“Can you see if the Kiint repaired any of the terminals?” Renato asked. “That would save a minute or two.”
“Nothing like that showing yet,” Monica datavised.
Renato walked along a row of the big cubes, annoyed they were all so opaque. The first station of terminals was mineral distillation, followed by thermal maintenance, then distillation mining. On impulse he wiped a gauntlet against the ice on one cube, upping the brightness on his suit lights. It was a chunk of machinery inside. “These gizmos look like they’re brand new,” he datavised. “I’m not sure this is a museum. Could be they archived actual physical components, the ultimate template back-up in case something screwed up their electronics.”
“Any kind of disaster big enough to eradicate their crystal memories would wreck these machines first,” Oski datavised. “Besides, think how many different components there are to make Tanjuntic-RI work. A hell of a lot more than we can see in here.”
“Okay, so it’s just the really critical ones.”
“I think I’ve found it,” Monica datavised. “This terminal has been spruced up, and it’s still a couple of degrees warmer than the rest.”
Oski scanned her suit sensors round to locate the ESA operative. “What’s the station?”
“Planetary habitation.”
“That doesn’t sound quite right.” She hurried over to where Monica was standing, suit lights converging on one of the terminals.
“The Tyrathca are now in ring five,” the serjeant guarding the ramp entrance datavised. “I am blowing the airlock behind them.”
Despite her high suit sensor resolution, Monica could receive no indication of the explosion. “Oski, we really don’t have any more time to hunt round,” she datavised. “Just get what you can from this terminal, and pray the Kiint knew what they were doing.”
“Confirmed.” The electronics specialist knelt down beside the terminal, and started working on the front panel.
Ione was tracking the Tyrathca through multiple observation points as they spread out through the streets of ring five. As soon as the airlock detonated and collapsed behind them, trapping the last two in the rubble, they had deployed in a wide sweep formation. The sensor disks were picking up microwave radar pulses from several of the soldiers. Their emissions helped to target the first batch of homing grenades which she launched, eliminating a further three. Then they wised up to that and switched the radars off. She launched a swarm of smart seeker missiles, programming them to flit above the tops of the towers. Arrowing down as soon as they located a suit.
The launch betrayed her general direction. Ultimately, another plus point. She was on the other side of the airlock from the control offices and archive, drawing them away from the exploration team.
One of the sensor disks showed a soldier raise a rifle the size of a small human cannon. Ione started running, not caring about the lack of cover. A tower disintegrated behind her; the blast strong enough to create a rumble in the ring’s near-non-existent atmosphere. Big nodules of debris crashed into neighbouring towers, shattering the brittle concrete. Three of them toppled over, throwing up thick clouds of black dust which surged along the streets in every direction, blocking vision in all spectrums.
Monica followed what she could of the fight via the sensor disks. Nervous energy created a nasty itch along her spine and ribs. It was impossible to scratch through the suit. Even twisting round inside the armour was useless. There was nothing she could do to assist Oski and Renato. The pair of them had exposed the terminal’s electronics, and were busy attaching their own blocks to the primitive components inside. Their fluid motions were bringing effective results. Little lights were flashing around the rosette keyboard, and the monitor screen was producing a snowstorm of green and scarlet graphics.
She started walking round the outlying display cubes, alert for any other signs of Kiint activity. It was the one contribution she could still make. Not that it would be a lot of use at this point. It wasn’t until after she’d started on her second circuit of the planetary habitation station that her subconscious alarm grew strong enough to make her stop and take a proper look at what she was seeing. The shapes inside the opaque cubes were no longer nice and regular.
With real unease replacing her anxiety now, Monica swiped her gauntlet over the crinkled, sparkling ice, rubbing a patch clear. Her suit lights brightened, converging on the cube. Visual sensors altered their focus. Monica took a half step back, breath catching in her throat. Her medical monitor program warned her of a sudden fast heart rhythm. “Samuel?” she datavised.
“What is it?”
“They’ve got xenocs in here. Xenocs I’ve never seen before.” She scanned her sensors across the creature inside the cube, building up a pixel file image for the Edenist. It was bipedal, shorter than a human, with four symmetrically arranged arms emerging from mid-torso. No elbow or knee joints were apparent, the limbs moved as a single unit. Bulbous shoulder/hip joints hinted at a considerable articulation. All four arms ended in stumpy hands with four claw-fingers; while the legs finished in rounded pads. The head was a fat cone, with deep folds of skin ringing a thick neck, which would permit a great deal of rotation. There was a vertical gash, which could be either a nose or mouth, and deep sockets that could have held eyes.
“My God, Samuel, it’s sentient. It’s wearing things, look.” She focused on an arm, where a silver bracelet was wrapped around the wizened caramel skin. “That could be a watch, I think. It’s certainly technological. They caught a sentient xenoc and stuffed the poor bastard for their kids to look at in this freak show. Oh for Christ’s sake, what are we dealing with here?”
“You’re jumping to some very wild assumptions, Monica.”
“Then you explain what the fucking hell it’s doing in here. I’m telling you, they put it on show. It must have come from one of the planets they stopped at.”
“You’re in an archive, not a circus zoo.”
“Is that supposed to make me happy? So this is scientific not entertainment. What were they doing studying it? It’s sentient. It’s not a laboratory creature.”
“Monica, I know it’s shocking, but it isn’t relevant to our current situation. I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to ignore it for the moment.”
“Jesus fucking wept.” She spun round, and marched back towards the terminal where Oski and Renato were working. Heat and anger kept her going for several paces. Then she stopped and scanned the cube again. Her suit lights refracted off the gritty ice with its dark adumbrate core of sorrow and suffering.
When they’d come on board, she’d wondered about Tyrathca souls watching them. Now all she could think about was the soul of the unknown xenoc; lost and alone, crying out desperately for others of its kind. Could it see her now? Was it shouting its pleas for salvation from some obscure corner of the dreadful beyond? Unheard even by its own deities?
The medical monitor warned Monica she wasn’t breathing properly. She made an effort to inhale in a regular motion. “Oski? How are you doing?”
“I’m not sure. There are some files in here that look like communiquйs. I’ve just reverted to our fall-back option. We’re copying every memory to analyse later.”
“How long?”
“Programming is almost complete. It’ll take half an hour to datavise all their files over to our processors.”
“We can’t afford that.”
“I know. The bitek processors can shunt the information directly over to Oenone and Lady Mac in real time. We just have to hope the Tyrathca don’t come in here and find out what we’re doing until it’s finished.”
“That’s a safe enough bet. I expect they’ll be too busy chasing us.”
How the hell did they get up there?ione asked.
At least three Tyrathca soldiers were cantering along ring five’s ceiling gantries. The narrow metal walkways threaded amongst the crane rails and irrigation pipes were shaking alarmingly as the heavy bodies thundered down them. But they were ho
lding. And they provided the Tyrathca with a dangerously effective vantage point.
There were now six separate smears of billowing dust blotting out entire sections of the ring, evidence of shattered towers caught in the increasingly brutal crossfire. Tyrathca bodies lay everywhere, bleeding fluid and heat onto the cold alloy floor. One of the two remaining serjeants was limping badly, its suit leg crushed almost flat around the knee. Caught by a huge chunk of debris whose inertia defeated the binding generators. Several processors and hardware units on its belt were dead, ruined by maser fire.
Worse, from a tactical viewpoint, only one Tyrathca was currently stalking it. The remainder had moved away from the mayhem it’d unleashed to chase down the remaining heat trails. Four of them, including one breeder, were congregating round the open airlock into the control offices.
“They know we went in there now,” Samuel datavised.
“The ones on the gantries will be looking for us,” Ione datavised. “And they’ll see us soon enough.”
“We’ve finished programming the file extraction,” Oski said. “The data is being received by the starships.”
“Excellent. Get out of the archive, I’m about to blow the airlock. Ione, can you take out the soldiers on the gantries?”
“I’ll try.”
“At this point, you’re not expendable to us, okay? We’re going to need back-up to get out of here.”
“Understood. But only one of me will be able to keep up with you on the ramp.”
The injured serjeant raised its missile launcher, and fired the two remaining smart seeker missiles. They soared off into the gloom, twin spikes of intense amber light, seemingly rising out of sight around the ring’s curvature. It began to limp into the seething dust, heading back towards the archive. Searching round on its belt, Ione found a magazine containing neutron pulse missiles. Only four of the twelve responded to a datavise. She slipped the magazine into the launcher anyway.
When the others made it to the shelter of the ramp, she could then make life seriously unpleasant for the Tyrathca left in ring five.
Samuel and the last serjeant were waiting for Monica, Oski, and Renato right outside the archive. Monica’s thoughts were still in such turmoil after finding the xenoc that she didn’t trust herself to say anything to him.
“There’s still one soldier-caste left up on the gantry,” Samuel datavised. “Not that it matters much now.” He triggered the charges he’d laid around the airlock.
They were close enough to see the flash: a dazzling ripple of pure white light that burst across the ring, fading fast.
Samuel started running straight at it. They only had a hundred and fifty metres to go. He datavised instructions to the others, who activated their rocket launchers. A semicircle of towers fell in unison as the missiles pulverised their ground floors. Dust strangled the thin plumes of potent flame, sending out a curtain of impenetrable darkness that fountained straight upwards.
The airlock leading to the ramp had been wrenched to one side by the charges Samuel had laid around its rim, buckling the thick slab of titanium like so much plastic sheeting. A tide of rock had spewed out of the gap, narrowing it still further. His boots dislodged small loose fragments as he scrambled up. There was enough space to pass through, providing he turned sideways. As soon as he was on the other side, he started slapping EE charges on the walls. Monica and the others wriggled through the gap, with the serjeant bringing up the rear.
Eighteen combat wasps were closing on Lady Mac , the third time in an hour Hesperi-LN’s defences had launched such a salvo at them. Each time, Lady Mac had simply jumped away before any of them were in range, leaving the drones to search round helplessly for their target.
“Good job the Tyrathca never met anything hostile when they were on their voyage here,” Joshua remarked. “I mean, Jesus, they are absolutely crap at space warfare. Why do they keep firing salvos when we’re far enough above the planet to jump?”
“They’re lulling us into complacency,” Ashly said cheerfully. “They’ve worked out roughly where we’ve got to emerge next time, and they’ve flown their superweapon there ready to zap us.”
“Nope. Keeping the jump emergence coordinate as a random variable is file-one in the combat manual.”
“They wouldn’t have a superweapon anyway,” Liol said. “Building stuff like that takes inventive flair. And they just ain’t got it.”
“They do seem to be very dogmatic,” Dahybi said. “As they haven’t got a combat capable starship to field against us, their options are limited.”
“Limited, yes,” Joshua agreed. “But not to one.” He studied the tactical display. The nearest combat wasp would be close enough to start deploying submunitions in another two minutes. “Stand by for jump. Sarha, how’s the memory dump coming on?”
“No problems, Joshua. The bitek array is accepting the load.”
“Great, let’s hope there’s something useful in there.” He cut the fusion drives, holding the starship stable with ion thrusters. The flight computer showed him the energy patterning node status as the combat sensors retracted. “Here we go.” They emerged forty thousand kilometres from the combat wasp swarm. Hesperi-LN’s SD network took nearly three minutes to acquire lock on.
“Are you launching another combat wasp?” Liol asked.
“Not yet,” Joshua said. He datavised the bitek array for a link to the exploration team. “Where are you?”
“Coming up to level two,” Monica replied. “The ramp is sealed behind us, so if we don’t get ambushed, we’ll be at level one in another twelve minutes.”
“Okay, thanks, Monica. Syrinx, we’d better start finalizing our next move.”
“Agreed. We must assume the blackhawk will try and follow us again.”
“I can throw it off with multiple consecutive jumps. Can you do something similar?”
“No problem. Designate a rendezvous coordinate.”
“That’s trickier. This bloody diversionary battle has screwed around with our vector. I can get a rough alignment on the second planet with a small burn. We’ll slingshot around it, and re-align on the Orion nebula. After that, we can lose the hellhawk.”
“Very well. Oenone will swallow out to the second planet as soon as we’ve picked the team up. See you there.”
The second level cavern housed a gigantic fusion generator, three pale metal spheres standing one on top of the other, eighty metres high. Arching buttresses of pipes and cables were wrapped around the main section like mechanized viaducts, sinking away into the walls and floor. A quintet of heat exchangers surrounded it. Fluids had leaked from their valves and feed tube junctions, dribbling down the casings to solidify in colourful multi-layered ribbons. The cavern’s irradiated rock kicked off datavised Geiger warnings as soon as the exploration team bounded in from one of the corridors.
“This is it,” Samuel datavised. “Our shortcut.”
“It will be very short with this radiation level if we’re not careful,” Monica datavised. “This is as bad as a fission core meltdown. What kind of fuel did they use?”
“Heaven only knows.” Samuel scanned his sensors across the pipes that disappeared into the curving apex overhead. “Any of those three.” His suit’s tactical program datavised the designation icon to the others, highlighting the pipe he’d chosen. “According to the file Oski pulled from the control offices it’s a thermal gas duct. The exchangers transferred some of their heat along it to keep the level-one lakes warm. It’s an express route straight there. All we have to do is slice it open.”
Monica didn’t argue with him, despite the sudden doubts. She’d stayed with Oski and Renato in the archive, leaving details of their withdrawal to Samuel. That was teamwork. And it was as though he’d been her partner forever. They knew they could rely on each other now. She took the stumpy laser rifle from her belt, datavised its control processor for a continual burn, and lined it up on the pipe he’d designated.
Five ruby red beams stabbed
out, puncturing the pipe. Bright molten metal droplets drizzled down slowly, losing their radiance before they reached the ground. Monica’s radar caught the movement just before the maser beam hit her suit. A couple of homing grenades fired immediately from her dispenser, looping through the three dimensional maze of pipes to smash the corridor entrance where the Tyrathca soldier was lurking.
Backwash from the EE blast rolled her across the ground to clang against the base of a heat exchanger. Her infrared sensor caught a blur of motion away on the other side of the chamber. Radar was useless, there was too much machinery in the way.
“They’re in,” she warned.
“Oski, Renato, finish cutting the pipe open,” Samuel ordered. “We’ll take care of them.”
One of the Tyrathca cannon fired, blowing a hole in the side of the fusion generator. Monica grabbed her missile launcher, and fired off a pair of smart seekers. Samuel was kangaroo jumping up the side of a heat exchanger. Homing grenades spat out of his dispenser, zipping away to pummel the corridor entrances. Maser beams slashed at him. Monica’s sensors triangulated their origin, and she launched more smart seekers in retaliation. Explosions ripped round the chamber as the corridor entrances were closed.
“Pipe’s open,” Oski datavised.
“Go straight in,” Samuel datavised. “We’ll cover you.”
Monica dived under a buttress, scanning at ground level. The lower section of four hot Tyrathca spacesuit legs was visible ahead of her, below a coil-wound beam. She chopped them with the laser, slashing straight through the fabric. Large globs of weird purple gel burped out, oscillating wildly as they bounced off the floor and machinery. The Tyrathca stumbled and fell. Monica slid the laser along its flank. A tidal wave of gel blobs erupted. Then the body went into explosive decompression.
Oski’s manoeuvring pack fired at full power, lifting her towards the apex of the cavern. Every suppresser program she had that could squash down on her fear was in primary mode. They must have worked, she was quietly delighted at how calmly she was reacting to being shot at. Guidance programs bent her flight around the clutter of arching pipes as she rose higher and higher. She actually passed a two metre section of the pipe on her way up, its edges still glowing pink as it tumbled end over end.
The Naked God - Flight nd-5 Page 67