by Neal Asher
“The Clade that fired on the facility,” said Angel. “There will be no further attacks. Both the Polity and prador fleets are aware of the situation.”
“Good.” She really did not want to be climbing up that shaft when a hardfield generator at its top overloaded.
“There’s something else,” said Angel.
Reaching the base of the framework, she peered up at the hole, then looked round at the milling prador.
“Who is in charge now?”
“You are,” said one of them.
She nodded tightly, then pointed up. “That’s too narrow for you. Go back. You should be able to blast your way out the way we came in. Otherwise, if we survive, someone will unearth you.”
“We are to help you in any way,” said the prador, hesitantly.
“You can be no help now,” she replied. “Go.”
It took them a little while to get moving. They obviously didn’t like it, but she guessed they saw the logic of the situation. As they moved off, Cog came beside her and peered up. He had a bit of a crazy look to him. His burned arm had shed all its dead material to expose bloody ropes of muscle. She had to factor in, with what she could remember happened to injured hoopers, that he might be a bit unreliable. She turned to Angel.
“You said there was something else?”
He nodded. “The Harding black hole hit the accretion disc sun.”
“Shit!” she exclaimed. That had been out of her mind until now.
“And things have got really complicated,” Angel continued. “A U-space blister in the sun was opened by the black hole. A ship came out.”
“What?”
“It appears it was the Wheel’s plan all along to release this ship. It also seems that it is the Wheel’s aim for the weapons platforms to open fire on it.”
The two statements did not gel and she began to think hard. A sudden stabbing pain in her skull awoke her to the fact that she had just accessed her crystal and was running scenarios. She suddenly felt incredibly weak and, were it not for her suit, would have fallen. She leaned one gloved hand against a pillar of the framework and pulled back. She had to focus on the basic fact that if the Clade wanted it to happen then she needed to stop it. Trying to plumb the logic behind the actions of the swarm AI, and the Wheel, was something she must leave for now. Too much thinking could kill her. If she was going to die, she intended it to be when she had stopped those platforms.
Strength slowly returned. She stepped up onto a cross-strut, then inside the framework and began to climb. A moment later, Angel and Cog were with her, Angel moving rapidly ahead. She furtively checked out Cog. His arm looked drier and was functioning perfectly well. She could even see skin appearing here and there and the nubs of new fingernails at the ends of his fingers. But as he climbed, his eyes were open unnaturally wide. He had a twisted grin of concentration and his tongue was poking out the side of his mouth, its end developing a suspicious hollow.
“You’ll be able to keep it under control?” she asked.
He glanced at her, guiltily sucked his tongue back in, then said, “I’ve had a very long time to learn how to control it. I don’t have the inclination to go over the edge, like my brother, or like Trike.”
There it was again. She didn’t even know this Trike, yet, at the mention of his name, she felt a stab of panic. She felt something else too—a sense of connection—as if she could feel him moving closer to her and had touched his movement, his . . . power . . . his will.
“Is he strong?” she asked.
Cog gave her a puzzled look. It was after all a strange question. “What do you know about him?”
“All I know is that his wife was abducted by Angel and that you got her back.” She paused. “Had I all of my mind I would know more.”
They entered the shaft in the ceiling. Here the framework ended but the cutting machine that had made it had left deep grooves in the side that served as suitable handholds. Orlandine considered how, if she survived and this facility was still necessary, she would make access less easy. She had sent robots down here to install these frameworks, to raise the tunnelling machines to the ceiling. They should be removed, and these shafts should be smoothed out. But all this was perhaps irrelevant.
“Trike, just like my brother, is a man who maintains a facade of sanity,” said Cog. “In hoopers, when injured like I am now, that’s not a good thing. Most hoopers can regain their sanity and their human form. Those like Trike struggle to do so. There’s some kind of feedback with the virus . . . they can become monstrous . . . I don’t know why.”
Again her head ached as her thought processes ramped up, and again she had to repress them. She knew something about all this or, rather, she had known something about all this. She could only touch on the parts of it that remained in her organic brain. She had examined two prador the Spatterjay virus had mutated. Their changes had been radically altered by the Wheel so that, given time, they would have turned into Jain soldiers. She had also examined the virus very closely and in much detail. Not only did it carry the genomes of numerous life forms, including that of a squad of Jain soldiers; it also held quantum-processing crystals from those soldiers that multiplied along with the soldier’s genome.
“That’s because the virus contains elements of alien minds,” she said, groping for an answer without thinking too hard. “There is a connection. Alien mentalities are quantum stored in the virus and can influence its growth Maybe only minds of a certain kind can connect to those minds . . .”
“The minds are Jain?”
“Or Jain made.”
“Doesn’t bode well, then, for what’s happening out at the disc,” said Cog. “If the minds akin to the Jain are like Trike’s and my brother’s . . .”
“I would very much like to hear more about your brother,” Orlandine stated.
“Another time,” said Cog, waving a dismissive hand, then quickly moving on, “But you asked if Trike is strong. Well, I’ve seen his kind of change before, but not so intense, so concentrated.” He shook his head. “His body density, when we were aboard my ship, was . . . iron, and I don’t know what it is now. If he ever needed to be stopped, I don’t think anything less than one of your war drones could do it.” He glanced at her. “I fear him.”
“I do too,” said Orlandine, though why remained unclear to her.
“So how do we get through?” Angel asked from above.
He clung directly below the base of the hardfield generator. A brassy metal ring rimmed the top of the shaft, a foot and a half wide, and a curved surface closed it off. Only with a slight stab of pain did she visualize what lay beyond.
“You are both very strong,” she stated. “You tear out the ring. This will reveal the foamed insulation surrounding the generator. We go through that, about five feet, then you break the outer casing.”
“I see it,” said Angel. “I can deal with it.” He held out his hand and his fingers grew long and sharp, then blurred. He pushed them into the brassy metal with a high screaming whine. Glittering dust fell about them, then chunks of metal. He next stretched out one leg, doing a box splits right across the shaft, tore out the ring, and casually sliced it in half, dropping the pieces past them. His hands blurred again, and white foam insulation fell past. Soon he was hauling himself up beside the generator.
“Another dangerous individual,” Cog noted.
Orlandine let that go, and waited.
“Clear,” Angel called.
She climbed up into the space beside the generator. Angel was gone and she soon reached the hole he had cut in the outer casing and hauled herself after. Power feeds, optics, thermal convertors and hydraulic buffers made the generator chamber cramped. She wound her way through this to steps leading up, through another floor on which fusion reactors squatted amidst ducts, cables and pipes, like hornets’ nests amidst a tree canopy. She was then out onto another floor to the entrance of a shaft that Angel had reached. Here was a dropshaft that led straight to the surface.
“That will work?” asked Cog, coming up beside them.
A blank control panel stood to one side, but she had no idea how to work it. Of course, whenever she had come here before she had operated everything ahead of her mentally. In fact mentally, but without much conscious thought. She stared at the thing for a long moment, then reached down and turned her wrist ring, taking off one armoured glove. The palm of her bare hand against the panel activated it. She sighed, selected a number at random, touched it, and stepped towards the shaft. But Angel snapped out a hand and pulled her back.
“Me first.” He stepped in and the irised gravity field took him.
Frowning, Orlandine followed—his protectiveness was beginning to irritate her, not because it wasn’t necessary, but because it was. Stepping in, she felt the field take hold of her and accelerate her rapidly upwards. Passing brightly lit, glassy crystalline rooms, glinting with technology, she remembered her last time here. She had come to inspect the drive of Weapons Platform Mu and discovered that Earth Central had a spy lodged here. It seemed a lifetime ago now. Finally, she stepped out after Angel into a triangular room, one of six others in this drive’s hexagonal slice of the tower. Hearing the muted sounds of warfare, she wound her way through all the security hardware to the outer wall. The one-way mirror glass gave her a clear view across the facility and she felt a surge of anger at seeing the wreckage out there.
One of the towers was down in shattered ruin. A section of the wall was gone. Other towers had been damaged during the running fight— Clade units weaving between like fish in a reef, hunted by war drones. She transferred her attention to the nearest standing watch tower and saw the drone squatting there, unmoving, obviously shut down. Then she swung back just as Cog stepped from the dropshaft.
“Time to do this,” she said.
Closing her eyes, she actively sought access to her crystal and to the transceiver which was attached to it. Information began flooding in, query protocols, openings that were blank spaces effectively ending with question marks, demanding multiple digit, randomly altering codes. Her head ached abominably and suddenly she felt burning hot. Something crackled in her skull, back behind her sinuses, and she reached up to wipe blood dripping from her nose. Next, a hammer of data hit her. She was trying to read a thousand books at once, to gaze upon a thousand scenes—every sense demanded multiplication, and weird twisting data sets demanded input to senses she did not possess. Steady pain turned to crippling agony. A hand of force slapped her across the room and pinned her against a glass wall. From there she saw Angel convulsing and knew that an induction warfare beam had locked onto him. Cog staggered across the room, burning, smoke pluming from multiple impact points on his body.
No! I am Orlandine! she screamed in her mind.
Angel, breaking the hold the beam had on him, shot towards her and bounced off a hardfield, then he hurled himself back across the room. He snared Cog, and both of them went down into the dropshaft. She did not know if they could survive now this place had turned on them. Behind her she felt a softening as the glass decohered and opened a hole, then she was falling. It seemed she had been here before, but this time she had no Jain tech to protect her from the inevitable impact.
12
The U-jump missile is a game-changer. There is speculation that such missiles were an offshoot of technology developed by the alien weapons designer known as the Client during the prador/ human war. But we don’t know the date of the first test, just as the antecedents of a lot that comes out of ECS weapons development is not known. Certainly, it was produced after the war. It would have been used to crush the prador if it had been available during the conflict. The first known deployment of U-jump missiles occurred a century later, almost certainly because ECS wanted to develop a suitable defence before generally distributing the weapon. This defence is the bounce gate. Only during the war did we learn of the effect an operating runcible gate had upon a proximal U-space drive. This occurred when the prador seized a world that had an open runcible and whose AI had been destroyed before it could dispose of the gate. Fearing the prador might use the gate as a route of attack to the inner worlds of the Polity, ECS U-jumped an attack ship straight at the runcible. Rather than destroy it, the attack ship fell through, only to surface, travelling at close to light speed, out of another gate two hundred light years away. This was on the refugee transfer planetoid of Dereyeth, which no longer exists. Therefore, it was necessary, when developing bounce gates, to ensure that they could not connect to others. This was achieved by making them open coordinate gates—effectively a hole into U-space. But still, there is a danger when opening a hole into a continuum that it may yet be navigable by some intelligence. Because no runcible gate is one-way.
—Notes from her lecture “Modern Warfare” by E. B. S. Heinlein
TRIKE
Trike scrambled up the hill of wreckage and delightedly came upon the remains of one of the facility’s watchdogs. He picked up a disconnected leg and hefted it. The part of his mind which wasn’t wholly his own told him the thing was made of laminated diamond and alloy com- posite—the alloy being akin to prador hull armour. He swung it, bared his teeth and scrambled down the other side of the mound.
“Hey, strange human. I come!”
He glanced back. Brull was scrambling after him, a lot more agile on the wreckage than he was, despite having lost a leg or two. Trike just didn’t want to wait. She was ahead of him and up. She was . . .
Horror ground through him as he saw a human figure falling down the face of one of the towers. He froze, knowing he could not get there in time, and knowing with a sick twisting inside that he was seeing Orlandine. She hit bottom, raising a cloud of glittering fragments—glass debris. “They’re striking from orbit,” said Brull.
Not understanding what the prador meant, Trike turned to stare at him. Brull pointed with his remaining claw and, still not thinking clearly, Trike looked where he indicated. He saw Clade units weaving between the buildings and the back flash of high-intensity lasers locking on, the units disintegrating in lines of fire and molten metal. Then he saw the Clade smashing into the faces of buildings to get inside, or dropping hard— running for cover. He swung his attention back to where Orlandine had fallen and found himself reaching towards her, somehow. Then suddenly he was running, because this was not over.
He bounded over another mound of rubble. A Clade unit rose up beside him like a disturbed snake. He hit it hard with the hunk of claw and flipped it over. Brull’s Gatling cannon rattled and the thing jerked back through the air, shedding pieces of itself. It rose higher, perhaps instinctively, but fatally. A bar of fire cut through it from head to tail and a hot cavity blew open in the ground below it. Highly accurate railgun shot. It seemed other orbital weapons were now being deployed.
But ahead, the Clade was trying to close in. The units were using what cover they could and many were being hit from orbit, but they were drawing closer and closer to where a figure lay on the ground. Trike accelerated, almost flying as he ran. He swiped at another unit, the impact so hard its head left its body, which made an odd whirring sound and began to collapse in on itself. The chunk of claw was smoking, and it bent as Trike slammed it down on the head of another unit, using the force of that to drive his leap over a fallen girder, but losing grip on his makeshift weapon.
Danger above. Crawling down the face of the building from which Orlandine had fallen came four more of the things. He knew he couldn’t get to her in time. But then something big, all sharp edges, screamed overhead and crashed into them, carrying them straight through the shattered face of the building. Inside, defensive systems kicked off like one continuous rolling explosion. The praying mantis drone exploded out again, shedding pieces of Clade unit, then dropped hard, slamming into plasticrete just a hundred feet from Orlandine. From there it spat particle beams and lasers in every direction.
As Trike drew nearer, a line of shots cut across the ground in front of him. A warning? He just
kept on moving. The drone abruptly moved to put itself between him and Orlandine. It obviously didn’t want to kill him else it would be eating him up with a particle beam by now, but it was being protective. He didn’t slow, but turned his shoulder and rammed straight into it. The thing skidded back along the ground.
“Captain Trike,” it said. “Desist.”
It grasped him with its forelimbs, their sharp edges turned outwards. He shoved them apart again, reached up and grabbed it behind its neck, then turned and bashed its head down into the plasticrete. He stepped up onto its body, using it as a stepping stone, and leapt towards Orlandine. It twisted, horribly fast, and this time it did not turn its razor edges outwards as it swiped at him. A forelimb screeched across his chest, splitting his jacket and slicing his flesh. He snapped out a hand and caught it, the edge cutting into his palm. He then seized it with his other hand and brought it down hard on his knee, snapping it. As the drone staggered back, utterly baffled by its failure, he whirled to Orlandine.
Blood spattered the inside of her visor and ran out of her suit’s shoulder joints. The thing had buffered the impact, or she would be dead and probably in pieces now. Reaching down, he unclipped the helmet and carefully pulled it from her head. He then caught hold of her chin and the neck ring of the suit. The drone was back, looming over him, but dared do nothing for fear of injuring her further. Her eyes rolled and she finally focused on him.
“Trike,” she managed, blood spattering her face.
He couldn’t understand what he was feeling. He didn’t know this woman but felt something almost sexual, as though he wanted to be inside her, bond with her, be one with her. Without thinking, he leaned in and kissed her savagely. His triangular tongue went in hard. He felt it ripping through soft tissues, crunching up through cartilage and grinding into bone. The strange fibres in the end of it . . . he felt them stabbing out and spreading. Meanwhile he could also feel crawling and ripping all over his body. When he peered down at his hand he saw the brown and white veins wriggling like snakes from his skin, oozing over the neck ring, spreading from where he gripped her chin. They went into her like nails and her skin bubbled and bulged with their movement. He felt them spreading inside her—throughout her body.
