by Neal Asher
“Quadrant Six, rail, five kilotons, two miles,” he instructed the relevant gunner.
The missile shot out at low speed—at full railgun speed it would simply have smashed against the seawater as if facing an exotic armoured wall. The resultant explosion would blow back, taking out railgun and gunner. A few hundred feet from the ship, it fired up its own drive and accelerated, a burning magnesium glare behind it and great bubbles of superheated steam rising to the surface.
Sverl now saw that his ship had enough clearance from the bottom. Taking his claw from the weapons pit control, he reinserted it in one of the drive controls and fired up his vessel’s multiple fusion engines. If the fired missile didn’t disrupt the two torpedoes’ cavitation drives, or destroy the things, surely his fusion drive would? Then again, surely Cvorn would have known that?
His great ship bore the shape of a prador carapace—a great chunk of exotic metal six miles across, sprouting weapons turrets and sensor arrays like high-tech barnacles. Now, it began to rise rapidly, seemingly poised on top of a newly ignited sun. Sverl touched the ocean tractor drives to set it turning, bringing the two particle cannon ports round to the side. Then a massive detonation either destroyed the two torpedoes, or destroyed any view of them, but he suspected they’d just changed course.
“Quadrant Two, be aware of possible incoming as we breach.” He withdrew one claw from the drive and again reinserted it into weapons, meanwhile asking himself how he would have done it. The torpedoes would have their own momentum, so it was a simple calculation to judge where they might exit the ocean’s surface. Another few touches with the tractor drive had his ship turning further.
“Seven and Eight, loose forty of those Polity grav mines directly after we breach,” he instructed. “Use a swarm two dispersion, close at one mile.”
“Father, they will pose a danger,” replied the second-child at the rail-gun and subsidiary weapons arrays in Quadrant Seven. Aboard any other prador ship, posing such a question would have resulted in summary execution. Well, at least after any battle. But Sverl’s children had learned that he expected their input and would, to misapply a human metaphor, provide carrots rather than always wielding the big stick.
“Further dispersion will be by CTD blast from below,” Sverl replied, opening up a control unit link to the big CTD in the mineshaft, which now lay a mile below his ship. “The grav mines will be driven out by the blast front and may well intercept the rising destroyers.”
They were a neat and simple Polity toy, those mines. The grav-engines could be easily shielded because they had just one setting—neutral buoyancy—and they carried proximity-detonated CTDs. They would be a second unpleasant surprise for Cvorn and the rest; the first being what was about to happen below.
BLITE
First had come a rumble and The Rose shook underfoot, but Blite had thought nothing of it because he had been on many seismically active worlds. However, the crowd moving down the adjacent road paused as one, as if they had all heard the first footfall of some approaching giant, then picked up their pace. A sense of panic infected the sulphide-laden air. Apparently earthquakes weren’t a common occurrence here.
Standing on the hull of his ship, Blite swung round to peer out to sea through his monocular. He could just see a purplish glare penetrating to the surface of the ocean at the far horizon. It could have been a visual effect characteristic of this world, but when that light changed to a deep red-orange flash, Blite thought otherwise.
“So everyone’s fucking off but us,” said Ikbal.
The Rose had landed and powered down—with nothing now available to the drive systems. A clattering had started up, followed by an ear-piercing tinnitus whine. Other sounds had followed, until the inside of the ship was filled with a cacophony worthy of an automated factory gathering pace. It became unbearable, hence Blite relocating outside and allowing his crew to follow him.
“Some are getting ready to fuck off,” he replied to Ikbal, “but they all should have left long before now to be far enough away.” He glanced across at the nearby houses in this more salubrious portion of town. The evacuation seemed well organized, fast and pretty calm, but there had been damage to the city and it was still ongoing. He counted four fires, one blazing merrily in the upper floor of a nearby three-storey building. Its flames were now flicking through a peaked roof tiled with some sort of stone—the tiles cracked with sounds like gunshots and slewed to the ground in pieces. He turned his attention to Brond and Martina, who had set up a remote console, linked to the ship’s sensors, there at least being sufficient power to operate those. “Any idea what that was?” he asked.
“Particle beam fired a couple of miles down,” replied Martina grimly. “Looks like it hit something—steel and carbon spectra.”
“Shit.” Blite raised his monocular to his eyes in time to see the ocean boiling out there, and a bright glare below. “Shit, shit,” he added.
First up came four towers, spearing out of the ocean like giant brass asparagus shoots. Below them rose the turret they were attached to, then the rest of the enormous ship was gradually revealed. Blite swallowed drily. He had heard that there was a prador dreadnought down there, but the reality had failed to impinge until now. The behemoth continued to rise, like an island being pushed up by some seismic event. Weapons turrets and pits decorated its surface and, from one of the latter, objects began spewing out. Blite increased magnification to pick out one of these and set his monocular’s chameleon-eye lenses to track it. The thing looked like a thick silver coin, until it engaged chameleonware and disappeared.
“Now those,” said Brond, “are Polity grav mines.”
“Unusual,” Blite replied, trying to keep his tone calm and analytical. “Prador tend to dislike using Polity tech—they see it as an admission that it might be superior.”
As the dreadnought cleared the ocean, particle beams stabbed out and down from two turrets and two bright flashes ignited above the ocean. They were two yellow suns, expanding and flattening as a blast front rolled out across the ocean.
“What was that?” asked Greer, sitting on the edge of the hull with her feet on one of the nacelle struts.
“Secure yourselves now!” Blite shouted, dropping his monocular to swing on its neck strap and reaching to unreel the safety line from his space suit belt. He squatted to clip its hook over one of the hull-mounted rings. “Close up your suits too!” he added, sweeping his suit visor across.
While the others secured themselves like Blite, Chont and Haber were still running back to the ship. They’d been investigating the edge of the Carapace, where it was attached to the ground. Arriving, they quickly scrambled up a ladder on the side of the ship, then fixed their safety lines to that.
“Any detail on that explosion?” Blite asked Martina and Brond over suit radio.
“All of it,” replied Brond. “Two cavitating-drive torpedoes exited the ocean a couple of miles from that ship and fired up rocket motors. The father-captain must have been wise to them because he nailed them straight away.”
“Blast power?”
“About a megaton each—directed. Some sort of armour-piercer.”
By now the blast front had reached the shore and Blite didn’t need a monocular to see it. An explosion of white water marked out the edge of the sea from horizon to horizon, then disappeared in a boiling line of dust. As it drew closer he saw chunks of vegetable matter being hurled up into the air, but felt a momentary relief. If he’d seen rocks being picked up, he’d have known that a safety line wasn’t enough. Hitting the less salubrious suburbs of Carapace City, the blast front picked up even more rubbish as it flattened flimsy shanty dwellings. Blite dipped his head and waited.
It reached them a moment later and their surroundings disappeared in dust and debris. The wind tried to wrench Blite from the hull of his ship, but just didn’t have the strength. However, a square bubble-metal sheet ten feet across came out of this chaos, slamming sideways just beside him and tumblin
g onward. He licked his lips and took a steadying breath, then raised his monocular to his visor and clicked it onto the attachment points on his suit’s helmet. Linking into his suit’s system, the device’s imaging was now visible inside his visor. He adjusted it through its spectrum to try and get a view through the dust. Infrared just gave him a sun glare now a few miles above the sea, with something else visible down to one side, probably still below the ocean. Ultraviolet was no better. He was about to give up on it, since the dust was already clearing, when another bright light ignited under the sea. This grew, and grew until it blotted everything else out. He detached the monocular—the glare now perfectly visible without them.
“And that?” he wondered out loud.
A moment later his perspective abruptly changed. And though he still stood on the hull of his ship it seemed he was floating out above the sea, peering down and down, into the depths. A massive blast there had ignited the surrounding ocean and he could feel the force of it rising up. Then he was back again, trying not to throw up.
“Penny Royal?” he managed.
“Captain,” said Greer.
He glanced over to her and saw her pointing over the side of the ship, towards the hold door. Blite now identified the vibration he’d been feeling through his hand, as he squatted with it resting against the deck. The hold door had opened. He stood up, just in time to see one of the globular objects, which he’d last seen when he sat on one in the hold, rise into sight. The hole open into its internal complexity gleamed like a shattered red eye.
“Screw this,” he said and detached his line, walking over to the edge of his ship. He now had a clear view of Penny Royal exiting the hold, in sea-urchin form but with a much more open formation than usual. It had an intricate tangle of silver and black at its core. Five more of those globular objects circled it like huge white soap bubbles. And, more prosaically, one of them was spooling out a heavy s-con cable attached somewhere inside the ship.
After a brief pause Blite asked, “What are you doing?”
The next moment Penny Royal delivered its reply, though whether this was a memory or some kind of manufactured experience, Blite couldn’t tell.
He was lying on sand holding up a shield, fending off the blows from a big studded mace wielded by someone dressed for some serious SM. He knew, absolutely knew, that if he relaxed his grip on that shield he would be beaten to death.
Then he was back to reality, stumbling away from the edge of his ship, no longer nauseous but just plain scared. He swore quietly. He was going to be a lot more parsimonious with the questions henceforth.
The AI began to rise, the object towing the cable remaining behind it, while the others abruptly shot away. Blite tracked their flight out towards the ocean, then lost them in the remaining dust. He tried again with his monocular and picked up one of them, hovering out towards the edge of the city about fifty feet above the ground. Then he realized he was seeing something else beyond.
The ocean heaved, a low dome of water tens of miles wide rising. Then the surface exploded upwards in spume and steam, as doubtless massive bubbles of superheated steam breached. The whole mass collapsed again with slow grace, but from its edges a disturbance fled. Blite tracked it inwards and watched a wave mounding up as it drew closer to the shore. He lowered his monocular, then searched around for somewhere nearby to reattach his safety line. The mounded wave hit the shore and just kept coming—the ocean simply seeming to eat up the land lying between him and it. He considered swearing, but decided he’d done enough of that.
“Just lost all power,” commented Brond.
Blite looked around. Why had it suddenly grown darker and colder? He raised his monocular again, but it was dead. He reattached it to his helmet to run a diagnostic, but his suit just flashed a power failure warning in his visor, which worryingly simply faded. Again he surveyed his surroundings. On the nearby road, powered vehicles had failed too. After a moment, he realized that he could no longer see the fires over in that direction. He turned towards the three-storey building that had been burning nearby and gazed dumbfounded as the flames died. Then the glow of embers inside the peaked roof just faded.
“What the hell?” he wondered, forgetting his earlier decision about profanity.
Penny Royal was now about a hundred feet up, which was perhaps the full extension of that s-con cable. Beyond it, high in the sky, the prador dreadnought was now little more than a glowing speck.
“Disruptive entropic effects inevitable,” whispered Penny Royal. “Your ship’s reactor does not provide enough power.”
The AI was sucking power out of everything around them, Blite realized, but how and what for? He was damned if he was going to ask and end up flat on his back in another Roman arena virtuality.
“Now Cvorn and the Five make their move,” the AI added. “Skute’s ship is damaged, but on its way up nevertheless.”
Blite switched his attention to the ocean and found his view of it distorted, as if he was seeing it through a slice of amber. The tsunami, which was now little more than a mobile pile of slurry and plant matter, had nearly reached the city. It was about six feet high, but Blite knew such a mass of water would annihilate the rest of the shanty town, probably bring down some of the stronger buildings around him, and could easily turn over his ship.
Beyond the wave, the captain now saw two prador destroyers rise from the ocean on fusion drive. They resembled the dreadnought, but were sleeker, more horizontally stretched-out versions. They were also much smaller—each being about two miles long.
“The wave,” said someone, Blite wasn’t sure who.
It hit an invisible wall and just stopped. Blite raised his gaze and saw something he hadn’t realized until now. That amber tint in the air stopped about fifty feet up, where those globular objects hung in the sky. Penny Royal had created a massive curved hardfield around the ocean-facing edge of the city.
A shield, he thought, of course.
Was this, Blite wondered, a demonstration of some previously unseen altruism on the part of the AI?
More explosions ensued above the ocean and one of the destroyers tilted, some of its outer protrusions had been torn away and a glowing dent was visible in its hull.
“The mines!” Martina’s shout was just audible in Blite’s closed-up suit, and over the constant roaring that surrounded them. He glanced over at her and saw she had manually opened her visor, and did the same.
The undamaged destroyer abruptly dropped, green lasers stabbing out all around it and lighting up the steam and spume out there. The damaged destroyer also began firing, even as a third began to emerge from the waves. Further detonations ensued, multiple blast waves carrying across the ocean towards the land, and the city. Now, as the tsunami began to ebb, the hardfield began to rise and reconfigure as those spherical objects repositioned themselves in the sky. The airborne field began to form an oval stretched out across the sky facing the ocean, its lower edge now fifty or so feet above the ground. Its upper edge was now maybe two or three hundred feet up.
Blite watched the dying tsunami flowing in. Though its force had been blunted by the hardfield, it was still strong and high enough to wipe out the more distant parts of the shanty town. A blast front followed it, picking up spume and debris on its way in, but it wasn’t as powerful as those first two waves—seemingly dying even as it reached them. He slapped his gloved hands together and huffed out vapour in air turned decidedly chill, stood up and nearly fell over. He was more careful with his footing as he realized that ice was forming on his ship’s hull.
“They’ve got the dreadnought’s mines nailed,” said Brond.
“Well,” said Martina, “the prador did work out how to see through simple chameleonware during the war.”
The laser strikes continued out there, the subsequent detonations progressively further from the three ships, which now hung above the ocean at the same level.
“What I don’t understand,” said Blite, “is why they aren’t goi
ng after the dreadnought.”
The world abruptly turned a blinding actinic white, as something detonated against the oval hardfield. The ground and his ship shifted and he went down on his backside. Penny Royal was a black star against that light with streaks of pink lightning issuing from the tips of its spines. And Blite felt the twist passing through his body that he often felt when The Rose’s space drive engaged. Steam and smoke rose all around and Blite spotted the fire in that three-storey building briefly flare back into life. Seen through the force-field the glare died, fading to a red macula. As Blite steadied himself and rose up into a squat, he realized he could now no longer see the edges of the shielding. He glanced behind, seeing that amber hue there, and it was now above, too.
“Unfinished business, I reckon,” said Ikbal, now close beside him. He nodded to the surrounding buildings. “The people here were kidding themselves if they thought the prador considered them anything more than vermin.”
Two more blasts ensued, one above, and one behind. These faded too, snapping out like oxygen-starved acetylene flames. A particle beam played across the shield, leaving a diminishing shadow in its path, then winked out. Penny Royal had once terrified Blite, but at length he had grown accustomed to it. He was suspicious of it and sometimes it annoyed him. It left him often baffled, certainly respectful and never less than afraid of what it might do. Now he felt a growing awe.
“Return inside now,” the AI’s voice whispered out of the air. “Danger increasing.”