‘You’re recovered.’ Tergal spotted him first.
Anderson wondered about the tone of resentment he sensed, and recognized that Tergal had not found these latest adventures to his liking.
‘As best as can be expected,’ Anderson replied.
Arden and Thorn now turned towards him, too. He gazed past them to where the vulture perched on the wide deflated head of the droon. During his reading, in the library of Rondure, he had never come across the word ‘vulture’, but he recognized this creature as an uglier version of some pictures he had seen of things called ‘birds’.
‘The conquering hero returns,’ said the vulture.
Anderson did recollect reading how some birds were good mimics, but that did not sound like mimicry to him. In fact it sounded very like Unger Salbec. He winced at this reminder—another complication to add to the What now? malaise he seemed to be suffering.
‘Tergal told me your trial has lasted twenty years.’ Arden studied him with some amusement. ‘And you also told me our friend here would be dragon enough.’ She pushed a foot against one sprawled-out limb, which looked like a twisted and torn I-beam projecting from the wreckage of some collapsed building. Anderson stepped back a pace, remembering one particular third-stage sleer in a hailstorm.
‘It’s enough,’ said Anderson.
‘So you’ll return to Rondure?’ she asked.
Anderson shrugged. If he returned anywhere, it would be to Bravence, where Unger Salbec awaited him. But he was not the kind of person who returned anywhere. He glanced at Tergal. ‘What do you think?’
Tergal shook his head. ‘I have debts to repay, if you’ll allow me.’
Anderson nodded, turned to Thorn. ‘What about you?’
‘That remains to be decided,’ said Thorn. He studied the weapon he held, pulled out the empty clip and stared inside it almost accusingly, before slapping it back into place. He then pointed over Anderson’s shoulder.
They all turned to watch the blimp approach.
In utter frustration, Skellor withdrew from Cento. It was like the Occam Razor—that AI burn. But he had encountered no other Golem possessing the ability to destroy its own mind. He supposed Cento had prepared himself for this—having assessed the dangers Jain tech represented to one of his kind. Skellor pushed the Golem away. No matter—he really, really had more important concerns.
The brown dwarf’s tidal swathe was hitting with metronomic regularity, splitting and tearing apart Ogygian all around him. Bound together by internally generated diamond fibres and with what remained of his human nervous system shut down, Skellor tried to bend with the flow, distorted, the fibres snapping inside him, other structures breaking. But he rebuilt them, bound himself together with more fibres, and concentrated all his resources on constructing inside his torso the gravitic generator that would power him to survival.
The agent probably thought he had won—thought that this was the end of Skellor. But Skellor was more than mere human: he could survive this, would survive this.
The temperature was rising. Already some materials inside the ship were beginning to vaporize. The continuous grinding, twisting and flexing of the ship’s structure and the rippling of its hull were generating most of the heat. Bubble-metal I-beams, taking on a cherry glow, stretched like toffee and twisted apart, the inert gases used to foam their metal bleeding away into vacuum. Behind Skellor, the hull separated like wet cardboard, and underneath him the floor bowed alarmingly, then began to slew away. Everything, bar himself and one other item, was coming apart as if utterly rotten. That the Golem chassis retained its shape was testament to Polity materials technology. But even that would not survive the impact to come.
The next gravity wave hit hard and lasted longer, shattering what remained of the ship across a kilometre of space. Pieces of it were now incandescent—boiling into vacuum. Skellor retained his own shape — reinforced it from inside using structural force fields powered by his internal gravitic generator. But something was wrong. That wave had nearly ripped him in two, yet with the theorized output of the generator, it should not have. And he would need everything the generator could give him, as there was much worse to come. He ran a diagnostic on the machine, but found it was functioning at optimum. Separate from his internal diagnostics, he probed inside it with nanoptic fibres, and located the node growing right in the centre of it. He opened the generator, forced the node out, closed the generator and had it up to forty per cent of function when the next wave hit.
Skellor screamed, mostly in rage and frustration — now a piece of diamond-sewn meat stretched out over four metres of nothing. Tidal forces had shredded the remains of the ship, the bulk of it now a falling arc of metallic vapour. Skellor was the largest single chunk remaining, the second-largest being an eyeless Golem skull. He slowly drew himself back together, high above an endless brown plain; became a black human doll full of whorls and knots. Witch-fingered. Much of his substance had been torn away or had boiled into vacuum, and his mind was losing cohesion. Before it went completely, simple physics impinged: he could not survive this; how had he ever thought he could survive this?
Some hours later a fibrous mass containing Jain eggs, which so far had managed to retain their shape, hit the surface. Half that mass turned to energy. All that remained was a baroque silver pattern across the dun surface.
Through tunnelling vision Cormac watched as out of an elliptical port on the side of the nacelle, at the end of a jointed arm, extruded a close-quarters laser. This device looked something like a premillennial machine-gun, though rather than belt-fed with ammunition, it was fed by thick, ribbed power cables. But it served the same purpose, normally being used against smaller opponents who had actually managed to get close to the ship’s hull. It was precisely the weapon required to remove Cormac from the grapple, probably in pieces. He spat blood and looked aside, still seeing into the tear in his perception. Perhaps he could step inside the ship, cause damage… something? No, the whole idea was laughable now. He had done it; he had shifted himself through U-space by an act of will, but right then he had no idea of how he had done it. And what could he do inside the ship, injured and weak as he was? Reality was himself suspended in vacuum with a laser pointed at him and death imminent. Then, through that same tear in vision, something surfaced distantly, something huge.
‘I see,’ said King.
The laser powered up, a hot glow emitting from its sooty workings. It turned on its arm and fired. The cable glowed red, white, blue-white, then the centre of that light exploded into globules of molten carbon. Once again Cormac was weightless as the grapple and a short piece of the cable he was clinging to began to fall back towards the brown dwarf. The laser folded away, all ports closed, and the attack ship receded above him.
‘You saw that I did not gain access to Skellor—or to Jain technology,’ King sent.
‘So,’ Cormac managed.
‘Tell Jerusalem that.’
As he fell, Cormac faded; even the perceptile programs he had been using were not managing to keep him conscious. He saw a vision of curving steel, thought himself near impact with the dwarf star, but realized that was wrong. If he was that close, he would not see a curve to the horizon—would probably see nothing at all.
Then something titanic engulfed him, and claws, three-fingered and gleaming, closed on his upper arms. As they separated him from the cable, things ripped inside his body. Blood exploded from his mouth, and something hard entered his neck. After a numb hiatus, which he read in his gridlink as having lasted seven minutes, came bright aseptic light.