The remaining arbite reported when Agansu pinged it.
~Holding approximately steady in downward course of water, it told him.
~Attempt to rise, he told it. ~Head for the top of the tank. I shall too.
The suit let him stand, unsteady, shuddering, in the torrent. Agansu saw two broken-looking bodies being swept past, naked.
He activated the AG, lifted off the floor, and began to make his way, quivering, battered from all sides, up through the chaotic swirl of the descending column of water.
He and the remaining arbite burst from the surface of the water into a great dark space more than sixty metres high and hundreds across, buffeted by swirling winds.
High above, just beneath a randomly pierced ceiling, a rig of metalwork gantries hung suspended. Some figures moved up there.
~Avatar-android identified, the arbite told him as they rose, accelerating, together.
~Fire, destroy it, he told the arbite.
Violet bolts seared through the air, sparking explosions from the ceiling; sparks and pieces of glowing debris fell towards them. Two figures were running, overhead.
~Target employing visual camouflage fields, the arbite reported, still firing as they rose. Next thing, the leading figure — a composite haze of images, like a stacked pack of ghosts — fell or threw itself from the gantry and came whirling down through the turmoil of air and falling debris towards them, light glittering from it.
The colonel realised suddenly, only at this point, that he had lost the kin-ex side-arm. He had no idea exactly when or where. This was upsetting. The android body had its pair of forearm-mounted lasers — but he doubted they would prove especially effective after what had happened at Bokri. The arbite fired at the falling figure, seeming to hit it. Agansu raised his arms, aiming at the other running figure, then, in a single staggering impact and a wash of white, was hit by something, and sent tumbling.
He was aware of falling, somersaulting. He steadied himself, or the suit did. He didn’t know. When he was floating in mid-air, he looked around and could see nothing of the last arbite or the figure that had dropped from the gantry. Below, in the great swirl of water and dashing, chaotic waves, there were the fading remains of what might have been two large splashes on the dark waters.
~Arbite, report, he said.
“Comms internal only,” the android body told him. Agansu felt groggy. And odd: strange, unbalanced. He looked at his right arm, which was not there. He stared. The arm ended at about midway on the upper part. The stump was still smoking.
~Arbite… marine oper— he started to say, still unsure regarding what had happened.
“Comms internal only,” the android body repeated.
“Yes, of course,” Agansu said, looking inside himself to monitor the body’s operational state. Severely compromised. AI substrate intact, obviously: AG, conventional locomotion and one arm and one laser left.
~Upwards, he thought, and ascended through the bruising cataract of air.
“Ximenyr? Where’s Ximenyr?” she yelled, crouched down by the frightened-looking man in front of her He was clad in one of the dark tunics, and holding grimly on to a desk as the air rushed past. This level, one up, looked like the foyer of some exclusive hotel. Getting up here had been a little easier than her last ascent as the storm of air gradually lessened. It was still fierce enough.
“Where’s Ximenyr?” she shouted again over the roaring. The man just shook his head.
She turned away, muttered, “Suit, any idea?”
“Interrogating local systems,” the suit said, still in Berdle’s voice. “Mr Ximenyr’s suite is this way; please follow.”
The suit seemed to raise itself. It faced a broad, well-lit corridor. She walked with the suit, then started to jog through the noticeably thinner air. “Switching to supplemental oxygen supply, ten per cent,” the suit announced. She felt something connect delicately with her nostrils; a cool draught hit the skin there.
“Still trying Berdle?” she asked the suit.
“Constantly,” it told her, in his voice. “Here,” the suit said, drawing them both to a stop at a double doorway. “Open?” it asked.
“Yes!”
“Opening,” the suit said, and the doors slid apart.
Oh shit, the ship thought to itself.
The Mistake Not… had lost contact with all of its devices on and in the airship, including its own avatar. It was busily scattering new surveillance stuff all over the place now, as fast as it could, but it might already be too late.
The airship Equatorial 353 was riding as high as it could go, tearing its upper surfaces to shreds along the giant grater that was the ceiling of the huge open tunnel, shedding panels and pieces of equipment as it ground slowly to a stop, all the while dropping what looked like megatonnes of water from its lower reaches: whole falls, giant cascades of water were issuing from its sides, while further sheets and folds of water fell straight down from its ventral line, taking bulkhead panels and entire sections of hull with them, falling, spinning slowly away in the colossal squall of rain. The airship ground to a stop, trapped against the ceiling of the tunnel. Water continued to gush from its lower hull.
Crushed, broken bodies littered the network of pipes, girders and structure beneath the stricken craft. Not all were dead; the ship Displaced what medical support drone and life-saving equipment it had to those still able to be saved.
There were a lot of drone-like military devices floating about the place — over two hundred and forty of them. They were making a nuisance of themselves; sixty-four had already tried attacking its outermost bump-field with X-ray lasers — though exactly why and with what hope of success, the ship was unable to work out; maybe they’d all gone mad — plus all of them now seemed to be working themselves up to attack it again with some other piece of seed-shootery nonsense, so, once it had despatched all its medical teams, it targeted all of the enemy drones, disabling each with a pinpoint granule of plasma fire and instantly — even before they could explode properly — wrapping them individually in Displace fields and swatting them into hyperspace, directed roughly towards where the Churkun was — it assumed they were its.
There might be more of these aggravations inside the airship, it supposed. It still couldn’t see within the vessel properly and its devices were taking their time getting inside.
Fuck this, the Mistake Not… decided, and sliced a tiny cone, less than a couple of metres deep and the same across, off the very stern of the airship with a millimetrically flourished ZPE/b-edged destabiliser field. The cone fell away in a cloud of sparkling grey. No bodies sliced in half, which was good, but there was still 4D shielding ahead. The ship cut again; three metres this time, still with no casualties, or result.
The zero-point energy/brane edging component seemed be handling the 4D shielding well; much less blow-back than it had been led to expect from the simulations. The Mistake Not… was growing more confident using the weapon. This time it cut twenty metres off the stern of the crippled airship and held the resulting hull section in a maniple field, lowering the conic section to the soaking, pooled floor of the tunnel, trying to avoid laying it on any of the bodies.
Finally.
It was past the shielding. It could see into the interior of the airship. It could already tell there were a lot more dead and dying bodies inside, though no more annoying drone military.
~Berdle? Anybody? it asked.
Ximenyr’s suite or not, the man himself wasn’t there.
“No persons present,” the suit told her.