Brass Man

5

Out of necessity, Mr Crane wore a protective suit. The blasts of searing gas from the many volcanic vents, as well as the spills of glowing magma across the hellish landscape, were bad enough and would eventually have melted his brass outer covering despite its inlaid s-con grid, but there was also the acidic atmosphere that might have etched away that covering first. Skellor also wore a suit, but one he had extruded from inside himself. As the two of them trudged towards the wedge-shaped survey ship perched on the glowing ridge ahead, Skellor wondered if he was foolishly wasting time with this side jaunt—and if that sense of aesthetic correctness might prove his downfall.

Skellor knew that though he possessed huge abilities to interact with and alter his environment, this was simply like possessing hands and eyes—for being able to use them did not necessarily mean you knew precisely how they operated. And though he could acquire information, knowledge, skills, he did not possess enough of them to take overt actions while ensuring sufficient personal safety. Some proof of this was how Cormac’s simple ruse had lured him to Elysium, to within range of the sun mirrors. Then, Skellor’s lack of knowledge and his subsequent actions, which he equated to those of an impulsive adolescent, had nearly been fatal to him. Admittedly, it would have been difficult for him to know about Cormac’s previous dealings with Dreyden, the erstwhile ruler of Elysium, but thus putting himself within range of weapons capable of obliterating him had been stupid. He remembered, almost with a wince, the pain he had suffered while his Jain substructure in the Occam Razor burned. Someone would pay for that.

Drawing closer to the ship, Skellor saw two people clad in reflective hotsuits heading down towards the plain of ash. It amused him that there were four people here searching for Jain artefacts. They would be very surprised, and very chagrined, when living Jain technology found them. Skellor pondered that irony.

Though that was not his purpose here, he needed information about what he carried inside him—the Jain technology that was mutating in a way somehow hidden from him—and that information was not something he could acquire from the Polity. However, one brief exchange between Cormac and Dragon—absorbed as part of his memory from recordings inside the Occam Razor—had told him where to obtain such information. Dragon knew about Jain technology, and somewhere — probably on the perimeter of human space—two Dragon spheres still lurked. But how to find them? As he and Crane began to climb the slope, Skellor reviewed what he thus far knew about Dragon.

The creature in its initial form of four conjoined spheres had been a probe, a data-gatherer sent by the Makers—a race of energy-based life forms located out in one of the Magellanic clouds. But it malfunctioned and started interacting with humanity, setting itself up as some sort of demigod on the planet Aster Colora. Upon delivering some obscure judgement, it had then apparently destroyed itself. But, as far as Skellor could work out, it had actually separated itself into four entities to surround and attack the Maker ship sent to retrieve or destroy it. The drastic events at Samarkand had then proceeded from there: one sphere destroyed by Cormac in the process. Events at Masada had since accounted for another sphere. From both farragos, Skellor could see that these entities liked to meddle in human affairs. Dragon now even had its own corporation operating in the Polity, and its own networks of humans coming under its control via the Dracocorp biotech augs. How these networks connected back to their controlling Dragon spheres was the only firm lead he had and, with this small piece of business out of the way, would be the one for him to pursue. But now… now it was time to look inside the survey vessel.

There was no special code to operate the outside door, just a simple inset handle easy to operate for someone in a hotsuit. Skellor had already observed the carrier shell in orbit above, and with an earlier probe he had discovered that neither the shell nor this survey vessel it had transported here were run by AI; therefore such a simple door mechanism confirmed for him that both shell and vessel were old and privately owned. He pulled the handle up and, as the door swung open, he waved Crane ahead of him. The Golem almost had to crouch to fit himself inside the airlock. Skellor followed, pushing up close to Crane and pulling the outer door closed. In a minute, the lock had filled with cooled air and the safeties preventing him opening the inner door cut out. Crane was the first to duck inside.

‘What have you forgotten now?’ asked someone, from further inside the ship.

Crane stood with his head bowed so as not to bang it against the ceiling. Skellor looked around. Here was the initial decontamination and rough-cleaning area, and there were no artefacts in the isolation tank. But, then, this four-man research team had not been here very long—Skellor had followed them out only a day after their departure. This team, he had learnt, consisted of three humans and one Golem. A woman, easily identifiable as not being the Golem, ducked through into the cabin, and froze.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ she managed.

‘Have you found anything yet?’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Unforgivable rudeness,’ said Skellor, placing his hand against the control panel for the airlock. From the Jain substructure inside him, he sent filaments searching, connecting and overriding the safety system. He pointed to the open airlock. ‘Mr Crane, put her in there.’

The woman had time only to let out a yelp and duck back a little way before Crane’s hand closed on her shoulder. She struggled and began screaming, and just then one of the men ducked through from the other direction, holding level a small gas-system pulse-gun.

‘Tell that thing to put her down,’ he demanded.

Skellor just turned and walked towards the man. Three shots slammed into his chest, opening smoking holes and flinging pieces of his Jain carapace across the deck. Reaching the man, he slapped the weapon away, grabbed him by the jacket, and almost negligently tossed him towards Crane, who caught hold of him in his other big hand.

‘Well, our friend must be one of the other two, so let’s go back outside,’ said Skellor.

The woman carried on screaming and fighting; the man tried reasoning, but he too soon started to scream once the outer lock was open. Skellor was surprised at the tenacity with which a person could hang on to life. Even with smoke pouring from their clothing, their skin melting and slewing away and contrails of flame whipping up and about their bodies, the two still tried to fight their way past Crane and back into the ship, which was filling with the same searing acidic air anyway.

‘Hey ho,’ said Skellor, as the two finally died and the heat began to blacken and contort them into ebony foetuses. ‘Let’s go find the others.’

‘“Mission objective achieved” is all I’m getting,’ said Angelina, her fingers pressed against the bean-shaped aug behind her right ear.

‘What about visual? Aural?’ John Stanton asked.

‘Nothing.’ Angelina shook her head. ‘It won’t tell me anything more. It’s almost as if it’s shut down. We know where it will be anyway, so no problem there.’ Now turning to face Semper and Stanton, she said, ‘I’ll want you first to check that Stalek and that idiot Falco are both dead.’ And with that she waved the two men ahead of her.

Stanton closed his mouth on any further comments and tried to restrain his cynicism about this whole little outing. He drew his heavy pulse-gun from its insulated holster in his hotsuit. From his belt he detached a small adhesive mine and held it in his left hand. He was just as unenamoured with the idea of using a subverted Golem as were many others in the Pelters’ organization. Facing forwards, he and Semper now advanced.

Stalek had built his house on the equatorial belt of Huma, so it necessarily possessed a ceramic shell and thick, heavily insulated walls. At present that insulation only served the purpose of maintaining a comfortable internal temperature against the constant fifty degrees outside, since the resinous incendiary briar that constituted most of the surrounding jungle had yet to achieve ripeness. In the distance, Stanton noted a column of smoke from where one patch of briar had reached that point in its growth where the sparks from its exploding seedpods ignited it. It was early, though. Later in the season, this entire continent would become an inferno: the briars burning down to provide plenteous ash in which the seeds could lie ready to germinate in the ensuing sooty rainstorms.

Semper studied the door’s palm lock, then let out a bark of laughter. He took a crowbar from his belt, jammed it under the lock, and levered the plate and attached console from the wall.

‘Is that a good idea?’ Stanton asked.

‘It’s a dummy,’ Semper explained. ‘Understandable really: he has to be able to get in and out wearing a hotsuit, so he can’t use something that operates by his palm print and DNA coding. Merely a simple input code.’

Taking a small console from his belt he unwound two optic cables terminating in interface clamps, which he now closed on two optic cables trailing from the back of the lock and into the wall. Then he simply waited while the device he still held did the job of safe-breaker for him. The seals on the circular door eventually whoomphed, and it hinged outwards to reveal an airlock and an inner door. Semper stared inside for a long moment, before turning to Stanton.

‘Now this I don’t like,’ he said. He stooped and picked up one of the many pieces of briar charcoal that were scattered on the ground, then tossed it into the lock. The thing that immediately dropped from the ceiling onto the charcoal was a wolf spider half a metre long—only it was a spider with metal bracings and hydraulic pistons augmenting its legs, and a more complicated arrangement of gleaming motors augmenting its obsidian fangs.

‘Jesus!’ Semper bellowed.

Stanton’s pulse-gun sputtered white light, hitting the creature mid-air as it leapt out at them. It slammed back against the jamb, hit the ground and, smoking, made to leap again at Semper. Angelina drew her own weapon and fired, complementing the shots Stanton was again putting into the creature. Twice more it leapt and their shots slammed it back. It only gave up when its organic body was reduced to a charcoal remnant inside its cyber-bracing skeleton.

‘Okay, Semper, the door,’ ordered Angelina.

Stanton kept his weapon pointed at the cyborg spider as it slowly curled up its legs like a fist. Semper took rather longer over the true palm lock operating the second door, but soon they were stepping into the brightness of Stalek’s home.

‘Stanton, find his house system and neutralize it,’ Angelina instructed, herself making no move to go further into this strange home.

The big man moved on, rounding furniture seemingly fashioned from the carapaces of huge crustaceans, while keeping an eye on the large plants contained in pots scattered throughout the room—plants whose beautifully coloured giant daffodil heads turned to track his progress. Reaching the further wall, he studied something set into it that looked more like a work of weird art than any technology, then stepped back raising his weapon and blasted it, his shots punching molten holes through the gleaming metalwork and oddly shaped touch panels and screens. The bright lights flickered briefly as they dropped from the control of a house AI to some backup safety system. Turning, Stanton fired twice at a plant lowering its lime-green and purple striped head towards him, severing its stalk. As the head dropped to the ground, it protruded a red tongue coated with small metal hooks.

‘About as safe as we’re gonna get,’ he observed.

Angelina pointed to a wooden door to Stanton’s right. ‘We go there—up to the attic. That’s where Stalek did his work.’

She followed, giving the plants a wide berth but staying well back so he and Semper would encounter first anything nasty, Stanton noted, as he operated the simple latch and opened the door. The stairs winding up into the attic were lit by biolights—yet another sign of Stalek’s attraction towards exotic technologies. Stanton eyed the spidery creatures with their glowing sugar-bag bodies, then glanced back at Angelina.

‘Why the hit on him?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Seems to me he was providing you with some useful toys.’

‘Not really your concern,’ Angelina replied. ‘But he was becoming increasingly unstable, and some of his work was of questionable… quality.’

‘So you have this lunatic subvert a Golem Twenty-five android for you?’

‘Just get up the stairs, mercenary,’ Angelina spat.

Stanton nodded to himself and began to climb, thinking how Angelina and her brother Arian were not the best people to make judgements on the stability of others. However, Stanton was not about to push his luck too far—the money of these terrorist rich kids was still good.

From the topmost landing, four wooden doors led off into different rooms, but Angelina, coming up closer behind Semper and Stanton, pointed to the one directly ahead. ‘The rest also contain various workshops, but he uses that one for any final assembly.’

Adhesive mine still to hand, Stanton nodded to Semper, who shoved open the door in front of him. Stanton stepped into the room and then slid to one side, crouching down, pulse-gun aimed and adhesive mine held palm outwards in readiness. Semper did the same, moving to the other side of the door. Stanton noted that the man was just as trusting as himself: as well as brandishing a pulse-gun, he held a small EM grenade.

No action. Stanton slowly stood upright and surveyed the room.

Stalek’s and Falco’s bodies were not visible, but Stanton tracked the trails of blood over to the Cleanviro booth, and guessed where they might be.

‘Find the fucking control module,’ said Angelina, obviously shaken by what she was seeing.

Stanton left Semper to go over to where wrecked computers and other equipment had been stacked in a corner of the room. Himself, he did not intend to turn his back on the room’s other occupant. The Golem had pulled a chair up in front of a table. It wore a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Before it on the table, several objects were laid out as if it was involved in some intricate game of chess with an unseen opponent. Those objects consisted of various tools and pieces of hardware, a small rubber dog and two other gruesome items. While Stanton watched, the Golem reached out one brass hand, clad in a blood-crusted fingerless woollen glove, and carefully turned the head of the aviapt so that it faced Stalek’s head. It then looked up and gazed at Stanton with midnight eyes.

‘Found it.’ Semper came over and handed a small console to Angelina.

The woman’s hand was shaking, Stanton noted, as she took the console and detached from it the small black pebble of a control module. She closed her eyes for a second, concentrating, then slipped the module into one of her belt pouches.

‘Stand up… Mr Crane,’ she said finally.

The Golem stood and stepped aside, as if ready to come around the table. Stanton took a step back. Jesus, the thing was big! Standing there, it seemed to fill the entire room. Stanton estimated it to be at least two and a half metres tall.

‘Hold it there!’ Angelina yelled.

The Golem froze.

‘You will follow us, doing no more than I instruct,’ she said, with enforced calm in her voice. She turned to Stanton. ‘Put that mine of yours on its chest, over its brain case.’

Stanton was not so sure he wanted to get that close, but he obeyed. As he stepped in, the Golem abruptly reached up and undid the top buttons on its coat, exposing its brassy chest. Stanton placed the mine carefully, hoping that hand movement had been at Angelina’s behest. The Golem buttoned up its coat again.

‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said.

The Golem reached down and closed its hand over one of the severed heads.

‘Leave that!’

The hand closed and the head imploded with a dull thud, spewing bloody gobbets of brain across the table-top.

‘Follow!’

As Angelina turned away, Stanton saw the Golem’s hand snap out and take up the small rubber dog, which it slipped quickly into its pocket. He made no comment on this, nor when the Golem turned its face towards him and half closed one eye in what might have been a wink. With Semper at his side, he just followed the killing machine out, glad that the thing was walking at Angelina’s back rather than his own.

‘A message in a bottle would be the nearest analogy.’

Cormac chewed over the words as they crossed the now empty chamber to the Flint runcible. Before reaching the dais, he halted and glanced round at his companions. Gant stood beside Mika, as if ready to prevent her escape. Perhaps that was because it had taken so long to get her moving. The result of this delay was now stacked on a gravsled that Thorn guided by a remote-control device: the woman’s luggage.

The Flint AI had already emptied the place, and Cormac knew that it was training just about every detector available on his companions. It had shut down all computer access other than the voice link to itself, and there were no robots present—nothing that Jain technology could subvert.

‘But there’s no record of the Vulture having landed there?’ he suggested.

‘No record of that ship’s presence, true,’ replied the Flint AI. ‘But three ships did land that could easily have been the Vulture. Also, Viridian did detect a U-space signature unrelated to any ships that landed in the designated areas. The most likely explanation is that Skellor has installed chameleonware on the Vulture, and brought it down somewhere else.’

‘And the essence of the message?’

‘Vulture is managing to retain some independence by shifting herself into a memory sector not occupied by a Jain thrall program. Each time she does this and initiates some independent action, the program occupies that sector, forcing Vulture to move on. Obviously there is a limit to how many times she can do this. She also detailed the events on the asteroid—which we had already surmised.’

‘Is there anything to suggest where Skellor is going?’

‘All she knew was that he went to Viridian to obtain a “pathetic metalskin” to “complete”. These are Vulture’s words, though I gather the information was obtained by translating Jain code bleeding directly from Skellor’s nonverbal thought processes.’

Cormac was surprised. He had expected the pursuit to be a ship-borne one rather than one through the Polity runcible network, because if it was true that Skellor was after the Dragon spheres, he’d more likely find them on the Polity border or beyond.

‘You can get hold of metalskins anywhere in the Polity,’ said Gant.

‘Viridian seems an unlikely place to go looking for one,’ Thorn added.

Cormac looked at Mika, waiting for her opinion. She appeared ill to him, but perhaps that was imagination after all that she had told him.

In measured tones she said, ‘Viridian is where we encountered the Maker. It is also where you killed Arian Pelter. There was a metalskin Golem there with Pelter — that brass killer of his called Mr Crane.’

‘That’s true,’ said Thorn, ‘but Cento and Aiden seriously fucked up that one.’

Cormac glanced at him. ‘You’re right, they tore it apart and then shattered its mind. There should be nothing there for Skellor. However…’ He turned and looked towards the runcible. ‘Flint, I need you to reset to Viridian. I have to go there to find out what this is all about.’

‘Unfortunately I cannot do this until after your companions have departed. They must go to Elysium, where precautions have been taken, and then on to the Jack Ketch.’

It made sense: Mika or Thorn could rush at the interface, once it was reset, and end up on a world where no precautions had yet been made against Jain-tech subversion. Earth Central was now taking precautions over anyone who had merely come in contact with that tech, but those two, who definitely carried it inside them, the AI was treating like possible plague carriers.

‘Okay.’ Cormac turned to his companions. ‘Mika, once you’re on the Jack Ketch, get aboard what you require—it can be sent by robotic craft from the Jerusalem. Make sure you get everything, as we’ll likely be in for a long haul afterwards, without further physical contact with any Polity worlds.’

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘The Jerusalem?’

‘It’s there at Elysium, grabbing anything Jain-related—I’ll explain later.’ He turned to Thorn, who also, he thought, looked unwell. ‘Thorn, no fuck-ups during transit, as I’ll bet that any breach of the precautions will result in atomic sterilization.’

Thorn nodded.

‘Flint, is there any restriction on trooper Gant?’

‘None that I am aware of. Like yourself he has been scanned and found to contain nothing… anomalous.’

‘Okay. Gant, you’ll come with me.’

Cormac stepped to one side and waved the others ahead of him. Gant moved to his side and watched them go. Mika glanced round, still looking thoughtful, then stepped up onto the dais and approached the shimmer of the Skaidon warp contained between the bull’s horns of the runcible. She stepped through it and was gone. Thorn then guided the gravsled ahead of him, causing it to rise higher and positioning it centrally to the warp. Before sending it through, he gave Gant a meaningful look.

‘I’ll get Mika to memplant me on the Jack Ketch, but I don’t suppose we’ll be celebrating in Elysium,’ he said.

‘If she thinks it advisable,’ Gant replied woodenly. ‘But it might be better to wait until your mycelium is removed.’

Thorn nodded, and himself stepped through.

After a pause Cormac asked the runcible AI, ‘Are you reset?’

‘Destination Viridian now open,’ it replied.

Stepping onto the dais, Cormac asked Gant, ‘What was all that about?’

They approached the shimmering wall of energy, its light playfully batting their shadows about behind them.

‘Feeling his mortality,’ Gant replied.

‘That’s a first.’ Cormac stepped through.

The ash was five hundred metres thick in places, accumulated on this volcanically active planet’s single small tectonic plate, which slid around its surface like an ancient stone ship. There were no artefacts preserved in the ash, nor in the underlying stone, rather the artefact was the cause of both, requiring nothing to preserve it even here. Having resilience greater than any other material on the planet, it had neither melted nor broken, and the stone had accreted around it and the ash built up on top of it over the aeons.

Cento considered how, for many years, researchers had come to study what they considered a natural phenomenon: a large layer of thermocrystal carbon within this small tectonic plate. Only recently had a scientist noted that the dense structure of this substance, which was similar to diamond, also bore a molecular resemblance to memory crystal. The woman, Shayden, then tried an optic interface, and was astounded by the reams of code feeding back. Some of it looked like genetic data, but most of it was scrambled and as yet indecipherable. Polity AIs were now studying the download from the fragment of crystal Shayden had used, in the hope of determining whether it was memory storage of the Jain or perhaps of some other ancient race. Cento was here for the more prosaic purpose of ensuring that Shayden, who now waited back at her ship with her research assistant Hourne, had not falsified her results.

‘We should see the layer further down,’ said Ulriss.

Cento turned away from peering over the edge of the plate, and glanced to where Ulriss indicated. The dip, further down, would indeed bring them closer to the layer of thermocrystal carbon, just as it would bring them closer to the river of magma boiling through the crevasse beside them.

‘Then let’s hurry,’ he said, checking the timepiece set in the wrist of his suit, not because he needed to check the time but because he wanted Ulriss to remain aware of how little of it they had left.

‘We should get some out-gassing before it blows.’ Ulriss gestured to the hellish plain beyond the river of molten rock, where a perfectly curved cliff, almost like a hydroelectric dam, occasionally became visible through the pall of smoke. This was just one edge of a massive caldera which, every five hours for the last twenty years, had blown out a few million tonnes of rock—molten and solid—and ash, and a cornucopia of poison gases to contribute to the volatile and lethal atmosphere.

‘We will be gone before then, whether I obtain a sample or not,’ Cento replied.

They trudged on down the slope, eventually reaching the position indicated. Cento unshouldered his bolt gun and looked around. Noting an area clear of ash, he walked over, pressed the device down and triggered it, firing a fixing bolt into stone. Discarding the bolt gun, he then unreeled, by its end-ring, the monofilament line from the abseil motor on his belt. Stooping to click the ring into place on the bolt, he heard Ulriss begin yelling over com.

‘What! No! Stop! No!’

Cento stood and whirled to see the poor man suspended off the ground, held there by his biceps in the grip of a hugely tall humanoid, who was walking him back to the crevasse edge. Cento reached down to detach the ring, but suddenly became aware of another humanoid. This one was standing beside him, clad head to foot in some sort of biotech suit. How he had not detected the approach of this one, Cento could only put down to the use of sophisticated chameleonware. In less than a second he had assessed the situation: the likely source of the tech meant these two must be somehow connected with events on the planets Cheyne III and Masada, and therefore with how things would now proceed. Ignoring the smaller individual and leaving the ring attached, he accelerated towards the big one, who was now holding Ulriss out over the white-hot river. That the larger humanoid intended to drop the man, Cento had no doubt. The abseil motor screaming as it wound out monofilament, Cento leapt, just as the figure did drop Ulriss. He should have been able to grab him a couple of metres down from the edge… Before he even went over a big hand slammed into his chest and stopped him dead. The big humanoid… Golem… To move that fast…

‘Oh God! No! Nooo!’

Cento stabbed his hand towards the big Golem’s chest just as he heard Ulriss’s gasp of shock as he hit the magma. There would still be time—the man’s hotsuit would take a minute to give out. But the second hand clamped around Cento’s wrist. The big Golem pulled and turned, easily spinning Cento over and slamming him down on his back. The monofilament was now caught up under Cento’s armpit and biting through his suit. Cento tried to turn as the other Golem wrenched him to his feet and the filament cut deeper. He felt the arm disconnect—sheared clean away at the shoulder — then a backhanded blow deposited him at the edge.

‘No! Oh fuck nooo!’

Cento rolled over in time to see Ulriss fighting to stay on the surface of the magma, his suit splitting and beginning to belch flame. His final scream truncated as his suit blew away and he burned incandescently. Something black and skeletal skittered like a spider on a hot plate. Briefly, a cloud of black oily smoke occluded the view and when it cleared only the silvery remains of the man’s hotsuit floated on the magma.

‘Not fast enough, Cento.’ It was the one in the bio tech suit who spoke.

Cento rolled as he came upright, so the monofilament was no longer twined around his chest. Perhaps he could pull it across the big Golem’s legs… He glanced at the speaker. ‘Who are you, and what do you want here?’

‘Your arm.’ The man pointed to the severed limb.

‘Why should you want my arm?’ said Cento as he moved sideways, dragging the filament across with him.

‘Because it’s his.’

His?

Cento gazed back at the big Golem, noting that his arms were not evenly matched. His own severed arm, lying on the ground still wearing the sleeve of his suit, was a brass-coated metalskin limb—both a replacement and a trophy from a battle fought years ago on a planet called Viridian.

Mr Crane?

How could this be Mr Crane? Cento clearly remembered their fight. Crane nearly destroyed him once, and it had needed both himself and his companion Golem Aiden to finish the monster. They tore him apart, destroyed his crystal matrix mind. Yet now the same Golem was back, and it seemed much stronger and faster than before. That made no sense.

Abruptly Cento leapt to one side intending to pull the monofilament across Crane’s legs, but the big Golem leaped nimbly and accelerated. Cento braced himself, but Crane outweighed him three to one, and easily knocked him back over the edge. Scrabbling for grip with his remaining three limbs, Cento slid down a slope angled thirty degrees to the vertical. Stone just broke away from his grasp, but when the abseil motor started whining, he managed to reach down and initiate its brake. The line jerked him to a halt only a metre above the magma.

‘That was close.’

Cento looked up and saw both of them gazing down at him.

‘I wonder what happens if I do this?’

Cento fell, hit the slope and slid further down, jamming his hand deep into a crevice to halt that slide. Monofilament fell about him like spindrift. With the spectrum of senses he possessed, he did not need to look down to know that he was up to his thighs in magma. His hotsuit gave out as quickly as Ulriss’s, fire and smoke gusting around him as syntheskin and the other combustible components of his legs burnt away. Now glancing down he saw metallic traces mirroring the surface of the molten rock. When the magma flow finally pulled his lower legs away, it was something of a relief, as now it no longer threatened to drag him down. Glancing up again, he saw that this respite would not last. With slow but inexorable care, Mr Crane was climbing down towards him.

Cento did not highly rate his chances now against the huge Golem. He glanced from side to side hoping to see something, anything that might enable him to survive. To his right, just above where the crystal layer slanted down into the magma, was the open end of a lava tube, just under a metre wide. Maybe he could swing himself in there? Even though he was aware that these tubes usually extended no more than a few metres—bubbles of gas in the cooling magma rather than a flow of it having formed them—this seemed his only option. Perhaps ensconced in such a place he could even defend himself.

On his remaining arm he levered up his now reduced body weight. Glancing down he saw that his legs had separated at the knee joint and that only his bare hip bones protruded from the remains of his suit. The magma had melted the components in his knees, but not the ceramal of his bones. Looking up and seeing that Crane was now only a couple of metres above him, he began to swing himself from side to side to get up enough momentum. He released just as a boot slammed down towards his wrist.

He hit the edge of the lava tube, groped inside it, his hip bones scrabbling away below him like a dwarf’s legs; then he was inside and turning himself round—the tube, as expected, being only a metre deep. Shortly, Mr Crane’s head appeared upside-down in the tube mouth, peering in through the visor of his hotsuit. Cento finally admitted to himself that he was dead: there was no escape. The big Golem, with his full complement of limbs and obviously superior strength, would just reach inside and drag him out, probably to send him after Ulriss. Sure enough, the big hand now groped inside like a fat spider, slapped away Cento’s defending hand, and closed over his face. There came a long pause, then the hand released him.

What now?

It wasn’t possible to read the expression on that brass face. Mr Crane suddenly reached down to the bottom of the lava tube, to the layer of crystal that formed its floor. He groped to the edge, where the crystal was jagged, and snapped a piece off, which he brought up and held before his visor for inspection. He then closed his hand around it, holding out only one long forefinger, which he brought back to his visor. He placed it vertical to his mouth: Shush now, be quiet.

Mr Crane hauled himself out of view.

While the metallier licked his lips and weighed yellow jade, Tergal studied the display of weapons in the cracked glass case and speculated on what Anderson’s reaction might be to learning how he had obtained that precious stone. He realized the knight did not trust him, had been keeping a close eye on him. And well he might. Though the attraction of the knight was that he was everything Tergal wanted to be, as soon as that attraction waned, Tergal would rob him and move on. It was what he did—he was scum.

Tergal had not told Anderson the entire truth. The minerallier Fround had been a hard man yet an honourable one, and Tergal’s mother, after birthing the bastard Tergal so young, had been considered spoiled goods, so Fround’s offer for her had been more than generous. He had paid for her in the yellow jade, of which only he knew the location. In the months that followed, Tergal’s mother, though not loving the man, had come to respect him—and, Tergal knew, would come eventually to that other state too. Tergal now understood that his dislike of Fround had been rooted in jealousy—in having to share the mother who had once been all his own—and that his subsequent behaviour had been contemptible.

Fround’s attempts at gaining the boy’s friendship had only increased his dislike. Those attempts had included the free use of Stone, one of Fround’s three sand hogs; a generosity in money and clothing; and finally sharing the knowledge of the location of the precious jade. In his jealousy, Tergal had only construed that the man had been trying to buy him. Now he recognized Fround’s bewilderment at such a reaction: the man had been according Tergal equal status when he might so easily have rejected him. He had only been trying to act like a good father.

Tergal sighed—too late now to put things right. He truly regretted stealing both jade and hog, yet not his departure. In the years that had passed since, thieving or exchanging some of the jade or even working his way across many lands, he had experienced much more than would a parochial minerallier, and now was actually travelling with a Rondure Knight—the kind of man he had once thought only the inflated province of history and myth.

‘Getting more frequent now,’ the metallier said.

Tergal turned to him. ‘What?’

‘The quakes—getting one just about every twenty days.’

Tergal nodded, then looked pointedly at the jade. He wasn’t going to get carelessly chatty with someone who was undoubtedly preparing to sting him.

‘I can give you a thousand pfennigs,’ said the minerallier eventually, as he began racking his weights.

Tergal turned from the case. ‘There’s seventeen standard ounces of jade there, and the usual market price is between eighty and a hundred pfennigs an ounce. At the lowest rate, that’s thirteen hundred and sixty.’

The minerallier shrugged. ‘You would deny me any profit at all?’

‘I would deny no man profit, only limit the extent of it.’ Tergal stabbed a finger down at the glass case. ‘One thousand one hundred, and this, and we have a deal.’

The minerallier came out from behind his counter, and walked over to stand beside Tergal. He peered down at the weapon indicated.

‘That is worth two hundred and fifty alone, and you will require ammunition. I can let you have two spare clips, a hundred rounds, and nine hundred pfennigs.’

‘You’ll wait until jade is a hundred pfennigs an ounce,’ Tergal observed.

The man shook his head. ‘There you are wrong. Observe the grip. I obtain these from Central Manufacturing, then make such fine additions. I would use the jade for the same.’

The lapis lazuli grip had been what had first attracted Tergal’s attention. He might find a better deal elsewhere, but not this particular handgun.

‘Make that a hundred and fifty rounds and you have your deal.’

‘Very well,’ said the minerallier, reaching into his pocket to take out a roll of money. Quickly he counted out the notes and handed them over. Tergal counted them again and slipped them into his own pocket, noting just how small a proportion they were of the man’s entire roll. From under the case, the metallier removed three heavy paper boxes of ammunition, which he placed on a table nearby. From the case he removed the gun itself and two clips. He handed them to Tergal.

‘Are you with the knight?’ he asked.

‘I am.’

The man reached over to where some leather items hung in a jumble behind the display case. Sorting through, he eventually found a plain belt and holster.

‘How much?’ Tergal asked.

‘Gratis,’ said the man. ‘If you’re with him,’ he gestured to the sunlit street, ‘you’ll need to get to your weapon fast when he takes on his next commission.’

‘You think?’ Tergal was confused. The roll of money had certainly attracted his attention, and now this unexpected generosity had defused his growing speculation about how he might get his hands on the rest of that roll.

‘Oh yes, not much call for them round here now, with most people carrying weapons like this.’ The man slapped a hand against the weapon holstered at his own hip—perhaps reading some of Tergal’s intention. ‘But elsewhere the work of a knight usually involves sleers and apeks, when it doesn’t concern the bounties set on human killers and thieves.’

Over the last few days, Tergal had not even stopped to consider that. To him Anderson had been just a figure out of a story, and what with coming into Golgoth and the talk of dragons, that feeling had only increased. But, of course, Anderson must have some way of putting the pfennigs into his pocket, and probably he was well used to dealing with scum. It now occurred to Tergal that he would not be telling the knight the full story of his own past—that perhaps he did not even need to.

‘Thank you.’ Tergal took his acquisitions out into the sunshine.