A hostile alien had been trying to break in; this much had been evident to Thorn, even in his confused state. Here, though, was a crowd that might send even Lucifer’s minions running for cover. Enormous segmented insectile horrors seemingly carved of obsidian or bright chemical-yellow crystal sulphur romped about on the dusty plain. Amid them towered the creature that had been attacking the VR chamber—it was the only one possessing that strange ziggurat head unadorned with pincers, saws or other lethal appendages. It was going berserk, spitting streams of volatile liquid at the other creatures, thrashing at them with its tail, attempting to snatch them up. Yet its attacks seemed to be having no effect whatsoever. Thorn eventually realized that the larger creature was attacking holograms.
‘Holocapture, you said?’ He glanced at the woman before dropping from the rim of the hole, then he scraped burning mucus from his boot heel into the dust.
‘Yes, but not for much longer. We have to go now.’
‘Go where?’ asked the one who seemed to be wearing some primitive version of space armour.
The woman pointed to the shimmer of a hard-field wall some hundred metres distant. ‘Dragon will turn it off as we reach it, then back on once we’re on the other side.’
‘Dragon?’ Thorn eyed her.
‘Would you rather stay out here?’
Thorn glanced at the rampaging monster, and the illusions it sought to kill. Already some of them were becoming translucent and displaying reference gridlines inside themselves.
‘Our stuff,’ protested the younger of the two men.
‘Most of it was on Stone and Bonehead when they bolted,’ said the elder. ‘Let’s go.’
After glancing down at the cylinder of the ancient holocapture device she carried, the woman abruptly broke into a trot. The two men, glancing over towards the monster circus, were quick to hurry after her. Thorn was unsurprised to see that some of the images had blinked out—an antiquated device like that would take them out one at a time as its power faded. Hurrying after the others, he glanced both ways along the length of the hard-field, and hoped Dragon did not intend to display some of its macabre humour by leaving the wall switched on. The monster, once the last image of its monstrous prey vanished, was not likely to be in the best of tempers. He then noted, in the distance, the familiar shape of a telefactor lifting off a strew of boulders and quickly heading away, even using a brief fusion burn, which was odd because in such straits he could see no reason why Jack would want to recall such an easily dispensable device.
Just as they reached the shimmering wall, the creature emitted a sound like an air horn in a cave. The woman held up her hand and caught something glassy in it just as the wall dispersed in silvered autumn. Glancing back once, Thorn observed the monster hammering towards them. No point in running once they had crossed this barrier, for without the wall they were dead for certain and with it there would be no reason for haste. He didn’t look back again—none of them did. Perhaps they all thought it might break some spell.
A dull thrumming sound was all that told them the droon had run straight into the replaced barrier. Finally it was okay for them to look round. They saw the monster, weird and terrifying, marching back and forth behind still-wavering energy distortions. To Thorn it briefly occurred that he might still be in VR. But that would not change his present behaviour—virtual pain hurt just as keenly.
Time seemed to slow, as if to give Cormac an appreciation of what was happening to him. He brought his hand up to the side of his head, but in the eternal second it took him to do so the aug creature had established a direct causal link between the proximity of his hand to itself and the amount of pain it allowed him to feel. Pulling the thing away from his head would be more difficult for him than sawing off his own hand. However, coldly, his secondary awareness, established in his gridlink, knew all about that. It counted milliseconds and calculated trajectories. It would be a close-run thing, for already Jain fibres were beginning to invade the gridlink itself. Shuriken, hanging in the air, whining like an abandoned pet, abruptly dropped to the dust—there was no longer room for that channel; Cormac must turn all to one purpose.
Skellor, the toe of his boot coming down on the Tenkian weapon, started to appear from that point upwards.
‘That’s one for me.’ He grinned at Cormac.’ You can’t fight it for much longer, agent.’
Cormac kept his eyes on Skellor’s face, and elements of his mind out of the man’s grasp. Can you keep a secret? he asked himself. Slack seconds accumulated and, locking his hands together, he raised his arms above his head and tensed. Immediately a reaction bored through from Skellor: the man did not like this, wanted Cormac to lower his arms.
‘See you… around,’ Cormac managed through gritted teeth just as a shadow swept across, and the telefactor reached down with clawed grips, grasped Cormac’s arms and hauled him into the sky.
‘You will crawl back to me!’ Skellor shouted after him.
The program Cormac had created and transmitted followed through. As the telefactor rose out of the canyon and flew above the sandstone buttes, it extruded a three-fingered plant sampler with a chainglass vibroblade. The three chrome fingers closed on the squirming aug creature as in a foam of blood and mucus it settled closer against Cormac’s head. It then pulled the creature out, stretching the pink tubules that penetrated flesh and bone. The vibroblade extruded, turned like a clock hand, cut the creature away and the telefactor discarded it. Cormac did not see it fall, was too busy gasping in agony.
‘You haven’t really escaped, you know.’
The probing carrier signal informed Cormac that he had done precisely that and, so long as he gave no reply, Skellor would not be able to trace his whereabouts.
Jerusalem had offered a number of choices to its crew and passengers: cryopods, gel-stasis (basically being sealed in containers full of shock-absorbing gel), or they could just carry on as before. Mika chose a half-measure. She didn’t want to be utterly disconnected during the penetration of the USER field; nor did she wish to be entirely unprotected, for she knew that though AI ships could survive a severe hammering, it was not necessarily the case that their passengers would. So she chose to sit out the worse patches in an acceleration chair. And she was beginning to wonder if that had been the right decision.
Alarming crashes and bangs kept echoing throughout the great ship, and only minutes ago she had heard a distant huge explosion—which Jerusalem calmly informed her was from the implosion of a hard-field generator. Now the entire ship was vibrating like an aeroplane hitting turbulence. Staring at the chaotic swirling grey image on the screen—more like a monochrome image of some creature’s internal organs than anything else—Mika wondered what it all meant. Were they making any headway?
‘Jerusalem, how are we doing?’
‘We have penetrated four years into the USER field. However, in ship-time of thirty hours I will have to drop out of U-space for repairs.’
‘Repairs?’
‘I have ejected three fusion reactors that went out of phase, and seventeen hard-field generators have imploded. A resultant fire killed twelve humans in gel-stasis. Three Golem, five other AIs and two haimans were also killed while making repairs.’
‘Haimans?’ asked Mika.
‘People like D’nissan—those who are seeking synergy with AI.’
And there it was: a piece of information that had entirely passed Mika by, probably because she had never thought to ask. She also noted how Jerusalem had listed those casualties along with the other components of the ship. It was not a comforting thought.