Polity Agent

18

Warmth enclosed her, but in no way assuaged the pain. Sensing movement, Mika opened her eyes on blackness overlaid with jumbled non-sensical code. Then two words stood out—suit breach—and she realized she was seeing her visor display gone awry. Beyond it, in the minimal light this display provided, the blackness shifted. Further movement, more urgent, and something ungently began stripping her spacesuit from her body. She shrieked as mangled bones twisted inside her leg. Then the visor sank down into the neck ring and wet flesh surged over her face. Stifled, she fought for breath, began to lose consciousness. But next came a warm breeze as the flesh withdrew. She gasped, sucking in stale air smelling of burnt steak.

Ahead of her walls of similar flesh continued to withdraw—she could feel it all moving—then the lights turned on to give her confirmation: small globes affixed in an undulating surface which constantly dripped white fluid. Managing to tilt her head slightly, she peered down at herself. Red tentacles securely bound her against the living wall behind her. It also seemed evident that some of them penetrated her body—she could feel movement inside her. Now, right before her, a cobra pseudopod rose into view.

‘Hello,’ she managed. And even this extremity could not quell her fascination. She was actually, without any technology intervening, inside a Dragon sphere.

The pseudopod swayed from side to side as if seeking the perfect angle from which to strike, its single sapphire eye glowing hypnotically.

‘Can’t we… discuss… this?’

The thing struck at an angle with concussive force, wrenching her neck to one side and burning hot behind her ear. A sudden horrible ache suffused her skull, a scratching buzzing vibration intensifying in her eardrum. This, Mika realized, might be how it would feel to have an aug attached without using the correct anaesthetics. She knew when something entered and connected, because this harsh organic world went away again.

‘Show me,’ something said, and started to fast-forward through her memories, like a viewer impatient with the slower parts of a film. Streams of images and sensations screamed through her mind, but this did not seem fast enough. There came a horrible dislocation as something made an imprint of her total mind, peeled it free like a scab from a raw wound, and placed it to one side, then imprinted another and another until her ego and sense of self seemed something viewed through a cut gem, with alternative Mikas playing out in each facet. It scanned her childhood and adolescence at the Life-Coven on Circe, meticulously winnowing out the very smallest detail. Concurrently it whipped through her subsequent training and early career with ECS, but with slower precision it scanned her memories of Samarkand, then, almost with a horrible sensuousness, pored over the memories of Masada, then Cull.

Somewhere, deep behind that chronological separation, she still felt whole however, and sensed something of this mind’s purpose: her entire life as a basis for comparison. And she understood how the entity prepared for a meticulous reading of her memories of the time when it had fallen out of contact with its fellow; through her it intended to check the veracity of the other Dragon sphere’s story.

Upon reaching the time of the USER blockade around Cull — when it had lost contact with the other sphere, which was actually on that world—it allowed Mika to come back together again. Now, like a spectator to her own life, she proceeded to watch those events unfold: her studies of Jain technology; the Jerusalem’s run into the Cull system and brief contact with the other sphere lodged there, the short journey to a nearby system where the old colony ship Ogygian, with Skellor and Cento aboard, crashed into a dead sun; Cormac’s rescue and the lengthy task of putting him back together again. As it checked her memories, Mika could feel a feedback of growing dismay from this portion of Dragon. When it finally reached the events at Celedon, and Cormac’s subsequent interrogation of the other sphere, during which that one finally broke its Maker programming, she became partially aware of her body again—smelling oven smoke, feeling a discordant vibration within the sphere, and the wash of hot air entering her organic cell. As subsequent events played out, a pain grew in her skull and the connection began to break down. Vision and full sensation returned, and with their revival she screamed.

As the pseudopod ripped away from her head, another pseudo-pod shot into view and wound itself around the first one like a vine. The Dragon sphere then began jolting from side to side, her cell deforming around her. The two pseudopods continued thrashing, as if intent on strangling each other, then through the wall she felt the crump of some massive internal explosion. Acrid stinking smoke filled the area around her. Through watering eyes she observed one of the pseudopods abruptly freeze then grow flaccid, deflating as if all the juice were being sucked out of it. The still-living one rose up, shrugging its opponent away from it like ragged clothing.

‘So… which?’ Mika managed. It seemed this sphere was also in conflict with its Maker programming.

The binding tentacles writhed about her, and she felt those inside her moving as well. She came near to crying out again as pain grew in her in waves, but then something ran cold as ice up her spine and hit the ‘off’ switch in her skull.

Mika’s dreams were dragons.

The comet’s course headed to aphelion—out from the system through the asteroid belt—perihelion lay far in its future, after it swung back through the inner system. Previous fly-bys had boiled off most of its ice to leave a core of rock conveniently wormed through with hundreds of huge caverns. Deep scanning of the interior revealed one cavern system suitable for her purposes. Cutting through ten yards of ice would give the ship access. And Orlandine could hide.

After correcting the Heliotrope’s course so that it matched that of the comet, she used the fore-mounted plasma cutter. The ice fluoresced as it made the transition from complex ice to water ice, and then into vapour. Cutting two deep holes, she opened the claw to its widest point, then manoeuvred the ship forwards until a claw tip inserted into each hole. Then she just fired up the cutter to full power and, over ten minutes, gave the comet a tail it had not possessed in many thousands of years, though this time a brief one that quickly faded into vacuum.

Once the hole was wide enough she detached the grab claw, then swung the ship around and reversed it into the cave. Utter darkness now, but every movement and action she precisely mapped in her extended haiman mind. At her order the ship fired cable-mounted gecko pads against the cavern wall, and drew itself into place. With an afterthought she made it clamp its main grab, like the pincers of some giant mechanical earwig, to a rocky outcrop. Then she powered down all the ship’s systems, before heading out to explore her new home.

After physically detaching her carapace, and herself, from the interface sphere, Orlandine headed aft to don a spacesuit and assister frame, then scuttled to the airlock. Once outside she clung to the hull and looked around. With her cowl up, the cavern seemed as bright as day from residual infrared emanating from the ship’s thrusters and the fluorescing of complex ices nearby.

The cavern stretched a hundred yards across and was four times as long, curving near the end down into a narrow hole. The walls consisted of countless concave hollows holding rounded pebbles encased in tough nodular masses of ice. Gas had bubbled through magma, then cooled, and the subsequent stresses had collapsed thin shells of rock into fragments. The cavern acted like a tumbling machine each time the sun thawed the comet, rounding the fragments eventually into pebbles. Millions of years of thaws and freezes, maybe billions had elapsed. That no pebbles floated free was probably due to them picking up enough frictional heat to stick to the ice as it cooled and supercooled. Orlandine pushed herself off from the hull, floated over to one side wall and grabbed an ice nodule to steady herself. Where her foot brushed accidentally against the wall, pebbles tumbled away like opaque bubbles. She would have to watch that. Careless movement in here could result in the open space being filled with a perpetual hail of them. Taking care to only grab clear ice nodules with no pebbles stuck to their surfaces, she made her way along the wall to the hole leading into another cavern. However, briefly peering in there confirmed just more of the same.

Orlandine spent less than an hour exploring before returning to the Heliotrope. How long could she tolerate waiting here? Back within her ship she decided to explore Jain technology in a virtuality. Perhaps that would keep boredom at bay.

Boredom did not get a chance to impinge.

Some in the cave were resting, others still meticulously checking weaponry. Blegg sat unnaturally motionless on a boulder, his head bowed. Cormac bowed his own head, and in his gridlink opened the memory package given to him by Jerusalem, and uploaded it directly to his mind. First, came the pain, then Cormac became himself, many months before:

They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it as both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento became a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour…

…

This is memory, and I must not lose sight of that. The pain is not real. My mind is whole, I am whole…

…

Cormac fought against the enclosing structure, but could do nothing to help Cento. When he felt the wash of tidal forces through his body, he knew that in very little time that same wash would intensify sufficiently to shatter the Jain structure, but by then the tidal forces would have compressed and stretched his body to a sludge of splintered bone and ruptured flesh inside it. It occurred to him, with crazy logic, that such damage to himself was required as payment for the pain he already suffered. On another level it occurred to him that he was not entirely rational at that moment.

…

You didn’t try to subvert Cento. You knew you were going to die and just wanted the satisfaction of tearing him apart with your hands. Skellor, you erred.

…

The Ogygian jerked once, twice, then suddenly Cormac lay heavy inside the Jain structure — being crammed over to one side. Grappling claws.

…

Cento and Skellor both slammed into the wall. The Golem was down to metal, and Skellor even managed to tear some of that away. Long pink lesions cut into Skellor’s own blackened carapace, golden nodules showing in these like some strange scar tissue.

…

It became too much: to choose a moral death, then to accept an inevitable one, and then to have both taken away. If only he could strike even the smallest blow. But he could do nothing—was ineffectual. Then, in that moment of extremity, Cormac saw the way. Wasn’t it laughably obvious?

…

Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three yards to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.

Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and began to fire.

…

‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.

…

Cento, now impacted on the surface of a dark sun, along with Skellor.

…

Gasping a warm damp breath of the cave’s air, Cormac jerked into the present. Checking the time readout in his gridlink he realized that though those events aboard the ancient spaceship Ogygian took very little time, it had taken just over an hour for him to incorporate them in his mind. But what a vast difference his knowledge of them imposed on his thinking.

He had suffered horribly at Skellor’s hands, his mind just as ripped up as his body at the end. But he had translated himself through U-space—something always considered an impossibility for a human being, which was why he had never really believed Blegg to be human. But now Blegg claimed to be the avatar Cormac had accused him of being, and could not translate himself through U-space, yet it seemed Cormac could.

Cormac heaved himself up from the boulder he was propped against, phantom pains shooting through his body as it remembered old injuries, and his mind muggy and seemingly dislocated within his skull. Glancing across the cave he saw one of the Sparkind attaching a CTD to the underside of the autogun. It would be set to detonate the moment that weapon ran out of ammunition. Spikes had since been driven into the rocky lip of the fissure down which they intended to exit, and dracomen and the other Sparkind were checking the cable winders attached to their belts. For a moment Cormac experienced a surge of painful memory: that time on Samarkand when he, Thorn, Gant, and the two Golem, Cento and Aiden, had prepared similar gear for their descent into a shaft cut down into the ground. And how Gant died there—the first time.

‘What has the memory given you?’ Blegg, standing at his shoulder.

Without turning, Cormac replied, ‘I don’t really know. I now look around this cave and it seems to me all this rock is as insubstantial as mist, yet I know that if I try to step through it the most probable result will be concussion.’ Now he turned to face Blegg fully. ‘I am not the same person I was then. Jerusalem needed to subsequently rebuild much of my body and my mind, since I was neither whole nor, I think, entirely sane.’

‘Perhaps… in a moment of extremity…’

‘Perhaps.’

Cormac now observed the flesh-stripped Golem crouching over the badly burnt soldier. The Golem removed the autodoc, took some thumb-sized bloody object from one of its manipulators and put it to one side, then pressed some control so that the autodoc folded away all its surgical gear. He then returned it to its case.

‘They wouldn’t have been able to get him safely through the fissure,’ Blegg explained. ‘And he remained lucid enough to make his wishes known… via his aug.’

‘He chose to die?’ Cormac asked.

‘He was memplanted.’ Hence the bloody object just extracted.

‘Oh that’s all right then.’ Cormac felt a surge of anger return, then immediately stamped on it because again he realized its source. The wounded soldier would have been an encumbrance they could ill afford. And in a horrible way he felt grateful that the sheer lethality of the weapons used against them had left so few wounded, yet also horrified about how many they had killed. Including Thorn. He turned towards the survivors, seeing they only awaited his instructions. ‘Okay, we go now. No point waiting here until the enemy start coming through the walls. You Golem run the lead lines down and the rest of us will follow. Arach’—he turned to locate the drone, which came scuttling from a side cave—‘I take it you don’t need a line?’

‘Nah, these extra legs have their compensation,’ the drone grated.

Cormac nodded. ‘Myself and Blegg will go down last on the lines. I want you to remain here until we’ve reached the bottom. I want you to detach any lines up here that don’t auto-detach, then follow us down.’

‘Sure thing, boss,’ the spider-drone replied.

Cormac eyed Arach, then headed over to the fissure. As he approached, the leading Golem pulled end-rings from the cable winders on their belts, unreeling monofilament cables apparently as thick as climbing ropes as the winders sprayed them with orange cladding—providing both easier grip and to protect the unwary from filament thin enough to slice through flesh. The Golem then attached the rings to the spikes driven into the stone lip before abseiling down. The rest followed, attaching their belt winders as they went. Scar followed his dracomen down, then Cormac waved Blegg ahead of him. The old Oriental nodded and almost reluctantly joined the descent.

‘Arach, what are you going to do?’ Cormac asked as the spider-drone stepped delicately up beside him. ‘You can’t follow us all the way once down below.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’

It seemed to Cormac the drone danced a little, almost gleefully. He knew it relished the prospect of battle, but did it want to die?

‘I could always stay with you,’ Cormac suggested, and wondered where the hell that had come from.

Just then the rock about them shuddered and stalactites within the cavern crashed to the floor, shattering like porcelain.

‘I thought they were hours away from us,’ Cormac said.

‘That was nothing to do with the burrowers,’ Arach replied. ‘I just detected a gravitic anomaly.’

Cormac felt heartened by this. The ECS Centurions contained gravtech weapons, and the brief quake he had just felt indicated they might be using them.

‘Time we were on our way?’ Arach pointed down into the fissure with one sharp leg.

Cormac walked over, then turned to scan all around inside the cave before lowering himself down. He clipped the line into its slot in his belt winder, which governed its friction setting to how fast he moved. At first he abseiled down the slope, but when its angle altered to make this impossible, he had to walk backwards down it. Away from the lights up in the main cavern, he turned on his envirosuit light. Time dragged by without the others yet coming in sight, and he thought that those below him must be moving faster, so he accelerated. The slope began to level out further when Scar and Blegg became visible to him. He could see them ducking as the fissure began to close up. By the time he reached them, the cave floor had levelled and the party stood grouped together.

‘Time to detach those lines,’ he suggested.

Crouching its way past, a Golem moved to the rear and sent up the signal to open the connector rings. With a high whine the monofilament wound in to belt winders, stripped-off cladding showering the floor like orange-coloured chipping from an auto-plane. Only a few yards behind the open rings at the ends of the returning lines came Arach.

Scar moved up beside Cormac. ‘We will soon have to crawl through a very narrow section.’ The dracoman gestured at the drone. ‘The drone’s body is ten inches too thick.’

Arach gave a wide spiderish shrug. ‘Guess I’ll have to leave it for our friends then.’ Abruptly the drone jumped, flipping over, the tips of its legs finding purchase in ceiling crevices. There came a low-pitched grating sound and from between the spider drone’s body and the ceiling, a talc of rock dust showered down. Then came a couple of clonks and a hydraulic hiss, as Arach eased forwards and dropped from his abdomen, spinning round to land on his legs again. After a moment the abdomen, remaining attached to the ceiling, opened its hatches and lowered the two gatling cannons.

‘Neat trick,’ Cormac commented.

‘One of my favourites,’ Arach replied. ‘Though my power reserve is much smaller now.’

Cormac eyed the drone: it looked somehow even more sinister now it appeared to be all legs. ‘Will it survive the CTD blast?’ He pointed up.

‘So long as the roof doesn’t collapse, and maybe even then,’ Arach replied.

Cormac nodded. ‘Let’s keep moving, shall we?’

They crawled through crevices where sometimes Cormac found it necessary to turn his head sideways to manage to worm through. It was exhausting work, and during the first few hours Cormac stayed thoroughly aware of time passing. Reaching an area in which it again became possible to stand almost upright, he called a halt and they broke out supplies. He eyed the dracomen, who opened packets of what looked like raw meat and gobbled it down. He, Blegg, and the human Sparkind enjoyed more standard fare, and Cormac never knew coffee to taste so good.

‘Time is passing,’ Blegg noted.

‘It is,’ Cormac replied. ‘At our present rate of travel we should reach the pool Scar’s people detected—not long before the estimated breakthrough time of our friends above. We definitely need to be underwater by the time that autogun runs out.’

‘Yes, we certainly do.’

Cormac glanced at him. ‘Not feeling so fatalistic now?’

Blegg started to say something, then decided against it. ‘We should be moving on,’ he finally replied.

Cormac was worming through another particularly cramped stretch when he heard the distant sound of the autogun firing. Checking, it surprised him to see how much time had passed, and realized Blegg’s estimate not to have been far off—it took their attackers ten hours and fifteen minutes to break through. Cormac’s estimate of their own progress had not been so good. Even the dracomen were growing weary, and the pools not yet in sight.

‘Thirty yards to go,’ came Arach’s call from ahead.

‘Move!’ Cormac bellowed. ‘We need to get through here fast!’

Here, as soon as the CTD blew, they would be fried—the heat and energy of its blast funnelled down to them through the fissure. They all began moving a lot faster and with less regard for minor injuries. Cormac listened to the whoosh and chatter of the gun — waiting for that moment when it ceased. Abruptly Scar and Blegg, just ahead of him, were rising up onto hands and knees and progressing faster. He heard a splash, and yet another splash. As he too rose up from his belly into a crouch, Scar passed the ring end of a line back to him. He attached it to his winder—too easy to get lost under water that might quickly turn murky. Through his gridlink he raised the helmet and closed the visor of his envirosuit, and followed the others down into water lanced through with their envirosuit light beams.

About them the pool lay deep and wide, but soon the two dracomen ahead led them into a narrow intestinal pipe corkscrewing through the rock. Twice they surfaced in travertine sumps, and on a third occasion a glare of light passing through the water ignited the sump with rainbow colours.

‘The autogun just ran out,’ one of the human Sparkind commented.

They waited, then suddenly the water itself surged upwards, forcing them towards the ceiling.

Now, thought Cormac, only Arach’s little present stands between them and us. He reckoned those Jain-constructed biomechs could move faster down here than he and his fellows, though they might have to burrow again if there had been intervening rock falls.

‘What explosives do we have remaining?’ he asked.

‘Grenades, eight planar mines and one more CTD,’ replied one of the Golem.

‘Let’s hope we won’t need the CTD,’ he said. ‘Position the mines where you deem appropriate—proximity detonation.’ He added unnecessarily, ‘Let’s keep moving,’ as the water level descended.

Within an hour they left the pipe and ascended a gently upward-sloping fissure. The temperature slowly began to rise, which indicated this cave system opened up somewhere to the surface. Then abruptly the upward slope ended against a wall of stone. Reaching this and directing his envirosuit light upwards, Cormac discerned another fissure climbing up into darkness.

‘How many mines left?’

‘Four.’

‘Okay, you Golem take the lead. Position two of the mines up in the fissure and when you reach a suitable point, run lines down.’

As the Golem headed rapidly up through the fissure Cormac turned to the others. ‘All of you, take a rest.’ He himself felt utterly drained, partly a result of the stimulants he had used while fighting through the jungle above. He did not want to use any more of them until it became absolutely necessary.

Lines snaked down to them twenty minutes later, just as a dull boom echoed through the cave system. The biomechanism must now have entered the underwater cave system. They hooked up their winders and ascended to where the Golem had secured themselves. The fissure here turned to follow an angle of thirty degrees from the horizontal still ascending.

With disheartening regularity over the next few hours the mines they had planted detonated behind them. Twice they needed to stop and take seismic readings to find some available course ahead. Once it became necessary to use one of their remaining mines, then some of the grenades, to blast a way through into another tunnel. While in there another dull boom resounded from behind. Checking some instrument one of the Golem told them, ‘That was the last mine we planted.’ Cormac felt he really did not need that—he could count. Then, manoeuvring through one sharply curving tunnel, he noticed a steady climb in temperature. Further along he found it necessary to close up his envirosuit. Next, reddish light began to impinge.

‘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 there 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.