by Neal Asher
Something else arced through the air, its source Arach, and its terminal whine familiar. Cormac ducked down as this missile landed amidst the spreading tendrils and exploded, spreading something like phosphorus across the ground. The blast seemed to propel Cormac through an area of new growth, where shoots like giant red asparagus speared up from the incinerated remains of stalks. He stumbled through a mass of red vines writhing under painfully bright sunshine, and out onto charred ground scattered with smaller blood-red shoots of new growth. Dracomen emerged either side of him, then Blegg came stepping out backwards concentrating fire up into the face of some attacker. Arach came last, two cannons swivelling and targeting independently, the shots ripping into fast-moving silvery opponents, the flash of his particle cannon stabbing out regularly like a fiery tongue. Without that drone, Cormac realized, this would have been over very quickly. He swiftly counted—eighteen dracomen surviving—then turned round to see mountain slopes ahead.
‘I’ve got you now,’ came Thorn’s voice over com.
Running down like silver dogs came four Polity autoguns. Drawing close, they squatted obediently and poured violet fire into the jungle.
17
USER (underspace interference emitter): this device works by rhythmically inserting and removing a massive singularity through a runcible gate. The U-space interference this causes will knock any ship within its vicinity back into realspace. The singularity is contained by an inverted gravity field which is in turn powered by tidal drag, since the singularity is spinning very fast. The containment field necessarily collapses in the U-continuum and reinstates when out of it again. Huge forces and huge amounts of energy are employed, most of it generated by the singularity’s spin, therefore, that spin gradually slows. When it drops below a certain threshold, the USER must be returned to an as yet unrevealed military complex—rumoured to be sited in orbit around a black hole — where titanic magnetic accelerators spin the singularity back up to optimum again. It is also rumoured that this technology has been available for some time, but AIs were loath to employ it because by artificially creating singularities (black holes, essentially), they are shortening the life span of the universe. Evidently they intend sticking around for a while, and the fact that USERs are now being employed might suggest the AIs have found a way to deconstruct black holes.
- From ‘Quince Guide’ compiled by humans
As a precaution, when the two dragon spheres came together, Mika had again donned her spacesuit. Good thing, too. She grabbed up her pack and quickly stuffed into it anything immediately to hand that might increase her chances of survival: food, drink, energy canisters and medical supplies. Closing up her helmet and visor, she headed for the shimmer-shield, pushed through, then opened the airlock beyond. Stepping outside she looked up to a view not cleaned up by computer like the view from inside. Bright actinic sunlight cut through from one side, between a curved ceiling and curved floor composed of draconic flesh. Masses of pseudopods were sliding down beside her—a massive but eerily silent avalanche. Scales slowly tumbled through vacuum around her, and nearby they dropped sharply on the gravplated walkway. She kicked them aside as she strode towards her craft. She noted, as the gull-door rose at her approach, the docking clamps folding into the metal of the manacle below.
‘Can you hear me, Dragon?’ she asked, halting for a moment.
Nothing.
What was happening? The two spheres were breaking their connection, and thus far she saw no sign of hostility between them. But would she recognize that anyway? Perhaps right now they were fighting some battle on a virtual level, or perhaps they adhered to certain rules of conduct for something like this? They were alien, and despite lengthy investigation remained alien still, so who was to know? However, as Mika ducked into the little craft, the dragon spheres seemed to her like two card-sharps standing up from the table, about to put some distance between each other, making room to manoeuvre before going for their weapons, each hoping to get the drop on his opponent.
The gull door closed and Mika stared at the controls for a moment before taking hold of the joystick. With no AI available to fly the craft for her this time, she must now do so herself. A finger brushed against a touch-plate gave her ‘systems enabled’, then engines droned as she raised the joystick. The craft rose smoothly until it fell outside the influence of the manacle gravplates, then it jerked through vacuum as if a tether had been cut, but with no real loss of control. Mika aimed for the sunlight between the two curved draconic surfaces, the screen before her polarizing on the glare.
Dragon scales hailed against the hull, some of them hitting it quite hard before spinning away, so Mika kept the speed to a minimum. She swung the craft to one side to avoid a dead and discarded pseudopod, but clipped it all the same. Desiccated by vacuum, it shattered into red glittery fragments and black vertebrae.
The previous connection between these portions of Dragon entire now broke apart completely, the two pseudopod trees sinking away. Now Mika saw that the two spheres were visibly drawing apart, microgravity creating whirlpools in the fog of shed scales, and space opening wide before her. She accelerated as blue-green light seemed to fill the intervening space. Some kind of weapon? No, just a storm of ionization. More acceleration, since at any moment she might be caught up in some energy strike many orders of magnitude above this current jungle glow. From the beginning, the dragon spheres had utilized full-spectrum lasers as weapons. She knew the sphere she had recently occupied now contained gravtech weapons, and it struck her as likely that whatever weapons the Polity possessed, these giant spheres either already possessed or could create them within themselves, and they probably owned even more drastic ones than that.
Clear space now in the full glare of the sun. Mika turned the craft about, shut down the engines, and enabled available automatics to keep it from colliding with anything else that might be tumbling about out here. Slowly drawing away, she felt like a mouse scuttling from between two bull elephants beginning to face off.
Then it started.
Almost as one, ripples began to cross the surface of each sphere. They revolved once around each other, while still drawing apart, then accelerated away together. Perhaps ten miles away from her, a laser flashed between them, blackening an area of Mika’s reactive screen. As the screen cleared she saw a mist of plasma and glittering scales rise from the surface of each Dragon sphere, and in one sphere a glowing canyon became visible to her. She realized then that from her present position she did not know which sphere was which, because she could not see the manacle. But, then, how would knowing that help her?
The spheres began revolving around each other again, and now she caught quick glimpses of the manacle on one of them. Then their revolutions slowly drew to a halt, the sphere without the manacle occluding the other from her view. Laser strikes threw it sharply into silhouette, and streamers of plasma fire and debris shot out all around it. Then something seemed to distort space, flattening the one sphere she could see into an ellipse. The wall of distortion sped towards her even as she started the craft’s engines and grabbed the joystick. It struck. The entire craft rippled, emitted a tearing crash, and bucked as if someone had taken hold of the very fabric of space and snapped it up and down like shaking dust from a carpet. The screen disintegrated, blowing out the air supply, metal visible around her suddenly contained whorls and ridges. Then she blotted out any view by coughing blood onto her visor. It felt to her as if someone had smacked an iron bar simultaneously against every bone she contained, then shoved a barbed harpoon through her and twisted it, knotting up her insides.
I am going to die.
Her suit diagnostics made no sense at all, however the static cleaner still operated and shed the blood from the surface of her visor down around her chin. Now she could truly assess the damage to her craft: some god had taken hold of it and twisted it up like an old newspaper.
Gravity weapons.
So it seemed the so-called friendly sphere had killed her.
She focused out at vacuum, and a cliff of draconic flesh rose up before her. Something wrong: this part of Dragon was no sphere at all, but egg-shaped with an odd twist in it, with fluids boiling out into vacuum from an opening gashed down one side.
Ah, the other guy, was all she thought, before a writhing wheel of pseudopods—the business end of a fast-moving tree composed of those things—slammed up, closed around her vessel, and dragged her down.
* * * *
Stupid stupid stupid.
Though the underspace interference field knocked her out of U-space nearly fifty AU from the centre of the action—further than Pluto is from Earth—from which action the light of numerous explosions was only now reaching her, Orlandine was still in the same trap as those ECS attack ships. And she was also exposed in open vacuum between the inner system of planets and an outer ring of asteroids shepherded by a collection of cold planetoids.
Running programs to determine the strength of the USER field, Orlandine quickly realized the USER device itself lay somewhere within that inner system, and estimated a travel time of more than a year before she could distance herself far enough from it to drop back into U-space. Heliotrope possessed cold coffins, so for her the journey would not be so interminable, however she did not much relish the idea of leaving herself that vulnerable. Other ECS ships could jump to the interference field’s perimeter within that time, then come in on conventional drives. The longer the field remained functional, the more defences ECS would install around its perimeter, and it seemed likely they might possess weapons capable of knocking other ships out of U-space once the field shut down. So, the longer she remained in this area, the more likely would be her capture.
Checking her scans of the distant battle, she realized that travelling insystem to find somewhere to hide was no tenable option. Hundreds of alien ships swarmed in the area. She did not expect the Polity ships there to survive, nor did she think her presence here would go undetected for long. But another option remained: the asteroid field.
Orlandine fired up the Heliotrope’s fusion engine, turned the vessel, and headed away just as fast as she could. Somewhere amid those cold stones she should be able to find a place to hide her ship, and there power it down to avoid detection while she awaited the conclusion to events now occurring in the inner system.
* * * *
‘Why are they holding off?’ Thorn enquired. He plugged a monocular into his visor to gaze out over the red jungle towards the enormous spiral ship.
The sky was growing darker now, taking on a milky green hue as the sun descended behind the cloud cover like a heavy rucked-up blanket. In the jungle around the alien ship, things were moving about, and occasionally half-seen shapes drifted high above. To Cormac’s left, where some cataclysm had denuded the ground cover, swirled errant lights like St Elmo’s fire.
Cormac glanced across at Blegg, who now squatted beside the nearest of those strange cubic ruins, which seemed like short sections cut from a square granite pipe with sides a yard thick. Seven cubes altogether were scattered over the area—just some unknowable ruin.
‘What do you think?’ Cormac asked the old Oriental.
Blegg squinted down the slope at the red foliage. ‘We know that if they wanted to wipe us out, it would be no problem to them: they could just drop a warhead. I would say they are reluctant to destroy a possible source of information, potentially valuable, and certainly easier to obtain than, say, trying to capture a Centurion.’
‘So they’ll still try to grab us?’Thorn enquired.
‘That’s what they tried in the jungle. Why else send in what were effectively ground troops when you could sit in the sky and burn the jungle down to bedrock? I believe the killing only started when the dracomen’s resistance to Jain technology got them reclassified as being not worth the effort to capture.’ Blegg looked around to the remaining dracomen and Sparkind positioned in surrounding terrain, then to the autoguns, and finally up at Arach crouching atop the nearby cube. ‘They will come again, and this time their assault will be more organized. We just have to decide what to do.’
‘How difficult is that?’ said Arach. ‘We fight.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Blegg.
Cormac understood the man’s reservations. NEJ and the other ships remained out of contact, and it seemed likely they had either fled the enemy or been destroyed by it. So now this small ECS force lay isolated at the bottom of a gravity well, with little more than hand weapons available, and the forces arrayed against it seemed huge. In situations like this soldiers generally considered how they might die.
‘I for one have no intention of allowing myself to be captured.’ Cormac reached into his pocket and removed a small multipurpose grenade—a chrome cylinder no larger than a cigarette lighter, but with a charge capable of turning a human body into so much bloody fog. He gestured with the grenade towards Blegg. ‘You, however, have another option. You can escape. You can translate yourself through U-space.’
‘Yes, there’s always that,’ Blegg replied. He sounded tired. ‘But so can you.’
Cormac grimaced and returned the explosive to his pocket. ‘That is our last option,’ he said, not entirely convinced the option lay open to himself anyway. He needed first to open and absorb Jerusalem’s memory package, and it seemed unlikely he would be given the time for that. He looked around, then focused on Thorn, who had now removed his monocular from his visor. ‘Thorn?’ he enquired.
Thorn replied, ‘With us out in the open, all they need to do is sit up in the sky and pick us off with stunners or lasers, whatever they choose.’ He patted a hand against the envirosuit he wore. ‘The dracomen might stand a chance but we’ve no chameleonware.’
‘The cave system, then,’ Cormac commented.
‘So it would seem,’ said Thorn. ‘All we have to do is survive down there until rescue arrives—if it is coming at all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Should we send the dracomen into the jungle? They would stand a better chance out there.’
‘I will try giving that order to Scar, but I don’t see him obeying it,’ Cormac replied.
‘Movement,’ said Blegg, abruptly.
Thorn turned and raised his monocular again. ‘Humanoid figure—a familiar one.’ He made to pass the monocular to Cormac, but Cormac waved it away. Ramping his visual acuity, using a program in his gridlink controlling the muscles around his eyes and configuring signals direct from his optic nerves, he soon identified the Legate walking from the jungle and up the slope towards them. He beckoned Scar over to him while he watched.
‘Scar,’ he said, ‘I am going to talk to this… Legate. And when it doesn’t get what it wants, I suspect we’ll be back into a fire-fight. Myself and the rest of the humans, and Arach, are going to run for the cave system and blow the entrance behind us. I want you to take your people into the jungle—with your camouflage you have a better chance of surviving there.’ Scar just stared at him for a long moment. Cormac continued, ‘This way some of us might survive to deliver a report to ECS forces when they arrive.’
Scar held up one hand, clawed fingers spread. ‘I will send five into the jungle.’
‘This is not open to negotiation, Scar.’
‘No, it is not,’ the dracoman replied, and moved away.
The Legate was now only a few hundred yards away, and Cormac thought it laughable how the entity held its hands up and open as if to show it carried no weapons. He knew all its weapons would be inside it. Once the entity had approached to ten yards away, Cormac stepped forwards. ‘I think that’s about close enough. So tell me, what do you want? I would guess you haven’t come here to surrender to us.’
‘It is good that you retain your sense of humour,’ said the Legate. ‘Allow me to acquaint you with realities.’ It pointed upwards with one overly long finger and, in that instant, com was restored and Cormac received a time-delayed information package from the NEJ. He held this package in his gridlink, as loath to open it now as the memory package gifted to him by Jeru
salem. He suspected bad news, but more than that he suspected their com codes had been cracked by whatever this being before him represented.
‘Nobody is to open that package,” he instantly broadcast from his gridlink.
It almost seemed the Legate heard him as well. ‘We have not yet broken your com codes, since the algorithms that control them were created by AI. Had we broken them, be assured that you would now be under my control, as would all here, AIs or those using gridlinks or augs.’ The Legate turned its nightmare head slightly towards Horace Blegg. ‘Including you.’
Cormac decided he must take the risk. ‘All of you, accept nothing via my gridlink for the next minute.’ Out loud he said, ‘Blegg, Thorn, back away from me.’ He looked up at Arach. ‘I want you to soft link to me. Any sign that I’m subject to a subversion program, you take me down then—’ he stabbed a finger at the Legate, ‘then you take him down.’
‘What the—?’Thorn began.
Horace Blegg slapped a hand on his shoulder and began drawing him away. ‘Information package from the NEJ—we don’t know if it is genuine.’
As a further precaution, Cormac reached in his pocket and thumbed up then held down the dead man’s switch on his grenade. Only then did he open the package.
Haruspex and Coriolanus were visible ahead, glaring bright in the light of the near sun. ‘We have all released beacons broadcasting this package, so hopefully it will get through to you,’ Jack informed him. ‘We are attempting to sling-shot around the sun, to make a run on the USER which is located on a moon orbiting the other living world here. While that USER continues functioning, estimated time to the arrival of Polity forces here, one year. Only if the USER is shut down will that estimate reduce. We will reach the USER in seventeen hours. The expected time of arrival thereafter of the dreadnoughts, less than a day.’
