‘There is a suiting area at the end, then an airlock,’ Dragon informed her.
Mika felt a sudden horror. Dragon did not want to go back to the Polity and face Earth Central. The entity’s agreement about contacting Cormac was rubbish — just to humour her. She had obviously become a liability Dragon now wanted rid of. Why else lead her to this dead end of a suiting area and airlock? She would never be able to get the lock open before this biomech was upon her.
‘You’ve killed me,’ she said.
‘If I had wished to do that there are easier ways.’
As she approached the suiting area, Mika spun herself round in mid-air again and drove her feet against the wall to slow herself. Her boots skidded along shattering Jain-tech, chunks of it bouncing away in every direction. Then she caught the edge of the door, swinging round it into the cylindrical room beyond. Some type of spinning disc rose out of her way, and she shouldered into the wall beyond and caught hold of a nearby ladder rung to prevent herself bouncing away. Looking up at the spinning thing, she could now just about make out the two stalked eyes sticking up from it.
‘The airlock, Mika,’ Dragon reminded her.
She propelled herself over to the door to operate its manual controls, determined not to look back. But as she finally got the locking mechanism open and began shoving hard against stubborn hinges, she could not stop herself.
The biomech had almost reached the suiting area, but then something streaked down the length of its body making a sound like a hammer drill. Its big leg and two smaller limbs fell away and, unbalanced, the biomech turned and crashed into the door jamb. Spinning in the air behind, the remote then came down hard behind the thing’s head. Sparks flew, as from a cutting disc going into metal, but then the remote began to slow and the biomech to reorient itself upon her.
‘Mika, there are more coming.’
The airlock door was nearly open, but the biomech was already pulling itself into the suiting room. She saw the remote abruptly stop spinning, and two blue eyes gazed towards her. Then the thing just shrank, shrivelled, as if being sucked into the cut it had made in its enemy. Then came the detonation: fire blasting from between the biomech’s mandibles and blowing open its torpedo body. It slammed against the wall, its remaining legs folding up and tightening like a fist. The blast flung Mika against the door, shoving it all the way open so that she fell into the space beyond. She did not allow herself a moment to catch her breath. Already she could see other… things approaching down the corridor. She heaved against the door, which swung freer now, and drove it closed behind her.
‘Is the remote dead?’ she asked.
‘It wasn’t really alive, Mika.’
‘Interesting way you employed it,’ she observed.
‘I am always prepared to learn,’ Dragon replied. ‘And I have always thought Cormac’s Shuriken rather effective.’
Those other assailants had to be in the suiting room by now, so Mika turned her attention to the outside lock. Thankfully it opened with ease and in a moment she was out on the docking ring of the Trafalgar. It was disheartening to see just the nose of the attack ship protruding some hundreds of yards around that ring. Her boots sticking gecko fashion, she started plodding towards it.
‘Faster,’ Dragon instructed. ‘I cannot see them now, but they will not have given up.’
Mika accelerated, then everything shuddered around her, the docking ring jerking underneath her feet and nearly breaking the grip of her boots. She went down on one knee for stability’s sake, reaching out to lodge her fingers in the port for an oxygen line. Light flared around her, overloading her suit visor’s light amplification. Using the belt control she quickly brought it down, her surroundings resolving back to visibility out of the glare. Gazing out she saw huge movement now in the Jain coral. A whole mass of it, to one side, had broken from its surroundings and shifted, and a veritable swarm of fragments was swirling up around it. Everything about her was now moving, but at least not so violently. She stood up and hurried on towards the docked attack ship.
‘Dragon, what’s happening?’ she asked, wondering if those objects she had earlier seen Dragon attaching to coral branches were bombs.
‘It is a dangerous option,’ said Dragon, ‘for this is an energy-starved system and injecting energy of any kind can activate it — as you have seen.’
Mika glanced back. The airlock door she had just used was spinning out into vacuum, with a smaller version of the mech that had chased her clinging to it. Flat segmented worms were now oozing from the airlock and, sticking easily to the material of the docking ring, began to squirm after her. They were moving faster than she was.
‘Do not let them catch you,’ said Dragon. ‘They will just utilize the materials of your body and your suit for the energy they will then provide.’
With its remote gone, was Dragon gazing through her suit’s sensors or her own eyes?
Glaring light again, with a bluish cast she recognized as originating from a particle cannon.
‘You mean eat me.’
Mika was moving as fast as she could manage without breaking contact with the docking ring. Soon the attack ship was looming above her and she moved into its shadow, knocking up light amplification again and heading for the docking tube and surrounding mechanisms. As she clambered along the framework towards the attack ship, the pursuing flatworms moved into the same shadow and reared up. Upon the underside of the attack ship she re-engaged her boot soles and walked upside down round the hull, back into that intermittent blue glare. Eyes fixed on the hull horizon she hurried round, hoping to see her intership craft at any moment. The flatworms had now reached the hull too, and were speeding towards her. Then it was there, the top of her craft, and a few more paces brought it fully into view.
It was useless to her.
Jain-tech tendrils had wound up over the skids and now bound the craft firmly to the attack ship. Portions of the little craft were missing and inside the cockpit silver worms revolved like a bait ball of fish. Flatworms were in sight beyond it, and others still coming up behind her.
‘Throw yourself from the ship, Mika.’
Mika squatted, turned off the gecko function of her boots, then launched herself out into vacuum. Behind her the flatworms speared up like spiral towers, and began to straighten and narrow, extending towards her. Then bright light flared all around them and they beaded like heated wire solder. The ensuing blast flung her through hot smoky gas and fragments burning like fuse paper, and she saw a giant chunk of Jain coral tumbling past her. More snaky things stabbed into view, snapping closed on her like the arms of a hydra, then pulled her fast down to the surface of the draconic moon that now loomed into view.
Mika lay there pinned tight by Dragon’s pseudopods as a volcano of white fire erupted in a ring extending perhaps half a mile across all around her. She was forced against the restraining pseudopods by sudden acceleration and, through smoke, flame and a storm of coral fragments, watched the Trafalgar and its grisly contents recede.
She felt safe now, but it wasn’t until Dragon drew clear of the disintegrating blooms of coral that she learned the cost of that safety. The other part of Dragon hung scarred and burned in accretion-disc fog, hardly recognizable as a sphere so severe was its damage, and beyond lay the hollowed-by-fire remains of a whole host of giant biomechs like the first that had attacked. That other half of Dragon looked decidedly dead to her
‘Now you talk to him,’ said Dragon.
For a moment Mika had no idea what the alien entity was referring to.