He was hexed with some schizo software, stolen by rebels and loaded up with a killer's memories and instincts.

Mr Cranes segments are all mixed up memories from his inception to his present state.

Another leg of this book is about Rogue AI's who want the jain tech for themselves and cause problems for everyone, including their daddy, who has to kill some of them. Where they have an encounter with a brown hole and Skellor gets his and Cormac is rescued by a rogue AI. Cormac becomes his hostage and they all head out to space. Skellor spreads jain tech willy-nilly to take over a bunch of people and begins killing them. Skellor thinks it's a great place to hide, which is what the Dragon thought too, until Skellor found it. He tracks down Skellor to a small world that lost their Polity roots hundreds of years ago. His abilities are growing and it would appear that he's on the path to becoming Horace Blegg Jr. Obviously the Polity can't have this, so they send in Agent Cormac, again. Because sure as shooting, the Dragon knows all about the Jain tech. Skellor, that lovable rapscallion who just wants to kill Ian Cormac and destroy the Polity with Jain tech, is back! His personal infestation of jain seems to be out of control, so he digs up Mr Crane (the titular Brass Man) and starts looking for another Dragon sphere. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. I think I'm going to be having a lot of fun with all these books in the very near future. Not in the same quality, mind you, but when we're dealing with huge AI-mindships and the whole Polity behaving badly, I had a LOT of great flashbacks. :) As a space-opera, I was constantly thinking about how this ranks up to Iain M. I will NOT say that this novel was as good as the others in terms of plot or twists, but the ambiance was pretty awesome. Oh, the bad guys get a LOT of time and they're pretty much entirely a Bond-Villain schtick. Cormac is great, too, and he definitely gets a powerup here, but mostly the novel is all about the bad guys and these two. Well, fortunately, the Brass Man, a robot built like a literal tank and so full of split personalities that he's almost become SANE, is a great character. Where's the character-driven stuff? They're now on a tech-race about to turn all the intelligences in the galaxy into greed-monsters inciting war on a REALLY huge scale. It may not seem that way because we're surrounded by more Ship and World-AIs than we can shake a stick at, Jain mushrooms infecting whole civilizations with super-high-tech hacking monstrosities (that are mycelium), androids, cyborgs, messed-up alien ecologies, and alien BDOs that aren't so dumb. In a lot of ways, this is primarily a character-driven novel.

Brass man neal asher