by Neal Asher
Once the hole was wide enough she detached the grab claw, then swung the ship around and reversed it into the cave. Utter darkness now, but every movement and action she precisely mapped in her extended haiman mind. At her order the ship fired cable-mounted gecko pads against the cavern wall, and drew itself into place. With an afterthought she made it clamp its main grab, like the pincers of some giant mechanical earwig, to a rocky outcrop. Then she powered down all the ship’s systems, before heading out to explore her new home.
After physically detaching her carapace, and herself, from the interface sphere, Orlandine headed aft to don a spacesuit and assister frame, then scuttled to the airlock. Once outside she clung to the hull and looked around. With her cowl up, the cavern seemed as bright as day from residual infrared emanating from the ship’s thrusters and the fluorescing of complex ices nearby.
The cavern stretched a hundred yards across and was four times as long, curving near the end down into a narrow hole. The walls consisted of countless concave hollows holding rounded pebbles encased in tough nodular masses of ice. Gas had bubbled through magma, then cooled, and the subsequent stresses had collapsed thin shells of rock into fragments. The cavern acted like a tumbling machine each time the sun thawed the comet, rounding the fragments eventually into pebbles. Millions of years of thaws and freezes, maybe billions had elapsed. That no pebbles floated free was probably due to them picking up enough frictional heat to stick to the ice as it cooled and supercooled. Orlandine pushed herself off from the hull, floated over to one side wall and grabbed an ice nodule to steady herself. Where her foot brushed accidentally against the wall, pebbles tumbled away like opaque bubbles. She would have to watch that. Careless movement in here could result in the open space being filled with a perpetual hail of them. Taking care to only grab clear ice nodules with no pebbles stuck to their surfaces, she made her way along the wall to the hole leading into another cavern. However, briefly peering in there confirmed just more of the same.
Orlandine spent less than an hour exploring before returning to the Heliotrope. How long could she tolerate waiting here? Back within her ship she decided to explore Jain technology in a virtuality. Perhaps that would keep boredom at bay.
Boredom did not get a chance to impinge.
* * * *
Some in the cave were resting, others still meticulously checking weaponry. Blegg sat unnaturally motionless on a boulder, his head bowed. Cormac bowed his own head, and in his gridlink opened the memory package given to him by Jerusalem, and uploaded it directly to his mind. First, came the pain, then Cormac became himself, many months before:
They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it as both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento became a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour…
…
This is memory, and I must not lose sight of that. The pain is not real. My mind is whole, I am whole…
…
Cormac fought against the enclosing structure, but could do nothing to help Cento. When he felt the wash of tidal forces through his body, he knew that in very little time that same wash would intensify sufficiently to shatter the Jain structure, but by then the tidal forces would have compressed and stretched his body to a sludge of splintered bone and ruptured flesh inside it. It occurred to him, with crazy logic, that such damage to himself was required as payment for the pain he already suffered. On another level it occurred to him that he was not entirely rational at that moment.
…
You didn’t try to subvert Cento. You knew you were going to die and just wanted the satisfaction of tearing him apart with your hands. Skellor, you erred.
…
The Ogygian jerked once, twice, then suddenly Cormac lay heavy inside the Jain structure — being crammed over to one side. Grappling claws.
…
Cento and Skellor both slammed into the wall. The Golem was down to metal, and Skellor even managed to tear some of that away. Long pink lesions cut into Skellor’s own blackened carapace, golden nodules showing in these like some strange scar tissue.
…
It became too much: to choose a moral death, then to accept an inevitable one, and then to have both taken away. If only he could strike even the smallest blow. But he could do nothing—was ineffectual. Then, in that moment of extremity, Cormac saw the way. Wasn’t it laughably obvious?
…
Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three yards to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.
Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and began to fire.
…
‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.
…
Cento, now impacted on the surface of a dark sun, along with Skellor.
…
Gasping a warm damp breath of the cave’s air, Cormac jerked into the present. Checking the time readout in his gridlink he realized that though those events aboard the ancient spaceship Ogygian took very little time, it had taken just over an hour for him to incorporate them in his mind. But what a vast difference his knowledge of them imposed on his thinking.
He had suffered horribly at Skellor’s hands, his mind just as ripped up as his body at the end. But he had translated himself through U-space—something always considered an impossibility for a human being, which was why he had never really believed Blegg to be human. But now Blegg claimed to be the avatar Cormac had accused him of being, and could not translate himself through U-space, yet it seemed Cormac could.
Cormac heaved himself up from the boulder he was propped against, phantom pains shooting through his body as it remembered old injuries, and his mind muggy and seemingly dislocated within his skull. Glancing across the cave he saw one of the Sparkind attaching a CTD to the underside of the autogun. It would be set to detonate the moment that weapon ran out of ammunition. Spikes had since been driven into the rocky lip of the fissure down which they intended to exit, and dracomen and the other Sparkind were checking the cable winders attached to their belts. For a moment Cormac experienced a surge of painful memory: that time on Samarkand when he, Thorn, Gant, and the two Golem, Cento and Aiden, had prepared similar gear for their descent into a shaft cut down into the ground. And how Gant died there—the first time.
‘What has the memory given you?’ Blegg, standing at his shoulder.
Without turning, Cormac replied, ‘I don’t really know. I now look around this cave and it seems to me all this rock is as insubstantial as mist, yet I know that if I try to step through it the most probable result will be concussion.’ Now he turned to face Blegg fully. ‘I am not the same person I was then. Jerusalem needed to subsequently rebuild much of my body and my mind, since I was neither whole nor, I think, entirely sane.’
‘Perhaps… in a moment of extremity…’
‘Perhaps.’
Cormac now observed the flesh-stripped Golem crouching over the badly burnt soldier. The Golem removed the autodoc, took some thumb-sized bloody object from one of its manipulators and put it to one side, then pressed some control so that the autodoc folded away all its surgical gear. He then returned it to its case.
‘They wouldn’t have been able to get him safely through the fissure,’ Blegg explained. �
��And he remained lucid enough to make his wishes known… via his aug.’
‘He chose to die?’ Cormac asked.
‘He was memplanted.’ Hence the bloody object just extracted.
‘Oh that’s all right then.’ Cormac felt a surge of anger return, then immediately stamped on it because again he realized its source. The wounded soldier would have been an encumbrance they could ill afford. And in a horrible way he felt grateful that the sheer lethality of the weapons used against them had left so few wounded, yet also horrified about how many they had killed. Including Thorn. He turned towards the survivors, seeing they only awaited his instructions. ‘Okay, we go now. No point waiting here until the enemy start coming through the walls. You Golem run the lead lines down and the rest of us will follow. Arach’—he turned to locate the drone, which came scuttling from a side cave—‘I take it you don’t need a line?’
‘Nah, these extra legs have their compensation,’ the drone grated.
Cormac nodded. ‘Myself and Blegg will go down last on the lines. I want you to remain here until we’ve reached the bottom. I want you to detach any lines up here that don’t auto-detach, then follow us down.’
‘Sure thing, boss,’ the spider-drone replied.
Cormac eyed Arach, then headed over to the fissure. As he approached, the leading Golem pulled end-rings from the cable winders on their belts, unreeling monofilament cables apparently as thick as climbing ropes as the winders sprayed them with orange cladding—providing both easier grip and to protect the unwary from filament thin enough to slice through flesh. The Golem then attached the rings to the spikes driven into the stone lip before abseiling down. The rest followed, attaching their belt winders as they went. Scar followed his dracomen down, then Cormac waved Blegg ahead of him. The old Oriental nodded and almost reluctantly joined the descent.
‘Arach, what are you going to do?’ Cormac asked as the spider-drone stepped delicately up beside him. ‘You can’t follow us all the way once down below.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
It seemed to Cormac the drone danced a little, almost gleefully. He knew it relished the prospect of battle, but did it want to die?
‘I could always stay with you,’ Cormac suggested, and wondered where the hell that had come from.
Just then the rock about them shuddered and stalactites within the cavern crashed to the floor, shattering like porcelain.
‘I thought they were hours away from us,’ Cormac said.
‘That was nothing to do with the burrowers,’ Arach replied. ‘I just detected a gravitic anomaly.’
Cormac felt heartened by this. The ECS Centurions contained gravtech weapons, and the brief quake he had just felt indicated they might be using them.
‘Time we were on our way?’ Arach pointed down into the fissure with one sharp leg.
Cormac walked over, then turned to scan all around inside the cave before lowering himself down. He clipped the line into its slot in his belt winder, which governed its friction setting to how fast he moved. At first he abseiled down the slope, but when its angle altered to make this impossible, he had to walk backwards down it. Away from the lights up in the main cavern, he turned on his envirosuit light. Time dragged by without the others yet coming in sight, and he thought that those below him must be moving faster, so he accelerated. The slope began to level out further when Scar and Blegg became visible to him. He could see them ducking as the fissure began to close up. By the time he reached them, the cave floor had levelled and the party stood grouped together.
‘Time to detach those lines,’ he suggested.
Crouching its way past, a Golem moved to the rear and sent up the signal to open the connector rings. With a high whine the monofilament wound in to belt winders, stripped-off cladding showering the floor like orange-coloured chipping from an auto-plane. Only a few yards behind the open rings at the ends of the returning lines came Arach.
Scar moved up beside Cormac. ‘We will soon have to crawl through a very narrow section.’ The dracoman gestured at the drone. ‘The drone’s body is ten inches too thick.’
Arach gave a wide spiderish shrug. ‘Guess I’ll have to leave it for our friends then.’ Abruptly the drone jumped, flipping over, the tips of its legs finding purchase in ceiling crevices. There came a low-pitched grating sound and from between the spider drone’s body and the ceiling, a talc of rock dust showered down. Then came a couple of clonks and a hydraulic hiss, as Arach eased forwards and dropped from his abdomen, spinning round to land on his legs again. After a moment the abdomen, remaining attached to the ceiling, opened its hatches and lowered the two gatling cannons.
‘Neat trick,’ Cormac commented.
‘One of my favourites,’ Arach replied. ‘Though my power reserve is much smaller now.’
Cormac eyed the drone: it looked somehow even more sinister now it appeared to be all legs. ‘Will it survive the CTD blast?’ He pointed up.
‘So long as the roof doesn’t collapse, and maybe even then,’ Arach replied.
Cormac nodded. ‘Let’s keep moving, shall we?’
They crawled through crevices where sometimes Cormac found it necessary to turn his head sideways to manage to worm through. It was exhausting work, and during the first few hours Cormac stayed thoroughly aware of time passing. Reaching an area in which it again became possible to stand almost upright, he called a halt and they broke out supplies. He eyed the dracomen, who opened packets of what looked like raw meat and gobbled it down. He, Blegg, and the human Sparkind enjoyed more standard fare, and Cormac never knew coffee to taste so good.
‘Time is passing,’ Blegg noted.
‘It is,’ Cormac replied. ‘At our present rate of travel we should reach the pool Scar’s people detected—not long before the estimated breakthrough time of our friends above. We definitely need to be underwater by the time that autogun runs out.’
‘Yes, we certainly do.’
Cormac glanced at him. ‘Not feeling so fatalistic now?’
Blegg started to say something, then decided against it. ‘We should be moving on,’ he finally replied.
Cormac was worming through another particularly cramped stretch when he heard the distant sound of the autogun firing. Checking, it surprised him to see how much time had passed, and realized Blegg’s estimate not to have been far off—it took their attackers ten hours and fifteen minutes to break through. Cormac’s estimate of their own progress had not been so good. Even the dracomen were growing weary, and the pools not yet in sight.
‘Thirty yards to go,’ came Arach’s call from ahead.
‘Move!’ Cormac bellowed. ‘We need to get through here fast!’
Here, as soon as the CTD blew, they would be fried—the heat and energy of its blast funnelled down to them through the fissure. They all began moving a lot faster and with less regard for minor injuries. Cormac listened to the whoosh and chatter of the gun — waiting for that moment when it ceased. Abruptly Scar and Blegg, just ahead of him, were rising up onto hands and knees and progressing faster. He heard a splash, and yet another splash. As he too rose up from his belly into a crouch, Scar passed the ring end of a line back to him. He attached it to his winder—too easy to get lost under water that might quickly turn murky. Through his gridlink he raised the helmet and closed the visor of his envirosuit, and followed the others down into water lanced through with their envirosuit light beams.
About them the pool lay deep and wide, but soon the two dracomen ahead led them into a narrow intestinal pipe corkscrewing through the rock. Twice they surfaced in travertine sumps, and on a third occasion a glare of light passing through the water ignited the sump with rainbow colours.
‘The autogun just ran out,’ one of the human Sparkind commented.
They waited, then suddenly the water itself surged upwards, forcing them towards the ceiling.
Now, thought Cormac, only Arach’s little present stands between them and us. He reckoned those Jain-construc
ted biomechs could move faster down here than he and his fellows, though they might have to burrow again if there had been intervening rock falls.
‘What explosives do we have remaining?’ he asked.
‘Grenades, eight planar mines and one more CTD,’ replied one of the Golem.
‘Let’s hope we won’t need the CTD,’ he said. ‘Position the mines where you deem appropriate—proximity detonation.’ He added unnecessarily, ‘Let’s keep moving,’ as the water level descended.
Within an hour they left the pipe and ascended a gently upward-sloping fissure. The temperature slowly began to rise, which indicated this cave system opened up somewhere to the surface. Then abruptly the upward slope ended against a wall of stone. Reaching this and directing his envirosuit light upwards, Cormac discerned another fissure climbing up into darkness.
‘How many mines left?’
‘Four.’
‘Okay, you Golem take the lead. Position two of the mines up in the fissure and when you reach a suitable point, run lines down.’
As the Golem headed rapidly up through the fissure Cormac turned to the others. ‘All of you, take a rest.’ He himself felt utterly drained, partly a result of the stimulants he had used while fighting through the jungle above. He did not want to use any more of them until it became absolutely necessary.
Lines snaked down to them twenty minutes later, just as a dull boom echoed through the cave system. The biomechanism must now have entered the underwater cave system. They hooked up their winders and ascended to where the Golem had secured themselves. The fissure here turned to follow an angle of thirty degrees from the horizontal still ascending.
With disheartening regularity over the next few hours the mines they had planted detonated behind them. Twice they needed to stop and take seismic readings to find some available course ahead. Once it became necessary to use one of their remaining mines, then some of the grenades, to blast a way through into another tunnel. While in there another dull boom resounded from behind. Checking some instrument one of the Golem told them, ‘That was the last mine we planted.’ Cormac felt he really did not need that—he could count. Then, manoeuvring through one sharply curving tunnel, he noticed a steady climb in temperature. Further along he found it necessary to close up his envirosuit. Next, reddish light began to impinge.