Neal Asher: Polity Agent

The adjacent room contained hastily constructed human facilities: a shower unit, toilet, a row of bunks and a food and drink dispenser. Fairly Spartan, but then what did he expect? Hailex took one of the bunks while Scar and the other dracomen took possession of some of the others. Cormac chose one and sprawled himself on it. Almost immediately weariness hit him in a wave, but he did not allow it to drag him under.

‘What do you intend to do with us?’ he asked.

‘An interestingly debatable question, and one I will consider in depth if by any chance I manage to survive a conflict that is only a few light hours away and currently spreading towards me.’

Cormac drifted off for a moment, then snapped back to consciousness as he felt the vibration of the ship’s fusion drive starting up. ‘You are moving away from the conflict?’

‘I am. There is some wreckage nearby and resources I might possibly utilize.’

‘Wreckage of what?’

The King of Hearts’s, AI gave him no reply.

Through Heliotrope’s sensors Orlandine observed some machine, shaped like a fifty-foot-long flatworm fashioned of copper, come oozing from the bunker structure. Within fractions of a second she assessed the situation: obviously the chlorine build-up in the methane sea below her had been detected. Plotting currents and distribution, whatever was responsible for the detecting had now worked out its probable source and had sent something to investigate. She needed to speed things up. Shutting down power to the mycelium, she instead supplied full power to the larger drill, then instructed all but two of the mooring harpoons to detach. Under the impetus of the drill, the ship swivelled slightly, drawing the cables taut. Relentlessly the bit bored down—only fifty feet to go. She started the pump that would increase shaft pressure behind the CTDs to force them down. As they began moving she loaded programming to the small impellers constructed to drive them through liquid methane and into position.

Forty feet.

The worm-thing reared up, its top section twisting into a helix. Detection. It knew her location now. Orlandine targeted it with Heliotrope’s cutting lasers. At this distance they would not hurt it, but that was not her intention. The helix snapped back down to its flat ribbed shape and, on either side of it, two jets of gas appeared. Orlandine targeted the apex of each gas stream as they abruptly sped towards her. Picking out the beams, lased green light flickered on ice dust in the almost non-existent atmosphere. Two incandescent explosions followed and a confetti of iron-hard ice rolled out before the blast waves. More missiles followed.

Twenty-five feet.

The CTDs now rested firmly behind the drill bit, but the quantity of chlorine down there might not be enough. It lay in a grey maybe area, for she could not know one hundred percent the efficiency of the mycelium. She damned Heisenberg.

No more missiles headed her way. Heliotrope bucked as blast waves struck it, and even inside the interface sphere she could hear a hail of ice against the hull. The attacker now started to head towards her ship. Whatever controlled it probably now fully realized the danger. Below, through the mycelium, she observed numerous rod-shaped objects emitted from the USER station and speeding up towards her like T-cells.

Fifteen feet.

The copper flatworm crashed its way through a last barrier of contorted ice out onto flat ground, and accelerated towards the ship. It was all about energy here. During the long journey from Cassius, Orlandine had prepared weapons systems for Heliotrope — two particle-beam projectors and a rail-gun that could operate up to near-c to fire solid projectiles as well as deploy the selection of esoteric missiles she had constructed. But now she did not possess a sufficient profligacy of energy to utilize them.

Ten feet.

Only one option remained. Initially she intended to inject the CTDs, seal the drill shaft, and fire up her ship’s fusion engine to escape before detonating them. Not a tenable option now.

The worm surged within fifty yards of the ship when Orlandine allowed the two harpoon cables to slacken. The drill’s torque turned the ship around precisely as far as she had calculated.

Five feet.

She fired up the fusion engine and two sun-bright blades of flame stabbed across, low above the icy ground, and struck the approaching worm. It held for a couple of seconds, then parts of it began to ablate. Abruptly it began to coil upwards, then it just flew apart. Orlandine shut down the engine.

Four feet.

‘Come on!’

Four feet.

‘Fuck, fuck!’

The drill shaft, being fed down in hollow sections behind the independently operating drill head, could clearly advance no more. Diagnostics screamed the reason at her: the force of the engine burn had bent one of the drill-shaft sections right below the ship. And the ship’s detectors now picked up seismic disturbances not caused by the drilling—more visitors. Orlandine began racking up pressure in the shaft and the drill bit began turning again as that pressure pushed it down further, but then it stopped again. No joy—and Orlandine knew what she must do. She resupplied power to the mycelium, then quickly detached herself from the interface sphere. No time for delay, no time at all. In the hold she donned a heavy-duty assister frame and spacesuit, then headed for the airlock, meanwhile maintaining EM contact with the ship’s systems.

The lock popped open on a settling snow of iridescent ice flakes. She glanced over towards where the engine flames had scorched the terrain and saw the remains of her attacker: its individual segments melted down into the ice, vivid rainbow light flaring and swirling around them—a low-temperature photoluminescent effect.

Stop admiring the view, Orlandine reprimanded herself, and scuttled down from the lock, clinging upside-down to the hull underneath the ship. Just four damned feet. The bent shaft-section now became visible. Over beside it she dropped to the ground and, using the same tools she had used on the Dyson segment to cut ice blocks, sliced down around it and began levering out chunks of ice. Minutes passed before she removed enough to clear a gap down around the shaft by four feet—minutes she could not now afford. Almost incidentally, still watching through the ship’s sensors, she fired the lasers at rapidly approaching objects.

‘Multi-tasking!’ she shouted triumphantly, as she turned to head back inside, and wondered not for the first time if she was going insane.

Spheres of fire ignited on the horizon as she reached the lock. Just as she was closing the door behind her, a storm of razor ice impacted the hull. Something tugged at her thigh. Glancing down she saw air gusting from her suit, then a sudden explosion of breach sealant closing up the rip. She ordered the drill to start working again as the lock cycled, gave some slack to the mooring cables. The bent shaft of the revolving drill began to slam Heliotrope about, but it was working again, boring down.

Two feet… through!

Stumbling back inside the ship, Orlandine sent the signal to detach the drill bit. Under pressure the five CTDs shot down into liquid methane. Orlandine ordered emergency detach from her assister frame and it clattered to the floor. She felt slightly sick and dizzy.

Cables… detach from shaft…

For a moment she could not figure how to do that, then, as she finally reached the interface sphere, remembered how and sent the required signals. As the ship detached from the drill, the pressure within the drill shaft exploded underneath Heliotrope, hurling it up and away from the planetoid, and throwing Orlandine to the floor. Not enough to move the ship far, but the constant blast of methane following it out through the open shaft continued the job. More missiles coming in now, and the ship’s lasers, now underpowered, were having problems hitting them all. Orlandine dragged herself to her feet and connected to the interface sphere, immediately gaining a greater perspective. Heliotrope steadily rose on a large methane geyser. The CTDs below were slowly moving into position, the bacilliform objects still shooting up towards them. The exhausts of all the missiles speeding towards her surrounded the planetoid like a cage. By now the reactor had nearly built up enough energy to fire up the fusion engine again, but not yet because of the drain from deploying the lasers.