Brass Man

Blinding pain blossoming behind his eyes, Cormac vomited, but resisted the impulse to respond to that communication. Gritting his teeth against the next heave of his stomach, he groped in the thigh pocket of his environment suit, found a medkit and pulled from it a reel of analgesic patches. He wanted to scream at Skellor that the man could not have made these by-blow monstrosities, that it was all a lie. As the first, second, then third patch began to flood his body with their balm, he perceived that the image was indeed real—and guessed the source of those ugly creatures Skellor now controlled.

As the well into which he was staring slowly contracted, Cormac reached down to his holster and drew his thin-gun to check its load. Besides the one it already contained, he carried four extra clips on his belt. Each of these contained the fine aluminium powder that carried the energetic pulse of the weapon, and each contained the powerful laminar battery that supplied that same energy. But Cormac just shrugged to himself: he was prepared to fight, but it seemed so futile in the end. No matter how horrible were the creatures hunting him, they were not coming of their own free will—he would be killing slaves. Anyway—he glanced at the telefactor — he could pass above such encounters.

He put away the weapon and found a blue-seal dressing in the medkit, pressing it to the hole in his head. Tasting blood, the dressing deformed to fit his skull and probed inside the hole, plugging it, salving exposed nerves and creating frameworks for accelerated regrowth. Water, from a neck spigot built into the suit, thawed the dryness of his mouth. He stood and gazed out over the buttes to where he could see distant fires burning. He would just have to do what he could.

It was then that he heard a familiar whickering sound and caught the glint of something in the air. And, with a sound like a disc cutter slicing into an oil drum, Shuriken smashed into the telefactor.

Finally reaching vacuum, Dragon shrugged off planetary dust and, clawing only at the surface of space in a way that Polity AIs and human physicists would have given a lot to know, accelerated towards the sun. A few hours into its journey it detected probing signals from the ships out by the gas giant. Doubtless they considered Dragon to be an imponderable in their infantile plans. Dragon, however, intended to become a severe inconvenience. Now accelerating on a course for a slingshot, the entity focused internally for, being what might be described as the tinkerer quarter of Dragon entire, it had never been able to leave things alone for long. Concentrating on the various engines lodged inside itself—creations with a less biological bent than much else it contained—Dragon began to make adjustments.

While skimming the AI nets of the Polity in search of the i

Bathed in actinic light, Dragon slung itself in a tight orbit around the sun, shielding at full power, and always accelerating. Then it used those strange engines inside itself to flip hard out of the well. Travelling at a substantial proportion of light speed, the giant entity shot out into the system. Some hours later the large green sphere of a frozen giant, erratically ringed and orbited by hundreds of icy moonlets, loomed out of the darkness. Dragon then used those engines to decelerate, the gravity wave then propagating ahead of it blowing a methane ice plume from one of the moons so that momentarily it looked like a comet.

The device the ships had brought with them was some distance out from the planet, and would have been difficult to detect had it not contained a million-to

Dragon began building energy for a massive full-spectrum laser strike, but a maser beam struck the entity’s skin seconds before it could fire, and started boring a canyon through its flesh. Screaming inside, Dragon diverted the laser energy into a U-space surge that tilted it into U-space. A microsecond later, the USER interference flung it out again, but a thousand kilometres from its entry point.

‘Well, I haven’t got a lance,’ came the laconic communication.

Turning sharply, the glowing violet attack ship Excalibur came out from hiding behind a single icy moon shaped like a kidney. Straightening, it began firing near-c kinetic missiles.

‘But you can still call me St George,’ Sword sent.

A cold wind was scouring away the dust from the plain as if, having been held back by Dragon’s hard-field for so long, it was anxious to make up for lost time. Vulture, having just had one of her sleer nymphs incinerated by Crane’s laser lighter, was now trying to figure out how to prevent one of the fourth-stagers from snipping the head off the rubber dog. Standing at the end of the chainglass box, she shrugged dust from her feathers with avian nonchalance and saw that there was only one way— and it involved supper. Vulture pecked down on her piece, pulled it aside and, holding it down with one claw, snipped away its pincers and saws before flipping the unfortunate creature around in her beak, to get it head first, then swallowing it. The miniature fourth-stager was satisfyingly meaty and wriggled all the way down. Perhaps, in her previous incarnation as a ship AI, Vulture would not have appreciated this treat in the same way. But she was what she was, and as Crane made his next move—advancing the piece of crystal and turning it over—she eyed the other sleers. Of course, the aim was to get the Golem to arrange its pieces in a very particular pattern that Dragon had earlier shown Vulture. It was an arrangement it could have taken Crane a thousand years to achieve by chance, but chance was not having a good time here. The dice were loaded.

Cormac tried to recall Shuriken, but the small comscreen on his wrist holster began ru