The Orphaned Worlds (15 page)
The
Plausible Response
moved onward and downward as the shift drive kicked in Robert experienced an odd ripple in his vision, like light turning sideways and back, and a slight pulse of vertigo. Tier 88 was a series of vast, dark plains strewn with the shattered ruins of colossal seven-limbed statues. Eighty-nine was a showcase of failed stellar engineering, the extinguished remains of miniature stars orbiting a megaplanet, itself a cold, dead tomb-world, its face scarred by the inhabitants’ final paroxysms of violent despair. Other arrays and patterns of suns were visible in the distance, chains and bracelets, magnified by the lounge’s viewing system; the rest were burnt-out husks hanging in an ashen firmament.
Again the ship tier-shifted and the next number was 91. For a moment Robert wondered why they had bypassed Tier 90, then he turned his attention to the vista outside, an immense level plain of stone across which water poured in vigorous rivers, even torrents, while large masses of pale, leafless growth were rooted here and there, their dense, tangled meshes sloping all in one direction as deformed by constant winds. Then, without warning, the view swung through ninety degrees and Robert held on to his chair, battling a surge of vertigo as the watery plain outside became an almost sheer rock face.
‘Apologies, Robert,’ said the Ship. ‘It was a necessary attitude correction.’
Almost corrected the position of my breakfast
, he thought as he watched the sheets of water rushing down, the droplets spraying out and the dense, waxy-white tangles of angular growth hanging from a rock face that stretched away into haze. Then he frowned, staring intently at something that seemed grotesquely out of place – there, at the crook of one of those angular branches, was a strange formation. And suddenly he realised that it was, unmistakably, a skeletal joint. The pale entwining meshes were not plant growth but bones, the fleshless remains of unimaginable lifeforms, clinging to that drenched, enormous cliff.
‘Hello, Daddy?’ came Rosa’s voice from somewhere overhead.
‘Yes, Rosa.’
‘Daddy, we’re about to make the shift to Tier 92 – would you like to join us on the bridge?’
Outside, the cliff and its burden of cadavers slipped away as the Ship altered course.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said, shutting down the flimscreen as he headed for the door.
The lights were down low on the bridge, the shadows pushed back by golden radiance fanning out from wall sources at deck level, contrasting with the multicolour glows of the consoles.
‘Greetings, Robert Horst,’ said Reski Emantes, who was hovering at one of the sensor stations. ‘You’ve not missed much – the deployment of coruscating wit and its triumph over the dullminded, that kind of thing.’
‘Translation,’ said the Ship. ‘It has been even more openly insulting and arrogant than usual. I suspect that some strain of overcompensation is at work.’
Robert walked up to the split-level command dais, exchanging a knowing smile with Rose, who rolled her eyes.
‘So when do we make the shift?’ he said.
‘In a few minutes, once the shift drive has finished matching values with the boundary matrices.’
‘Then we make our insanely hazardous leap into a completely uncharted region,’ Reski Emantes said. ‘Hope you’re ready.’
Robert glanced around at the droid then smiled at Rosa. ‘Uncharted?’
‘Yes, but not unexplored,’ she said. ‘There have been a few reports, sketchy ones that mention dead, fossilised planets …’
‘Drive aligned,’ said the Ship. ‘Desynchronisation in twenty-seven seconds.’
‘Acknowledge,’ said Rosa, looking up at the wide monitor screen.
Again, the momentary deformation of light along with the passing lurch of vertigo … and the sky was different, a dark, grainy vastness broken by a single, muted light source, greyish-brown in hue, almost a dull copper, emanating from a single star. And there were worlds, too, drifting in their hundreds, maybe thousands. From the console sensors it appeared that all were of planetoid size or smaller, and, oddly, every one was a perfect sphere, no oblate spheroids, no irregular bodies. In the grainy, coppery starlight, planetoid surfaces took on a dark, brassy sheen, their scars, cracks and craters thrown into high relief. Robert understood how a passing visitor could describe them as fossilised – they were dry, dusty desolate globes, nothing more.
‘Now that’s interesting,’ said Reski.
‘What?’ said Rosa.
‘Watch.’
A small section of the wide screen enlarged to fill the centre, bringing one particular cluster of dark planetoids into clearer view, in time to see a small one sweep towards a larger one. But instead of colliding, it glanced off in a slow, stately and contactless ricochet that sent it spinning languidly away.
‘Gravitational inversion,’ said Reski Emantes as the enlarged section dissolved, showing again the vista of drifting planetoids. ‘All those worldlets repel one another.’
It’s like a gigantic game of murmlespiel
, Robert thought.
‘Ship, are we near the rendezvous?’ said Rosa. ‘Any sign of anyone else?’
‘Destination coordinates are over four thousand kilometres dead ahead,’ said the
Plausible Response
. ‘Sensor readings are confused – I seem to be detecting between three and twenty-five vessel contacts.’
‘What he means is that his systems are incapable of distinguishing between real-image data and echoes reflected by the antigravity planetoids,’ said Reski Emantes as the droid came into view on the exterior monitor.
‘What,’ Rosa said, ‘are you doing out there?’
‘The delirious excitement on board was more than I could bear,’ the droid replied. ‘Now, if you’ll follow me to our destination, I’ll relay sensory data to my underequipped colleague.’
With that, the machine set off in the direction of the rendezvous coordinates.
‘Ship, would you …’
‘Keep the pipsqueak in range? Certainly.’
Minutes passed and a cluster of planetoids, some as large as Earth’s moon, others no wider than a sports stadium, drew steadily nearer.
‘I can’t see anything …’ Robert said.
‘There is something,’ Rosa murmured, adjusting onscreen sensor variables.
‘Long-range detects say that there is a ship somewhere in close visual range,’ said the
Plausible Response
. ‘And two more 1,953 kilometres away in the port hi-quarter, but their apparent image loci are flickering on and off, as well as changing position … ah, it seems that our intrepid pathfinder has altered course.’
True enough, on the widescreen the droid was veering off to the right, towards a middle-sized planetoid about a thousand kilometres in diameter.
‘Reski, where are you going?’ Rosa said.
‘I’ve detected some odd energy readings on that moonlet,’ came the reply. ‘Like the residue of a drive. Turbulent yet it’s highly localised.’
‘That planetoid does appear to be the source of some of the anomalous detection signatures,’ said the
Plausible Response
.
‘Okay, we’ll follow the droid,’ Rose said. ‘But keep the sensors on full alert.’
Robert sat back as the tiership swooped down after Reski Emantes. The small, barren world loomed before them and an inky darkness fell like a curtain as they crossed into its shadow, cut off from the star’s meagre radiance. The Construct droid was sending back a continuous feed of scan data as it came nearer to the moon. And the nearer it got the stronger the effects of that strange gravitic repulsion.
‘A very odd experience,’ said Reski Emantes. ‘A constant, gentle push … but do all these planetoids stay in the vicinity of that star?’
‘Reski, there’s something on the move down there …’
Robert heard the urgency in her voice and sat up.
‘Yes, I am picking up … my exosensors say the object is small and rising … not powered, rising on the antigravity, but I’m unable to narrow down its location. It’s somewhere within the 64 cubic-kilometers below me …’
‘Rosa,’ Robert said slowly. ‘This is …’
‘I know – I’m triangulating both sensor arrays and getting a partial …’ Suddenly she stared up at the screen. ‘Reski, get out – it’s a missile!’
‘Too late …’
On the screen, against the moonlet’s dark backdrop, a thruster flared abruptly and a moment later there was a bright, harsh flash. Instantly, all of Reski’s datafeeds went dead while an enlarged visual showed the Construct droid tumbling slowly, wrapped in an aura of jagged energy.
‘What was that?’ Robert said. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘
That
,’ Rosa said, pointing.
Another section of the widescreen had enlarged to show a portion of the planetoid’s rocky surface, a sports-pitch-sized area seemingly melting away to reveal a deep recess out of which a ship began to rise. To Robert’s eyes, at first glance, it resembled an immense crablike machine, then when he looked closer he saw the additional armoured effector limbs, the pincers, the broaches, the rotary blades, the serrated tines, and the profusion of hooked symbols that decorated the upper and lower carapaces. It looked vicious and brutal, and viscerally epitomised the words ‘war machine’.
‘Can we fight that thing?’ he said. ‘Can we stand our ground?’
‘My projectors could do it some serious damage,’ said the
Plausible Response
. ‘But it’s twice my mass as well as being heavily armoured and shielded – by the time I got through its outer hull it would have me in a close-quarters grapple and would be literally tearing me apart.’
Robert regarded one of the secondary screens where the droid Reski Emantes drifted, seemingly lifeless, then he looked at Rosa.
‘So what do we do?’
‘Daddy, we run! Ship?’
‘Evasive manoeuvres engaged, course set for far side of the planetoid after the next, heavy thrust initiated.’
He stared at the hostile vessel, imagining its claws ripping their way into their ship.
‘What is that craft?’ he said. ‘Are there any records identifying it?’
‘Indeed there are,’ said the Ship. ‘It is a hunt-invigilator of the Steel81 Claw, I believe.’
Frowning, he glanced at Rosa.
‘That’s its rank, Daddy – all you need to know is that it is a Knight of the Legion of Avatars, and it’s coming after us!’
The last of the Bargalil base crew had barricaded the access corridors to the hemicylindrical dorm section, then welded the doors shut. They were heavily armoured pressure doors, easily capable of resisting the laser lances on some of the subverted maintenance drones. There was a heavy-grade cutter in the large workshop but it was integrated into a motorised ceiling assembly and the Legion Knight wanted to spend as little time on sterilisation as possible – there was no telling how soon a ship would arrive from the other moon or the planet and he had a great deal of essential materials to locate and salvage.
Fortunately, a rapid analysis of the command centre’s crude schemator units revealed that a secondary fuel line passed through the foundations. It was a simple task to choke off the outlet and send a small remote along the pipe to bore holes and ignite when enough fuel had escaped.
The explosion ripped open the dormitory with an angry yellow flare of burning gases that quickly faded while debris and bodies flew in all directions. Watching from the oval roof of the main complex, the Legion Knight was puzzled, having expected a contained incineration from the amount of fuel that had been released. But when one of the ejected pieces of debris altered its trajectory towards him and opened fire with an energy weapon, the mystery was solved. Gas tanks for vacsuits would have intensified that explosion yet somehow one wearer had survived the eruption.
The suited, six-limbed Bargalil seemed undaunted by the Legion Knight’s size as it flew straight down, firing off beam bursts that did little more than heat a few spots of the carapace to a dull red. The Knight felt a twinge of admiration for such a daringly suicidal assault – along with the Sendrukans, the Bargalil were an impressive species and would be likely candidates for convergence, once the Legion of Avatars established unopposed dominion.
He let the survivor get to within fifty metres before directing a nearby patrolling drone to swoop down, latch onto the Bargalil and steer him sideways towards one of the surface airlocks which was just starting to cycle open. Seconds after diving inside, both machine and captive were engulfed by an explosion, preceded, the Knight noticed, by a small bright flash, a sign that the Bargalil had triggered a grenade.
As metal and organic remnants sprayed out of the twisted airlock, the Legion Knight received an unexpected alert, from the recently reactivated exospatial comm-signal sensors. It was, to his surprise, a dyadic realtime communication from his two remaining Scions, those who chose paths to Darien different from the third, whose failure remained a source of grief. In their last communication they had offered up reassurances but no specifics as to their plans; perhaps this time more would be revealed. So as the reprogrammed drones of the depopulated base went about their scavenging, he opened the waiting channel.
>We greet you, Illustrious Progenitor, and enquire after the state of your well-being. Your subspace beacon has been silent for an entire quarter-cycle<
>This concerns us, Illustrious One. The journey to Darien is long and we well recall the state of your great and venerable workings and their enclosing body-shell. We urge you to reconsider undertaking such a long and onerous passage, especially since our own plans are now well advanced<
The Legion Knight was impressed and amused at this ploy.
>Illustrious Progenitor, understand that we counsel caution out of duty to you and the principles of convergence. Be advised that in the event that you reach Darien without further mishap, you will see that formidable obstacles await you – an Earthsphere cruiser and a Brolturan battleship, the latter of which maintains around the planet a sensor shell of some sophistication. We are uncertain as to how you might overcome this<