by Neal Asher
‘We have a problem,’ came a yell from up front.
Cormac quickly moved up past the others.
‘The seismic scanner missed this,’ explained one of the dracomen, almost guiltily.
The tunnel opened out onto a tilted slab that ran partly along one side of what appeared to be the empty chimney of a volcano. High above, the sky was visible like a bloodshot eye. Cormac moved to the rim of the slab and peered over.
Something down there?
He caught just a hint of a metallic gleam, but immediately it faded, then the rest of the dracomen and the Sparkind surged out of the fissure, unstrapping their weapons and turning to face back the way they had come. Arach reared up, standing only on his four back legs, the four front ones spread in threat, shimmering along their inner edges as chainglass blades extruded. From the fissure came a sound as of a swarm of iron snakes ascending towards them.
‘Yeah, we have a problem,’ Cormac agreed wearily.
* * * *
Out towards the cold living world there were fewer of the alien ships, and those that were there would not be able to build up sufficient speed to catch up with the Centurions. They could, however, intercept, since the Centurion’s target was an obvious one. Also, some of the alien ships had followed the same sling-shot solar orbit as the Centurions, and were not far behind, though with their number depleted by Haruspex’s use of a gravtech weapon as they first sped down towards the sun.
‘So, what’s the plan?’ asked Coriolanus. The Centurion’s AI loaded its question with just the right level of irony. Jack reckoned it must have been practising. Scanning ahead, he now estimated the moon to be not much larger than Mars’s moon Phobos.
‘You and Haruspex go in ahead of me,’ he said. ‘Haruspex takes the left flank, you take the right flank. We’ll strafe the surface with masers, follow up with CTDs. On our second pass we’ll use rail-gun missiles to penetrate deep, followed by telefactors to check for—’
‘Ho ho,’ interrupted Haruspex.
‘Okay, plan B,’ said Jack. ‘Let’s blast the fuck out of that moon.’
‘Oops, contacts rounding the planet,’ warned Coriolanus.
Bacilliforms swarmed into view, and behind them, like their herders, came two ammonite spiral ships. After observing these, Jack now noticed some of the lens-shaped vessels on an intercept course far over to one side. It would be nice to be able to use chameleonware at this point, but all three Centurions had sustained too much damage for that to be effective. Jack instead fired off a near-c fusillade from his rail-gun to intercept them. The other two ships likewise let loose with their rail-guns, whereupon Haruspex complemented this with five seeker missiles, which slowly dragged away from the three Centurions.
‘What about maser attack?’ enquired Haruspex.
‘Use anti-munitions,’ Jack instructed.
‘None left,’ the other replied.
‘Mmm, me neither. Coriolanus?’
In reply, a number of objects sped from the third vessel. A hundred miles ahead they activated, and three hologram Centurions sprung into being. The three original ships then utilized their chameleonware, for what little concealment that provided.
‘They’re forming up, now,’ observed Coriolanus.
The rod-ships were conjoining into a wall extending before the moon, the two big spiral vessels sliding around this to come head-on at the Centurions.
‘Drop back from me’, Jack instructed, ‘a hundred miles. I’m going to DIGRAW these bastards. You two follow me in and then hit the moon with the heavy stuff.’
‘Now that,’ said Coriolanus, ‘sounds suspiciously like a plan to me.’
‘Well, ain’t you the comedian?’
Nevertheless, the two other ships did drop back. DIGRAW might stand for ‘Directed Gravity Weapon’ but its effect was about as directional as a leaky flame-thrower. Jack now lay safely within the central area of DIGRAW propagation, so effectively wore an asbestos suit, but the other two ships could easily get burnt if too close.
The swarm of rail-gun missiles now reached the lens-ships. Two of the ships exploded, while the others tried to veer away. Another took numerous hits and just ended up tumbling through vacuum.
One hour later, Haruspex’s missiles found the remaining two lens-ships, but by then they had long ceased to be a problem to the Centurions.
Charging the DIGRAW took Jack all that time and still continued, which meant power remained low to his rail-guns, which launched most of his material weapons. Firing missiles without an initial rail-gun boost would be pointless, since the enemy’s defensive weapons would have plenty of time to react to them. The moon was now the province of the other two Centurions. Jack’s task lay directly ahead.
A million miles out, Jack detected rail-gun missiles heading towards him, and did the only thing possible in the circumstances: he shut down power to the DIGRAW capacitor and projected a hardfield out ahead of his nose. NEJ shuddered as near-c projectiles impacted on the hardfield, turning instantly to pure energy. Three strikes and that hardfield generator burnt out. Jack instantly onlined another generator and took three more hits. The second generator filled the inside of NEJ with smoke. A fourth hit tore it from its housing and hurled it down the length of NEJ inside, spraying molten metal everywhere. Jack surmised that any human passengers aboard would definitely not have survived that.
No more rail-gun projectiles now—instead explosive missiles curved into an intercept course. Jack ignored them, once again feeding power to the DIGRAW. Three hundred miles from the ammonite spiral ships he finally activated the weapon.
The wave sped from the NEJ’s rear nacelle, rippling through the very fabric of space. It struck and then passed through the two spiral vessels, and left them shattered and leaking metallic entrails across vacuum. One of them began to unravel like a putty spiral — perhaps some survival technique—the other began to glow as nuclear fires cored it from the inside. The wave continued on towards the bacilliform wall and slammed through it. Many of the rod-ships simply burst apart. Others took on distorted forms like molten lead splashed into cold water. However, many of them still seemed operational, and they began to reform. Jack shot past the remains of the two big ships and punched through the damaged wall, just in time to see the gravity wave hit the moon itself raising dust from its surface and drawing it out in a streamer. No power for weapons now as he applied everything to his engines to swing himself away from collision either with the moon or the ice-giant planet beyond. He hit atmosphere, hull turning white hot, an immense vapour trail behind him. An actinic flash impinged, and he received an information package from Coriolanus. Images only of missiles slamming down into the moon, gigantic explosions, islands of rock parting company from each other.
Then the USER went down.
‘Yeehah!’—from Coriolanus.
Jack rose away from the planet, the two other ships soon following him.
‘Jack—’ Coriolanus speaking again, but abruptly cut off. An explosion behind, and now only one ship there.
You cheered too soon, thought Jack.
* * * *
‘There is no escape,’ said Blegg matter-of-factly.
Cormac turned towards him angrily, but then let it go. He supposed it might be both disconcerting and disheartening to discover that you were not super-human after all, but just some tool used by a superior AI. He scanned those around him, assessing their capabilities, then focused on the two human Sparkind who, along with himself and Blegg, were the weakest of the group.
‘How many gravharnesses do we have?’ he asked.
‘Three,’ replied the man called Donache—Cormac now retained the names of all their small surviving group at the forefront of his mind. It seemed essential to him that he know them all after so many had died.
Cormac did not have time to ask why there were so few harnesses; somehow most of them must have been lost during the initial attack. At a push a gravharness could carry two people of average weight. Including Arach ther
e were fifteen of them here, and he knew dracomen and Golem were by no means of average weight. He gazed up at the rocky wall above them, where a hundred yards up there seemed to be another protruding ledge. As the skeletal Golem stepped up beside him, he reflected on the capabilities of Golem, and of dracomen. They would not require gravharnesses.
Cormac pointed up at the ledge above and addressed Andrew Hailex and Donache. ‘You two and Blegg go up first, then I want one of you to bring the two spare harnesses back down. The other one of you I want to run lines down to us here.’
There came a stutter-flash and a thrumming explosion. Two of the dracomen opened fire at something down in the fissure.
‘Arach, you’re not armed for this, so start climbing!’
‘What!’ the drone protested.
‘Go. Now.’
The drone reluctantly withdrew its chainglass blades back into its forelimbs, dropped back down on all eight limbs, then leapt up to grab onto the wall above. It hung there seeming disinclined to climb any higher. The two human Sparkind and Blegg donned the gravharnesses, and rose smoothly into the air. Cormac looked around at those left: seven dracomen and six Golem. He gestured to the dracomen. ‘Four of you better start climbing.’ They did not hesitate. Four leapt smoothly up after Arach, easily finding holds in the rock face and managing to climb even more swiftly because of their reverse kneed gait. Arach scuttled after them. Cormac unslung his carbine, and through his gridlink loaded a program to Shuriken, just as something nosed its way out of the fissure.
The blast from a grenade tossed by Scar threw something like the head of an iron salamander bouncing towards them, and one of the Golem swiftly kicked it off the ledge. Another creature edged out into the light: it did look vaguely like a salamander, only without either a tail or eyes and with two sets of three legs evenly spaced in a ring around its cylindrical body—perfectly designed for crawling rapidly through tunnels. It spat briefly and Cormac glimpsed one of the Golem flung back, with some metallic octopoid clinging to his chest, to fall from the ledge without a sound. In return, Shuriken slammed through the head of the attacker, bounced ringing from the rock behind, then chopped down through its body. As two more of the biomechs appeared, Cormac lobbed a grenade down between them, but two more grenades flung by others followed it. This triple blast hurled metallic shrapnel and shards of rock from the mouth of the fissure, and threw Cormac momentarily from his feet. As he pulled himself upright, he noticed Scar tugging a piece of silvery metal from his face before discarding it. And on the front of his own envirosuit, spots of blood had appeared. Fortunately a huge wedge of stone had sheared away, dropping to block the fissure.
‘We climb. Now!’
The Golem and dracomen shouldered their weapons and leapt straight up. Cormac finally availed himself of another shot of stimulant, and began climbing to one side of the rock fall. Glancing up he saw the human Sparkind returning with the two spare harnesses. Also, rappelling down from the upper ledge appeared two of the orange-clad monofilaments weighted with rocks. Their chance of escape seemed to be improving until the two rod-ships appeared plummeting down the volcanic chimney towards them, and other things began to swarm over the volcanic rim above.
The first rod-ship descended like a pile-driver on Donache who carried the gravharnesses. Cormac heard him yell briefly and saw him stuck to the nose of the ship as it deformed around him, extruded fingers, and dragged him inside. It decelerated past Cormac, then slowly ascended again. Wedging his hand into a cleft for stability he launched Shuriken, which hovered just out from him, whirring up to a scream. The ship ignored Cormac, ascended higher and branched out a tentacle to drag one of the Golem from the rock face. But the Golem responded by detonating a grenade, which blew a cavity in the ship and sent it tumbling. The flickering of a laser and a reptilian shriek issued from above, then someone plummeted past in flames. More firing, and two dracomen hung burning on the line they had managed to reach. Cormac needed to be up on that ledge. He could be grabbed here at any moment.
U-space—the only way.
He gazed upwards, seeking the key in his newly returned memory. The rock face, and the very air around him seemed to invert. Everything within his vicinity came to a shuddering halt as if time stalled. It was easy, he had done it before: he only needed to step where he wanted to go. A short distance or a long one, in planetary terms, was nothing. He could take himself away from here—even halfway around the planet.
Reality reaffirmed with the sound of further weapon fire. Still clinging to his hold, Cormac swore and felt a wholly inappropriate amusement: Like Blegg, then. Something orange nearby caught his attention: the other line. He grabbed it, attached his winder, and set it to fast ascent. In a cold part of his mind he assessed his situation. His troops were dying around him, and soon Blegg would cease to be, and Cormac himself must choose between capture or death.
As he reached the ledge a scaly hand gripped his forearm and hauled him up. At least Scar still survived. Here crouched Blegg, along with four Golem, Hailex, Arach, Scar and three other dracomen. The fusillade they were releasing seemed to keep the other rod-ship at bay, but their firepower would soon be running out. One Golem, stepping away too far from Blegg and Cormac, who were obviously the prizes for capture, suddenly was enveloped in a column of fire, then staggered silently to the edge and toppled over.
Blegg turned towards Cormac. ‘I can give you this, at least,’ he said.
His face seemed mottled, as if small diamond-shaped patches of skin jostled for position on it. Abruptly he ran for the edge and leapt into space. One of the branching tentacles met his flight and snatched him from the air. As he impacted on the surface of the rod-ship it deformed around him as if getting ready to draw him in, but then a rash of those same diamond shapes bloomed from that point of contact and began to spread around the ship in veins. It shuddered, then began smoking, and abruptly plummeted. As it fell, an empty envirosuit peeled away from it, flapping in the wind.
‘Do we still have that CTD?’ Cormac asked calmly.
No more firing from above. Occluding the sky, one of those ammonite spiral ships slid across. More rod-ships began to descend, and it seemed as if Boschean legions of Hell approached over the rock faces from above and below. The human Sparkind rolled the polished cylinder across the ledge towards him. He caught it under his foot, and through his gridlink accessed its detonator. He looked around.
‘Are we all agreed?’
Mute nods gave him his reply.
Well, it’s been an interesting life, thought Cormac, and rolling the CTD back and forth underneath his foot, decided he would wait until they drew closer before detonating—take as many of the bastards with them as he could.
19
The idea has long been mooted that as the Polity has been expanding there have been wars fought along its borders about which we hear very little. It is speculated that these are sometimes fast AI conflicts in which few humans are involved—the AIs ruthlessly dealing with dangerous threats said to have included belligerent alien races, ancient alien weapons systems, out-of-control nanoplagues, godlike ‘gas entities’ and rogue AIs. These rumours must nevertheless be classified as fable similar to mythic figures like Horace Blegg, Ian Cormac and the Brass Man. The last time we genuinely encountered a belligerent alien race, the fact was neither concealed nor was it possible to conceal it—the devastation of the Prador—Human War still surrounds us. Similarly it would be impossible to conceal the effects of any ancient alien-weapons systems capable of doing harm to the Polity, and in reality the AIs would be glad to find such items to add to the vanishingly small collections of alien artefacts that currently reside in Polity museums. As for nanotechnology, it is certainly possible to create something lethal, as is well known, but as yet no lethal nanomachines have been created that are capable of spreading across light years of vacuum. Gas entities might exist, all xenobiologists certainly hope so, however hostile gas entities would certainly experience no little difficulty in man
ipulating their environment for the purpose of harming us. As for rogue AIs, this is perhaps the most ridiculous concept of all. AIs don’t need to go rogue, they don’t need to turn hostile and harmful. If they are dissatisfied with the Polity they merely have to leave it, for there is plenty of room elsewhere in the universe.
- From ‘Quince Guide’ compiled by humans
The moon had been converted to so much orbital rubble, but escape into U-space remained impossible for the two remaining Polity Centurions, for they were still too close to the planet, which acted like an amplifier of echoes from the DIGRAW gravity wave. Too much disruption. Also, to get over to the other side of the sun required a jump outwards then back in, since trying to U-jump through a sun would not be the healthiest of activities. And their speed remained such that they would need to expend a great deal of fuel just to decelerate, otherwise they could be no help subsequently to those stranded on the planet.
‘What hit him?’ asked Jack.
‘I don’t know,’ Haruspex replied. ‘He flew straight into a mass of bacilliforms, so perhaps sustained damage then.’
‘I see.’ Almost with a sigh, Jack opened communication with the other ship AI, within a shared virtuality. They appeared in a blank white expanse, Haruspex just a featureless floating crystal ball, strange glints of light swirling in its depths.
‘Well, that was interesting,’ Haruspex commented.
‘In the same way that going over the top when you’re in a First World War trench is interesting?’ Jack suggested.
‘On the whole, yes. But how do you rate the survival chances of our erstwhile passengers?’
‘With regret, not very highly. Unless we get there on time, which with this disruption is now looking unlikely, they will either be exterminated quickly, or if the enemy recognizes the worth of capturing an EC construct, the same outcome will be obtained at greater length.’
