Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)
Page 17
Timoshene expertly drew the shotgun, flipped it muzzle first and handed the grip to Hiro. Hiro took it, examining with fast, professional interest. “Nice balance.” He pumped the breech, peering inside. “Good for low-G, don’t think it would jam. Ranged detonation?” Inspecting the magazine and shells.
“Anti-personnel shells explode short,” Timoshene agreed. “As much a grenade launcher as a shotgun.”
“Very nice.” Hiro put the magazine back, chambered and de-chambered a round, then handed it back. Timoshene indicated Hiro’s pistol, as much from courtesy as interest. Hiro handed it. The grip was a little too compact for a parren hand, human hands and fingers being shorter. The mechanism was electro-mag, and despite the narrow caliber, the muzzle velocity would put holes in anything short of marine-grade armour. The tiny sensor beneath the muzzle indicated targeting interface, telling the wielder exactly where the bullet would go — useful for pistols and rifles as it wasn’t for shotguns.
“Standard issue or personal preference?” Timoshene asked, handing the pistol back. The tone of the shuttle’s engines had changed, a slow decline indicating descent.
“Both,” said Hiro, holstering the pistol in his front webbing and pulling on the helmet. “Even standardised weapons can become a preference. Too much personalisation can interfere with inter-operability.”
“Agreed.”
“One thing,” said Hiro, looking at all four parren. “For this mission, no external coms, no trackers, completely silent. Autistic, the human techs call it, I don’t know if that translates.”
“It does. We have made the adjustments.”
“You are hiding from her?” Shola asked suspiciously.
“Maybe a little.”
“Tell us,” Timoshene demanded. “What do you suspect?”
“I suspect nothing. But most of Defiance remains unexplored, many systems have barely aged and remain functional, and I have been detecting signals that suggest recently restored function in places where no function should exist. Because of the squabbles between your denominations, parren have been far more focused on confronting each other than on exploring Defiance. It leaves us exposed.”
“Exposed to what? Defiance is old and dead.”
“And waking up. Like Hannachiam woke up. She’s got far more control over Defiance than parren and humans do combined.”
“Humans have insisted that Hannachiam is not threatening.”
“No, Hanna’s quite friendly. But Hanna’s got no idea what really constitutes a threat to organics, and she relies on outsiders to give her advice. Styx can communicate more to her in ten seconds than we can in a year. So guess who Hanna’s largest influence is?”
“And why have you not communicated this concern before?” Shola accused him.
Hiro laughed, helmet shaking slightly as he shook his head. “Oh buddy,” he said. “We’ve been trying, trust me. But parren just want to fight each other, and Phoenix is mostly just trying to get our ship running. No wonder Hanna talks to Styx instead.”
It took seventeen minutes at reduced surface speeds. This was Komaren Dai, almost devoid of lights, its horizon indistinguishable from black space in all directions but back toward where the blaze of newly-installed civilisation still glowed. Timoshene performed a final check of his suit systems as the shuttle began its descent, rotating tail-forward to slow its progress with a rumble of thrust. External cameras fixed on their destination for the first time, and on visor-vision Timoshene saw a jumble of dark shapes that seemed to shift as the perspective changed. Vision switched to ultra-violet, and still there was little to see. As a child, Timoshene recalled being afraid of the dark, but when he’d phased to House Harmony the last vestiges of that fear had faded. Darkness was a thing of beauty and stillness, of quieted colours and cool meditation. But venturing this far from the occupied regions of Defiance, he felt almost as though his childhood fears had returned. This many light-years from any sun the absence of light could be overwhelming, like a physical force that drowned out all but the stars. The shuttle switched to infra-red, and received only cold greys and blues in reply.
The pilot hit underside floodlights, and brightness blazed upon a series of broken crane arms, mechanisms leaning wildly askew. Landing pads and surface grapples were broken and torn, clearly the result of long ago weapons fire. This had been a docks, evidently pulverised in the war that had destroyed the drysines and ended the Machine Age for good.
“Possible landing site ahead,” came the pilot’s report on coms. “There will be no full landing, there is a chance the pad will not hold the shuttle’s weight with all that damage. Engines will stay running, suggest you exit from top hatch and jump from left wing.”
“Timoshene hears you.” He disengaged his seat restraints and gestured at Shola, Dalray and Kino to follow. With visors down and suits pressurised, Timoshene gave a command that turned the entire forward hold to vacuum, rendering the dorsal airlock unnecessary. All four parren, and then Hiro, clambered out and onto the top of the hovering shuttle.
Afraid of the dark or not, that younger Timoshene would have found the scene unutterably exciting — standing atop a hovering shuttle with its engines burning, surveying the floodlit scene of a strange mechanical graveyard — huge, skeletal arms stretching for the non-existent sky, shadows moving in ghostly unison as the floodlights moved. But now the older, wiser Timoshene felt only the calm satisfaction of knowing that he was where the universe intended him, serving his rightful master, performing his function for the betterment of all. It was a truism among warriors that nearly all of the phasing went from Fortitude to Harmony, and rarely the other way around. Harmony warriors called Fortitude the house of children, waving their swords and playing at soldier. Harmony was where young soldiers went to learn true courage and purpose.
Timoshene peered off the edge of the shuttle’s left shoulder — this model’s engines were underside, and not dominating the far wingtip as some did. He gave the pilot instructions, aligning the jump as the pilot watched from the cockpit ahead, holding them steady. Timoshene jumped, a slow descent in low-G to an intact portion of pad, then a fast bounce to clear the way for the next. Shola followed, then Hiro, coming down touching midair icons to activate his map display.
Behind, the shuttle powered up, Timoshene’s visor darkening to block the thruster-glare as it regained altitude, then went in search of somewhere safer to land. The brightness cleared and the five explorers looked about, their breath harsh and loud within the confines of their helmets. Timoshene’s visor switched to infra-red, each suit equipped with its own helmet flashlights, emitting in wavelengths invisible to the naked eye but illuminating everything quite clearly on IR.
The pad on which he was standing had been peeled like an orange, huge sheets of steel bending inward with the force of some ancient projectile. Within, long, deep levels dropped into cavernous interiors.
“Well?” Timoshene asked the human. He glanced at Hiro, and found him looking straight up through his visor. Timoshene looked, and saw teeming billions of stars, suddenly revealed in the absence of the shuttle’s lights. Deep space was never entirely dark, and the starfield this far from any illuminated settlement was spectacular beyond belief. Typically the Defiance sky showed the moving glow of low-orbit ships passing over, but now there was nothing but stars. He thought he knew what Hiro was looking for. “Can you see any human suns from here?”
“I don’t know,” said Hiro, sounding faintly wistful even past the translator. “Maybe if I turned on the visor starchart. But there’s no time. We have to go down.” He took a recon ball, activated and dropped it. The ball fell slowly, adjusting course with light thrust. Timoshene saw the feed highlight on his visor, and blinked on it — the map expanded as the ball showed what it saw — deep levels below, falling faster now, past machinery floors… and suddenly a concourse of sorts. Thrust halted its fall, and it skittered sideways and attached to a beam, awaiting recovery. “You receiving that feed?” Hiro asked.
Timoshene stepped off, thrust increasing as his fall accelerated, angling him into the middle of the gaping hole through the decks. The weapon that caused this must have been enormous, he thought, gazing about as he fell. The edges of the hole were melted, old steel frozen like liquid honey turned to ice. Levels passed, like layers of a wedding cake, too disfigured and smashed together to even imagine what they’d once been… only here below came a thicker layer, open space and a gap ahead through the destruction. Timoshene angled his suit that way, controls set for intuitive flight control, translating body motions and gestures into thrust direction and power.
The intuitive control deactivated when he landed on an intact rim, enabling him to walk once more. The recon ball detached from its wall and returned to Hiro, landing behind him. Timoshene bounced ahead.
Within the opening was an enormously large passage, a former thoroughfare for smaller spaceships. Cavernous and filled with debris, like the cast away toys of some giant, thoughtless child. Old shuttles, spaceships unidentifiable… perhaps sentient AI ships, Timoshene had heard the parren researchers talking about them. AIs did not need to enter and exit ships as parren did — they were machines themselves, some were built directly into the bridge. Sentient ships, interfacing with thousands of other sentient, synthetic forms about them…
And here they were, cast on their sides, blasted by long-ago firepower, now cold and still in the silence of millennia passed. Hiro came up behind, and Timoshene bounced lightly forward, gazing at the giant wrecks as he passed. Ahead, one part of the passage had collapsed, machinery and systems in the walls making a curtain of old, dead technology. Timoshene hit thrust, not powerful enough to make him fly on a full gravity world, but here it propelled him to the top of the wrecked hull, then to bounce along its surface. His boots slipped on a covering of metallic grit, lying over everything like silver dust and glowing on his helmet’s IR like ice. Steel so old it flaked, and made dust like the insides of an old mansion… that, and residue from the blasts.
“Up ahead,” he said, reading his map. “Six hundred terek.”
He jumped from the dead ship’s hull, grounding softly and continuing to bound. Here on his left was a dead drone — drysine, no doubt, as they’d all been drysine in this last, futile stand. They’d beaten the deepynines, and thought they’d won. Timoshene wondered if a drone could feel regret, or despair. Or even the black irony that after so much unchallenged dominance over organic beings for so long, the machines had done most of the work in wiping each other out, only for their new organic allies to complete the final remainder and end the Machine Age for good.
“This one is new,” said Dalray. On visual came a feed from Dalray’s suit — a drone, but different. Bigger, thicker limbs, several of them blasted off.
“There were many models,” said Hiro. “We’ve only seen a fraction of them. Ours are the basic multi-purpose, these look like heavier workers, for larger engineering jobs.”
“This was a transport hub,” said Timoshene. Both Dalray’s and Hiro’s voices sounded tense. Being in here was quite an experience. It felt like death, and of old empires long since destroyed, but recently reawakened. A man of less-calm mind could get very jumpy, looking at all these bodies and recalling just how much of Defiance had actually survived intact for twenty thousand years. Hannachiam, no less.
“The anti-aging nanos don’t seem to be working here,” said Hiro, as they bounced past yet another large ship. This one’s entire rear section had been sheared off by a new incoming round, making a series of visible holes through the above decking, each the size of a house. “Not surprising, considering the damage it’s taken. Three hundred metres.”
“How do nanotech bots survive so long themselves?” asked Kino.
“There are radioactive metals built into the structures,” said Hiro. “The bots feed on radiation, and the half-life is hundreds of thousands of years. So it’s pretty much a limitless power source. The bots congregate on that radiation and build colonies, which build more colonies, then go out and spread and keep everything maintained as best they can.”
“Enough radiation to harm organics?” Shola wondered.
“No more than background. Nanos don’t need much — it’s an increase of about five percent on what you’d receive on Defiance anyway.”
Finally they emerged from the long tunnel into a deep hole beneath the surface. Its sides were wider than the ceremonial grounds Timoshene had frequented as a child on his homeworld, imagining the day when he might parade upon them as an adult in service of his master. The hole was perfectly circular save for observation features and protrusions he couldn’t name. The ancient sides glistened with steel-dust, and several perfect ordnance holes gaped black and empty. IR light poured through the steel framework ceiling, some distant light source sweeping a glaring beam past the obstructions… probably a shuttle, Timoshene thought, many kilometres distant. Without the IR feed on his visor, it would be invisible.
“This was the way to the surface for all these ships,” Hiro observed, looking slowly around. “The roof would have retracted.”
“A factory hub,” said Timoshene. To one side, at ground level, a huge, cavernous entrance beckoned. “This way.” He bounded, his men following. Gazing up at the high, curving walls, he wondered what this place must have looked like in its prime. Filled with drysine workers, like the insides of an insect hive. None of them able to imagine that one day it would all look like this — cold, broken and deserted.
Inside the doorway was like stepping into a giant cave, filled with giant scaffolds. Timoshene stared up, seeing suit IR light reflecting back in his visor, structures cluttered overhead like a forest of artificial limbs. Those limbs dangled now, long disused and broken about the frames of conveyors, making great highways against the ceiling. On the ground head, Hiro saw a giant hauler, a vehicle with an array of cargo racks for vertical storage.
“An assembly line,” Hiro said, bouncing gently forward. “The vehicles must have carried finished product to shuttles outside. The arms must have been for mid-air assembly. They kept the floor clear for vehicle access.”
“The product may have been variable,” said Shola. “AI manufacturing need not follow strict lines. All the machines can think.”
“Your scans are incapable of being more precise than this location?” Timoshene asked Hiro.
“No.”
“Then we must look further back. This way.”
He bounced with purpose toward where multiple conveyors defied all expectations of a wall, burrowing through and back like a giant worm devouring an apple. Each frame in the conveyor had multiple shape-shifting grips to carry the variable sizes of things being manufactured… as Shola had suggested. Nothing rusted in a vacuum, but still it looked old, like bread that could not go mouldy, but was instead stiff and dry. None of these mechanisms had moved in many an age.
“I’d recommend weapons,” said Hiro, pulling his pistol.
“Weapons,” Timoshene told his men, and pulled his shotgun from the canvas sheath beside his thigh armour.
The far side of the wall was all hacksaw nest. Humans and parren required some sense of architectural order, things arrayed in levels. In hacksaw nests, everything blended together, a tangle of machinery interwoven into the very fabric of the surrounding infrastructure.
Timoshene leapt to the frame of one of the mass transit chutes used by drones, where magnetic rails and rubber grips would transform a drone’s body into its own vehicle. Now the chute was empty, interior mechanisms dissolved away with age, weaving through the clutter of machinery like the skeleton of some long dead alien snake with circular ribs.
They progressed with simple, long-striding leaps from one rib of the passage to another, weaving down and across as AIs, contrary to all organic prejudi
ce, disliked straight lines and right angles. Ahead was not so much a wall — for AIs disliked those as well — as a profusion of branching structural supports, like the root system of a giant tree growing somewhere above. The function was like a wall, bracing the internals in Defiance’s light gravity and making certain nothing fell down. About those supporting roots grew a series of smoothed bulbs, the most orderly structure Timoshene had seen so far, reflecting dull IR light from the advancing suits with a smooth-polished sparkle.
A light blinked red on the audio-sensory function of Timoshene’s visor. He blinked on it as he moved, the icon directly alongside respiratory and life-support indicators, and received a projected map of what the suit’s sensors had gathered so far of this hacksaw maze. Here in red, moving along the elevated transit corridor, were audio-signals generated by the movement of four parren and one human — vibrations caused by boots on steel, which transmitted through surrounding structures and were received by sensors on his own suit. It was the only way audio could work in a vacuum — vibrations moving through the only substance that could carry them. Typically they were hard to pinpoint, but this indicator was showing several coming from… directly above. Twenty metres above.
“Hiro,” said Timoshene, in that prickling state of early alertness that was not yet tension. “My suit sensors are showing me an audio signal twenty metres overhead. Something is moving.”
“Yeah, I was wondering about that,” Hiro said conversationally. “I was about to ask if you saw it too, or if it was just my new sensors playing tricks.”
“Those silver bulbs do not look like any sort of metal,” said Dalray, pausing with a one-handed grip on the passage frame to look more closely. The nearest was just a few metres to one side now, and looked as though in stronger light it would give them all an elongated reflection of themselves, like a convex mirror. “My visuals suggest a ceramic-based alloy. We are looking for any sign of unauthorised manufacturing activity, yes? This material will not show residual heat.”