Brass Man (54 page)

Aphran, briefly separating herself, said, ‘I am almost too close to understand this.’

Jack merely fed through to her his view of the gas giant, adding the spectroscopic analysis of its upper atmosphere which he had made when first arriving in the system. Then he continued to convert himself into a flying particle accelerator.

* * * *

The telefactor released him, and he staggered a couple of paces before going down on his knees. The ground seemed to be shaking, but Cormac could not be sure. The machine protectively circled him on the top of this butte, while he shook his arms trying to return feeling to them and wished the task in his head were so simple.

So this is how madness feels.

Cormac just knew things weren’t operating correctly in his skull. The cold gridlinked Cormac observed this chaotic version of himself trying to re-establish some grip on reality. The aug creature’s attack had left organic damage to his brain, but it had also riddled it with new neural connections and Jain filaments. From both sides Cormac fought doubled perception, because almost like speaker and microphone in conjunction he instinctively knew that he could generate a feedback loop, which in this case would be fatal to him. It was with a kind of horror that he felt his idea of self seemingly slipping away from him, and in his striving to prevent this, he truly understood just how fragile was human awareness, the human ego—how it was just the surface of a very deep and dark pool.

Slowly Cormac returned. He regained
organic
control of his limbs, rather than through the implants inside his skull. But then he hit against the wall of his own pain. To return completely, he must completely feel the hole that had been ripped in behind his ear, his brain swollen inside his skull, and the central empty pit of a migraine that he knew would turn him blind and puking sick. Skellor brought him back some of the way, though not intentionally.

Iwill find you, agent. My creatures are coming for you.

Along with Skellor’s threat came an image Cormac processed in his gridlink, breaking the remains of awareness he had positioned there. His head feeling on the point of exploding, he saw that projected image in the blind spot opening before him. Half-human creatures scuttled and loped out into the light. Many had pincers where their mouths should have been, or else opening and closing inside their mouths like the organic version of some grotesque doorknocker. One horror possessed a scorpion’s body with a partially human face moulded in chitin. After it came a centaurish thing with the upper half of a woman connected at the waist to an insectile segmented eight-legged lower half. Madness, utter madness, but what did it all mean?

Blinding pain blossoming behind his eyes, Cormac vomited, but resisted the impulse to respond to that communication. Gritting his teeth against the next heave of his stomach, he groped in the thigh pocket of his environment suit, found a medkit and pulled from it a reel of analgesic patches. He wanted to scream at Skellor that the man could not have made these by-blow monstrosities, that it was all a lie. As the first, second, then third patch began to flood his body with their balm, he perceived that the image was indeed real—and guessed the source of those ugly creatures Skellor now controlled.

As the well into which he was staring slowly contracted, Cormac reached down to his holster and drew his thin-gun to check its load. Besides the one it already contained, he carried four extra clips on his belt. Each of these contained the fine aluminium powder that carried the energetic pulse of the weapon, and each contained the powerful laminar battery that supplied that same energy. But Cormac just shrugged to himself: he was prepared to fight, but it seemed so futile in the end. No matter how horrible were the creatures hunting him, they were not coming of their own free will—he would be killing slaves. Anyway—he glanced at the telefactor -he could pass above such encounters.

He put away the weapon and found a blue-seal dressing in the medkit, pressing it to the hole in his head. Tasting blood, the dressing deformed to fit his skull and probed inside the hole, plugging it, salving exposed nerves and creating frameworks for accelerated regrowth. Water, from a neck spigot built into the suit, thawed the dryness of his mouth. He stood and gazed out over the buttes to where he could see distant fires burning. He would just have to do what he could.

It was then that he heard a familiar whickering sound and caught the glint of something in the air. And, with a sound like a disc cutter slicing into an oil drum, Shuriken smashed into the telefactor.

* * * *

Finally reaching vacuum, Dragon shrugged off planetary dust and, clawing only at the surface of space in a way that Polity AIs and human physicists would have given a lot to know, accelerated towards the sun. A few hours into its journey it detected probing signals from the ships out by the gas giant. Doubtless they considered Dragon to be an imponderable in their infantile plans. Dragon, however, intended to become a severe inconvenience. Now accelerating on a course for a slingshot, the entity focused internally for, being what might be described as the tinkerer quarter of Dragon entire, it had never been able to leave things alone for long. Concentrating on the various engines lodged inside itself—creations with a less biological bent than much else it contained—Dragon began to make adjustments.

While skimming the AI nets of the Polity in search of the innovative, and incidentally avoiding some very nasty programs whose sum purpose was to track the massive entity down, Dragon had been pleased to come across further research into that enigma wrapped up in a dilemma: gravity and its relation to U-space. And, when other killer programs had become active, Dragon knew it was venturing where ECS was developing military hardware. Grabbing as much information as it could without attracting attention, the entity retracted from the AI nets. Studying its theft, Dragon had quickly apprised itself of what ECS was up to, and used this as the basis of its own research project, which had resulted in some of the engines it now contained. These devices consisted of frame-stretched Calabri-Yau shapes—as the humans called them—and massive singularities held out of phase with normal space. It had been generating the latter that had caused the earthquakes back on the planet. Now, using baroque constructs of runcible technology for amplification and focusing, Dragon could do more than cause the ground to shake—the entity could shift and distort the very fabric of space. Obviously the interference device now active in this system stemmed from the same ECS research program Dragon had raided. The entity wanted a closer look—but most importantly it wanted a way out.

Bathed in actinic light, Dragon slung itself in a tight orbit around the sun, shielding at full power, and always accelerating. Then it used those strange engines inside itself to flip hard out of the well. Travelling at a substantial proportion of light speed, the giant entity shot out into the system. Some hours later the large green sphere of a frozen giant, erratically ringed and orbited by hundreds of icy moonlets, loomed out of the darkness. Dragon then used those engines to decelerate, the gravity wave then propagating ahead of it blowing a methane ice plume from one of the moons so that momentarily it looked like a comet.

The device the ships had brought with them was some distance out from the planet, and would have been difficult to detect had it not contained a million-tonne singularity and been the centre of the U-space storm. Scanning the thing while decelerating around the ice giant, Dragon began to plumb its function. The entity began to see how the USER oscillated the singularity through a partial runcible gate to cause the interference—taking some large heavy object and repeatedly dunking it in the pond that was U-space. Simple, really, and also simple to destroy.

Dragon began building energy for a massive full-spectrum laser strike, but a maser beam struck the entity’s skin seconds before it could fire, and started boring a canyon through its flesh. Screaming inside, Dragon diverted the laser energy into a U-space surge that tilted it into U-space. A microsecond later, the USER interference flung it out again, but a thousand kilometres from its entry point.

‘Well, I haven’t got a lance,’ came the laconic communication.

Turning sharply, the glowing violet attack ship
Excalibur
came out from hiding behind a single icy moon shaped like a kidney. Straightening, it began firing near-c kinetic missiles.

‘But you can still call me St George,’ Sword sent.

* * * *

A cold wind was scouring away the dust from the plain as if, having been held back by Dragon’s hard-field for so long, it was anxious to make up for lost time. Vulture, having just had one of her sleer nymphs incinerated by Crane’s laser lighter, was now trying to figure out how to prevent one of the fourth-stagers from snipping the head off the rubber dog. Standing at the end of the chainglass box, she shrugged dust from her feathers with avian nonchalance and saw that there was only one way— and it involved supper. Vulture pecked down on her piece, pulled it aside and, holding it down with one claw, snipped away its pincers and saws before flipping the unfortunate creature around in her beak, to get it head first, then swallowing it. The miniature fourth-stager was satisfyingly meaty and wriggled all the way down. Perhaps, in her previous incarnation as a ship AI, Vulture would not have appreciated this treat in the same way. But she was what she was, and as Crane made his next move—advancing the piece of crystal and turning it over—she eyed the other sleers. Of course, the aim was to get the Golem to arrange its pieces in a very particular pattern that Dragon had earlier shown Vulture. It was an arrangement it could have taken Crane a thousand years to achieve by chance, but chance was not having a good time here. The dice were loaded.

* * * *

Cormac tried to recall Shuriken, but the small comscreen on his wrist holster began running alien code diagonally across it. He stripped the holster and threw it aside as if it had become infectious, as it in fact had, then drew his thin-gun and backed away as Shuriken ripped through the telefactor once more. This time the weapon hit a component that ignited like an arc rod and showered out molten metal. The telefactor dropped out of the air as if its strings had been cut, crashed against the side of a butte, then tumbled into the canyon below, where a final bright flare from a discharging power supply killed it.

This, now, was a scenario Cormac had often contemplated, and had played out a couple of times in VR. Knowing how effective Shuriken was in his hands, he had wondered what would happen if he ever came up against someone wielding a similar Tenkian weapon. In none of those scenarios had it been his own weapon, in none of them had he got a blind spot in the centre of his vision into which the lethal device disappeared every time he looked at it directly. Nor had he a head that felt as if it had been slammed in a door five or six times, nor had he OD’d on analgesic patches. It occurred to him then that if Skellor were trying to kill him now, it would at least be quick. Then he told himself not to think like that—speaking to himself was still a very strange experience—and concentrated on the task in hand.

In his gridlink, Cormac created a visual patch to fill his blind spot—and felt something like a knife blade going into his cortex. Skellor, it seemed, was playing with him, for Shuriken was now darting around the butte like a mosquito in search of bare skin. Cormac tracked it round, focusing, pushing himself into a fugue of concentration. He could not allow the slightest shake or jitter, as he would get few chances at this. Finally he fired twice, missing the first time with a ranging shot, but hitting with the second. Flung back, with chipped and cracked chainglass blades extending, Shuriken turned upwards so it resembled a gleaming eye gazing down at him. Cormac fired again, centred perfectly on target. Shuriken pulled in its blades like a sparrow folding its wings and dropped out of the sky as had the telefactor before it.

It occurs to me that it is time I used my hostages,
Skellor sent.

What do you mean?
Cormac asked, not worrying about his signal being located, as Skellor certainly knew where he was right now.

Well, there’s these to begin with.

Images now came through. Cormac was wary of them, expecting some attached virus. He ran them through a scan program, viewed them. The creatures he had earlier seen were turning on each other, tearing each other apart. Why was Skellor doing this?

They’re not sufficiently human, I suspect,
Skellor pondered.
How about a little look through Tanaquil’s eyes?

Now Cormac’s point of view was of someone up on the city platform and, bleeding through with that, Cormac could feel the rigidly suppressed anguish of this victim of Skellor’s. Tanaquil turned to look as people came towards him from the surrounding buildings. Zombie-like they moved past him, gathering into a crowd rubbing shoulders. The sense of anguish increased and, in the network he was partially in contact with, Cormac could feel the silent screams. The first one to reach the edge, a man dressed in thick clothing and a long padded coat, paused before climbing the two steel fences there, and just stepped off. He bellowed—Skellor returning to him enough control to do that—then others were following him, seemingly eager to throw themselves to their deaths.

No...

The one word came through; Skellor ruthlessly suppressed anything else. Tanaquil now watched a naked woman climbing the same fences. She too went over the edge, screaming. The eyes Cormac was seeing through now blurred with tears.
Jeelan.
The name broke through Skellor’s rigid control. Just audible came the sounds of bodies impacting far below.