The silvery sphere lifted slowly, calmly out of the smoking debris, perfectly unharmed. It drifted through the kilometre-wide hole in the city’s plaza level and moved slowly away, dropping its film of shields and altering its shape slightly to that of a large ovoid. It turned to the direction humans called facing and accelerated out of the gorge.
27. The Core
They stood on the edge of the kilometre-wide crater left in the plaza level. The suit visors made the scene bright as day. Ferbin clicked the artificial part of the view off for a few moments, just to see the true state of it. Dim, cold greys, blacks, blues and dark browns; the colours of death and decay. A Rollstar was due to dawn about now, but there would be no sign of it this deep in the gorge for many days yet and no melting warmth to restore the Falls until some long time after that.
There was still a faint infrared glow visible through the suit’s visor, deep inside the crater. Steam lifted slowly from the dark depths; the vapour rose and was shredded to nothing by the cold, keening wind.
Anaplian and Hippinse were checking readouts and sensor details. “Something like a small nuke,” Djan Seriy said. They were communicating without touching now, reckoning the need for silence was over. Even so, the suits chose the most secure method available, glittering unseen coherent light from one to the other, pinpointing.
“Small blast but serious EMP and neutrons,” the ship’s avatoid said. “And gamma.”
“They must have been fried,” Djan Seriy said quietly, kneeling down by the breach in the plaza’s surface. She touched the polished stone, feeling its grainy slickness transmitted through the material of the suit.
“Little wonder there’s nobody about,” Hippinse said. They had seen a few bodies on their flight over the city, coming in from the outskirts, and a surprising number of dead lyge and caude, but nothing and nobody moving; all life seemed as frozen and stilled as the hard waters of the Sulpitine.
But why isn’t there anybody else here? Hippinse sent to Anaplian, lace to lace. No aid, no medics?
These people know nothing about radiation sickness, she replied. Anybody escaping would have got to safety thinking they were over the worst of it and getting better and then died, badly, in front of the people they reached. Wouldn’t encourage you to come see what happened. They’ve probably sent a few flying scouts but all they’ll report is dead and dying. Mostly dead.
While the Oct and Aultridia are too busy fighting each other, Hippinse sent.
And something seriously capable is profoundly fucking with the level systems, top to bottom.
The drone Turminder Xuss had floated off some way when they’d set down. It floated back now. “There’s some sort of tech embedded in the vertical ice behind one of the falls,” it announced. “Probably Oct. Quite a lot of it. Shall I take a look?”
Anaplian nodded. “Please do.” The little machine darted away and disappeared into another hole in the plaza.
Anaplian stood, looked at Hippinse, Ferbin and Holse. “Let’s try the Settlement.”
They had stopped only once on their way in, to look at one of the many bodies lying on the snow-scudded surface of a frozen river channel. Djan Seriy had walked over to the body, unstuck it from the grainy white surface, looked at it.
“Radiation,” she’d said.
Ferbin and Holse had looked at each other. Holse had shrugged, then thought to ask the suit. It had started to whisper quickly to him about the sources and effects of electromagnetic, particle and gravitational radiation, rapidly concentrating on the physical consequences of ionising radiations and acute radiation syndrome as applicable to humanoid species, especially those similar to the Sarl.
Then Djan Seriy had removed one of the strakes on the right leg of her suit, a dark tube as long as her thigh and a little thinner than her wrist. She had laid it down on the surface of the frozen river and looked at it briefly. It had started to sink into the ice, raising steam as it melted its way through. It had moved like a snake, wriggling at first, then slipped quickly down the hole it had made for itself in the solid surface of the river. The water had started to ice over again almost immediately.
“What was that, miss?” Holse had asked.
Anaplian had detached another piece of the suit, a tiny thing no larger than a button. She’d tossed it into the air like a coin; it had gone straight up and had not come back down.
She’d shrugged. “Insurance.”
In the Settlement, barely one person in a hundred was still alive, and they were dying, in pain. No birds sang, no workshops rang or engines huffed; in the still air, only the quiet moans of the dying broke the silence.
Anaplian and Hippinse instructed all four suits to manufacture tiny mechanisms which they could inject into anybody they found still living by just pressing on their neck. The suits grew little barbs on the tips of their longest fingers to do the injecting.
“Can these people be cured, sister?” Ferbin asked, staring at a man moving weakly, covered in vomit and blood and surrounded by a thin pool of dried excrement, trying to talk to them but only gurgling. His hair came out in clumps as his head jerked across the frozen mud of one of the Settlement’s unpaved roads. Thin bright blood came from his mouth, nose, ears and eyes.
“The nanorgs will decide,” Djan Seriy said crisply, stooping to inject the fellow. “Those the injectiles cannot save they’ll let die without pain.”
“Too late for most of them,” Holse said, looking round. “This was that radiation, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Hippinse said.
“Apart from the ones with bullet wounds, obviously,” Djan Seriy said, rising from the now limp, sighing man and looking around at dead soldiers clutching guns and the crumpled bodies of a couple of lyge lying nearby, armed riders crushed beneath. “There was a battle here first.”
The few twists of smoke they had seen were fires burning themselves out rather than smoke from the chimneys of works and forges and steam engines. At the main railhead for the Settlement, all the engines and most of the carriages were gone. Hundreds of bodies lay scattered about.
They split up in twos. Djan Seriy and Holse checked the Archipontine’s carriages and the rest of the headquarters compound, but found only more dead bodies, and none they recognised.
Then Hippinse called from the hospital train.
“I’m sorry! The fellow I shot. Tell him I’m sorry, won’t you, somebody, please? I’m most terribly sorry.”
“Son, it was me you shot, and — look — I’m fine. I just fell over in surprise, that’s all. Calm, now.” Holse lifted the young man’s head and tried to get him sitting upright against the wall.
His hair was falling out too. Holse had to wedge him in a corner eventually to stop him falling over.
“I shot you, sir?”
“You did, lad,” Holse told him. “Lucky for me I’m wearing armour better than stride-thick iron. What’s your name, son?”
“Neguste Puibive, sir, at your service. I’m so sorry I shot you.”
“Choubris Holse. No damage done nor offence taken.”
“They wanted whatever drugs we had, sir. Thinking they would save them or at least ease their pain. I gave away all I could but then when they were all gone they’d not believe me, sir. They wouldn’t leave us alone. I was trying to protect the young sir, sir.”
“What young sir would that be then, young Neguste?” Holse asked, frowning at the little barb just flexed from the longest finger on his right hand.