Line War ac-5

by Neal Asher

  The inner door of the airlock opened and Bludgeon scuttled through, raising his blind head towards her. A brief informational exchange ensued, almost a mathematical greeting, then Bludgeon turned and headed towards the interface sphere as Orlandine stepped into the airlock of Heliotrope, maybe for the last time. The airlock evacuated quickly — the air it contained being pumped into a reserve tank, for though Heliotrope’s present occupants had no need of it, it could be used for cooling too. Orlandine clambered outside and pushed herself off from the ship heading towards the war runcible. For a moment she considered using the reaction jets located at the wrists of the suit, then abruptly decided against that. Trying to keep busy with such minor details just to avoid painful speculation could lead to disaster. She really needed to pause now and think hard about what she was doing, so she closed down all contact with both Heliotrope and the war runcible, and allowed herself a still moment in which to ask herself some salient questions.

  Was Fiddler Randal working against Erebus, or was he merely something Erebus had fashioned to lure her into a trap? Further confirmation of everything he had so far told her had come with the methodology of Erebus’s attack upon the Polity, for it was perfectly in accord with the plans Randal had shown her earlier. It occurred to her that to assume this was some sort of trap for her was utter arrogance on her part. Surely she wasn’t that important to Erebus? Then again it seemed she was clearly important enough for Erebus to attack a world of ‘no tactical importance’ just to kill her brothers. It all seemed very odd, and she felt that Randal, who she kept locked up in that secure virtuality, had not yet told her everything. However, she felt this all to be worth the risk. Here at this rendezvous the war runcible would not be able to deliver its full potential but, unless a USER was quickly deployed, they still had a good chance of escaping any treachery. At their final destination, even if that was a trap, Erebus might find that it wasn’t a strong enough one. The war runcible, she hoped, would come as a rather unpleasant surprise.

  Orlandine bent her legs to absorb her own impact against the hull of the war runcible while simultaneously initiating the ‘gecko’ function of her boot soles to stick herself in place. She then reached out with one arm of her assister frame to grab a rung of the ladder curving round the hull towards the nearby airlock. Now at her destination, she once again made contact with the ever-spreading Jain-tech network within the massive device, and ordered it to open the lock for her. As she entered, she saw the fusion drives wink out and, glancing to one side, she could just about see, with her human eyes, the asteroid they had been heading for turning slowly in vacuum some hundreds of miles away. Soon she was fully inside the war runcible and opening her helmet to the breathable air that for some time now had been displacing the original inert preserving gas. She could walk easily now, since all the gravplates within the device were fully operational, which was perhaps not entirely to Knobbler’s taste, since equipped with all those tentacles, he seemed specially designed for moving in zero gravity. He had also been designed to move speedily through corridors wider than those available here. His multiple limbs and big body leaving scratches and dents on the walls, Knobbler came into sight ahead of her, finally clattering and crashing to a halt and totally filling the corridor.

  ‘After the test it will take Bludgeon five days to reach Anulus,’ the big drone observed.

  ‘No problem,’ Orlandine replied. ‘Once Erebus takes the ECS forces out of play, it will take some time for it to marshal its own forces. Erebus won’t want to come out of the end of the corridor to Earth with anything less than full strength because there’ll still be plenty of resistance between the end of the corridor and Earth itself.’

  With a surprisingly fast and sinuous twist, Knobbler moved on ahead — one sensor-tipped tentacle still pointing back towards her.

  She strode along behind him, mentally checking all the repairs and modifications that had been made to the war runcible. The other drones were getting all the weapons up to speed since, for her plan to work, the runcible at least needed to survive in order to implement it. She sent signals to the interface sphere she had installed in this particular segment’s control blister, preparing it for its final component: herself.

  * * * *

  Azroc felt a moment of extreme frustration at not being presented with all the information and analysis available to the others present in this dodecahedral chamber, but then that would have defeated the object of him being here. He observed the cloud of magma now spreading out from the misshapen planetoid in the Caldera system and reflected that its effect upon the two Caldera worlds would be minimal. Then he pondered his earlier warning to Jerusalem about the wormships that had been orbiting that planetoid. Wormships that were now toast. He had said he was certain they must be up to something out there — that their attack upon the Caldera worlds was being delayed for some purpose, just like that other attack involving asteroid bombardment.

  ‘So what did you use,’ he asked. ‘A stealthed missile or were there attack ships out there?’

  ‘Neither,’ Jerusalem replied unhelpfully.

  ‘Is it necessary for me not to know what happened?’ Azroc asked.

  ‘When you have a loose cannon, it is best to give it a target and stand back, rather than try to control it,’ Jerusalem supplied.

  Obviously the cannon in question was not Azroc himself. ‘The nature of this cannon?’

  ‘You have doubtless heard of a homicidal Golem called Mr Crane — the one some refer to as the brass man?’

  ‘I thought he was Skellor’s sidekick — working for the bad guys.’

  An information packet arrived instantly and Azroc studied the Golem’s potted history. Mr Crane: a Golem Twenty-Five prototype corrupted for use by separatists, and then destroyed by Cormac’s troops on the planet Viridian. Resurrected by Skellor using Jain technology and turned into something even more dangerous than Golem. Then sent by Skellor as an envoy to Dragon on the planet Cull — after Jain-tech extraction, since Dragon would not allow such tech anywhere near itself. Dragon had repaired Crane’s corrupted and fragmented mind but, as with all things Dragon did, the nature of that repair was questionable. It was certain the brass man now contained Dragon technology, as opposed to Jain-tech.

  Jerusalem added, ‘I question whether Mr Crane’s nature can now be assessed with any accuracy.’

  ‘So why did Mr Crane blow up a planetoid to wipe out the best part of fifty wormships and, more importantly, how?’

  ‘The “why” is simple. Mr Crane had become the unofficial protector of the sleer-human hybrids on Cull, which Erebus wiped out, so he is now out for vengeance. The “how” is complicated. We allowed him to use Polity vessels and runcibles to go in pursuit of the wormship used to kill those hybrids, which was then down on a small moon. He first obtained a spaceship from certain arms dealers on the Line, then went after the wormship and killed its legate captain.’

  ‘I see,’ said Azroc. ‘And this is how you know that the worm-ships are captained.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Mr Crane next sought further information about the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which we supplied. Possessing a legate’s vessel enabled him to gain access to Erebus’s com and to use chameleonware that would be ignored even if it was detected in use, being Erebus’s own chameleonware. At the Caldera planetoid he analysed Erebus’s intentions to a quite remarkable degree, then used stolen detonation codes and a CTD imploder to the devastating effect you yourself just witnessed.’

  ‘Definitely a loose cannon to have on one’s side then,’ Azroc admitted, curious to know more about this lethal brass Golem. But that wasn’t relevant to his present task, so he returned his attention to the overall battle. ‘Wormship fleets are now disengaging at seventeen different locations,’ he observed. ‘It seems the shape of this attack is changing.’

  ‘Evidently.’ The reply came across flat and toneless, which meant Jerusalem was applying its processin
g power elsewhere and that a hastily fashioned sub-mind was now responding. But, even so, such a sub-mind probably possessed an IQ of an order of magnitude higher than Azroc’s own.

  Azroc gazed from all vantage points at the model of the attack now hanging in virtual space inside his own mind. He once again modelled the Polity infrastructures beyond it — supply routes and manufacturing worlds, military bases and shipyards — but still could see no correlation. What was Erebus after?

  ‘Erebus hasn’t employed USERs at any point of attack,’ he noted. ‘This leaves him vulnerable to us bringing in reinforcements, but allows him to bring in reinforcements too, and thus keep his attack protean.’

  Stating the obvious, Azroc thought. And his words seemed almost a prophetic commentary as those same fleets Erebus was withdrawing began to join attacks on other worlds. Azroc stared in frustration at the model he had created. Only twenty hours ago it had seemed that Erebus was preparing for ground assaults to capture about eight worlds, leaving the rest either depopulated or destroyed. Yet now some of those ground assaults were being abandoned, as were some of the other more destructive attacks. Even those wormships that had been engaged in accelerating the big asteroid towards one target world were now abandoning their position.

  ‘There are more wormships arriving in the Caldera system than elsewhere,’ he observed, though it seemed a trite comment to make considering the devastation there. Wormships were swarming out of U-space and hurtling down towards the twin Caldera worlds with almost careless abandon. The sun mirrors, previously used for energy generation, had now been turned into weapons and were busy frying wormship after wormship. Space in that zone was no longer black, and it seemed as if the conflict was being enacted inside a block of amber.

  Azroc tried to step back from it all. What did Erebus want? Let Azroc suppose the entity wished, for whatever psychotic reasons, to either smash or take over the Polity, how would he, Azroc, achieve such an aim if he controlled the same resources? He would infiltrate the Polity, deploy his forces into critical places throughout it, and then initiate a surprise attack. Yet Erebus had done nothing of the kind. Instead it had first revealed its forces outside the Polity, giving ECS time to prepare, then at leisure had begun attacking the very periphery, even though it had the option to U-jump right inside and launch an attack there.

  Azroc decided that there must be some critical piece of information still missing. He withdrew from his models and returned to utilizing ordinary human sensation and comprehension of his surroundings. The hologram at the centre of the hedron now displayed a montage of battle schematics intermixed with occasional gravity maps.

  ‘Any news yet from your agent about the attack on Klurhammon?’ Azroc enquired, swinging his attention across to those working at the concentric rings of consoles occupying the adjacent floor.

  ‘There has been no—’ The voice began in that same flat tone used by the sub-mind, then abruptly cut off. Then the real Jerusalem continued, ‘It would seem that Agent Cormac and the King of Hearts were given new orders.’

  ‘It would seem?’ Azroc noted that some of the personnel manning the consoles were now getting up and abandoning their posts.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jerusalem. ‘Apparently I myself wanted him to proceed to Ramone and there capture a legate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cormac and his ship are currently down on the surface of Ramone, though details of his progress are sparse. Communications are intermittent, since encryption needs to be changed frequently by the groundside defence forces there.’

  Azroc noted that those abandoning their posts had occupied an area around one particular individual. Azroc saw to his surprise that this was a Golem.

  ‘Now,’ said Jerusalem.

  A length of console and a circular section of deck exploded into the air. At that precise moment all but the Golem threw themselves to the floor. A great ribbed pipe two metres across terminating in a massive four-fingered claw and numerous ports and lethal-looking protuberances shot out of the hole, curved over whip-fast, and slammed down on the Golem. Cryogenic gas exploded out at the contact point, as the claw closing on the Golem tore up part of the console and the metal flooring underneath. Miniature lightning flared and earthed, and there came the bright flashes of particle beams cutting within the mass. Then a glowing white explosion blasted the claw into the air, and an ensuing arc-fire melted both the Golem and everything lying within a few feet of it. The wrecked claw seemed to pause in frustrated hesitation, then retracted itself back down into the hole it had made.

  ‘Damn,’ said Jerusalem.

  ‘And precisely what happened then?’ asked Azroc.

  ‘I was just trying to capture one of the enemy in our camp,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘The same one who gave Cormac and the King of Hearts those false orders.’

  Like the impact of a boulder falling, Azroc felt a large mass of fresh information fall suddenly within his remit.

  ‘I have already analysed this data for other similar false orders,’ Jerusalem explained, ‘and, oddly, it seems there have been no others issued. Yet Erebus’s agent here was in a position to cause us maximum damage by doing so. Now, see what else you can find.’

  As Azroc began checking through the files and logs the enemy’s Golem agent had been using, he felt a surge of emotion, again from that point somewhere below emulation. This time, though, he recognized fear. The fact that one of Erebus’s minions had managed to penetrate here, right to the heart of the Jerusalem, told him this was a war that the Polity might actually lose.

  * * * *

  The antigravity tank was a disc-shaped affair with a ceramal skirt below and a wide turret jutting above from which protruded twinned particle cannons. Now only one of the cannons was capable of delivering its usual destructive potential. The other had been modified so its accelerating coils could be used to propel helium superfluid doped with iron particles, a supply of which resided in two cylindrical tanks welded to the tank’s skirt. Anything hit by a jet of this stuff would be frozen solid in a second, since the fluid’s temperature was only fifty degrees above absolute zero.

  ‘Remember,’ said Cormac to Hubbert Smith. ‘If you get a legate in your sights, you nail it immediately.’

  Smith nodded briefly and climbed the steps leading to the open hatch in one side of the tank, and then lowered himself inside. Watching him go, Cormac continued to reflect on whether this was all a complete waste of time. Yes, the superfluid would certainly freeze Jain-tech hardware, but it could not freeze electric or photonic signals, so if the legate they targeted happened to contain some sort of explosive device that could survive the freezing process there would still be nothing to prevent it sending the detonation signal. It struck him that Jerusalem was either prepared to expend personnel for minimum gain, or this mission he was about to undertake was an act of desperation, and Cormac hadn’t thought things were going so badly.

  ‘Three wormships landed and decohered on the surface,’ said Remes. His tone had become leaden since the destruction of the AI Ramone, the one who had brought him into being. Maybe Remes was missing his parent.

  Cormac studied the aerial shots showing the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which Remes was now relaying direct to his gridlink. The segmented objects looking like organic trains that had first led the enemy attack had now withdrawn and formed defensive lines two hundred miles long. Further back, behind them, were three Jain-tech substructures like huge spiky mollusc shells bonded together with tar that seemed likely to form the cores of each wormship. The nearest one lay twenty miles straight out from their present position here at the end of the grounded atmosphere ship. And there, he hoped, he would find his legate captain.

  ‘We’ll start with this nearest one,’ said Cormac. ‘You’ll hold back from hitting all three of the ship cores for the moment, in case we don’t find what we want in this one?’

  ‘We have cancelled the main assault,’ Remes confirmed. ‘Now that the wormship fleet has withdrawn, there
will be no need to expend any further lives — except in support of your mission.’

  Comforting, Cormac thought. Without him here, the ground forces would have needed only to maintain city defence while awaiting bombardment of the enemy by ECS capital ships. With the Cable Hogue looming up, he supposed it wasn’t surprising that the remaining wormships had retreated. However, information was now becoming available that this was not unique, for Erebus’s forces were being redeployed elsewhere throughout its concerted assault on the Line worlds.

  ‘Is that atmosphere gunship on the way yet?’ Cormac enquired.

  Remes pointed back towards the city, before turning away and heading for the antigravity platform upon which they had arrived. Glancing where indicated, Cormac observed another massive ship like the one here on the ground drifting towards them like a skyscraper uprooted and turned on its side. Then he glanced round to check the disposition of his own small force.

  Two of the bargelike troop carriers were loaded with fifty soldiers each, including twelve dracomen and numerous Golem. All the human soldiers contained those ‘little doctors’. He wasn’t sure why he had asked for such troops specifically, though he had a horrible suspicion he had chosen them because they seemed less human and therefore of less value. He didn’t want to examine his own motivations too closely.

  The AG tanks were to go first, after the atmosphere gunship had done its work. The carriers were to follow, surrounded by a selection of gun platforms. Cormac glanced across at Scar, who was strolling back from some sort of draco-conference with a group of his brethren, then he crooked a finger at Arach, who was gazing out intently at their destination from fifty feet up on the side of the grounded atmosphere ship. The spider drone ran straight down the sheer armoured surface, bounced on the ground leaving a small crater, then hurtled across towards him.

  ‘I don’t need to give you specific instructions,’ Cormac explained to both the dracoman and the spider drone. ‘Everything is fair game, except a legate if we’re lucky enough to come across one. Let’s go.’ He led the way over to a flying gun platform on which a pulse-cannon was gimball-mounted. Since the gun seat was intended for a human, Cormac took possession of that while Scar stood by the control pillar. After hesitating for a moment, Arach grabbed a box containing an extra supply of the ordnance he used, climbed aboard securing the box behind him, then raised one leg, the glimmer of razor chainglass extruding along one edge of it. With two quick swipes he removed a large chunk of the safety rail, then settled himself down at the very rim of the platform. Opening his abdomen hatches he raised into position his two Gatling-style cannons and swivelled them to point off at right angles to each other. Then, as the shadow of the huge atmosphere gunship drew across them, Scar took them up into the air.