Neal Asher: Brass Man

‘That was a real-time image,’ the AI replied.

Cormac frowned, not liking what this implied. ‘Why not just grab him?’

‘No contact allowed with the barrier ships.’

Cormac sighed and laid his head back. ‘And the weapon used? I don’t think I saw anything like that before.’

‘Combined CTD and gravity-imploder missile,’ the AI replied.

‘I see—the imploder to prevent the smallest fragment of debris being blasted away, so that the CTD burns everything down to an atomic level, if not below that.’

‘Correct.’

‘Right, so now you’ll tell me why ECS is chasing ships back to Elysium.’

‘Total quarantine of the Elysium system has just been reinstated. The Elysium AI has shut down the runcible. Debris has been detected on an asteroid, previously discounted because out of the range of blast scatter from the Occam Razor, and moving in an elliptical orbit that took it outside of the search area. Polity capital ships are returning to surround the system.’

‘You’ll be rejoining them?’ Cormac asked, sitting up and pushing away the scanning head.

‘EC has reapplied previous restrictions: no one who had any physical contact with Jain technology or any of its products is going anywhere. Because I have you aboard, I myself am now not one of the guards but the guarded.’

‘And this comes direct from Earth Central itself?’

‘It does.’

‘Tell me, has senility long been an AI problem?’

‘Amusing, but missing the point,’ said Jack. ‘EC knows it is impossible to suppress such a technological juggernaut, but this is a case of attempting to slow it down a little so we can move some people out of the way. Your associate Mika is, as you have told us, already obtaining substantial benefits from Jain tech, and no doubt scraps of it will be picked up all around this area. But consider what would happen if someone were to find, for example, one of those creatures Skellor used to attack you on Masada, and handed it over to some well-organized Separatist enclave.’

‘Yeah, okay, I’ve heard this spiel before. But we’re talking about one stray asteroid that we missed. I’ve been okayed as clean, as has most of Elysium.’

‘The order is not open to question—total interdiction.’

Cormac remembered what that meant.

He nodded and swung his legs from the surgical bench, noting as he did so the readout on the diagnosticer’s screen, informing him that his gridlink was still offline and impossible to use unless reinstated by a high-level AI. But speculation about that he put to the back of his mind—something was happening at last, and he had been bored out of his skull during that latter half of the quarantine period.

‘This asteroid, is it going to be obliterated like that one you just showed me, or do we take a look?’

‘We take a look.’

‘We… as in you and me?’

‘Yes.’

Cormac couldn’t help grinning as he felt the vibration of the Jack Ketch’s fusion drives igniting. Heading for the door to this long-unused surgical facility, he lost his footing outside as he stepped into a corridor in which the gravplates were not operating.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Jack, slowly powering the plates back up so that Cormac settled back down to the floor.

‘See, you’re as excited about this as me.’

Now, with the gravity stabilized, Cormac noticed how the corridor had changed. When he had come aboard this ship, the cabins and corridors were new and skeletal, the Jack Ketch not often having had to provide for human passengers. Now his boots came down on pale blue carpet decorated with a nicely repeating pattern of nooses. The spill from spotlights, mounted in ornate brackets, lit the corridor, though their main targets were portraits spaced along walls bearing the uneven look of old plaster.

‘Very nice,’ said Cormac.

‘Glad you like it,’ replied the AI.

‘To make us poor humans feel more comfortable?’

‘Of course.’

Cormac studied one of the portraits, vaguely identifying it as of some very early premillennial cosmonaut, then he broke into a trot towards his destination. The corridor terminated against a dropshaft slanting up at forty-five degrees, and glaringly of the present time. Locating the touch-plate set in an ormolu moulding beside the slanting entrance, Cormac input coordinates, then reached out a hand to check that the gravity field was operating before he stepped inside the shaft. The irised field wafted him in a direction that was now up, and he soon stepped out into what was called the bridge of the ship, though the vessel was not controlled from there. Jack was pilot, navigator and captain, and controlled the ship from wherever his AI mind was located deep inside it.

This chamber occupied the upper level of the ship’s nose. The ceiling, curving down to meet the floor ahead of Cormac, was not visible, for a VR projector created the illusion that there was no ceiling at all and that he was walking out onto a platform open to vacuum. This platform, it seemed, possessed a low stone wall to prevent the unwary from stepping off the edge into the abyss. There were no instruments for humans to use, nor any need for them, though Jack could easily project a virtual console here. In the centre of this was what Cormac now mentally referred to as the drawing room.

Below a free-floating crystal chandelier, which might have been merely a projection or the real thing, club chairs, a drinks cabinet, coffee table and other items of premillennial comfort were arranged on a large rug, at the corners of which incongruously stood Victorian cast-iron street lamps giving off a soft gaslight. These were all items from Jack’s collection, replicas all, but almost to the molecular level. Now, Cormac saw that off to one side the AI had added something else.

‘Is that for my comfort as well?’ asked Cormac.

The wooden framework towered against the stars, no doubt perfect in every detail, mechanically sound, its trapdoor oiled.

‘It is here because I find it aesthetically pleasing,’ Jack told him.

Cormac turned to the localized sound of the AI’s voice.

Seated in one of the club chairs, the hangman looked like a bank manager or a stockbroker from sometime before the twenty-first century. His antique suit was pinstriped and tight on his thin body, his face white and skull-like. The brim of the bowler hat he never removed was pulled low on his forehead, shading his eyes, so that when the light caught the lenses of his spectacles, they glittered in shadow like something insectile. His overfull briefcase, no doubt containing execution orders and probably a coiled rope, stood beside his chair. Cormac suspected he wore sock suspenders and Y-fronts—for every detail of the hangman was meticulous—just like the mind this ancient automaton represented.

‘Your idea of aesthetics is a little worrying,’ Cormac observed. ‘I take it that this is not just any old gallows.’

‘No,’ said Jack, ‘it’s the Nuremberg one.’

Cormac fell silent as he allowed himself to absorb that. Using as an avatar an automaton from an age two centuries ago, rather than a holographic projection, was another strange facet of this AI. But he preferred that to Jack’s attraction to devices of execution. Stepping onto the drawing room rug Cormac decided this was a subject best dropped, and instead asked, ‘How long will it take us to get to this asteroid?’

‘It will be ten minutes.’ With a clinking ticking of gears and levers, Jack stood, turning to face Cormac. ‘This is a matter of some urgency, so I’m going to drop into U-space.’

Cormac strolled across the rug, then out across the black glass floor leading towards the nose of the Jack Ketch. Here he gazed over the ersatz stone wall into vacuum. From below and to his right, the sun heated his face as if he had just peeked over a wall beyond which a bonfire burned. Its glare filtered, he was able to look directly at it, and there observed, flung up from its vast infernal plains, an arching lariat of fire that could have swallowed worlds. Curving up from his left, then ahead and up high, before being attenuated to nothing by distance, the asteroid belt seemed an artefact, having been shepherded into neat rings by the larger chunks remaining from whatever cataclysm had shattered the planets of this system. Then the VR feed blanked to infinite grey depth, and Cormac felt that shift into the ineffable as the ship dropped into underspace. He realized he was seeing a representation less real than the one before. No human could experience underspace unshielded.