by Neal Asher
“One moment,” said Trike.
He walked over to one of the cars and peered at his reflection in the mirrored glass. It was very dirty and the image unclear.
“We cannot linger,” Brull stated.
Trike nodded, then stabbed his clawed fingers into the metal pillar beside the side window and levered the glass out. Luckily it was reinforced glass and did not shatter. Holding this, he moved to go after Brull, then stopped and stepped over to a pool left by the recent storm. He cleaned the glass in it with a clump of insulation he found, then, walking after the prador, inspected his face. Yes, he had changed.
His teeth were now those of a carnivore: yellow, tough and pointed. The interior of his much larger mouth was black and red, like some pit in hell, and he could open it wide enough to put his fist inside easily. His head had grown longer, and flatter on the top with a buzz of black hair. But it was also wider, resembling a post whose end had been spread upon being hammered into the ground. His nose had remained the same but out of proportion to his other changed features. His eyes looked small and piggy and mean, while his pointed ears had acquired a wavy frill down their backs. And those veins: brown and white and webbing his dark blue skin. Just, only just, he could recognize something of the Trike he had once been. He lowered the glass and hurried after Brull.
“So what’s happening to you?” asked the prador.
Trike shrugged. “You know what the Spatterjay virus does to its host. With me it is doing something more.” He didn’t mention that the course of his transformation had been changed by the addition of what he now recognized was the large clump of organic technology hitching a ride in his body.
Brull paused at a high fence around the junkyard, unnaturally still.
“I am not aware of the details of such changes,” he said.
“You mean you haven’t looked into what has been happening to you?” Trike enquired.
Brull whirled round, his feet tearing up the ground, and stabbed his claw to slam shut on Trike’s neck. “That is restricted knowledge!”
Trike reached up, inserted his hands between the two jaws and started pushing. The motors and hydraulics that had closed the claw began whining and he simply pushed it open. Brull swept it sideways, sending Trike stumbling, then brought the open mouth of a particle cannon to bear, pointed straight at his head. Reaching back with his free claw, he inserted it into the grip of a Gatling cannon fixed to his underside and aimed that on him too.
“The knowledge is not as restricted as you would suppose,” said Trike. He pointed off beyond the fence. “Do you want to kill me now, or would you rather save your ammunition for them?”
Brull turned his stalked eyes. Beyond the fence and over the fields, on the other side of the road, silvery objects were breaking into the sky. The Clade trapped below had found another way to the surface.
“Ah fuck,” said Brull, again demonstrating his firm command of Anglic.
He turned and swept a claw across, knocking the fence at an angle, then trampled it down as he began running.
“This way!”
Trike hesitated, not sure if he wanted to follow a creature that had threatened him. But he realized that if his knowledge had been so critical, Brull would—when he’d failed to cut him in half—have used his weapons. He broke into a run after the prador as it skidded on the surface of the nearby road and headed along it. They were now moving away from the city in a semi-agricultural area. Here and there houses with extensive gardens sat between fields of ever-corn, others scattered with low foliage and the bright pink globes of protein gourds. Below the Clade units, a harvester rumbled through the corn, striding on spindly legs and combing off the loose seed heads—its programming disregarding the chaos all around.
“Why are we running?” Trike called.
“Just run,” said Brull.
It seemed to him they would do just as well facing the Clade here as anywhere else. Even so, as he ran he scanned his surroundings for something to use as a weapon, damning the fact he’d lost his machete. He slowed, spotting a heavy wooden post, but what would that do against a Clade unit? Anyway, it seemed that his hands were a more effective weapon now. Only then did he notice that he had retained the sheet of mirror glass under his arm. He saw no reason to abandon it.
The glittering swarm swirled above the harvester and then, for no particular reason, a few of them shot down and ripped through the thing, shattering its main body. The machine collapsed, trailing smoke and fire into the field. Such pointless destruction stirred some of Trike’s old anger and he wanted the fucking things here. But the swarm just continued to swirl. Surely the units had seen Brull and him by now? What were they waiting for?
The road dipped down into a valley lined with tea oaks and humped over a wide slow-moving river. Before heading downslope, Brull skidded to a halt. A launcher folded out from the side of his under-carapace— its frame loaded with missiles. Spitting a tail of fire, one of them shot out straight towards the swarm. Trike tracked its progress. It detonated right in the middle of the units, its hot flash momentarily blinding him and the globular explosion slamming out. Antimatter, he realized, as the blast wave flattened and set the crops below smoking. He saw Clade units falling, the rest widely scattered by the blast, and felt some objection in himself from that other, because apparently the prador were not meant to have antimatter weapons here. As the Clade regained control of themselves they spread out further, doubtless to make a less compact target. Then they accelerated towards the road.
“Well that got their attention!” Trike shouted as the blast wave filled the air around them with smouldering straw. But Brull had already turned away and was running at full pelt down the hill.
The Clade units came in fast. Seeing one hurtling straight for him, Trike paused, took the mirror glass from under his arm, and with all the force he could muster, skimmed the glass at it. The sheet left his hand with a sonic crack and struck the unit right in its face, shattering. Still, the unit tumbled out of the sky trailing sparks and hit the road beside him. He grinned, then ran over to it as it tried to rise, stamped down on its head and grabbed its thrashing tail. Another came, streaking along the road behind him. He raised his foot then whipped the first unit around, using it as a club. Head-to-head impact and the second went down while the first now hung limp. But it was heavy and made of very tough metal. Trike had found his weapon.
Running down after Brull, he flinched as a particle beam crackled just over his shoulder. Then the chainsaw buzz of a Gatling cannon filled the air with impacts and a rain of hot metal fragments. Clade were everywhere, while the prador was covering him from the bridge. Why this spot? Trike wondered, as further units swept in from every direction. His answer, as he ducked the whip of a tail and shoulder-rolled onto the bridge, shot up out of the waters on either side.
Two prador and some other object shed water as they emerged and opened fire. Brull used more of his missiles, the hot flash of their detonations making even Trike’s skin smoke at such close quarters. Gatling cannons crackled and hammered, particle beams scored the air like hot irons going into butter. But that other object was the most effective. Lashing with his makeshift club, mainly to keep units off Brull’s back, Trike eyed it. The vaguely spherical object possessed bulky collections of missile launchers, with cannons on either side, and it hammered at the Clade continuously. He felt an objection from that other again, as well as a flash of curiosity for how the enclave prador had managed to smuggle in one of their war drones. He recognized the source of these aberrant thoughts now, and the nature of the organic technology that occupied him. But this was a small concern as a moment later a flood of shifting metal surrounded him.
The attack lifted him from the ground, where he continued to fight the writhing mass. Spiked tails slammed at his body, while sliding, jointed bodies wrapped his limbs and torso, trying to crush through them. A blast ensued, and he saw Brull and the bridge sliding into the river. The prador drone tumbled past, with Clad
e crawling all over its surface. Suddenly it righted and turned, opening fire on one of its own—the Clade had it. Trike felt pain as spiked tails converged by his neck, digging into his rigidly hard flesh. He struck out in a frenzy, crushing heads, tearing at the bodies gripping him. Again he glimpsed the battle: one prador with the top half of its armour ripped away, something pink and speckled black struggling inside as Clade tore it apart. A missile streaked up from the river and hit the drone, a massive close blast hurling him and Clade through the air, his skin burning.
And he fell. He hit the riverbank where steaming water lapped. Clade swarmed above, a disc-like cloud of them turning, then suddenly they just peeled off and headed away. He hauled himself up, debris falling about him and smoke boiling all around from the burning river valley. Over on the other side of the river, he could see part of the drone like the charred half of some huge egg shell. Further along was one of the prador, its armour smoking, its head turret and limbs missing on one side. That wasn’t the one he had seen earlier, with its shell opened out, which meant the two that had waited in ambush here were down. Had Brull survived?
He returned his attention to the river and it was almost without surprise that he saw two stalked eyes rise up out of the water and swivel to check things out. Next, pushing a wave ahead of him, Brull clambered out onto the bank.
“We were lucky,” he said.
Trike stared at him, wondering if the prador had just lost his grip on Anglic.
10
Underspace is confusing. Our ability to travel from one point in realspace to another, instantaneously, by submerging our ships into U-space like submarines, is blithely explained by the contention that U-space is a continuum which does not possess the dimensions of time or distance. It is a place divorced from our universe, and it is possible to enter or thereafter exit it at any point or time in our universe. However, this is clearly untrue. There are time delays in U-space that may or may not relate to the realspace distance travelled. There are energy debts to be paid related to the distance travelled. These debts ramp up steeply if any attempt is made to time travel, and are paid for by either massive photonic eruptions or entropy capable of extinguishing stars. The gravity wells of astronomical objects in the real can be detected in U-space, and there is a direct relation to our gravity maps. Certain technologies that reorganize matter at pico-scopic levels create readable signatures. Currents,flows and even storms are evident too, so that sometimes a shorter distance in our universe is more difficult (in terms of expenditure of energy or time) to circumvent through U-space than a longer one. Underspace interference emitters can stir up that continuum to make travel in it difficult or impossible. Their effect is a local one: if a USER is deployed in one star system, travel in U-space is stopped there but not elsewhere. This does not tie up with the idea that U-space is devoid of the dimension of distance. It can therefore be argued that U-space is a continuum intimately related to our own, not one that is divorced from it. This also indicates that our understanding of U-space, and the mechanisms we use to travel through it, are at the level of a prehistoric man’s understanding of fluid dynamics and marine engineering when he hollows out a log to float on a river.
—from How It Is by Gordon
KNOBBLER
Knobbier reviewed the nasty situation. The lethally dangerous Clade had to be stopped. An orbital strike from above could turn this area into an inferno at any moment, and something which could be very dangerous to all sentient creatures in this part of the galaxy was happening here and at the accretion disc. But he was happy. He was home.
“Dug in like a tick on a porcupine’s arse,” said Cutter, squatting beside him on a slab of rock overlooking the Ghost Drive Facility.
“Been checking your wartime quote file?” Knobbler enquired.
“A paraphrase really—I like to be original.”
“Dug in the Clade may be, but not trying to enter,” Knobbler observed.
He and his companion war and assassin drones had been hitting the main swarm all the way from the city to out here. There had been losses—ten old comrades were dead, while a further twenty-three were wrecked. These were recoverable somewhere behind, and grouching about being taken out of the fight. Meanwhile, the count of Clade units had dropped by two hundred and fifty-seven. Still, over two thousand of the fuckers were here, while another eighty or more were on their way from a fight with enclave prador a few miles back.
“So what’s the plan now?” asked Cutter.
With a sound like knives running over rock, the big mantis drone groomed himself. Using his sharp-edged limbs, he had taken out at least twenty units, but the tough Clade bodies had taken their toll. He was blunt. The laminar diamond configuration of his edges enabled them to self-sharpen—peeling off layers like a cat’s claws—but he needed to accelerate the process which gave him an edge.
“We can’t go heavy on them now,” said Knobbler.
In fact, there were few places they had been able to deploy anything big. Over the city, they would have caused casualties in the population below. On the route here, the Clade had clumped up twice and paid the price. And now, the danger of either damaging the facility or having its defences power up to target them prevented the drones getting “heavy.” Hence, Knobbler had called a halt when the Clade went to ground before actually entering the place.
The ground around the facility lay clear of vegetation and rocks for half a mile. The facility would instantly assess and react to anything entering this kill zone without the correct codes. Visitors would be given ample warning of the penalty for moving closer. The drones, like giant robber crabs squatting atop the guard towers, were ready to react unfavourably if any did. Their reaction would be triggered about ten feet inside the cleared area—the smoking remains of two Clade units down there were a practical reminder of this.
The Clade, after its initial probe, had dropped down into the trees and boulders outside the clearing, all surrounding the facility. Knobbler’s own probe was a war drone fashioned in the shape of a blued metal electric eel, and whose suicidal bent made it perfect for the task. It now lay in two halves on the slope below, running through a list of expletives from every human language, while trying to draw its two halves together by casting spider-silk fibres.
“So we just sit and watch?” Cutter suggested.
Knobbler rumbled round and stabbed a tentacle towards the horizon where the approaching Clade units were visible. “I will ponder on the matter,” he said. “Meanwhile, you take some of the boys and deal with them.”
“Okay.” Cutter engaged grav, then complemented that by using his wings to take him into the air, summoning other drones as he went. Six rose up out of the surrounding landscape: the Clam, a couple of glittering flatworms; a thing like a big carp with belly tentacles, but with such heavy armour it only slightly resembled a Spatterjay Molly carp; a giant yellow scorpion fly; and another that was similar to a dragonfly larva. Cutter, now closing his wings, fired up the fusion engine in his tail. They assembled behind him and shot off. Knobbler swivelled back to face the facility, concentrating on what lay ahead of him.
The Clade was managing to defeat most scanning, but high-frequency ground radar had picked up disturbances. It seemed that some units were edging out towards Knobbler and his drones. He had no doubt that many remained to ensure nothing got into the facility, but these others, he suspected, were about to try something new. In a straight face-to- face fight in the air, Knobbler and his crew mangled them, so they were resorting to their favourite tactic: being sneaky.
“Bludgeon?” Knobbler enquired.
Cutter’s companion, their expert in all things warfare-related in the virtual and informational world, had sited himself on the lee of the hill. Here he oversaw some alterations Tinker—a multi-limbed creature that resembled nothing more than an unlikely collection of limbs—was making to Worm. This last drone, a burrower like a giant centipede but with paddle-like, digging limbs down its sides and pincers to the fore
, had once liked pulling prador underground to dismember them.
“Nearly ready,” Bludgeon replied.
Worm’s upgraded sensorium should give them a clearer idea of the Clade’s intent, along with more precise location data. Knobbler watched Tinker’s progress for a little longer, before swinging his attention back to Cutter and his comrades as they fell towards the approaching Clade. The Clam began disintegrating Clade units with pulses of railgun fire as the two forces closed on each other. They met a moment later with an impact audible from where Knobbler squatted. He saw Cutter slicing and snatching. The scorpion fly slammed home its collimated diamond sting loaded with destructive nanites, and the Molly carp reached out to grab and crush. However, they were in the battle only briefly before the rest of the units dropped out of the sky and hit the ground, burrowing in.
“Ready,” Bludgeon informed him.
Worm reared up then speared down. His sharp, zero-friction head and pincers went in easily and, with his paddle legs fountaining earth out behind him, he rapidly disappeared. Ten feet under within just a minute, he travelled towards the Clade lines. Soon after, his scanning routines and the scanning nodes he had dropped began giving good feedback to complement what was coming from ground radar. Knobbler constructed a 3D image in his mind. Where Worm had gone, the soil lay twenty feet deep above bedrock. Nowhere could Knobbler see the Clade, until he detected motion actually down on the bedrock. They had moved surprisingly fast. This looked like it might be a—
Fifty feet ahead, a twisted old tree exploded into the air, with Worm shooting sideways out of the blast, pursued by five Clade units.
