Nemesis (32 page)

They all made their way around the central ring-corridor to the bio-lab. Citra held her elegant profile high throughout, as if considering the entire business beneath her. She led them into the small room and pointed at the fold-out wall-case where the reagents were stored. Sam positioned himself behind her.

‘Please show us where that compound is kept.’ he said. ‘Anyone see anything unusual here?’

Amazingly to Ash, he appeared to be the only one noticing what Sam was up to. The others had their attention riveted to the stupid cupboard. He added misdirection to Sam’s long list of disturbing skills. Ash took a quick step back as Sam silently reached for the sedative gun. He held his breath.

Suddenly, the lights turned red. A shrieking siren cut the air and threat indicators started spilling up the wall-screens.

Ash couldn’t help but grunt in surprise.

‘What the hell is that?’ said Venetia, glancing about.

Zoe stared into space as her view-field kicked on. ‘It’s the Photurians. They’re here.’

Mark turned and bolted for the bridge with Zoe close behind him. Sam took his moment and slammed the gun into Citra’s back. She gasped as the drug filled her body.

Venetia stared at him in shock. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she exclaimed.

‘Get out of here!’ Sam told her firmly. ‘Get to your station, quickly! The last thing we need now is someone hysterical dividing the ship’s attention again. This whole investigation will have to be resolved later.’

Venetia just stared.

‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘We only have minutes!’

Reluctantly, she turned and fled the room.

‘Ash,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t leave. Help me strap Citra’s body down. We may need to manoeuvre at any time.’

Ash took Citra’s arms and led the way as they steered her back to the med-bay.

‘This is fucked!’ he whispered to Sam as they struggled with her body. ‘I quit. I’m sick of this shit. I’m telling Mark how to stealth the hull.’

‘Don’t you fucking
dare
,’ Sam growled.

‘What’re you going to do, try and hit me?’ Ash sneered. ‘I’m a fucking Omega roboteer. I’ll deck you before you can blink. You think you’re so fucking scary. That shit outside is scarier than you will
ever
be.’

‘Listen to me, you cyborg clown,’ said Sam as they struggled through the med-bay hatch. ‘This mission is bigger than either of us. Our lives are irrelevant here.’

Ash laughed. ‘No shit, Sherlock. But guess what? Your precious plan is already fucked, in case you hadn’t noticed. Those Nems out there have left your script. There was nothing in your plan about a crying kid with exploding hands.’

‘Irrelevant,’ Sam snapped. ‘Don’t you get it? The attack
has
to go ahead. We’ll never have another chance.’

‘No. I
don’t
get it. What I do get is that you’re fucking crazy and I’m done. I never signed up for murder.’

‘Actually,’ said Sam, ‘that’s
exactly
what you signed up for.’ He slammed Citra’s sleep-case shut.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ said Ash. ‘This whole thing is beyond broken and it ends here.’

He turned and made his way quickly to the bridge, with Sam right behind him.

10.4: MARK

Mark jumped into the
Gulliver
’s helm-arena and surveyed the drone swarm. Panic gripped him. Though the ship had warned them just seconds before, the Photurians already had almost every viable exit vector in the system covered. And they were moving fast – nearly twice the speeds he’d seen at Tiwanaku.

‘How?’ he said.

While their backs were turned, the tiny system had gone from empty to hosting more than fifteen thousand warp-enabled drones. The experimental hull shapes had vanished, replaced by ones built for business. They resembled giant silver pollen grains a hundred metres wide.

Zoe opened the comms channel from the lounge.

‘We came through the arrival spike with minimal damage,’ she said. ‘Most of our sensors were retracted. We got a good scan of the light-profile, though.’

‘Take a look at this,’ said Mark, and posted her the bad news.

She fell silent, watching the coordinated surges of warp spill around the sky that surrounded them, locking them in.

‘Can they see us?’ she breathed.

‘I don’t think so, otherwise we’d be dead already. It won’t take them long to find us, though. They’ll have the system perimeter totally enclosed within twelve minutes. This place isn’t big.’

‘Then let’s go!’ said Zoe. ‘Now!’

‘We can’t,’ said Mark. ‘We’re still tethered to the asteroid with half the ship’s guts hanging out. It’ll take me at least that long to pack up even if I leave robots on the rock.’

‘So we’re trapped,’ said Zoe, her voice cracking.

Venetia clipped in next to Zoe and pulled out her touchboard. ‘Where are they?’ she said. ‘How are we looking?’ Her face fell when Zoe passed her the data. ‘They’ve adapted,’ she said.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Mark. ‘At Tiwanaku I had a clear speed advantage. Not any more. If we try to make it out of here at a dead run, they’ll pick us off before we’re far enough out to go superlight.’

‘Why are they so different now?’ said Zoe. ‘What’s going on?’

‘We don’t know that they are,’ said Venetia. ‘Remember, Tiwanaku had millions of these things in a huge range of different shapes. They had months to build them. Maybe they just picked the ones they hadn’t yet reshaped and sent them our way. Or perhaps all those modifications weren’t as stupid as they looked. Maybe they were design experiments.’

Zoe frowned into her view. ‘I have Yunus’s display up and I’m seeing incoming comms on the diplomacy channel.’

Mark piped it in.

‘Human vessel,’ said the swarm, ‘make yourself visible. We come in peace.’

It had a new voice. This time, it sounded unpleasantly like Yunus Chesterford.

Venetia shot Zoe a horrified look. ‘Now I’m glad Sam knocked Citra out again,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t want to hear that.’

‘He did
what
?’ said Zoe.

Mark wasn’t sure how to feel. His doubts about Citra had evaporated the moment she’d accused him. Her reaction had been so instantaneous and so grounded in loathing that something inside him sealed up the moment he heard it. What was the point of reading subtle motives into everyone’s actions when there was someone in the room who obviously wanted him dead? He didn’t like Sam’s choice of solution, but on the other hand he was glad he wouldn’t have to worry about her for a while. He had enough on his plate.

‘We are here to prevent any future misunderstanding,’ the swarm told them smoothly. ‘We offer only harmony and efficiency. Your integration will be painless and clean.’

‘Well, that clinches it,’ said Mark. ‘I’m definitely in. Anyone else?’

‘That message scares me,’ said Venetia. ‘Notice their use of language? That’s changed, too. They’re getting smarter. Or better attuned to humans, at least.’

One of Mark’s tactical SAPs pinged him.

‘I just received a predictive analysis,’ he said. ‘With eighty-seven per cent probability, they’ll start closing in as soon as they have the exits locked down. They’ll pick their way over every rock in this system until they find us. That gives us six hours at the very most. Is there
anything
good about this situation?’

‘Maybe,’ said Zoe. ‘Maybe. We have a signal match for the arrival spike. It’s definitely a warp-burst and they’re not showing a trail, which confirms my theory. I’m scanning their arrival vector for the transporter ship. If we can damage it, the Photurians won’t be able to follow.’

‘Except we don’t have any weapons,’ said Venetia. ‘And we’d have to get to it without dying first.’

Mark glowered the wave of bright points stealing across the tiny star system and felt hunted. For whatever reason, the universe appeared to have it in for him. It galled him that such apparently simple creatures should be further up the galactic food chain than he was.

‘These robots are stupid,’ he said. ‘They still think
efficient integration
sounds appealing to us. There
has
to be a way to outsmart them.’

‘You want a diversion, then,’ said Venetia. ‘A lure.’

‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘Exactly. If we had any messenger drones, I’d use one of those. We can give thanks to the mighty IPSO senate for fucking that one up for us.’

Zoe sat up straight. ‘I have a solution!’ she said. ‘Or part of one. We repurpose one of the drones you picked up for me at Tiwanaku.’

‘How?’ said Mark. ‘That was all debris. You can’t build a working drone from that.’

Zoe smiled. ‘Can’t I? What do you think I’ve been trying to do for the last four days? How else do you imagine I’ve been figuring out how they work?’ She slid a window showing her work to his sensorium. Amazingly, she’d pieced together more than half of the kit necessary to construct a working device. ‘It’s all in pieces at the moment, of course, but give me half an hour. We could fill in the bits we don’t have with equipment from the ship’s stores.’

‘Would it actually
warp
?’ said Mark. ‘Gravity drives aren’t something you knock together in minutes.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Just not very well, that’s all. But our fake ship doesn’t have to go far. It just needs to get their attention.’

Mark grimaced. ‘It’s a start, I guess, but that’d take out, what, two or three drones before they nailed it?’

‘So we put a disrupter on it,’ said Zoe. ‘That’s how they used to disable drones during the war. You simulate the ionic crap that blocks warp near stars – make it so they can’t sustain a stable pattern of curvon decay. All we’d need is a cold plasma to trash their inducers. Then any drone that goes near our lure gets stuck.’

‘Shame we don’t have one of those, either,’ Venetia put in.

‘Are you kidding?’ said Zoe. ‘We’re sitting on one. All we have to do is mine the lighter metals right out of the asteroid we’re tethered to, then use our own engines to ionise them. Or we jack extra juice through an X-ray bounce probe. This ship has one of those.’

Mark laughed aloud. He’d never heard of anyone jerry-rigging a disrupter before. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.

‘We have
mining equipment
?’ said Venetia.

‘All ships do,’ said Mark. ‘Ore-extraction tools are part of the standard deep-space self-repair kit. We’d have to hollow-mine, of course, otherwise they’d spot us – drill right under the hull join and buffer the tailings.’

Venetia threw up her hands. ‘Okay, you have everything you need. But there’s still the problem of how to divert attention from the
Gulliver
. Whatever we can build isn’t going to look remotely like us …’ She thought for a moment, then said, ‘But I may have a solution for that. After we’ve mined the asteroid, we blow it up and eject the lure at the same time. The drones head for the lure. We drift with the debris and try to look as much like a rock as possible. Can we blow it up? If you can fake a starship, you can rig a fuel bomb, I presume?’

‘Easily,’ said Mark. ‘You know, I’m starting to think we might have a chance of getting out of here. Presuming they fall for it, of course.’

‘If they don’t, we’re dead in any case,’ said Venetia. ‘It has to be worth a shot.’

Ash stepped into the bridge then, his face a mask of fury. Sam strode in right behind him. It looked to Mark very much like the two of them had just had some kind of fight. Something about Citra’s attempt to kill him, perhaps, or whether to try to remove him from the captain’s seat again. He didn’t have time for it. They had a ship to save.

‘Ash,’ he said, before his subcaptain could get a word in, ‘I need help. I’m going to be running a whole team of construction robots and I need support.’ He sent an outline of the plan via memory packet straight to Ash’s sensorium. ‘Do you think you could cover some of our subsystems?’

Ash blinked in astonishment. His expression caved in. ‘Are you serious?’ he said. He looked about to cry.

Mark frowned in confusion. He hadn’t expected such an emotional response.

‘I know it’s risky,’ he said, ‘but it’s all we’ve got. Can you help?’

‘Of course,’ said Ash. He looked oddly defeated. ‘I’ll cover albedo control, make us look like the debris – I have some ideas about camouflage.’

‘Great,’ said Mark. ‘It’s all yours.’

It’d be good to have Ash mucking in and sharing ownership of the ship. A little camaraderie over the next half-hour might make the difference between life and death. He passed Ash control over the hull integument.

‘I can help, too,’ said Sam. ‘Send me a plan outline.’

Mark passed one to his view. Sam nodded judiciously, his expression carefully neutral.

‘This could work,’ he said. ‘It’s a long shot, of course, but better than nothing. I have one recommendation, though.’

‘Which is?’

‘Put a bomb on that decoy. Once you trap those drones, you take them out. We could overload the antimatter containment using fuel from our own supply.’

Mark’s spirits lifted a little further. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That makes perfect sense.’

‘I’ll work on the decoy design with Zoe,’ said Sam. ‘I have experience in that area. Given the right material, we’ll have a piece of junk passing for a starship in no time. I may need to cannibalise from our kit, though.’

‘No problem,’ said Mark with a grin. ‘Whatever you need, you’ve got it.’

They had a few scant hours to ready their escape, but the threat appeared to have brought them together at last, just when their mutual trust had looked ready to break. If they lived, maybe he’d be able to salvage something from this mess of a mission after all.

10.5: ANN

Ann waited for Will in the
Chiyome
’s privacy chamber and practised zero-yoga to keep a tight rein on her nerves. The room had been prepared for him in advance, using the package of biotech deterrent Meleta had provided. For all that she feared the alien coating they’d spread on the walls, Ann dreaded facing Will more.

The hatch opened to reveal Will’s long, expressive face, which wore a curiously empty expression more distressing to her than sadness or anger could have been. He drifted up to meet her. He looked haggard but taut, like a man made of old wire.