Polity 4 - The Technician (54 page)

‘Blood,
I need a quarter-kilotonne blast right here.’ Ergatis sent the coordinates
along with the request, its attention fixed on the wreckage where the device
had come down, where survivors were staggering into view, trying to find
somewhere to go.

‘Why?’
the attack ship asked, as it swung round and back in towards the city.

‘Because
though the device has cracked the city raft, it is not lying over the crack –
one half of Zealos will be at ninety degrees to the ground within four minutes
if we don’t do something.’

‘Understood.’

The
missile came down, a black line scraped against the sky, hit precisely
underneath the fallen device. In a massive explosion tonnes of foamstone
fountained out from underneath it, hardly dislodging it at all. Then it
dropped, disappearing into hot rubble like a lead weight sinking through wet
porridge, and the half of the city that had already risen ten metres, sank back
down, cushioned by displaced mud. No sign of the survivors Ergatis had seen,
just the shock wave would have turned them to a bloody fog. The AI upped its
death count by a further hundred, then wondered if there was any point in counting
when it simultaneously received visuals from Amistad showing what had just
materialized in the Braemar system, and notification of further U-space
signatures in the atmosphere of Masada.

‘It is here,’ Tombs had said, ‘the mechanism is here,’ just before
something began rearranging the inside of Grant’s head. He was on the floor
again, his side hurting – Shree had cracked one of his ribs. He clutched at the
gratings as the floor suddenly seemed to become a wall. Next came the panic: he
didn’t know how he had got here, he wasn’t sure where ‘here’ was, then he
wasn’t sure who he was.

The
thunderous crashing he did identify – a triple sonic boom of something moving
fast through atmosphere, fast and low – then the meaning of the words ‘sonic
boom’ fled his mind. Tombs, still standing impossibly on the wall Grant clung
to, said something. Grant gazed at him in incomprehension, a sound in his head
like someone hand-sawing through a log. He pressed a palm against his temple,
still clinging with the other hand, knew only confusion. Someone began yelling,
and he only realized it was him as a flashbulb light filled his surroundings,
the world took a deep breath, then blasted it all out at once.

The wind
picked him up, sent him rolling until something hard and angular came down,
clamping him in place. He gazed in terror at the big claw pressing on his
chest, then up into an array of green eyes below a scarred and domed head.
Flute-grass stems blasted across, followed by spatters of smoking mud and a
heavy black smoke, then the claw lifted away and a Human hand closed on the
front of his jacket. Tombs hauled him to his feet.

‘They
can only delay it for a while,’ Tombs said, and pointed.

Grant
gazed out beyond the pillars to where a massive bell-shaped object hung tilted
in the sky, shedding black debris and pouring smoke. Next the sleek blue shape
of a Polity attack ship sped past, its sonic boom a solid sound that sent him
staggering. He spotted Sanders, crouched, her hands over her ears, squatted
down beside her. In its passage the attack ship left another massive blast.
That flashbulb went off again and Grant was glad he hadn’t been looking at that
moment. When he did look out towards the object, one massive chunk of it peeled
away in a cloud of fire, then just fell. As it disappeared from sight the
second shock wave hit, but this time Grant was ready for it, bracing both
himself and Sanders. Looking up again as the wind threw debris between the
pillars, he saw that Tombs stood utterly steady, as if made of iron.

Next the
building bucked underneath them. Ground shock from that fallen chunk of the
object. Grant readied himself for more of that as, trailing fire, the rest of
the thing abruptly dropped out of the sky. With an eardrum-tearing shriek the
attack ship hammered in, decelerating at a seemingly impossible rate to a halt
above the site. In the smoke and steam its energy weapons were perfectly
visible; proton beams and lasers, even a maser etching out its existence so it
seemed a glass column reached down. Then something else stabbed down, a single
missile, and the attack ship accelerated away again. When he saw Tombs stepping
over to one of the building’s pillars, crouching down behind it and catching an
arm round it, Grant braced himself for the worst.

First
the building bucked again, rising up on a ten-metre wave through the soft
ground, but that was only from the fall of the object. Then the sky ignited,
all the pillars around thrown into black and purple silhouette. The shock wave
hit, and no preparation was enough for it. Grant lost his grip on Sanders,
found himself hurtling through the air. He clipped a pillar, thumped down into
soft mud, the debris-laden air soon darker above him than any Masadan night.
Then the wind blast reversed, and the building became a grinning mouth of
pillar teeth trying to suck him inside it again. The roar actually seemed
composed of all the debris: a solid substance in the air. This just went on and
on eternally. He anchored himself, driving heels and hands into soft ground.
But next it all paused, as if reaching some physical limit, other sounds
impinging; the patter of falling mud, the landscape around him groaning.
Gradually, it began to wane, fall of debris became a light black snow, and
Grant just lay there gazing into a darkness that cleared to a smoky fog, at the
last swept abruptly away by an icy breeze.

‘Are you
okay?’

He
wasn’t sure how long he’d lain in comparative silence before hearing the words.
He looked around to see Sanders standing beside him, surprised he hadn’t been
deafened.

‘I think
so.’ At last he felt able to stand up, which he did. ‘Glad to see you are.’

She
shrugged. ‘It slid me against one of the pillars and pinned me there.’

‘Tombs?’

She
nodded towards the building. ‘He seems indestructible.’

They
walked across a thick layer like the outflow from a compost shredder, and
stepped back into the building. The gabbleduck still squatted here in the same
position as before, seeming oblivious to the crap that had fallen all over it,
even in its eyes. Tombs stood between two pillars, gazing out at the steadily
rising mushroom cloud.

‘Straightforward
fission bomb,’ he said without turning. ‘Probably the dirty burn has a more
disruptive quality itself.’

Grant
moved up beside him, shuddered – it seemed explosions of that shape had branded
themselves in the Human consciousness. Then he lowered his gaze, seeing Shree
Enkara, fifty metres beyond the end of a walkway, pulling herself up from the
ground, glancing back at them then abruptly heading for a nearby stand of flute
grass. He moved to go after her, but Tombs caught his shoulder.

‘There’s
no need,’ he said.

‘But
she’s got that Jain tech—’

‘The
Technician is out there – she won’t get far.’

Grant
thought about that for only a moment. Shree deserved to die for what she had done,
but not like that. No one deserved to die like that.

‘No,’ he
said, ‘I’ll bring it back for you, and I’ll bring her back.’

He
stepped through and down, and set out after her.

Acceleration, instant, unfelt by her Human body but sensed in more ways
than a Human body could sense. Masada dropped behind, whilst space debris
impacted on the adamantine slopes of Cheops’s sides
and its drive glowed like a small sun. Ahead, Calypse slowly grew, but
magnification rendered in clear detail the object poised over its onyx face.

It
seemed a cornucopia woven from strips of metal. Only the metal weighed ten
times more than lead, was harder than diamond, tougher than ceramal, and each
of those strips measured fifty metres across. Inside that horn of plenty the
mass of dodecahedrons Janice Golden had first seen in constant motion about
each other had conglomerated in one unmoving lump. Mass sensors indicated that
this thing would still balance the scales with the planet Mars, and already
tidal effects were visible down on the surface of Calypse. The gas giant’s moon
system had disrupted too – and no one would know the result of that until
later, when they started clearing up the mess.

‘Why is
no interception on the way here?’ Janice asked. ‘We knew its intentions were
hostile. Why are we only now being allowed to take the gloves off?’

‘Actually,
no,’ came the reply from Scold, ‘we did not know for
sure.’

Currently
travelling on a parallel course, a thousand kilometres away, the modern
dreadnought loomed huge in her sensors, and Janice felt like a puppy running
beside a full-grown wolf.

‘So we
had to wait until it started killing people? I’m betting that wouldn’t have
happened if this had been a Prador dreadnought.’

‘Perhaps
because we have nothing more to learn from the Prador,’ the other ship AI
replied.

Yes,
that seemed highly likely. The order to attack had been delayed whilst further
information was gathered. That information was more important to the rulers of
the Polity than a few civilian lives. How hugely things changed throughout
history, and how greatly they remained the same.

‘A more
apposite question should be: why out here? Why not right over Masada?’ Scold
wondered.

‘Probably
so it can suck up matter like it did before.’ Fully interfaced now and lying in
her sarcophagus, Janice couldn’t tell if it was herself or the Cheops AI that
replied. More likely an amalgam of the two had spoken the words.

‘It
could also be targeting Flint,’ Scold noted.

The
Braemar moon Flint currently lay on the other side of Calypse, but in less than
twenty hours would lie directly over the mechanism. That wasn’t really a
concern. This should all be over long before then, one way or another. With a
thought, Janice opened ports over her four big rail-guns, gazed through ship
eyes into their hardened bunkers and watched conveyor magazines loading one-ton
missiles of mono-dense iron wrapped in a layer of case-hardened ceramal. As the
guns began firing their roar echoed through vast open spaces within Cheops as if from a horde of monsters.

‘No finesse,
then,’ suggested Scold.

‘Just a
probe to test things before we start to finesse the attack.’ Janice noted that Scold had begun firing too, though it seemed to be lacing
its inert missiles with a nice selection of atomic and chemical explosives. ‘We
have to test it, see how it reacts, see if the weaknesses are where we expect
them to be.’ Janice paused. ‘We also need to ensure your U-jump missiles will
hit home – no point wasting them.’

‘No,
really?’ said Scold.

Janice
didn’t bother going on, she’d long realized that when an AI started getting
sarcastic it was time to stop talking.

Travelling
at a large proportion of light speed, the two clouds of missiles sped out, the
gap between them narrowing as they closed on their target, till they melded
into one cloud. Abruptly, something materialized before this cloud – one of the
objects they had already seen down on the planet. Janice ensured that every
scrap of data from this encounter was being relayed back to Amistad, and to the
ships defending Masada.

The
thing flared, briefly, emitting an EM pulse of massive intensity. The missiles
to the fore of the cloud vaporized, but after that there seemed something wrong
with the instrument readings, for the whole cloud seemed off course. Then, as
her entire ship groaned around her, Janice realized, with a sudden sinking in
her gut, what she had just seen.

‘Fuck.
Gravity weapon.’

Her
sensors had registered the passing of a line of distortion throughout her ship.
The gravity wave had hit even before the EM blast reached the missiles, in fact
that blast might have been only a side effect of it. Damage diagnostics began
to catch up. The internal structure had weakened by 10 per cent, there were
reactor breaches and systems crashes but luckily, since this was a weapon the
Polity had also been developing and had thus also prepared a defence against,
both her ship and Scold now used reactive antimatter
containment. Twenty years ago they would both have been toast.

The
cloud of missiles, though diverted, had not been diverted enough, but the
mechanism was ready for that. The U-space signature from it seemed as
disruptive as a USER, and the thing didn’t entirely submerge in that continuum.
Even to her most precise sensors the mechanism seemed to stretch into an object
five hundred kilometres long, then snap back into shape, five hundred
kilometres from where it had been.

Inert
missiles hurtled straight down into Calypse, pocking its face with hundreds of
thermal blasts each spreading to the size of North America then fading to blood
red. However, just a few of the missiles Scold had
fired, which possessed their own guidance systems, diverted enough to come down
on the mechanism. Two of them hit. Silent detonations in space, small suns
igniting; explosions that would have gutted a ship like Cheops.

‘Minimal
damage,’ Scold noted as the fires faded. Just shallow craters in that
basketwork of super-dense strips, some shrapnel of that same matter hurtling
away. ‘Intersecting X-ray lasers . . . now – microwave on pattern D412.’

They fired
simultaneously; a complex pattern of energy attack tangling along the length of
the mechanism, generating hot spots where recent sensor data indicated complex
systems, microwave beams tracking what seemed to be com-lines, possibly optic.
Explosions within the massive machine, visible through its basketwork interior,
tracked progress. An irised gravity field began to generate to its fore as it
began to turn towards Calypse, but then something massive blew near the front
end, molten matter bled out into space, and the field winked out. The whole
mechanism shuddered, began responding with multispectrum lasers whose energy
load was easily absorbed and distributed by the superconductive layers in the
armour of the two massive ships.