Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Yes,” said Styx. And reached down with one of those big forelegs, toward Skah. Skah reached up as the car accelerated into the dark tunnel, and touched where Styx’s hand would be, if hacksaws had hands. “The connection is stable. I believe the systems below will prove operational, once activated.”

  Lisbeth noticed that beside her, Lieutenant Dale was leaning on the muzzle of his enormous Koshaim rifle, its butt to the floor, its muzzle angled upward… and directly at Styx’s head. His armoured glove was rested upon the trigger handle, and Lisbeth doubted that the safety was on. They’d been in this situation before — following Styx into a giant drysine facility where she might conceivably find enough power and technology that she no longer needed Phoenix, or any organics at all. One swipe of those forelegs, once the vibroblades had activated, and there’d be nothing left of organics in this car but bits and pieces.

  Lisbeth wondered if Styx was comfortable enough yet with her new body that she’d notice the direction of Dale’s gun. Brilliant or not, Styx had not operated with a body since Argitori… and there, she’d employed a relatively immobile, non-combat chassis. It occurred to Lisbeth that she’d never really asked Styx why. If Styx was specifically designed for combat tactics, why devolve to such a non-lethal body, when she’d specifically designed one so deadly for now? Though AIs, Styx had agreed, were somewhat autistic compared to organics, sometimes struggling to make sense of external dataflows as quickly, preferring instead the ever-more complex patterns in their own heads. Could an AI lose track of the outside world, after being locked inside a deep-space rock for twenty thousand years? Had she lost interest, like some hopeless castaway having long since abandoned any hope of rescue, and curled up in her comfortable command room, hooked into a virtual world and dreaming electronic dreams?

  After a minute of what felt like freefall, the car began to slow. And suddenly it fell clear of the enclosed shaft, and broke into open space on rails, slowing all the while. Flashing past the windows were a tangle of pipes, cords and complex, intricate patterns of steel and machinery. Here, finally, was something like what Lisbeth had expected when she’d heard of this great hacksaw city — a maze-like nest, like Phoenix’s marines had discovered in Argitori, where a human could lose all sense of direction, up and down. Through this maze, hacksaws would scuttle like insects, having little need for human concerns of privacy, or segregated rooms and corridors. The large-scale structures of the higher ground required a certain symmetry, particularly to accommodate shuttles and equipment, but down here they could be free.

  The car came to a halt atop a wide platform, doors opening only on one side, as the other led to narrow, crawling corridors that held to no single direction. Gesul went first, almost eagerly, with Timoshene at his shoulder, rifle aimed and ready. Then First Section minus Dale, who waited for Styx to unfold herself into the car and flow after them out the door. Lisbeth went last of all, tightly clutching Skah’s hand.

  “Risbeth, rook!” said Skah, with pure awe. About the platform, the jungle of hacksaw habitat cleared into a great cavernous space, broken by the tangles of unidentified technology that spilled from the upper levels in great clusters, like the fasciae of some organic’s innards. The platform, Lisbeth saw further, was atop something enormous, and roughly spherical. It was as though they were all standing upon some huge ball, like a globe beneath them, surrounded in this jungle clearing of hacksaw confusion, the curving edges of the ball turning to sheer drops on all sides.

  The platform was not regular, either, and the organics had to watch where they trod, for the ground rose and fell upon irregularities, like walking along a forest floor and being careful not to trip on the roots of trees. Encircling the regular platform were equally irregular panels… or rather, the supports where panels ought to have been, to human eyes. Clearly they were the base for some sort of holographic display, Lisbeth thought as she followed the others toward what looked like the platform centre… but she did not recognise the technology. Some lights glowed here and there, diffuse and difficult to see exactly where they shone from, making shadows amongst the surrounding tangle.

  “Dammit Styx,” Sergeant Forrest breathed as he stared about him. “I thought AIs were supposed to think in straight lines.”

  “Itself a linear thought, Sergeant,” Styx replied. “AIs calculate the most efficient path between two points. In complex systems, we find that is rarely a straight line.”

  “You sure take us to see some shit, LT,” said Private Reddy in a low voice. Lisbeth had been filled in on First Section’s adventures in Gamesh, the largest city on Konik, while she’d been held captive in the Kunadeen. And she’d heard that Reddy in particular was now held in awe by the rest of Phoenix Company, having displayed on numerous occasions that unique combination of ability, nerve and luck that all marines valued.

  At the centre of the platform, a column of bundled cords headed skyward, like the stem of a giant apple. Styx paused before it, secondary forelegs joining the main pair to touch small sensors, then more again as the twin pairs of underside short arms joined in. About the chamber, Lisbeth saw small lights only. Behind them, the elevator car’s emergency running light strobed the darkness.

  “Surely Jin Danah has put a lock on this place when he was last here?” Gesul wondered. “This is the core command centre for the city, yes?”

  “That is correct, Gesul,” said Styx, circling the stem, red eye peering. “I predict that Jin Danah’s engineers chose to leave the city’s command functions largely untouched. This technology was beyond their comprehension, and meddling with it would likely disable it without adding to parren understanding. I am detecting little sign of a blockage, save for some simple network controls that are now quite deteriorated with age.”

  Abruptly, the surrounding side-screens sprang to life, holographic displays like the shield wall of some ancient army, alive with data. The hacksaw maze began to glow and throb, with a rumble of new vibration.

  “Well I can’t see why you wanted the damn civvies down here,” Dale growled suspiciously. “Except to get the tourist experience. There’s not a heck of a lot for us to do, Styx, and we’re going to need more marines topside real soon.”

  “You are mistaken, Lieutenant Dale,” Styx said calmly, still manipulating hidden switches. ‘Again’, her tone implied. “This is not merely a command centre. You are standing upon the central processing core of the city. Drakhil’s people called it a ‘pathenpar’, which in the old Klyran tongue means ‘great mind’. Perhaps the modern translation would be a ‘mega sentience’, but that is misleading. The Tahrae called her Hannachiam, in that way of organics who need to grant verbal names to each entity. She has been sleeping for a very long time now, and if my readings are correct, I believe I may be able to wake her.”

  “Her?” Gesul gasped. “It’s… she is… sentient?”

  “Another inadequate word. You will see. But I would like you all down here, civilians and aliens of different races, because Hannachiam was known to find such contact stimulating. If she can be woken, she may need convincing. And it may be up to these civilians to convince her that their people are indeed worth saving.”

  29

  Erik had tunnel vision. In combat he always did, but this time it was a relief in that it did not let him see the ships beside him dying. Geish did not even bother calling them, the smaller parren ships left behind by the initial deepynine arrival, only now catching up and hurtling in with suicidal determination. Their size made them harder to hit, but their defensive armaments weren’t up to repelling this volume of firepower, and after surviving the initial firewave, three now died in quick succession. But they were forcing the deepynine to divide their fire, which gave the bigger ships a chance. Still, as Erik saw Scan marking incoming certain and predicted round clusters, it looked horrible.

  Oddly enough, there wasn’t much talking on the bridge. Everyone knew their jobs and the battleplan was already decided, all targets detected and very few surprises left, leaving
very little to talk about. Suli was most vocal, shouting ‘Corkscrew Three!’ as Erik threw them into a left-side evasive pattern, telling Karle and Harris on Arms what motion to expect and save them seconds in identifying it. Then, ‘Reverse Kick! Two-fifteen hard and port roll!”

  As fire ripped past them, and main guns hammered again and again, Karle pouring fire onto the five big deepynines, now frighteningly close and getting closer as Phoenix cut across their rear-facing bows, simply trying to put a volume of fire into the space they needed to go that would force them to abandon their approach, or die trying not to. Erik could see them evasive, twisting back and forth with their thrusters still flaring at full deceleration, still toward the moon, but no longer straight toward it, bobbing and weaving like canoes on a rough sea. Defensive fire surrounded each in a corona of fire, hitting incoming rounds from Phoenix and the six parren ships in pyrotechnic flashes visible even on main scan.

  A crash from somewhere behind, and a big kick Erik felt through the controls. “Rear quarter, mostly shielding!” came Rooke’s shout on coms. “We’re okay!” Erik could see Arms Two highlighting incoming fire as it changed direction straight toward them, self-propelled rounds meeting outgoing area detonations and disintegrating before the combined velocity of directional shrapnel. More shrapnel rained off the bow armour, already scarred from Brehn System, a sound like a fistful of gravel against a steel wall.

  They were about to pass the optimum fire-angle of the wide-arcing three sard ships, whose fire was mostly directed at the smaller parren pursuers behind them. Forty more seconds, Erik saw, and they’d be through the worst of it. But if they didn’t get a couple of those big ones to at least break off…

  A big flash on Scan to one side. “Tiamah’s gone!” called Geish. That was the ship that had picked up Aristan in Cephilae, then brought him to Brehn, then to Elsium. After Aristan’s death, they’d declared for Tobenrah… and now paid for that loyalty with their lives. Then, “Mark Four’s hit! Big evasive, he’s shifting!” As one of the big deepynines swung wildly aside, spinning and only partly in control…

  “Ignore him, get the others!” Erik commanded, randomly changing their evasive pattern once more, alternating thrust from two to nine-Gs then back again, doing every crazy thing he could to keep them alive in the firestorm.

  Gesul’s flagship Stassis broke up and cartwheeled, neither Geish nor Jiri bothered to call it… whack! as something ripped across their side, and Erik’s boards lit up with damage lights, dish-three gone and one of the defensive batteries…

  One of the big deepynines abruptly cut thrust to evade as his near-scan showed something nasty, then vanished in a fireball like a small sun. “Gotcha!” snarled Karle, then the loudest noise Erik had ever heard, a head-snapping impact, darkness, stars, then his ears screaming in pain and lungs gasping as air left the bridge…

  Consciousness snapped back, alarms howling, smoke in his nostrils on the gale of new air blasting from vents. ‘Masks on!’ the automated voice yelled. ‘Masks on!’ But he couldn’t, because he had a ship to fly… only his VR display was out, and the screens now flickered in a jumble of bad data, main systems informing him that the engines were offline and attempting to reconnect…

  Crash! as something else hit them, this time further aft, and the distinct sensation of a backward spin. Coms crackled with a jumble of voices, people yelling, others asking for instruction…

  “Captain, your mask!” yelled an unidentified voice in his ear — it was Spacer Deng, on designated response roster, located just behind the bridge and tasked with responding in case they were hit, to secure the bridge crew and pull out survivors. Erik threw all systems off his screen except attitude, trying to see how they were spinning and correct it…

  “Suli!” he yelled, muffled even now as Deng fought to get the mask over his face. “Suli, what’s your attitude reading!” No response. “Rooke! Engineering, this is the Captain, get me attitude control if you can’t get me thrust!”

  “Sir, we have to go!” Deng yelled at him, voice muffled behind his own mask.

  Go? Erik ignored him, attempting to reboot flight control so that he could at least stop them from tumbling… but the screens didn’t respond, and then he noticed that the right screen wasn’t working because it had a hole in it the size of his fist. He stared at it for the first time, noticing that the smoke smell had gotten abruptly worse, new air pumping onto a fire could do that, fresh oxygen increasing the burn. The fans would pull smoke from the air, but beyond his damaged screen there was a lot more smoke. And spacers, pulling bridge crew from their chairs. And only then, many seconds too late, did he realise what had happened.

  “Sir, we’re dead!” Deng was yelling, fumbling with his straps. “Nothing aft of M bulkhead is responding! We don’t know if the rear half is still attached!”

  But something was still working, because he could hear and feel the thump and crash of outgoing fire… lighter, more rapid, that was Arms Two, Lieutenant Harris on defensive guns. A flood of new air hit his lungs as the mask abruptly began working, and he fought to get the dead headset off his eyes, then help Deng get the screen aside, and fought clear of his seat for the first time… and saw response crew pulling Suli’s limp body from her chair, her screens smashed, holes through the rear bulkhead and a lot of drifting, round blobs of blood amid the smoke.

  “Suli! SULI!” As Kaspowitz tackled him, headed for the main corridor and determined to take his damn fool Captain with him.

  But now someone else was shouting up the far end of the bridge, “Leave me the fuck alone or we’re going to die!” That was Bree Harris on defensive guns, still firing as that one system was somehow still working, with new fire incoming and Phoenix now defenceless save for her. Response crew were trying to move her as well.

  Erik fought clear and hauled himself across the bridge toward her, only now seeing the shocking extent of the damage. The round had gone straight through the nose cone, fragmented, then sprayed through the bridge, and no doubt adjoining corridors, like a shotgun. The whole right side of the bridge was a mess, the automated anti-decompression systems had saved them all from suffocation, foam even now hardening and bubbling in the worst breaches, breaking in balls and floating with the other debris. Wei Shilu was still at Coms, screams muffled behind his mask, two spacers trying to bind up his shredded arm before moving him. And here behind the overhead mount that blocked much of the view, Erik found Bree Harris, her post miraculously untouched, even now controlling defensive guns, directing remaining turrets to keep firing. Beside her at Arms One, there wasn’t enough left of young Keshav Karle to be worth removing.

  “Stay with her!” Erik ordered the recovery Spacer. The youngster looked green at the human ruin in the chair alongside. “Stay with her and help her move, but only if you have to! And if you’re going to throw up, remove your mask first!” And he grabbed the supports and pushed off back toward the main corridor, shrugging off Deng’s attempt to grab his arm on the way out. “I’m fine, dammit.” And he floated into Chief Petty Officer Goldman on the point of entering, the ship’s second senior-most enlisted crew heading straight for the bridge to speak to the Captain directly, as procedures dictated in a catastrophe. “Goldman, I need full damage assessment ASAP! Get me a landline to talk to Rooke if nothing else works, or send me a runner! Operating room is T-3, I want all coms routed to there, and I want full repairs on the bridge right now, see if we can get some function back in the main posts.”

  “Yes sir,” said Goldman, a tough old guy whose face bore the scars of several previous catastrophic events, and had been in Fleet longer than seventy years, last he’d bothered to count. Even now, amidst smoke, red emergency light and the screams of wounded in the corridors, he managed to look composed. “Already done with the runner and coms, Emergency shift has triage running, there’s a blockage to Medbay but we’re working around it. Repairs could be a while, Engineering isn’t responding, we don’t know if it still exists.”

  Random m
otion pushed them into a wall — misfiring attitude thrusters, Erik guessed, doing something unknowable to what felt like a slow tumble. “Once we’ve got the damage tied down,” he said, “I want all crew armed and defensive placements observed. We’re out of the main firezone for now, and the enemy’s occupied with their landing, but they can’t be entirely sure everything they want is down there. Some might be up here, so they’ll likely send something after us.”

  Goldman shook his head in hard exasperation. “Sir, spacer weapons against deepynines…”

  “I want crew into back-quarter, raid the marines’ stores, get anything big they’re not using, suits, Koshaims, grenades, anything…”

  “Captain,” Goldman interrupted. “Back-quarter is completely decompressed — damage control thinks they can make an airtight link to Medbay, but Engineering’s out of the question and we’ll have to suit up to get into back-quarter!”

  “Then do it! And if you need extra hands, all bridge officers are now fair game except Arms Two, that’s the only post working so boss them around and assign work if you have to, got it?”

  “Yes Captain, on it.” And he put his legs against a wall, with the grace of a man who’d spent most of his life in space, and flew down the corridor, already shouting orders. Normally on a warship the bridge officers were in charge. Now, without a functioning bridge, the Petty and Warrant Officers effectively ran Phoenix. Or what was left of her.

  “Major, I can’t raise them.” Trace thought that Hausler sounded close to tears. “Scan showed them hit, and now there’s just…”

  “Lieutenant Hausler,” Trace commanded, “you will stay in cover and not expose yourself looking for a scan or com fix. You’re a sitting duck in the open, and Phoenix cannot afford to lose more assault shuttles.”

  Except that Phoenix didn’t seem to be there any more. It was hardly surprising, given what they’d been flying into. The shuttles had good enough scan from this range to see the fight, and reported most of the parren ships were dead or badly damaged, and that one of the big five deepynine ships had been destroyed, and another two had diverted, forced to dodge so hard in approach that they’d missed their rendezvous, and would have to circle out beyond the moon, and head back late. One of those, Ensign Yun insisted, looked to be badly damaged, its new thrust profile erratic, so maybe they’d not have a full complement left either. One of the three trailing ships, that they thought were occupied by sard, had also been destroyed, at an enormous cost to the smaller parren vessels assaulting from behind.