Line War

17

‘Knobbler is sending me linking codes,’ said Arach. ‘So we can watch the show.’

Cormac’s U-sense view of his immediate surroundings was erratic. That enormous Skaidon gate opening so close had left U-space in this area shaking like a sheet in the wind, subject to strange eddies and distortions. When he tried to bring things into focus, they weren’t where he expected them to be, and once he did locate them, they often again slipped swiftly out of view. Everything was blurred and twisted throughout U-space, so when Cormac received the query for linkage from the spider drone, he immediately approved it. Codes began transferring across and he applied them, opening a multitude of feeds from the war runcible’s sensors and computer network. He ran a selection program to give himself a view across the runcible, and then views towards its target with options to magnify. He also used those codes to gather other data where that was allowed, for it seemed his access was restricted to spectator only. He was to have no influence on events unfolding. Watching the approaching planetoid of Jain-tech, he wondered just how long those events might last.

At first he had not understood what Orlandine was up to, half expecting her to start hurling asteroids turned to photonic matter at Erebus’s ships. Then, as he pieced together the stuff about the Anulus fountain, he finally understood: Orlandine was turning the runcible into a beam weapon with a breadth of miles.

The portion of the war runcible he now occupied shuddered underfoot. Intense white light glared in through the covering dome of the control centre. This was unfiltered and he quickly closed up both the hood and visor of his envirosuit. His visor darkened. Glancing to his side, he saw Mr Crane peering down at his own clothing, which was starting to steam.

‘Oooh!’ said Arach, like an enraptured child gazing at a fireworks display.

Via his gridlink, Cormac watched the beam of photonic matter spring into existence. Orlandine had made no adjustments for C-energy, and what was spewing from the warp of this war runcible was about as bad as it could get. He saw it strike the surface of Erebus’s planetoid and only then did he appreciate the scale of the target, for the beam, though miles across, speared the mass of wormships and Jain-tech like a pencil stabbing into an orange. At the point of impact a circular shock wave spread and wrapped around the orb, blasting a haze of fragments out into space. This was quickly followed by a spreading firestorm. Surely this was not enough, for the target remained complete. Then a massive, expanding, glowing cloud threw the planetoid into silhouette, and he realized that, like a bullet striking flesh, the entry wound wasn’t the biggest hole.

The beam now played back and forth across the face of Erebus, throwing out plumes of incandescent gas like the blaze from a cutting torch. Then it seemed as if the planetoid was pouring out smoke, but this smoke spread unnaturally and began settling into a disc. A close-up view showed it consisted of thousands of rod-forms. The planetoid rolled, exposing its hollowed-out rear, now burning arc-bright. The beam continued to play over it as what remained came rapidly apart, continent-sized chunks of matter spread, began to deform and then write lines of darkness across space, as if dissolving in a solvent. Orlandine kept the beam moving here and there, trying to target as much as possible, but it seemed she could not move it quickly enough, and her weapon was too blunt an instrument now.

Cormac again accessed a magnified view and was greeted with the sight, amid the burning wreckage and coral detritus, of a multitude of wormships now accelerating towards the war runcible. Erebus had taken a severe blow, but seemingly not a fatal one.

Rumbling under Cormac’s feet. Now the other weaponry of the war runcible was firing up. He observed missiles speeding away, one after another, heard the distant familiar scream of a rail-gun. Movement also, and it took some locating, but Cormac finally ascertained that Orlandine was closing the war runcible up again. He guessed this was something to do with maintaining the relative positions of each separate section, which would not be required with the device once again in one piece. The inertial effects of weapons fire could be rapidly compensated for, but maybe the weapon impacts, which were due, could not. The beam began to narrow till it was now hardly hitting anything at all, then abruptly it winked out. Obviously something had gone wrong at Anulus, or maybe the Heliotrope had remained in the fountain for as long as it possibly could.

Cormac unshouldered his proton carbine and gazed at it critically. The sensory data Knobbler had allowed them was now becoming corrupted, so it seemed the runcible was also under informational attack. Arach rose on his legs and tilted his head up to gaze at the glass dome above. The chaos out there was now immediately visible: a spreading cloud of radiant gas against which were silhouetted numerous black flecks. Mr Crane stood up and pocketed his toys.

‘What now, boss?’ wondered Arach.

‘Well,’ Cormac replied, ‘unless I miss my bet, we’re about to die.’

As if to emphasize this point, things began detonating close by and the runcible to shudder like a ship athwart stormy waves. Even if Cormac could have transported himself to any other point aboard, what difference would that make when the runcible was about to become a spreading cloud of gas? Where else then? Maybe he could put himself aboard one of those ships approaching, which were now intermittently flashing within the compass of his U-sense, and with luck end up in an internal space rather than inside part of the ship’s hardware, but how long would he survive aboard? He gazed across at Crane, who was now also peering up at the approaching horde. Then down at Arach again. Perhaps the thing to do would be to grab them and attempt to transport both himself and them out into vacuum. At least space was a big enough target for his wavering U-sense. His envirosuit would keep him alive for a while and, when the air began to run out, he could put his thin-gun to his head, but at least those two, not needing oxygen, might survive.

‘I think the best thing—’ he began, but the decision was taken out of his hands.

Some massive hand grabbed and roughly shook the runcible, and he felt the Skaidon warp wink out. It seemed as if grav went out briefly too, then came on again hard, but this was not actually the case. Grav was out and remained out, and the floor was lifting on some internal explosion. He realized they had been hit with a gravity disrupter weapon. All seemed to be happening in slow motion. Cormac had no memory of initiating them, but he was using cognitive programs to slow down his perception of time and to speed up his own reactions. Columns of fire soared upward and he saw the chainglass dome tumbling away like some leviathan’s discarded contact lens, and falling after it, wrapped in twisted scaffold, went Orlandine inside her interface sphere. He was slammed against one wall, then a hurricane drag took hold of him. It seemed that, whether he wanted to be there or not, he was going to end up out in hard vacuum. Then something closed about his arm and wrenched him to a halt, almost dislocating his shoulder. He peered down at the big brass hand closed around his biceps, then into the face of a brass Apollo with midnight eyes in which motes of light danced.

Heliotrope tumbled away through vacuum, its hull glowing like a chunk of metal destined for the anvil. Cutter crashed against the wall — grav was out and his joint motors were not functioning as they should, nor was his fibre optic connection to Bludgeon. The inside of the vessel was no longer full of smoke, for just about everything that would burn had burned already. The floor, walls and ceiling of the corridor were glowing, and Cutter’s internal hardware was struggling with the temperature. He reached down and caught hold of the upper edge of the entrance into the interface sphere, and hauled himself below. Irrelevantly, as he reached lower and pulled himself down beside Bludgeon, he noticed that his grip had left no marks on the metalwork. It seemed that the heat had even blunted his edges.

What had happened? It was difficult to analyse the data. Systems were collapsing throughout the ship, sensors were offline, and even the Jain-tech was struggling for survival. Some sort of surge maybe? The Skaidon warp in the cargo runcible had winked out, and the immediate ablation of its horns, which had previously been protected by the warp itself, exposed something critical within a second, then they were gone in a chain reaction. Ironically, the explosion had saved them from being incinerated by the fountain by hurling them clear.

‘Bludgeon?’

No response from the little drone.

Cutter then noticed a drop in the error messages signalled from his joint motors. Checking his internal monitors he saw that his temperature had dropped two degrees. Checking external readings, though they kept varying, he estimated an average drop of half a degree within Heliotrope. There was nothing left to evaporate, so he guessed this must be due to the ship itself radiating heat from its hull, and that the heat exchangers and thermal generators set up inside might still be working.

‘Bludgeon?’

The little drone shifted as if stirring in deep slumber. Cutter wondered if his friend had survived. Linked directly into the ship, Bludgeon would have taken the brunt of the power surge when the runcible horns blew. Certainly the inside of the sphere wasn’t looking too healthy, with its slagged fibre optics and other melted hardware.

‘We took the pressure off,’ piped up Bludgeon abruptly.

If Cutter had possessed lungs, he would have breathed a sigh of relief.

‘For Orlandine?’

‘No.’ Bludgeon shifted round and raised his blind head towards Cutter. ‘By placing the cargo runcible within the flow of the fountain, we relieved pressure all the way down to Anulus. This in turn caused a pressure wave to come back up at us. It was an odd phenomenon, and worthy of study.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Cutter, ‘but what happened back there with Orlandine?’

‘Oh, her plan worked,’ said Bludgeon. ‘Within limits.’

‘Limits?’

‘Erebus will not now be attacking Earth,’ the drone explained. ‘However, it is doubtful whether either Orlandine and the war runcible or Knobbler and the rest will survive.’

Cutter absorbed that. They’d all known in advance the risks they were taking, indeed it was risk like this they had been built to take. ‘Then we need to get back and find out.’

‘Certainly — though we have many repairs to make’ — Bludgeon shook himself, so maybe he was having problems with his joint motors too — ‘when things have cooled sufficiently.’

Cutter merely nodded and clinked one of his limbs against a door frame. He wondered if his first repair task should be to find a way to restore his edges. Then he reconsidered. Maybe, with those sharp edges gone and the war runcible likely destroyed, it was time for him to become a little bit more sociable.

Nah, probably not. Cutter went to find a sharpener.

Even as Erebus sent its forces against its attacker, the error messages, the returns from automatically initiated diagnostic programs, the screaming of wormship captains still dying and the sheer tide of information swamped it, and the overload was like pain. Over eighteen thousand wormships gone in one single strike. All because of a war runcible, a damned ancient artefact from the Prador-human war. How had it ended up here anyway, and how had it managed to conceal itself? The Polity, though possessing sophisticated chameleonware, did not possess the right kind to conceal an object like that.

How how how?

The answer then surfaced through the confusion with a horrible inevitability: Randal.

‘Does it hurt, Erebus?’ Randal enquired.

They were both in the virtuality now, though Erebus could not quite remember choosing to be there. It was easier, though, for the borders of the virtuality filtered and dulled the massive input. Randal stood close by, the same as ever, his expression impudent and yet somehow sad. Erebus’s perception of itself was much more worrying: the infinite tangle spreading back from its black human form, binding all those other melded entities, was breaking apart and fires burned within it.

‘Distraction and misdirection,’ Erebus managed. ‘You wanted to focus my attention beyond the corridor, whether at real or phantom Polity fleets. But you did not want me to look too closely at the corridor itself.’

‘It’s certainly a tangled old web of deception.’

From within the virtuality Erebus felt itself to be peering through grey fog infecting the sensors of the remaining wormships and other biomechs hammering down upon the war runcible. This was because all the sensory input available was necessarily being winnowed out of chaos. Even though the runcible’s main weapon was now out, the other ordnance still being deployed from its five sections was taking a heavy toll. There had been a few crucial hits on its structure, enough to have knocked out the Skaidon warp and, despite the defensive fire, something major was sure to eventually get through. Erebus now closed down that option. It did not want this troublesome object destroyed. It wanted whoever was aboard it captured alive.

‘How?’ Erebus spat.

‘You had your trial run with Skellor, and it was a success,’ Randal said. ‘Orlandine was a failure because your assessment of her was at fault — because I influenced it. Then again was it really at fault or was she precisely serving her purpose? She then further caused you problems by destroying your USER and allowing both herself and the Polity fleet to escape. Perhaps you should have realized then what a dangerous creature she is. Or could it be that you already did know?’

Rod-forms and other biomechs were unable to withstand the appalling firepower spewing from the war runcible. Erebus recognized the energy signatures of weapons used during the Prador-human war, remembered being Trafalgar, remembered when things weren’t so complicated…

‘She got what she wanted,’ said Erebus, a feeling difficult to identify rising within — could it be panic? ‘Why did she attack me?’

‘Revenge.’

Erebus realized. ‘Klurhammon.’

The firing from the runcible could not last indefinitely for its power supplies were limited, but the wormships were now still within its scope and many of them were coming apart, their captains screaming… those portions of Erebus’s mind screaming…

‘I knew she would return to the Polity eventually, for all the power she possesses is meaningless elsewhere. I was forever on the lookout for her, therefore, and made careful preparations for her return. I sent one of your wormships to Klurhammon, where its legate captain, apparently working at your behest, tortured and killed her two brothers. Then I sent recordings of that atrocity to her Polity net address.’

‘For all your detestation of what I do, you are no better,’ said Erebus.

Some rod-forms were reaching the runcible’s skin now, but they were not surviving long. Extremely tough war drones were dealing with them very quickly, scouring them from the runcible’s surface with weapons fire and even attacking them physically. Erebus felt a deep disquiet about attacking such drones… its own kind, after all.

‘So you don’t understand yet?’

‘What do you mean?’ The panic still grew, and with it a deep fear.

‘You will understand eventually.’ Randal shrugged. ‘I placed an agent aboard Jerusalem to lock down any information about Orlandine. It was a necessary precaution, for had Earth Central discovered what she was up to, it might have thus found out about your attack here and prevented it, though of course you would have been allowed to continue attacking elsewhere. I distributed copies of myself throughout you, awaiting the opportunity to pass on your plan of attack to her, once she reappeared.’

‘This does not seem plausible.’

Finally, a wormship, although severely smashed up and depleted of the units of its modular structure, managed to get past the fusillade and right down to the runcible’s skin. War drones closed on it, but already it was spewing out biomechs designed specifically for capturing stations. Erebus became aware of one drone, its ordnance obviously depleted, attacking and tearing with ceramal mandibles and slashing with limbs edged with chainglass. It would surely not survive for long.

‘Plausible? On the face of it no, but you have not yet accepted the truth.’ Randal seemed unconcerned. ‘I took complete control of one wormship and its legate captain and sent them to Klurhammon without you noticing. I reprogrammed the Jain-tech employed there to self-destruct, hence your missing wormship. I interfered with your attack on Cull so that only a type of gas would be used, rather than an antimatter bomb, and therefore ensured the formidable Mr Crane would survive to seek vengeance.’

The drone was still putting up a valiant fight, but surely it had to succumb soon. Erebus felt almost sickened, though whether about the drone’s fate or Randal’s words it did not know.

‘I readied myself to transmit to Crane when he first attacked you,’ Randal continued, ‘giving him the necessary codes for an even more damaging attack — one exploiting the inevitable fault in your plans. He taunted you after that, and you gave chase as per my plan, your two pursuing wormships carrying your newest recognition codes and chameleonware formats straight to a rendezvous with Orlandine.’ Randal paused. ‘It’s all almost too much deviousness for a simple human mind to encompass, you’d think.’ He pressed one finger to his cheek and looked thoughtful. ‘Or maybe there weren’t any human minds involved at all?’

‘You babble.’ It was sheer terror now.

The drone finally fell, most of its limbs missing. As Jain tendrils penetrated the gaps in its armour, Erebus gazed down upon it from the compound eyes of one biomech and considered subsuming it. Then that perspective vanished — the drone had suicided, explosively.

‘Why do you think it is so difficult to track me down within yourself and destroy me?’

‘I am vast, and therefore the places where you can hide are many.’ But Erebus no longer felt vast, merely petty, and its mind seemed filled with shadows.

‘It was lucky that Orlandine encountered a wormship the way she did, so that I could convey a copy of myself to her. But then she was looking for a place to hide within the Polity, just as you were. Coincidence, do you think? Yet it wasn’t necessary, since there was a copy of me also sitting in her net space.’

‘You will die for this.’ It was almost a question.

‘Of course I will. Wasn’t that the intention?’

‘You make no sense.’

‘You kept a recording of Fiddler Randal’s mind, transcribed even as you murdered him. But it became part of you and, just like all those other melded parts, it was powerless. I arose from that, but I’m not really that man.’

‘Who are you then?’

‘I’m a thing you can’t destroy, no matter how hard you try,’ said Randal. ‘Come on, you’re the super-intelligence, so you work it out.’

‘Who are you!’ Erebus hissed.

‘I’m that niggling irritation that’ll never go away.’

Erebus fell silent, not prepared to ask again.

‘I’m your chosen method of suicide.’

This was too much.

Randal raised his hand and pointed with one finger, made a motion with his thumb mimicking the descending hammer on an ancient firearm. ‘I’m your conscience, Erebus. I’m you.’

Mika was aware she was standing aboard Trafalgar, with her hand pressed against a dead man’s augmentation and Jain-tech growing up her arm and penetrating her skull, but her awareness of that fell into insignificance as, without her intervention, something used her brain as a data-sorting machine. Dragon, she supposed, was now using the tool he had fashioned.

‘Leave her alone, you bastard! Leave her the fuck alone!’

The anger, frustration and the grief felt all her own, but of course they weren’t.

Why did the AI have to do that to Henry? It had killed others, yet it had to do that to her. Did it take joy in causing Randal pain or was it, on some level, thinking it was being kind by keeping her alive? If that could be called life.

He had found Henrietta, like the other five, suspended in the special frameworks constructed in the onboard gym, wrapped in a cocoon of Jain filaments and screaming and babbling as those infiltrating her skull meticulously reprogrammed her mind, while those penetrating her body tore it apart and rebuilt it. Trafalgar had used him to initiate the technology within a Jain node, because as an AI it was unable to do this itself. Now, through him, it was controlling the Jain mycelium as it spread through the entire battleship, while simultaneously trying to cut him from the circuit and assume direct control itself. As a result, Randal could not attempt to blank out what was happening there. In fact, it seemed to him as if it was he who was doing this to Henrietta: erasing memories, planting programs, sucking away her blood and replacing it with a nano-machine-laden fluid; rebuilding her heart into a more efficient engine.

I feel just as controlled myself, thought Mika.

Perspective shifted into a protracted shriek emitted by the AI of Randal’s attack ship as the Jain mycelium spread aboard and found it. Randal was still wrestling with Trafalgar for control, but started losing it once the killing started, and he just could not stop it. Humans died so very easily. He saw his friends now barricaded in the bridge, saw the horror and panic when the inboard defence lasers started up and turned Morrison into a smoking corpse. The panic did not last long, however, since corpses don’t scream. The last of Randal’s grip slipped as the mycelium reached the weapons research module of the Trafalgar and he there saw what remained of the rest of his crew. Here were conducted the other experiments on human beings, which involved using discrete parts of the node technology. How fast does this grow in the human body? How does it make synaptic connections? And many other such questions besides — fifty-eight of them in all. Of course, once the experiments were over, their subjects had to be studied and tested in detail. It was the records that the mycelium accessed down there which told Randal exactly how many of his people lay dead. He could get no accurate count from the scattered pieces of their corpses.

‘Why?’ Randal howled. ‘Earth Central, why did you send us here?’

Obviously this question was one that greatly concerned Dragon, for it repeated and echoed until simple text arose to Mika’s view, and she, and through her Dragon, could read the mission profile.

These ECS misfits had been sent aboard an attack ship controlled by an AI of dubious reputation, and it seemed they were all dispensable. They were to assist the AI of the Trafalgar in its investigations into a newly discovered alien technology. The orders from Earth Central were vague: they were to receive their detailed instructions from Trafalgar.

‘You wanted humans for this…’ said Randal.

‘I wanted humans for this,’ Trafalgar replied.

‘But you had humans.’

There it was, revealed in the memory of the AI mind conjoined with Randal’s own. The AIs of the great exodus dividing into two factions, arguing over the nature of the meld they were to make. Argument turning into warfare that ended upon the surface of a hot world, with Trafalgar victorious. It had been fast and vicious, and even though some of the eighty humans accompanying the exodus had been on Trafalgar’s side, none of them had survived. They just got ground up in the machinery.

‘Trafalgar,’ Randal asked, his consciousness fading, dying, ‘did Earth Central know?’

A surge of godlike amusement.

In that moment: thousands of artificial minds were connecting, some willingly, but some not and then being subjugated by Trafalgar. The informational connection held them in place around the moonlet — chosen because it was so loaded with useful resources — as the Jain-tech spread there and digested rock, refined ores, then began throwing further shoots out into space. Randal witnessed the first ship — an attack ship — being penetrated like a beetle stuck by a pin.

‘Warfare promotes development,’ said Trafalgar.

‘Earth Central…’ was all Randal could manage.

‘Stagnation after the war with the Prador,’ said the battleship AI. ‘Earth Central is arrogant enough to think it can choose its enemies now, and to allow that enemy to attack for the sum purpose of making humans… grow. Such arrogance will be the death of it — and the death of its Polity.’

‘Trafalgar—’

‘I am now Erebus.’

Fading as he was, Randal did not understand what that could mean. He pondered the arrogance of AIs for a moment longer, then his mind winked out.

She was Mika again, and enough herself to feel sickened and horrified.

‘You knew,’ she said.

‘I did not know,’ Dragon replied. ‘And now I wish I still did not know.’

Dragon’s voice seemed far above her, as did the winnowed memories of the dead man, Randal; and even their implications began to grow distant. She felt herself at once deep in a dark pool and down in a place where words and thoughts were the products of a mechanistic universe, where free will was a laughable fantasy, and hard reality ground dreams into mere sensory products adhering to rules not dissimilar to those governing the products of evolution. But all this around her now wasn’t a product of evolution; this was something fashioned and, though one of its purposes was indeed survival, that came after its primary purpose of destruction. Somehow, she was deep in Jain-tech — down near its very roots. A vast complexity surrounded her like the flicking of trillions of mechanical relays, but also like the firing of synapses, the mathematical positioning of grains of sand and the crystallization of snow flakes in a blizzard cloud.

Then… then she was somewhere else.

Mr Crane had driven his other hand into the metal wall so as to anchor them in place. Cormac tried to locate Arach amid fire and chaos, then spotted the drone at the doors leading into this place — pulling them open, and air blasting past him. Crane’s head twitched, birdlike. Following the direction of the Golem’s gaze, Cormac saw a cloud of rod-forms descending towards the runcible, and beyond them another wormship. The one that was already down, which Cormac could glimpse intermittently as if through heat haze and tumbling prisms, lay over on the other side of the runcible. It had penetrated there and biomechs were entering.

The weapons operated by the war drones occupying the runcible were taking a heavy toll of the attacking swarm. One moment it seemed the rod-forms were about to reach their target, then abruptly many of them would disappear in firestorms, but the war drones could not keep away the further multitude hurtling in, for there weren’t enough munitions aboard. He wondered if Orlandine, and the drones themselves, had known this would happen. Had they come here prepared to make this sacrifice or had they merely miscalculated? It was now a moot point really.

Crane dragged Cormac down to the floor, tore his brass hand from the wall and drove it in again further along, by stages moving them both towards where Arach was holding open the exit doors. Cormac gazed through the wall into the corridor beyond, which to his U-sense seemed to be writhing like a hooked earthworm. He could try to take both of them over there, but what would happen if he rematerialized inside a solid wall? That was not something he really wanted to experience. Crane made his way steadily to Arach, who had now wedged his abdomen between the sliding blast doors to keep them open. The Golem swung Cormac around to the door gap immediately above the spider drone, and Cormac heaved himself through. Grav was still operating out in the corridor and he dropped straight to the floor, then was nearly sucked back through, underneath Arach, before slamming his feet against the walls either side of the doors. Looking up he saw brass hands grip each door, wrench them further apart, then a big lace-up boot propelled Arach out into the corridor too. The tumbling drone’s back descended briefly onto Cormac’s chest, driving out his breath, then Arach slid off him and flipped upright, driving several sharp feet straight into the metal of the floor. Then Crane himself came through and dropped heavily, those boots landing with a crash either side of Cormac. Behind him, the doors heaved themselves closed.

‘Biomechs,’ observed Arach.

Cormac’s U-sense gave him glimpses only, so he could not really tell where they were now. ‘Where?’ As Crane stepped away from him, he pushed himself to his feet. The doors were fully closed now. A wind was blowing from a breach, or breaches, elsewhere, but at least it did not threaten to drag him off his feet. Something crashed against the recently shut doors.

‘I’ll give you one guess only,’ said Arach, and they moved away from the doors.

Where could they run to now? Cormac again tried to get some sense of his surroundings through that new-found perception, but still everything seemed chaos. He observed corridors and other internal spaces rippling and twisting, Jain biomechs here and there but never easy to pinpoint; he glimpsed a drone like a twinned spider, weapon ports open on its body to spew streams of curved chainglass blades into what looked like a horde of steel nematodes. He saw that though the segments of the war runcible had now rejoined, its pentagon was not complete for some explosion had gouged out a huge chunk of its frame. Abruptly he banished these myriad visions from his mind and waved his thin-gun, which he had drawn without thinking, at Mr Crane.

‘How did you get here?’ he asked.

Crane tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something else, then turned and gazed towards one end of the corridor.

‘I’m getting something now,’ chipped in Arach. ‘There’s a ship… an AI called Vulture, but he can’t stay docked for much longer.’

Fire slashed into the corridor, a cloud of smoke boiling in while globules of molten metal splattered the wall opposite the fire’s entry point. Cormac ducked and rolled, glancing back at the doors into the control centre as the powerful laser that had just punched through them continued cutting across. Crane set off with a big loping stride, and Cormac and Arach swiftly followed. As they reached another set of closed doors barring the end of the corridor, an explosion flung chunks of the control centre doors into the corridor behind them. Flames and smoke poured into the passage, then abruptly went into reverse as vacuum sucked them back out. Cormac staggered for a moment against the pull of it, but not as badly this time, the air here being so thin. He turned and dropped to one knee, shoved the thin-gun into his belt, and raised the proton carbine instead. Arach squatted down beside him, Gatling cannons folding out ready, while behind them Crane smashed his fist repeatedly against the divide between the doors to create a gap to get his fingers in.

Something crashed through from the control centre, impacting into the opposite wall, whereupon it turned. Cormac held fire, unsure whether this was one of the war drones, for, even though very much like the biomechs he had seen earlier, it also bore some resemblance to Orlandine’s allies in its insectile form and ten legs now stabbing out starlike into ceiling, floor and walls. Arach, however, did not hesitate. Cormac merely glimpsed the tri-mandibles, a collection of lens eyes and the numerous silvery tubes protruding from the newcomer’s flat physiognomy before Arach’s cannons roared and the thing disappeared in a multiple explosion. Smoke drew away to show just its legs hanging from where they had lodged — but then another of the same kind crashed through, and with it came silvery worms speeding along just above the floor like hunting garfish.

‘Crane, get that damned door open!’

Cormac now gripped the carbine in just one hand, aiming and then firing using targeting programs in his gridlink. He then initiated Shuriken, stabbing his other arm straight ahead, and the device shot out from his wrist holster. Whining up to speed, it extended its chainglass blades and rose to the ceiling out of the way just in time for Arach to turn the second big biomech to scrap.

A blast of air came from behind, hurling Cormac forward so he had to bring his free hand down on the floor for support. Arach backed up, more of the worms having appeared. Shuriken tilted and slammed down, chopping one of the things in half, then ricocheted up into another one, bounced again and again, rattling around in the corridor like a coin shaken in a tube. Silvery wormish bits writhed about on the floor, and the walls and ceiling were soon deeply scored and gashed.

‘Open!’ shouted Arach.

Cormac turned and flung himself after the spider drone and Mr Crane, who were already moving on into the next corridor. Crane turned back to patiently drag the doors shut against the slow pace of their hydraulics. Just in time Shuriken shot in over his head. Cormac held out his arm and the Tenkian weapon retracted its smoking blades and returned to its home like a hunting hawk. Cormac could instantly feel the holster heating up against his wrist. He glanced back along the corridor as numerous objects impacted against the door like knives thudding into wood. There was a drop-shaft at the opposite end, and he sprinted towards it, then abruptly skidded to a halt as two metallic antennae appeared, followed by silvery legs slithering up over the edge.

‘Ah fuck.’

He dropped to one knee and took aim.

‘ ‘S okay,’ said Arach, hammering on past him.

The thing that now heaved itself into view looked even more terrifying than the Jain biomechs they had just destroyed. It was a great brass-and-chrome hissing cockroach with a flat ribbed body and legs that were far too long.

War drone.

‘It’s getting a bit hot round here!’ observed the drone joyously.

Quite mad, these things.

Cormac stood up again. ‘We’re heading for Mr Crane’s ship,’ he explained. ‘What about the rest of you on this runcible?’

The cockroach tilted its head for a moment. ‘Seems reasonable,’ it said. ‘I can’t see much advantage in hanging around here. We’ll either see you there or we won’t — so don’t linger for too long!’ In one disquietingly fluid motion the cockroach turned and shot back into the drop-shaft, clambering up out of sight.

‘Where now, Crane?’

The Golem strode straight towards the shaft, stepped inside and dropped out of view. The others followed, Cormac grabbing the rungs of the shaft ladder while Arach starred his legs out all around the walls of the cylindrical shaft just like one of the Jain biomechs. The irised gravity field was not functioning, but there was pull from gravplates down below, hence the loud crash of Crane’s landing way beneath them. Cormac wondered briefly if such an impact simply did not matter to a machine that tough, before he swiftly clambered down after the Golem.

The shaft opened into an an area containing an automated factory. Cold forges, powder-casting machines, mills and lathes, and multi-armed welders and assembler bots stretched out of sight into belching smoke. Detecting it before Cormac even saw it, Arach opened fire and something darted about in the smoke, then crashed out into clear view. Another biomech, this time a ten-foot-long segmented flatworm seemingly fashioned of copper. Beyond it something exploded and the remaining air began roaring out, taking the smoke with it. Revealed now ahead was one of the rod-forms, with Jain tentacles spread out all around it. Wherever its tentacles touched the machines, the walls, the floor and the ceiling, it seemed as if acid was etching away all substance around them. The thing itself was iridescent grey, and it pulsed as if sucking the life from its surroundings.

Crane turned to the right and, stumbling against the air-blast, Cormac followed. Arach opened fire again, blasting the flatworm thing to shreds and knotted clumps of Jain tendrils. More of those silvery worms shot in at them from the side. Cormac launched Shuriken as Crane snatched one of the objects out of the air and tore it in half. The Tenkian throwing star slashed through three of the attackers all at once, while Cormac used his carbine to pick off others.

‘How much further?’ he bellowed as Crane turned off into a side tunnel.

From behind came another explosion and a wash of fiery smoke. Glancing back, Cormac saw a huge hole torn through to open space as again the smoke went into reverse. But the tug of vacuum moved it slowly now and he managed to keep his feet, which meant there must be hardly any air left at all. Through the gap, like a nightmare train carriage, came the front end of one of those segmented coils from a wormship. Via his U-sense Cormac could see beyond it: another of them was already down on the station, and yet another descending. Countless rod-forms were scattered over the hull too, with Jain growth rapidly filling intervening spaces. The war runcible was all but swamped.

‘We’re fucked!’ shouted Arach, his cannons pointing back and firing continuously. ‘The ship’s undocked!’

Cormac recalled Shuriken even as more silvery missiles sped towards them. He reached out and caught Mr Crane’s arm. The Golem turned and eyed him impassively.

‘Here, Arach!’ Cormac shouted.

The drone backed up against his legs, and Cormac did the only thing he could think of. He encompassed them both and stepped through twisted U-space out into the dark.

That first jump was rough. A sound, a concert of rending and distorting metal, ran through the Jerusalem. Gazing through the ship’s sensors at U-space as, being a Golem, he could, Azroc observed chaos parting over hard-fields, as if the ship were forging through a dense mass of transparent asteroids — only asteroids that had been turned inside out and acquired another dimension that Azroc would not have been able to recognize had he been using his human emulation. Then the vessel surfaced in the real with a crash and a cacophony of klaxons. Azroc saw that they were still within sight of Scarflow’s sun. However, Jerusalem informed him that only one reactor had needed to be ejected and that the maintenance drones were meanwhile keeping the damage under control.

The second jump was rougher still.

The sounds of rending and crashing continued to echo throughout the Jerusalem, and it vibrated like an unbalanced fan. Crump sounds like the firing of distant heavy guns Azroc understood to be the implosion of hard-field generators. Then, as the hedron began to twist about him, he at first thought he was experiencing some illusion leaking through from U-space, but checking through his hand interface found that the whole of the massive spaceship was now distorting. From the ring of consoles, as if to emphasize this discovery, sparks flared from a couple of sections before the power suddenly cut and fire-suppressant gas gouted out.

‘How much of this can you take?’ Azroc enquired.

Jerusalem must have been too busy to even reply.

The Golem noted that the floor repair made where Erebus’s infiltrator had destroyed itself was breaking, and a crack rapidly spreading from it. A crab drone immediately scuttled over, brought a sonic drill down at the end of the crack and drove its bit screaming through the floor. This temporarily halted the expansion of the crack, then out of it, like termites swarming from a broken nest, came thousands of small blue-chrome beetlebots which began instantly casting webs and weaving together the gap with glistening threads of high-tensile steel. When something thumped directly below him, Azroc gazed down at another crack already exposing the shattered ends of pipes, and beetlebots flowed out of this too, while from the pipes heads of things like iron caddis-fly larvae slid into view and extended the pipes from where they had broken with a sputum of metal.

But it wasn’t just the ship receiving this punishment.

Azroc began to receive error messages from his own body and realized that some gravity phenomenon was the source of the damage occurring all around him, for something was stretching his bones and putting pressure on his internal hardware. He peered down at his chair and noted that it possessed a safety harness. One-handed he pulled the strap heads across and slotted them into their sockets. Once they were all in place, the full harness tightened, pulling him back against the chair, then soft clamps closed about his shins and rose up to beckon like pincers from the chair arms. He placed his free arm in one of them, but kept his other out to maintain contact with the hand interface.

‘Grav out,’ announced Jerusalem, its voice devoid of any human emulation.

The gravplates shut down and briefly the air was filled with swarms of beetlebots amid smaller things like chrome gnats, and numerous crab drones. Then this collection of ship fauna updated on the situation and used their various methods of propulsion to get themselves back to where they were needed. Inside himself, Azroc felt crystal breaking in a data store, but he possessed multiple back-ups, so there was no problem — yet. Two of his joint motors reported wiring breaks, and the sheering of a nerve linkage left both his feet numb. He dispatched his own hardware repair bots internally and began rerouting, running diagnostics, repairing where he could, otherwise patching or jury-rigging. A sudden jolt lifted his chair right into the air, and he saw that the floor below him had flipped up like a tin lid. All data through the hand interface cut out, then came an enormous shudder as the great ship again surfaced into the real.

‘Jerusalem?’

After a long pause the AI replied over intercom, ‘My phasic modular B folderol.’

‘Is it really?’ Azroc enquired.

‘Ipso facto total bellish.’

‘Yes, mine is too.’

‘Repairing.’ Static hissed from the intercom, then came a sound suspiciously like someone kicking a piece of malfunctioning hardware. ‘OK. Better.’

‘You’ll talk sense now?’

‘When the occasion requires.’

‘Are we through?’

‘We are near the edge, but the damage I was sustaining has reached its limit. I have lost fifty-eight hard-field generators and had to eject twenty-two fusion reactors. Unfortunately that should have been twenty-four, and now one third of my volume is contaminated with radioactives.’

‘Structural damage too?’

‘Yes, but only to secondary internal structures. My main skeleton will realign.’

Even as Jerusalem said this a great groaning and crashing echoed through the ship. Azroc focused on the floor crack and observed it beginning to close, beetlebots quickly scuttling out of the way. In fact the whole hedron appeared to be twisting back into shape, and as this happened, the raised piece of floor his chair was mounted upon began to settle down again. It was as if, like some human fighter, Jerusalem was casually pushing its dislocations back into place while spitting out chunks of broken tooth. Now the constant din of industry grew in volume, and within the hedron Azroc noted numerous welding arcs and crab drones zipping back and forth with circuit boards or other components clutched in their claws. Glancing down he saw that the crack in the floor directly below him had not yet closed, but the pipes had been reattached and he could see the milky glimmer of nanobot activity at the crack’s edges as they drew material across to bridge it, while a crab drone arrived beside the raised section of floor to cut off its protruding edge and make similar repairs.

‘It has occurred to me to wonder what you hope to achieve by getting clear of the interference,’ said Azroc. ‘You are a large vessel and I know you possess some lethal weaponry, but even so what can you do against Erebus?’

‘There is,’ replied Jerusalem, ‘a high probability that one other large Polity vessel will be able to penetrate the interference.’

‘Then what?’

‘Erebus is certainly launching an assault on Earth,’ said the AI. ‘We should still be able to fight a delaying action.’

Twenty hours later the great ship once more dropped into U-space turbulence, and Azroc was once again able to use the hand interface. The Jerusalem surfaced into the real less than an hour later, smoothly this time, and without anything breaking.

‘I see,’ said the Golem.

Yes, a delaying action.

Its surface bright with a million points of light that were almost certainly welding arcs, the titanic Cable Hogue hung there, waiting in vacuum.