those two remaining Dragon spheres went. And I want Thorn simply because he deserves to be here.’

‘As you will.’

After eight hours fiat out on his bed, Cormac returned to a bridge lit by the gloaming of underspace, and with two additions: a guillotine over to one side, to balance the gallows, and the illusory form of Aphran—the Separatist leader who had once employed Skellor and who had been killed by him. There was no time to interrogate the spectre, though, because within minutes the U-space grey was displaced by a close view of Elysium. Such questioning would have to wait for the next journey in the Jack Ketch, when it began its pursuit.

The nerve shunt in his neck and the paralytic she had injected through the probes should have prevented the Outlinker from feeling anything, or even moving, but he was writhing, fighting against the clamps that secured him to the table so that they creaked alarmingly, and his face was clenched in agony. It had to be the mycelium—it was bypassing the shunt, and maybe even his nervous system, so as to control his body directly. Mika hoped that in this process it had not restored his consciousness. But as she directed the four grasping claws once again into his torso—into a ribcage opened out like the wings of a macabre butterfly and the clamped-open gut cavity—he opened his eyes and glared at her. There seemed no other option but to do it quickly now, and never mind how brutal she must now be. The claws closed on the writhing mass clinging to his spine, and through the telefactor gloves she wore she initiated the secondary incisions. With brutal efficiency, the autodoc cut through muscle and bone from the lower end of the main incision down each of his thighs, sealing veins, capillaries and arteries as it went.

Usually operations conducted by a surgical robot were bloodless, but with something this major, bleeding was inevitable. Sucking heads hissed over exposed flesh, taking away blood, which rather than cleaning and reinjecting she was replacing with an artificial substitute. It seemed the safest course—his blood was probably loaded with Jain nanomachines. Now she directed incisions across the shoulders and down both his biceps, and also up into his neck. Into all of these secondary incisions she directed wide-focus laser scalpels rather than chainglass ones, as she had found that the mycelium healed straight mechanical cuts made into itself almost immediately. In his thigh she saw the clumped filaments shrivelling away and, despite the vacuum nozzle behind each of the laser scalpels, she smelt burning flesh.

‘Now, you bastard!’ she said, flicking the sweat on her forehead to one side and sending the instruction to the robot to retract its four claws. Servomotors whined and, with a wet tearing sound, the trunk of Jain filaments, wound around the plum-sized dark nodules it had been growing, began to come up. In his biceps, she saw the severed clumps pulling in towards his torso and disappearing at the end of the incision. Those in his thighs tore up with the main mass. This mycelium, a fibrous blue-grey mass, something like a tree branch, tore up and away, but no tree branch writhed like a hooked ragworm to escape. Following its program, the surgical robot swung aside, bowed and deposited the thing in a chainglass vessel reserved for this purpose, slamming the lid closed on it as a door is closed on a hornet ejected from a house. It then swung back to Apis.

Mika checked her readouts. All the life-support equipment was working at its maximum. She could keep Apis alive like this for many hours; but then she would need those hours to put him back together. Tiredly she went to work, cell and bone welders humming and hissing busily. When she finished, he would be complete and physically unscarred, but the remains of the Jain mycelium might still kill him, and if he remembered any of this, he might not be entirely sane.

Two metres down they hit gold, or rather brass.

The head was like something cracked from a brass statue of Apollo, only lines of division and of mechanical linkage showing that this head bore features that had once moved. Marlen reached down, attempting to pick the head up with one hand, but it was too heavy. He put his spade aside and grasped the object in both hands, holding it up to their captor, who took it in one hand, as if it weighed nothing, and inspected it. With a shudder, Marlen glimpsed movement in the grasping hand like something black writhing underneath the skin.

‘Case-hardened ceramal covered with a layer of zinc and copper alloy containing the superconductor net,’ the man said, then turned to the two diggers. ‘Keep digging. I want it all—every last piece.’ After a pause, he redirected his attention to the head, and Marlen, turning once again to take up his spade, briefly glimpsed two brass eyelids clicking open to reveal obsidian eyes.

‘What a pretty machine you are, Mr Crane. Aphran was so in awe of you.’

Placing the head on the ground, its gaze directed up at the sky, the man took his hand away and the eyes closed.

Soon Marlen and Inther uncovered a heavy ripped-open torso with one leg attached whose weight required both of them to haul it out of the excavation. Then came the other leg, and an arm. Continuing to dig, Marlen and Inther unearthed smaller components and fragments of memory crystal. The man was now getting impatient. Checking his scanner, he paced the entire area, then finally returned to them, obviously angry.

“There’s an arm missing,’ he snarled.

The two diggers gazed up at him dumbly. Then Marlen stooped, picked up another of the lumps of memory crystal, and placed it at the rim of the hole. The man now turned his attention to this, and abruptly smiled. ‘Find all of that.’ He turned and headed over to the laid-out pieces of android. Still digging, Marlen found that the latest command was not so harshly enforced, now their captor had other things to occupy him, so Marlen could keep a wary eye on what was occurring.

Their captor knelt by the juncture between separated leg and groin. He picked up the leg in one hand, then reached out and tilted the torso so that the exposed ceramal thighbone, still attached to the torso, was raised off the ground. He then slid the leg back over this bone until it was nearly back in position. He could not get it all the way on because of the torn metal, ripped optics and bent mechanical linkages at the break. Dropping the torso back to the ground, he then turned his attention to the arm, which he could do no more than push close to where it had been ripped away. Ball joints, protruding below the head, seated into the neck with audible clicks. Now, his expression beatific, the man pushed his hand inside the torn-open chest and closed his eyes. Immediately his skin seemed to turn grey, with a black insectile shifting underneath it. He jerked and, lying on the ground, the huge brass Golem jerked as well. In the gap between brass shoulder and arm, Marlen glimpsed glittery squirming movement before the arm drew up to the shoulder, sealing the gap.

‘Bring those other components,’ the man ordered.

Marlen scrambled out of the hole, gathered up the pile of twisted metal and brought it over. Dumping this on the ground beside the Golem, he observed swirling tentacular movement spreading from the man’s hand into the chest cavity. Marlen went back to pick up the pieces of crystal. As he returned with these, it was in time to see the man backing off, his hand still in the cavity, while the Golem stood up. Withdrawing his hand the man glanced down at the twisted scrap, snorted, then kicked it aside. Without speaking, he then directed Marlen to place the crystal fragments on a nearby rock. Given no further orders after this, Marlen stood watching while the man squatted and assembled the fragments like a Chinese puzzle.

‘There are more pieces to be found. Return to your digging.’

Before the instruction took full control of him, Marlen managed, ‘Who… what… are you?’

The man looked surprised at this resistance and somehow prevented the order from taking full effect, so that Marlen was able to remain where he was.

‘Me—just a man who has important work to do. It doesn’t matter that you know who I am, and soon enough the whole Polity will know my name. I’m Skellor. Now, best you get back to your digging, as your companion will soon be no great help to you, since I will be requiring his arm.’

Marlen turned and walked woodenly back to the hole, inwardly resisting all the way, knowing why it didn’t matter what he knew. Inther walked past him the other way, still drooling, one eye now red with blood. Marlen supposed Inther had been chosen because his stature more closely matched that of the Golem. Even while he shovelled earth, Marlen possessed freedom enough to turn his head and watch what happened to Inther. He did not, but he could not close his ears to the horrible sounds that ensued, and Skellor crooning, ‘Ah, Mr Crane, soon you will be better, so much better. I’ll perfect the work others left incomplete.’

The lander was a flat ellipse with a quarter segment cut out, where was substituted an ugly particle cannon and a pan-pipes missile launcher. Ascending on AG, the pilot made the mistake of correcting with HO attitude jets. Stalek sighed, pulled down his visor and checked the projection in its bottom right-hand corner, to be sure that all his hotsuit’s seals were locked down. He then took the remote control off his belt and pointed it ahead of him, sending his favourite pet digging for cover in the loose soil under the briars over there.

Inevitably, the flame from one of the ship’s attitude jets touched the ridge, and the incendiary briars there exploded into fire. Falco, standing to Stalek’s left, hurriedly slammed down his beaked visor as he had only just realized the possible danger.

The ship swung away and up, the particle cannon tracking the sheets of flame, then out in an arc from the fire itself looking for attackers. Stalek felt something thump against his shoulder and glanced down as a briar pod—much like a segmented cluster of Brazil nuts — landed on the ground with its segments opening out. He noted the pod’s blue-green hue.

‘Premature,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Falco.

‘Premature burn. The briar isn’t really ready, so the fire won’t spread.’

Falco nodded and flicked up his visor, once again demonstrating to Stalek the man’s stupidity. Stalek would have dispensed with him long ago had it not been for Falco’s ability to follow orders with admittedly no imagination but meticulous precision—exactly the sort of person required for some of the more repetitive mind-numbing tasks Stalek’s business required. Still watching the man, Stalek waited. The fire was dying, but the danger wasn’t past. Briar pods began thumping down all around, in a green hail. It took one of these breaking on Falco’s armoured shoulder to make the man realize he should not yet have opened his visor. Falco swore and jumped, slamming his visor down over his avian face again. Stalek sighed and returned his attention to the ship, as it came towards them.

Coding the frequency he had been sent into his comunit, Stalek said, ‘Any kind of naked flame down here is not really a smart idea. I suggest that if any correction of attitude is required, you use gravadjustment or air jets.’

There was no reply, but it was noticeable that the pilot did not use HO jets while landing the ship nearby, in the process crushing down masses of the tangled, snakish briars. Stalek smiled at the choice of landing site. He had not expected them to put the ship down there. With its hard, sharp leaves giving it both the appearance and the potential to hurt of green razor wire, it was never a good idea to get too close to the Huma incendiary briar. But obviously the crew did not know that. A section of curved hull then folded down and hinged open, making a ramp and walkway over to the clear area where Stalek and Falco waited.

Two heavily armed figures left the ship and came down the ramp. After scanning the area—though why, Stalek could not fathom, as they must have already done that from above—one of them spoke into the comunit integral to his helmet.

‘Clear. Bring it out.’

How very strange, thought Stalek. Perhaps a definition of ‘clear’ he had yet to learn.

A third member of the crew came down the ramp leading a coffin-sized cylinder floating on AG a metre off the ramp. The item. Stalek rubbed his hands together even though he could feel little through the insulated gloves.

‘Do you have payment?’ asked the heavy who had spoken before.

Stalek peered at the man. This was where things got a little problematic. He indicated a box by his own feet. ‘Half a million in etched sapphires, and two ten-kilotonne-yield CTDs. I’m afraid that will have to be it. I couldn’t lay my hands on any APWs at this short notice.’

The man grunted, obviously satisfied with that. Stalek wasn’t surprised. They were probably glad to get anything at all for this item it had taken them so much effort and such loss of life to acquire—this thing that had turned out to be useless to them.

The cylinder arrived with the third man. Stalek wandered over and peered inside as the top half section of it split and hinged open. The Golem Twenty-five lay there utterly motionless, catatonic—as it had been since talking to itself non-stop for two days, then apparently trying to smash its way out of its prison with its head. The Jovians had assumed that their EM pulse had wrecked its mind. Stalek knew better. Something odd must have happened to it at the programming stage and, as unlikely as it seemed, Cybercorp had produced a dud.

‘Let’s see the money,’ said the one who had brought the cylinder down the ramp.

A woman, Stalek saw, and attractive. Shame. He turned his attention to the box he had brought, waved a hand at it. ‘It’s all there.’ He pointedly did not look towards the ship, having just glimpsed the black shape hopping up onto the ramp and scuttling inside it.

The woman squatted down, turned the simple lock on the case and flipped back the lid. She gazed in puzzlement at what seemed to be a coil of ribbed oxygen pipe.

‘Joden? Joden!’

The screaming from inside the ship was abrupt and harsh—agonized. From the box, the pipe uncoiled, whip-fast, opening gleaming pincers at its end which it snapped closed on the woman’s throat. She gargled and thrashed, blood bubbling out of her punctured suit. Meanwhile, Stalek had calmly removed two small spheres from his suit pocket. He tossed them towards the two men as one of them brought his weapon to bear, while the other did not seem to know what to do: open fire or help the woman. The spheres shot forwards, turned briefly incandescent, punched through two environment suits. Stalek stepped back as pulse-gun fire slammed into the front of his own suit, but the laminated armour made nothing of the ionized gas hits, and an inlaid superconducting mesh took away the heat. The spheres did precisely what they were supposed to do: exploding and flinging needles of pure potassium through the two men’s bodies, the metal igniting and burning fiercely in contact with moisture.

Their suits, Stalek noted, were quite good quality, for while the men boiled and burned inside, the only sign was a jet of oily steam from each of the holes the spheres had made upon entry—that and the way the two thrashed about and screamed a lot. When it was finally over, Stalek looked pointedly at Falco, who was studying the pulse-gun scars on the front of his suit, ahem’d and pointed to the still floating cylinder. Falco walked over and closed it up, then, grabbing the towing handle, pulled it after his boss. Stalek paused once to look back. He would come out to check there was nothing more of value inside this ship before he sold it on to his contact up in Port Lock. When the fires started, later in the season, they would incinerate all other evidence—not that anyone would be looking. Shaking his head, Stalek felt a degree of bewilderment. How ever had such amateurs managed to steal a Golem Twenty-five from right outside Cybercorp?

The Sand Towers, the wind-carved buttes exposing their layers of coloured sands recounting the ages of Cull, extended as far as he could see to his left and right, and tens of kilometres beyond towards the plains. Raising his family monocular to his eyes, Anderson Endrik now inspected the Overcity of Golgoth, spread across its great steel platform high up on the Towers, then the lower city crouching in the foothills. The entire city was a product of metallier industry, and the centre of the closer, lower section bore the appearance of giant iron lichen holding the spheres and ellipses of its denizens’ metal houses. Sprawled all around it were long low steel mills and factories interspersed with chimneys belching smoke. Anderson had heard much about this place: that old technologies were being resurrected in pursuit of the dream of re-establishing the downed communication link with Earth, of interstellar travel, and of rejoining the human empire. Anderson raised his monocular to the sky to observe Ogygian—the ship that had brought his own ancestors here—a sphere connected by a narrow body to the triple nacelles of the U-space engines, glinting like green quicksilver in the turquoise firmament. Then he lowered his monocular to let it hang by its strap and, tapping his goad against the back of its sensory head, urged his sand hog mount into motion.

‘Are all the rumours true, or just bullshit?’ wondered Tergal.

Anderson glanced aside at his young companion.

Tergal was skinny and tall, his head topped by the wide-brimmed hat of a gully trader, with long dark hair spilling from under it down his back. He wore a leather jerkin, canvas trousers and sandals, and armed himself only with a punch axe and heavy crossbow. The boy’s sand hog, Stone, was also young, perhaps only the age of one human lifetime, for it still bore the red flush of youth and, as Anderson had noticed when the hog had first folded out its feeding head from underneath itself, it still possessed all its blunt white teeth. Seated in the saddle glued to the creature’s long teardrop-shaped carapace, Tergal was a metre lower than Anderson. The rough ride the young hog gave him also threw him continually from side to side.

Anderson’s own hog, Bonehead, was mature, and twice the bulk of Stone. The ears on its sensory head Anderson had trimmed back to stubs, and it was missing a few teeth. Its gait, however, up on its two powerful hind legs, was smooth. He remembered searching old records about why their mounts were so named. One reference to ‘hog’ had its meaning as something greedy, which certainly applied to Bonehead. When he discovered that hog also meant pig, he realized the true reason for the naming. When the creatures’ sensory and feeding heads were meshed, the composite head which resulted looked very much like that of a domestic pig portrayed in a very old picture. The carapace body, when viewed from the side, was also comparable, as was the pinkish coloration of sand hogs. Of course the similarity fell apart when these creatures rose up on their muscular hind limbs, or parted their composite heads on separate necks.

‘Ah, I think much truth can be weaned from the sand slide of rumour. Doubtless much old technology has been recovered or relearned—but surpassed?’ Anderson shook his head.

‘But they have advanced… you’ll grant that?’ The boy gestured to the city.

‘I’ll grant you that, though it could have been inferred before even seeing this place.’

‘How?’

Anderson eyed the youth. ‘Gully traders becoming wealthy by transporting coal and metal ores here?’ he suggested.

Tergal glanced at him. ‘I don’t know much about that. My mother was a trader by birth, but my stepfather is a minerallier. I know our mining was confined to shallow pits until the metalliers started wanting more coal and ores. My stepfather used to make a living from single-handedly mining gems. Now he employs hundreds of immigrants from Dalure, and even Rondure, and his mines extend right underneath the mountains. But does increased demand equate to advancement? It might well be just because their population has increased.’

Anderson grinned. ‘That’s one clue, but there are others.’ He reached into his belt pouch and took out a small cloth bag closed with a drawstring. Opening this, he shook out a handful of shell cases into his palm. ‘These tell us a lot. I found them scattered in a gully traders’ campsite, and I dug the metal slugs they propelled from the remains of a sleer. I’ve yet to see the weapon that uses them, but by their size I would guess the explosive is somewhat more efficient than my black powder.’ Anderson nodded to where he holstered his fusile muzzle-loader beside his saddle. ‘I’d guess they’re smokeless and that the weapon even has the facility for fast repetition of fire.’

‘What leads you to that assumption?’ Tergal asked archly.

‘They’re uniform, so probably not the product of individual skill. We’ve always known how repeating weapons function but just haven’t possessed the materials technology and industrial infrastructure to manufacture them—something like that takes time, effort and considerable organization to build. But having reached such a level of expertise, why not make the best weapons of that kind that you can?’

‘And?’Tergal asked.

Anderson weighed the shell cases, as if in judgement, then slipped them back into his bag and placed it in his belt pouch. ‘Impressive weapons, certainly mass-produced, but not a product of the technology our kind first arrived here with. Do you think that if they had surpassed the old technologies, the metalliers would still be producing something so primitive? Where are the pulse-guns and the beam weapons, then?’

‘Yes—I see.’ The boy shrugged.

‘Course, I could be talking complete bollocks,’ Anderson added.

Tergal muttered something foul and, causing static sparks to flare, whacked his goad against his mount’s sensory head, and it reared, nearly unseating him as it pulled ahead. Anderson watched the boy a moment longer, then turned his attention to the eye-palp Bonehead extruded from its upper porcine sensory head and turned to observe him disapprovingly. He shrugged and placed his fingers against his lips to signal his own silence, and Bonehead sucked the eye-palp back into its skull, looking forwards. Anderson decided he wouldn’t needle the boy further.

It had always been his intention to make this final leg of his journey to the Plains alone, but the youth, joining Anderson’s camp one night, seemed disinclined to go away. Anderson had yet to fathom the boy’s history, but certainly it contained theft and quite possibly murder. Anderson suspected the boy balanced on a cusp — attracted by the kudos of travelling with Anderson but undecided about whether or not to rob him. Anderson would let him make his choice, and let him suffer the consequences of the same. At least, while the boy decided, he was not harming anyone. But mostly Anderson was glad of the company and of a willing audience to his many enthusiasms.

The concrete road winding towards Golgoth, the City of Skulls (named so because of the similarity many of the houses bore to those items), soon reached an intersection in the foothills and thereafter became much wider. Surveying his surroundings, Anderson observed further signs of technological advance. In the distance, he saw electricity pylons, and supposed it was true the metalliers had repaired the old power station in Bravence. Hereabouts the sand was only prevented from turning into shifting desert by the white and yellow plates of what was called egg lichen, though why it was called that Anderson had no idea—eggs were something he had only seen under a microscope, and had nothing to do with lichen. However, here there were also wide expanses levelled into fields producing cereals and root vegetables, irrigation frames being mounted over the latter, and occasional sprawls of glasshouses, usually as an adjunct to the occasional lone metallier dwelling, which consisted of anodized sheet aluminium nailed over wooden frames.

Much closer to the city, they passed through a small village, and he was fascinated by some vehicles parked at the side of the road. Obviously these did not require sand hogs to pull them. He was tempted to stop and make an inspection, to find out what kind of engines were used—electric, combustion, steam turbine—as that would certainly give him a true idea of metallier advancement. But he guessed he would soon be seeing more of such vehicles—a supposition soon proved true when they finally forced him and Tergal off the road.

‘Tergal, I reckon I’ll stop for the night before entering the city.’ Anderson gestured to a roadhouse a short distance ahead. ‘Will you join me?’

‘I thought you were eager to see Golgoth?’ the boy asked.

‘Eager yes, but not terminally so. I’d like to have some idea of what we’ll be riding into—and such information we should be able to obtain here.’

‘Then I’ll join you,’ Tergal replied.

The roadhouse, though fashioned of gleaming lacquered alloys and sheets of glass, did have what were recognizable as hog corrals around the back, though they were much smaller than the parking area for powered vehicles between it and the road. Anderson urged his hog across the lichen-bound dunes directly towards the corrals, his hog’s divided rear feet pulling up tufts of the yellow and white lichen as it strode along. Tergal hesitated, then turned his own mount to follow. As they drew close, a metallier strolled out towards them. He was recognizable as such by his long snake-leather coat, facial tattoos and sand goggles, for metalliers did not possess nictitating membranes like real humans. Drawing his hog to a halt, Anderson immediately observed the weapon the man had resting across his shoulder. It was all blued metal, half the length of Anderson’s fusile, and bore a long rectangular protrusion from the side, which he guessed to be a magazine. This was what Anderson had come for.

‘Where would you like us to put our mounts?’ he asked.

‘Any corral will do,’ the man replied, gesturing with his weapon. ‘There’s carrion in the far shed, if you want to feed them. Fifteen pfennigs a night.’

‘Fifteen!’ Tergal exclaimed, as his hog settled down onto its four short forelegs.

‘Unfortunate, I know,’ the man said, ‘but at that I make little profit.’

‘And how much for a room in this place?’ Anderson asked, undoing his lap strap as Bonehead also settled onto its crawler limbs.

‘Ten—costs more for hogs because they’re rare around here now. I keep thinking of closing the corrals, but then another one like you comes along, and I don’t.’ The man eyed him, and Anderson supposed what attracted the curious look was his attire. He guessed that not many people in so advanced a society dressed in armour fashioned from chitin and black bone, but then, with the weapons they possessed, he supposed not many of them needed to.

‘You’re a Rondure Knight,’ the man said. ‘Are you on your trial?’

Anderson took up his pack from behind his saddle, stood up, and walked to the edge of his hog’s carapace, from where he dropped to the ground.

‘That I am,’ he replied.

Walking over to the nearest corral, he pulled the steel draw bolt and opened the gate. Bonehead, seeing the opportunity for food and sleep, required no urging and, still on its crawler limbs, slid past into the corral. Tergal led his own younger hog by hooking his goad under its carapace’s skirt. Anderson walked over to the feed shed, opened the door and stepped back to allow a swarm of warple bugs to scuttle for cover. Breathing only through his mouth, he could almost taste the stench. He reached in, grabbed a carapace rim, and dragged out the suppurating carcass of a rock crawler. Joining him, Tergal grabbed the other side, kicking the door closed behind him, and they heaved the carcass over the rail into the corral. Both hogs moved in, sensory heads swinging up from underneath their bodies, then their feeding heads also swung up to engage with an audible crunch below the first heads. The younger hog gave Anderson’s precedence, but there would be enough there for both of them.

‘What’s your name?’ Anderson asked, as they returned to the metallier.

The man held out his hand. ‘Laforge.’

Anderson shook his hand, replying, ‘I’m Anderson Endrik and my companion is Dound Tergal.’

Tergal gave a half-hearted wave, but showed no inclination to take the man’s hand.

‘Where do we go?’ Anderson asked the metallier.

‘I’ll show you.’ The man turned and led the way. ‘The refectory is open all the time, so you should be able to get a meal.’

‘Not at these damned prices,’ Tergal muttered as they followed.

They entered the roadhouse through metal doors inset with rough green glass filled with bubbles.

‘A room each?’ Laforge asked them.

‘One will do,’ Anderson replied, glancing at Tergal for confirmation before holding out the ten-pfennig note he had pulled from his belt pouch.

‘Tell me, where did you obtain that weapon?’ he asked, as Laforge pocketed the note.

The man turned, selecting a key rod from the bunch hanging on his belt as he led them to the nearest door.

‘In the city. Central manufacturing produces them, but every metallier shop carries a stock.’ He glanced round. ‘If you’re interested, I know the best place to go.’

‘I’m interested. I take it sand hogs are not usual transport in the city itself?’

‘Not really—but I’m going in tomorrow morning. My brother runs just the establishment you require on Second Level. You may find cheaper, but you won’t find better.’ He opened the door.

The room was a five-metre box with a single window set high up, and they walked in over the suction of a sand grid by the door. There was a carpet and four bunks. In an alcove to their right were a washbasin, a toilet, and even a roll of paper towelling. Anderson was surprised at the luxury—he had expected the price to pay for only the four protective walls.

Laforge detached a key rod and held it out to the knight. ‘This opens your door and turns on the water supply.’ He gestured to the alcove. ‘As I said, the refectory is open.’ He closed the door on his way out.

‘A little more than we expected,’ Anderson suggested.

‘I’ve been in worse places, I suppose,’ Tergal allowed.

He turned to Anderson. ‘I didn’t know you were coming here for weapons.’

‘How long have you travelled with me?’

‘Two days.’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me. Just as there’s a lot I don’t know about you.’

‘I know now you’re a Rondure Knight who is on his trial.’

‘But not what that trial is.’

Tergal waited.

Anderson went on, ‘I need the best weapons I can find, because I am heading to the Plains, where I intend to kill a dragon.’