“First I need to talk to—” the voice from the grille was saying.
~Wow! Parinherm sent. ~Sub-gramme AM explosion fifty up! Correction; series of same but smaller.
The air in the lift seemed to pulse gently as the shock wave travelled down the shaft’s structure. Berdle put his hand out and took hold of Cossont’s elbow. She appeared to have noticed the pulse of infra sound and was opening her mouth to speak as the thud from above came. The blast wave slammed down onto the roof of the car, sending the human, avatar and android briefly up into the air as the whole lift was rammed down a notch on its trio of side ratchets; the three dropped to the floor again, steadied themselves.
~Debris approaching you, the missile sent. ~Medium sub-sonic. It sidled back through the dust and smoke choking the debris-littered access tunnel to inspect the control unit. ~Target unharmed.
It’s a ship, Berdle thought. The unit’s being effectorised by a ship, or a unit as strong as one a warship would carry.
~Pause, he told the missile. ~Prepare full personal destruct, immediately under unit.
“Wh—?” Cossont had time to say, before a series of titanic claps shook the elevator car from above. Her helmet had inflated itself and gone to triple layer above the crown of her head. Berdle watched the lift’s ceiling dent in a couple of places.
Fifty metres above, still in a storm of smoke and dust and a faint snowfall of ceramic flakes filtering from the shaft’s summit, the missile positioned itself carefully.
The voice of Colonel Agansu, from the grille, did a little better than Cossont, getting out the whole of “What—?” before matters proceeded.
~That’s a scout missile? Parinherm asked Berdle. ~Really?
~No, that’s a knife missile, Berdle replied. ~And expendable, as it turns out.
The roof/ceiling above would take more, the avatar decided, and the elevator car appeared structurally sound.
Alarms were warbling in the distance, and the local networks, where not under attack, were buzzing with sudden traffic. The Incast facility was not without protection or resources, and was fighting back as best as its automatics knew how against the effector onslaught from outside and inside its walls. That the other side had such powerful assets in place so quickly was not a good sign though, the avatar knew.
~We’ll need to protect Ms Cossont physically now, from above, Berdle told Parinherm, double- and then treble-checking the state of the missile’s anti-matter battery before — to the missile — sending the signal,~At 35 per cent AM yield; prepare, confirm.
~Copy 35 per cent AM yield.
~Enact.
The knife missile blew itself up.
Cossont felt herself go utterly limp, from the outside in, somehow. Had she had the time, she’d have worried about her bowels relaxing, but instead she was fascinated to find that she now had no control whatsoever over any of her major muscles, which, having been lost to her, now seemed to have developed minds of their own and taken the decision to roll her up into a foetal ball, while Parinherm and Berdle, perhaps similarly afflicted, were arching over the top of her. If she’d seen this done on stage, she thought, it might have looked quite an elegant ballet move.
“Blast-from-above-coming-apologies,” Berdle said in her earbud, talking very fast and clipped.
There was an almighty crack of sound, she felt briefly weightless, though still held down by the two bodies spread over her, and then the floor came smacking up towards her, slapping her feet, creaking her bones and making her insides feel bruised. Her chin, on her tight-together knees, tried to bury itself between her calves. The shoulder bag with the cube in it pressed painfully into her back. It all went very dark. She expected to find her ears ringing but they weren’t. Something cracked above her, making the whole lift shudder.
“Okay?” Berdle asked her, as the avatar and the android pulled up away from her and her suit started bringing her quickly to her feet. Standing, she suddenly found she had control of her body again. There was a haze of dust in the car, and the centre of the roof had caved in to the extent that the three of them had to stand back near the walls.
“Yeah,” she said. “What was—?”
“Knife missile self-destructing directly above us,” Berdle said. “Excuse me.” The avatar squatted, his hands seemed to sink into the surface of the soft plastic floor, and then he pulled back. There was the sound of tearing, protesting metal, and Berdle’s feet sank deep enough into the plastic tiles to cause ripples round the soles of his shoes, which themselves seemed to be deforming. Parinherm jerked suddenly, seemed to stagger.
Cossont stared at it. “You okay?”
~I just tried activating some AG, Parinherm sent to Berdle. ~I think I got targeted; non-viable. “Fine!” it told Cossont brightly, at the same time.
~Our adversaries are able to manipulate the topography of the local gravitational environment, when we give them a target, Berdle told the android.
Parinherm thought about this. ~Neat, he sent.
~The other Displaced components are experiencing the same problems, Berdle told the android, ~only the knife missiles are unaffected. AG is a little subtle for their purposes; they just use naked force fields.
Pulled by the avatar, a giant flap of metal and plastic came peeling and screeching back from the floor, showing the shaft underneath, sinking away into darkness several hundred metres below.
Berdle dropped head-first into it, his feet remaining hooked onto the floor.
~Parinherm, the avatar sent, along with a simple diagram of what it wanted the android to do. ~If you would.
~Certainly, Parinherm replied, and dropped through the hole too, also head-first, feeling Berdle catch his ankles as he fell past and then cooperating in a swinging motion that within two oscillations allowed his hands to reach the upper edge of an open doorway where a tiny missile the size of a human thumb was floating, two delicate-looking outstretched field components fending off the twin doors, which were sliding back and forth continually, trying to close.
“Vyr,” Berdle shouted. “Make sure the cube is secure within your bag, then climb down my body. Lie on my back and hold on very tightly. The suit will help.”
“What?” Cossont said, kneeling by the side of the hole in the lift floor and staring down the bottomless-looking shaft. Berdle was stretched across the shaft at forty-five degrees; she couldn’t see Parinherm at all.
“Climb down me first,” Berdle said reasonably. “We’ll tackle the rest as we go.”
Quaking, Cossont checked the shoulder bag was fastened, then lowered herself down the body of the avatar, feet first, holding on to his legs, then turned round on her knees on the slope of Berdle’s back. She had never been more thankful for having four arms. Also, the suit did seem to be helping, but not as much as she’d have liked. She lowered herself to lie on his back, shaking, blood pounding in her ears. The bag slid round her shoulder, hitting Berdle on the head. Her hand was shaking as she went to grab it.
“Sorry!” she yelled.
“No, I’m sorry,” Berdle said. “Are you afraid of heights?”
“No,” she said through clenched teeth, “just of dying generally.” She put the bag over her shoulder again and hugged the avatar from behind, so hard that had he been human she’d have worried about cracking his ribs.
~Okay? Berdle sent to Parinherm.