by Neal Asher
The moment the shield wall opened to allow the gunship through, it seemed like someone had opened a hatch onto a howling thunderstorm. Immediately, munitions began to impact on the gunship’s hard-fields as they first filled the gap in the wall, then eased out ahead of the vessel. Some missiles, coming in at acute angles, penetrated the narrow gaps in shielding, but were soon mostly tracked and obliterated by autogun fire. Some, however, blew cavities in the ship’s armour. One of them dipped down directly towards Cormac’s little force. Immediately gridlinking to his pulse-cannon, he transferred targeting to his own visual field, placed a frame over the missile, acquired it and gave the instruction to fire all at once. The cannon swung up and to the side — consequently dropping then swinging his seat in the other direction — and fired. The missile exploded, raining chunks of white-hot ceramic over the troop carriers. Having nearly been thrown from his seat, Cormac now strapped himself in securely and grabbed the cannon’s guiding handles.
Once beyond the shield wall, the gunship accelerated and the tanks began to follow it out. They floated along only a few feet above the ground so that they could slam down at any moment, for stuck like limpets to the ground they were less vulnerable to many forms of attack and also attained a stable firing position. The two troop carriers followed, gun platforms rising up around them like flies about cattle. But there were no further attacks for the gunship was scouring the ground ahead.
Missiles and beam weapons kept stabbing down from the huge vessel at targets moving about in the churned wasteland below. Cormac caught subliminal glimpses of rod-forms with Jain growth spread all about them, objects like steel cockroaches and others like long flat coppery leeches, before they disappeared in explosions or else some beam weapon tracked across them. He saw a gun turret shoot up like an iron mushroom from the earth before a massive blast excised the whole area to leave a smoking crater. The top part of the turret glanced off the underside of the gunship and began to drop again, before a particle cannon beam turned it to vapour. Always there came the sounds of metal smacking on metal and the glassy crunch of ceramic armour giving up, amid deafening explosions and high-energy shrieks. Cormac had almost forgotten how severe this all could be. He applied a program in his gridlink to optimize his hearing, toning down the worst of the racket to enable him to hear what he needed to hear, but even if he survived this mayhem, he knew his eardrums might require some doc-work.
Ahead of them multiple detonations were raising a massive firestorm that blotted from view the segmented lines of the enemy. Behind this hard-fields shimmered and flickered like the scaly flank of some translucent giant beast. Then parts of the enemy hard-field wall began to blink out. The Polity assault was too concentrated for it to withstand, and enemy shield generators burned out one after another. Then came another massive explosion, flinging up numerous lengthy wormship sections.
‘Looks like someone dropped a firecracker into a tin of mealworms,’ said Smith, over com.
This choice of description was unusual enough for Cormac to do a quick search of his internal library to find ‘mealworms’. The quickly glimpsed images he was provided with seemed appropriate.
The gunship slid on over the carnage it had already wrought and began firing at targets beyond. Cormac’s forces accelerated and spread out to optimum dispersement. He himself concentrated on familiarizing himself with the pulse-cannon, since until they reached their destination there was little else he could do to influence events.
A quick check showed him that the pulse-cannon possessed no autogun capability. Its processor had been removed because its unsophisticated shielding could not defend it against Jain worms or viruses and had been supplanted by some pretty basic hard wiring. It seemed that, in an utterly old-fashioned way, he would have to be this weapon’s mind.
Running recognition software so that that he would not commit any friendly fire, his gridlink cued to cut weapon fire should his targeting frame fall upon other Polity vehicles or personnel. Keying himself to react fast to anything moving close by that wasn’t any of his own force, he found himself overreacting to flames and smoke until further refining the program. He placed his finger ready both on real and virtual triggers, and then his hindbrain and the weapon became conjoined as an autogun. All was turning to carnage around him as, with fast robotic precision, he fired the cannon while only glimpsing his insectile targets amid the smoke of explosions. It occurred to him then that he really ought to have more personal investment in all this, so he used cognitive programs to get the rest of his brain up to speed. Around him the action seemed to slow down, but seemed no less deadly for that.
Soon they were passing through an area where segments of wormship lay scattered like discarded egg cases, and where hollow rod-forms smoked in the scorched earth. Even though the atmosphere ship had scoured a path through, still a few armoured monstrosities swarmed out into the light. The weapon he controlled firing intermittently, Cormac realized he was nailing only about one in fifty of them, and probably only the ones Arach allowed him to, for the spider drone was very enthusiastic indeed in demonstrating the capabilities of a hundred-year-old war drone. Eventually Cormac accepted the futility of his own meagre input so just turned the pulse-cannon off. He noted the human gunners on nearby platforms putting their weapons aside too, content to watch Arach dance about blasting Erebus’s finest into scrap. Cormac allowed himself a smile, but only a brief one — the reward for complacency on the battlefield was usually a body bag.
Ahead of them the atmosphere gunship rose high out of the smoke and focused on fighting a duel with something directly below it. Just beyond the scattered segments of wormship, the churned-up soil sloped down towards a murky boiling lake. Cormac instantly forced himself to greater alertness, since anything could be lurking under the water’s surface. Arach was also doubly on his guard, ceasing temporarily to reload from his ammo box and peering intently over the edge of the gun platform. The discshaped tanks, in a maneouvre Cormac had seen before, turned on their edges, pairs of them mating up at their bases so they seemed to roll above the lake surface like wheels. However, there came no attack from below, so Cormac U-sensed into the depths. Obviously whoever was running the gunship had also considered this a likely ambush risk and already made it safe. He perceived things still glowing deep down in the water as great globular bubbles of steam rose to the surface, and he wondered if the intense heat down there would eventually boil the lake away.
The upslope beyond the lake looked like the back of some spined beast, for here a forest had been reduced to spiky shards of wood, all evenly coated with black mud. The tanks maintained their wheel formation, which seemed the best strategy since great numbers of attackers kept erupting into the open from underground. Not much to hit on the slope beyond, however, and the few assailants there were of a different nature, designed for another environmental niche. Floating silver worms writhed out of the mess and speared upward, only to disappear under multiple weapon fire and fall away like aluminium confetti.
Beyond the shattered treeline at the top of the slope, a few miles ahead, lay the wormship core still enclosed in a geodesic dome of hard-fields, the nearer side of which the atmosphere gunship was pounding. The occupant of that mass of Jain substructure must have realized the danger now represented by Cormac’s force, for mushroom gun turrets sprouted from the ground lying beyond the hard-fields, and were almost as quickly obliterated from above. Then a gap opened as the defence there began collapsing, and they drove for it without hesitation. Missiles and semi-living predators started to hammer down on the attackers from every direction. A nearby blast sent a troop carrier nosing into the ground ploughing up a bow wave of mud. Cormac glimpsed a pair of AG tanks hurtling apart like flying hubcaps; he saw a gun platform hanging canted, a burning man falling from it. Soldiers poured from the crashed troop carrier towards the tangled wall of Jain substructure, pairs of tank separating to cover their attack. The other carrier landed nose-first against that wall and discharged its passe
ngers too.
Scanning, Cormac requested via his link.
The scan data came through piecemeal owing to the interference and constant electronic attacks. Cormac cursed and resorted to his U-sense to fill in the gaps. He mapped hollows, energy concentrations and movement, from which he built up a schematic of what lay ahead. He then formed a protean attack plan and saw it instantly applied. An explosion flung chunks of Jain coral through the air and opened up the wormship core. Soldiers stormed inside, and tanks and gun platforms entered wherever access was wide enough. Scar guided their platform in behind Smith’s adapted tank and one other to which it was still paired in wheel formation. With the still-functioning particle cannons of these twinned tanks incinerating any intervening structure, they advanced. It seemed like they had entered the interior of a ceramic wormcast, tunnels and cavities opening all around them from which unidentifiable things shrieked and skittered. He saw star-limbed monsters, created thus for travelling fast in this environment, jetting explosive bullets from between their glass mandibles. He glimpsed skeletal balls rolling out and unfolding into shapes disquietingly similar to Arach — before Arach himself destroyed them. Orders relayed to the atmosphere gunship resulted in the whole structure shaking about them as the big craft above began demolishing those areas of the wormship core irrelevant to Cormac’s purpose but certainly still containing enemy mechanisms.
As he processed the information now being presented to him by the various scanners mounted in tanks or carried by soldiers, and sometimes relayed directly from Golem sensoriums but mainly from his own penetrating sense of his surroundings, Cormac grew distant from the frenetic part of himself he labelled ‘autogun’. Briefly he wondered if this was how AIs and haimen felt when they created sub-minds and sub-personae, but there was far too much to do now for him to indulge in such idle speculation.
T3 and 5 concentrate fire on your 6 elevation 3… units 3, 5 and 7 advance and secure area designated 12 axial on globe grid…
He issued orders faster than human speech, also running subprograms to enable him to issue separate orders simultaneously. Modelling the ebb and flow of the attack in his gridlink he looked for openings, weaknesses, the best way to apply the forces at his disposal with the aim of getting Smith’s tank safely to that energy-dense concentration of matter lying deep within this core structure, though necessarily distancing himself from the lights constantly going out in this model as people and machines died all around him. Gradually, the attacks from Jain-engineered organisms ebbed around his own particular group, since it was of prime importance to protect Smith and his tank, and their reason for being here. Final barriers crashed down with the sound of shattering porcelain to reveal a chamber fifty feet across, in the centre of which was suspended some glassy concoction like a giant synapse, protrusions connecting it all around to the chamber’s walls.
And something was moving inside it.
Then suddenly all enemy movement within the ship’s core ceased.
Through the eyes of others Cormac saw biomechs simply freeze in place, automated weapons that a moment before had leapt out at them like trapdoor spiders now sagging and dying. Firing still continued for a while, but it all came from Cormac’s own forces. In reply to his query, someone in the gunship above informed him that all enemy movement for miles around had also ceased, all the Jain biomechs frozen.
Just now, Cormac thought with cold clarity, the legate right there ahead of us has obviously realized we are here to capture it, so it will destroy itself. We will be very lucky if such destruction does not include us and the entire ship’s core.
But nothing was happening.
Smith, Cormac sent, needing to add no more.
The two tanks ahead finally separated, and Smith’s vehicle accelerated, smashing its way through glassy struts. A stream of superfluid jetted towards the synapse thing like the beam of an energy weapon, but merely splashed against it and rained down. Surrounding struts shattered and the central structure tumbled. Still playing a stream of liquid helium upon it, Smith followed it down. It hit the chamber floor and shattered, spilling out something bulky and metallic. Focusing in with his gun sights, Cormac could see no sign of a legate.
‘Scar, take us down there,’ he ordered.
Soon the gravplatform was crunching down into what looked like the wreckage of an immense greenhouse. Smith’s tank settled over to one side, its superfluid gun still directed at a grey bulk amid the wreckage. Cormac unstrapped himself and stepped down to the floor, enviroboots crunching on the mess. Interference was dying all around him, while outside channels began to open and bandwidth to grow.
‘What is that?’ he wondered.
‘Still alive — I think,’ Arach replied.
Cormac turned to the drone and to Scar. ‘Stay put but be ready to get out of here fast.’
They reluctantly obeyed as he moved forward.
Drawing closer to the grey bulk he observed something like a huge coiled grub, with cold fog billowing from it. Maybe this was merely some sort of protective coating with the legate inside? Drawing his thin-gun, perhaps more for reassurance than any real expectation that it would be effective, he advanced to stand directly over the strange object. Gazing down at it, he mentally peeled away various layers to get to the core. There was something humanoid inside… something rather too humanoid. The grub-thing abruptly opened out to reveal what was bonded into its inner surface. A skeletal human face, with Jain tendrils penetrating all around its head like a Medusa hairdo, turned to gaze up at Cormac with its utterly black eyes.
‘Oddly,’ began the woman entrapped there, ‘it was his final destruct order that enabled me to break his hold… at least for a while.’ She blinked, licked her lips. ‘But now I find I am anxious for this all to end.’
‘Stay alive and help us defeat him,’ said Cormac, catching on at once.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘While the betrayer still sits on his throne I won’t be allowed to live, and anyway I don’t want to. You have precisely ten minutes from now to get your people beyond the blast radius.’
Betrayer?
Cormac glanced towards the single barrel of Hubbert Smith’s tank, from which depended a neat line of icicles.
‘That won’t work,’ the woman advised him. ‘Get out of here now.’
‘We’ll take you with us.’
‘One of the many CTDs here sits inside what is left of me,’ she said.
Cormac didn’t have any difficulty believing her, for within the grublike object that both held her and of which she had become a component, he could see a dense mass sitting amid the spread-out parts of her body.
‘Who are you?’ he asked out loud.
‘Run now,’ she replied dreamily.
Cormac reached out and scraped a fingernail down her cheek. He was damned if he was going to leave here with absolutely nothing — there was a good chance that this little scrap of tissue under his fingernail would be able to at least tell them who she was. Then, inside her, he spotted movement: changes in electrical activity around the CTD.
‘Okay, out of here!’
Smith’s tank flipped up to rejoin its partner, the two tanks slamming together like cymbals. Cormac turned back towards the AG platform, expecting obliteration at any moment. He needed to be on that platform and away, so, without conscious consideration, he stepped past the intervening space between them, his boots slamming down on the ceramal deck. A Gatling cannon spun towards him, and Scar turned with teeth bared.
‘Go! Now!’ Cormac ordered as he quickly strapped himself into the gunner’s seat.
Scar glanced towards where Cormac had been standing only a second before, then he wrenched the platform into the air. Soon they were retracing their route into the wormship’s core, hurtling along after Smith’s tank. No detonation yet. Maybe the woman had known what he could see, and so had given him a warning. Within minutes they were outside again, in the hot smoky air.
‘Hold here,’ Cormac instructed, as he watc
hed all the troops piling back aboard the one mobile carrier. He then assessed the perpetually updated model of his attack plan and the relative positions of those within in. Soon everyone who could was out of there and, once they were racing away over the incinerated mud, Cormac signalled for Scar to continue.
‘We failed,’ Cormac announced, both verbally and over com.
‘That’s unfortunate,’ replied Remes from twenty miles away, ‘but now it appears that you weren’t even supposed to be here at all.’
Just then a blast lit up the entire sky.
‘What?’ Cormac turned and looked back in time to see a tsunami of debris bearing down on them. The hot shock wave hit hard, tilting the gun platform and flinging debris past them. He glimpsed chunks of Jain coral hurtling through the air like scythe blades, saw Scar headless at the platform’s controls and Arach tumbling away helplessly through the storm. Then, a boulder of Jain coral slammed straight into the side of the platform like a giant fist. The gun collapsed crushing Cormac underneath it, and something else hit him hard on the side of his head.