Brass Man (53 page)

As Fethan moved further into the city, aug creatures leapt out onto him regularly from their numerous hides in fallen scaffolding, just like ticks waiting in the grass. They clung to his clothing before scuttling up towards the side of his head. He understood then the reason for the hand weapons the refugees had been carrying, for soon he himself had picked up a length of steel tube and became adept at swatting the things in mid-leap -like playing baseball with tomatoes. Every individual he came across now was already a victim of these horrible parasites. This looked like the work of Skellor: it was the kind of ruination the man habitually left behind him.

Working his way on through the lower city, Fethan began to note that the same creatures, now evident everywhere, seemed to be all flowing in one direction. Perhaps, tracking them back, he might find their source—and even close it down? Hopefully, by then Skellor would be aboard one of the landers, and not located at that source. Whatever, Fethan was not the kind to witness horror like this and do nothing in response.

* * * *

It started like the rumbling of a distant thunderstorm. Anderson halted and looked for something to cling on to, as this felt like a really big quake on the way. Soon the ground started to vibrate, shaking up a mist of dust.

‘Shit,’ he said. Something about this one just did not feel right. And soon he understood why, as cobra-like pseudopods began exploding from the ground like a nightmare crop of bean sprouts.

Detritus rained down all around them. Anderson saw the woman pull out a wide hat from her pack and put it on, then pass the pack over to the man Thorn so he could hold it above his head. The four of them huddled in the lee of a boulder studded with crystals of smoky quartz, and grit filled the air around them. In the distance, where the pseudopods had first arisen, a great dust cloud was furiously swirling in which Anderson glimpsed further ophidian movement amid flashes of blue-green light. As the shower of stones began to pass like spring hail, and the four finally felt able to straighten up, they saw pseudopods erupting from the ground in a line that cut directly towards them. Then, nearby, a row of them exploded into the air, curving over to glare down at them with their single sapphire eyes. Anderson noted that even the woman seemed confused about what was going on here, yet she had brought them confidently into this realm. Resting his hand on the butt of his handgun, he wondered how many of these things he could take down with him before one squashed him into the dust.

‘What is this?’ Tergal had drawn his own weapon, and was swinging it from one of the great flat heads to another. Thorn abruptly reached out and, in a move difficult to follow, disarmed him. ‘Are you crazy!’Tergal shouted.

Thorn inspected the weapon, then clicked across its safety catch. He tossed it back to Tergal. ‘Dragon here,’ he gestured towards the forest of pseudopods, ‘could swat that other thing back there like a bug.’ He stabbed a thumb in the direction of the droon.

Anderson slid his hand away from his own weapon.
Dragon—
again referred to in the singular. Lafrosten’s story had told of only one such creature, but Anderson had since heard stories of many more known as sand dragons. Surveying the nightmare forest of fleshy trees, he spotted three, four, five of the crested heads Lafrosten had described. There must be hundreds, nay thousands of the creatures here. He wondered which one of them he had supposedly come to kill.

Cupping her hands round her mouth, the woman, Arden, shouted, ‘What’s happening?’—trying to attract attention in the uproar. A single crested head turned towards her, then shot forwards, cutting a furrow through the ground with the base of its neck. Soon it was hovering over them, curving down to inspect them as if eyeing an interesting roach it had been about to step on.

‘Dragon, what are you doing?’ Arden then asked more quietly.

‘The option to spectate has been taken away from me,’ replied the reptilian head, studying them with eyes of deepest blue.

Anderson realized his own mouth was gaping, and quickly closed it. He had often repeated the gist of Lafrosten’s story, but not until this moment had he grasped that it was only a mere glimpse into some other, even larger tale. He recalled that the dragon had
spoken
to Lafrosten. Therefore it was a sentient creature, and therefore it had a purpose all its own: it was not just some character in a fairy tale—a tale that had taken on the dimensions of myth, even to Anderson who had actually met Lafrosten. This was
real.

‘The option to spectate has been taken from you? That was evident long before now,’ said Arden.

The head turned slightly to one side. ‘Thorn,’ it observed.

Thorn nodded in acknowledgement.

‘You came from the first ship, the one that was attacked,’ Dragon stated.

Anderson noted how Thorn paused, perhaps weighing up the value of a lie. Eventually he said, ‘I did.’

‘Who was with you aboard that ship?’ Dragon asked.

‘I think you know,’ said Thorn.

Dragon hissed for a moment, then stated, ‘Ian Cormac.’ The head swung back to Arden, and Anderson discovered he had never actually heard real
sarcasm
voiced until now. ‘The
good
guys,’ said Dragon.

‘What are you planning to do?’ Arden asked.

The head turned and gazed up at the sky. ‘Make waves,’ it said.

The ground bucked again, sending them all staggering. They retreated back to the lee of their boulder and steadied themselves against it. The nearby pseudopods rose even higher, the earth churning between them. The fissures where they exited the ground joined together, melded, and, wide as a metallier house, the main trunk from which they all issued heaved itself into the air. The pseudopods splaying out from it poised overhead like a giant blue-tipped fan which then tilted forwards, a long mound rising behind it as the rest of the trunk shrugged free. Anderson realized that a hundred metres away this trunk mated with a river of scaled flesh—was just one branch of it. All around similar podia were surfacing, then drawing back towards the dusty maelstrom. Then he saw an immense dome rising up, sucking in all this tangled madness of sand dragons back towards itself. This nucleus was truly titanic and, as it drew in at the sides, began to reveal itself as a giant sphere. Anderson stood stunned when, briefly, a wind cleared away the dust. He saw the sphere whole, rising from the plain on a vast trunk of ophidian growth. Then it kept rising higher, distorting and expanding as it drew that same growth into itself: a vast scaled moon floating light as a metallier blimp. Higher and higher, receding into the sky.

Anderson felt a hand on his shoulder and looked across at the man called Thorn.

‘Dragon,’ the man said briefly.

Tergal now turned towards the knight, his expression somewhat maddened. ‘Shame you lost your lance.’

Anderson lowered his gaze and observed two creatures bounding through the dust storm. ‘Well, it’s coming now, if a little late.’ He gestured to Bonehead and Stone. ‘I wonder what brought them back here.’

‘Dragon,’ said Arden.

Anderson looked at her for explanation, but instead she asked, ‘These are yours?’

‘They are that—faithless beasts.’

‘That’s good, because with Dragon gone the force field will have gone as well.’

With that, they all turned to peer back the way they had come. The ejected VR chamber was a black dot on the horizon, seemingly floating on a stratum of mist, but of the droon there was no sign. Anderson found little comfort in that.

* * * *

Vulture flapped a wing over the glassy surface to blow away the settling dust. ‘Quite an uproar,’ she noted. ‘Dragon is nothing if not dramatic’

The fossilized apek rested, perfectly frozen, in a coffin-shaped block of solid chainglass that was raised above the ground now. Etched into the block’s upper surface was a chess board. Beside this rested a spherical draconic container. Vulture had to wonder about the symbolism of it all. She looked around at the amphitheatre Dragon had cleared. The ground here was perfectly level, as if raked, in a fifty-metre circle in the middle of devastation. Amid the broken rock beyond the neat circumference lay much dragon detritus: desiccated pseudopods like a shed snake skin draped across boulders, iridescent scales the size of dinner plates, broken constructs like the by-blows of old combustion engines and lizards. Shaking her head, Vulture hopped up onto the face of the glass coffin, then turned her attention to her companion.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘lay out your pieces.’

Mr Crane gazed down at the board with painted-bead eyes, blinked once, then abruptly squatted. He delved into his pockets and took out his toys. The rubber dog was his queen, the piece of crystal his king and the blue acorns were pawns. He had one piece more than required, but then was ever a battle fought by evenly matched opponents? Vulture pecked once against the draconic sphere. The thing twitched, split, and spilt miniature albino sleers, which scuttled to take their positions on the grid and with dragon eyes glare at their opponents. Now the sphere contracted, pushing out two sand hogs with minute lance-wielding human figures mounted on them, then a small droon.

‘Y’know,’ said Vulture, ‘“surreal” is a word for the pretentious, but I can’t think of a better one right now.’

Mr Crane took off his hat and studied the layout. He reached out and nudged a blue acorn two squares forward. A sleer nymph scuttled to it, took hold of the acorn and moved it one square aside.

Vulture said, ‘You don’t know the rules, Crane. I do, which is why this is going to be a game difficult for me to lose.’

* * * *

21

Intelligent weapons have been with us for centuries now, ever since the first computer-guided missiles, jet fighters and tanks. As human wars spread out into the solar system, such weapons increased in complexity of function and mind until there were things with the outlook of trained hunting dogs but bodies more lethal. With the introduction of laws concerning AI rights, it should have been unacceptable for governments to create Al-guided bombs, missiles or other intelligent machines that would destroy themselves in the process of destroying an enemy—tantamount to creating AI kamikaze. But such organizations had been sending human beings to their deaths for millennia and did not rank other intelligences any higher. Retaining this attitude when they were finally calling the shots, the AIs proved themselves just faster and brighter versions of ourselves. The virtual world reflected the real world, as it always has ever since the invention of the first computer virus, and during those same solar wars, worms and kill programs were used to great effect. Looking back, some would say, ‘Same shit, different day.’ If only that were so. Unfortunately, intelligent weapons are subject to evolutionary pressures more substantial than those found in the natural world. And tigers now occupy what was once the territory of hunting dogs.

-
Excerpt from a speech by Jobsworth

A door opened in whiteness, and a translucent hand gestured Jack through. King and Reaper froze on this level while on another level they utilized all their resources in fighting the worm Aphran had turned back on them. Then the embedded VR programs caught up and the ouroboros separated and struck across the eternal white. A gigantic reptilian maw closed on Reaper with a sound of bones breaking. King hurled himself back—to a tunnel hoovering down from a different direction. Jack closed the door, and the virtuality became a huge white pearl enclosing a muffled screaming. Then it sucked into itself and disappeared with a wet thwack.

‘Two minds,’ said Jack.

‘Quite possibly lethal when you only expect one,’ Aphran replied.

He turned towards her in a brown virtuality, probed on other levels and immediately knew that with the freedom he had allowed her she had taken so much more. She had now embedded herself so deeply in his systems that he could never root her out.

‘They will escape, of course, but perhaps they will be damaged,’ he said. ‘Certainly they will henceforth be more circumspect about virtual attacks.’

‘Certainly.’

‘So now we must prepare for a
physical
battle.’

Jack reduced this point of awareness, increasing his awareness of himself, of the ship. He noted that automated systems had now closed the cracks in his hull, and his larger internal structures had realigned. However, there was still a lot of small-scale damage, and much preparation yet to make. He initiated the ship’s Golem, and also those robots sturdy enough to tolerate the constant acceleration. Moving slow, the chrome skeletons and other gleaming creatures began working their way through him, making repairs. When Aphran offered her services, almost without thinking he devolved control of many of them to her. He could not fret too much about this—could not fight something that was now more part of himself than even King and Reaper had been.

Ahead, the gas giant loomed like some giant polished spherical agate, surrounded by the detritus cast off from its own shaping. Jack considered how he must use this killing ground if he was to survive, and in the same instant redirected Golem and other robots to the conversion of his two internal manufactories. In his nose he opened the two baleen-tech scoop fuellers for combat refuelling, then detached their ducts from his fuel tanks and reattached them to three dropshafts he aligned, end to end down the length of his body, so as to terminate against one of his rear fusion chambers. The irised gravity fields in the shafts did not have sufficient power for the task intended, but the robot army inside himself began disassembling gravplates to provide the components needed to boost that power. Other internal redesigns devised were mainly for achieving greater structural strength. Maybe, having been incepted from him. King and Reaper would guess what he intended. But they had not done so yet, else they would not be tailing him down towards a gas giant. But, then, it was only because he had been so badly smashed inside that Jack had even contemplated such radical, tactical redesign.