“It doesn’t work that way,” Anaplian said. “Would that it did.”
She fell silent as they tore upwards into the air, spreading out. Hippinse cleared his throat and said, “The type of progress you guys are used to doesn’t scale into this sort of civilisational level; societies progress until they Sublime — god-like retirement, if you will — and then others start again, finding their own way up the tech-face. But it is a tech-face, not a tech-ladder; there are a variety of routes to the top and any two civs who’ve achieved the summit might well have discovered quite different abilities en route. Ways of keeping technology viable over indefinite periods of time are known to have existed aeons ago, and just because something’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s inferior. With workable tech from this thing’s time the stats show it’s about sixty-forty it will be less capable than what we have now, but that’s a big minority.”
“I’m sorry to have to involve you in this,” Anaplian told the two Sarl men. “We are going to have to descend to the Machine level and possibly the Core of Sursamen to confront something we have very little knowledge of. It may well have highly sophisticated offensive capabilities. Our chances of survival are probably not good.”
“I do not care,” Ferbin said, sounding like he meant it. “I would gladly die to do whatever I can to kill the thing that killed our brother and threatens the WorldGod.”
They were leaving the atmosphere, the sky turning black.
“What about the ship, ma’am?” Holse asked.
“Hippinse?” Anaplian asked.
“I’m broadcasting for help,” the avatoid replied. “Oct systems, Nariscene, Morth; anything to patch us through. Nothing’s coming back from the chaos in the local dataverse. System disruption is still spreading, jamming everything. Take heading to another level to find a working system and even then it’d be somebody else’s whim.”
“I’ll signal it,” Anaplian said.
“I guess we have no choice,” Hippinse said. “This should get us some attention.”
“Arming,” Anaplian said. “Coding for Machine space rendezvous, no holds barred.”
“Total panic now mode,” Hippinse said as though he was talking to himself.
“How can you signal the ship, ma’am?” Holse asked. “I thought signals couldn’t get out of Shellworlds.”
“Oh, some signals can,” Djan Seriy said. “Look back at the gorge down from the Falls. Where we landed earlier.”
They had risen so fast and travelled so far laterally already, this was not easy. Holse still hadn’t located the gorge below the Hyeng-zhar, and hadn’t thought to ask the suit to do so for him, when a sudden flash attracted his eye. It was followed by four more in groups of two; the whole display lasted less than two seconds. Hemispherical grey clouds burst blossoming around the already dead light-points, then quickly disappeared, leaving rapidly rising grey-black towers behind.
“What was that?” Holse asked.
“Five small anti-matter explosions,” Anaplian told him. The debris stacks were already falling over the horizon as they raced away just above the outer reaches of the atmosphere. “The Liveware Problem and its remotes are monitoring the Surface at Prime level, listening for unusual vibrations. Those five explosions together won’t rattle Sursamen as much as a single Starfall but they’ll make the planet ring like a bell for a few minutes, all the way out to the Surface, which is all we need. Surface compression waves. That’s how you get a signal out of a Shellworld.”
“So the ship—” Holse began.
“Will right now be making its way towards the Core,” Anaplian said, “and not taking no for an answer.”
“Getting something,” Hippinse said. “Oh. Looks like—”
Brilliant, blinding light splashed off to Ferbin’s left, diagonally ahead. His gaze darted that way even as the images danced inside his eyes and the suit’s visor blacked out the entire view then cast an obviously false representation up showing the horizon, nearby towers and not much else. The image he was left with was that of a human figure, lit as though it was made of sun stuff.
“Anaplian?” Hippinse yelled.
“Yes,” her calm voice came back. “Laser. Strong physical hit. Optical sighting; no ranging pulse. My suit has slight ablation and I slight bruising. All mirrored up now. Suits have split us up already. Expect mo—”
Something hammered into Ferbin’s back; it was like a cutting sword blow landing on thick chain mail. The breath tried to whistle out of him but the suit was suddenly very stiff and it felt like there was nowhere for the breath to go.
“Under CREW attack, dorsal, above,” the suit informed him. “No immediate threat at present power and frequencies.”
“That’s one hit each, two on me,” Anaplian said. “More have missed. I am reading a ceiling source, Nariscene tech, probably — tss! Three on me. Source probably comped.”
“Ditto,” Hippinse said. “We can probably soak. Outrange in twenty.”
“Yes, but maybe more ahead. I am sending Xuss to deal with. Practice if nothing else.”
“My pleasure,” Turminder Xuss said. “Can I use AM too?”
“Anything,” Anaplian said.
“Leave to me,” Xuss purred. “I’ll get back ahead and anticipate similar?”
“Feel free,” Anaplian said. “Kinetics would be a bigger worry; prioritise and warn.”
“Of course.”
“Regardless, shoot first.”
“You spoil me.”
“Ah!” Holse shouted a moment later. “Faith, even my old man never hit me that hard.”
“Should be this one’s last,” Xuss said. “There; straight up their collimator. Oh! Pretty.”
“Firing not admiring,” Anaplian told it.
“Oh, really,” Xuss said, somewhere between amused and annoyed. “Already on my way.”
They flew over the landscape far below for another few minutes without attracting any more hostile attention, the world seeming to turn like a great tensed drum beneath them, shining and darkening as Fixstars and Rollstars came and went and complexes of vanes and ceiling structure cast them into shadow.
Ferbin cried a little more, thinking of his brother lying dead, disfigured, assaulted in that cold, abandoned carriage. Unmourned now they had been forced to leave, unattended save for a dying servant who was himself hardly more than a child; it had not been a death or a lying-in-state fit for a prince of any age.
A cold and terrible fury grew in his guts. How fucking dare anything do that to so young a man, to his brother, to so many others? He had seen them, he had seen how they’d died. Prompted by Holse, he’d had his suit tell him the effects of high radiation doses. One hundred per cent certainty of death within four to eight days, and those days full of appalling agony. It looked like his brother had been injured before the lethal blast, though that made no difference; he might still have lived but even that chance, however good or slim, had been snatched away from him by this filthy, pitiless murderous thing.
Ferbin sniffed back the tears and the suit itself seemed to absorb whatever he could not swallow. No doubt to be recycled, reused and purified and brought back to him as water from the tiny spigot he could summon to his mouth whenever he wanted. He was a little world in here, a tiny, perfect farm where nothing went to waste and every little thing that fell or died was turned to fresh use, to grow new produce or feed beasts.
He had to do the same, he realised. He could not afford not to employ Oramen’s cruel, ignoble death. They might well have to surrender their lives in whatever doomed enterprise they were now embarked upon, but he would honour his young brother in the only way that could mean anything from this point on and turn Oramen’s death to a determining reinforcement of his purpose. He had meant what he said to Djan Seriy earlier. He did not want to die, but he willingly would if it helped destroy the thing that had killed his brother and meant to do the same to the WorldGod.