Neal Asher: Brass Man

They walked straight into the lethal blur of machinery and, of course, it flinched away from them, creating a space ten metres in diameter around them, until they reached the second stair taking them down to their destination. Here, on a smaller floor, technicians pursued specialist projects whilst, behind a glass wall alongside them, silver skeletons with ribbed chests open like butterflies marched neatly towards a perpetually cycling clean-lock and to the glare beyond where sentience awaited them. In this room it was sometimes difficult to distinguish specialist project from technician. Even pure humans like Pendle were visually identical to Golem who had donned syntheflesh. Sometimes there were humans so in love with the machine it was difficult so see any humanity left in them. Apensat was a silvery thing with the geisha stoop and glittery limbs of a surgical robot. But he also had normal arms and a face in there under the cowling. He looked like a man a huge polished-chrome beetle was gradually subsuming.

With a fluid hand gesture, mirrored by gleaming spidery limbs, Apensat indicated a Golem skeleton standing nearby, its chest open just like the others processing beyond it.

‘This is him?’ Pendle could see that it must be. The thing was two and a half metres tall, its ceramal bones bearing that slight bluish tint of the newer alloy/ceramofibre composite. Everything about it was heavier, more robust, impressive.

‘No,’ said Buphal, ‘that’s an anthrop chassis. That’s him.’

Pendle looked to where Buphal was pointing at a lozenge of memory crystal sitting in an AI support column on a nearby bench. He walked over, pulled up a swivel chair and sat down, reached out and tapped the base of the column to get the mind’s attention. To one side of the column a projection monocle rose off the bench. Below it, the air flickered, and the standard iconic head appeared: metallic—even the eyes, teeth and tongue.

‘Unit G25 alpha, I’m going to load some syntheflesh/skin schematics as, with the larger size you chose for yourself, the order must go via Specialist Ordering.’ Pendle glanced round and saw that both Buphal and Apensat had their attention focused on the Golem chassis. Of course it was all complete rubbish; Pendle’s job had been non-existent for three days now since, being described as redundant for a long time, that description had now been made official. However, he felt that though his job was finished, his crusade had only just begun. Out of the top pocket of his Corp overalls he removed a piece of memcrystal the size of a fingernail and inserted it into the slot at the base of the column. Immediately it began to load. The projected head multiplied to infinity as if positioned between facing mirrors. Pendle snatched the monocle out of the air, killing the image. He then retrieved the memcrystal, dropped it between his feet, and ground it into white powder.

‘Standard spec,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘They’ll be able to handle it in synthetics.’

Even though finally ejected from the Cybercorp plant a number of days later, Pendle did manage to turn up at the launch of the Golem Twenty-five, where he waited expectantly. But what happened was most unexpected. The nanoscopic dose of neurotoxin that finally killed him, just after the Golem was stolen, was not the main reason he coughed and gasped so much. That was laughter—Pendle had always been a sucker for irony.

Mika knew the doctor mycelium was a small fragment of the Jain technology Skellor had controlled and, like some primitive stumbling across a ground car, she had walked away with a wheel but had no idea about the workings of bearings, electric motors and hydrogen fuel cells. The fragment of nano technology resulting in the mycelium inside the Outlinker, Apis Coolant, had been a stored sample she used only because the alternative was to watch the boy die as his fragile body fought a losing battle against the gravity here on Masada. Why she then grew a similar mycelium inside herself was less clear. ‘For research purposes,’ was her answer to any who asked—not because it enabled her to live in an asphyxiating atmosphere surrounding her, or because it enabled her to quickly recover from severe injury, and not because her physical strength was now twice normal. But there was a downside… as always.

The changes the doctor mycelia were undergoing she was unable to fathom. They were growing thicker and more complex—becoming something more than she required. Perhaps this dangerous experiment was keeping the Polity ships and personnel in orbit, and the quarantine in place. Thus far, their only contact had been via straightforward radio transmission—no signal deep enough to take any kind of computer viral attack from Jain tech on the surface—and ECS stratojets dropping medical supplies, food and equipment. They had every reason to be wary of Jain technology. Using it, Skellor had subverted the AI dreadnought Occam Razor and left a system in chaos: cylinder worlds containing brain-burnt populations, the wreckage of spacecraft and satellites, and tens of thousands dead. But that was not all the Polity might fear down here.

Standing on the shell of a huge tricone revealed at the top of a mound of debris flung up by the impact of the Dragon sphere that had fallen here, Mika gazed out across the plain of mud now covering some of that creature’s remains. Coming towards her, moving birdlike on the mat of rhizomes that had quickly spread across the bared surface, came the rest of Dragon: dracomen—Dragon’s children—formed from the body of that dying alien entity.

They ran towards her with seeming urgency, but then they ran everywhere like that. There were twenty of them in this party, and Mika noticed that two were small but with lanky legs. Children, for these new dracomen were able to breed. This in itself should be enough to frighten the rulers of the Polity: dracomen first being biological machines made by Dragon to serve that entity’s own obscure purposes.

Dragon, when originally discovered on the planet Aster Colora, had consisted of four conjoined spheres each a kilometre across. After delivering an obscure warning to the human race, it apparently destroyed itself. Only later had they learnt how it had fled, breaking into four distinct spheres as it went. And later still they learnt it was an organic probe sent by an alien race, and had malfunctioned. Ian Cormac destroyed one sphere in punishment for the human catastrophe it later caused, on a planet called Samarkand, while trying to evade its alien Makers. Another had both destroyed and transformed itself here. Two remained: their purposes still obscure, possibly dangerous, and their abilities unplumbed.

As the party drew closer, Mika jumped down from the tricone, recognizing only Scar, one of the original dracomen, by his weapons harness and… his scar. He slowed to a walk to mount the slope up towards her. Beyond him, she noticed that four of his fellows were carrying the body of a grazer slung from two poles. This creature, with its multitude of limbs and many-eyed head, looked the offspring of a kangaroo and a lobster. It was one she did not recognize, but dracomen were bringing in all sorts of new species to feed their growing population.

‘Polity?’ said Scar, as he reached her.

‘The last I heard, the quarantine has been lifted at Elysium, but still remains in force here. It seems unlikely to be lifted any time soon.’

‘Danger?’ asked Scar.

‘No. The most likely decision will be to declare this world below the technological threshold for membership, and leave you all to make your own way,’ said Mika, assuming that Polity personnel such as herself would be lifted from the surface, if only for the purposes of study.