by Neal Asher
‘Shit! Get us out of here!’ Cormac shouted.
Apis, who had strapped himself in at the controls before anyone else could object – though Cormac wouldn’t, as the boy probably knew them better than anyone else on board – ran at high speed through a start-up sequence and grabbed the joystick. Thrusters roared and the craft tilted to one side, the view of the planet swinging round by a hundred and eighty degrees. There came a thunderous crash, and light flooded the cockpit as from a lightning strike. Now the satellite was behind them, and blowing apart, huge fragments hurtling outwards ahead of a wave of fire.
‘Hold us here,’ ordered Cormac. ‘I want to see this.’
Manipulating thrusters, Apis swung the craft around so the main screen showed a view of Dragon rolling across the darkness above them, heading towards the horizon of Masada – following a line of gleaming shapes suspended above atmosphere like a bracelet of charms for the planet. The creature remained in sight as they descended into atmosphere, and they watched it pause by another satellite and spit an actinic bar down onto it – another satellite gone in a fiercely bright explosion against the blue-black of space.
‘Take us further in,’ said Cormac, then he looked round when the boy seemed disinclined to respond. Apis looked pale and slightly sick.
‘The Golem, on the Occam Razor . . . they hit the ion engines,’ he stammered, as the landing craft began its brick-like descent. ‘We’ve only got manoeuvring thrusters.’
Cormac closed his eyes and massaged his temples with his forefingers – he was getting a headache.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘This craft hasn’t got AG, so we’re going to need a flat area at least two or three kilometres long. How much can you slow us with the thrusters?’
Now asked technical questions, Apis lost his sick expression and shrugged himself into a businesslike frame of mind. He checked his instrumentation. ‘Enough to prevent us burning up, though I calculate . . . we will be going in at between five hundred and a thousand kilometres per hour.’
Cormac glanced round at the other three. ‘This could prove interesting,’ he observed.
‘You have a strange idea of what constitutes interesting,’ Mika replied.
‘Normally something that involves an explosion, unfortunately,’ added Gant.
Scar merely bared his teeth.
Cormac went on, ‘If any of us survive this, it’s going to be you, Gant. Your primary mission has to be to get news of what happened on the Occam to the Polity. ECS has to know about Skellor – he could be more dangerous than anything we’ve ever faced before.’
‘You are a cold bastard,’ said Gant.
‘Whatever gets the job done,’ Mika commented sarcastically.
Cormac ignored them both.
The craft was soon shaking, and what had earlier been merely a low droning outside was now growing into a constant roar. Cormac gazed ahead as they punched through stratospheric cloud, above purplish ocean with a scattering of islands like black scabs. Apis manipulated the thruster controls, lifting the lander’s nose for the further horizon. Soon they noticed the ocean below was scattered with icebergs.
‘Will we make it to the main continent?’ Cormac asked almost conversationally.
Apis gave a tight nod in reply.
Separate bergs started knitting below them into an ice sheet, which then started to break apart again. The line of a landmass rose over the horizon, with thick cloud tangled above it. When it became evident that this terrain ahead was mountainous, Apis used the thrusters to take them higher. The roaring was now deafening, the craft shaking alarmingly. Across the main screen rolled motes of something molten, and along its edges a hot glow encroached. Valleys and tors rolled underneath the craft, and it punched through cloud masses – losing vision for long seconds. Spearing down through a final cloud bank, they came out over flat plains, with a glimpse of chequered ponds and a wider spread of agriculture surrounding them. To their right a city loomed out of haze, then rapidly receded.
‘Dragon!’ Cormac yelled, pointing up to the sky where blooms of light ignited behind cloud, as from a distant thunderstorm.
Signs of civilization receded and they were now plummeting onto an uncultivated plain. The roar doubled as Apis initiated the thrusters to slow the craft, and kept them full on. As he fought to keep its nose up, the craft continued to descend, blurs of beige, dark red and green flashing by beneath them. There came a loud vicious hissing and, glancing at the rear-view screen, Cormac saw a cloud boiling up behind a track hammered through the vegetation below. Apis hit boosters and the cloud was shot through with sheets of flame. Suddenly they were all pressed hard against their straps, and their craft was bouncing and breaking. In the rear-view screen, a thruster nacelle, still jetting flame, curved into the cloud and disappeared. The craft itself began to slew, but Apis managed to correct for this. When Cormac glanced at him, the boy looked terrified but determined. This state of affairs seemed to just go on and on, then, as the din lessened, the craft abruptly, tilted, then flipped. There followed a chaos of rending crashes and bone-jarring jolts, as they rolled over and over, with pieces of the lander breaking away, and cold acidic air rushing in through the gaps torn in the hull, along with a haze of papery fragments. Then they were sliding along, tilted to one side, with wet black mud spraying up through gaping holes.
Cormac found himself fighting for breath as the oxygenated air inside the craft poured away. A roaring in his ears soon drowned out the chaos of the crash. With his vision tunnelling, he saw that Apis had managed to close over the hood of his exoskeleton and the suit, detecting the lack of oxygen, had automatically raised the visor. Behind, Mika was fighting for breath, while Gant was undoing his safety straps. Then Cormac lost it – he blacked out completely.
Thorn could not help but be impressed by the set-up they had here. Studying his companions in the elevator, as it rapidly accelerated up into the building, he wondered what their story might be. The girl looked a little bewildered by events around her, but utterly determined to stick with the old Golem, Fethan. Lellan Stanton . . . now here was an intriguing woman. She had little of her brother’s brutish appearance, but obviously a shitload of his innate intelligence. She and Jarvellis were of a kind – clever, forceful, and not to be crossed. Yes, Thorn rather liked her already.
‘What was it?’ John Stanton asked.
Lellan replied, ‘Some sort of explosion.’ She listened to her helmet’s earphone. ‘I’m not getting much sense out of them up there – there’s a lot of yelling.’
Thorn reflected on their frantic journey across the floor of the cavern in the jury-rigged AGC. Something big was happening, and there might ensue some kind of reaction from those down here – this place was wound up tight and seemed ready to explode. He’d seen it in the faces of the soldiers and technicians, and he’d seen the armament they’d built up. Through the glass side of the elevator Thorn saw that they had now reached the ceiling of the cavern, but that they were not slowing. Up and through – dark stone speeding past lit eerily by the elevator’s internal light.
‘Could be something to do with that rock you dragged in with us?’ he suggested.
Jarvellis shook her head. ‘That fragmented and burned up without their notice, but maybe we were detected. That might explain all the activity,’ she said, her expression worried.
‘No, that,’ said Lellan, tapping the side of her helmet. ‘That was Polas I was listening to. As far as I can gather, there’s been an explosion on or near EL-41, and the possibility of explosions at 40 and 39. They’re putting up the big dish and refractor now.’ She paused, listening again, then: ‘Seems that was 38.’
Finally the elevator drew to a halt and its doors slid open onto a chamber crammed with equipment. One side of this chamber was walled by a window of tinted chainglass giving a view of mountains and sky, so it seemed evident they were located inside some high peak.
As soon as Lellan stepped out of the elevator, a thin weasel of a man began to ges
ture to her frantically. He sat in a half-circle console with a number of screens jury-rigged before him. Other people throughout this chamber were operating other machines, babbling into microphones, or frantically tapping instructions into consoles of antiquated design. Removing her helmet, Lellan trotted over to the beckoning man. Thorn took his time following along behind, as he once again studied the set-up around him – they had obviously had to do the best they could with whatever they could lay their hands on, but this was as good an operations room as any. It surprised him to see that it even had an old military projection tank – a holojector showing the entire Masadan system. However, he doubted that it displayed real-time – that would have bespoken a sophistication they definitely did not possess here.
‘It’s gone,’ the man called Polas was saying. ‘It’s fucking well just gone.’
‘Show me,’ said Lellan.
Polas gestured at the screens. One of these showed a radio picture of the black dots of stars on a white background, cut off to one side by the black arc of Calypse. Another showed an empty grid, while another showed just empty blue. On a ring of lower screens, mathematical symbols and graph representations clicked on and off, flickering and changing as if some primitive AI were trying to justify the impossible.
‘What about the recording?’ Lellan asked.
Polas grimaced. ‘The machine dumped it as being out of parameters – thought it had made a mistake.’ He shouted across to one of his fellows, ‘Dale, you managed to retrieve it yet?’
The woman Dale shook her head as she continued clattering away at her keypad – chasing down something on her screen.
‘The rest?’ asked Lellan. ‘Have they gone as well?’
‘So the equipment tells us. There’s also that.’ Polas pointed to the chainglass window. Outside in daylight sky, a smoky disc was dissipating – one edge of it silhouetted against Calypse.
‘Okay, it’s time to send up the probe,’ said Lellan.
‘Might be software, glitched by whatever that was,’ Polas pointed out.
‘Just do it.’
‘A probe?’ Thorn turned to Jarvellis, who was standing beside him.
‘We brought it for them on our last trip. They only have the one,’ she replied.
‘Won’t its launch be detected?’
‘Dispensable probe, and a separate and dispensable site.’
Polas swung a side console across his lap – one with touch-controls rather than the buttons and ball controls of most of the consoles here – and with his fingertips expertly traced out a sequence. The radio screen’s view changed to the same one they were seeing through the chainglass window. This view then vibrated as somewhere a rocket probe blasted from its hidden silo and headed into the sky.
‘I’ve got it!’ Dale yelled, while they all watched this scene, and she came running over with a software disc. Polas snatched it from her, swung the touch-console back out of the way, and inserted the disc into a slot in one of the more primitive consoles. He quickly rattled over the buttons while gazing at the gridded screen, then triumphantly hit the last button with his forefinger, and sat back.
‘About a minute beforehand,’ he explained.
The screen image changed to show the curved satellite laser array Thorn had earlier seen from Lyric II, except that this view was from below, and he could clearly see the reflective throats of laser tubes open before him. They watched this unchanging scene for slow drawn-out seconds, then abruptly Polas leant forwards and stabbed his finger at one of the smaller screens, showing a tangle of signal waves.
‘That’s what made it dump the recording. No way can we set this system to accept a U-space signature – it screws everything,’ he said.
‘U-space?’ Lellan repeated. ‘They don’t jump this close . . . what is that?’
On the screen, something gigantic loomed behind the laser array. As they watched, it rolled closer – a vast and incomprehensible shape. From it, off to one side of the screen, a black fleck fell away, then the screen whited out for a second. When it came back on, the laser array was a spreading cloud of debris laced with fire, and the vast shape rolled on.
‘What the fucking hell was that?’ asked Lellan.
Polas wiped his hand down his face to cover his mouth. Almost as if he didn’t want what he was going to say next to be heard, he muttered, ‘There was something about it. Something out at the cylinder worlds . . . Behemoth . . . just a name.’
‘There’s no mystery,’ interrupted Thorn.
They all turned to look at him.
‘That was Dragon,’ he told them. ‘And my guess is that things are just about to start getting very complicated – and very deadly.’
The agony and the terror left him, sucked away through the growing Jain architecture inside the Occam Razor. Those of his command crew who still had enough of their humanity left to feel their own pain were sobbing, which meant there were only two of them, being Aphran and the man who controlled the U-space engines. Skellor silenced them with a thought and began to analyse what had happened. When he had discovered that, he glared at the corpse of Captain Tomalon and wished he’d not been so hasty in having the man killed. The trouble Tomalon had caused was worth as much punishment as that damned Cormac would receive when Skellor finally got hold of him.
It was the burn again. Through the crew member who now controlled all the Occam Razor’s energy shielding and shield generators, he located the huge misalignment. Overall there were eighty-four separate generators that shielded the ship from the hard radiation of space, or attack, and most importantly from the mind-scrambling effects of U-space – which even now were not clearly understood, at least by any human mind. The flat screens – a harder version of the shimmer-shield, and likewise a product of runcible technology – all had to mesh perfectly within a second of the U-space motors dropping the ship into under-space. They also oscillated on and off thereafter – the brief period they were off enabling the U-space motors to keep the ship hurtling through that ineffable dimension. But that had not happened: they’d dropped into U-space unshielded; then, within only a few minutes, had been forced out of it again when the shields started operating out of alignment to the motors. Every one of those generators had been connected in a complex net, and every one of them had been run by something that fell somewhere in between a submind and a plain control program.
‘You piece of shit,’ spat Skellor, shutting down the grav-plate below the Captain’s corpse. Then, grunting with an effort that had tears of blood forming in the corners of his eyes, he extruded a Jain outgrowth from the wall behind the corpse, which grabbed it around the neck and hauled it upright and back against the wall. Probing inside the man, he found nothing alive. It was not the shots that had killed him – the man’s mind was burnt out like everything else on this ship. There would be no satisfaction there.
Skellor closed his eyes, the rage in him growing beyond the proportions of the human part of his mind, cycling into something difficult to contain. Opening his eyes, he fixed his gaze on the man – the thing – he had created, to control the ship’s shielding. This man started shaking inside the Jain architecture that enclosed him, then he started screaming as its material closed about him. His bones broke with erratic thuds, and suddenly his screams were choked off. Abruptly all of him that was still visible shrivelled and turned grey. He diminished, drained away as nutrient for . . . Skellor.
With his rage finally under control, Skellor slid into a cold analytical mode. There had been no real satisfaction there because what he had killed possessed less sentience than an animal, and the screams had been little more than an autonomic reaction, utterly disconnected and operating in its own limited circuit. Now Skellor must grow a replacement for this erstwhile member of his command crew. He turned his attention to Aphran and saw that she was watching him with terrified eyes – there was still enough of her left to realize her danger. Skellor turned his attention away from her before further temptation to kill overwhelmed him, and
gazed out through the ship’s sensors. Taking navigational information from those parts of himself and from the command crew wherein it was contained – already he was finding it increasingly difficult to identify those parts as somewhere outside his own mind – he saw that there was a solar system near enough for the ship to reach in a U-space jump of only minutes’ duration. There he would find what he needed: energy from a sun, asteroidal matter – all those things he needed to fully control the Occam Razor, and to grow.
Cormac returned to consciousness, gasping: lightheaded with the euphoria produced by oxygen flooding a brain starved for long enough to drag him into unconsciousness. He reached up and more firmly clamped the mask over his nose and mouth, then opened his eyes.
His vision was blurred and dark around the edges, and it was a moment before he realized Gant was stooping over him. In another moment, he remembered where he was. He looked at the main screen, saw fire and black smoke, and heard a roaring crackle from outside the craft.
‘You all right?’ Gant asked.
Cormac removed the mask from his face for a moment. ‘Bruised, but not broken I think, though somewhat annoyed with myself.’ He put the mask back on.
‘Annoyed?’
Cormac found it easier to speak into the mask, rather than run out of breath while speaking with it pulled away from his face. ‘I should have remembered about the air mix down here, just as I should have had Apis run a diagnostic on those ion engines.’
‘As to the air mix, not everyone’s perfect,’ said Gant. ‘And as to the engines, do you think that knowing they wouldn’t work would have helped in some way?’