‘You go on through,’ said Gant, then abruptly fired up at the ceiling as one of the ship’s Golem came scuttling across it like a spider. The explosion took out ceiling panels and caused sparking cables, insulation, and structural members to rain down. Half the lighting panels went out. Cormac did not hesitate – Gant could move a damned sight faster than he could, so it was logical he should come through last. Cormac was already running for the landing craft when to his horror he saw that blast doors were slowly drawing across the shimmer-shield maintained over the mouth of the bay.
‘Move it, Gant!’
Behind him there were further explosions. He reached the craft just behind the others and looked back just as Gant dived through the doors, rolled, came upright and turned and fired at the ship’s Golem following close behind him. Then Gant was running for the landing craft. Cormac went down on one knee and took careful aim at the doors – subliminally seeing Scar doing the same beside him. At his back he heard thrusters starting on the landing craft and felt a side-wash as the grav-plates underneath it disengaged. Two Golem came through the doors, both of them with pulse-rifles. Scar and Cormac’s fire intersected on one and blew it to scrap. The second one fired at Gant, and had him stumbling with smoke exploding from his back. But Gant was Golem too and soon regained his balance and continued. Scar now hit the second Golem, while Cormac tracked other movement to his right. More Golem over there, and he felt a sinking in his stomach when he saw what they were carrying.
‘Into the ship, now!’ he bellowed, Gant being close enough.
They piled into the landing craft even as it began to lift and turn. Cormac glanced ahead, saw Apis at the controls, and thought it superfluous to urge him to get them out of there. He hurried forward, dropped into the seat beside the Outlinker, strapped himself in, and glanced down at the screen giving a rear view, as the craft tilted nose-down and headed for the shimmer-shield. But there were Golem back there, aiming APWs, so this was not fast enough. Purple flashes igniting the bay, the craft lurched as if a giant hand had slapped its back end.
‘Use the ion drive,’ Cormac instructed – calm and cold.
Apis hit the control for ion drive but, obviously damaged, it blew out its grids and hot metal exploded back into the bay – straight into the faces of the Golem. There was some satisfaction in that, but now nothing but the thrusters operated, and it seemed to be taking forever to reach the shimmer-shield. Cormac noticed that the outer doors had ceased to close, it now being evident that they would not close in time to prevent the landing craft getting out of the bay. Behind, more Golem with APWs were gathering. Skellor did not want those doors now closed between themselves and the Golem. Purple flares again, and again the ship lurched, pieces of it blasting forward, away past the cockpit, in a glittering shower out into space. Then white light filled the bay behind them as the second CTD detonated, and the craft tumbled out through the shimmer-shield on a plume of fire.
‘Perfect timing,’ opined Gant, as he grabbed Scar and pulled the dracoman down into a seat, before strapping himself in. Scar dropped his seat back as far as it would go, for only like this would it accommodate him, and he snarled as he too strapped himself in. Mika muttered something, turned pale, then grabbed up a sick-bag from the compartment on one side of her seat – with grav-plates being so common in Polity ships, there were not many who’d had the microsurgical alteration to their inner ear that prevented motion sickness. Apis, of course, was now in his element.
‘Yeah,’ said Cormac, glancing back at Gant. ‘But Skellor got control of the doors, so how long before he gets control of the weapons systems?’
All of them gazed at the screens as the craft’s thrusters propelled it with painful slowness from the vast ship, so that they rose almost like a drifting balloon from a metal plain. Cormac wondered how long it would take. Tomalon had said Skellor now controlled the Occam’s engines, so he could trundle along behind them while he got the dreadnought’s weapons online. In fact he probably wouldn’t even need to move the Occam – they weren’t exactly escaping at any great speed.
‘Perhaps we should have stayed in there?’ Gant suggested.
Difficult call: if they had stayed, the Golem would have killed them; escaping like this the Occam’s weapons would kill them. With his emotions under a mental boot heel, Cormac realized he had lost, and that he and these people with him were soon to die.
Then something occluded their horizon: a moonlet of scaled flesh rolled down on them and engulfed them in wombish blackness. Momentarily they were slammed from side to side, and the landing craft groaned as if it might break. Then there was that familiar dislocation, that strange sideways pull into the ineffable, and Cormac knew they had entered U-space. He reached out to the console before Apis, and clicked down the button for external com.
‘I thought you’d lost your ability for trans-stellar flight,’ he said.
‘I lied,’ Dragon replied.
Enough of what it was to be human remained in him for the need to verbalize orders rather than assume complete control of their recipients. He gazed down at the Occam Razor’s Captain and saw that the man had managed to crawl as far as the door since being dethroned, leaving a snail trail of blood and plasma.
‘Kill that,’ Skellor instructed, and both Aphran and Danny walked across to the man and fired into his body simultaneously. Tomalon hardly moved – perhaps he had died already.
Skellor now gazed down at himself and realized that he would have to be permanently enthroned so long as he wanted to control this ship. Initially the Jain substructure had sent filaments into the connections, and down the optic cables and ducts that spread from this point, to control the disparate elements of the Occam Razor. But as he had sought to refill those spaces where the burn program had taken out essential AI subsystems, it had been necessary for him to thicken those filaments for the transference of information and power – to grow outwards into the ship. Now he sat enfolded in thick ligneous growths, like some woodland statue long abandoned in the roots of an oak. With every effort he made to take control of a system, this structure grew and thickened.
He looked up at Aphran and Danny. The boy wore no expression as, even though not directly linked, he was now a part of the structure – of Skellor. Aphran, however, bore an expression of barely contained horror.
‘Go and find those of your group who have survived, and return with them here,’ he instructed, then silently watched as they turned to the doors. With a microscopic part of himself, he opened those doors ahead of them. That had been one victory, one small system he had overcome. But not enough.
Still Skellor struggled to worm through the hardwired security that remained in place throughout the ship – integral to the control of the weapons systems – and still he was not quite there. So Cormac and his companions had escaped – just when he thought he had them, they had slipped from his grasp. And that both angered and scared him.
Skellor understood that no one must ever know of what he had done. ECS would hunt him down forever, and thus he would never be able to settle and find his strength. All those who had escaped must die – including Dragon. But before he killed them, he must first gain full control here. Connecting to cameras one after the other, he tracked the progress of Aphran and Danny through the ship, just as he tracked them from the inside through their augs. It occurred to him then that the two Separatists were operating like submind-directed ship’s drones, and that this was a much more efficient option than him trying to completely control everything. He could have called the remaining Separatists to himself, but that would have required him to personally direct each one here, which used up processing space. Yes, a certain amount of self-determination in those units underneath him was a good thing; that would free him up to concentrate on other tasks. He understood that there was a limit to just how much he could be aware of. It was not so much a case of processing power and memory space, but almost one of having some sort of emotional investment in every situation or system
he controlled or viewed.
Turning his head as much as the Jain structure allowed, Skellor viewed the other chairs in this bridge pod, and understood what he must do – there was a rightness to it, almost as if preordained. Seven chairs – and through Aphran and Danny’s augs he sensed that – including themselves – seven of the Separatists remained alive.
With an effort that momentarily blinded him to the continuous input of information from that part of the ship he did control, he grew spurs from those roots of Jain structure below the floor. He felt them rapidly growing, feeding on and converting the surrounding material as they did so – insulation, plastics, metals, chainglass. From the skein of optics he was already tracking out to the navigational instruments scattered about the surface of the ship, he sent a spur to one of those chairs. From the monitoring systems for the engines, another. From weapons control, life-support, internal security, ship’s maintenance, and shield control. Other smaller systems he attached where appropriate – structural integrity to ship’s maintenance, a split spur for control of the ship’s reactors to all of them . . . Command was totally his own, but each of the others would possess what autonomy he allowed them. Glancing down he watched these growths breaking through the floor below the seven seats and spreading underneath them. Then he stared at the doors and waited for his command crew to appear.
The utter stillness was familiar and Thorn immediately became aware that he was waking from cold-sleep. Running through mental routines inculcated into him over the many years of his training, he tried to remember just what his and Gant’s assignment was this time and, as had happened before, he remembered that Gant was dead. Confusion reigned for a moment as he tried to place himself – to remember where he was and what he was doing. Moving forward from the moment of Gant’s death, he remembered his return to Earth and the attempts by a Sparkind general to dissuade him from transferring out, next the retraining in both VR and the field for undercover duties in ECS, and a couple of infiltration missions in the Sol system before shipping out to Cheyne III. Then he remembered what had happened there.
There came a buzzing click, then a crack, and a pale line of light cut down to the left of him. Knowing what came next in no way ameliorated the sudden feeling of pins and needles as the nerve-blocker detached from his neck – it felt as if someone had been rolling him in cactus spines. The lid of the cold-coffin swung away from him – a man-shaped impression in hoared metal. This being a coffin that was upright in relation to ship’s gravity, handles extruded from the metal on either side of him and he grabbed them as soon as he was able to move his arms. The needles retracted, to be replaced by the sensation of his skin having been rubbed raw – burnt even. He gasped his first breath, fluid bubbled in his lungs, and he coughed and swallowed. Looking to his left, he saw John Stanton step out of his own coffin and begin isometric exercises – obviously the man was a veteran of travelling this way. It took Thorn a while longer, as he lifted each leg alternately and flexed it, stretched his back and neck, then stepped out as if onto ice, with one hand still gripping a handle for support.
‘It never gets any better,’ he commented.
After touching his toes a couple of times, then running on the spot for a moment with his breath gouting in the cold air of the hold, Stanton replied, ‘Never really bothered me. Sometimes you welcome the oblivion on long hauls.’ Stanton moved down past Thorn and headed towards the entry to the ship’s living quarters. Over his shoulder he said, ‘Only one shower here, so you’ll have to wait.’
Thorn now tried a few exercises himself. Even though normal sensation had mostly returned, the ends of his fingers were still numb from the nerve damage done by the toxin Brom had used on him. Another session with this ship’s autodoc seemed likely, he realized, as he went to a locker beside the coffins to find himself disposable overalls to wear while he awaited his turn in the shower. Donning the compressed paper fabric, he glanced round as Jarvellis stepped out of the flight cabin, heading for the living quarters.
‘Where are we?’ he asked her.
She halted and studied him. ‘Just coming insystem. The gas giant Calypse sits between Masada and us at the moment. It’ll take about six days.’ She gestured towards the flight cabin. ‘By all means go and take a look. John and I need a little privacy for a while.’
Closing the stick-strip of his coverall, Thorn nodded and, after slipping on the deck shoes that came in the same packet, headed towards the flight cabin. He understood her perfectly: obviously she had come out of cold-sleep some time before himself and Stanton, and he well knew how the body’s normal function kicked in over a very short period of time – he himself had often felt unbearably horny in the hour after thaw-up. What he did not understand was why the two of them hadn’t left him on ice for a while longer. Looking around, he was suddenly aware of how cramped the cargo area now was. With only small chagrin, he realized that Stanton and Jarvellis had been out of cold-sleep at least once since he himself had gone into it.
In the flight cabin, Thorn dropped into one of the command chairs and gazed at the main screen. Displayed there was the gas giant Calypse, with the corona of the sun glaring to the right of it – its main light muted by a black reactant disc. As Stanton had explained before they had gone into cold-sleep, Masada was surrounded by the laser arrays and cylinder worlds of the Theocracy, with the planetary population held in constant thrall by the ruling caste’s technological advantage. This being the case he wondered how his colleagues intended to get Lyric II down to the surface. Admittedly, there were often holes through which a small ship could slip, since in any space-borne civilization there had to be a lot of traffic. But this ship, though it could be mistaken for an insystem hauler, was not exactly small. He thought he might as well experiment.
‘Lyric, are you able to respond to me?’ he asked.
‘I can respond, though you might not like the response,’ the ship AI replied.
‘I’m a little puzzled about how Stanton intends to get this ship down to the planet’s surface undetected. He told me that there’s just one spaceport and that’s only for Theocracy military or cargo traffic, and I’ve every reason to suspect that the cargo on board here is not for them.’
‘And what was your question?’ Lyric asked him.
‘How does he intend to get this ship down to the surface of Masada undetected?’
‘Sorry, can’t tell you that.’
‘Do you have Theocracy security codes?’
‘Didn’t last time I looked.’
Sitting back Thorn grimaced to himself: only the terminally naive believed that AIs did not lie. In fact, in his own experience AIs made better liars than human beings.
‘What’s your cargo?’ he asked bluntly.
‘Do get real, Mr Polity agent.’
‘Okay, what can you tell me about Masada?’
‘I’ve got about ten thousand hours on the subject. What do you want to know? Political system, ecosystem, symbiotic adaptation, religion? About half of what I have covers that last subject alone.’
‘How about half an hour’s eclectic selection? I should think I’ll be able to get use of the shower by then.’
‘All right, I’ll begin with the planetary ecosystem prior to the arrival of human beings, findings of the first surveys, then subsequent occupation, and then the history of the Theocracy. Would that be sufficient?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
With Thorn asking questions, the film show lasted an hour. The two items that most fascinated him were the natural ecosystem and the odd life system introduced by the Theocracy: in the former case the tricones, heroynes, gabbleducks and terrifying hooders; and in the latter the adapted crops and protein sources that were a product of the toil of most of the surface inhabitants. Also the symbiotic life-forms created as a cheaper alternative to breathers and environment suits, as well as being more dogmatically acceptable to the Theocracy than any adaptation of the God-given human form. He was just asking about the Underground when S
tanton entered the flight cabin.
‘Not a very stable situation,’ Thorn observed to him.
‘No, but stable enough to last for another fifty years, without a sufficient push to topple it meanwhile,’ Stanton replied.
Thorn gestured to the cargo hold. ‘And all that stuff’s part of the “push”?’
‘It is,’ said Stanton. ‘And, do you know, when I bought the main bulk of this cargo on Huma, that planet was undergoing Polity subsumption.’
‘That normally takes some time, but obviously you found an opening?’
Stanton shrugged. ‘So I thought. Things were chaotic there, but not very much so. When I found out how tight the security was, I was tempted to go somewhere else, but then a dealer approached me.’
‘But you risked the deal anyway?’ Thorn asked.
‘I had a way out but, strangely, I didn’t need it. The Polity agents I could see watching my every move did not even attempt to intervene.’
‘You’re saying you have Polity sanction?’
‘It was known who I was buying this cargo for. What I am saying is that it’s in the interest of the Polity for things to become as unstable as possible on Masada. ECS intends to draw the Line across the world, and most of its population will welcome them gladly.’
‘Will you?’
Stanton stared at the screen, now showing a lurid but almost rustic scene on the surface of the planet – except for the proctors watching over all from their aerofans, with rail-guns trained on the people below.
‘As a child here I always felt there had to be something better than Theocracy rule, but while here, and for some time after, I never saw how you could get beyond the sordid facts of human nature. I’ve since learnt that the way you do get beyond is by removing human nature from the equation.’
‘So you are a reformed Separatist?’ said Thorn.
Stanton glared at him. ‘I have never been a Separatist. I’m a mercenary, and that’s all.’