Free Brass Man by Neal Asher Page B

pointedly did not look towards the ship, having just glimpsed the black shape hopping up onto the ramp and scuttling inside it.
     
    The woman squatted down, turned the simple lock on the case and flipped back the lid. She gazed in puzzlement at what seemed to be a coil of ribbed oxygen pipe.
     
    ‘Joden? Joden!’
     
    The screaming from inside the ship was abrupt and harsh—agonized. From the box, the pipe uncoiled, whip-fast, opening gleaming pincers at its end which it snapped closed on the woman’s throat. She gargled and thrashed, blood bubbling out of her punctured suit. Meanwhile, Stalek had calmly removed two small spheres from his suit pocket. He tossed them towards the two men as one of them brought his weapon to bear, while the other did not seem to know what to do: open fire or help the woman. The spheres shot forwards, turned briefly incandescent, punched through two environment suits. Stalek stepped back as pulse-gun fire slammed into the front of his own suit, but the laminated armour made nothing of the ionized gas hits, and an inlaid superconducting mesh took away the heat. The spheres did precisely what they were supposed to do: exploding and flinging needles of pure potassium through the two men’s bodies, the metal igniting and burning fiercely in contact with moisture.
     
    Their suits, Stalek noted, were quite good quality, for while the men boiled and burned inside, the only sign was a jet of oily steam from each of the holes the spheres had made upon entry—that and the way the two thrashed about and screamed a lot. When it was finally over, Stalek looked pointedly at Falco, who was studying the pulse-gun scars on the front of his suit, ahem’d and pointed to the still floating cylinder. Falco walked over and closed it up, then, grabbing the towing handle, pulled it after his boss. Stalek paused once to look back. He would come out to check there was nothing more of value inside this ship before he sold it on to his contact up in Port Lock. When the fires started, later in the season, they would incinerate all other evidence—not that anyone would be looking. Shaking his head, Stalek felt a degree of bewilderment. How ever had such amateurs managed to steal a Golem Twenty-five from right outside Cybercorp?
     
    - retroact ends -
     
    * * * *
     
    The Sand Towers, the wind-carved buttes exposing their layers of coloured sands recounting the ages of Cull, extended as far as he could see to his left and right, and tens of kilometres beyond towards the plains. Raising his family monocular to his eyes, Anderson Endrik now inspected the Overcity of Golgoth, spread across its great steel platform high up on the Towers, then the lower city crouching in the foothills. The entire city was a product of metallier industry, and the centre of the closer, lower section bore the appearance of giant iron lichen holding the spheres and ellipses of its denizens’ metal houses. Sprawled all around it were long low steel mills and factories interspersed with chimneys belching smoke. Anderson had heard much about this place: that old technologies were being resurrected in pursuit of the dream of re-establishing the downed communication link with Earth, of interstellar travel, and of rejoining the human empire. Anderson raised his monocular to the sky to observe Ogygian— the ship that had brought his own ancestors here—a sphere connected by a narrow body to the triple nacelles of the U-space engines, glinting like green quicksilver in the turquoise firmament. Then he lowered his monocular to let it hang by its strap and, tapping his goad against the back of its sensory head, urged his sand hog mount into motion.
     
    ‘Are all the rumours true, or just bullshit?’ wondered Tergal.
     
    Anderson glanced aside at his young companion.
     
    Tergal was skinny and tall, his head topped by the wide-brimmed hat of a gully trader, with long dark hair spilling from under it down his back. He wore a leather jerkin,