Orbus

by Neal Asher

  As the advancing Jain and the Guard defenders swirl into each other, Sniper finds himself passing within just a few miles of a formation of five Jain. He first focuses his rail-gun entirely upon one of them, and fires a fusillade of inert missiles. Then he launches ten of the Prador missiles, each in a different direction, all following the slightly adapted program he has just devised. Copying the Jain, he rapidly begins changing the spectrum of his laser, continuously loading it with a varied selection of viruses and worms. He is damned if he intends to lose out against these fuckers this time.

  As he has calculated, they change their formation slightly, one of them accepting the impact of the rail-gun missiles whilst two others cover it, the remaining two focusing their attention on the missiles as they loop round. He ramps up his drive to full power, turns on his supercavitating conefield, and spears down towards their hardfields. The impact is massive, juddering Sniper almost to a halt, but it breaks up their formation and knocks out their hardfields. His own conefield gives out, blowing numerous internal fuses and slagging two of its five emission coils. Drive still firing at full power, he comes down on one of them and propels it away from the rest.

  A claw closes on one of his tentacles as the creature tries to turn him round to face its particle cannon. Setting his spatulate cutter running, he spears it inside the mirrored barrel of the cannon and slices down inside, sheering power lines and components. The creature begins to extrude something tubular which ignites at its tip–a thermic lance–while the others now swing round to follow. Sniper fires his steering thrusters, spinning himself and the creature with precisely enough timing for his opponent to receive the brunt of a particle-cannon blast from one of its fellows, which cuts a smoking crater in its back.

  Finally, tearing through its internal components, Sniper hits something vital and the creature’s movements become sluggish. Using another tentacle Sniper selects mines from his armoury, withdraws his main tentacle and begins to insert the things inside his prey. The other four Jain are now otherwise engaged, as the ten missiles finally head back towards them and begin to prowl around them like piranhas. Sniper decelerates, allowing the four to fall in his direction, then propels their fellow towards them. His opponent crashes amidst them, some twenty yards ahead of Sniper, and meanwhile begins to move much faster and to correct its tumble. It has self-repaired astonishingly fast–just in time for the numerous mines inside it to detonate. Chunks of the Jain slam into its fellows, sending them into instant disarray.

  Programmed to respond to this detonation, the prowling missiles now speed in. Sniper folds in his tentacles and puts his hardfield out to its maximum power and extent, set to roll back towards him at the precise time of the expected detonations, thus obviating some of the blast. Space turns incandescent, and Sniper finds himself hurtling away, his hardfield still functional though its generator is torn from its mountings and pressing against the back interior of his shell.

  Flame clears to reveal that two more Jain are now toast, but the remaining two begin accelerating towards him. On either side, he sees Prador already copying his technique and engaging claw to claw. How will they insert mines, though? Numerous blasts rapidly lighting the firmament indicate to him that they are not, but instead are engaging then detonating their own internal fusion tacticals. He admires their dedication, but decides it is not a technique he himself wants to employ. It might be a winning formula, too, if not for that energy feed emanating from the Jain ship to that relay and thence to individual Jain soldiers. These particular troops continue to fire a sequence of immensely powerful particle-beams that pick off the Guard with devastating precision. How can the Guard win against that? And as he launches further missiles and accelerates towards his own two opponents, he wonders how just he is going to win as well.

  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, erupts a dazzling white blast. One of the two Jain simply blackens and ablates away, and the second is sent tumbling helplessly. A bubble appears around it, closes then winks out, and a trail of shattered and molten debris mark its onward course.

  ‘Very good, drone,’ the Golgoloth sends. ‘Now let’s see what you can do about that relay.’

  Checking out towards the relay, Sniper sees complicated duelling going on all around it, with the hardfields projected from the Golgoloth’s vessel and from the Jain themselves taking on strange twisted shapes he has never witnessed before. Next scanning down towards the ancient hermaphrodite’s ship, Sniper sees that about half the Jain force is currently heading towards it, under a hardfield umbrella, power being fed to them by that relay. White lasers probe up, and every now and again one of the Jain simply detonates like a fuse blowing in some circuit. The Golgoloth has also launched missiles, which circle round questingly. However, judging by their present casualty rate, at least twenty of the Jain will reach the Golgoloth’s ship before this is all over, and just one or two of them might be enough.

  ‘What cover can you give me?’ he enquires, setting himself on a course that will take him round that hardfield action.

  ‘Enough to keep them from close engagement,’ the Golgoloth replies, then adds, ‘Trust me.’

  Sniper likes the creature’s sense of humour.

  He now concentrates on repairing some of the damage inside himself, dispatching minibots to weld his hardfield generator securely in the position it now occupies. Reinstalling fuses, he sets his three remaining conefield coils running again. This will give him three-fifths of a cone, which might mean the difference between life and death. He checks power, finds he is a quarter down, then loads more mines and missiles inside himself. The Jain spread about the relay obviously know he is coming, for many of them turn in his direction. A particle beam lances towards him, but splashes on an angled hardfield and deflects, losing coherence, and blasts past Sniper like the output from a flamethrower. Other Jain try to manoeuvre for a clear shot, but shifting themselves outside of their main formation puts them in the way of the Golgoloth’s bubble fields. They, too, instantly become clouds of spreading debris. Others retreat to defend the relay itself, and he considers the odds.

  ‘Unless you can take out the ten of them around that relay,’ he tells the Golgoloth. ‘I haven’t got a fucking chance of knocking it out.’

  ‘It only has to be out for less than a second,’ the Golgoloth replies. ‘Can’t you think of something clever and martial?’

  Sniper now knows what needs doing. He launches his whole stock of missiles towards the relay, tweaking the programming of each as he fires them. That should keep ‘em busy. Now for the mines, which he begins internally loading to his rail-gun and firing, their programs sets equally as varied. Because they do not precisely fit the rail-gun barrel, their accuracy isn’t that great, but he wants nothing explosive left inside him for what is about to come.

  ‘Get yourself ready,’ he sends, whilst firing up his fusion engines to take him on a course behind the relay.

  ‘I see,’ says the Golgoloth. ‘Our brief acquaintance has been an interesting one.’

  About the relay itself, missiles detonate one after the other. Sniper is satisfied to see the tail end of a Jain tumbling away and a claw, glowing white hot, go spearing past him. One of the Golgoloth’s fields then manages to punch through, and a brief sheer-plane slices two more of the Jain creatures in half horizontally. Then Sniper is bearing down on a seemingly solid bar of microwave energy. He fires up both his hardfield and conefield and falls into the bar. The remaining conefield coils last only a tenth of a second, while the hardfield generator persists for a further two-tenths of a second, the excess heat draining into his s-con grid but, once that becomes overloaded by microwave radiation, the grid simply turns molten inside him. Sniper’s internal temperature ratchets up dangerously, even as he uses emergency measures to protect his most vital component: the crystal of his mind. Three of his minor tentacles simply fall apart, and one of his major ones explodes as the metal of a motor turns to gas. An age seems to pass in only tenths of a second, as he final
ly tumbles out of the beam’s path. But has he cut off the microwave flow to the relay for long enough?

  He has.

  Through blurred visual input, Sniper watches numerous bubbles flash in and out of existence in surrounding space, strewing debris after them. A white laser blinks into hazy existence, deploys in a rapid circle that incorporates the doughnut of the relay, until the thing becomes a ring of burning gas. Sniper tries to fire up his fusion engine, but it merely belches a dirty red flame before sputtering out. He tries his particle cannon on a nearby Jain, but nothing happens. His mind seems to be filled with nothing but error codes, but at least he still has a mind. The nearby Jain swings towards him, other more distant Jain swing towards him too, but then that same white laser licks out to touch them, one after another, turning them instantly into puffs of glowing gas. Distantly, Sniper can see the remaining Guard now close to the Golgoloth’s ship, and can see how the attacking Jain are swiftly being dispatched.

  ‘Nice one,’ he sends, then notes the error code informing him that a glowing slagged item inside him is all that remains of his ability to communicate.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he notes, as he falls away from the action.

  It isn’t over, not by any means. That swarm of objects now rising from the Jain ship is probably the rest of the buggers, and a brief brightness flooding surrounding space sees yet another dreadnought turned to scrap metal. Around that distant Jain vessel, the darkness is intensifying again, as it recharges to take out the remaining dreadnoughts, or the Golgoloth’s ship, or even the King’s ship. However, it is over for Sniper, and he thinks it doubly over for him when a hardfield bubble materializes around him and drags him to an abrupt halt. He waits for it to close down to a point, but instead it throws him in a different direction. Enough of his sensors remain for him to observe a set of crenellated hold doors opening, before he crashes down onto a ceramal deck, bounces and thunders into a rear wall.

  Seems he is home, then, and he waits for Gurnard to find some means of talking to him.

  *

  The Golgoloth feels as raw and beaten up as it often used to feel after one of its siblings had attacked it–before it first learnt how to avoid them, then turn them against each other, then find other means to defeat them before it slaughtered them all. But at least this is a feeling to which it has been long accustomed. The reality, it suspects, is that little of its own original physical body remains for, over the long years, it has replaced all of its underhands, legs, both claws, numerous internal organs and something like 80 per cent of its major ganglion. Its mind remains its own, however, always its own. This, it seems, is precisely the King’s condition, having lost or changed most of his physical body over the years. But now it seems the King is losing his mind.

  ‘It can be done,’ intones Oberon.

  The Golgoloth checks its displays and once again begins integrating its exterior ganglia distributed throughout the ship. Certainly it has five U-jump missiles now ready for firing, but USER disruption within this system has turned underspace into a chaotic and ever-changing geometry.

  ‘If I fire them, they’ll be bounced out, probably turned inside-out too,’ says the Golgoloth. ‘There’s no stability out there. Anyway, you’ve got your own kamikazes.’

  ‘Not accurate…enough,’ the King struggles to say.

  The old hermaphrodite peers at the image of the King and gets a horrible inkling of what the mechanisms interlaced throughout his body, and the pillar they connect to, are for, and also what the Human female and the two chrome-armoured third-children are currently doing. At that moment, on other sensors, the Golgoloth watches another of the King’s dreadnoughts die, and knows that its own ship would not last long if thus targeted. Perhaps it is time now to make a run for it, just using conventional fusion drive. The King and his remaining forces should keep the Jain occupied for a little while and, due to the U-space disruption, the Jain would only be able to pursue the Golgoloth by using conventional drive too. Perhaps the Golgoloth could stay ahead of them, using the techniques it long ago employed to first avoid Oberon’s hunters; perhaps it could even lead the Jain into the Polity itself and let them become a problem for Earth Central and all its subordinate AIs.

  ‘Stability is integral in space weave. Obedience is integral to success,’ remarks Oberon.

  Right, he is definitely losing it–for that isn’t how the King talks at all. Meanwhile, other displays show that the nearest dreadnought is launching three bulky missiles the Golgoloth recognizes as the current Prador version of its own U-space missiles: large flying bombs piloted by first-child minds, suicide weapons.

  Oberon continues, ‘If you run, my five remaining dreadnoughts and my own ship have you in their sights. If you survive that, which I doubt, the kamikazes will follow you and, once you reach stable U-space, they will kill you.’

  Ah, the King is back. The Golgoloth estimates its chances. The firepower remaining to the King does make fleeing an unlikely option. It doesn’t matter how many hardfields the Golgoloth can deploy if it becomes the target of a few hundred rail-guns and as many energy weapons.

  ‘Space weave?’ the hermaphrodite enquires.

  ‘Weapon a product of revolving singularity positioned across interface of U-space gate–effect focused through spiral gravity field,’ says the King. ‘You will all be erased, as is necessary for our survival.’

  Oberon is swinging his head from side to side, his voice now produced by machinery rather than his own twitching and clashing mandibles. The Golgoloth also notes that the King’s words confirm he has accessed Jain quantum storage, because he has just described technology that certainly does not exist within the Kingdom, and might not yet even exist in the Polity.

  ‘You mean that weapon which just destroyed two of your dreadnoughts,’ says the Golgoloth, pretending to be thick.

  ‘That weapon…yes,’ manages the King.

  ‘What about positioning?’ asks the Golgoloth, very much not liking what seems to be implied here.

  ‘Yes…you must put yourself right in front of that beam, my old friend.’

  My old friend.

  Suddenly, those words seem to be enough, and the Golgoloth feels a great sadness surge through him. Oberon is also saying goodbye, it realizes. But the question remains about how to deal with what will certainly replace the King–a Jain soldier.

  ‘It is indeed sad to lose a long-time friend,’ says the Golgoloth. ‘True replacements are difficult to find.’

  ‘You know all…about replacements,’ says Oberon. ‘The first replacement…for me…will be dealt with. Arrangements have been made.’

  The Golgoloth just has to trust that this is true, as it fires up its engines, turns its vessel so its least damaged side faces the ship of bones, and then accelerates towards it.

  19

  An esteemed colleague once pointed out to me that though it is convenient for major events in fiction to tip on some pivotal moment, for instance for Gollum to bite the finger off Frodo and thus send the ring of power into the fire, reality is rarely like that. He claimed that the march of history carries too much momentum for those small key events to knock it aside. I patted him on the shoulder and agreed, considering the assassination that led to the First World War, the bullet through Kennedy’s skull, the positioning of an iceberg back in 1912…Our stories do not pivot on one point but on thousands of them, moment to moment, every one of them a step in that same long march.

  –Anonymous

  As Vrell finishes his explanation, Orbus feels his legs grow slightly weak. Shit, his shooting isn’t that great–he managed to miss Vrell–but now so much depends on it. He glances to one side at the Golgoloth’s children, and notices they show the usual Prador signs of stark-staring terror. That is understandable, since both their task and Vrell’s task are likely to get them killed.

  ‘But with weapons we will be better,’ observes the one named Geth.

  ‘There will be no time,’ Vrell replies, through Thirteen. ‘Once
the Jain soldier has taken him, it will try to destroy us all as quickly as possible. Though it cannot immediately detonate the fusion devices inside the Guard, because the King has switched them over to manual, or the self-destructs of the ships or access to their weapons, since they have been isolated too, it will go for control over the weapons of this ship, and those are formidable. With the help I have, I can freeze his pit controls, but it will not take him long to get to my own, or to others in here. He must be held back for long enough, or we all die.’

  It is the longest speech Orbus has ever heard Vrell make, and he ponders its content. How coincidental that their weapons are cached here in this very room, and that Vrell has found Sadurian’s AI hiding within the ship’s system. And how fortunate that the dangers of informational attack from the Jain made it necessary for Oberon to offline those self-destruct mechanisms.

  ‘How will you know when?’ he asks.

  ‘I am monitoring,’ Vrell replies, through Thirteen. ‘Oberon has just communicated with the Golgoloth, and I am now analysing their plan of attack for error.’

  ‘They have one then?’

  ‘They do but, since Oberon is currently being hijacked by a Jain soldier, there is no guarantee that the information underlying this plan is valid.’