The armour also contained synthetic nerves, but not nearly so many as his syntheskin had contained, and this served to dull the edge of Crane’s world. However, the armouring on the hands remained just as sensitive as the removed syntheskin—no doubt so that he could feel when he broke bones and stilled the beat of a heart.
‘That the control module they want to use?’
Crane opened his eyes—dark now with their layer of polarized chainglass—and saw the bird man gesturing to a small, black pebble-like object his boss now held.
‘Yes, it can be linked in to just about any augmentation, and its link is encoded,’ the man replied. ‘I’ll leave that to Angelina and her dear brother, though. Why they wanted this method of control, I don’t know—maybe so only one person can have their finger on the button at any one time. Meanwhile…’
He picked up a small remote console and pressed the pebble into a recess made for it. Crane felt the immediate connection.
‘Okay, Crane, I want you to move about the room while I check the link,’ said Stalek. When he glanced at his console, his expression became confused.
‘Mr Crane?’ he questioned.
Mr Crane reached up and disconnected, from the back of his head, the optic cable leading to Stalek’s main console, then in two long strides he was looming over Stalek and the bird man.
‘How is it—’ said the bird man, then made a gulping, retching sound as Crane’s armoured hand closed around his throat and jerked him off the ground. The Golem tilted his own head birdlike to one side, like this man whose legs were now kicking at the air, then closed his fist. The sound was rather like that of an apple squeezed in a press. The bird man’s eyes bulged and his tongue protruded from his beak, then his body dropped to the floor, shortly followed by his head.
Turning to Stalek, Crane flicked feathery flesh from his hand. Stalek grabbed up the console and inset module and, in panic, tried to operate its controls. As he backed to the wall, Crane followed him with short delicate steps.
‘Pelters… damn them… Oh shit.’
Crane reached down and took off Stalek’s hat, placed it on his own head and tilted it to a rakish angle. The orders Stalek was desperately inputting did nothing to counter the one Crane had already received from the module. He reached out again, took away the little console, and tossed it to one side.
‘No, please… no… don’t…’
In some part of himself, Crane was satisfied with this outcome—repayment for what they had done to him. He closed his hand on Stalek’s face, lifted him up, and began to undo the man’s coat. Stalek fought back, but might as well have tried to fight a stone wall. Crane stripped the coat away, held it up for inspection, then rapped Stalek’s head repeatedly against the wall until something cracked and the man ceased to struggle. This made it much easier for Crane to remove the lace-up boots and trousers.
As he dressed himself, Crane noted that Stalek’s heart was still beating—its thumping quite plain to the Golem’s superb hearing. Suitably attired now, Crane picked the man up by one ankle and inspected him, then, as if curious to know what might be hidden inside, stabbed a hand into the man’s torso and ripped out his intestines. The heartbeat stopped soon after the mess hit the floor. By then Mr Crane had turned to the console and, with bloodied brass fingers, picked up the small rubber dog before, with one sweep of his arm, sending all the equipment on the table crashing to the floor. There were other things he wanted to do, while awaiting the arrival of his new owner.
The Jain-tech worm had taken several microseconds to subvert the telefactors and track back to the exterior input centre. Jerusalem took a considerably shorter time to recognize that this tardiness was not some subterfuge to put a victim off guard but because, without a guiding intelligence, the attack was slower. This fact, and because Jerusalem did not want certain conclusions further delayed, had for the present saved the lives of the scientists still working inside Exterior Input. Had the worm been as fast as Jerusalem knew was possible with Jain tech, the AI would have had to fusion-incinerate that particular area of itself, rather than take the time to eject the centre. Now the sealed chamber, like a section of a great iron nautilus, tumbled away trailing severed optics and ducts, while Jerusalem watched it through many eyes—some of them the sights of missile launchers, lasers and particle beam projectors.
In fact, the worm’s promulgation through the telefactor systems had not been so much an attack as a tentative probe—for attack would presuppose a guiding intelligence. The technology was searching for new directions in which to grow, rather like a creeping vine. Jerusalem toyed with this comparison, considering how Jain tech, like a fig vine, could strangle its host. But, no, it was more of a plague technology. The AI then amused itself by making statistical comparisons between the extrapolated spread of Jain tech on Earth and other historical plagues on the same planet. Should this particular Pandora affliction get out of control, the one most closely resembling it might be the flu epidemic that World War I soldiers brought back with them from the trenches. Then, again, that comparison was not so close either. Piqued, Jerusalem instead turned the bulk of its attention inward.
The bridge pod of the Occam Razor was still rendering up reams of information, but there were subtle differences between the Jain tech there and that seeded on the asteroid. Still working by analogy, Jerusalem felt these were the differences between wild and cultivated plants (the latter representing the tech in the bridge pod). Or perhaps wild and trained animals? Certainly, the tech in the pod had appeared more purposeful in its growth, guided first by Skellor and then by the Aphran entity. It was purposeful under Aphran’s control still, though very slow now at the low temperature Jerusalem held it.
But, analogies aside, all the information was there, and this recent ejection of Exterior Input had delayed Asselis Mika—and those the AI had deliberately assembled around her—from reaching certain conclusions. Jerusalem allowed itself a silicon sigh and, despite being aware that impatience was one step towards singularity, which would be both nirvana and death to it, wished that the humans, haimans and lesser AIs would just get a move on and work it all out.
The force-field wall behind her now, Arden pulled a melon-shaped object out of her backpack and depressed a control on the end of it before tossing it on the ground. Stretching out spines with a wrinkled material connecting them, the object spread, pulled the material taut, and began to bulge upward into a dome. The spine ends then stabbed down into the earth or sought out rock crevices. Within a minute the ground tent Dragon had created for her was secure. The thing was always warm to the touch, and inside it was white and like a reptile’s gullet. It was a living thing and she remembered how, when first receiving it, she had taken a long time to pluck up the courage to sleep inside it, fearing it might one day decide she would provide more nutrients than the ground into which it rooted.
Sitting down before the tent, Arden took out some other scaly packages. One was a flask that provided hot coffee and, so long as she kept it topped up with water, it would continue providing for a number of days. Once the coffee started to taste a little rank, it was time to drop the flask down the nearest hole for one of Dragon’s pseudopods to retrieve. A second package’s only function was to keep fresh the sandwiches she had made earlier, though the bread and the fillings had been provided by other draconic biomachines.
She ate her ham sandwiches and drank hot coffee while the sun grew bloated and orange on the horizon. Then, deciding the light was just about right, she took out her holocap, turned it on, and listened to the whine as its small u-charger topped up its lithium batteries. Eventually the ready light came on, and she pulled out the device’s monocle and tossed it away from her. The little glassy object began to spin and make a whining sound as it rose ten metres into the air. Arden folded up a miniscreen from the main device and, using a small pointer detached from the side of it, began scrolling down her alphabetically arranged menu. Shortly, she came to ‘sleer 1–5 transform’ and selected it. Below the spinning monocle, like something invisible being pumped full of dye, a first-stage sleer appeared, then began to grow. Observing this, Arden again contemplated building in something that showed the creature shedding its carapace or encysting, and each subsequent growth spurt, but the holocap’s memory space was beginning to get a little crowded.