Ancestral Machines

by Michael Cobley

  Brock and Akreen were arriving from a lower-level companionway by the time Pyke reached Engineering.

  “What are we doing here?” said Brock.

  “We are here, Lieutenant, because this is the only other place on the ship with safety couches as good as the ones on the bridge.” He let that sink in for a moment. “Just a precaution.”

  Engineering’s control and monitor stations were crammed into a narrow but tall compartment that stretched over two decks. Pyke sent Brock down the spiral leaf-steps to the station at the bottom, directed Akreen to the one in the middle (and gave him a swift lesson in fastening and releasing the restraints), then settled into his own couch at the top, replacing his Chainer headset with the one attached to the headrest.

  “Scar, how are we doing, this fine weather?” he said as the couch shifted forward, positioning him correctly before the control station.

  “All systems optimal, Captain. Ready to leave.”

  “Fire ’em up and take us out, then.”

  He smiled as he felt, or imagined he felt, the strengthening vibrancy of the ship’s drives as they began to deploy their pent-up power. The main triple-screen display before him showed a range of onboard system readouts, as well as a tiled selection of video feeds from the hull cams and open feeds from the Shadow Bastion. One was a sound-and-vision contact request from the control centre at the towertop, and after Pyke okayed it he found himself face to face with G’Brozen Mav.

  “Captain, it is gratifying to see that you are well… oh, along with Lt Brock and your unexpected associate.” Mav scowled. “The lieutenant mentioned only that she had vital matters to discuss with you before she dashed off, but now it appears that the both of you are leaving us, and in the company of a warrior of the Zavri, whose unswerving loyalty to the Shuskar forces me to question your motives.”

  Akreen intervened. “I am Akreen, First Blade of the Zavri, and I have learned cold and terrible truths in recent days. The last of the Gun-Lords has seized the Sunheart and all its destructive powers–we shall pursue it there and kill it. If we survive the sun-dive.”

  “Which we shall, of course, without a doubt,” Pyke said. “Easy as falling off a log!” Yeah, into a really big furnace!

  G’Brozen Mav looked contrite. “I see–and now I can see that even the unheard-of instance of a Zavri leader turning against the Shuskar should not be discounted in these days! My apologies for distrusting you, although if only you had shared this plan–which I’m sure you have thought through in exhaustive detail. Well… in the spirit of cooperation, I believe you should know that some security monitors up here are showing Khorr and a handful of his marauders heading towards the ship berths, but since you’re about to depart I shall pass this on to our patrols.”

  “Sounds like a good plan, Mav,” said Pyke with a wink. “And see if those Shuskar left any interesting bottles lying around–I’m going to need a mighty stiff drink when we get back!”

  “I shall send out a search party immediately,” said the Chainer leader. “May the battle-spirits guide you all to victory.”

  I know what kind of battle-spirits I could do with right now, he thought as G’Brozen Mav cut the link.

  “Scar, are we clear of that atmosphere containment yet?”

  “Field transition almost complete, Captain.”

  “Good–Lieutenant, I do hope you brought those Sunheart coordinates as you promised.”

  “I’ve just jacked in a data-pin with the location–your ship pronounced them flawless!”

  “That is nice,” he said sardonically. “Scar, are all the forcefield emitters properly tasked and aligned?” And will they keep us alive in the flames of hell?

  “They are, Captain, and I have re-analysed the forcefield configuration sequence, and re-run the virtual tests under the most stringent of conditions.”

  “And?”

  “The solar irradiation flow exerts a certain abrasion effect on shields like ours,” said the AI. “The power drain will push our generators to their tolerances, but my tests indicate high survival probabilities. We are fortunate that you had those upgrades installed recently.”

  For a moment Pyke wanted to ask exactly what the probabilities were, then decided to let it pass.

  “Okay, and now that we’re leaving the frying pan, how long till we reach the fire?”

  “ETA at high cruise will be 9.8 minutes, Captain.”

  “Don’t want to pop your party balloons,” said Brock, “but I’m getting messages from the Citadelworld about that Shuskar flagship.”

  Sure enough, the visual sensors showed it emerging from the field that sealed in the canyon dock’s atmosphere, a vessel of brute, blockish lines which then turned its blunt prow in the Scarabus’s direction. Pyke watched this with a mixture of aggravation and dread, and a modicum of relief. At least Ancil and the rest were safe–no way they could have got on board if it was already departing.

  “Scar, that thing’s an ageing junkheap! Surely we can outrun it, or bloody its nose with a spread of missiles.”

  “We can outrun them over short distances, Captain, but the flagship’s drives, for all their rudimentary design, still have more muscle and would catch us over the medium stretch. But there is a more immediate problem–realigning the forcefield emitters has left the ship with minimal stern shielding, which makes us vulnerable…”

  “Incoming message from the flagship, Captain,” said Brock.

  “Of course there is,” Pyke said acidly. “Let’s see it.”

  His main display blinked, and there was Khorr, leering out at him. Pyke groaned.

  “Frackin’ hairy hell! You just can’t leave me alone, can ye?”

  “We are joined by fate, Pyke,” Khorr said in a weirdly insistent manner. “Our paths have crossed and recrossed, each of us has dodged the hammerblows that flew to and fro amid our tenacious affrays, and now strands of destiny have drawn you and I together, in this place—”

  “Sorry, wait a second, what was that?” Pyke cupped a hand to his ear. “Did I just hear a reeking load of pseudo-mystic bullskag? Why, yes, I do believe that I did!”

  On the screen a furious Khorr slammed his fist on the control panel and jabbed a big finger at Pyke. “I’m going to rip the guts out of that flying trashcan and blast your hull into a smoking, torn and leaking basket!” He turned to someone out of sight and said, “Target their engines! Target their stern! Hit them with everything!”

  Watching, Pyke heard a faint thud, saw the picture of Khorr waver slightly, then heard alarms sounding. Khorr turned and said, “What was that?” The answer was mostly inaudible but Pyke could just make out “primary weapons generator”.

  He grinned. “That’s a crying shame, so it is,” Pyke said down the channel. “And there’s you all ready to do yer badass desperado-from-hell routine as well.”

  But Khorr wasn’t listening as he stood and went elsewhere on his bridge to argue with someone.

  “What is all this about?” said Brock, who was seeing everything on her display too.

  “Not got a clue, Lieutenant, but so far they’ve not managed to get off a single shot.”

  Khorr reappeared, ordering someone to target the Scarabus with upper-hull beam cannon batteries, and almost immediately the lights on his bridge failed, as did the artificial gravity.

  “This seems a bit…” Pyke started to say, stopping when he heard someone on the flickering bridge shout something about “intruders on Deck 8–no, Deck 5!” and “My reports indicate Deck 3, sir”, then Pyke shook his head and guffawed out loud.

  It’s Ancil and Kref and the others–has to be!

  “Panic over,” he said. “Khorr has his hands full. Let’s get back to focusing on the next hair-raising, death-defying escapade.”

  “Panic over?” Brock said. “Are you sure?”

  Before Pyke could answer, the visual link to the Shuskar ship went out in a brief burst of interference.

  “Trust me,” said Pyke. “We’ll have no more lying f
lannel from that quarter!”

  “Actually,” she said a moment later. “They’re veering off course and piling on the velocity–and heading straight for the sun!”

  On his display a small pane popped up, showing the Shuskar ship at high magnitude, its main thruster burning a bright blue.

  “Aye, it’s quite popular this season–Scar, what’s our ETA now?”

  “ETA for insertion launch point, 6.4 minutes.”

  Second by second the time dragged by. At 3.5 minutes Brock told them that two lifepods had launched from the Shuskar flagship and at 2.1 minutes she announced that it was burning up in the sun’s corona.

  “Bye bye, Khorr,” Pyke murmured. “So much for the strands of destiny, eh?”

  “Your confidence in the face of adversarial threat is most commendable, Captain,” said Akreen. “Does it extend to the next stage of our journey?”

  Pyke didn’t have the heart to pass on his conviction that his own crew had used the portal generator to board, and then sabotage the flagship, so instead he served up a platter of reassurances and a side order of tech-specs and spannerspeak. Akreen listened politely and, once he’d finished, said, “I understand, Captain–great rewards demand great risk.”

  Pyke’s smile was rueful. Now there’s a leader who knows what it’s all about.

  Then, almost like a surprise, the ship AI announced that they had reached the launch point and that the sun-dive had now commenced. Pyke inhaled deeply, blew it out through pursed lips. The deep background vibrations of the drive altered pitch very slightly, signalling a ramping up of velocity. The Warcage’s sun loomed large now, its vast curvature of fusion-driven brilliance scaled down to a dirty, mottled orange by the monitor systems. No one spoke, perhaps out of reluctance to shatter this strange silence, the kind of tense and austere hush that living beings shared when faced with the possibility of utter obliteration.

  The ship’s forcefields snapped into their customised configuration before the heat of the sun had a chance to start raising the hull temperature. The velocity was still increasing as the Scarabus plunged through the swirling tendrils and curtains of the outer corona. At once the temperature at the leading edge of the forcefield began to spike–this was where the inner forcefield layers came into play, their braided energy sheaths shifting in rapid patterns designed to channel and divert torrents of deadly radiation around and away from the ship.

  Such shield operations required a huge and continuous power supply which was why, apart from Engineering, the rest of the ship was dark, airless and without artificial gravity. Pyke tried not to think about that, preferring instead to imagine the shock on the faces of the Gun-Lord’s goons when the Scarabus swept in, guns blazing.

  At least, that was his plan. According to the data brought on board by Lt Brock the Sunheart had an entry harbour of some kind for visiting ships, which should open for them since the Scarabus still had the authority beacon mounted. He was about to see if the sensors were picking up anything when he heard a far-off muffled thud, felt a tremor pass through the compartment and saw red alerts flashing on his displays.

  “What’s going on?” said Brock. “Are we okay?”

  “Secondary generator just blew,” Pyke said. “Don’t worry, we still have enough juice to finish the trip.”

  Except that now we have to run the primary generator past its tolerances and shrink the overall forcefield envelope, he thought as the ship AI put these contingencies into operation. But if the power balance deteriorates any further I might start losing bits of the ship!

  A minute later, sixty long agonising seconds, the navigationals reported picking a guide signal on the beacon’s frequency. The ship AI steered them along the projected path and suddenly the ship was flying down a huge fissure emptied of the sun’s super-heated plasma. The titanic strain on the primary generator eased and on Pyke’s screen several readouts began slowly falling out of the red zone. He breathed a long sigh of relief, ending in a cough.

  “So–we are alive,” said Brock over the comm, sounding slightly amazed.

  “Not baked, singed, charred or even lightly toasted!” Pyke said. “But alive and ready to put the boot right into any filthy Shuskar vermin stupid enough to get in our way!”

  “Well, who knows,” she said. “You may get your wish.”

  “The truth is cold,” said Akreen. “But vengeance is hot.”

  “And right now,” Pyke said, “we are so very, very hot!”

  For a moment or two no one said anything and Pyke felt as if he were coming down from the high of having dodged death yet again. On his screen, a video feed from a hull cam–possibly the only one still functioning–showed what the guide signal was leading the Scarabus towards.

  The Sunheart’s harbour was a vast open space with amber-to-orange pulsing walls that reached up and up. Successive levels hung above the harbour in a steep incline, mostly strange open floors, some occupied by building complexes, others filled with landscaped gardens, or pools and waterfalls. The Scarabus was swooping down towards one end of a huge crescent of docks and berths. Pyke kept a nervous eye on the hull-strain indicators and the output readings for the primary generator, as the ship continued smoothly along the path towards one of the smaller berths. The hull cam panned to reveal the full sweeping curve of docking recesses and some were gargantuan.

  “Rensik uncovered some old documents about the Sunheart,” said Brock. “It says, ‘The Builder’s Hall of Command is at the very apex of this magnificent edifice. Risertube sedans provide a relaxed ascent past a series of architectural marvels, or visitors can avail themselves of autocraft that will transport them effortlessly to the Sunheart’s paramount level where every day crucial decision are—’”

  “What the hell is that?” Pyke said.

  “A translation Rensik did for me,” said Brock. “Sounds like a tourist brochure.”

  “Ya know what?” Pyke said, keying in a series of commands to stop the navigationals following guide data issued by the Sunheart docks. “I didn’t come all this way to be fobbed with some lame sightseer saunter! We’re here to end this! So no more shilly-shallying–it’s time we kicked in the front door–Scar, full power to the thrusters and get us to the skagging top of this thing!”

  From a lost corner of her memories, Dervla recalled some ancient pre-space song about being down so very long that everything starts to look like up. And during the drawn-out, seemingly endless captivity within her own skull, her own body, she had eventually reached a nadir of such hopeless, lifeless blackness that she thought it would consume her down to the core, that she would eventually cease to exist. But she was not consumed, she was not obliterated, and existence continued.

  And purely by the fact that she had endured and survived, she knew that she was stronger than her own despair, even though she had been without any kind of hope. And with that knowledge came an understanding of her captor, Xra-Huld, the realisation and recognition of the all-devouring fear of death–exacerbated by the loss of its four broodmates–which was the real driver of its lust for control, its abiding hate for anything that might constitute a threat.

  I see you, Dervla thought. Right at that moment the biomech was conducting a small conference with several planetary Shuskar Governors, speaking with her mouth, gesturing with her hand, and she thought, Oh, how I see you, see the terror that crawls beneath the surface, buried deep and hidden well. But I see!

  When the time came she would hold up the mirror of its fears and shove them down its parasitic throat!

  And that was the moment when a massive splintering crash thundered and reverberated around the huge open auditorium. The Gun-Lord Xra-Huld paused in mid-sentence and turned to look.

  A ship had flown all the way up to the paramount tier and crashed through the encircling glass barriers. Shattered glass rained down as the ship halted to perch on the wide topmost bank of seating, with some of its landing gear extended and a couple of the auditorium’s long narrow banners draped across its hull
.

  Xra-Huld’s fury was blistering as he ordered all the auditorium guards to attack and open fire on the intruder vessel. And Dervla, staring through her own eyes, could scarcely believe that she was looking at the Scarabus. And if she’d had control of her own mouth she would have gleefully yelled, “Kill them, Pyke! Kill them all!”

  Akreen’s opinion of the Human male, Pyke, was a variable thing. Sometimes the Human’s lack of respect and scant regard for status and the chain of command was so pronounced that the First Blade considered trying to put himself in charge. At other times, Pyke’s impulsive resort to extravagant imprecations reminded Akreen of the few Valzanians he had encountered away from the battlefields, veterans in cursing, each and every one. Then Akreen would observe how Pyke cajoled and persuaded his colleagues to follow a particular course of action, including his crew, who were permitted latitudes of dissent that would have been unacceptable in a Zavri battalion. But when Pyke ordered his ship to fly straight to the apex of the Sunheart’s elaborately stratified structure, what Akreen felt was a surge of exhilaration!

  All that he could perceive about the situation came from the display screens before him. The ship system readouts were incomprehensible, but the video feed from the hull cam as the ship flew vertically was compelling. The immense tiers and structures became a bizarre topography across which the Scarabus hurtled. Akreen’s physiology, as always, was sensitive to the electrical flows of his surroundings, such that he had dampened it ever since stepping aboard Pyke’s vessel. Now he was extending that sensitivity again, preparing himself for the struggle that lay ahead.

  “This is it!” Pyke yelled from above. “Hold on to yer hats!”

  For a moment Akreen wondered why he didn’t have a hat to hold on to… then on the screen the shiny reflective surface that the Scarabus was passing over suddenly swung up to become an obstacle that the ship smashed its way through. Amid a cascade of splintering panes, falling and shattering on the ship’s hull, Pyke steered them into a huge U-shaped auditorium, using the suspensors to halt and settle onto a wide curving bank of seats, extending some landing legs to keep the ship level. Pyke and the female Brock were arguing over who should be first out, even as the first sounds and flashes of small arms fire became evident. Akreen decided to exert some First Blade authority, although with sufficient Human-like courtesy to avoid what the lieutenant once referred to as “rubbing someone up the wrong way”.