Brass Man

16

The plain was an ancient seabed scattered with salt pans left as, over many centuries, the sea had evaporated. Weathering had revealed fossil remains, boulders containing crystals of smoky quartz like inset windows to a cold furnace, and fields of stones sieved out of the ground by the perpetual wind. Arden, during her long sojourn here, had journeyed a great deal within the perimeter allowed her. She had found a wonderful fossilized twelve-metre ancestor of an apek, all glittering iron pyrites and opalized carapace, and, acceding to her request, Dragon had sealed it under a layer of some rough substance similar to chainglass. She had found diamonds, emeralds, star rubies and sapphires, as well as other nameless gems and, with the disquietingly organic mechanisms Dragon manufactured for her inside itself, had cut and polished them. For a woman whose lifetime areas of study had been xenobiology and xenogeology, it had been an interesting time, and only as a matter of principle had she regularly protested against Dragon’s imprisonment of her. She supposed her patience stemmed from having been born within the Polity. With all the benefits of a genetically enhanced body and a seemingly limitless lifespan, what was the hurry?

Because of Arden’s long and detailed study of the plain, she knew precisely when she reached the area Dragon had excavated and then replaced above itself—not because the land level was higher here, as there were many such areas across the plain, but because of the meticulousness of the geology. The boulders with their quartz inclusions were placed just so, the stone fields looked as if they had been raked, and single fossils were placed artfully on dusty surfaces. There seemed something akin to a Japanese stone garden about it all, or of some display in a Polity museum. Trudging back from the edge of the plain, her pack of light camping equipment slung from one shoulder, she recognized a particular boulder with a seemingly wind-excavated hollow under one side of it, and veered from this signpost to head for her home—the one she possessed here anyway. Then she jumped in surprise, dropping a lump of pale yellow beryl she had just found, when one of Dragon’s pterodactyl heads slid out from underneath that same boulder and rose above her with a hissing roar.

‘No Jain, just Crane,’ it said cryptically, gazing back the way she had come.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Arden hissed, stooping to pick up the fallen beryl. ‘You said this Skellor guy is loaded with the stuff.’

The head swung towards her. ‘He is, but the Golem android he has sent here as his ambassador, though showing signs that it once contained Jain mycelia, is now free of that parasite.’

‘Ah, the “metalskin android” Vulture mentioned? He’s called Crane?’

‘Mr Crane—he’s very specific about that.’

‘Should be interesting,’ Arden opined.

Dragon blinked. ‘You intend to remain?’

‘You want me to go, just when things are livening up?’

‘Maybe too lively,’ said Dragon. ‘Polity ships now.’

‘Here for that Skellor?’

‘The ship is called the Jack Ketch’

It took Arden a moment to dredge her memory for what that name meant. She remembered the historical context, and rumours of other things—hints of AI atrocities, brief and bloody annexations and border wars. But, then, it gave some Polity citizens a bit of a buzz to talk of such things—it was like sitting round the campfire telling ghost stories.

‘Ah,’ she said.

‘A telefactor comes, watched by Vulture.’

‘Will you let it through the barrier.’

‘Maybe… And now a landing craft has launched.’

Events, it seemed, were moving apace, and Arden realized that her long stay on this plain with her enigmatic companion was ending. As she continued towards her comfortable cave, she could not help but feel a little sad about that.

Anderson gazed over to the other side of the corrals, recognizing the vehicles from the mineralliers’ encampment. No doubt the moisture-induced growth spurt had driven them away from their excavations.

‘Why do we have to leave so early?’ Tergal complained.

Because Unger Salbec is deeply asleep, but I don’t know how much longer that will be the case, thought Anderson. Because I want to get through all the greenery before it makes travelling difficult,’ replied the knight, as he paid off the bleary-eyed corral-keeper.

‘It’s because of that woman,’ said Tergal. ‘You want to avoid a confrontation with her.’

Anderson turned away, ostensibly to watch Bonehead peek his sensory head from under the skirt of his carapace, then jerk it quickly back in the hope Anderson hadn’t noticed. He had rather enjoyed his confrontation with Unger, but it was not something he wanted to extend. As soon as immediate lust was gratified, he knew she would begin slowly extending their brief encounter, querying his choices, lightly discussing future scenarios in which they would be together, elbowing her way into his life. He justified his abandonment of her by telling himself there was something a bit twisted about a woman loving the killer of her brother, but that did not entirely assuage his feeling of guilt. Entering the corral to thump his foot against Bonehead’s shell, he wondered briefly if his fleeing the situation here might be more to do with its possibilities than its perversity. Such an inclination to escape complications had separated him from Unger on five previous occasions, and was probably the reason he had been on the road for most of his life. Climbing up onto the sand hog’s back then plumping himself down in the saddle, he recognized that cowardice came in many forms. With a reluctant hissing and creaking, Bonehead lurched to his feet.

Mounting Stone, Tergal observed, ‘You know, maybe it would be better if you sorted things out here. You don’t want her to catch you unawares.’

Anderson let out a bark of laughter—he couldn’t help himself.

‘Will you ever trust me?’ Tergal asked.

Anderson did not reply to that. ‘Talking about unawares.’ He eyed the uniformed metalliers moving out from the shadows between nearby buildings.

Tergal glanced towards them. ‘One of them cornered me last night after you disappeared. Very curious to know all about me, where I was from, and where I was going. My replies were understandably limited.’ He looked round at Anderson. ‘I wonder if it’s anything to do with that explosion last night.’

‘Explosion?’

‘You didn’t feel it? The damned buildings moved. How could you sleep through that?’

‘Clear conscience.’ Anderson winked.

Tergal looked at him askance, then returned his attention to the uniformed men approaching.

Anderson called out, ‘How can I help you?’

A metallier, similar in dress to Kilnsman Gyrol, peered into a book he was holding. ‘You’re Anderson Endrik, a Rondure Knight?’

‘I certainly am.’

The man nodded. ‘Where are you heading now, and to what purpose?’

Anderson eyed the others. They were armed—he had noticed that last night—and they seemed quite edgy. ‘Up to the Plains. But as to my purpose,’ he shrugged, ‘maybe to hunt a sand dragon, maybe just to take a look.’

The man nodded and closed his book.

‘Who are you looking for?’ Anderson asked.

‘Don’t rightly know. Someone dangerous, alone and heading in towards Golgoth, so that puts you in the clear.’ He stared from one to the other of the pair. ‘Just so long as you don’t head towards Golgoth.’

‘Is it something to do with that explosion last night?’ Tergal asked.

The man gazed over his shoulder into the buttes. ‘Could be. Some strange things happening lately.’ He stepped aside and waved them ahead.

As he and Anderson departed the concrete road and headed back towards the route they had been travelling the previous day, Tergal suggested, ‘Perhaps we’ve already seen who they’re looking for.’

‘Heading in the wrong direction,’ Anderson observed. He glanced back. ‘I don’t know why, but I feel we’re well out of it. I don’t like it when lots of people start running around with guns—makes me nervous.’

Soon the metallier road and roadhouse were out of sight behind them, and they were travelling through a transformed landscape. The sulerbane plants were now knee-high to a human, but presented no problem for the two sand hogs. Joining the yellow fungus smearing the canyon walls were black-and-white checked nodules, things like pale green street lamps, and the occasional long shelf-like bracket fungus alternately white and transparently banded. Green fronds had also exploded from the ground in many places, exposing the flesh-red underground volvae in which they had been coiled. But it was the sudden faunal activity on which the two travellers kept a wary eye.

Stilt spiders and sleers swarmed through the vegetation, though luckily nothing large enough to take on a sand hog, so the two of them, like white hunters on elephants, could view the activity of these alien tigers. Female sand gulpers no longer fed in lines spaced across the canyons, but clumped together in herds around the smaller males who now carried burdens of tubular eggs on their backs. Snapper beetles were everywhere, though dispersed now, such was the extent of the bounty on offer. And patches of ground in damper shadier places writhed with the activity of cliff-eels. By midday, nothing having tried to attack them, Anderson called a halt so that they could push aside sulerbane ground leaves and collect sand oysters, which they then ate raw while they travelled. It was only some minutes after this, as he was tossing a shell to one side, that he spotted the pursuing sand hog.

‘Oh hell,’ he said.

‘That woman,’ muttered Tergal, reaching for his weapon.

Anderson waved a calming hand. ‘Put it up, boy. I misled you somewhat about her. She certainly doesn’t want me dead.’

The hog Unger rode stood a man height taller than Bonehead, was ruddy-coloured and leaner. Anderson recognized a thoroughbred similar to those used in the races held in Bravence. As Unger drew it to a halt beside him and glared down, he winced.

‘Once again,’ she said, ‘you fail to say goodbye.’

‘You should know me by now, Unger.’

‘I think I do, but it has taken this last time to finally open my eyes. This, Anderson Endrik, is the last time I chase after you. Our love affair, to my mind, has been far too intermittent, and too often spoilt by my knowledge of how you like to put yourself in danger.’

‘The nature of my job,’ Anderson explained.

‘It doesn’t need to continue so.’

‘It’s all I know.’

“We talked about alternatives. I have a place in Bravence. Come there with me now.’

Anderson looked regretful. ‘Things to do—I can’t abandon them now.’

Unger glanced at Tergal, then turned again to Anderson. ‘Boys’ games. I give you three months to take up my offer, then I take up other offers made to me.’

Tapping her goad against one side of her hog’s carapace, she turned it back the way she had come. ‘Three months,’ she repeated, then whacked the goad down hard. As it hurtled away the big lean hog tore up vegetation.

‘Perhaps you’ll explain,’ said Tergal.

‘She wants a husband,’ Anderson admitted.

‘And this is the great danger you’ve been avoiding?’

Anderson shrugged.

Tergal went on, ‘If I hadn’t seen you kill that third-stager…’ He shook his head.

Later that day, Tergal came to feel that the knight should concentrate on avoiding dangers of greater lethality.

Personally, Fethan would rather have gone down to the surface of the planet than come across to this ship, but the order to do so had been emphatic, and so closely linked was he to the savage creation of Jerusalem inside him, that Fethan did not like to contemplate what might be the consequences of disobeying it. Gazing at the ship through his visor, he realized it must be ancient — centuries old at least. It was a colony ship: one of those sent out before the invention of the runcible, before the Quiet War, or AI takeover, and the Prador War — humanity’s first encounter with hostile aliens. Probably, on its very basic U-space drive, it had taken ages to reach this location, before the colonists could wake up and disembark.

‘Jack,’ he said suddenly, ‘the landers.’

‘Elaborate please,’ the AI replied.

‘Well, did they all parachute down?’

There was a beat — a positive infinity in AI terms.

‘There are three landers attached to the central body of the ship. Presumably they were used to ferry the colonists and their supplies to the surface, then they were recalled to the ship.’

‘You’re thinking in AI terms.’

‘Is this relevant to our purposes here?’ asked Jack. ‘I am an attack ship, not an archaeologist.’

‘It might have some bearing on the situation below. If no return journey were intended, the colonists would’ve been daft not to make use of those landers. They’d have stripped out the ship too.’

‘Please let me know when you find out what occurred.’ Jack managed to inject bored sarcasm into his tone.

As they drew closer to it, Fethan began to grasp the sheer scale of the ship.

‘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.

Wearing a combat spec envirosuit, Cormac followed the soldier into the lander and took a seat behind him which had only recently been bolted to the floor. In the narrow space behind both of them, bars ran along the ceiling. This area was designed so that the skinless Golem could pack themselves in standing upright and gripping the bars. No allowance had been made for comfort, since none was required. Also bolted to the floor were boxes containing the supplies they might need: an autodoc, food and drink, and numerous lethal toys.

‘Take us down,’ Cormac said, strapping himself in.

Ahead, the doors of the small bay irised open with a rushing exhalation. Gant pulled up on the joystick, then eased it forward; the craft rose on maglev and nosed through the invisible meniscus of an advanced shimmer-shield. Clear of the ship he ignited thrusters that were almost inaudible, but the acceleration forced Cormac back into his seat. He knew Gant was taking it easy: this craft was without all the usual safeguards added to one intended for humans, and using its full potential would have resulted in Cormac getting jellied in his chair.

Soon they were dropping away from the red spectre of the Jack Ketch, through infinite blackness and star glitter, towards the jewel of the planet.

‘Take us to the crater first. I want to eyeball the site.’

At first, the lander hurtled nose-down to the planet, but when it entered atmosphere Gant turned it to use its main motors for deceleration. Through the screen they observed their red contrail and the deep black of space fading to a blue in which the stars dissolved, then a pale turquoise into which clouds fell like the ghosts of boulders. As the soldier brought the lander’s antigravity online, Cormac could just see the horizon. Then the soldier turned the ship again so that very quickly the horizon tracked round and rose. Soon he had the ship tilted down towards rumpled-up yellow mountains and a dusty desertscape.

‘Fethan wants a word,’ Gant said abruptly, and stabbed a control to turn on one of the console screens.

Cormac turned his attention from the exterior view to the screen. ‘What have you found?’

‘There are crew onboard,’ the old cyborg replied, a skeleton crew.’ He winced at his own pun and continued, ‘We booted up the main computer and looked at the manifest, then Cento cracked the encryption on the captain’s log. Seems the captain spent too long out of hibernation staring at nothing and harping on about the emptiness of space, and by the time the ship got here he was into deep psychosis. He’d decided he was not going back into deep space, nor down onto the planet, so, while the rest of the crew were down on the surface helping get the colony established, he recalled the landers.’

‘What about this skeleton crew?’ Cormac asked.

‘By the time they figured out something was wrong, they were too late. He shut down the sensor net, specifically the pressure sensors, raised the pressure inside the ship and, when the landers docked, he opened all the airlocks to them. The pressure drop killed everyone remaining aboard—dying from the bends. He was okay because he was in his suit. He survived up here for about two years before dying. As far as we can work out, it was from a heart attack brought on by terminal obesity. He was so big by then he couldn’t get out of the bridge.’

‘Any sign anyone has been aboard since?’ Cormac asked.

‘None.’

‘Anything else I need to know?’

‘Not really… The colonists are mild ‘dapts and the new standard humans. Beyond that, there’s nothing here about what went on down there after the landings.’

‘Okay, let me know if you find anything relevant.’

Gant shut off the communication link, then gestured ahead, slightly to one side. ‘That’s the plain under which Jack thinks Dragon is lurking.’

There was nothing to distinguish it other than that it seemed to extend for ever.

They were still slowing as the mountains melted into a promontory of the plain, like knobs of butter on hot toast, and then that too began to break apart. In a moment, they were low over canyons and buttes of brightly coloured sandstone, occasionally shadowed by smears of green. When they began to descend into a canyon choked with verdancy, Cormac reached across and pressed a hand against Gant’s arm.

‘Hold us here,’ he said.

Cormac gridlinked: Jack, is this greenery a recent bloom?

It is, the AI replied.

Okay, give me a map of the near area.

Jack downloaded orbital scans to him, and through his link they became direct experience. He gazed omnisciently down from space, focusing on ten square kilometres, and realized, upon seeing the lander revolving like a clock hand above it, that he was observing an image only seconds old. Overlaid coloured lines indicated trails that Jack ascertained had been used by humans. Cormac pulled back, linked to Jack at another level, sucked data, and picked up on the nearest trail — left by some sort of vehicle, its tracks picked out bright orange above the foliage that had subsequently hidden them.

Take us higher, he told Gant, not bothering to speak out loud.

The soldier gave him a strange look, but obeyed.

The tracks wove between buttes, finally terminating at a road where they lost definition. From there, Cormac thought, the vehicle, even supposing it related to Skellor and was not simply that of some sightseer, either went on to the city or to the nearby smaller human settlement.

Cormac pointed, and said out loud, ‘Over there.’ Shortly they were over a concrete road and strange bulbous dwellings up on stilts. Cormac noted people outside watching their descent. There seemed no panic, and he was aware in an instant that many of them wore uniforms and were armed. He readied Shuriken in its holster, and hoped no one would be stupid enough to start shooting meanwhile. The simple fact was that, even without the weapons he and Gant carried, they were practically invulnerable. Upon receiving the signal, it would take Jack less than a second to fry—from orbit — anyone foolish enough to attack them. It would not be necessary for him to send a signal should they locate Skellor, since Jack would open fire immediately.