Neal Asher: The Line of Polity

"So what do they want here?"

"To kill calloraptors, I expect," said Gant. "It's something Scar took great pleasure in."

Thorn considered that. "I think we should move over to the side of the tunnel," he suggested.

In the seat beside Jarvellis, Cormac clipped his harness into place and watched her expert manipulation of Lyric II 's controls. The ship responded with a deep thrumming, like a musical instrument being played by an expert hand. He watched her take hold of the joystick as the screen revealed the debris being blown about outside. Lyric II lifted and tilted, its legs and feet quickly retracting before the toes could stub themselves on surrounding rock.

Bringing the ship over wilted vegetation towards the river, Jarvellis glanced up as Stanton returned to the cockpit. "All done?" she asked, and Stanton nodded.

At least in cold-sleep the boy would feel no pain should their ship be destroyed, thought Cormac. But then he doubted that any of them would feel very much — it would be so very quick. The unexpected presence of the child left him feeling hollow inside, though no less resolute. In the end duty had to come first.

"How long?" he asked.

"Lyric?" Jarvellis prompted.

The AI replied, "We should achieve escape velocity in one half of an orbit — that's two hours nominally. One hour after that we will be able to submerge in underspace."

Cormac nodded to himself as the screen now showed them coming up out of the river valley and achieving enough height so that Jarvellis did not have to navigate the ship along the watercourse. Higher still, and the ion engines were now cycling up to a steady roar. Though the screen continued to show the forward view as they accelerated, he guessed that the ship was now beginning to tilt into their vector so that the engines could blast out directly behind. Air turbulence began to give the craft the occasional tentative shake as it accelerated. It maintained that more due to brute force than to aerodynamics — like most ships of the time, Lyric II was built to land and take off by using antigravity.

Cormac recalled a conversation he'd had with Jarvellis: "The 'ware effect doesn't hide AG, it merely blurs it over a number of kilometres," she had told him. "That was good enough for Theocracy detectors, but not to get us by a Polity dreadnought."

"What about the fusion engines on this?" he'd then asked her.

"Taking us straight up, the blast would flare visibly outside the range of the 'ware effect. Skellor would detect us that way too."

"I guessed so," said Cormac. "Can we slingshot around the planet on ion boosters? We'd leave a trail, but that's something we'll have to risk."

In response Jarvellis had opined that the trail would be one of wreckage — Lyric II not being built to withstand such forces. However, they had little choice.

"Approaching Mach one," she announced now. "Let's hope Skellor's got no one listening down there, because the 'ware only covers us for long-distance checking of air disturbance. They'd still hear the sonic boom."

"Let's hope that, indeed," said Cormac — and didn't really like to think beyond. It seemed to him that the processing power and technology Skellor had under his control meant the man was only limited by his own imagination. Probably Skellor was watching through the eyes of his calloraptors, but would it occur to him to listen also? No doubt, from where he hung geostationary, he could see in great detail much of what occurred on the planet, but what was his focus? He had certainly missed the journey Stanton and Cormac had made on that aerofan, probably because his attention was directed entirely towards his creatures' attack on the cavern. Had it occurred to him to set up listening posts? Did he have anything watching on the other side of the planet? Much depended on the detail: it wasn't good enough to have the power of a god without a god's universal vision.

A subscreen gave them a receding view of the Occam Razor, while another screen presented a view across the top of Lyric II whereby Cormac could see that they were now flying perpendicular to the ground so that the ion engines could operate most effectively. The ship had started to vibrate, and from somewhere there came a whistling scream, like a bombshell coming down but never hitting. Every now and again the craft gave a shudder as if something structural was about to break.

"Let's drop the Mach readings: we just passed five thousand kph," said Jarvellis.

The ground was now far enough below them for many small details to be lost, not that there was much diverse detail over this wilderness. The open plains receded underneath them, changing from greenish blue pocked by great splashes of red to a sudden band of grey stone, then cerulean ocean. Jarvellis adjusted a sub-screen to show the continent receding behind them like a thick blanket of mould skimmed back off the oceanic surface. The ship was now howling and shuddering constantly, and by the way she was white-knuckling the joystick Cormac suspected that Jarvellis did not consider this at all a good sign.

"Do you have stress readouts for this craft's superstructure?" asked Cormac.

"Yes, I do," admitted Jarvellis. "But I'm not looking at them."

Soon they were puncturing cloud as they flew on into night. Looking at the screen with a view all across Lyric II , he observed ice building up and flaking away in glittering contrails.

"Are we leaving a vapour trail?" he asked her.

"No, the exhaust is too hot. Our only problem right now is the ionic trail and, as you said, we just have to hope he doesn't spot that."

"Other problems?" Cormac persisted.

"Proximity lasers online," the AI chose that moment to announce.

"That problem," Jarvellis replied. "Your Dragon creature did a fine job of destroying the laser arrays. Shame it left the debris up here as well. I've set our course to avoid the worst of it, otherwise I'll dodge the larger fragments whilst Lyric here vaporizes the smaller ones."

"But surely you'll be able to do all that inside the 'ware field?" Cormac pointed out.

Stanton interjected, "Sure they'll get vaporized inside the 'ware field, but that vapour won't stay inside the field for long. You were worried about a moisture vapour trail lower down. Now you can worry about a metallic vapour trail up here."

Cloud banks lay below them like a mountain range of crystal sulphur and snow, with jade ocean glimpsed far below through deep crevasses. Above this they hurtled further into space that could never get completely dark because of the Braemar moons suspended like lanterns, and behind them, the shining glass sculpture of the distant nebula. Cormac registered U-chargers powering up then on a subscreen and observed vapour explosions as the ship's lasers obliterated obstacles that were too small to be visible but large enough to punch holes through the hull. Operating the steering thrusters, Jarvellis took the ship swaying to one side to pass a lump of wreckage resembling half a piano made of polished aluminium. For a short while the lasers continued operating at full capacity, though not well enough, for they could hear the sharp bullet-cracks of impacts.

"Lyric, damage?" Jarvellis spat, when these impacts finally ceased.

"Four micropunctures, now sealed. One large hole in the hydraulic cylinder for landing foot two. I've shut off the hydraulic fluid supply to it, but cannot repair. We need to space dock for that," the AI explained.

"Be glad of the chance," Jarvellis muttered, glancing at Cormac.

He was observing the display that noted their speed in kilometres per hour. Now pushing twenty-five thousand, he saw that they had achieved escape velocity, and that now the arc of the horizon was dropping below them.