Neal Asher - Line War

‘Is the remote dead?’ she asked.

‘It wasn’t really alive, Mika.’

‘Interesting way you employed it,’ she observed.

‘I am always prepared to learn,’ Dragon replied. ‘And I have always thought Cormac’s Shuriken rather effective.’

Those other assailants had to be in the suiting room by now, so Mika turned her attention to the outside lock. Thankfully it opened with ease and in a moment she was out on the docking ring of the Trafalgar. It was disheartening to see just the nose of the attack ship protruding some hundreds of yards around that ring. Her boots sticking gecko fashion, she started plodding towards it.

‘Faster,’ Dragon instructed. ‘I cannot see them now, but they will not have given up.’

Mika accelerated, then everything shuddered around her, the docking ring jerking underneath her feet and nearly breaking the grip of her boots. She went down on one knee for stability’s sake, reaching out to lodge her fingers in the port for an oxygen line. Light flared around her, overloading her suit visor’s light amplification. Using the belt control she quickly brought it down, her surroundings resolving back to visibility out of the glare. Gazing out she saw huge movement now in the Jain coral. A whole mass of it, to one side, had broken from its surroundings and shifted, and a veritable swarm of fragments was swirling up around it. Everything about her was now moving, but at least not so violently. She stood up and hurried on towards the docked attack ship.

‘Dragon, what’s happening?’ she asked, wondering if those objects she had earlier seen Dragon attaching to coral branches were bombs.

‘It is a dangerous option,’ said Dragon, ‘for this is an energy-starved system and injecting energy of any kind can activate it — as you have seen.’

Mika glanced back. The airlock door she had just used was spinning out into vacuum, with a smaller version of the mech that had chased her clinging to it. Flat segmented worms were now oozing from the airlock and, sticking easily to the material of the docking ring, began to squirm after her. They were moving faster than she was.

‘Do not let them catch you,’ said Dragon. ‘They will just utilize the materials of your body and your suit for the energy they will then provide.’

With its remote gone, was Dragon gazing through her suit’s sensors or her own eyes?

Glaring light again, with a bluish cast she recognized as originating from a particle cannon.

‘You mean eat me.’

Mika was moving as fast as she could manage without breaking contact with the docking ring. Soon the attack ship was looming above her and she moved into its shadow, knocking up light amplification again and heading for the docking tube and surrounding mechanisms. As she clambered along the framework towards the attack ship, the pursuing flatworms moved into the same shadow and reared up. Upon the underside of the attack ship she re-engaged her boot soles and walked upside down round the hull, back into that intermittent blue glare. Eyes fixed on the hull horizon she hurried round, hoping to see her intership craft at any moment. The flatworms had now reached the hull too, and were speeding towards her. Then it was there, the top of her craft, and a few more paces brought it fully into view.

It was useless to her.

Jain-tech tendrils had wound up over the skids and now bound the craft firmly to the attack ship. Portions of the little craft were missing and inside the cockpit silver worms revolved like a bait ball of fish. Flatworms were in sight beyond it, and others still coming up behind her.

‘Throw yourself from the ship, Mika.’

Mika squatted, turned off the gecko function of her boots, then launched herself out into vacuum. Behind her the flatworms speared up like spiral towers, and began to straighten and narrow, extending towards her. Then bright light flared all around them and they beaded like heated wire solder. The ensuing blast flung her through hot smoky gas and fragments burning like fuse paper, and she saw a giant chunk of Jain coral tumbling past her. More snaky things stabbed into view, snapping closed on her like the arms of a hydra, then pulled her fast down to the surface of the draconic moon that now loomed into view.

Mika lay there pinned tight by Dragon’s pseudopods as a volcano of white fire erupted in a ring extending perhaps half a mile across all around her. She was forced against the restraining pseudopods by sudden acceleration and, through smoke, flame and a storm of coral fragments, watched the Trafalgar and its grisly contents recede.

She felt safe now, but it wasn’t until Dragon drew clear of the disintegrating blooms of coral that she learned the cost of that safety. The other part of Dragon hung scarred and burned in accretion-disc fog, hardly recognizable as a sphere so severe was its damage, and beyond lay the hollowed-by-fire remains of a whole host of giant biomechs like the first that had attacked. That other half of Dragon looked decidedly dead to her

‘Now you talk to him,’ said Dragon.

For a moment Mika had no idea what the alien entity was referring to.

Cormac gazed upon the scene with a feeling of impotent frustration.

Individually the wormships were no match for the Cable Hogue or Jerusalem, but there were hundreds of them. He watched as one of Erebus’s fleet abruptly accelerated towards the two huge ships, beam weapons and DIGRAW blasts lashing out to hit the swarm of missiles earlier launched by the Hogue. Thousands upon thousands of explosions ensued, lighting up the fleet of wormships as if they were a shoal of sea creatures moving out into sunlight. They began launching their own missiles and rod-forms that must have come from their own stocks since they had destroyed all the free-floating ones. Space distorted between the Hogue and the wormships as the big ship employed the same weapon Cormac had seen it use at Ramone. He saw two of the alien vessels enveloped in spacial distortion before being slammed sideways into their fellows, the ensuing detonation scattering numerous others in the formation.

‘I cannot get through to either Jerusalem or Cable Hogue,’ said Vulture.

For a moment Cormac could not understand why he felt so uneasy about that.

‘Perhaps it would be better if you waited,’ he suggested, but he wasn’t sure why.

‘Why?’ the AI inevitably asked.

Cormac watched a wormship unravel as if dissolving in vacuum, numerous detonations within its compartmentalized structure steadily cutting it to pieces. He observed millipede chunks writhing away, trailing fire from each end; saw coppery rings, like slices from a pipe, spilling from one ship-thread hollowed out by some bright fast-burning incendiary. He had seen no missile hit the vessel, nor any other initial evidence of beam or gravity-weapon strikes. This destruction must have been the result of some electronic warfare device like the one the Hogue used to take out those first three wormships. Whatever, it was very effective — troublingly so.

‘It would be best if those two AIs did not learn of our presence here,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how they can ever win against a force like this, so if they are captured and any information reamed from them, Erebus will then know we are here.’

It was a completely plausible explanation, and it was also a lie. Something had kicked in with Cormac almost at a level below conscious analysis. Though Erebus was definitely the enemy, he simply did not sufficiently trust his own side. He wanted to step back to assess, and know more, before he committed himself to any new action.

The drones, he remembered.

Cormac used his U-sense to gaze back into the Harpy’s cargo hold and there observed the surviving drones: a great mass of metal insects occasionally shifting, here a claw opening and closing, there legs flexing against the ceiling, elsewhere some complex glittering appendage probing a com panel, all crammed together like the contents of an insectivore’s stomach. These armoured killers were comfortable in conditions no human could have tolerated or perhaps survived. He sought com contact with them, and it was Knobbler who replied, acting as spokesman for them all.