I tipped my head back and threw the neurachem into seeing through the swirling currents of light to the crystal roof. At first, I couldn’t understand what Vongsavath was talking about. I couldn’t find the gate, and guessed it had to be somewhere on the other side of the ship, completing another orbit. Then I zeroed in on a vague blotch of grey, too dim to be…
And then I understood.
The storm of light and power raging around us was not confined to the air under the dome. Space around the Martian vessel was also seething to life. The stars had faded to dimly-seen gleamings through a curtain of something that stood hazed and shivering, kilometres beyond the orbit of the gate.
“It’s a screen,” said Vongsavath with certainty. “We’re under attack.”
Over our heads, the storm was settling. Motes of shadow swam in the light now, here scattering to corners like shoals of startled silverfry seen in negative, elsewhere exploding in slow tumbling motion to take up station on a hundred different levels around the re-emerging corpses of the two Martians. Sequenced splinters of flashing colour flickered at the corners of attenuated fields in shades of pearl and grey. The overall thrumming subsided and the ship began to talk to itself in more denned syllables. Fluting notes echoed across the platform, interspersed with organ deep pulses of sound.
“This is—” My mind spun back to the narrow trawler cabin, the softly awake spiral of the datacoil, the motes of data swept to the top corner. “This is a datasystem?”
“Well spotted.” Tanya Wardani stalked under the trailing skirts of radiance and pointed up to the pattern of shadow and light gathered around the two corpses. There was a peculiar exultation on her face. “A little more extensive than your average desktop holo, isn’t it. I imagine those two have the primary con. Shame they’re not in any state to use it, but then I also imagine the ship is capable of looking after itself.”
“That depends on what’s coming,” said Vongsavath grimly. “Check out the upper screens. The grey background.”
I followed her arm. High up, near the curve of the dome a pearl surface ten metres across displayed a milky version of the starscape now dimmed by the shield outside.
Something moved there, shark-slim and angular against the stars.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Deprez.
“Can’t you guess?” Wardani was almost shivering with the strength of whatever was slopping around inside her. She stood centre stage to us all. “Look up. Listen to the ship. She’s telling you what it is.”
The Martian datasystem was still talking, in no language anyone was equipped to understand, but with an urgency that required no translator. The splintered lights—technoglyph numerals jolted through me, almost as knowledge; it’s a countdown—flashed over like digit counters tracking a missile. Querulous shrieks fluted up and down an unhuman scale.
“Incoming,” said Vongsavath, hypnotised. “We’re getting ready to engage with something out there. Automated battle systems.”
The Nagini—
I whipped around.
“Schneider,” I bellowed.
But Schneider was gone.
“Deprez,” I yelled it back over my shoulder, already on my way across the platform. “Jiang. He’s going for the Nagini.”
The ninja was with me by the time I reached the downward spiral pipe, Deprez a couple of steps behind. Both men hefted Sunjets, stocks folded back for easy handling. At the bottom of the pipe I thought I heard the clatter of someone falling, and a shriek of pain. I felt a brief snarl of wolf go through me.
Prey!
We ran, slithering and stumbling on the steep downward incline until we hit bottom and the empty, cherry-flashed expanse of the first chamber. There was blood smeared on the floor where Schneider had fallen. I knelt beside it and felt my lips draw back from my teeth. I got up and looked at my two companions.
“He won’t be moving that fast. Don’t kill him if you can avoid it. We still need to know about Carrera.”
“Kovacs!!”
It was Hand’s voice from up the pipe, bawling with repressed fury. Deprez dropped me a taut grin. I shook my head and sprinted for the exit to the next chamber.
Hunt!
It isn’t easy running when every cell in your body is trying to shut down and die, but the wolf gene splice and whatever else the Wedge biotechs had thrown into the cocktail rose through the midst of the nausea and snarled down the weariness. The Envoy conditioning rode it upward.
Check functionality.
Thanks, Virginia.
Around us the ship quivered and shook to wakefulness. We ran through corridors that pulsed with sequenced rings of the purple light I’d seen splash off the edge of the gate when it opened. In one chamber, one of the spine-backed machines moved to intercept us, facings awake with technoglyph display and cluttering softly. I fetched up short, smart guns leaping to my hands, Deprez and Jiang flanking me. The impasse held for a long moment and then the machine slouched aside, muttering.
We exchanged glances. Beyond the tortured panting in my chest and the thudding in my temples, I found my mouth had bent itself into a smile.
“Come on.”
A dozen chambers and corridors further on, Schneider proved smarter than I’d expected. As Jiang and I burst into the open of a bubble, Sunjet fire spat and crackled from the far exit. I felt the sting of a near miss across my cheek and then the ninja at my elbow had floored me with a sideways flung arm. The next blast lashed where I had been. Jiang hit, rolled and joined me on the floor, face up, looking at a smouldering cuff with mild distaste.
Deprez slammed to a halt in the shadow of the entrance we’d come through, eye bent to the sighting system of his weapon. The barrage of covering fire he laid down boiled up and down the edges of Schneider’s ambush point and—I narrowed my eyes—did absolutely no damage to the material of the exitway. Jiang rolled under the strafing beam and got a narrower angle on the corridor beyond. He fired once, squinted into the glare and shook his head.
“Gone,” he said, climbing to his feet and offering me his hand.
“I, uh, I, thanks.” I got upright. “Thanks for the push.”
He nodded curtly, and loped off across the chamber. Deprez clapped me on the shoulder and followed. I shook my head clear and went after them. At the exitway I pressed my hand against the edge where Deprez had fired. It wasn’t even warm.
The induction rig speaker fizzled against my throat. Hand’s voice came through in static-chewed incoherence. Jiang froze ahead of us, head cocked.
“…vacs, an… me—… ow.—peat, re… ow…”
“Say. Again?” Jiang, spacing his words.
“—saiiii…—port no…—”
Jiang looked back at me. I made a chopping gesture and knocked my own rig loose. Finger stab forward. The ninja unlocked his posture and moved on, fluid as a Total Body dancer. Somewhat less graceful, we went after him.
What lead Schneider had on us had lengthened. We were moving more slowly now, edging up to entrances and exits in approved covert assault fashion. Twice we picked up movement ahead of us and had to creep forward, only to find another wakened machine ambling about the empty chambers chuntering to itself. One of them followed us for a while like a stray dog in search of a master.
Two chambers out from the docking bay, we heard the Nagini’s drives powering up. The covert assault caution shattered. I broke into a staggering sprint. Jiang passed me, then Deprez. Trying to keep up, I doubled over, cramping and retching, halfway across the last chamber. Deprez and the ninja were twenty metres ahead of me when they ducked around the entrance to the bay. I wiped a thin string of bile away from my mouth and straightened up.
A shrilling, ramming, detonating scream, like brakes applied fleetingly to the whole expanding universe.
The Nagini’s ultravibe battery firing in a confined space.
I dropped the Sunjet, had both hands halfway to my ears and the pulse stopped as abruptly as it had started. Deprez staggered back into view,
painted bloody from head to foot, Sunjet gone. Behind him, the whine of the Nagini’s drives deepened to a roar as Schneider powered her up and out. A bang of disrupted air at the atmosphere baffles, barrelling back down the funnel of the docking bay and buffeting my face like a warm wind. Then nothing. Aching silence, tautened with the high-pitched hum of abused hearing trying to deal with the sudden absence of noise.
In the whining quiet, I groped after my Sunjet and made it to where Deprez was slumped on the floor, back to the curving wall. He was staring numbly at his hands and the gore that coated them. His face was streaked red and black with the same stuff. Under the blood, his chameleochrome battledress was already turning to match.
I made a sound and he looked up.
“Jiang?”
“This.” He lifted his hands towards me, and his features twisted momentarily, like the face of a baby not sure if it’s going to cry. The words came one at a time, as if he was having to stop and glue them together. “Is. Jiang. This is.” His fists knotted up. “Fuck.”
At my throat, the induction rig fizzled impotently. Across the chamber, a machine moved and sniggered at us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A Man Down is not a Man Dead. Leave No Stack Behind.
Most tight spec ops units like to sing that particular song; the Envoy Corps certainly did. But in the face of modern weaponry it’s getting harder and harder to sing it with a straight face. The ultravibe cannon had splashed Jiang Jianping evenly across ten square metres of docking bay deck and containing wall. None of the shredded and shattered tissue was any more solid than the stuff dripping off Luc Deprez. We walked back and forth through it for a while, scraping streaks in it with our boots, crouching to check tiny black clots of gore, but we found nothing.
After ten minutes, Deprez said it for us both.
“We are wasting our time, I think.”
“Yeah.” I lifted my head as something belled through the hull beneath our feet. “I think Vongsavath was right. We’re taking fire.”
“We go back?”
I remembered the induction rig and hooked it back on. Whoever had been yelling at us previously had given up; there was nothing on the channel but interference and a weird sobbing that might have been a carrier wave.
“This is Kovacs. Repeat, this is Kovacs. Status please.”
There was a long pause, then Sutjiadi’s voice crashed in the mike.
“—pened?—e…—aw… launch. Schnei—…—ay?”
“You’re breaking up, Markus. Status please. Are we under attack?”
There was a burst of distortion and what sounded like two or three voices trying to break in over Sutjiadi. I waited.
Finally, it was Tanya Wardani that came through, almost clear.
“…—ack here,…—acs…—afe. We…—ny,…—ger.—peat, no… da…—ger.”
The hull sang out again, like a struck temple gong. I looked dubiously down at the deck beneath my feet.
“Safe, did you say?”
“—essss…—o dang—…—ack immedi—…—afe.—peat, safe.”
I looked at Deprez and shrugged.
“Must be a new definition of the word.”
“Then we go back?”
I looked around, up at the stacked snake-body tiers of the docking bay, then back at his gore-painted face. Decided.
“Looks that way.” I shrugged again. “It’s Wardani’s turf. She hasn’t been wrong yet.”
Back on the platform, the Martian datasystems had settled to a brilliant constellation of purpose, while the humans stood beneath it all and gaped like worshippers getting an unexpected miracle.
It wasn’t hard to see why.
An array of screens and displays was stitched across the space around the central structure. Some were obvious analogues of any dreadnought’s battle systems, some defied comparison with anything I’d ever seen. Modern combat gives you a familiarity with compound datadisplay, an ability to glean the detail you need from a dozen different screens and readouts at speed and without conscious thought. Envoy Corps conditioning refines the skill even further, but in the massive radiant geometries of the Martian datasystem, I could feel myself floundering. Here and there, I spotted comprehensible input, images that I could relate back to what I knew was happening in the space around us, but even amongst these elements there were chunks missing where the screens gave out frequencies for unhuman eyes. Elsewhere, I couldn’t have told if the displays were complete, defective or totally fried.
Of the identifiable dataware, I spotted real-time visual telemetry, multi-coloured spectrograph sketches, trajectory mappers and battle dynamic analytical models, blast yield monitors and graphic magazine inventory, something that might have been grav gradient notation…
Centre screen in every second display, the attacker came on.
Skating down the curve of solar gravity at a rakish side-on angle, she was a slim, surgical-looking fusion of rods and elliptical curves that screamed warship. Hard on the heels of the thought, the proof dumped itself in my lap. On a screen that did not show real space, weaponry winked at us across the emptiness. Outside the dome, the shields our host had thrown up shimmered and fluoresced. The ship’s hull shuddered underfoot.
Meaning…
I felt my mind dilate as I got it.
“Don’t know what those are,” said Sun conversationally, as I arrived at her side. She seemed entranced by what she was watching. “Faster-than-light weaponry at any rate; she’s got to be nearly an astronomical unit out and we’re getting hit instantaneously every time. They don’t seem to do much damage, though.”
Vongsavath nodded. “Prelim systems scramblers, I’d guess. To fuck up the defence net. Maybe it’s some kind of grav disruptor, I’ve heard Mitoma are doing research into—” she broke off. “Look, here comes the next torpedo spread. Man, that’s a lot of hardware for a single launch.”
She was right. The space ahead of the attacking vessel had filled up with tiny golden traces so dense they could have been interference across the surface of the screen. Secondary displays yanked in detail and I saw how the swarm wove intricate mutual distract-and-protect evasion across millions of kilometres of space.
“These are FTL too, I think.” Sun shook her head. “The screens deal with it somehow, gives a representation. I think this has all already happened.”
The vessel I was standing on thrummed distantly, separate vibrations coming in from a dozen different angles. Outside, the shields shimmered again, and I got the vague sense of a shoal of something dark slipping out in the microsecond pulses of lowered energy.
“Counterlaunch,” said Vongsavath with something like satisfaction in her voice. “Same thing again.”
It was too fast to watch. Like trying to keep track of laser fire. On the screens, the new swarm flashed violet, threading through the approaching sleet of gold and detonating in blots of light that inked out as soon as they erupted. Every flash took specks of gold with it until the sky between the two vessels emptied out.
“Beautiful,” breathed Vongsavath. “Fucking beautiful.”
I woke up.
“Tanya, I heard the word ‘safe.’ ” I gestured up at the battle raging in rainbow representation over our heads. “You call this safe?”
The archaeologue said nothing. She was staring at Luc Deprez’s bloodied face and clothing.
“Relax, Kovacs.” Vongsavath pointed out one of the trajectory mappers. “It’s a cometary, see. Wardani read the same thing off the glyphs. Just going to swing past and trade damage, then on and out again.”
“A cometary?”
The pilot spread her hands. “Post-engagement graveyard orbit, automated battle systems. It’s a closed loop. Been going on for thousands of years, looks like.”
“What happened to Jan?” Wardani’s voice was stretched taut.
“He left without us.” A thought struck me. “He made the gate, right? You saw that?”
“Yeah, like a prick up a cunt,” said Von
gsavath with unexpected venom. “Man could fly when he needed to. That was my fucking ship.”
“He was afraid,” said the archaeologue numbly.
Luc Deprez stared at her out of his blood-masked face. “We were all afraid, Mistress Wardani. It is not an excuse.”
“You fool.” She looked around at us. “All of you, you fucking. Fools. He wasn’t afraid of this. This fucking. Light show. He was afraid of him.”
The jerked nod was for me. Her eyes nailed mine.
“Where’s Jiang?” asked Sun suddenly. In the storm of alien technology around us, it had taken that long to notice the quiet ninja’s absence.
“Luc’s wearing most of him,” I said brutally. “The rest is lying back on the docking bay floor, courtesy of the Nagini’s ultravibe. I guess Jan must have been afraid of him as well, huh Tanya?”
Wardani’s gaze flinched aside.
“And his stack?” Nothing showed on Sutjiadi’s face, but I didn’t have to see it. The wolf splice custom was dying to give me the same sinus-aching ride back behind the bridge of my nose.
Pack member down.
I locked it down with Envoy displacement trickery. Shook my head.
“Ultravibe, Markus. He got the full blast.”
“Schneider—” Vongsavath broke off and had to start again. “I will—”
“Forget about Schneider,” I told her, “He’s dead.”
“Get in the queue.”
“No, he’s dead, Ameli. Really dead.” And as their eyes fixed on me, as Tanya Wardani looked back disbelieving. “I mined the Nagini’s fuel cells. Set to blow on acceleration under planetary gravity. He vaporised the minute he crashed the gate. Be lucky if there’s tinsel left.”
Over our heads, another wave of gold and violet missiles found each other in the machine dance and, flickering, wiped each other out.
“You blew up the Nagini?” It was hard to tell what Vongsavath was feeling, her voice was so choked. “You blew up my ship?”
“If the wreckage is so dispersed,” said Deprez thoughtfully, “Carrera may assume we were all killed in the explosion.”
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