Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  She leapt from her sling and strode across the flight-deck.

  “Ella?” I called after her.

  “Let her go,” Karrie said.

  I slipped from my sling and followed Ella. “I’m suiting up and coming with you. You can’t go out there alone.”

  She disappeared through the hatch and descended the ladder.

  “Jesus, Ed. She’s a damned machine. She’ll be ten times more capable than you in any situation–”

  I knew the sense of Karrie’s worlds, but right then my heart was overriding my head. I slipped through the hatch.

  “Christ!” Karrie yelled after me. “You’re not going out there alone, dammit. I’m coming with you!”

  Five minutes later Karrie and I were suited up. I broke out three rifles from stores and handed them out. Ella moved towards the exterior hatch.

  I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “What about–” I began.

  “I don’t need a suit, Ed.”

  Behind me, Karrie snickered.

  Ella said, “We’ll move away from the ship, gain high ground. When the spiders show themselves…”

  We cycled through the airlock and stepped onto the buckled deck, to be greeted by a chiaroscuro panorama of black shadow and golden sun glare. The vista was disconcerting. The brain is soothed by order, neat lines and precise geometry, but the blow-out had rendered normality chaotic. What should have been the interior of a prime class cargo vessel was a blasted travesty of order, a haywire tangle of metal and machine parts. The spacer in me was troubled.

  Ella gestured, and I made out a twist of metal rising like a spiral staircase to a section of horizontal decking: a perfect vantage point.

  She took off, sprinting and leaping and covering a couple of hundred metres in about ten seconds. Karrie and I gave chase, using our thrusters to assist us over the uneven deck and up the jagged rise of metal. A minute later we crouched behind a scorched radiation baffle and stared back the way we had come.

  My ship sat directly below us like a contented toad. Five hundred metres away, the Interceptor perched daintily akimbo on thin magnetic stanchions, twinkling in the sunlight.

  As we watched, movement showed towards the rear of the Interceptor. A gaggle of spider-drones jetted from their ship and took cover behind scraps of metal.

  My heart thudded.

  “Did you see exactly how many left the ship?” I asked.

  Ella’s reply sounded tinny in my helmet. “I counted four. That leaves five in the ship. I’ll take out the four, then tackle the Interceptor.”

  Down below, a spider broke cover and jetted towards my ship, its domed carapace twinkling in the sunlight. In a couple of eye-blinks it reached A Long Way From Home.

  The spider landed on the side of my ship and clung on, one tentacle directed towards the viewscreen. I wondered if it was scanning for life…

  I glanced at Ella, gesturing at my rifle. She shook her head. “Don’t want them to know where we are. We’ll wait till the other three show themselves.”

  The first spider climbed across the skin of my ship. Karrie touched my arm, gesturing back towards the Interceptor. The other three spiders were breaking cover and jetting towards the first.

  Ella said, “I’ll take out one and two. You take number three. Karrie number four, okay? Fire when I fire.”

  Heart pounding even faster, I nodded. Karrie gave the thumbs up.

  I arranged myself on the edge of the deck, gazing down at the floating spiders.

  Ella lifted her rifle, aimed and fired. Two quick blasts took out the drone beside our ship and the leader of the follow-up party. I aimed at the third drone and squeezed off two rapid shots, surprised and elated as the spider exploded in a dazzling blast. Beside me, Karrie accounted for the spider bringing up the rear.

  Suddenly, all was stillness down below. Adrenalin coursed through me, bringing involuntary laughter to my lips.

  My elation was short-lived.

  Ella touched my arm and pointed. Another five spider drones jetted from the Interceptor and headed towards us.

  And now they knew where we were.

  The leading spider raised a tentacle and fired. A line of flechettes hosed towards us, missing Karrie’s head by half a metre and ricocheting off a metal spar next to my shoulder.

  Ella pushed herself away. I rolled, grabbed Karrie and applied vertical thrust. We shot into the air, earning a round of fire. A second later we thumped against what had been a bulkhead and I cut the thrusters, applied horizontal thrust, and sped off after Ella.

  We dodged through a crazy obstacle course of tortured starship, fleeing for our lives.

  Karrie and I might not have made it by ourselves, but Ella came back for us. One second she was nowhere to be seen, and the next she landed before us, grabbed our hands and took off towards a floating corridor. We passed within, jetting between flame-scorched walls.

  The corridor snaked for a hundred metres then turned at a right angle unplanned by the starship’s designers. We eased through a tight gap and found ourselves in a small observation nacelle. Ella looked around, checking for another way out. She found one: a rent in the far wall of the bubble-shaped chamber.

  I pulled myself towards the long, curving screen and gazed down on a sunlit scene of mangled starship, my heart thudding. Ella and Karrie floated beside me, staring out.

  “There,” Ella said, pointing. “There, there and there…”

  I made out four small, sunlit specks jetting their way through the wreckage, moving relentlessly towards us.

  Karrie said, “It’s as if they know exactly where we are.”

  “Impossible,” Ella replied. “They’re merely going on last observations and extrapolating.”

  “So what do we do now?” Karrie asked.

  “We circle back towards their ship. When we get there, we disable it and light out.”

  Ella’s long, black hair floated, dishevelled, about her perfect features. I wanted to reach out and stroke her cheek.

  Karrie said, “And how the hell do we do that – I mean, find where the ships are? I don’t know about you, but I’m lost.”

  “I know exactly where the ships are located,” Ella said.

  I stared through the screen. Four spider-drones were leaping through the debris towards us.

  “Where’s number five?” I said.

  “Maybe they left it guarding the ship,” Karrie said.

  “If so, then one spider will pose no threat,” Ella said. “Okay, let’s go.”

  She made for the slit in the nacelle, eased herself through, and disappeared. I followed, squeezing through the rent and turning to help Karrie.

  We were standing on a narrow ledge, staring at a vertiginous drop past what had been the ship’s reactor. Below, all that remained was a blackened cauldron, littered with charred wires and what might have been shattered skeletal fragments.

  Above us, two slabs of thickened metal provided a hidey-hole like an equals sign. Ella took my hand and leapt.

  We sailed through the intervening space, blinded as we came back into sunlight, and landed on the lower slab. I swam inside, eager to be away from the open end. Karrie caught up with us.

  Ahead, Ella stopped.

  Now we knew the whereabouts of the fifth spider.

  The spider leapt, caught Ella before she could move, and retreated with her into the shadows.

  Karrie was faster, and more accurate, than I could ever have been.

  She fired her laser and hit one of the spider’s standing tentacle. The spider tottered, giving Ella the opportunity to twist in its grip, raise her rifle and insert it into one of the drone’s cranial ports. She pulled the trigger. The resulting detonation sent her tumbling backwards.

  She fetched up in my arms. The front of her onepiece was scorched, showing burned flesh beneath. I glanced at the spider gyrating before us, limbs twitching. Karrie fired again and finished it off.

  “Thanks,” Ella said to Karrie. “I owe you one.”


  “No sweat.” Karrie sounded dazed, as if she couldn’t believe her own accuracy. I wondered if it had been a lucky strike – helped by the fact that she had not been overly bothered about hitting Ella at the same time.

  “Okay,” Ella said. “This way.”

  We followed her down a helter-skelter of twisted metal, emerging in a sunlit chamber minutes later. I recognised what must have been the dining hall decorated with assorted art-works, its walls slotted with horizontal observation screens.

  I took Ella and Karrie’s hands and jetted off across the void, fetching up against the far wall. We hung near a screen, gazing out.

  Karrie pointed, and I nodded. A kilometre away, partially obscured by tortured spars and floating bulkheads, I made out the squat bulk of A Long Way From Home, and beyond it the Interceptor.

  There was no sign of the pursuing spiders.

  Ella turned, holding onto the frame of the screen, and stared through. She showed no reaction to the burn across her drumskin-tight abdomen. Floating there, she looked like a troubled teenager treading water, her expression pulled into a frown.

  “What?” I said.

  She pointed through the viewscreen, to a blocky, blackened chamber floating before the fiery ball of Dzuba.

  “What about it?”

  She ignored my question and pointed across the hall at a corridor. “This way.”

  Confused, but trusting her, I took Ella’s hand, then Karrie’s, and applied horizontal thrust. We jetted across the hall towards the corridor, then pulled ourselves through the swing doors.

  Ella led the way along a series of corridors and passageways, twisted out of true by the blast. We were heading away from the ships.

  Seconds later the corridor ended abruptly, giving on to open space. Twenty metres away was the chamber Ella had indicated through the screen, connected to a floating corridor.

  We joined hands and jetted across the gap, then inserted ourselves into the umbilical and bobbed along the snaking corridor. Minutes later we came to a thick door marked: Limited Access. Authorised Personnel Only.

  The sliding door was ripped diagonally. Ella eased herself through the gap. Exchanging a glance with Karrie, I followed.

  We were in a long chamber, the entire left side of which had been torn away in the explosion. The chamber was open to the dazzling light of Dzuba, which illuminated a row of tanks along the length of the right-hand wall. I counted ten in all.

  I approached the first tank, peered through the shattered glass, and grimaced at the contents.

  The body was bloated, its nakedness swollen to gross proportions. He had been a young man, once. The expression on his face suggested he’d been conscious of his demise.

  I looked along the row of tanks. Most of them had been punctured and depressurised in the blow-out. I saw a tank whose screen was still in one piece, and jetted towards it. I peered in, shielding my eyes, and made out the contorted form of another human being. Whatever powered the tanks was still in operation: a strip-light illuminated the corpse’s tortured death mask.

  Ella was examining the last tank. “What the hell was this?” I asked.

  She stared at me, an odd expression in her eyes, and just shook her head.

  I couldn’t work it out. Cold sleep had been superseded decades ago, when the void was discovered. So why had the Mitsubishi-Tata combine been transporting corpsicles through space?

  Ella pressed her face against the glass and peered into the tank.

  “I always thought there was something strange about this ship,” she said. “Why did Mitsubishi leave it becalmed, why the scorched-earth policy? They sent in operatives to destroy the evidence. This chamber was originally closer to the core of the ship, but blast pushed it all the way out here. The operatives obviously assumed it’d been destroyed in the blow-out.”

  “How do you know all this?” Karrie asked.

  “I downloaded a classified file just before I absconded from the manufactory asteroid. The file contained encrypted information about the ship and its cargo.”

  I stared at her perfect face and indicated the tanked corpses. “They were illegally transporting colonists, right? Or ferrying criminals or…”

  She said nothing, just nudged past me and headed for the entrance. I had no option but to follow.

  For the next fifteen minutes we skirted the outer edges of the explosion. To our left, the fiery giant of Dzuba burned. To our right, somewhere in the tangled sphere of wreckage, five spider-drones continued their remorseless search.

  Ella came to a halt, clutching a girder, and signalled for us to join her. “The ships are down there,” she said, pointing. We peered over a sheared bulkhead and saw the two ships, less than a kay away. “Follow me.”

  There was still no sign of the spiders, and that made me jumpy. The drones were perfectly camouflaged in this realm of sunlight and silvery shards: they could be anywhere.

  Ella swarmed over the bulkhead and pushed herself from one piece of floating debris to the next, pausing between each push to scan ahead. Cautiously, we followed.

  We were half a kay from the ships when we came across the next spider-drone.

  Ella was leading the way, scaling an abbreviated sponson. Karrie went next, using her suit’s jets, and I brought up the rear. We came to the top, paused and looked ahead. A battlefield of assorted debris separated us from the ships.

  I actually saw the spider, perched on a blackened engine cowl five metres ahead and to our right. Its legs were retracted and it sat absolutely still, as innocent as a pepper pot. My gaze flicked over the drone, and only a fraction of a second later did I realise my mistake.

  But by that time it was too late.

  It waited until Ella was level with the spider, then struck like a mechanical cobra. A tentacle lashed out, snaring Ella. Karrie aimed her laser again, but this time she was too slow. The spider, clutching Ella, raised a second tentacle as quick as lightning and fired at Karrie.

  I yelled out loud as a flechette struck her face-plate.

  She tumbled head over heels, careering away from me, and I could only think that if a flechette had breached her face-plate…

  I looked back at Ella. She hit her captor with a karate chop, snapping its weapon’s tentacle, then raised her laser and – instead of firing again at point blank range – smashed the butt into the drone’s optical sensor.

  The drone released her, tentacles flailing, and she gave an expert karate kick. I watched the spider sail into space, impotently windmilling its limbs. Ella raised her laser, took aim and fired. The drone exploded, the beautiful bloom of its detonation quickly extinguished in the vacuum.

  A second later she dived, hit me in the midriff and hauled me into the cover of an engine block just as line of flechettes stitched the air where I’d been standing. She pulled me after her, stopping only when we were a good hundred metres from where we’d been ambushed.

  I looked around for Karrie. “Where – ?” I began.

  Ella pointed. “Look…”

  I peered through a briar patch of tangled circuitry to where she was pointing.

  “Oh, Christ…” I whispered.

  Fifty metres before us, the four remaining drones were hauling Karrie’s unconscious form towards the ships. Unconscious, I hoped – not dead.

  I attempted to reach her via the radio link, but she didn’t reply.

  I said, “What do they want with her?”

  Ella thought about it. “A bargaining chip?”

  “But that’d work only if Karrie were alive.”

  “She is. I am monitoring her suit’s metabolic read-outs. Karrie was knocked unconscious by the blast, but her suit retained its integrity. She’ll be okay.”

  I felt a wave of relief. “So… what do we do?”

  I stared through the wreckage. The drones had reached their ship, bearing Karrie like a trophy, and laid her on the buckled decking. Karrie lay very still, floating a metre above the deck.

  “Ed, make sure the spiders do
n’t catch sight of you, okay?”

  “What about you?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  But a second later she was gone – vanishing behind a jackstraw mess of metal-work – back the way we had come.

  I reckoned she was going to make a detour around the ships and somehow effect Karrie’s rescue. She had said she owed Karrie one, after all.

  I opened the radio link and told Ella to be careful, but she chose not to reply.

  I raised my head and stared down at the quartet of drones. They floated above the deck, surrounding Karrie’s bobbing form. They appeared to be discussing what to do next.

  I willed Ella to appear and annihilate the bastards single-handedly…

  I clung to the girder, floating in space, and I had never felt as helpless in all my long life.

  Fifteen minutes passed, thirty…

  One hour later I was beginning to think that the drones had caught Ella when I glimpsed movement a hundred metres ahead and to my left.

  A slight, nimble figure moved through the wreckage towards the decking where the ships sat. My heart surged, then sank. I could hardly bring myself to watch the fire-fight that was bound to ensue.

  Ella pushed herself from one chunk of floating debris to the next. As she kicked off, her momentum impelled the debris with motion, leaving an easily traceable pattern of wreckage swirling in her wake.

  And if I could see it, then so could the drones.

  The odd thing was, it seemed as if Ella wasn’t that concerned about being seen. I wondered if this was part of her master-plan, some tactic beyond my merely human cognitive capabilities.

  She picked her way through the wreckage towards the gathered drones, and minutes later appeared before them… and still I expected some last minute twist, some grand combative gesture that would render the spiders kaput.

  She pushed herself from her last place of cover and landed on the deck with a quick genuflection, as if curtsying to her enemies.

  And then she raised her hands into the air and gave herself up to their custody.

  I called out her name, cursing her stupidity. I tried to get through to her on the radio.

  Silence.