"I won't ask if you're okay," said Urbanus.
Lying on the floor, with something tucked underneath his head and a yelling crowd all around him, Jebel stared at the Golem squatting beside him. Without Urbanus' intervention he would not have had to wake to this. He tried to find some anger at that, but it eluded him.
"What happened?"
Urbanus nodded over nearby, so Jebel hauled himself up a little to look. They were in a runcible embarkation lounge surrounded by crowds of people packed in tight: families with children, pets, hastily gathered belongings. Nearby were rows of the injured, prostrate like him but being tended by medical personnel and a couple of mobile autodocs, like chrome beetles.
"We managed to get twenty of them out," Urbanus told him.
Jebel winced, but it seemed almost an automatic reaction.
"Why did you stop me?" he asked.
"Because you were intent on killing yourself."
"Last I heard, laws against suicide were pulled a few centuries ago."
"Then I stopped you for selfish purposes and for the Polity. I did not want you to die, and one such as yourself will be useful in what is to come."
Jebel again tried to feel some anger at the Golem, but the anger now eating away his internal numbness focused in only one direction, and Urbanus possessed too few limbs to be a candidate.
"If you wish, I can return your weapon and you can go kill some more of them. You'll die. Either by them killing you or when this station is destroyed as seems sure to happen."
Jebel hauled himself up further until sitting upright. Waves of dizziness blurred his surroundings, and now he smelt burning and heard the distant sounds of weapons fire. "Where are we?"
"Within the area the Prador cut off. We couldn't get out, and now our best chance of escaping lies through this runcible." Urbanus pointed.
Jebel stood and gazed over the heads of the crowd. ECS commandos and station personnel ringed the runcible, the two bull-horns of its gateposts mounted on a black glass dais. Through a gap in this cordon a line of people four across was filing up to the Skaidon warp and stepping through, as through the skin of a bubble, and disappearing. Despite the racket of the surrounding crowd, it all seemed pretty orderly. He guessed that would soon change if the Prador entered this place.
"Why aren't the Prador here?" he asked. "You told me a while ago that they might try to seize this runcible."
"Two reasons, I suspect. They are withdrawing from the station, probably because something is imminent from the mother ship. They are also probably aware that if they got close to the runcible,Avalon would destroy it, taking many of them with it."
Jebel absorbed that. Though Urbanus had previously explained that the station AI might be prepared to destroy the runcible rather than allow these Prador to get their claws on it, he had not thought to ask why it was so important. You needed AIs to operate runcibles and AIs the Prador did not possess.
"That would kill all these people as well. Why? What use would a runcible be to the Prador?"
"Despite all the claims to the contrary, we haven't really fathomed how advanced these creatures are. Runcible technology, even without AI control, could be used as a powerful weapon. And from recent experience it seems likely that would be just how they would use it."
Jebel nodded. "Is it open port now?" He glanced over at those filing through the Skaidon warp.
"For the civilians, at present. But it won't be for us when our slot comes up in about five minutes."
"Why not?"
"Because we are needed," said Urbanus. "Do you think for one moment that onlyAvalon Station is under attack?"
Immanence first launched a small swarm of missiles carrying simple chemical-explosive warheads, and watched with every sensor at his disposal. The swarm, first accelerated by rail-gun, ignited solid-fuel rockets to disperse and then bring the missiles in to target points all along the station. Within fifty kilometres of the station they began to detonate as defence lasers and masers fired. Immanence ran tactical programs to log the positions of those defences and then accelerated his ship towards the station. Missiles were now rising up from the defence positions, preceded by a storm of solid rail-gun projectiles. The captain supposed the AI was firing every weapon it controlled. What else could it do?
A thousand kilometres out he picked his targets. Five hundred kilometres out the rail-gun missiles began to impact on his ship's hull. Again, piezoelectric layers and thermal generators stacked up the charge inside his vessel and he released it through all four particle cannons. The beams bored into the station's hull, air and fire exploding out behind as they cut trenches to their targets. Some of those defence positions just disappeared, others blew glowing craters as stored munitions detonated. Immanence veered his ship, passing over the station. More firing from down there, and in return, stabs from the particle beams taking out their sources. He swept in a long, slow turn, and approached again. This time he selected four particular warheads: stasis-contained antimatter wrapped in a layer of hydrogen compressed to a metallic state. He veered again, firing, and watched these lethal devices speed down towards the station as he accelerated away. Still some defences, for one of the missiles was struck and bloomed into an expanding sphere of fire, bright as a sun. This sphere touched off a second missile which created a similar explosion nearer to the station, but ahead of this one's blast wave, the two others struck.
Two explosions ate through the Polity station in seeming slow motion. Hull metal peeled up before the blast waves and ablated away. White-hot structural beams hurtled out, losing their shape as they turned to liquid then gas. The station burned and broke apart, its debris melting away as the two explosions melded into one. The sleet of radiation struck Immanence's ship, soaking into screening and causing various detectors to scream their alarms. But before the main blast front reached it, he dropped his ship into U-space, clattering his mandibles in delight all the while.
4
They sailed away, for a year and a day—
Moria sipped her greenwine—an inferior quality to the one George provided—and gazed across the city bar. There were many more uniforms visible now: the plain green or khaki of ECS soldiers on leave, and occasionally those wearing chameleon-cloth fatigues underneath thin, white coveralls worn to make those soldiers visible, but easily torn away. These latter troops were always armed, always sharp-eyed and never drank. Auging in to the newsnets Moria had learned about a missile being fired at a military AGC and a bomb exploding in a bar like this one. She had seen a four-man team of soldiers—two of them Golem—marching away at gunpoint someone in civilian dress. Separatists. They were always present on Trajeen, and soon captured or killed the moment they acted, but now it seemed they had become more active.
"This place is doing a good trade," said Carolan. "The economic benefits of war."
"Well the troops need to be fed and watered, then you get the herd instinct operating for the civilians. They don't want to be alone when stuff like this is happening." Daven Xing glanced at Moria and winked.
Ellen—Carolan's companion—gazed at Daven over her beer as if he had just issued a wet fart. Moria couldn't decide if Ellen disliked him intensely, or the opposite and was trying hard to conceal it. At one time Moria would have been fascinated by the interplay and perhaps considered how best to defend her territory—just on principle since after being her lover for two weeks Daven no longer really interested her. But her last shift at the gate project changed her entire outlook. She possessed no patience for such games, or the interest in such petty concerns.