“Your reinforcements?”
“This will take a little explaining.”
Floyd looked down just in time to see a blur of light streak through the spread legs of the tower, between the second and third stages. He followed the motion as best he could, peering through a dark complexity of girderwork, and made out another moving clump of lights shadowing the first. Floyd tracked the sleek, flexing shapes as they arced higher, reaching an apex before hairpinning and diving back towards the base of the tower. They moved so fast that they cleaved rippling lines in the air, suction vortexes that pulled loose debris into them.
“Please, explain away,” he said.
“I’ll try. You saw what just happened?”
“You dying, you mean?”
“No one died. Especially not Auger. But it’s not Auger speaking right now.”
“You feeling all right, kid?”
“You’re talking to Cassandra,” she said. “The tiny machines you saw belong to me.”
“But we saw you die.”
“You saw my body die. But the machines got out in time. They fled my body at the moment of death, before Niagara’s aggressors were able to subsume and interrogate them. Now they’re using Auger as an emergency host.”
“You just… did that?”
“There’s nothing trivial about it,” she said, with a touch of defensiveness. “These machines can encode and transfer no more than a shadow of my personality and memories. Believe me, dying isn’t something I take lightly, especially here.”
Floyd looked up again, certain that the silver men could have killed him by now if that was their intention. But they had stopped their slow advance. They were hesitating, pinned between their ship and the quarry they sought.
“Maybe we should talk about this later,” he said.
“I wanted you to know what was going on, Floyd. I’ll continue to control Auger until we’re out of this mess. Then she can decide what she wants to do with me.”
“What will her options be?”
“She can continue to harbour me until we find a suitable Polity host, or she can order me to leave and I’ll die. Whatever happens, I assure you she will come to no harm.”
“Did she give her permission for this?”
“There wasn’t time to ask. Matters, as you’ve doubtless noticed, are at something of a head.”
The huge Slasher ship was under attack. Smaller ships—two of them, at least—were strafing it with lines of slicing light. The light gouged painful hyphens into Floyd’s eyes, as if someone was slicing them with razors. He forced himself to look away.
“Is this your cavalry?” he asked.
“Yes. I requested assistance as soon as we left Mars, but I didn’t know how many ships would be able to respond.”
“Are we going to win this one?”
“It’s going to be close.”
The larger vessel was fighting back. Through narrowed eyes, Floyd risked a glimpse, watching parallel lines of light surge from undamaged gunports along its flanks, connecting with the aerial attackers. All three ships in the engagement were protecting themselves with movable shields: curved sheets of translucent material that sped from one part of the hull to another, flexing and flowing to adjust to the changing shape beneath them. Wherever a beam touched, one of the shields would dart into place, absorbing the damage, glowing along its edges like paper about to burst into flame. After a few seconds of this, the shield would erupt with light and shatter into a million little sparks that rained down towards the Champ de Mars.
Gradually, though, it became clear that the big ship was taking the worst of the damage. Its shield movements were becoming increasingly frantic, yet still too sluggish to parry the darting assaults from the smaller craft. A third of the way along its length, an explosion ripped through the translucent blubber of its hull, puckering it out in petalled folds like an exit wound from a bullet. Bright grids of machinery shone through the gash. A smaller chain of explosions chased each other to the tail of the ship. The luminous symbols under the translucent layer began to warp and flow, losing sharpness.
“She’s dying,” said Cassandra, speaking through Auger.
The quintet of silver men broke up into individuals, severing the connections between their armour. Three of them rushed to the cargo boxes, gathered them up and headed for the ramp leading back into the wounded ship. The other two resumed their unhurried stroll towards Floyd and Auger, unconcerned—it seemed—by whatever was happening to their compatriots or their one means of escape.
The access ramp was sliding back and forth as the ailing ship struggled to hold station next to the tower. For one moment, it looked as if the three silver men would miss their step and fall into the abyss, taking the cargo with them. Somehow they made it, dashing inside as the access ramp slowly hinged back into the ship, like the closing jaw of a sated whale.
More explosions peppered the length of the ship. The tail was now hanging lower than the nose, as if—absurdly—she was taking on water. One of the attacking ships had sustained a fatal strike and was slowly losing altitude, with ink-black smoke—or something that looked very like smoke, at least—billowing from a gash in its flank. Floyd followed its progress down as it gradually lost height in a gyring death-spiral, until it finally exploded somewhere near Montparnasse.
The two silver men had nearly reached the top of the stairwell. In a few seconds they would be within easy sight of Floyd and Auger.
“Listen to me now, Floyd.”
“I’m listening.”
“We need to leave. I’ve sent small clusters of machines into both shuttles, in an effort to regain some degree of control.”
“And?”
“Both ships are beginning to wake up from the EM pulse. Our best hope is Caliskan’s shuttle: it’s smaller, faster and less likely to be picked up by interdiction weapons.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
Across the ruin of the observation deck, something pulled Floyd’s attention to the embattled ship. A slot opened in its back and something jetted out, emerging quickly and gaining speed with every second. At first he assumed it was some new, last-ditch weapon. But the pip-shaped object continued to rise, squirting fire from one tapered end.
“What was that?”
“An emergency escape vehicle. But whoever’s in it won’t get far.”
The one small ship that remained peeled abruptly away from the larger vessel, making an obvious effort to intercept the other vehicle. There was a brief exchange of fire between the two vessels before the escape craft punched through the geometrically textured quilt of the clouds. The clouds lit up with a hard-edged flash, chased by a drawn-out peel of thunder. Through a crack in the clouds, Floyd caught a momentary glimpse of the pip clawing its way back towards orbit, cutting across the night like a shooting star.
“You want to rethink that?”
“They won’t get much further. The interceptors in near-Earth space will take care of them.”
The main ship could no longer maintain station or attitude. It had tilted to forty-five degrees, spewing smoke and fire, its hull feverish with a dance of scrambled symbols. It began to rotate, bringing its lower extremities into contact with one of the four main supports holding up the observation deck. The entire structure slid sideways a few metres, accompanied by a terrible metallic rending noise. Through the gap where the stairs ended, Floyd saw tons of metalwork hurtling down towards Paris. But the dying ship wasn’t dead yet. It was still rotating, pushing against what remained of the tower’s uprights. Another lurch ensued—almost enough to throw them from the narrow sanctuary of the stairwell.
“Look,” Floyd said, aghast.
Calsikan’s little barbed vessel slid over the edge of the landing stage, dashing itself against the tower as it fell. It dwindled, tiny as an egg, tumbling end over end and occasionally bouncing against the latticed metal legs of the tower. Somewhere near the bottom it blew apart in a veined, brain-like fireball. Floyd felt the tower rock with greater force than ever before. The other parked ship—the one they had arrived in—had slid towards the middle of the deck as the angle of tilt altered, but it would only take another resettlement to send it toppling over the edge.