by Neal Asher
Loman continued to stare, feeling panic rise up inside himself. It had always been accepted that Behemoth would run, after Miranda had been destroyed. Had it not come out here to hide from the Polity in the first place?
"The General Patten was the biggest and most advanced ship we had, yet Behemoth tore it apart without using the weapon it's just used to destroy the Flint complex. What do you think the fleet could do against it?" he asked.
"They could slow it, Hierarch," suggested Aberil.
Loman stood up, walked to the edge of his grav-plates, and stared up at the chainglass screen. He placed his fingers against his aug and tried to find something amid the racket blocking or obliterating the channels. It did not take him long.
"Amoloran! Amoloran!" something bellowed over the ether.
"Listen to me," Loman sent back. "I am the Reverend Epthirieth Loman Dorth, Hierarch of Masada. Amoloran is dead. What do you want here, Behemoth?"
Suddenly the static faded and Loman felt himself to be standing in a vast chamber. The screen he gazed up at now seemed to have translucent scales all across its surface; a sharp astringent smell filled his nostrils, and he felt uncomfortably warm.
"You closed me out with prayer, and I could have destroyed you then. You destroy an Outlink station, and for this the Polity blames me. Now you have hurt me, and for this you will pay," Dragon told him.
"You were not hurt by any order of mine," Loman replied. "You attacked a ship sent on a mission by Amoloran. Those in that ship turned on its engines and burnt you, and for that you killed them all. There is no payment to be made."
"Oh you will pay," Dragon replied.
"Hierarchy it's turned towards us," said Aberil.
With some difficulty Loman severed the link, blinking away the strange after-effects from his vision, and turned to his brother. "What?"
"It just changed course. It's heading towards us."
Loman felt his mouth turn dry and a brass hand clench in his guts. "Send the fleet," he said, and unsteadily returned to his couch.
"Would it be possible to hit Behemoth with Ragnorak?" he silently asked Aberil.
"No, Hierarch. Ragnorak is designed for static targets, and Behemoth would just move out of the way."
Aloud, Aberil continued, "It's accelerating."
In silence, Loman watched the display unfolding in the tank, then a display on one of the control screens fed through from the targeting gear on Ragnorak. There all he saw was a small, slightly distorted sphere growing slowly larger against a background of blackness.
"How long will it take to reach us?" he asked.
"At this rate, just over the hour," Aberil replied.
"So the fleet will get to it first?"
"Yes."
But then what? Loman considered how brief would be his reign as Hierarch. There had been briefer ones, but never with such possibilities of great achievement. He closed his eyes and thought that perhaps this was their reward for dealing with one who had obviously been an emissary of Satan, not God — this was their punishment for not recognizing the difference. Members of the crew at the instrumentation around him were now mumbling prayers. In his mind, he slowly began to recite all the Satagents — but now with his eyes open, and all expression erased from his face. He was on the fifth one, just like Amoloran, when Aberil broke the gloom on the bridge.
"The fleet has gone into underspace."
Loman groped for some sort of reply. They might succeed in stopping the creature, but it seemed very unlikely — something that could tear apart a warship like the General Patten and could destroy something as huge as the Flint complex in a matter of seconds would take some stopping.
He was about to speak again when something slammed into him through his aug — tearing open a link in a way he'd always thought impossible.
"How so obviously you are not Polity AIs, and how slowly your ships enter underspace. With your pathetic fleet all around you, Reverend Epthirieth Loman Dorth, look to your world!"
"What… what do you mean?"
The only reply was fading gargantuan laughter.
"Behemoth has dropped into underspace. It has gone," said Aberil.
Loman sat back and very carefully closed down the channels that linked him to the U-space transmitter on this ship, and thus through to the cylinder worlds. He did not want to listen to the millions dying.
It was a brief U-space jump, yet it seemed interminable.
"Not too bright, are they?" opined Gant, staring at the console out of which had been relayed Dragon's exchange with the Hierarch.
Cormac shrugged and was about to make some comment, but Apis intervened, "Dragon seemed about to attack that device. What happened?"
Cormac explained, "It looks like their ships need to get up speed first to drop into underspace… they can't do a standing jump. But Dragon can."
Apis looked thoughtful for a moment as he closed the clasps down the front of his exoskeleton. "Perhaps they are not used to making war on something that fights back."
"Perhaps," said Cormac, now gazing up at the pterodactyl head that was still hovering above them. "You lied about your ability to drop into underspace, so am I now to believe your story about these people using the mycelium you provided to destroy Miranda?"
"It is true," Dragon replied briefly.
"Okay, I'll accept that for now, but do you suppose for one minute that the Polity would ever forgive you the slaughter of the population on Masada or in those cylinder worlds?"
"I am dying."
"I see, so you intend to go out in bloody style."
"I will live."
"Any remote possibility of a straight answer?"
"I will destroy only their laser arrays."
Cormac glanced around at his companions. It was with a total lack of surprise that he saw Mika holding some sort of instrument up to one of the draconic tentacles. Scar was poised in the air — a reptilian statue. Gant had his foot hooked under the back of one of the seats and once again clutched his APW to his chest.
Cormac returned his attention to Dragon. "What about us? What do you intend for us?"
The head suddenly dropped down so that it was poised right before Cormac. "If I kill and destroy, your Polity will kill and destroy me. You will let me live, Ian Cormac. For how I will now help you, you will let me live."
"I might when I figure out what the hell you mean when you say you are 'dying' and 'will live'. I'd have thought a creature of your capabilities would have learnt how to communicate clearly by now."
The head swung so that it was directed towards Scar. In response the dracoman hissed and seemed ready to attack. Dragon merely said, "He will know — when it is time." With that it abruptly withdrew towards the airlock, tentacles detaching and slithering away after it; the great plug of tangled flesh drew back into a living cavern beyond, and the airlock began to close. The screen they had been observing now showed only something dark and organic, which shifted slowly.
Cormac paused for a moment, then said, "Get strapped in. I think the shit's about to hit."
Seconds later they felt Dragon surface from underspace and, ahead of the lander, curtains of skin began to part. Cormac hunted across the controls until he managed to adjust the setting of one of the lower screens to infrared, to obtain the view he required. Now they could all see a tunnel opening ahead, and going into huge peristalsis. The craft slid forwards twenty metres, and slammed to a halt with a dull boom — then again, as another stretch of tunnel opened. Five times this happened, until through the main screen they saw a vague circle of luminescence. With competent precision, Apis reached down and reset the screen Cormac had previously adjusted — back to its normal view overlooking one side. Then they were out, and falling towards the gleaming arc of a world, starlit space fading to blue on that arc, and hanging nearby a huge machine-gun-magazine satellite, gleaming in bright sunlight. In the rear-view screen Dragon loomed huge against the stars, a distorted sphere across which now passed ripples of light,
as over a pool of water containing fluorescing bacteria into which a stone has been cast.
"Shit! Get us out of here!" Cormac shouted.
Apis, who had strapped himself in at the controls before anyone else could object — though Cormac wouldn't, as the boy probably knew them better than anyone else on board — ran at high speed through a start-up sequence and grabbed the joystick. Thrusters roared and the craft tilted to one side, the view of the planet swinging round by a hundred and eighty degrees. There came a thunderous crash, and light flooded the cockpit as from a lightning strike. Now the satellite was behind them, and blowing apart, huge fragments hurtling outwards ahead of a wave of fire.
"Hold us here," ordered Cormac. "I want to see this."
Manipulating thrusters, Apis swung the craft around so the main screen showed a view of Dragon rolling across the darkness above them, heading towards the horizon of Masada — following a line of gleaming shapes suspended above atmosphere like a bracelet of charms for the planet. The creature remained in sight as they descended into atmosphere, and they watched it pause by another satellite and spit an actinic bar down onto it — another satellite gone in a fiercely bright explosion against the blue-black of space.
"Take us further in," said Cormac, then he looked round when the boy seemed disinclined to respond. Apis looked pale and slightly sick.
"The Golem, on the Occam Razor… they hit the ion engines," he stammered, as the landing craft began its brick-like descent. "We've only got manoeuvring thrusters."
Cormac closed his eyes and massaged his temples with his forefingers — he was getting a headache.
"Of course," he said. "This craft hasn't got AG, so we're going to need a flat area at least two or three kilometres long. How much can you slow us with the thrusters?"
Now asked technical questions, Apis lost his sick expression and shrugged himself into a businesslike frame of mind. He checked his instrumentation. "Enough to prevent us burning up, though I calculate… we will be going in at between five hundred and a thousand kilometres per hour."
Cormac glanced round at the other three. "This could prove interesting," he observed.
"You have a strange idea of what constitutes interesting," Mika replied.
"Normally something that involves an explosion, unfortunately," added Gant.
Scar merely bared his teeth.
Cormac went on, "If any of us survive this, it's going to be you, Gant. Your primary mission has to be to get news of what happened on the Occam to the Polity. ECS has to know about Skellor — he could be more dangerous than anything we've ever faced before."
"You are a cold bastard," said Gant.
"Whatever gets the job done," Mika commented sarcastically.
Cormac ignored them both.
The craft was soon shaking, and what had earlier been merely a low droning outside was now growing into a constant roar. Cormac gazed ahead as they punched through stratospheric cloud, above purplish ocean with a scattering of islands like black scabs. Apis manipulated the thruster controls, lifting the lander's nose for the further horizon. Soon they noticed the ocean below was scattered with icebergs.
"Will we make it to the main continent?" Cormac asked almost conversationally.
Apis gave a tight nod in reply.
Separate bergs started knitting below them into an ice sheet, which then started to break apart again. The line of a landmass rose over the horizon, with thick cloud tangled above it. When it became evident that this terrain ahead was mountainous, Apis used the thrusters to take them higher. The roaring was now deafening, the craft shaking alarmingly. Across the main screen rolled motes of something molten, and along its edges a hot glow encroached. Valleys and tors rolled underneath the craft, and it punched through cloud masses — losing vision for long seconds. Spearing down through a final cloud bank, they came out over flat plains, with a glimpse of chequered ponds and a wider spread of agriculture surrounding them. To their right a city loomed out of haze, then rapidly receded.
"Dragon!" Cormac yelled, pointing up to the sky where blooms of light ignited behind cloud, as from a distant thunderstorm.
Signs of civilization receded and they were now plummeting onto an uncultivated plain. The roar doubled as Apis initiated the thrusters to slow the craft, and kept them full on. As he fought to keep its nose up, the craft continued to descend, blurs of beige, dark red and green flashing by beneath them. There came a loud vicious hissing and, glancing at the rear-view screen, Cormac saw a cloud boiling up behind a track hammered through the vegetation below. Apis hit boosters and the cloud was shot through with sheets of flame. Suddenly they were all pressed hard against their straps, and their craft was bouncing and breaking. In the rear-view screen, a thruster nacelle, still jetting flame, curved into the cloud and disappeared. The craft itself began to slew, but Apis managed to correct for this. When Cormac glanced at him, the boy looked terrified but determined. This state of affairs seemed to just go on and on, then, as the din lessened, the craft abruptly, tilted, then flipped. There followed a chaos of rending crashes and bone-jarring jolts, as they rolled over and over, with pieces of the lander breaking away, and cold acidic air rushing in through the gaps torn in the hull, along with a haze of papery fragments. Then they were sliding along, tilted to one side, with wet black mud spraying up through gaping holes.
Cormac found himself fighting for breath as the oxygenated air inside the craft poured away. A roaring in his ears soon drowned out the chaos of the crash. With his vision tunnelling, he saw that Apis had managed to close over the hood of his exoskeleton and the suit, detecting the lack of oxygen, had automatically raised the visor. Behind, Mika was fighting for breath, while Gant was undoing his safety straps. Then Cormac lost it — he blacked out completely.
Thorn could not help but be impressed by the set-up they had here. Studying his companions in the elevator, as it rapidly accelerated up into the building, he wondered what their story might be. The girl looked a little bewildered by events around her, but utterly determined to stick with the old Golem, Fethan. Lellan Stanton… now here was an intriguing woman. She had little of her brother's brutish appearance, but obviously a shitload of his innate intelligence. She and Jarvellis were of a kind — clever, forceful, and not to be crossed. Yes, Thorn rather liked her already.
"What was it?" John Stanton asked.
Lellan replied, "Some sort of explosion." She listened to her helmet's earphone. "I'm not getting much sense out of them up there — there's a lot of yelling."
Thorn reflected on their frantic journey across the floor of the cavern in the jury-rigged AGC. Something big was happening, and there might ensue some kind of reaction from those down here — this place was wound up tight and seemed ready to explode. He'd seen it in the faces of the soldiers and technicians, and he'd seen the armament they'd built up. Through the glass side of the elevator Thorn saw that they had now reached the ceiling of the cavern, but that they were not slowing. Up and through — dark stone speeding past lit eerily by the elevator's internal light.
"Could be something to do with that rock you dragged in with us?" he suggested.
Jarvellis shook her head. "That fragmented and burned up without their notice, but maybe we were detected. That might explain all the activity," she said, her expression worried.
"No, that," said Lellan, tapping the side of her helmet. "That was Polas I was listening to. As far as I can gather, there's been an explosion on or near EL-41, and the possibility of explosions at 40 and 39. They're putting up the big dish and refractor now." She paused, listening again, then: "Seems that was 38."
Finally the elevator drew to a halt and its doors slid open onto a chamber crammed with equipment. One side of this chamber was walled by a window of tinted chainglass giving a view of mountains and sky, so it seemed evident they were located inside some high peak.
As soon as Lellan stepped out of the elevator, a thin weasel of a man began to gesture to her frantically. He sat in a half-circle conso
le with a number of screens jury-rigged before him. Other people throughout this chamber were operating other machines, babbling into microphones, or frantically tapping instructions into consoles of antiquated design. Removing her helmet, Lellan trotted over to the beckoning man. Thorn took his time following along behind, as he once again studied the set-up around him — they had obviously had to do the best they could with whatever they could lay their hands on, but this was as good an operations room as any. It surprised him to see that it even had an old military projection tank — a holojector showing the entire Masadan system. However, he doubted that it displayed real-time — that would have bespoken a sophistication they definitely did not possess here.
"It's gone," the man called Polas was saying. "It's fucking well just gone."
"Show me," said Lellan.
Polas gestured at the screens. One of these showed a radio picture of the black dots of stars on a white background, cut off to one side by the black arc of Calypse. Another showed an empty grid, while another showed just empty blue. On a ring of lower screens, mathematical symbols and graph representations clicked on and off, flickering and changing as if some primitive AI were trying to justify the impossible.
"What about the recording?" Lellan asked.
Polas grimaced. "The machine dumped it as being out of parameters — thought it had made a mistake." He shouted across to one of his fellows, "Dale, you managed to retrieve it yet?"
The woman Dale shook her head as she continued clattering away at her keypad — chasing down something on her screen.
"The rest?" asked Lellan. "Have they gone as well?"
"So the equipment tells us. There's also that." Polas pointed to the chainglass window. Outside in daylight sky, a smoky disc was dissipating — one edge of it silhouetted against Calypse.
"Okay, it's time to send up the probe," said Lellan.
"Might be software, glitched by whatever that was," Polas pointed out.
"Just do it."
"A probe?" Thorn turned to Jarvellis, who was standing beside him.
"We brought it for them on our last trip. They only have the one," she replied.
