‘Engaging chameleonware,’ King intoned.
A sudden change of course sent Cormac staggering to one side despite the gravplates’ attempts to compensate. Abruptly, the war runcible was hanging out there in space, and he felt it was almost within his grasp. With an effort of will he could throw himself across to it, transport himself to the selected set of buffers… Then it fell out of his grasp as King of Hearts turned hard and accelerated. A blinding stream of ionized matter stabbed past. Its effect was negligible to Cormac’s deeper U-sense but, upon snatching information from King’s server, he saw that Orlandine was firing a particle beam at them powerful enough to cut the attack ship in half.
‘Oops,’ said Arach. ‘I guess this means she’s hostile.’
‘Surely not,’ said Smith. ‘She throws moons at those who really irk her.’
Ignoring this comedy duo, Cormac instructed, ‘King, closer.’
‘I’m trying,’ King replied, ‘but there’s the small matter of the rail-gun missiles and the targeting systems trying to lock onto me, despite my chameleonware, which I’m incidentally having to reconfigure every five seconds.’
‘Right,’ conceded Cormac.
Another abrupt change of direction sent him staggering, so he stepped over to a fixed chair and braced himself against it. Despite the attack ship dodging back and forth, King managed to keep the image of the war runcible steady. Each time Orlandine’s particle beam lashed out, Cormac flinched and drove his fingers harder into the chair back. At one point it flashed particularly close and a sound like a ship’s hull scraping a reef echoed through the bridge. A second later the outside view was momentarily blocked by a cloud of incandescent gas filled with sparking globules of molten metal, for the beam had grazed King’s hull. Then flashes blossomed about the war runcible and, again linking to King’s server, he identified their source as a multitude of hunter-killer missiles being launched.
‘I cannot stay here for much longer,’ said King. ‘I will attempt one close run, then I’ll have to pull out. Just be ready.’
Cormac glanced around at Arach, who was gripping the indents specially cut in the floor for him, then across at Hubbert Smith, who was rigidly ensconced in a chair with his arms crossed and a frown creasing his face. He felt King of Hearts turn again and, reaching out with his U-sense, found the attack ship now heading directly towards the war runcible. He brought that massive objective into full focus, his perception sliding inside it. Concentrating on one of the five horn assemblies, he identified his destination and tried to fix on it. The sensation was like preparing to jump down to the deck of a violently rocking boat. The missiles were now close, their nose cones glaring steel eyes in the blackness.
Now.
Cormac felt able to take himself across and knew, at that moment, he could bring more along with him.
‘Arach!’
The drone abruptly scuttled forward and Cormac reached down, placing a hand behind his head as if grabbing the scruff of a pet dog.
Smith?
No, there wasn’t time to grab him, for even now King of Hearts was turning to evade the approaching missiles and so moving away from his objective — and anyway he didn’t trust the Golem. As he stepped through nothingness, he felt that his perception of missiles whipping past him could only be illusion. He focused on a landing point, his foot coming down on metal. Gravity snatched hold of him and he realized the metal under his foot was a wall.
‘Whoohoo!’ Arach yelled.
Cormac fell back towards a gravplated floor, turning in midair to land heavily on his feet and then roll. He ended up crashing into Arach, who had landed much better. The drone steadied him with one gleaming limb, which Cormac used to haul himself upright.
Stay with it…
He still kept King of Hearts within his perception, but warheads were now detonating out there, while something here — perhaps the runcible technology surrounding him — was interfering with his U-sense. Through his gridlink he set the CTD for signal-break detonation, unhooked his rucksack and abandoned it on the floor, then prepared to make the jump back to the attack ship. Too late, for the attack ship was gone — either it was already out of range or one of the detonations had destroyed it. He tried making contact through his gridlink but found too much interference.
‘What now, boss?’ Arach enquired
‘Can you contact King?’
‘Nah,’ said the drone. ‘Lot of EMR out there and there’s signal-blocking in this place.’ Arach reached out to point one limb up.
Cormac looked up to see that running above them was an open framework of bubble-metal stanchions. Wound around some of these were metallic vinelike growths he recognized instantly.
‘I reckon it’s everywhere here,’ the drone added, punctuating this comment by opening his abdomen hatches to extrude his Gatling cannons.
Cormac again shouldered his rucksack. A brief instruction to Shuriken prepared the weapon for fast release, then he raised his proton carbine and hoped to hell he wouldn’t have to use it.
‘She must know that we’re here by now,’ he said.
‘How true,’ said a voice he knew was Orlandine’s.
Something peeled open twin sliding doors at the end of the corridor and a monstrous figure crashed through. Cormac crouched protectively and observed the bastard child of a giant steel octopus and a crab. War drone. One of Arach’s Gatling cannons turned and fired. The thing was lost in flame, then an instant later Arach’s missiles were detonating against a hard-field some yards ahead of it. Arach ceased firing and backed up until standing directly before Cormac. Behind the hard-field, the big drone braced its tentacular limbs against the walls of the corridor. Then its lower waspish abdomen detached and drifted forward. It began turning randomly, and around it the air filled with distortions like hard-edged heat haze. Cormac was unsure of what he was seeing until he spotted a chunk of metal sticking out from one wall clatter to the floor, cut clean through. This object was projecting atomic shear fields, and now it advanced to the hard-field and began to slide through.
‘I might survive this,’ observed Arach. ‘But you won’t unless you get the hell out of here.’
Cormac glanced back down the corridor to another twin door, before facing forward again. He could take himself away in an instant, and he could take Arach with him, but now that he was here he wanted some answers.
He stood up and held out his rucksack. ‘My death will result in this detonating, but I don’t even have to die. I can transport myself and my companion, in the same way I brought us here, to any other part of this runcible and then send the signal for this to detonate from there.’
The spinning abdomen was now through the hard-field. When its invisible shears brushed the walls they made sounds like sharpening knives. Cormac reached into his pocket, groped around for a moment, then pulled out the Europan dart. He held it up.
‘Orlandine,’ he said, ‘I know you can hear me and I know you can see me. You can probably do so much more than that because of course you’ve deified yourself with a Jain node.’
Abruptly the thing ahead stopped spinning and just hung motionless in the air.
‘Orlandine,’ Cormac continued, ‘I want you to tell me about Klurhammon and your two brothers.’
The reply was immediate. ‘You could have asked me that while you were still aboard your attack ship. Incidentally, that’s a neat ability you have there. It is one, despite my deification, as you call it, that I don’t possess.’
‘I can stop you now,’ Cormac replied. ‘But while I was aboard King of Hearts that was not an option.’
‘Why would you want to stop me destroying Erebus?’
‘I need to be convinced that is your true purpose.’
‘Very well, Ian Cormac of ECS, leave your CTD on the floor there and Knobbler will bring you to me.’