Polity Agent (52 page)

Seeing the creature’s speed, and the rapid reaction of the dracoman diving from its path, Cormac realized he himself must move a lot faster to now stay alive. He located a long unused program in his gridlink and put it instantly online. His perception of time now slowed as his thought processes accelerated. The program simultaneously stimulated his body’s production of adrenaline. Then he raised his carbine—but far too slowly. Fire flared from his left, hitting the point where the creature’s legs joined behind its head on one side. It slammed into the ground ploughing up soil, the legs on its other side still gripping stalks and pulling down some of the sheltering leaves as well. Now in bright sunlight, it tried to rise again. Arach hurdled over towards it in an instant, a particle cannon’s beam flashing turquoise between his pincers, and incinerating the attacker’s head.

‘Let’s keep moving,’ urged Cormac. He reached into a pocket on the side of his pack and removed a flat case from which he extracted one of eight short glass tubes, which he now inserted into his envirosuit’s med-access. A prickling at his wrists as the stimulants entered his bloodstream, an abrupt coolness, and then he began sprinting. Blegg and the dracomen kept up with him easily. He knew he must be the slowest moving among them. As he ran, he opened the bandwidth of his connection to Shuriken, now feeling as ready as he could be.

The dracomen spread out wider, and became difficult to spot as they resorted to their own natural chameleonware. They could only be seen at all because at this rapid pace their shifting skin patterns could not keep up to speed with their changing surroundings, and because their weapons and equipment could not be similarly concealed. The second creature did not even get close. Glimpsing a shape speeding in towards them, Cormac initiated Shuriken and sent it spinning five yards out from his body, humming as it extended its chainglass blades, but the dracomen promptly fired upon the attacker simultaneously from three different directions. It body blew to fragments leaving only its limbs still clinging to nearby stalks. Arach scuttled inquisitively through this mess, Gatling cannons swivelling, then moved back into deeper jungle to one side of Cormac.

‘Aw, leave some for me,’ the drone called out to the dracomen.

It soon received its wish as a new type of beast joined the fray.

They kept running on, many other creatures attacking. Proton and pulse-gun fire all around, Arach seemed to be everywhere, concentrating his huge firepower on grouped masses of the alien assailants, in the process bringing down swathes of jungle in burning fragments. The long-legged things could extend their heads, Cormac discovered, as he sent Shuriken hammering through one telescopic neck. The detached head landed beside a fallen dracoman, who rolled aside quickly and came upright to fire down at it, as the head now scuttled off on its mandibles like some independent beast. The target bounced briefly in red flame and then flew apart. Cormac recalled Shuriken and sent it skimming towards another such creature. Premature action, as the headless body of the first one, still suspended in midair, extruded a long metallic tongue which wrapped around the dracoman and wrenched him back viciously. A strange groaning squeal ensued, then two separate halves of smoking dracoman hit the ground. Cormac fired his carbine, its flame meeting the tongue as it now shot towards him. Shuriken, almost as if angry about the dracoman’s death, hammered in and out horizontally through its own opponent, then chopped up and down vertically on its return course. The creature fell to pieces.

Blegg, beside him, keeping pace. ‘Seems they’ve decided we are the ones to be captured alive, and the dracomen are now dispensable.’

‘How many?’ Cormac asked.

‘Five dracomen down.’ Blegg pointed at something weaving towards them. It resembled a long iron nematode hovering a foot from the ground, sliding through the air with the writhing of a snake. A red scythe of fire hit it in the middle, then two shorter versions of the same thing darted away. They both swung round on the source of the shot: a dracoman, clearly visible now since in using their camouflage there was too much danger of hitting each other in this fire-fight. One of the metallic things slammed into his chest, and with a sound like a cleaver striking a butcher’s block, pieces of dracoman and long shards of metal exploded in every direction. More and more Jain-factored creatures were coming in from every direction. A dracoman was snatched up in triple jaws, and the explosion of its carbine energy canister hurled Cormac to his knees. Up again. Left arm numb against his side where smoking shrapnel was embedded. Pain blocking program initiated, then firing one-handed into a nightmare head looming over him. Blegg slammed into his side, just as Shuriken came screaming overhead and straight into the creature’s mouth.

‘Up!’ Blegg spun him round, drew a carbide commando knife, and in one quick movement levered the hot metal from his arm. ‘Not too bad,’ he observed

With movement returning to that arm, Cormac drew his thin-gun and fired off to his left with that, while simultaneously firing with the carbine past Blegg. The tracking and targeting program he was using was sending him cross-eyed. A
whumph
as a rod-ship crashed down amid them, crushing foliage and ejecting tendrils as thick as falling trees. Cormac saw another dracoman caught up as he himself concentrated fire on the deflating but spreading rod-ship. Spearing towards him, the ground lumped up like a worm track. He aimed downwards just as tendrils exploded from the earth and wrapped around his leg. Severing them with fire, he subliminally saw the captured dracoman slammed hard against the ground and discarded. Not even a complete thought sent Shuriken whirring over above the dracoman while it shook itself like a dog and staggered upright again.

Something else arced through the air, its source Arach, and its terminal whine familiar. Cormac ducked down as this missile landed amidst the spreading tendrils and exploded, spreading something like phosphorus across the ground. The blast seemed to propel Cormac through an area of new growth, where shoots like giant red asparagus speared up from the incinerated remains of stalks. He stumbled through a mass of red vines writhing under painfully bright sunshine, and out onto charred ground scattered with smaller blood-red shoots of new growth. Dracomen emerged either side of him, then Blegg came stepping out backwards concentrating fire up into the face of some attacker. Arach came last, two cannons swivelling and targeting independently, the shots ripping into fast-moving silvery opponents, the flash of his particle cannon stabbing out regularly like a fiery tongue. Without that drone, Cormac realized, this would have been over very quickly. He swiftly counted—eighteen dracomen surviving—then turned round to see mountain slopes ahead.

‘I’ve got you now,’ came Thorn’s voice over com.

Running down like silver dogs came four Polity autoguns. Drawing close, they squatted obediently and poured violet fire into the jungle.

* * * *

17

USER (underspace interference emitter): this device works by rhythmically inserting and removing a massive singularity through a runcible gate. The U-space interference this causes will knock any ship within its vicinity back into realspace. The singularity is contained by an inverted gravity field which is in turn powered by tidal drag, since the singularity is spinning very fast. The containment field necessarily collapses in the U-continuum and reinstates when out of it again. Huge forces and huge amounts of energy are employed, most of it generated by the singularity’s spin, therefore, that spin gradually slows. When it drops below a certain threshold, the USER must be returned to an as yet unrevealed military complex—rumoured to be sited in orbit around a black hole -where titanic magnetic accelerators spin the singularity back up to optimum again. It is also rumoured that this technology has been available for some time, but AIs were loath to employ it because by artificially creating singularities (black holes, essentially), they are shortening the life span of the universe. Evidently they intend sticking around for a while, and the fact that USERs are now being employed might suggest the AIs have found a way to deconstruct black holes.

-
From ‘Quince Guide’ compiled by humans

As a precaution, when the two dragon spheres came together, Mika had again donned her spacesuit. Good thing, too. She grabbed up her pack and quickly stuffed into it anything immediately to hand that might increase her chances of survival: food, drink, energy canisters and medical supplies. Closing up her helmet and visor, she headed for the shimmer-shield, pushed through, then opened the airlock beyond. Stepping outside she looked up to a view not cleaned up by computer like the view from inside. Bright actinic sunlight cut through from one side, between a curved ceiling and curved floor composed of draconic flesh. Masses of pseudopods were sliding down beside her—a massive but eerily silent avalanche. Scales slowly tumbled through vacuum around her, and nearby they dropped sharply on the gravplated walkway. She kicked them aside as she strode towards her craft. She noted, as the gull-door rose at her approach, the docking clamps folding into the metal of the manacle below.

‘Can you hear me, Dragon?’ she asked, halting for a moment.

Nothing.

What was happening? The two spheres were breaking their connection, and thus far she saw no sign of hostility between them. But would she recognize that anyway? Perhaps right now they were fighting some battle on a virtual level, or perhaps they adhered to certain rules of conduct for something like this? They were alien, and despite lengthy investigation remained alien still, so who was to know? However, as Mika ducked into the little craft, the dragon spheres seemed to her like two card-sharps standing up from the table, about to put some distance between each other, making room to manoeuvre before going for their weapons, each hoping to get the drop on his opponent.

The gull door closed and Mika stared at the controls for a moment before taking hold of the joystick. With no AI available to fly the craft for her this time, she must now do so herself. A finger brushed against a touch-plate gave her ‘systems enabled’, then engines droned as she raised the joystick. The craft rose smoothly until it fell outside the influence of the manacle gravplates, then it jerked through vacuum as if a tether had been cut, but with no real loss of control. Mika aimed for the sunlight between the two curved draconic surfaces, the screen before her polarizing on the glare.

Dragon scales hailed against the hull, some of them hitting it quite hard before spinning away, so Mika kept the speed to a minimum. She swung the craft to one side to avoid a dead and discarded pseudopod, but clipped it all the same. Desiccated by vacuum, it shattered into red glittery fragments and black vertebrae.

The previous connection between these portions of Dragon entire now broke apart completely, the two pseudopod trees sinking away. Now Mika saw that the two spheres were visibly drawing apart, microgravity creating whirlpools in the fog of shed scales, and space opening wide before her. She accelerated as blue-green light seemed to fill the intervening space. Some kind of weapon? No, just a storm of ionization. More acceleration, since at any moment she might be caught up in some energy strike many orders of magnitude above this current jungle glow. From the beginning, the dragon spheres had utilized full-spectrum lasers as weapons. She knew the sphere she had recently occupied now contained gravtech weapons, and it struck her as likely that whatever weapons the Polity possessed, these giant spheres either already possessed or could create them within themselves, and they probably owned even more drastic ones than that.

Clear space now in the full glare of the sun. Mika turned the craft about, shut down the engines, and enabled available automatics to keep it from colliding with anything else that might be tumbling about out here. Slowly drawing away, she felt like a mouse scuttling from between two bull elephants beginning to face off.

Then it started.

Almost as one, ripples began to cross the surface of each sphere. They revolved once around each other, while still drawing apart, then accelerated away together. Perhaps ten miles away from her, a laser flashed between them, blackening an area of Mika’s reactive screen. As the screen cleared she saw a mist of plasma and glittering scales rise from the surface of each Dragon sphere, and in one sphere a glowing canyon became visible to her. She realized then that from her present position she did not know which sphere was which, because she could not see the manacle. But, then, how would knowing that help her?

The spheres began revolving around each other again, and now she caught quick glimpses of the manacle on one of them. Then their revolutions slowly drew to a halt, the sphere without the manacle occluding the other from her view. Laser strikes threw it sharply into silhouette, and streamers of plasma fire and debris shot out all around it. Then something seemed to distort space, flattening the one sphere she could see into an ellipse. The wall of distortion sped towards her even as she started the craft’s engines and grabbed the joystick. It struck. The entire craft rippled, emitted a tearing crash, and bucked as if someone had taken hold of the very fabric of space and snapped it up and down like shaking dust from a carpet. The screen disintegrated, blowing out the air supply, metal visible around her suddenly contained whorls and ridges. Then she blotted out any view by coughing blood onto her visor. It felt to her as if someone had smacked an iron bar simultaneously against every bone she contained, then shoved a barbed harpoon through her and twisted it, knotting up her insides.