by John Ayliff
Mardok barrelled into Keldra and grabbed her by the neck again. He moved unsteadily, almost unbalancing both of them. ‘What have you done?’ he shouted. ‘I’ll kill you, you—’
Mardok’s gun fired, but the shot went wide. Keldra had pushed his hand away. Now she pulled the gun from his grasp and shoved him away from her, kicking him in the chest and sending him sprawling drunkenly onto the ground. She raised the gun, her arm perfectly straight, and shot Mardok in the head where he lay. Bits of blood and brain spattered into the oily water.
Poldak and Soodok were raising their guns to shoot Keldra, but their responses were slow, held back by shock as well as whatever had been affecting them already. One of them fired – Olzan couldn’t tell which – but missed. Keldra turned and fired twice, putting a bullet in each of their foreheads, nearly deafening Olzan as the bullets went close by his head. Her face was a mask of cold fury; her hand was trembling just a little, in anger rather than fear.
Olzan fought to get his breathing back under control. ‘What happened?’ he said at last. ‘What did you do? It was you, wasn’t it?’
‘Check your atmosphere gauge.’
He looked at the read-out on his suit’s forearm. The pressure was normal, but the oxygen concentration was significantly down. ‘You suffocated them.’
‘Hypoxia. By the time you notice something’s wrong, you’re too light-headed to think straight. I used the airlock mechanism to cycle the oxygen out gently.’
‘You killed them,’ Olzan said again. The sound of the gunshots still rang in his ears. ‘Never mind. Let’s go. There’s not much time.’
‘We take the Seagull.’ Keldra was still holding the gun.
Olzan watched the blood spread out from the hijackers’ heads into the standing water. ‘All right.’
Keldra went back to work on the hangar doors. On Olzan’s timer, the seconds to the Black Line ticked away. The device beeped as they passed the thirty-minute mark. That was the point at which Olzan had told himself he would blow the doors, but after what Keldra had done to the hijackers he was too scared to cross her. Back on the Thousand Names he’d make it clear who was captain; right now, though, he would give her a few more minutes.
‘I’ve got it,’ Keldra said at last. The timer read twenty-four minutes.
Olzan felt the relief wash over him. He put a transmission through to the shuttle. ‘Vaz, we’re coming out through the hangar. Get ready to pick us up.’
‘Tell her to go back to the Names,’ Keldra said. She was walking towards the Seagull.
‘What?’
‘We’ll ride the Seagull out. Grab a wheel.’ She kicked the chock from in front of the spaceplane’s forward landing gear wheel, and pushed the stepladder away from its nose. ‘The air pressure should push it out, but it might need a little help.’
‘Scratch that, Vaz. Return to the Names. We’ll be with the package.’
‘That maniac had better know what she’s doing,’ Vazoya crackled in his ear.
Keldra had removed the chocks from the other two wheels and had grabbed on to the landing gear beneath one of the wings. Olzan hurried over and took hold of the other one. He fumbled to get a suit line around the landing gear column. As he did so he flicked his suit transmitter to the Thousand Names’s frequency. ‘Brenn, we’ll be dropping the package out in a moment. Get into position.’
‘Ready?’ Keldra asked.
‘Ready.’
She punched a command into her suit’s wrist panel. There was a shudder, and a groaning sound from the hangar doors as the long-disused mechanism unstuck itself. The display cases against the wall toppled and then fell, their glass fronts smashing. The vacuum seal broke and the door opened the rest of the way quickly, hinging outwards and upwards. There was a roar of air past Olzan’s helmet. The display cases were whisked out, tumbling out of sight, followed by a cascade of oily water and the bodies of the would-be hijackers.
The spaceplane moved forward, as if rising out of his hands. He took that as his cue to push. On the other wheel, Keldra was doing the same. The rush of air was gone after a moment, but they had got the spaceplane moving. Shoulders to the landing gear columns, they hauled its weight across the hangar floor towards the abyss of spinning stars.
The forward wheel went over the edge and the spaceplane’s nose went down, dragging them forward. Olzan jumped onto the landing gear and hugged the column as the spaceplane pitched out of the hangar doors into the infinite drop.
Stars wheeled around them. The silence of the vacuum was broken only by Olzan’s nervous breathing. For a moment he felt as if he was falling, then he went through the reverse of the perception shift he had gone through on the approach to the starscraper. He was weightless, clinging on to the spaceplane as it drifted away from the city. Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper was already rotating away from them and becoming lost in the throng of other surface features. In the other direction he could see the thruster flame of Vazoya’s shuttle as it sped ahead of them, and more distantly the comforting sight of the Thousand Names, its cargo bay doors opening onto a warmly lit interior.
There was something else out there, bigger than the Thousand Names but dark against the stars. Olzan felt a chill run through him. It was the Worldbreaker, now large enough to be seen with the naked eye, closing in on the doomed city. Olzan willed the spaceplane to drift faster. His timer read twenty minutes to the Black Line, but he was painfully aware that the line was only a best guess, and they were already within the margin of error.
Keldra had noticed the Worldbreaker too. Olzan could see her face through her visor. She was staring at it, not taking her eyes off it as the Seagull’s rotation moved it around in a circle in front of them. Her face was curled up with a hatred that she had not shown even to the hijackers when they had threatened the spaceplane. As Olzan watched she drew Mardok’s gun from her suit holster, raised it slowly, and then fired: a soundless white flash erupting in the vacuum. She fired again and again, faster and faster as she emptied the clip at the Worldbreaker. She said nothing, although the helmet channel was open. There were tears pooling up at the sides of her eyes, glinting with each muzzle flash.
The Worldbreaker’s mouth began to open, its sickly green light a ghastly mirror of the Thousand Names’s inviting cargo bay. It had positioned itself along the city’s long axis, as if finding the best angle to swallow it whole. A grating scream sounded in Olzan’s ears: the radio interference from the Worldbreaker’s beam. At the distant end of the city, the docking spindle twisted further before snapping off and being sucked into the Worldbreaker’s mouth. Starscrapers shattered, tiny shards of glass and metal falling sparkling away.
The muzzle flashes from Keldra’s gun stopped. Her finger kept working the trigger for a few seconds, then she gave an inarticulate cry of frustration, barely audible under the radio scream, then hurled the gun at the Worldbreaker. It spun away, flashing rhythmically in the sunlight, clearly on the wrong course.
There was an explosion at the end of the city, an orange fireball, briefly blossoming, as fire raced through the air in the second before it dispersed. The Worldbreaker beam had ruptured the first of the city’s habitation caverns. A halo of debris fanned out, the force of the explosion combining with the city’s angular momentum to hurl the outermost parts of the city surface outside the range of the Worldbreaker’s beam. A shockwave travelled along the city as the beam bored deeper. The cluster of structures that had included Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper disintegrated in an instant.
The city was in the centre of an expanding wave of debris. Olzan could see great hunks of rock and metal looming at them, backlit by the flickering green of the Worldbreaker beam. The leading surface was travelling outwards faster than the Seagull, propelled by the force of the explosion.
They had reached the Thousand Names. Brenn had almost matched velocities with them, so the Seagull floated through the cargo bay doors and settled gently into the elastic cargo webbing. Olzan pushed himself off the landing gear
and hand-walked across the webbing towards the airlock to the ship’s spine. Through the closing doors he could see the city breaking up into great chunks, its original shape gone.
‘Brenn, we’re secure,’ he said as the airlock door opened. ‘Get us the hell out of here.’ Keldra was just behind him. He grabbed her hand and helped her into the airlock. The lock drifted around them as the ship began to turn, but he didn’t feel the acceleration of a full burn.
They took the transit module to the forward ring, and Olzan ran to the bridge. The entire crew was there. On the screen, the last slivers of Konrad’s Hope were disappearing into the Worldbreaker’s mouth.
‘Brenn, what’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Why aren’t we at full burn?’
‘There’s a glitch in the main engine,’ Vazoya answered for him. She was standing next to him, her hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ve got manoeuvring thrusters but no main.’
‘I’m working on it!’ Tarraso snapped from the engineering console before Olzan could say anything. ‘We need to run a fuel line purge…’
‘There’s no time,’ Olzan said. ‘Wreck the fuel lines if you have to.’
‘We’re on it, Olzan!’ Vazoya stepped away from Brenn’s side and pushed into Olzan’s face. She glanced at Keldra, standing behind Olzan. ‘Maybe if you and your friend hadn’t taken so long saving your precious artefact—’
‘Too late.’ Brenn’s voice was without emotion.
They all looked to the screen. A jagged shard of rock was hurtling at them out of the darkness. The manoeuvring thrusters were pushing them aside, but not quickly enough.
There was a gut-wrenching impact sound, an impression of flames and of the room’s wall buckling inwards, and then something struck Olzan’s head and he lost consciousness.
Chapter Eight
The memory ended abruptly, leaving Jonas struggling to remember who and where he was. Second-hand memories bubbled at the back of his mind, the hacked implant firing wildly as it strained to override his motor control.
The Planetary Age artefact was still in front of him, the word Seagull picked out in silver lettering on its side. He tried to pull his hand away from it, but his hand didn’t respond. There wasn’t even the muscular pressure of pulling against a restraint. He felt as if he was a ghost, locked out of his own body.
Keldra’s taunting about Ayla rang unbidden at the back of his mind. Some people say that consciousness can survive a mind-wipe. Jonas pushed that thought aside. Servitor implants destroyed the neural connections to do with memory and personality: if he was able to wonder whether or not he was a servitor that meant that he wasn’t. This was a temporary muscle override: less efficient, less precise, and only sustainable for a few hours at a time. Keldra must still think she had a use for his conscious mind.
He could feel his heart pounding, his breathing becoming faster. This wasn’t panic, although it felt like it. The implant would be flooding his body with adrenaline in preparation for action.
‘Mr Reinhardt?’ Wendell Glass had appeared in his peripheral vision. Jonas couldn’t turn his head or even move his eyes to see the man clearly, but he could hear the panic building again in his voice. ‘Mr Reinhardt, are you all right?’
‘Mr Reinhardt, can you hear me?’ Cooper was beside Jonas, close but out of sight. His voice was more confrontational. That had been a challenge, not a concerned query.
Jonas’s hands twitched involuntarily. The implant had consolidated control. Suddenly his entire body lurched forward and his arms shot up to grab the artefact and clutch it to his chest. An alarm rang out shrilly, joining the distant whine that had been sounding since the EMP.
The implant spun Jonas around, and the room seemed to shift and dance as his eyes scanned the walls for something. Cooper and Glass were both standing close to him, but Glass took a step back when he saw him moving. Emily Glass was standing at the edge of the room. She was still wearing her memduction helmet and gloves, but now she focused on Jonas with a look of detached interest, as if he was another servitor show for her amusement.
Behind Emily was a door with an illuminated escape pod symbol above it. The implant fixed his eyes on it for a moment, then his arms hugged the artefact to his chest and his legs broke into a run.
‘Reinhardt!’ Wendell Glass screamed. ‘Put that back at once!’
Emily froze. For a second she looked as if she was about to dive out of Jonas’s way, but then she moved to block him. He felt his footfalls changing, one arm coming up, preparing to push past her—
Something slammed into his back, knocking him onto his face. The artefact slid across the floor and clattered against the base of a display plinth. Somewhere behind him, Wendell Glass shrieked.
He found himself rolling with the impact and springing back to his feet, moving a little clumsily but far more quickly than he normally could have. His vision fixed on the artefact for a moment, then the programme seemed to shift gears and he spun around to face Cooper. The captain was on his feet already, in a crouched high-grav boxing stance, eyes alert and focused.
The implant swung Jonas’s fist around, homing in on Cooper’s neck. Cooper dodged easily and threw a punch of his own, going for Jonas’s centre of mass, trying to knock him off-balance. The implant blocked, taking the blow painfully on his forearm.
The fight went too quickly for Jonas to follow. His muscles ached as the implant pushed them past their normal limits; he wanted to throw up, but the implant had locked down his gag reflex. He took blow after blow, far more than the implant landed on Cooper, but he knew that didn’t mean he was losing. The combat programme always intercepted the blows with non-critical parts of his body, painful but not impairing his ability to fight. Combat programmes avoided damage, not discomfort, and they could keep a body fighting far beyond normal human tolerances to pain.
If he hadn’t known that the true-born eschewed neural technology, Jonas might have thought that Cooper was using a combat programme himself. He seemed to know every move Jonas’s implant was about to make, and his motions were controlled, dispassionate, not making the mistakes of blind aggression that was so often the downfall of a free-willed human fighting against a programme. He had adjusted his stance perfectly for the gravities involved: his home gravity versus Jonas’s, and the four-fifths or so of a gee of Wendell Glass’s safe room. This adjustment for gravity was an area in which combat programmes were meant to have an advantage over free-willed minds, but it looked as though Cooper had been trained well.
The whining alarm became louder. Through the corner of his eye, Jonas saw yellow light spill into the vault from an open doorway, and heard the thumping of boots as two men ran in.
‘Shoot him!’ Wendell Glass shrieked. ‘Shoot Reinhardt! He’s a thief!’
‘Hold your fire!’ Cooper commanded.
The security guards ran past Wendell and weaved around Jonas and Cooper, trying to fix their guns on Jonas but not firing into the melee.
Jonas’s world lurched painfully to one side as Cooper landed a solid blow on the side of his face. Cooper pressed his advantage, slamming him into one of the display plinths and sending it crashing to the ground. Jonas was on the ground with Cooper pinning him down; his arm flailed but couldn’t land a solid blow. The captain’s learned skills had finally got the better of Keldra’s implant.
‘Get off him!’ Wendell shouted. He grabbed one of the security guards’ nerve guns. ‘Get off him so I can shoot!’
Cooper shifted on top of Jonas, reaching for something in one of his pockets. He brought up his hand and Jonas felt a cold, metallic object pressing into his skin at the base of his skull. The incessant whine of the alarm rang in his ears as he blacked out.
The screech of an alarm dragged Olzan back to consciousness. The thunk of a bulkhead door slamming shut made him snap his eyes open. There was heat, flickering white light, and a smell of burning metal.
He got to his feet and nearly fell again. The gravity was lower than normal and was shifting nauseatingly; it
felt as if the grav-ring had been knocked out of alignment. The bridge screen sputtered with static, and when it was dead the pale emergency ceiling lights barely illuminated the room. The control terminals were smashed and the spinward wall was buckled inwards alarmingly. Olzan’s side ached from where he had been thrown to the floor. That would hurt like hell when the adrenaline wore off.
Vazoya was on her feet, bending over the prone form of Brenn at the front of the bridge. It looked as if the pilot had been thrown out of his seat by the impact. There was no blood, but he wasn’t moving. Keldra was slumped against one wall, hands moving sluggishly, her face bloody where she’d been struck by shards of a smashed control terminal. Tarraso was getting to his feet, a little slower than Olzan, but apparently unharmed.
Something rapped on the hull. A chill ran down Olzan’s spine. They were still in the debris field: at any moment a larger piece might finish them off.
He grabbed the first-aid kit from the wall and tossed it to Tarraso, who nodded in acknowledgement as Olzan raced out of the bridge. Tarraso was Engineer-caste but he had some medical training. Olzan had to make sure the ship was safe.
A bulkhead door had come down, blocking the corridor in the spinward direction, with a red pressure loss warning light flashing terrifyingly. Olzan ran the other way until he reached the transit hub. The ring’s own systems were dead but the transit modules’ internal backups had kept them online. He stabbed the controls and clung to the straps as the module rattled up the ship’s spine. The doors opened and he propelled himself along the microgravity tunnel to the forward observation blister.
There was no sign of Konrad’s Hope now. The Worldbreaker hung in the space the city had occupied, obscenely large, its featureless shell big enough to contain a dozen cities. It was turning, and gradually accelerating towards whatever rock was next on its menu. Space around it was filled with a thinning cloud of debris, tumbling rocks and starscraper fragments making up a tiny fraction of the city’s original mass: the scraps that had fallen from the Worldbreaker’s mouth.