In the Mouth of the Whale (35 page)

Towards the end of the day, Ori found herself working alongside Hereata, fixing the bolts that held the terminal unit and retaining buffer of the railgun in precise alignment. Each bolt possessed a spark of intelligence that sensed its position relative to the others and could minutely alter the angle at which it was fixed, to allow for small flexings in the ship’s superstructure. They cheeped anxiously when they were removed, and continued to cheep in the bots’ catch nets; no one had worked out how to switch them off.

After a little while, Hereata said, ‘Hira has an interesting idea. She claims that the Mind called down the enemy. She says that’s why the defences failed. Not because the enemy overwhelmed them, but because the Mind reached out to them.’

‘It sounds like another of her fantasies,’ Ori said. ‘Nothing you should take seriously.’

‘We know the defences failed. We do not yet know why.’

Ori selected a bolt from the net slung between her bot’s forward manipulators and inserted it in the chair that held the rail to the sector plate. ‘That doesn’t mean we should accept the first silly explanation that someone cooks up. Especially someone like Hira.’

Hereata said, ‘Hira also says that our drones survived because we’re linked to the Mind. And because the Mind is allied to the enemy, we’re a danger to the ship.’

‘She told you that?’

The bolt’s cheeping slowed as Ori tightened it, stopped when it was properly seated.

‘Her bunky did. Lani.’

‘I told you how Hira was, back on the Whale,’ Ori said. ‘She hasn’t changed. When something bad happens, she looks for someone to blame. But if you’re worried about what she’s been saying, we could call her out. Confront her. After all, she has a piece of a sprite in her head, just like us. She served time on an observation station, just like we did. If we’re linked to the Mind, so is she.’

‘But her drone was destroyed,’ Hereata said, ‘and ours survived.’

Ori laughed.

‘I know. It’s ridiculous,’ Hereata said. ‘But if we confront her, she’ll say that we’re doing it because we really do have something to hide. And people are scared, Ori. They might listen to her.’

‘Lani got to you, didn’t she?’

‘I don’t like her. She is a violent person.’

‘Don’t worry about her. I’m on your side. And Hira can hardly tell Tenkiller or any of the other Trues about this stupid fantasy of hers, so it won’t come to anything. It’s just talk.’

‘Unlike Hira, I don’t claim any special insight about what the Mind may or may not want,’ Hereata said. ‘But I have been thinking about it. It seems to me that it is constrained by the logic of its situation. And logic gives it just four choices. It can side with us. The Trues and the Quicks. It can side with the enemy. It could choose to fight both us and the enemy, and drive us off its world or destroy us. Or it can remain aloof, either because it does not choose to fight, or because it does not even notice that we are fighting each other. Even though we are fighting over who should make contact with it.’

‘I like the idea that it stays aloof,’ Ori said. ‘Things are bad enough as it is, worrying about what the enemy is planning to do.’

‘But it hasn’t stayed aloof,’ Hereata said. ‘It touched me. It touched you. And all the others. Even Hira.’

Ori said, ‘What’s yours doing, right now?’

It was a little like talking about sex, she thought. Embarrassing and illicitly thrilling.

‘My sprite? It has been very quiet.’

‘Mine too.’

‘I wonder what that means.’

‘It means they aren’t interested in what we’re doing,’ Ori said. ‘It means they’re staying aloof.’

They worked on in silence and were finishing off the final checks on the terminal section of the truncated railgun when stars began to fall from the sky. Stars radiating out from a point a few degrees west of the burning moon, falling in long fiery streaks that passed above the ship. Ori tried to focus on the bright point at the head of one streak, but couldn’t make out much more than a fuzzy white speck a few pixels across.

Hereata flashed a pict of the speck’s absorption spectrum: carbon doped with titanium and wolfram.

‘Fullerenes,’ Ori said.

‘My best guess also. No doubt a heat shield.’

Ori watched a falling star drop behind the horizon, followed by another, and another. ‘There are so many of them.’

The stars continued to fall. Brighter now. Leaving distinct contrails. Then one exploded directly overhead and both Ori and Hereata flinched, clamping to the surface of the ship with all of their bots’ limbs. Ori replayed the explosion in slow motion, saw a triangular shape break apart into several sections that tumbled away, burning. Chalices full of flame . . .

The ship juddered as its main motor fired up. A moment later Commander Tenkiller’s voice cut through the background chatter of the other Quicks, ordering them to assemble on the general deck.

The commander was in formal dress, black jacket, trews slashed with scarlet, and a gold skullcap, flanked by the two surviving Trues in their exoskeletons and yellow and green uniforms, their breasts splashed with merit and valour bars. She’d dispatched flocks of autonomous microdrones on a scouting expedition, she said. Enemy activity had been detected some eight hundred klicks upwind and they were going forward to engage. She did not yet know what they would encounter, but they would meet the enemy with glad hearts and minds, and strain every sinew and neuron to win a victory.

‘I cannot promise you more than that. We have no safe haven now. We can only fight. And even if we do not win, we will make such a mark against the enemy that it won’t be forgotten any time soon. We are already under way and will be within striking distance inside ten hours. There is still much to do, and we will all of us work together to make sure that we are ready when we need to be ready. On a personal note, I want to say that I am honoured by the presence of each and every one of you under my command. I know that you will not fail me, or fail your comrades-in-arms. Now, let us pray.’

She led prayers to the One God for deliverance from the enemy and a great victory, and her second-in-command stepped up and gave the new orders of the day, and everyone went back to work. Ori saw Hira moving off amongst her acolytes, saw one of them, Hira’s bunky, Lani, turn and give her a frank and hostile stare. Ori stared back, and felt a small satisfaction when Lani looked away and turned and hurried to catch up with her friends.

Work was good. Work helped Ori forget everything else. She rode her bot and helped to move explosive loads and to check out the systems of the reconstructed railguns. There was a round of dry firing, supervised by Commander Tenkiller herself. Five of the guns worked and three failed in various ways, and the crews set to tracing faults and fixing them.

As they worked on, a few more falling stars streaked overhead, dropping past different parts of the horizon. And then there were no more.

After the failed railguns had been retested and passed fit for duty, Ori and the others were rotated off shift and given a four-hour break. She snagged a tube of water and a tube of vegetable paste, returned to her chair and lay down and slept. And jolted awake a little over two hours later to the soft ululation of the general-quarters alarm. She activated her chair and woke her bot.

It was early in the morning. Fomalhaut’s tiny disc glaring a handspan above the horizon in the east; a few stars still showing in the west. And stars were falling high above, leaving thin white scratches as they ripped across the sky’s dark blue dome. Ten, twenty, fifty. Tracking algorithms showed that the stars were falling to the south and east of the platform, burning down the sky, punching through the cloud deck about seventy klicks away. Too far away for the bot’s cameras to grab any detail, but Ori imagined the stars breaking apart inside the cloud deck to hatch enemy predators, the new-born flock turning, hunting, looking for targets, locking on to them . . .

Commander Tenkiller came on line, issuing crisp calm orders to prep the railguns for immediate firing. As Ori and the rest of the crew began to move towards their stations, more stars fell. Some shot straight overhead; others fell on either side. Ori saw one plunge past the port side, less than twenty klicks out. A finned shape falling straight down, vanishing into the cloud deck, where sporadic glows were appearing, burning foggily inside the thick veils.

The Eye of the Righteous
was beginning to turn. Ori saw a trio of bright shapes flash past, shockingly close, trailing long cords of shock-heated soot. She didn’t see the one that hit the ship.

It struck somewhere forward of her position. There was a terrific slam and a flash and debris flew up and the curved upper decking of the ship rippled. Ori’s bot was flung backwards in a long arc and slammed into a winch. She grabbed hold of the winch’s housing as the deck yawed. Damage reports popped up and there was something wrong with the feed: she couldn’t see anything clearly and fine motor control was fading in and out. Then everything failed completely. For a moment, she was in her chair, hearing panicky voices shouting at each other, and then a secondary link kicked in and she was riding her bot again.

It had started up its autorepair sequences in the few moments she’d been gone. Rerouting control of its fine manipulators, clearing dead patches in its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. But its sonar and deep radar were still down, and joints on two of its limbs had lost lubricant; it walked with a distinct limp as Ori steered it towards the point of impact at the bow of the ship.

At least half the bots that had been working outside were gone: knocked off the ship by the impact. Some of those left were working on the railguns; one signalled to Ori.

‘There may be more of them. Help us, damn you.’

‘The ship is damaged,’ Ori said. ‘Internal comms are down. We need to know our situation before we can work out what to do.’

The curve of the upper surface had acquired a distinct lean, tilting forward and to the right, and a hole some ten metres across had been punched into the plates close to the prow. Ori crabbed her bot over buckled plates. The edge of the hole exposed layers of insulation and fibrous fascias of pressure tanking, all of it distorted, as if a bubbling, dripping, roiling slough of liquid had been instantly frozen. Infrared and ultraviolet overlays revealed patches of activity. Hot spots. Intricate feathery streaks and veins that pulsed and shifted, extending fine threads into hull plating around the gash like some kind of horrible rot of the inanimate.

Ori extended an arm equipped with a set of probes and micro-manipulators. Zoomed in on one of the invasive threads and saw that it was composed of rod-shaped microscopic units, each attached to its neighbours by hairlike pilli. Even as she watched, rods pinched in half at their waists and the two halves pulled apart and promptly began to grow. Nanomachines, each with intricate internal architecture, extending and dividing in rhythmic pulses of activity.

Three other bots crabbed towards her. One was ridden by Hereata, the others by two drone jockeys, Aata and Ulua. Hereata said that she had seen the impact, and threw a pict at Ori: a deeply foreshortened view of a dark fleck falling beyond the truncated curve of a contrail that was bent into a sinusoidal shape by winds moving at different speeds at different heights in the sky. The fleck slipping sideways in the sky, seeming to skip towards the viewpoint in a series of skidding lunges, growing larger with shocking speed, jerking in and out of frame as the optical system of Hereata’s bot tried to track it, slamming straight through the prow of the ship in a flash of flame.

‘It steered straight at the ship,’ Ori said.

‘It took out the Trues’ lifepod,’ Ulua said. ‘No one knows where the commander and her officers are.’

‘This stuff is growing,’ Aata said, stepping back from the edge.

‘I know,’ Ori said. ‘We have to do something about it right away.’

‘We have to find someone in charge,’ Ulua said.

‘I think we may be in charge now,’ Ori said.

She seemed to be at the centre of a ringing calm, the way she’d felt riding the probe down through the cloud deck after the quake. Except this was real. She wasn’t safely lodged inside the Whale’s comforting bulk. This was happening to her. She felt a jolt of excitement, and also felt, for the first time in days, her passenger stir behind her eyes.

‘Leto and Tche were down there,’ Aata said. ‘They were preparing the last of the drones . . .’

‘They might still be down there,’ Ulua said. ‘Trapped between bulkhead doors. We should go down and look for them.’

‘I have a better idea,’ Ori said, and launched a fly-by-wire probe, spinning it out and down. The impact had punched through the hull plates and pressure tanking, smashed structural spars. The Trues’ lifepod had been sheared away, two ballonets had ruptured and collapsed across the wreckage of broken spars, and the hangar that had housed the predators was torn open. It was pitch black inside, but the probe detected shifting pulses of infrared around the edges of the rupture. Radar imaging of the hangar itself showed that walkways had collapsed or detached, a jumble of wreckage caught amongst the launch cradles – and then the connection dropped. Something had cut into it, was trying to pump information into the drone’s nervous system. Ori shut off the link and had the bot run a self-check, then picted images and analysis of the damage and the infection to the others.