Orlandine’s stomach tightened and her mouth went dry: a human physical reaction. She made some changes, which were applied via the mixed technologies laced throughout her body, and quickly rebalanced her neurochemicals, instituted a false calm and then a coolness that was positively cryonic.
‘Now,’ she informed Bludgeon, also transmitting to the drone the sensory data of what she was seeing as an additional confirmation.
Erebus’s planetoid surfaced into the real, generating a flash of light all around it as U-space distortions caused realspace to spontaneously generate photons. This was the kind of effect you only got when something really large surfaced. She had known that Erebus could draw together all its myriad ships into a conglomerate like this, but to actually see it was… unnerving.
More neurochemical adjustments.
With a blast of its fusion engine, Heliotrope accelerated towards the Anulus fountain. It covered the intervening miles in a matter of seconds, then turned nose to tail for a further blast in order to decelerate. The impact of the heat on the ship was instantaneous and it bled smoky vapour into vacuum from a hull raised to a thousand degrees Celsius within a matter of seconds. On steering thrusters it reoriented itself, but Heliotrope was so close now and its angle to the fountain such that the Skaidon warp could not protect it completely. With the task specially delegated to him, of operating the complex refrigeration systems, Cutter was now busy routing onboard water and stored air to boil away from hull outlets. Beginning to glow, Heliotrope slid into the fountain’s blast where even the minimal pressure against the meniscus of the warp drove the ship along the direction of flow. Further adjustments brought the ship upright to the flow, and Bludgeon expanded the cargo runcible gate further, impelling the three horn segments out on hard-fields. The sail effect increased, driving the ship along, while the heating effect on the ship decreased.
Inside Heliotrope there were fires, and its ventilation system was struggling to handle the smoke. But most of what was burning were the furnishings and such added for the benefit of soft humans. The two drones, one inside the interface sphere and the other only partially inside it, would have no problem with the heat since they were constructed to withstand the higher temperatures resulting from Prador weaponry. Other critical components were rated for higher temperatures than this too, while the Jain-tech, where affected, repaired itself.
There wasn’t a problem… yet.
Now Orlandine turned her attention to the energy readings, and was instantly appalled. A runcible spoon has infinite capacity, but this… She made her calculations while simultaneously adjusting the war runcible’s position — bringing it on target. No need to adjust for C-energy. No need at all.
Orlandine paused for just a second, then accepted the transmission from the distant cargo runcible in the Anulus fountain.
And unleashed the inferno.
17
One would have thought that a Polity controlled by the most logical and intelligent entities known would be a place in which those shadows called myth and legend were dispelled by the harsh cold light of reason. Not a bit of it. Though the evil of organized religion is all but dead on the more advanced Polity worlds, the wishful thinking remains and casts its own shadows. Though the idea of a single god in the Abrahamic mould has dissolved under ridicule, new and sometimes quite strange myths keep arising. These often relate to a collection of odd, dangerous, powerful and contrary characters bearing more resemblance to the pantheons of old rather than the one god and his angels and prophets — or perhaps even a weird combination of both. We have the legendary immortal Horace Blegg, who is the Wandering Jew, Hermes the messenger of the gods (those gods usually being Earth Central or one of the other high-up AIs), or sometimes Zeus in the role of deus ex machina — lowered onto the stage to sort out a mess made by mortals.
— Anonymous
‘Knobbler is sending me linking codes,’ said Arach. ‘So we can watch the show.’
Cormac’s U-sense view of his immediate surroundings was erratic. That enormous Skaidon gate opening so close had left U-space in this area shaking like a sheet in the wind, subject to strange eddies and distortions. When he tried to bring things into focus, they weren’t where he expected them to be, and once he did locate them, they often again slipped swiftly out of view. Everything was blurred and twisted throughout U-space, so when Cormac received the query for linkage from the spider drone, he immediately approved it. Codes began transferring across and he applied them, opening a multitude of feeds from the war runcible’s sensors and computer network. He ran a selection program to give himself a view across the runcible, and then views towards its target with options to magnify. He also used those codes to gather other data where that was allowed, for it seemed his access was restricted to spectator only. He was to have no influence on events unfolding. Watching the approaching planetoid of Jain-tech, he wondered just how long those events might last.
At first he had not understood what Orlandine was up to, half expecting her to start hurling asteroids turned to photonic matter at Erebus’s ships. Then, as he pieced together the stuff about the Anulus fountain, he finally understood: Orlandine was turning the runcible into a beam weapon with a breadth of miles.
The portion of the war runcible he now occupied shuddered underfoot. Intense white light glared in through the covering dome of the control centre. This was unfiltered and he quickly closed up both the hood and visor of his envirosuit. His visor darkened. Glancing to his side, he saw Mr Crane peering down at his own clothing, which was starting to steam.
‘Oooh!’ said Arach, like an enraptured child gazing at a fireworks display.
Via his gridlink, Cormac watched the beam of photonic matter spring into existence. Orlandine had made no adjustments for C-energy, and what was spewing from the warp of this war runcible was about as bad as it could get. He saw it strike the surface of Erebus’s planetoid and only then did he appreciate the scale of the target, for the beam, though miles across, speared the mass of wormships and Jain-tech like a pencil stabbing into an orange. At the point of impact a circular shock wave spread and wrapped around the orb, blasting a haze of fragments out into space. This was quickly followed by a spreading firestorm. Surely this was not enough, for the target remained complete. Then a massive, expanding, glowing cloud threw the planetoid into silhouette, and he realized that, like a bullet striking flesh, the entry wound wasn’t the biggest hole.
The beam now played back and forth across the face of Erebus, throwing out plumes of incandescent gas like the blaze from a cutting torch. Then it seemed as if the planetoid was pouring out smoke, but this smoke spread unnaturally and began settling into a disc. A close-up view showed it consisted of thousands of rod-forms. The planetoid rolled, exposing its hollowed-out rear, now burning arc-bright. The beam continued to play over it as what remained came rapidly apart, continent-sized chunks of matter spread, began to deform and then write lines of darkness across space, as if dissolving in a solvent. Orlandine kept the beam moving here and there, trying to target as much as possible, but it seemed she could not move it quickly enough, and her weapon was too blunt an instrument now.
Cormac again accessed a magnified view and was greeted with the sight, amid the burning wreckage and coral detritus, of a multitude of wormships now accelerating towards the war runcible. Erebus had taken a severe blow, but seemingly not a fatal one.