Heart of Granite

by James Barclay

  Valera closed fast, her upgraded drake allowing her to make the minute adjustments in the crowded battle zone to keep her right on them. Abruptly the two enemies split, abandoning their pursuit, and Valera and Gurney broke smoothly, a sharp turn and climb putting theminto their target’s slipstreams.

  ‘Skipper, you’ve got company.’ said Nevant. ‘Heading in on your seven.’

  ‘I’ll break off,’ said Gurney.

  ‘Negative,’ said Valera. ‘I’ve got these guys.’

  She nicked left and right past drakes flying across her path, saw her target dive left to avoid a collision and calculated an intercept that her drake followed to perfection. She pulled in a wing, used the other as a drag and turned on a pebble, suggesting tight fire. The enemy raced below her, catching harsh flame across its wings. They blistered and tore, sending it hurtling out of control to smash into another drake, a Heart drake.

  ‘Shit,’ she spat. ‘Gur-X, report.’

  ‘Target down,’ he said. ‘Coming back to you.’

  ‘You’ve still got two on your six,’ said Nevant. ‘Am in pursuit with XavX.’

  Valera angled sharply up, turned on her tail and powered back down; the drakes hunting her emerged from a confusion of flyers. They had no chance to avoid her. She picked one and her drake’s head snaked out and caught the oncoming drake on the top of the skull. Wings tight, Valera turned a sharp half-roll, dragging the enemy’s head around to snap its neck. She imagined force and her drake crushed its skull before letting it drop.

  Her drake exulted, spitting fragments from its mouth and they spun in the air, momentarily unbalanced as the Maf drake’s weight dropped away, before powering upwards.

  ‘Nev-X report.’

  ‘The other one’s escap . .. oh no it hasn’t. Ouch! Hot pouch, courtesy of Gurney.’

  Valera smiled. ‘Good work, C-One. Reform at a thousand on my marker. Let’s assess.’

  She climbed past the battle and into clear air, seeing almost three hundred drakes still engaged in high velocity combat below her. The sand density was dropping rapidly. Light was flooding across the desert and she could see both the Heart of Granite close by and there, down to the south-south-west, the squatter Maputo fifty kilometres away.

  Her emergency broadcast com crackled and fizzed and she caught snatches of a voice repeating a message.

  ‘Unknown contact on channel alpha one alpha. Identify yourself.’

  The voice spoke again. Different words this time and the odd one was clear enough. Valera swore, sure that she was understanding but hardly believing it.

  ‘Captain Meyer, it’s Valera Orin. Meyer, is that you?’

  Chapter 37

  She stabbed me. She stabbed me a thousand times and poured ice into my veins. Apparently that’s how a drake demonstrates affection.

  Maximus Halloran.

  Max’s eyes opened on the shifting dark of the pouch encasing him. He could feel some residual pain, echoes of agony. It still felt like he was pierced in more places than he had places but the ice-bound agony of it in his veins and the sheeting hot pain in his head had both faded.

  ‘We’re alive,’ said Max.

  His voice caused them to shift . . . no, caused Martha to shift . . . no. Max stilled completely while he decided whether to believe what had just happened. He had felt the sand beneath the tail when it moved. He had felt the dried faeces shift on drake scales.

  Max rolled his shoulders, slowly and gently. Their wing shoulders brushed against the shifting dry matter, which felt like it was cracking and powdery.

  ‘Whoa that’s . .. weird.’

  He pushed out with his mind but instantly knew he didn’t have to. This wasn’t yesterday or the day before and the old ways were obsolete. She was all around him . . . just there. And where there should have been fear Max felt exhilaration and strength. Martha wasn’t at peace, though. Images began to tumble through his mind: the HoG, the flight deck, the pen, the food tubes.

  We have to go home, said Max.

  More imagery followed, some obviously borrowed from his memory: Kirby, Landfill, Dylan and Diana, Hewitt with his swollen face.

  But we’re dead if we don’t go back, aren’t we?

  Martha shifted again and Max felt their hiding place cracking. Warmth suffused him and an image of Anna-Beth came to him. Then Kullani, the skipper, Grim, Monts . . .

  We have to go home, princess. Now we’re alive, we don’t have a choice, do we?

  Sensations of muscle tension and the building of power chased themselves through Max. The piercings across his body tingled, energy coursed his system and they exploded from the dried behemoth faeces and drove straight up, wings beating strongly, head stretched towards the blue.

  They turned towards the rising sun, the air already hot, the growing warmth in their scales glorious. The wind across their body was cool and flecked with sand and dust, the faint rippling of membrane as it flowed around their wings and fled down their tail was an endless thrill.

  They banked and rolled, dove and climbed; every move perfect, every tiny adjustment sheer delight. So pure, so effortless. Max felt the modulating pressure of the pierce points, sifted the images and decoded the thoughts, blending them with his own. He felt his body moving, knowing it was as much him as her. Not that that mattered any more . . . there was no him and her except where their minds meshed, there was only they.

  ‘Waaaaaaaaa hoooooooo!’ screamed Max. Martha exulted too, her bellow shuddering through her body. ‘Fucking hell, what a RUSH!’

  They played, explored, but always moved south. Max experimented, moving his arms, legs and torso as he always had, as he had been trained to do. Martha still responded but he felt her reluctance and it felt clumsy, slow. But now he’d tried the old way, he couldn’t switch back.

  A little help , he said.

  Images tumbled into his mind and the pierce points tingled again. Max felt himself relax, decoding the imagery as best he could, understanding with it the desire for partnership. For a moment, he still couldn’t work out how to get there, access that place where their movements came from shared stimulus, somewhere in a joint subconscious. When it came to him, it was so obvious he laughed; Martha responding with a rattling in her throat.

  He stopped trying to fly, let all the tension leave his body and simply imagined it. They barrel-rolled, turned a long spiral climb and then powered away south.

  That’s more like it.

  Martha barked her pleasure. The wind was glorious chill across their body. They adjusted their wing attitude to take advantage of a slow-rising thermal. The yearning grew with every wing beat. Max felt it like he was an anchor being dragged from the ocean floor. Slowly at first, then gathering pace until it became an unstoppable pull. A pull he had no desire to halt.

  It was the call home. The call to Mother.

  Martha fed Max anxiety, which he felt as a rising nausea. It coalesced as anger and a growl rose in his throat. Martha roared and they accelerated harder. They could feel it like waves across the shore: Mother was hurt.

  Images of the HoG, I-X, the flight deck full of drakes, and Anna-Beth flooded his mind. The message was clear enough that it crystallised into a single word that boomed about his skull: Protect.

  What the fuck’s happened?

  They were afraid.

  Max became aware of something else; a buzzing like a distant swarm of insects. Lights . . . mere pinpoints . . . sparked in his mind. They moved and shifted, pulsing, with the buzzing in sync somehow. Max tried to focus on it, force it into coherence but he could make out nothing but an odd staccato shifting pattern.

  Is this you or us doing that?

  Martha didn’t respond but sent out a chilling wail and their beat their wings still harder.

  What is it? Is it anything?

  Max’s senses were ablaze . . . no . . . their senses were ablaze, it was just that he couldn’t decode everything he was sensing, not yet anyway. The dominant feelings towards the HoG meshed uncomfo
rtably with a growing familiarity he felt for the light swarm. Slowly, Max began to filter the chaos, pushing his mind out towards individual pinpoints, certain that Martha would be steering him gently, guiding and teaching.

  Like pulling threads from a tangled ball of cotton, he began to tease sense from the mass of noise. Each thread had two distinct beats and wrapped about them were harmonious sounds, a little like sighing and cooing, chordal notes and faint bass rumbles. Max was so close to being able to name what they meant it made him twitch in frustration.

  Martha pulled an image from his mind; a hand scribbling a name with a pen. Max gasped. The threads were signatures. Each one he teased out was subtly or dramatically different from the last. And so it became obvious what they represented.

  Drakes . . . Holy Mother, that’s a battle, isn’t it?

  Martha didn’t need to confirm it. Max found his breathing short. Anna-Beth would be out there. So would the remnants of I-X.

  Don’t you dare die, any of you. I’m coming. But I’ve got to check on Mother first.’

  ‘Say again, Captain, you’re breaking up,’ said Moeller. By now, the whole of the Exec was in Flight Command.

  There had been no improvement in any situation barring the weather and right now, they all wished the storm was still blowing full force. Across the behemoth, teams strived to get systems back online and break the HoG’s paralysis with very limited success. Up in the sky, the drake battle was increasing in ferocity. After the brilliant initial attack for his squads, the attrition rate was worrying and the only squad not to have lost people so far was Inferno-X.

  The Mafs were running a classic strategy; continually breaking off by squadron and retreating a few hundred metres before heading back into the fight. The effect was to move the whole battle gently eastwards and leave the HoG exposed, but no counter punch was forthcoming thus far.

  But now the captain of an Exterminators platoon who should have returned hours ago was broadcasting from who knew where, saying something of great importance that none of them could decipher and it was making Moeller nervous.

  ‘. . . eat, am . . . klicks to your . . . Maputo has . . . gro . . .

  Six . . . gec . . . art . . . on . . . Pre . . . they . . . king fir . . . tags . . . age. Ove . ..’

  ‘Meyer, you are breaking up. Repeat, repeat, repeat.’

  Moeller slammed his palm on his desk and looked around at frustrated expressions that mirrored his own. He thumbed his ppalm. ‘Yarif, I’m sending you all Meyer’s coms. Get the voice-analysis and reconstruction software on it rightnow.’ ‘Apologies, sir,’ came the reply from outside Moeller’s office. ‘I don’t have access to any analytical systems. They’re still down.’

  ‘Get me Rosenbach.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Moeller snapped his ppalm away. ‘Any thoughts?’ Solomon, Avery and Kirby’s faces were tight with frustration.

  ‘Do we know where he is?’ asked Solomon.

  ‘Not beyond his original mission co-ordinates and that he must have a visual on the Maputo,’ said Moeller. ‘He must be close; ground visibility is still awful.’

  ‘Could Orin get a clearer signal?’ asked Kirby.

  ‘No,’ said Moeller. ‘That’s why she passed him to me.’ ‘We have to know what he’s saying,’ said Kirby. ‘Really?’ snapped Moeller. ‘I hadn’t realised.

  ‘Cut that out right now,’ said Avery. ‘Find a solution or say nothing at all.’

  It stank in the skull, it stank and it was not a place for claustrophobes. Eleanor Rosenbach hadn’t thought she was one such but the journey up to the nerve ganglions in the centre of the skull, which carried messages to all major systems centres, had made her think again.

  It was a long journey from the access points at the head of skull deck one, up the engineering and bio-systems flesh tunnels and into the bone-architectured space where key systems boards integrated electrical, mechanical and biological systems. A journey made necessary with the failure of the diagnostic systems in the ERC control centre. Arriving in the cramped space with nothing but a powerful splash light and her p-palm for company, Rosenbach sucked in a breath.

  The impact from the Wyvern, burrowing in before exploding, had caused fracturing all the way down here, some eight metres inside. The skull was supposed to be impregnable and she supposed it was, since the systems boards still had power from the emergency battery packs. But the shock had been sufficient to induce the widespread paralysis they were experiencing.

  Visceral fluid was dripping through cracks in the bone and the cracked viewing panels revealed swelling and bruising on the flesh surrounding the nerve ganglion. She pinged the systems board with her p-palm and was relieved to get a ready prompt to begin a diagnostic.

  ‘Finally you’re talking to me,’ she said.

  While she waited for the diagnostic to run, she sat back against a curved bone wall and let her hands smooth across the floor, feeling the tackiness of leakage and, faintly, the warmth of the HoG’s life. She needed to find a solution, something to unlock the paralysis, or at least get some defence online. And until she did, every one of the ten thousand or so on board was vulnerable.

  The weight of responsibility made her shudder and she shook her head to dispel the image at the same time as her ppalm bleeped to tell her the diagnostic was run and that Yarif wanted her to patch into Moeller and the Exec.

  ‘Mister Moeller, this is Rosenbach. Are you reading me?’

  ‘L and C. The Marshal Gen, ExO and Commander Avery are all in attendance. What have you got?’

  ‘All data is streaming to the ERC staff p-palms for analysis and Helena is on call for clarification.’ said Rosenbach. ‘Poor old HoG, she’s taken one hell of a kick. Systems boards are on batteries, there’s nothing coming from the ganglion at junction seventeen alpha. Bruising and swelling may be impeding nerve impulses and the coolant system is offline. The diagnostic confirms a widespread system shock. Seventeen alpha controls the central spinal column, legs and ship-wide motor systems and none of that is online. I can see two possible solutions.’

  ‘We’re listening,’ said Solomon.

  Rosenbach felt a thrill of nerves. The Marshal Gen had never spoken to her before. Even though she was stuck up a stinking tunnel, it was still pretty cool.

  ‘The first is a full reboot. If the ganglion is shocked, a systems reset should kick it back to life. Second, we get an ERC tech up to every junction and start to re-patch systems one by one. I need an allclear to proceed one way or the other.’

  ‘Why don’t I have radar?’ asked Avery. ‘And why are coms so poor?’

  ‘The HoG’s sensory functions are down. While she’s blind, so are we. Our coms boosters and dishes can’t align to get a strong bead. It’s all linked to the same issue.’

  ‘Which operation is the quicker?’ asked Kirby.

  ‘A reboot would take about an hour,’ said Rosenbach. ‘But if it doesn’t work then we’re back at square one. And we’ll have zero systems for the first twenty minutes of the procedure.’

  ‘Can’t you fix seventeen alpha directly?’ asked Solomon, her voice betraying her irritation.

  ‘Not without surgery, ma’am. And if the swelling is acute, no number of reboots will work.’

  ‘And what’s the lead time for your re-patch?’

  ‘We could have the first basic systems . . . eyes and mouth, for instance, re-patched in a few minutes. There complication is linking back into the spine, with seventeen down. We’ll have to assess the relative safe loads on the other junctions before I can give an estimate for defensive systems, radar and other imaging equipment.’

  ‘So are we rolling the dice or going step by step?’ asked Moeller.

  ‘Why the hell does so much vital stuff get routed through this one junction?’ asked Solomon. ‘Pretty fucking convenient weak spot for our enemies to exploit.’

  ‘It’s an accident of biological design,’ said Markov, chiming in for the first time. ‘Go step by step. I’m dispa
tching techs to all junctions. Eyes in ten minutes, I’d say. Eleanor will update you as other systems come back online.’

  ‘Okay, folks, let’s get to it.’ Avery clapped his hands. ‘We’re in your hands, Rosenbach.’

  ‘Copy, Commander.’ Rosenbach blew out her cheeks and began inputting re-patch options into her p-palm, using what few core systems she could access to aid her flow and load calculations. She got a ping from Markov. ‘Hey, Helena.’

  ‘Enjoying the stench up there?’

  ‘It is uniquely awful.’

  ‘Share me on your calcs and progress, will you? I’ll leave you on point but I’ll be plugged in, all right?’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Rosenbach. She patted the sticky wall. ‘Being up here reminds you she’s a living thing, that’s all.’

  ‘Something our Exec might want to remember from time to time. Good luck.’

  Their fear deepened as they approached and overflew the ailing behemoth. Smoke was rising from the top of her skull and there were massive black streaks and impact points on her body. Nothing was moving. Her legs did not shift where they stood, none of the turrets or missile boxes were tracking, and her head was still when it should have been rocking gently, snout and tongue sampling the air.

  Martha had continued keening, in fact it had intensified when they could see the damage close-up and now she was driving high up into the sky. Visibility was improving rapidly, heat was blooming as the sun rose and before long, only tiny dust particles would still be in suspension, like a fine mist.

  A few klicks east, the drake battle raged on and the silence surrounding him when his ears should have been alive with com chatter was unnerving. He needed his coms back but didn’t know how to activate them in his new environment, even though he still had the sub-vocal array on his throat.

  But even through his frustrations and his anxiety over Mother’s condition, he was still able to wonder at the extraordinary range of sensory information his pairing with Martha had opened up to him. Martha was using scent trails, heartbeats, brain activity, exhalations and even the eddies in the wake of wingbeats to build up a picture identifying each individual drake, ground lizard and behemoth, friend and enemy.