by Gary Gibson
Ty then caught sight of a suited figure drifting close to the asteroid's surface, partially obscured by the clouds of grit and ice. It took a few moments before he realized with a shock that the lower half of Cesar's body was missing. He pointed this out to Nancy and she cursed. 'He should have stayed with the damn launcher.'
'I guess he must have been hit by debris. We're lucky the launcher wasn't wiped out the same way.'
'Right now, I just want to get the hell out of here before we wind up like him.'
Something flashed out of the sky and the asteroid was struck a second time. A fresh plume of grey dust and ice shot up from its surface.
'I'm going to perform a fast burn,' announced Nancy, her voice taking on a hysterical edge. Ty twisted around to look at her, but all he could see was the side of her helmet. Suddenly it seemed important to be able to see her face. 'Then I'm going to decelerate for thirty seconds,' she added. 'Got it?'
'Got it.'
If I were the swarm, he thought, I'd collect chunks of rock from somewhere and accelerate them close to the speed of light. All it would take was a simple railgun technology; the rocks didn't even need to be very big to cause a lot of damage once they had reached relativistic speeds.
'Three, two, one,' Nancy counted aloud, and a second later Ty felt his heart and lungs press up against his spine while a seemingly enormous force flattened his head back against his seat. The asteroid's surface disappeared out of his peripheral view as the launcher blasted away from it.
Thirty seconds. Nancy hit a second button and cut off the burn. The intense pressure lifted from Ty's body and they were weightless once more. He twisted around and saw how the asteroid had already shrunk into the distance. Even as he watched, something slammed into it for a third time, cleaving it like a lump of dried clay smashed with a hammer.
'Jesus and Buddha,' Nancy swore, sounding like she was on the verge of crying with relief. 'They can hear us again! I've got a channel open to the Mjollnir, Nathan. I think we're going to make it.'
'Are they ready to jump out of the system?' asked Ty.
'I seriously fucking hope so. They're under attack, but no direct hits so far. Deceleration burn in ten, so get ready.'
Ty grabbed hold of his armrests as the launcher swivelled round in a slow, graceful arc until it was facing back the way they had come. No direct hits. He stared at the expanding cloud of debris that was now all that remained of the asteroid. If the Mjollnir had been hit by anything like that, there would be nothing left of it.
'Here we go,' said Nancy. 'In three… two… one.'
The launcher had not been built with comfort in mind. When the rockets cut out half a minute later, Ty twisted around to see the dirty-grey and black exterior of the Freehold starship fast expanding towards them. He could also make out a faint blue shimmer around the frigate's drive spines. More split-second bursts decelerated the launcher yet further, and soon the yawning mouth of a forward bay swallowed them up.
The bay doors slid shut over their heads and grappling arms reached out from the deck, locking on to the launcher and drawing it down into a cradle. Ty started to unstrap himself.
A deep thrumming sound rapidly resolved itself into a rush of air, but Ty waited until his suit gave him the signal before he pulled his helmet off, tasting welded metal and sweat as he sucked in a breath. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to get out of his suit. As he kicked away from the launcher and grabbed a handhold on the wall of the bay, he glanced across at Nancy, also with her helmet off, her face drenched in sweat.
'I'm sorry about Cesar,' was all he could say to her.
She shrugged, staring away across the bay. 'If it wasn't for him, we'd never have got that thing into the launcher.' She met his eyes. 'But if that thing's body isn't as valuable as you seem to think it is, he might have died for nothing. Can you live with that thought?'
He returned her gaze. 'Whatever it is the swarm's after, it's inside that Atn,' he replied. 'I promise you.'
Chapter Eleven
Several days after Dakota's encounter with Trader, the Magi ship that had resurrected her delivered her to the world known to humans as Derinkuyu, a major Skelite colony twenty-three light-years beyond the Consortium's borders.
The Skelites carved entire cities out of the deep bedrock of their worlds, creating warrens that extended far below the surface. Before the departure of the Shoal, the complex in which Dakota now found herself had been home to a small population of a few thousand human beings plus a smattering of Bandati and even, to her surprise, one or two Rafters drifting in their pressurized tanks. With the arrival of coreship refugees, the population had quadrupled overnight, spreading out to take up every last available inch of spare room in what Dakota suspected would be a claustrophobe's worst nightmare.
She wandered through a long, echoing concourse, its high arched ceiling supported by fluted stone pillars also carved directly out of the rock. Somewhere in the maze of shanty dwellings here was the Magi navigator who had agreed to act as her liaison.
Most of the dwellings she passed were constructed from scraps of plastic and metal, and even rough slabs of precariously balanced stone that looked like all they needed was a good hard push to send them tumbling onto their occupants with deadly results. Light came from a combination of glow-globes and what she suspected was a bioluminescent fungus spread in dense patches across the ceiling and upper parts of the towering pillars. Her nose was tickled by the varied smells from the dozens of cooking fires that splashed pale flickering light across the lower reaches of the pillars, carrying the scent of spices and blackened meat. She wondered if any of the people sleeping and talking and eating all around her really believed that the rescue they were almost certainly hoping for would ever come.
'Miss Merrick?'
She turned to see a figure looming out of the darkness, and knew immediately this was the man she was looking for. The figure resolved into an impossibly tall black man in his late twenties, with the ubiquitous shaved skull of a machine-head.
'Miss Merrick,' he repeated, now taking her hand with a smile. 'Leroy Rivers. It's wonderful to meet you at last.'
'I should be thanking you,' she replied. 'I wasn't sure I'd be able to find my way around this place without help.'
'Nobody else knows you're here?' There was a precision in the way he spoke, each word and syllable meticulously phrased.
She shook her head. 'You're the only one I've told.'
Rivers bent down towards her a little, and dropped his voice. 'We should not delay. It's not safe to stay around here one second longer than we need to. I have transport nearby, and I managed to acquire one of the items you asked for at very short notice.'
She nodded, and he led her towards a small open car with tractor wheels, parked close to a pillar. 'You're part of the relief operation?' she asked.
He laughed. 'That is the idea, but it's like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking ship. All we've managed to bring here so far are a few emergency fabricators, and yet there are people dying of diseases that are supposed to be extinct.'
'I see.'
'There is not enough room for all the refugees,' he continued, climbing into the driver's seat. 'We really need to expand into newer tunnels, but that means further negotiations with the Skelites, which is proving difficult, I'm afraid. There's been a lot of clashes between the original settlers and the refugees, but the Skelites refuse to open up more space.'
'Why not?'
'They want star-drives seeded from the Tierra cache,' he explained. 'That's their basic condition before they'll enter into any kind of negotiation.'
Dakota nodded. 'Right. I understand. They lost the coreship network along with us and the Bandati, so of course they don't want to have to rely on the Fleet or anyone else.'
She climbed into the passenger's seat, beside Rivers. He turned to look at her with an earnest expression. 'I will be straight with you, Miss Merrick. When you told me you wanted to come here, helping you find someo
ne I've never heard of was not my first priority. But your influence at Ocean's Deep is enormous, and if the Skelites here were to think they might get their star drive, it could take a lot of the pressure off. At present it doesn't take much to start a riot here, and before you know it there's another dozen dead bodies. People generally need to know things are going to get better.'
It took an effort of will for Dakota to meet Rivers's hopeful gaze. Things, she wanted to tell him, were just as bad everywhere. There were a thousand Leroy Rivers scattered over an area of space so vast it was difficult even to contemplate, all of them desperate to ward off a coming catastrophe.
She smiled in what she hoped was a convincing manner. 'I can't make any promises, Mr Rivers, because things are bad all over. But I'll see what I can do when I get back to Ocean's Deep.'
Rivers nodded and exhaled noisily, like a man who had just been unburdened of a heavy load. He turned to her again and smiled gently. 'Thank you for telling me that.' He reached down and activated a switch, and the car's treads ground noisily.
She studied him. 'You didn't believe a word of what I just said, did you?'
'No,' he said, with a broad grin. 'Not a word. But I still had to ask.'
Dakota looked away, biting her lip in shame.
'Something for you,' he said, pulling a plastic bag, filled with something that clanked noisily, out from under the dashboard.
He passed it over one-handed. Inside she found two short metallic tubes and something that looked like the grip of a gun.
'The weapon is modular,' Rivers explained. 'All you need to do is snap the components together. The locals call these things "ratcatchers". A small, high-capacity fusion battery housed in the grip powers the plasma bolts. Like I said, it's the best I could get hold of at short notice. But you're going to have to be careful about how you use it. They have a nasty habit of going wrong if they get overheated.'
She gave him a doubtful look. 'Wrong, how?'
'The battery is a fabricator hack job that bypasses the programmed safety limits. If it gets too hot, it blows up.'
She stared at him. 'And this is seriously the best you could get?'
'Weapons of any kind are in very short supply here. The second-stage Skelites themselves aren't exactly lacking in armaments, but they're less than keen on supplying them to us intruders.'
'So they're all home-made efforts like this?' she asked, emptying the bag's contents on the seat between her knees.
'Yes. I think that particular one came from a fabricator originally designed for making customized kitchen components.'
Rivers put the car into reverse, and the tractor treads crunched across the stone floor as he guided it carefully between the close-packed hovels and sleeping bodies, veering close enough to outstretched limbs at times to send Dakota's heart leaping towards her mouth. She studied the weapon's components and then carefully slotted them together, the grip sliding in last. When she held it in her upturned palm it felt light, insubstantial, more like a toy than a real weapon. Hugh Moss would have access to far greater firepower than this.
'I don't mean to pry,' said Rivers, 'but you said at one point you thought you might have trouble finding your way around on your own…?'
'I can't manipulate data the way I used to, Mr Rivers. I'm not much more than a passenger on the Magi ships these days.'
Rivers nodded, looking embarrassed. 'I'm sorry for asking. It seems so many of us are suffering from the bends.'
She frowned. 'The what?'
'That's what some of the other navigators are calling it now,' Rivers explained. 'The bends, or neural burnout – a sickness from diving too deep into the world of data contained inside every Magi ship.'
'Really.'
'I've not been affected myself,' Rivers continued. 'But I suspect it may only be a matter of time.'
'How long have you been a Magi-class navigator?'
'Six months,' he replied. 'Most navigators start suffering the ill effects after seven or eight months.' His smile faded a little. 'We should be going now. I found you a place to stay on a lower level.' Before long they were trundling through a series of endlessly winding passageways. Steps were carved into the stone on either side, every thirty metres or so, leading up to open galleries cut into the side of the passageways, just below the ceiling. Terran flora was everywhere, although much of it had clearly been engineered specially for an underground existence. Vines dropped down from the ceiling to brush against their heads as they drove on, while dwarf trees – oak, ash and a few unidentifiable hybrids – lined every district they passed through. These trees barely came up to shoulder height, and made Dakota feel like she and Rivers were a pair of giants going out for a Sunday drive.
Business districts merged into residential areas, the ceiling sometimes dipping so low that Dakota would have had to stoop if she disembarked, while at other times it soared to cathedral proportions, with tiers of recessed homes and businesses rising up and up, all interconnected by carved stone staircases. They moved through a cornucopia of odours, those of food cooked on open griddles in busy market places, the fragrance of pale-leaved flowers and the rankness of thousands of human bodies living for years at a time in this deep subterranean darkness. And as they moved from one district via a downwards-spiralling ramp to a lower district, the air became ever hotter, denser and damper.
'Tell me everything you know about Moss,' Dakota asked at one point.
'He turned up here slightly less than five weeks ago and established himself extremely rapidly. It's my understanding that he trains what are intended to be either bodyguards or assassins, depending on your source of information. Killers, certainly,' Rivers added, as they hurtled on.
'Assassins? But to assassinate who?'
'Well, at first the rumours were that Moss was training soldiers to act as protection for black marketeers in Derinkuyu. Then it turned out he was killing off all the black marketeers instead, and taking over in their place. Keep in mind,' he added, 'that much of this remains mere rumour and conjecture. He also supposedly has some arrangement with a tribe of second-stage Skelites living in burrows at a much lower level than this one. It's believed he's aiding them in their war with a neighbouring tribe.'
'What do you mean by "second-stage" Skelites?'
'Skelites go through three distinct stages of development during their lives. The first stage is born in pools of volcanically heated water on the surface. Those who survive go on to stage two, which is large, aggressive, extremely territorial and technologically innovative, though their existence is spent mostly in subterranean burrows like these. Those who survive their constant wars then enter a third stage, where they return to the surface and spend the rest of their existence reproducing and engaging in what I guess you might call intellectual pursuits.' He glanced briefly at Dakota. 'The second-stage Skelites are the only ones who have any contact with other species. And, of course, they're the ones who are demanding their own starships, since-'
Rivers never got to finish his sentence.
Dakota was not immediately aware that there had been an explosion – or that the car they were riding in had been pushed up from the floor of a tunnel with sufficient force to catapult it several metres into the air. Instead she now found herself some distance away from the car's burning wreckage, with no clear memory of how she had got from there to here. There were distant screams and shouts, and small fires blazed dimly through a spreading cloud of black smoke.
She sat up, looking down to see that the black liquid of her filmsuit had spilled out to protect her. Her clothes were torn and ragged, but she herself wasn't even scratched.
She jumped up and ran back to the wrecked vehicle.
Rivers must have died instantly: his head was twisted at an impossible angle, while his eyes stared sightlessly up from out of the wreckage. Dakota looked all around and observed that the tunnel was tall and narrow, with an arching roof high overhead. Galleries ran along the side walls, set back just below the ceiling. Two stone
bridges crossed overhead and connected these galleries – like so much in Derinkuyu, carved directly from the living rock. Thick black oily smoke pooled under the ceiling itself, just above the level of the twin bridges.
She dropped to her knees and scrabbled around with her hands beneath the wreckage of the car, then ducked lower until her chin almost touched the ground. Peering past Rivers's corpse, she finally spotted the home-made pulse-rifle. She flattened herself to the ground and slid beneath the shattered vehicle until she could grab hold of it.
A low whoosh came from somewhere close by, and through the thick smoke she could see the glow of flames billowing from somewhere further along the tunnel. But the smoke was beginning to clear a little as it dispersed in both directions along the passageway, and she now saw a figure emerge, moving with deliberate purpose towards her.
Dakota pulled herself around the other side of the wreck until it was between her and the approaching figure, and there hurriedly reassembled the rifle. She kept it close to her chest and raised herself to a low crouch, wondering which was the best way to run, just as the figure came close enough for her to make it out.
The man bearing down on her had four arms: the extra pair were situated slightly below and behind what she presumed to be his original limbs. Each one of his four hands gripped some kind of weapon; she saw a wicked-looking blade, a sub-machine gun and two force-pistols. A broad belt slung from shoulder to hip was laden with cartridges, throwing knives and more pistols. She watched his face twist into a mask of fury at the same time as he raised the submachine gun and pulled the trigger.
Frozen until this moment, she ran off to one side, heading for a staircase that led up to one of the galleries. She was followed by a dull clinking noise, and it took her a moment to identify this as the sound of bullets striking her filmsuit before dropping to the ground, rendered harmless as their kinetic force was absorbed.
She took the steps three at a time. Bystanders who had come out on to the side galleries to see what was going on rapidly scattered as she got higher.