by Neal Asher
‘I understand that all the Jain technology here is dying,’ he began.
‘So it would seem.’
‘Do you require anything more of us?’
Cormac considered that for a long moment, as it seemed evident that the two of them now wanted to be on their way. The image files and other evidence Cherub had provided had been very useful, and he was loath to let such a vital witness go, but really he could think of no reason now to detain them.
He nodded. ‘You’ve both been very helpful.’
Carlton gestured over to his right. ‘Our home lies about ten miles from here. We would like to head back there now, to see what can be salvaged…start putting things back together again.’
‘Your companion?’ Cormac nodded towards the woman. Despite the loss of her arm, she now seemed in rude health after Smith’s ministrations. She just looked lost and miserable.
‘Jeeder will come with us,’ said Carlton. ‘Her lover and many of her friends are all dead.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘There is, I believe, an ECS Rescue ship on its way.’
‘There is.’
‘They will help, I’m sure, but meanwhile we can’t just sit in the ruins and wait.’
‘I understand,’ said Cormac.
The woman now came down the ramp to join the other two. ‘Thanks for saving my life,’ she said, though she did not sound entirely sure about it.
‘Yes, thank you,’ echoed both Carlton and Cherub.
Cormac watched the three set off. He could have taken them to their home but suspected they wanted to make the break now and rediscover their independence. The people of this world, apparently, had always been big on independence.
‘So what are we to do now, boss?’ enquired Arach.
Cormac looked round at his companions: Arach squatting at Smith’s feet like a nightmare pet, with Scar standing to one side, essentially unknowable. He wasn’t sure how to answer, but King whispered a reply in his ear.
‘I’ve been ordered to join ECS forces who are now attacking fifty wormships that have launched an assault on the world of Ramone.’
‘Well, that’s a ship-to-ship fight so we won’t be much help there.’
‘I’ve questioned the orders and they have been confirmed.’
‘Really?’ Cormac was puzzled to be diverted away like this but had to assume that Jerusalem knew what it was doing.
King continued, ‘There has been a wormship landing on Ramone. You are to liaise with the commander of groundside defence of Megapolis Transheim. Apparently your mission will be to capture a legate.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Ours is not to reason why—’
‘Yeah, no need to go on.’
‘It seems,’ Cormac now replied to Smith, ‘that we’re just about to get bloody.’
Once the two spheres had again dropped into U-space, Dragon retreated into itself and refused to communicate. Mika tried accessing the memstore recounting the Atheter story but found it kept knocking her out of the circuit…almost like it resented her intrusion. Instead, she returned her attention to the data being collected by the probes deep inside Dragon. As she had noted before, there was something going on here that went beyond Dragon’s control of its U-space engines.
Her screen now showed the shifting of large amounts of material, massive energy surges and a great deal of computing…of thinking. Perhaps Dragon was busy doing things it felt constrained from doing while it was under direct Polity observation. The alien entity had, after all, broken its Maker programming and was now free to do and be whatever it wanted, but what did it want? She began running analyses to try and make some sense out of all she was seeing. After a few hours she had worked out that Dragon was building numerous additional layers of skin below its scales–layers of superconducting meshes and all sorts of complex metallic compounds–and that it was also constructing large tubes that ported at the surface all about its equator. That was as far as she got in her quest when abruptly the entity surfaced to the real.
‘Are we at our destination?’ she asked.
There came no reply. However, the journey till now could not have taken them that far, and somehow she felt that Dragon’s journey would be a long one. Exterior view was still available, but all she could see was starflecked space and the other Dragon sphere rising over a scaled horizon. Turning the scanners outwards rewarded her with more detail. They were in orbit about a dead sun: there were no planets here, just a massive ring of asteroidal debris. The scanners revealed that the two spheres were closing in on an asteroid shaped like a mile-long chicken egg with a large chunk excised from one side. The images were not particularly clear, for this asteroid lay on the other side of her own Dragon sphere and the scanning equipment had been designed to scan the sphere itself rather than anything beyond it.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
Still nothing.
‘Well, screw you,’ she said. ‘If you won’t tell me, then I’ll just take a look.’
She had hoped this at least would elicit some response, since the idea of taking her intership craft out did not appeal to her, especially since last time it had nearly resulted in her death. However, she was uncharacteristically feeling pissed off and stubborn so, closing up her suit, she headed for the exit and was soon outside.
Halfway over to her craft she suddenly wished she’d stayed safely inside, for, just a few paces out from her, she glimpsed a flicker of movement. Concentrating her gaze she watched a hemisphere of smoke, or dust, expand and disperse. At its central point, on the surface, she saw one large scale with a glowing crater in it measuring about a foot across. A line of similar hemispheres then bloomed in the distance. Meteor activity. Mika knew that even something the size of a sand grain, travelling at the kind of speeds materials could attain in vacuum, might easily cut her in half. She had two choices now, get quickly into the intership craft, which, like all Polity craft, would have some kind of anti-meteor laser, or return to the unit, which would have even better defences. She chose the craft.
Even as she launched from Dragon’s surface, a screen display warned her, ‘Travel at present is inadvisable due to increased meteor activity.’ A few tens of yards up from the surface something puffed to dust over to one side of her craft, then she glimpsed the green bar of a laser picked out by that same dust. She tried to ignore it and concentrate on flying the craft to a point where she could gain a better view. As a precaution she avoided the area directly opposite the other sphere, since there lay the gravity phenomenon that kept the two spheres linked together like barbells. Suddenly it felt as if the craft’s steering had failed for now it seemed to be wobbling its way through vacuum. She closed her eyes for a moment and then, when she reopened them, focused only on the instruments before her. No variation in her vector. Now looking down, she noticed the Dragonscape was heaving like the torso of a woman in labour.
Soon the asteroid rose into view, but it took a moment for her to realize why it seemed so familiar. Then she saw it looked a little like Deimos–though of course this object was bare of the mining facilities that covered that moon of Mars. She swung her craft high and, seeing the gap between Dragon and the asteroid was still closing, positioned herself for a better view of the contact point. Some frustrating work with the controls finally enabled her to start autopilot, the craft maintaining its position relative to her own Dragon sphere’s centre point. When she eventually looked up, what seemed like a shadow was now growing at the contact point, until she eventually discerned an asterisk-shaped break in Dragon’s surface. As she watched, the legs of this thing extended and extended to cover nearly one full hemisphere of Dragon, then great blades of thick skin began to fold out like the sepals of a flower. From this cavity rose a massive trunk, hundreds of yards wide, tangled all over with pseudopods. Mika had seen this thing before when the two Dragon spheres had connected to share their knowledge–before trying to kill each other. The sight frightened and awed her.
Nearly reaching the aster
oid, the trunk abruptly divided at its end into six enormous branches. The sight reminded her of a Terran tubeworm spreading its fronds to feed, and she thought maybe that wasn’t such a bad analogy. These six branches eventually closed on the asteroid and began drawing it in. Mika returned her attention to Dragon itself, and saw that the cavity was now about a mile wide. She could just see inside, where massive ribs rimmed a huge chamber like the ridging inside a reptile’s gullet. There were snakish things moving there, and great veined organs pulsing and shivering. Gleams of blue and red were scattered throughout it, like the lights inside the huge bay of some industrial ship. Yet this cavity still did not seem big enough to swallow the entire rock but, even as she watched, it shuddered and expanded further, then the surface of Dragon rippled as the whole entity expanded too.
Dragon drew the asteroid right inside itself, where bands of red flesh swiftly drew over it and things like living drill rigs, uncoiling masses of umbilici as they descended, dropped to the rock’s surface. The sepals closed across, but they did not meet each other. Even while Mika watched, pseudopods began sprouting around the edges of the star-shaped cavity and extended themselves across the intervening gap, joining together like webs cast by a spider, gradually stitching it all together. Then her craft accelerated. Dragon was moving again–that centre point had shifted.
Over the next hour she watched as skin was stretched and drawn together, leaving a star-shaped hole some hundreds of yards across. After a further hour, debris began geysering out from this aperture: boulders, flakes of rock at least a yard wide, amid lumps of conglomerate and dust. Dragon excrement. A little while after witnessing this, she noticed another asteroid drawing near, then gradually her view of that was occluded by the other sphere. A rock each then.
‘So you stopped off for lunch then,’ she commented, as a giggle ejected itself from somewhere below her sternum.
The hauler Clarence Bishop was a brick-shaped craft a mile long, most of its hull taken up by a series of massive square cargo doors. To the rear, separated from the bulk of the ship by bubble-metal pylons, was a massive ion drive. Manoeuvring thrusters jutted from the main body wherever they would not interfere with the smooth opening of the cargo doors. In a small rear hold sat a U-space engine added fifty years before, when the ship’s captain, Hieronymus Janger, had accrued enough wealth to move from insystem to interstellar hauling. In such a large ship one would have expected a large complement of crew, but most of the vessel was taken up by numerous holds packed full of cargo. Janger himself and a bolshy AI called Clarence were the only occupants.
‘I think we’ve been here before,’ remarked Janger.
The ship AI’s remote was a Golem chassis clad in syntheskin up to the neck, above which a gleaming skull was exposed but with the rear of its cranium missing, and from there optics sprouted, trailing across the floor to plug into a nearby console. The Golem placed the queen back down on the board and tentatively moved a finger across to tap it on a castle.
‘Approximately thirty-two years, seven months, two days, fourteen hours, twenty-two minutes ago, as I recollect.’
‘I thought you just said “approximately”.’
‘Yes, I didn’t count the seconds.’
‘Smart arse.’
The Golem withdrew its fingers from the chess piece and scratched its metal chin. ‘If you want me to play to my fullest capacity, I’ll do so. However, the last time I did that, you discharged the chess set through the airlock and got the yahtzee out again.’
Janger sighed. It had always been a source of annoyance to him that Clarence needed to handicap itself so as not to thrash him at every game. Also, though he vaguely recollected a game quite similar to this, he wasn’t sure who had won on that occasion. Of course Clarence, if it allowed itself, would remember every detail. He glanced across at the storage cabinets lining the living area and wondered if now might be a good time to get the yahtzee out, or even the playing cards, but then Clarence, working through this Golem, possessed the perfect poker face. Just at that moment the big hauler seemed to lurch underneath him, and he experienced that definite feeling of transition that told him the ship had just come out of U-space, and in this case none too gently.
‘That damned U-engine shouldn’t need servicing for another twenty years,’ he grumbled.
‘Nothing wrong with the engine,’ Clarence replied.
The ship shuddered massively, enough to skitter some of the chess pieces across the board and topple a king onto the floor.
‘Give me visual,’ said Janger, stooping to recover the chess piece. He felt a sudden crawling sensation up his spine. As he understood it, there was something occurring near the Line, but that was far from here. Surely he was well out of it?
‘Pirates?’ he suggested, only half joking.
‘I am somewhat bewildered,’ Clarence confessed.
A virtual screen cut down from the ceiling, right through the living accommodation, so it now seemed as if half the entire ship had been sheered off at that point and he was now gazing straight out into vacuum.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
There was something sitting out there, something massive: a pentagonal frame structure. The space the pentagon enclosed was one the Clarence Bishop could easily pass through, for the structure was some six miles across.
‘It’s a war runcible,’ Clarence observed.
‘It’s a fucking what?’
‘They started building such devices towards the end of the war for transporting things not equipped with their own U-space drive–fleets of ships, war drones and weapons. That would have saved on the manufacture of such drives. There was even talk of using the runcibles as accelerator weapons too.’
‘Uh?’
‘Perhaps you recollect hearing about the Trajeen incident.’
‘Chucking moons about?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Okay, so what is it doing here now, and how come it knocked us out of U-space?’
‘Anyone in possession of such a device would have no problem causing sufficient underspace interference to knock a ship into the real. Why it is here and why it has targeted us, I can only speculate.’
‘Speculate then.’
‘Pirates,’ the ship AI replied.
‘We’ve got lasers,’ said Janger.
‘They’ve got particle cannons, rail-guns, multispectrum EM weapons. Frankly, they could turn this ship into a wisp of vapour in less than a second.’
‘So resistance is futile.’
‘In my estimation, yes.’
The view now swung round and Janger observed some sort of spaceship docked alongside his own vessel. It looked fairly modern: a sleek craft with a pincer grab extending from its nose. Even as he watched, vapour puffed out from below it as one of the Clarence Bishop’s massive cargo doors began opening.
‘I take it you’re recording all this, and transmitting it?’ Janger enquired.
‘I’m recording it, but the U-space disturbances are preventing me from sending out a distress call.’
‘Right…give me an internal view of that hold.’
A rectangular frame drew itself into existence in the virtual screen, blanked for a moment, then as the camera adjusted light amplification, an image slowly resolved of a huge darkened hold. The space was packed with crates and large oddly shaped objects covered in crash-foam, all of them suspended in a quadrate scaffold. Janger detected movement and the camera swung to track it, then the view flickered and changed as another camera picked up that same movement from a different point of view.
‘Um,’ said Janger, not quite sure exactly what to make of what he was seeing.
‘Mantis religiosa,’ said Clarence.
‘Uh?’
‘The praying mantis–though this one appears to be fashioned of metal and is about eight feet long. I would suggest that what we are seeing here is an independent drone and, considering where it came from, that means a war drone that once fought the Prador.’
‘What’s it doing, anyway?’ Janger wondered.
‘Stealing our cargo?’ Clarence suggested.
The mantis drone appeared to be all sharp edges, which Janger could now see were perfect for cutting through the webbing security straps. Within a moment it had released a crate from the supporting scaffold and sent it drifting along towards the hold door. The camera followed the crate’s progress to where a horrifying-looking beetle of some kind diverted its course slightly, to another point where it was then fielded by what looked like a ten-foot-long aluminium scorpion. Panning back, Janger now saw a whole line of crates had already been set on this course.
But what could he do? He was outgunned by the war runcible and outgunned by those things stealing his cargo. He wondered briefly what his insurance position on this loss would be.
‘What are they stealing?’ he asked.
‘The components of a cargo runcible.’
‘What the hell do they need a cargo runcible for, when they’ve got that massive thing out there?’
‘A runcible is both the entrance and exit of a tunnel, but employing it to end up in exactly the same place might not be very useful. Beyond that I have no idea,’ replied Clarence. ‘By the way, the airlock into this living accommodation is now being used.’
‘And you didn’t stop that?’
‘I am impotent now. Something has seized control of me. That we can even look into the hold is either because we have been allowed to, or because the cameras were overlooked as being of little importance.’
Janger pushed his chair back, got up and rushed forward, straight through the virtual screen. On the other side of it he skidded to a halt by a row of lockers and yanked one open. From inside he pulled out a pulse-rifle, then an energy canister which he inserted into the gun’s stock. The rifle whined up to charge, yet showed a zero on its digital display. Janger swore and pulled out a second container, which clipped in place underneath the barrel. The display immediately shot up to 150.
But what now?
