Hilldiggers (polity)

by Neal Asher

  Harald shut off the display and sat back for a moment. The appearance of this Brumallian ship should not have any effect on his original plans, since what happened next was all about firepower. He decided to dismiss the intruder from his consideration, and returned his attention to their present situation.

  Because the technology was so risky to use, Fleet did not run many tests of its gravity disruptors. The last such test Harald remembered was when he had been a mere apprentice in the Engine Galleries. But, then, maybe there had been other tests the memory of which the bullet had scoured from his mind.

  Readying the gravity disruptor for firing also created all sorts of strange effects throughout the ship. Infra-sound and ultrasound spikes directly affected mood, so mock tests were conducted, producing similar sounds, and crew were instructed to practise interacting with each other without any emotional input. What these mock tests could not duplicate, however, was the sounds the ship made as huge forces began to distort the very fabric of space around it, and as the gravitic effects of that distortion began to twist and stretch the ship itself like a piece of bread dough.

  Numerous alarms began sounding, until an officer managed to shut them down, thereafter tracking the breaches and breaks on an electronic flow chart, and delivering instructions on what to do about them to the maintenance crews via his com helmet. Internal lights dimmed and in some places went out completely to be replaced by low-energy emergency lighting.

  "Begin your run to the cover point," Harald instructed Franorl, then watched Desert Wind accelerating away, its belly thruster stabbing down into atmosphere as the great ship laboured back up into vacuum.

  Defence Platform Four now lay just a few hundred miles ahead and above them and, rising over the curve of Sudoria, Corisanthe Main became just visible beyond it, picked out by the sun which now lay behind Ironfist itself. Some thousands of miles over to Harald's left, still in planetary twilight, lay Corisanthe II, and when he turned a camera in that direction he could see flashes, as of an approaching thunderstorm, from the battle being fought between that station and the hilldiggers Harvester and Musket.

  "I will be reaching cover point in thirty minutes," Franorl informed him, by voice only. "The troops are ready for station insertion."

  Harald nodded to himself, but carefully since his headache seemed to hang like a lead weight in the jelly of his brain. Via his eye-screen he accessed cameras located on railway platforms within Desert Wind, and there observed the first of 1,500 Fleet marines disembarking from the trains and heading for the lifts to take them down to the insertion craft crammed waiting in the docking bays. The men wore armoured spacesuits, carried disc carbines, grenade launchers and portable impact shields, and they were the reason Desert Wind had only played a minor role in the present orbital firefight. Harald had wanted to keep them safe and ready for the takeover of Corisanthe Main.

  He now tried dividing his eye-screen so as to view simultaneously the docking bay and the platform, but found, despite managing to divide his perception on one occasion since his injury, that he could not manage it now, as his eye just performed like an unenhanced one. Sudorian medical science had enabled him to get up and function again after such a serious injury, but he suspected his present problem might be due to damage to the enhancements rather than to himself. In irritation he flipped the eye-screen aside and abruptly stood up. Too abruptly, for dizziness assailed him and he needed to lean over and prop himself against a chair arm. After a moment the fit passed and, on shaky legs, he crossed the Bridge to climb the stairs.

  Once safely up in the Admiral's Haven, Harald removed his com helmet and control glove, then headed for the en-suite facilities. After using the toilet he started to splash some water on his face, then realised that he had not washed properly for some time. Twenty-five minutes remained before the other ship was in position and it seemed unlikely anything unexpected could happen within that time. Deciding to take advantage of the interval, he quickly closed down the computer units within his foamite suit then reached inside to disconnect the interface plugs from the sockets grafted along his collar bone. He then quickly stripped off the suit and undersuit, and stepped into the shower. He cleaned carefully around the collar-bone sockets, soaped himself down, scrubbed the blood from his hair and, finally feeling refreshed, stepped from the shower booth and went to find a replacement suit. Once dressed again he felt so much better that he even began thinking he could tolerate his headache enough to forgo taking further drugs for a while. With his com helmet in place and control glove back on, he headed for the stair while flipping the eye-screen back across. The image he summoned first was to be an exterior view of Defence Platform Four as seen from Ironfist. But nothing appeared. He began to run a diagnostic program to give him an audio report, then noticed from his left eye that the eye-screen was showing something after all. Puzzled, he removed the helmet, carefully keeping a finger on the automatic cutoff switch so that the helmet remained functional. Now he could see clearly that the screen was showing precisely the scene he had requested.

  Blind?

  Placing a hand over his left eye, he could still see everything from his right eye, including the screen image, but as he moved that screen closer, things started to get a bit strange at about a foot and a half from his face. Much of the helmet was simply no longer visible. Moving it closer, more and more of it disappeared from view, including the screen itself, and even the hand holding the helmet. The enhanced vision of his right eye was no longer registering anything that came within a certain range of it, which he recognised as both a hardware and an organic failure. This sudden knowledge jerked him to a halt, his mouth suddenly dry. Then came that uncontrolled surge of anger and he hurled the helmet away from him. Gasping, he staggered to a nearby seat where, seemingly without his conscious intervention, his hands sought out the containers on his utility belt. Two painkillers went into his mouth, after a hesitation followed by a third. He loaded syringes with the other drugs, and injected them into an arm that was now quite tender. He then sat and just stared, his mind seemingly on hold.

  "Admiral?" asked a nervous-looking subaltern from the top of the stairs leading up from the Bridge. "I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but Captain Franorl has reported that he is now in position."

  Harald abruptly pushed himself to his feet. Where had the time gone? Another mental organic failure?

  He waved the subaltern away and strode over to pick up his com helmet. He removed the earpiece and microphone, discarding the helmet itself as he headed for the stair, but snatching up his control glove on the way. Down on the Bridge, he moved with apparent decisiveness over to the Admiral's chair and sat down.

  "Disruptor status?" he demanded, using the control glove to transfer his visual com helmet functions to one of the screens ranged before him.

  "Gravity disruptor ready to fire," came the reply from Firing Control.

  Harald called up a series of views showing him the Defence Platform, above and ahead of them, and another view along the entire length of Ironfist. "Are non-grav sections now prepared for inversion?"

  "All are prepared."

  Harald now opened communication with hilldiggers Wildfire and Harvester. "Captains, are you within close range of or else within your specified cover points?"

  The Captains of those two ships quickly replied to confirm. Wildfire lay only a few minutes away. Harvester—and the ship slaved to it, Musket—was at that moment moving into its designated cover point.

  "Very well, you know what to do now." Shutting off that link, Harald opened his microphone to general address. "Invert the ship," he ordered. "Engineering, stand by for fast engine restart."

  Ironfist's steering thrusters came on all along one side, and the great ship began to roll. On the Bridge, of course, with a fully functional gravity floor, everyone maintained their positions easily. However, because of the effect of the planet below, they could all feel the ship itself turning over. Within a few minutes Ironfist was lying on its back re
lative to the planet, its underside facing up towards the platform. Most importantly nothing stood between the head of the disruptor, mounted below the ship's nose, and that Combine Defence Platform.

  "Fire disruptor."

  The ship then seemed to heave like some animal about to vomit. All around the Bridge could be heard the creaking and cracking of internal structures. Around the disruptor itself, which resembled two projecting fins curving forward, a shimmering haze appeared. With a thump that Harald could feel in his bones, that same shimmer sped away, became a wavefront propagating through the thin air, and then through the vacuum beyond. To either side the wavefront feathered: it was directional, but only in the way that a tsunami is. Harald quickly magnified his view of the Defence Platform just in time to see the wave strike it. At the forefront of the impact the platform seemed to stretch, almost like an oil spill riding over a wave in water. But, as the wave passed through it, the platform just ruptured and came completely unstitched. There followed some explosions, from munitions detonating, but surprisingly few. Platform Four just came apart.

  "Get us to the cover point, now!" Harald ordered. "Engines to full power!"

  Ironfist's main drive threw out a bright fusion flame, a mile long, from four fusion-chamber mouths each 600 feet in diameter. The flame was so bright because of the secondary burn of atmosphere. Even protected by the automatic adjustment of the gravity floor, some crew staggered and others toppled over as the massive acceleration threw the million-ton hilldigger forward, as steering thrusters then turned it over, and as the belly thrusters went to maximum power to throw it up out of atmosphere. Now, Harald knew, was the most dangerous time. It would take them less than twenty minutes to reach the cover point, since they had already been heading towards it at half speed behind Franorl's Desert Wind, and if the Combine Oversight Committee could manage to get its act together within that time and order the use of their own disruptors, Ironfist would be going the way of Defence Platform Four. Harald, however, had bet on them not being able to come to a decision that quickly. He sat clutching the arms of his chair, the screens before him running a chaotic series of views and code streams because he had not meanwhile offlined his control glove.

  Engine shutdown was followed by the sideways pull of steering thrusters at turnover, as the massive ship flipped over from nose to tail, the decelerating blast of the main engines now bringing them into their cover point. He glanced over at the seemingly panicked activity evident at Damage Control. It was a risky option to put the ship under this sort of strain right after using the disruptor. The recommended strategy was for a full maintenance check to be carried out, from engines to nose. Doubtless there would be hull breaches, cracks or breaks in the ship's skeleton. They would either make it or not.

  "We are now in the cover point," a voice announced.

  Harald unclenched his fists and smiled, more for the reassurance of those around him than because he felt any desire to. Their cover point lay close to Corisanthe Main, on a line running directly between that station and Corisanthe II. Harvester and Musket rested midway between Corisanthe II and III, whilst Wildfire's position was close to Main, on a line drawn between Main and Corisanthe III.

  Here then was another weakness in Orbital Combine's defences—one they seemed not to have recognised. He surmised that Combine's gravity weapons—the ones he wasn't supposed to know about—would be sited on the main three stations. The problem with such weapons was that the gravity wave, which propagated from a spatial distortion, had substantially more range than any conventional weapon. Even using such weapons in interplanetary space, during the War itself, had been a risky option. Here, in the vicinity of Sudoria, where everything was so close, it became riskier still. Because the stations rested at the points of a narrow triangle with Main at the apex, the firing of such a weapon at the Fleet ships where they were presently positioned by any of the two Corisanthe stations closest to them risked the destruction of the station that lay closest to the weapon's target. That risk was substantially less if such a weapon was fired from Corisanthe Main aiming at Wildfire, Desert Wind or Harald's own ship, Ironfist. However, if Combine did attack, they could not fire three weapons at once since the ensuing disruption would be sure to destroy their own stations. Yet if Combine limited itself to firing at just one ship, it risked immediate retaliation from the other two.

  Harald was betting the members of the Oversight Committee were too cowardly to take such a risk. However, he was not betting on his own Captains being prepared to use their gravity disruptors. He would control that option.

  McCrooger

  First came a rush of dizziness, then I felt the kind of high you get from sucking on pure oxygen. The sound of my heart was loud, intrusive, and my lungs ached and bubbled as I breathed. Here I was holding the station Director at gunpoint and making demands, and I wondered if I would even be able to stand upright once I was off this slab.

  "Why would you, an envoy from the Polity, want me to do that?" enquired Gneiss.

  "Because the Worm instigated this present conflict."

  "I thought you had brought us evidence proving Fleet the guilty party?"

  "Fleet is just the tool that Harald is using, and Harald himself is one of the tools the Worm is using."

  "Ah," he said, taking a pace forward, "the children of Elsever Strone." He paused, a brief look of pain crossing his features. "I would like to have known Orduval, but sadly that was not to be."

  My hands were sweaty, and the gun was beginning to feel rather heavy; I brought my left hand up to support the butt and concentrated on keeping the barrel on target.

  "The protocols," I reminded him.

  Gneiss focused back on me. "I am presuming that since you know that the protocols exist, you also know what they entail?"

  I didn't know the full consequences of all the protocols, only that, after Yishna's interference with them, they would now eject all four Ozark Cylinders from the station, and that at some point those cylinders would pass beyond Corisanthe Main's shields, to where they could be destroyed.

  He continued, "Do you want me to use the protocol that results in the thermal and EM sterilisation of the cylinders?"

  I shook my head, mainly trying to shake off the sweat running into my eyes.

  "Which, then?" Gneiss asked, mistaking my gesture.

  Thinking muggily, I said, "The one that results in the ejection of a cylinder."

  "But what will that achieve?"

  Damn, I definitely wasn't thinking straight. "Perhaps you've forgotten, but I'm holding the gun. What will be achieved, you can leave me to worry about."

  "Very well, there is one other small problem."

  "Enlighten me."

  "Without some sort of containment breach, I can only accede to your demand by using the system access in my office," said Gneiss.

  I swung my legs off the slab while eyeing him closely, trying to read him. Sometimes he showed strong emotion but at seemingly inappropriate moments, while the rest of the time he was disconcertingly blank, perhaps because, facing him, my point of focus immediately became those odd-looking eyes. I guessed he probably had some way of alerting station security from his office, or hoped he could engineer some sort of intervention on the way there. I stood up, shakily, then stepped to one side.

  "I guess you'll have to take me to your office, then," I conceded, just to see how he would respond.

  "You will be seen by others," he pointed out, which threw me completely.

  "Then it's up to you to find a way to get me there without being seen."

  He gave a mild nod of agreement, almost as if I had posed a little puzzle for him the resolution of which he deemed of no consequence.

  "Over there," he pointed, "is a locker storing bio-containment suits. They look little different from emergency survival suits, which many of the crew are now wearing since they enable greater freedom of movement than spacesuits." Peering at my gun, he added, "You will be able to conceal your weapon in the belly pock
et."

  I just could not make this guy out. He showed no emotional involvement in what was happening to him—in what I was forcing upon him—yet surely that could not be right, for this man was station Director of Corisanthe Main. I was also getting an impression from him of complete disregard for his own safety. Almost as if he would be prepared to take a bullet, just as an intellectual exercise.

  I lowered the gun, since my arm was aching, and moved back towards the lockers he had indicated. I took hold of the handle of one and pulled and, still watching him, groped about inside. After a moment I pulled out a package, and quickly recognised a suit similar to the one I had worn on the escape-pod taking me down to Brumal.

  "You're bleeding," he observed.

  Glancing down I noted fresh blood staining my dungarees, and a trail of droplets leading back to the slab. I could survive without my heart beating or my lungs breathing, by dint of IF21 distributing oxygen about my body, but I wondered if my body could survive without any blood inside it.

  "Kneel down," I instructed Gneiss, "and place your hands on the floor under your knees."

  With a slightly puzzled look he obliged. I quickly placed my gun on the floor, opened the packet and pulled on the containment suit. It came with its own integral overboots, so would at least prevent me from dribbling more blood all over the place. I pulled up the hood but did not bother to close the mask since I had no idea how long the small oxygen supply attached to the belt would last me.