Line War (22 page)

‘I have to wonder how Jerusalem knows there will be a legate down on Ramone,’ he said - maybe searching for a distraction from the cold reality looming beyond the ship.

A
thrumming
sound suddenly issued through the body of the
King of Hearts.
It was clearly preparing to drop into U-space, though he guessed this sound was not from the U-space engine but from numerous weapons charging up in readiness. Cormac slackened the tension in his fingers and tried to prepare himself again for an experience that now seemed to be becoming unwholesomely attractive to him, almost like a growing addiction.

‘It is understood that the major wormships are captained by partially distinct entities, which are sub-minds of Erebus. Maintaining a meld of AI minds over such distances is not feasible, hence some self-determination of Erebus’s sub-units must be allowed,’ stated King.

‘Didn’t you just make a little slip there?’ enquired Hubbert Smith. ‘When you said “Maintaining a meld of AI minds” didn’t you mean “Keeping these AI minds utterly subjugated”?’

‘Quite,’ replied King.

‘Putting aside Smith’s quite relevant point,’ said Cormac, ‘how does Jerusalem know wormships are controlled by “partially distinct entities”, and that those entities are in fact legates?’

‘The chances are high that at least one of those controlling a wormship down on the planet is a legate, since the proportion of Golem and other viable minds that fled the Polity after the end of the Prador war is high.’

‘So Jerusalem is supposing that each of these ships is controlled by one of those “Golem or other viable minds”, though now subjugated to Erebus’s will and quite possibly since remodelled?’

‘Your orders were sent by one of Jerusalem’s subordinates, but even so Jerusalem is
supposing
nothing, since that wormships are captained is accepted fact across the AI nets.’

‘Which brings me back to the original question: how does Jerusalem
know?’

‘The information became available.’

‘From where?’

‘I don’t know,’ King admitted.

At that moment Cormac observed the image of the
Cable Hogue
seem to stretch in some indefinable direction - then disappear. Even though he was trying to keep his U-sense repressed, he saw it entering U-space like a moon dropping into some vast sea. The time for questions had just ended, since the short hop insystem would take only moments. He then felt the twisting
shift
as the
King of Hearts
dropped into U-space. The apparent dome over them turned grey, and many of the ship’s sensors he was accessing now registered zero input. But again he was there,
alone,
in that same vast sea, feeling its currents and knowing that he could push a little
there,
move
there,
just a little effort and . . . Again that weird twisting sensation as the
King of Hearts
surfaced like a submarine, but Cormac felt as if the ship was leaving him behind. It took an effort of will for him to stay with it.

However, unlike a submarine, this ship - along with all the others - surfaced at the same speed at which it had entered the ‘sea’. Immediately the grey in the dome screen was replaced by starlit space filled with the flashes of munitions. Then abruptly it blacked out. Cormac closed his eyes, tried to ignore the slick sweat on his palms, and concentrated instead on what he was seeing through King’s sensors. The attack ship veered past a clump of three interconnected rod-forms, all radiating far into the infrared before one of them exploded to send the other two tumbling. Something crashed against the hull and bounced off, the impact of it rumbling through his seat, but the object rapidly tumbling away hadn’t been ejected by the nearby explosion. Instead, Cormac recognized a box-like segment - a piece of a wormship. A particle beam, stabbing out behind, lit it up briefly and it burst into vaporizing fragments.

The two hammerheads were moving side by side, Centurions arrayed all about them to intercept any attack, while, ahead of them, the
Cable Hogue
led the way in. Cormac observed five Centurions breaking away to intercept one of the lesser ammonite spiral ships. Going into high-gravity turns, the Centurions released a swarm of missiles. Impacts on hard-fields blotted the targeted spiral from view for a moment. As these faded, he watched the vessel remain utterly intact for a moment, then suddenly fragment in multiple explosions. The quantity of attack missiles had overloaded its hard-field generators, and those coming after had finished the job. As Cormac understood it, there had been fifty of the major wormships located here, but none of these ammonite ships. Then, as King directed its sensors at some distant object and brought it into focus, he found an explanation. There a wormship was unravelling, its long segmented components then coiling up again to form three of the spirals.

New view: far ahead, six wormships were slinging out rod-forms, like infected cells spewing viruses. Internal sensors for mapping mass gave a view of the gravity terrain ahead. The
Cable Hogue
hung within this like a lead ball on a rubber sheet, then it seemed the sheet was mounding up ahead of it. The mound swelled as it advanced - a wave in the spacetime continuum – and it spread across an ever-widening front. Cormac felt a sharp pain grow behind his eyes as his brain struggled to interpret in three spacial dimensions what he knew he was observing in five. He knew this pain would go away if he allowed himself to employ his U-sense, but he fought the temptation, denied it. The wave began to distort, and the best analogy Cormac could summon up was that it was turning into a roller. Reaching the wormships and swarming rod-forms, which were now linking together to form a wall a hundred miles tall, this roller curved right over, enveloping three wormships and a large proportion of the wall. It seemed the gravity phenomenon had just captured part of realspace. The pain in his head growing worse, he shifted to a view through normal EM sensors, and there observed the three wormships and section of wall undergo massive acceleration. All of them were distorted and breaking apart as they went out of play, heading directly towards the distant glare of the sun.

‘Now, that wasn’t a gravity disrupter,’ commented Smith.

‘Next generation,’ King allowed, before they proceeded into an area full of debris, rod-forms and missiles closing in on them from the three remaining wormships and three ammonite spirals.

As one, the Centurions now broke formation to intercept these attackers.
The Swan
took a hit on its flank, and Cormac saw a hole penetrate deep inside, rimmed with glowing girders. The ship was full of troops, quite a few of them now dead troops. Space further filled with fast-moving chunks of metal and the beams of energy weapons, which were only visible when they intersected something material. A Centurion glowed before becoming a line of fire. One ammonite spiral unravelled as another disappeared in three massive implosions. A wormship squirmed desperately and shed burned segments behind it as it fell towards
Bertha.
A single rail-gun missile slammed through this Gordian tangle, its material turning to plasma, and the wormship flew apart like ancient safety glass. The missile had come from the
Cable Hogue,
as did two of the ensuing impacts that spread the remaining wormships across the firmament. Then a particle beam lanced out, bright blue, only just visible by the stray atoms it touched and broke into strange shortlived isotopes. It panned across rod-forms, bursting them like balloons put in the way of an acetylene torch.

Then they were through.

‘I think I can leave you now,’ said the voice of a woman. ‘Nothing else in intercept range at the moment.’

Diana Windermere,
thought Cormac. He had already found out all he could about the captain of that massive ship, which was not a lot. She was apparently interfaced with the ship’s AI, which had been an old technique often used before AIs ruled the Polity. Though since refitted many times, that vessel was old, and Windermere herself was its fourth captain. He had no idea when it had been built, since that information was restricted even from him.

The planet Ramone now expanded into view, and the hammerheads, the
King of Hearts
and the Centurions began decelerating, falling into orbit. Ahead of them, the
Cable Hogue
accelerated, however. Accessing a logistical display, Cormac guessed the big ship was going to slingshot out again, heading straight for where the action seemed to be turning a volume of space over a hundred thousand miles across into a mobile firestorm. He rather suspected it was now about to get hotter there.

Despite the gravplates beneath him compensating, Cormac felt the distinct tug as the
King of Hearts
slowed into orbit.
The
Swan,
he noticed, was turning sideways, and seemed unable to correct. Its angle of approach worsened as both itself and its companion troop carrier began to graze atmosphere.

‘What’s going on there?’ he asked.

‘Swan is dead,’ King replied.

It must have been that earlier hit.
Lucky shot?
Cormac doubted it - you needed to be very lucky indeed to take out a ship’s AI with just one shot. He observed
Bertha
now moving away from its companion, and the Centurions below it rising to hold station above. The reason for this soon became evident as the body of
The Swan
seemed to begin disintegrating.

Squares of hull metal started to peel away so the vessel left a trail of them like shed scales. Soon the hull was stripped away all around its main body - the only sections remaining being at its fore, to take the heat of re-entry, on its neck and head, and around its rear engines. It looked like a giant bird from which flesh and feathers had been stripped to expose the bones of its carcass. Then, from within the quadrate girdered superstructure of its main body,
The Swan
began to eject objects the size and shape of train carriages. Hundreds of them zoomed out, a line of them stretching back right over the curve of the planet, like sleepers waiting for rails. They sucked the substance from
The Swan
so that within minutes it was possible to see right through its main skeleton. Cormac concentrated on the two lines of ejected re-entry units and observed most of them turning and dipping, nose heat-shields taking the brunt of atmosphere to slow them for AG descent. Some others weren’t managing to turn in time, and began tumbling, breaking apart. His U-sense abruptly kicked in, as if his attempt at repressing it only made it stronger. He saw people dying inside those disintegrating units, and fought hard to shut the image down. Half of the ground force sent here would arrive late and with its numbers depleted, which of course was preferable to it arriving not at all, but that didn’t make him feel any better.

Finally, the hammerhead bridge of
Swan
detached itself and lifted away, jets igniting underneath to throw it back up into orbit. Headless, the remains of the vessel lost all control, began to turn and, the impact of re-entry now hitting structure not intended for it, it began to burn - the exposed girders heating up and leaving a red scar across the firmament. Then it just broke apart: a melting smoking mass of fragments falling down towards Ramone. As if this was a signal, the Centurions abruptly accelerated, following
Swan’s
fleeing bridge back up - one of them no doubt primed to pick up the crew aboard it, before all of the Polity attack ships followed
Cable Hogue
towards that distant conflict. Cormac wondered if there would be anything left for them to engage.

‘Could have been worse,’ Smith commented.

‘It could have been better,’ argued Cormac, horrific scenes from inside those disintegrating re-entry units vivid in his mind.

* * * *

After her return to the conferencing unit, Mika watched the Dragon spheres consume two more asteroids, and the effects of that massive dinner were more than evident. Despite the gravplates within the floor of the unit, Mika could still feel massive shiftings below her and often had to shut off exterior view since the heaving and rippling of the surface outside tended give her a touch of motion sickness, which was strange, since she’d had the standard alterations made to her inner ear to prevent that effect. As far as she could gather, this violent movement was all part of the growth process, for both spheres now measured over five miles in diameter.

A number of the probes originally pushed down inside this particular sphere had been destroyed in the commotion, but she was still obtaining enough information from the remainder to learn that Dragon was making radical alterations to itself, for the sphere’s interior had changed beyond all recognition. The skin immediately underlying the scales was now over twenty feet thick, possessing a complexity of layers that almost went beyond analysis. Almost? Something had been niggling at Mika’s mind as she studied what information she could obtain about some of those multiple layers - the superconducting meshes, the kind of alloys being built up molecular stratum after stratum, and then came definite identification of a metal that had not been included on the human elementary table until humans had first walked on worlds beyond the solar system. That final identification clicked a switch in her mind.

Prador armour.

Some layers of this new epidermis bore close similarities to the armour those enemy aliens had once used on their ships, and which had explained why they so nearly flattened the Polity despite it being run by oh-so-superior AIs. As for the other less familiar layers? She didn’t know. More armouring, doubtless, more methods of defence, some perhaps intended against informational and EM warfare, and sensory apparatus, or whatever. Much of it lay far beyond her ken, and beyond the analytical abilities of the tools she presently controlled. But, certainly, much else was beginning to fall into place.