It was grandiose on a scale that Pyke had never seen before, and wrecked in a way he hadn’t been expecting. A double row of consoles and workstations lined the rear wall which was the highest bulkhead of the entire bridge. From the rear the ceiling curved down to meet a wide viewing window—it was about twenty feet high and maybe sixty wide. Other workstations were clustered in double ranks up the centre of the deck to meet another row that swept all along the base of the viewing window. But above all this hung a wide platform, clearly the centre of bridge operations. It was suspended from shiny cables that curved in from four anchor points, except that one of the cables had snapped and the entire command platform hung at a slight incline.
And it hung in shadows yet the lighting was not so poor that it did not illuminate the monstrous thing that jutted in through a smashed, fracture-webbed hole in the viewing window. The Damaugra, the doom of the Mighty Defender.
Dense clusters of ash-grey, spiralling metal coils had burst in through the viewing window, some large, some small, the very biggest of them having reached in to puncture the deck and the bulkhead, rotating, almost screwing themselves into the superstructure. That was the tearing, crunching noise he’d heard earlier, the sound of these coils biting deeper and deeper. Other kinds of tentacles extended through the press of coils, narrower ones with rows of curved fangs along either side. They were often flung out in pairs or threes, biting into the walls and the floor, anchoring themselves to the underframes, and Pyke saw low, bulbous shapes crawling to and fro along them. Pyke was astounded and aghast at the sight, wondering what it all looked like from outside the ship.
“Well, I’ve seen a few things,” said Simulation Pyke’s voice. “But this gets a special category all of its own.”
“Wait a sec,” Pyke muttered. “According to what the older Hokajil said, the bridge should still be at the moment when he began creating the time-zones to create his escape route …”
“Should we believe everything the old fellah said, especially in the light of Young Hokajil’s claims on the subject?”
Pyke shrugged. “If he was telling something like the truth, perhaps something has moved the bridge forward in time …”
“Something or someone,” said Sim-Pyke. “How about Raven and her thugs?”
“That would fit.” Pyke felt sweat break out across his scalp. “Does that mean this whole mess will shortly slam into the planet’s surface?”
By now Pyke had crept along the rear end of the bridge, keeping to the shadows between the row of consoles. Many of them were smashed and charred, some surrounded with spilled documents, some of which had burned to ash, which was handy for Pyke to streak through his hair. From here he also got his first good look at the Damaugra’s cyberlice—about the size of a domestic Earth cat, they had three limbs, were a dirty-brown colour on top and a greenish-white underneath, and each limb ended in a single chisel-tipped talon. The few that scuttled past him neither slowed nor seemed to take notice, which afforded a kind of grim relief.
As he moved, his perspective of the command platform altered—looking up, he saw that some of the platform’s floor tiles were transparent and that there were a few figures walking around up there.
“Seems like a fine opportunity to try out Hokajil’s time-thrower,” said Sim-Pyke in his thoughts. “You could target some of Raven’s minions and send them scurrying off.”
“Not a bad idea,” Pyke said. Crouching down in the shadow of a console, he unlimbered the device so that they could get a close look at the control panel. It took a few moments but they figured out how to set the thrower to scan for living creatures, how to target them on the tiny screen, and how to calibrate the temporal rewind. But when Pyke depressed the trigger the only outcome was a winking red light.
“Uh-oh,” said Simulation Pyke.
“What? Why uh-oh?”
“Not totally sure but Rensik says switch it back to standard time-throw mode and dial it down to a square metre, then fire it at one of the wrecked consoles.”
Pyke did as he was bidden, pointed the device and fired. Again, all that happened was a blinking red light.
“I saw it work,” he said. “I saw that grey-haired old geezer make Ustril and her creepy squad vanish …”
“Yep, and that was in one of Hokajil’s time-zones.”
“You saying that’s the reason?—’cos this isn’t one of them …” He racked his brains. “Is there some kind of dampening field at work, blocking the thrower?”
“Rensik says it’s more likely to be a natural field effect emanating from the Damaugra itself.”
He gritted his teeth. “Well, that kinda limits our options,” he said, laying the useless device down on the deck where he was crouching. “What do we have left?—frontal assault? …”
Suddenly a beam of light stabbed at him from behind and a voice said, “Who’s there? Stand up and show your face! No sudden moves!”
“Well, crap,” he muttered, raising his hands as he straightened and turned into the light. There was a moment’s pause.
“Ah, you’re here at last.” The torchbeam, attached to a rifle barrel, was lowered. Holding it was a bald man in mismatched body armour, his face half concealed by a visor with concave eyepieces. “Raven’s been waiting for over an hour. I better take you up there myself.”
“Make like this is just the usual kind of thing,” said Sim-Pyke’s voice, which Pyke felt amounted to pointing out the skagging obvious!
He shrugged. “Sure—just checking my gear …”
The guard waved him on ahead, escorting him over to where a two-person lifter plate carried them up to the command platform. Cyberlice were far more prevalent up here, skittering about wherever he looked, rushing along the splayed-out cables which joined the platform to the restless mass of spiralled metal coils that spilled in through the bridge’s smashed viewing window. Water vapour clung and curled around the edges of the gap, where jagged, razor-sharp glass nestled against the brute mass of the Damaugra. But up here there was no sign of Raven.
The guard prodded his shoulder. “No weapons allowed for outsiders.”
This just gets better and better, he thought as he slid the rifle off his shoulder and tossed it onto one of the dead consoles.
“That’s it,” said Simulation Pyke in his head. “Mean and moody, with a savage edge. Oh, and while you’re at it, see if you can get hold of a bit of that window glass—there’s bits of it lying everywhere.”
Pyke choked back his incendiary reply, keeping it down to a soundless snarl. As the guard nodded and beckoned him to follow, he spotted a good fist-sized piece of glass to one side. He told the guard he had some gravel in his boot, sat down to pull it off and, as he gave the boot a theatrical shake and rap with one hand, the other stealthily gathered the glass fragment into his pocket. Then he was back on his feet and being directed by the guard towards the front of the command platform where a cluster of talon-edge tentacles formed a bridge leading straight out to a maw-like gap at the centre of the Damaugra’s flexing knot of coils.
Pyke steeled his nerves as he stepped onto the bridge, which felt curiously solid underfoot. As he walked across it he glanced to his left and saw how the rest of the Damaugra’s immense tangle of coils spilled along the outside of the bridge to the hull then curved out of sight on the port side. Then all at once he had reached the constricted gap in that monstrous barricade of sharp-edged spiral coils.
The gap opened a little wider, then wider still, until there was enough room for him to enter. The guard grunted at him to continue.
“Watch the path—it gets a bit twisty.”
The tentacle bridge gave way to a succession of oval plates that made Pyke think of stepping stones. They provided a walkway through a tunnel composed of the intertwining innards of the gigantic creature, turning and dipping and twisting but always maintaining constant gravity underfoot. Sometimes the sharp coil edges were too close for comfort and as he walked Pyke could smell a strange odour, like hot oil
y metal, while his ears caught the hisses and clicks of a million blades caressing each other.
At last the claustrophobic tunnel opened out at a chamber walled with neat rows of the Damaugra’s coils, and lit by vein-like cables whose striation gave off a green and yellow radiance. A slope curved up one side to an oval platform bounded by a low parapet; at the rear of the platform was a bright recess from which all the glowing cables emerged to spread out and interweave across the walls. Cyberlice crawled everywhere.
“It’s been over two hours since I received your message,” came the familiar, despised voice. “Quickly, bring it to me!”
“What now?” Pyke muttered under his breath, noting the presence of half a dozen armed guards spaced along the incline as he climbed it.
“Well,” said Simulation Pyke, “this is all a bit unexpected.”
“You don’t say,” Pyke mutter-snarled.
“We didn’t think that this Damaugra creature was important,” Sim-Pyke said. “And now we’ve got this. Our advice? Don’t start a fight, try not to get killed. And let her have the crystal—put her in a good mood …”
Huh, he thought. Usually, only acts of homicidal slaughter can put her at her ease …
As he reluctantly mounted the incline, he cursed himself for his lack of imagination and foresight. Rather than listen to voices emanating from the crystal shard, he should maybe have turned back to the lower levels and tried to recruit his own gang of rogues and allies. Then come back up here to fight his way in and settle matters to his own satisfaction. Instead here I am about to stick my head between the jaws of monstrous fate and pray that it’s not that hungry.
Then he was there, strolling up to where Raven, once more impeccably dressed in black-on-black body armour, stood over a round table formed from the same grey material as the coils and cables. Upon it were the other two crystal pieces, hovering about an inch above the tabletop in a suspensor field. Behind her was the mysterious glowing recess which, from a closer perspective, proved to be a knot of bright arrays of small shapes, spheres, cubes, polyhedrons, all interspersed with miniature versions of the Damaugra’s spirally coils. There was also a ribbon of dataleads plumbed in and trailing out to a bland grey cylinder sitting on a sill below the recess.
“Give it here, come on,” said Raven, hand outstretched. “I had to wait for that courier for long enough, and now you’ve kept me waiting, too.”
As he delved beneath the hoody and into his jacket, she sized him up with narrowed eyes.
“So you’re from one of the outer time-facets, eh? You really do look quite like him,” she said, smiling lazily and biting her bottom lip in a way that, once upon a time, invariably presaged gunfire.
“Don’t see it myself,” he said. “Heard he was a bit of a jabber merchant, not my thing at all.” Pyke produced the crystal shard, still contained within its leather case. He went to reach out and hand it over but, strangely, found that he couldn’t manage it. Couldn’t stop thinking about Dervla, Ancil, Kref and Moleg, how they were dead yet still alive inside the bloody thing, well, whatever was left of them, anyway.
“No second thoughts,” Raven said. “Remember how well compensated you’ll be, or, alternatively, how dead you’ll be if I have to take it off your cooling corpse.”
It took an effort of will for him to stretch out and drop it into her waiting palm. He fixed a half-smile onto his face as he stuck his hands in his pockets, feeling in one of them the cold chunk of window glass.
“That’s better. Good boy.”
“So do you put it all together now?” Pyke said. “Lots of different stories out in the Mosaic about this. Wondering if the real thing’ll be spectacular.”
“It will be so far beyond spectacular,” she said, “that you’ll need new words to describe it.” She stroked the leather-wrapped crystal. “So stick around—it really will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As for the reunification, well, that’s not my assignment—I have an entirely different mission to tackle!”
Then she pulled off the leather top-piece and tipped the entire, exposed crystal out into her hand.
“This isn’t good,” said Simulation Pyke in his head.
“Don’t you mean, ‘this could be a mammoth clusterbotch’?” Pyke muttered, teeth gritted. “Looks like we’re about to come face-to-face with the tormentor-in-chief …”
“I was talking about that glowing recess and those wired-in components …”
Suddenly all his attention was on Raven. Standing next to the suspension field table, she trembled and shuddered where she stood, still clutching the crystal in her hand. Then in an instant the tremors ceased. She stood there, eyes closed, breathing in and out deeply, then sighed and opened her eyes. That glittering, hungry gaze settled on Pyke and Raven leaned forward, smiling.
“Well, well—Captain Pyke!” said the Legacy with Raven’s voice. “Miss me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Pyke—the Crystal Simulation, the Isle of Candles
From the moment real-world Pyke had entered the bridge of the Mighty Defender and seen the Damaugra and all its cyber-parasites, it became clear to Simulation Pyke and Rensik that some unforeseen scheme was afoot. Clearly, Raven and the Legacy had been working on deeper plans.
Around them the Isle of Candles was the same, quiet and cool, with an unchanging dusk keeping half the sky rosy while the encroaching night waited patiently. Pyke was sitting on one of the benches near the stone gazebo, staring into the observation ambit which Rensik had projected within the gazebo’s walls. The ambit was a 3D reconstruction of the crystal shard’s immediate vicinity, assembled from data-streams flowing in from the outer dimensional lattice. Pyke had watched as his flesh-and-blood counterpart first entered the bridge. When the time-thrower failed to work, it had started to look as if their plan was back in the running, provided real-world Pyke didn’t get himself shot or maimed. Then he encountered the guard and rode the lifterplate to the command platform, but instead of Raven there was a gantry of tentacles that led from the platform out into the Damaugra itself. At this point Pyke and Rensik agreed that they were as much in the dark as real-world Pyke.
“What has this bloody monster got to do with anything?” Pyke said, just after pointing out the chunk of broken glass to his counterpart.
“I do not know enough about this creature,” said Rensik. “I am currently running a few concurrent term queries in those archives still open to me …”
In the observation ambit, real-world Pyke was walking along a flexi-directional path through the razor-sharp guts of the Damaugra, emerging at last in a weird, green-lit chamber. Rensik was observing that the Damaugra had to have been generating containment fields and a breathable environment for Pyke and the other humanoids there, since this was effectively outside the ship. Then Pyke spotted the glowing recess at the top of a sloping pathway, felt a reflexive loathing on seeing Raven waiting there.
As Pyke’s counterpart approached the head of the incline, they were able to make out more details.
“There’s the other two crystal fragments,” Pyke said. “They’re definitely set up for the big moment.”
“Those are data-leads issuing from that recess,” said Rensik. “This is certain to be a cognitive nexus for the Damaugra, perhaps the main one.”
“Looks like it was meant to be a control room of sorts, maybe?” Pyke said.
“Yes, and those wires and components are Raven’s hack into the creature’s ganglia.”
Real-world Pyke eventually managed to hand the crystal over. It was an eerie feeling, knowing that the artefact which contained them was now in the possession of a psychomaniac.
“Hope you’re ready to engage the integrity enabler,” he said to Rensik. “The sooner we get this entire crystal hell-prison ready for the big smash, the better!”
“I don’t think the reassembly is what’s going to happen next,” said the drone.
That was when Raven tipped the whole, uncovered crystal into her open hand.
“Great, one vile villainess—incoming.”
A shudder passed through the ground underfoot, as if the entire Isle of Candles was experiencing a low-level earthquake, a continuous series of small tremors.
“The Legacy,” said Rensik. “It’s leaving.”
“This doesn’t usually happen when it seizes a host out in the world.”
“Exactly—it’s moving the entirety of its cognitive and perceptive self into Raven’s mind,” Rensik said. “Which means …”
Lights appeared in a cluster near the entrance to the gazebo, swirled together like a miniature tornado for a few seconds, then there was a brilliant flash and there stood Raven Kaligari. She looked dazed for a moment, then the alertness came back into her eyes, along with the familiar glint of the unhinged.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding! Crafty old Captain Pyke and his rusty box-buddy! Well, boys, it won’t be long before the crystals are one and the empire of forever is reborn. You might find a place in its magnificence, but only if you’re extra-nice and submissive.”
“Dream on, you murdering scum,” Pyke snarled, lunging at her. But his hands passed through her image, feeling nothing. Raven threw back her head and laughed, then blew him a kiss before hurrying away, climbing the path to the villa, her annoying laughter ringing out all the way.
“One of my archive searches has returned only meagre suggestions,” said Rensik. “In the meantime we need to pay attention to what the Legacy is about to do.”
In the observation ambit, Pyke watched as, having taken over Raven’s body, the Legacy leaned forward and said, “Well, well, Captain Pyke! Miss me?”
Real-world Pyke pushed back his hood and smiled wearily. “As a matter of fact, I did. I needed reminding what kind of malignant, disease-ridden, bloodthirsty, gutter-sweepings the galaxy is capable of vomiting up, and look!—there you are!”
The Legacy chuckled merrily, shaking its head. “Nice, very nice. I’m going to miss Humans so much—I’m especially going to miss you and all your surprising little schemes. But in the future to come there will be no room for tiny minds and tiny schemes. The empire of living matter will be the only scheme, the only plan, the only purpose.” The Legacy grew thoughtful. “I was explaining all this just a short time ago to that female you thought so highly of, at least to the simulation of her. She’s a kept woman now, you know—I have her corralled into a little house outside the city walls …”
Splintered Suns Page 45
