Brass Man (42 page)

            ‘There would have been thousands of colonists,’ Cento observed abruptly, ‘and hundreds of crew.’ Fethan did not disagree, but the Golem continued, ‘A ship like this was designed almost as a cargo carrier. The colonists would be in cold sleep, packed away just like the supplies the ship also carried. Even the crew would spend most of their time frozen, only being woken to perform essential maintenance tasks during the journey.’

            ‘Where’ll we look first?’ Fethan asked.

            ‘One of Jack’s telefactors has made an airlock in the sphere section operable.’

            ‘Okay.’

The telefactor was clinging to the hull like a great iron mosquito, its proboscis injecting the power to run the airlock that lay open beside it. Finally reaching the lock, they entered into the light cast by a malfunctioning fluorescent and by the plastic control buttons below a flickering screen. Once they were inside, the outer door hinged shut, then the inner one hinged open, gusting vapour into the lock. Fethan checked his suit reading and realized that the air mix would asphyxiate a human.

Overriding his suit’s safety devices, he removed his helmet and sniffed.

‘Dusty cellar with a hint of scrap yard,’ he said.

Removing his own helmet, Cento said, ‘I smell oxidized metal and ketones.’

‘Like I said.’ Fethan led the way further into the ship.

The tubular shaft leading from the airlock had sets of four doors spaced evenly around its perimeter at regular intervals, and traversing handles all down its length. When they came to a radial intersection, with six branching shafts, Fethan halted and moved back.

‘Let’s take a look in one of these.’ He gestured to one of the four doors just before the intersection. ‘This all looks like it might get a bit repetitive.’

Luckily, the electrically operated door had an inset manual handle. Fethan took hold of this and attempted turning it in the direction indicated on the handle itself. Something clinked and it moved freely, detaching from the door with a slight tug.

‘Brittle,’ he observed, pushing himself along to the next door.

Cento went over to another door to try that. Between them, they managed to snap off every handle. Fethan unshouldered his APW and began winding the setting of the weapon down to try and find something manageable.

‘Perhaps not advisable in here,’ said Cento. ‘It would be like trying to use an electric saw to cut wet tissue paper and, anyway, I’ve been here before.’ Cento stabbed his hand through a laminate of thin metal shell over foamed insulation. Then, getting a grip, his feet braced under a traversing handle, he heaved sideways, causing mechanisms to snap and crunch in the wall. Soon he had pushed the door far enough into the wall cavity for them to enter the room beyond.

‘Impressive,’ said Fethan, again shouldering his weapon. ‘Ain’t sure I could do that.’

‘Then get an upgrade.’ Cento led the way in.

Fethan at once saw that they had entered one of probably hundreds of cryogenic storage chambers. The room was wedge shaped, and transparent upright tubes, large enough to contain a person in each one, crowded the area like pillars arranged with only narrow access between them.

‘Hypothermal storage,’ Cento said, reaching out and brushing his hand across one curved surface.

The Golem was right. This was an old method of cryogenic storage, stemming from research into animal hibernation. People were pumped full of various exotic drugs and genfactored enzymes, before having their temperatures reduced to just above freezing point by being drowned in saturated brine. They were unconscious when this happened and their bodies constantly monitored thereafter, but there were risks in this old-fashioned method.

‘One in forty,’ said Fethan. ‘The chances were one in forty that you’d never wake up.’

Cento, rather than reply, simply pointed.

The man floated, dead and pickled, in the liquid initially used to preserve him for another life. From canulas in his arms and chest, tubes snaked to sockets at the top and bottom of the cryotube. Monitoring must have been done via radio implants, because there were no wires attached to him.

‘He could probably be revived now,’ said Cento.

Fethan looked at the Golem in surprise.

‘In another body,’ Cento added.

Fethan returned his attention to the corpse. ‘Adapted,’ he said, indicating the lip tendrils and wrist spurs. ‘I wonder if it was for the planet below. I don’t recognize this format.’

‘It’s one of the first types: spliced from other Terran life by viral recombination,’ Cento informed him. ‘Reptile and fish DNA was used to give humans greater tolerance of extreme heat and cold.’

‘For the planet below, then?’

‘Maybe. It was also used to increase the odds of surviving hibernation.’

Over the next hour, they discovered the sphere section of the ship was packed with cryotubes and empty holds that had once contained the colonists’ supplies. A single monitoring area, with attached living quarters, occupied the centre of the sphere. Here, taking their turns at revival, colonists would live for a few months whilst making necessary repairs and checks. Here, Fethan and Cento learned, after managing to boot one of the computers, that of the three thousand colonists aboard, fifty-eight had not survived the journey, which was pretty good odds. Fethan felt they were odds no Polity human would currently countenance, but now they did not live in the overcrowded Sol system, or want to flee the endless corporate, political, national or religious wars.

From the sphere, they moved back through the connecting body of the ship, following a rail system for cargo handling. Here portals of manufactured quartz looked out on open space, the planet, and onto the sides of landing craft clinging to the hull like dragonfly larvae to a reed. Rails turned at intersections into wide airlocks, obviously for the transference of large items of equipment. At the end of the track they pulled themselves around one of the abandoned cargo drays, the once rubbery substance of its tyres fractured like obsidian against both the ceiling and floor rails. Shortly they were back in a narrow shaft leading into the crew area of the ship. And here, stuck to the metalwork, they found a desiccated corpse.

‘Now, I don’t think that was part of anyone’s colonization plan,’ muttered Fethan.

* * * *

Tanaquil waited below the blimp towers as the two search balloons moored. Soon their crews came tramping down the steel stairs. His breath huffing like smoke in the cold air, he slapped his gloved hands and stamped his feet in the early-morning chill. By now he had hoped to be able to put away the clothing he was wearing and, for a brief few months, experience the pleasure of not having to use protective clothing outdoors, but spring was always unpredictable. Summer he dreaded more than the frigidity of the winter past, for keeping cool was more difficult than staying warm, and metalliers regularly died in that season. Real humans—identified by wrist spurs or secondary thumbs, nictitating membranes and lip tendrils—easily adapted to the extremes of temperature. Referring to ancient texts on the subject, metallier scientists had concluded that their own people had been genetically enhanced for intelligence, but in the process had lost much of their natural ruggedness. Tanaquil thought that was bollocks: metalliers were no brighter than any other people on Cull; they had just managed to acquire the bulk of the recorded knowledge left over from the colonization. And they had a dragon in their back yard telling them how to apply that knowledge.

With dragging steps and bloodshot eyes, the crews came out of the blimp towers. Walking over to one of the balloon captains, Tanaquil asked him, ‘Anything?’

The man looked set to curse but, recognizing the Chief Metallier, curtailed that and replied politely, ‘There’s a crater out there, not far from Grit, but we don’t know what caused it. No sign of the ship. Some mineralliers told us about a strange character they spotted walking alone but heading towards the plains. Few other dodgy specimens, too, but nothing unusual about them—they’re always to be found out there.’

‘Okay, go and get some rest now.’

The man nodded and moved on. Tanaquil turned to head back home, his boots clacking on the steel plates which, he now noted, were vibrating with a miniquake. The quakes were definitely getting more frequent now, but weren’t yet a real problem to the tough structure of his city. And besides, he had other more immediate concerns.

Maybe that warning from Dragon was all nonsense, for the creature’s pronouncements did not always make sense. Reaching the rail car he had used on the way in, he climbed in and pressed the button to send it on its way. It took him back along the narrow maintenance track to the residential section. Stopping it below his apartment block, he climbed out, holding open the door for some people to climb aboard who he guessed were part of the replacement balloon crews, for they took the car back towards the blimp towers. He halted for a moment to gaze up at
Ogygian
in the night sky. How could he possibly abandon his plans now? That was where he was going, up
there,
and he would drag his people along with him, too. He sighed and walked on.

As he re-entered the building, something momentarily gave Tanaquil the creeps. He felt someone was watching him as he entered one of the lifts lining one side of the short lobby. Inside the lift, he pushed his key-rod into the reader. The doors began to shut, pausing for a moment as if jamming against something, then closing with a bang. As the lift took him up, he began to feel even more spooked: he was sure he could feel something, smell something, hear faint sounds of movement. Eventually the lift halted at his apartment, and he gratefully abandoned the claustrophobic box. It was then that a hot hand closed on the back of his neck and threw him forward onto the carpet.

Tanaquil hit the floor on his shoulder, scrabbled forwards, then turned, coming up in a crouch. Someone was there in his apartment. All he could think was that Jeelan had let them in. But there was no one there, and he looked around in panic. Had he merely tripped? Had he imagined that grip on his neck?

‘You were out early,’ said Jeelan, walking naked from the bedroom and rubbing at her eyes. She stopped. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I don’t—’ Tanaquil began.

Jeelan screamed, bringing her hand up to one side of her head as something horrible just appeared there out of thin air. He saw a fiat leaf-shaped body, too many legs, blood.

From the ceiling?

She staggered back suddenly, as if someone had shoved her, hitting against a cabinet made of lacquered carapace, and slid to the floor. Tanaquil rushed towards her, seeing her hand poised over the thing grinding away at the side of her head, but she seemed unable to touch it. Before he could reach her, something slammed into his chest, knocking the wind out of him and throwing him flat on his back. Gasping, he tried to struggle upright. Jeelan was now showing the whites of her eyes only. She was drooling. Then suddenly he could no longer see her, as a figure appeared out of nowhere beside him and brought a knee down on his chest and a hand to his collar.

‘Jeelan!’

A hand slapped him once, almost casually, but it was like being hit by a piece of steel. Tanaquil tasted blood, felt pieces of broken tooth in his mouth.

“What do you—’

Something scuttled down the man’s arm towards the hand around Tanaquil’s throat. Tanaquil tried to knock the horrible thing away but, in one swift and brutal movement, his attacker caught both of Tanaquil’s hands in his own free one, the fingers closing tight and hard as manacles. The insect crawled across Tanaquil’s cheek, grabbed tight hold behind his ear, as if each of its spidery legs ended in fish hooks, then it began to chew in. There was no pain at first—too much adrenalin—but soon it grew horribly. Before Tanaquil could yell out, something filled his head like a nest of hot wires, and yelling became a privilege he was not allowed. Next, the assailant had moved back, and Tanaquil found himself standing up. He felt Jeelan standing too, through some connection to her—just like the web of similar connections he felt to other people all over this area. It became a spreading web as the insect things located Tanaquil’s people, one by one.

‘There,’ sighed Skellor. ‘I may have lost Mr Crane, but soon I’ll possess the entire population of a city.’

Tanaquil gaped at this nightmare that had walked into his life.

* * * *

Gazing at a realtime image of the colony ship on a wall screen, Cormac wondered if anything of relevance might be discovered there. But it was always best to take every opportunity to stack the deck, and that ship was a large item of hardware to have as an imponderable. Cento and Fethan had departed some time ago under the impetus of their suit jets, though it was not as if either of them needed suits for any other purpose, and they would secure the vessel.

Cormac glanced aside as Gant cracked the airlock of one of the
Jack Ketch’s
small landing craft—the kind designed for the insertion of Golem shock troops but now suitably rigged to support human life. It was the grey of inert chameleon paint, a slug shape ten metres long. Seeing the dead soldier beside it immediately after his previous thoughts about Cento and Fethan, brought home to Cormac how few actual humans there were on this mission: just Thorn and himself, and now he was beginning to wonder about the latter.