“We really are fucked, aren’t we?” Cossont said, her voice sounding odd inside her head and the helmet. She could taste what was probably her own blood in her mouth.
“Not necessarily,” Berdle replied through the earbud, sounding, as ever, relatively unconcerned. “Still one knife missile left.”
“But I thought it…”
“It left. It was not destroyed,” Berdle told her. “It went the long way round the building. I suspect they assumed any combat missiles we had left would just burst through anything in their way; certainly that would be the first thing to occur to a knife missile. So — although this has taken longer, nevertheless — the element of surprise is with the missile. Here we are; that’ll be it now,” the avatar announced, as light erupted all around the combat arbite.
The man in the glittering suit started to whirl round to where the combat arbite was throwing its arms up and disappearing and disintegrating inside a consuming torrent of white fire. Then the view went dark.
More battering and pummelling. It was like being slung into a big metal drum with a bunch of sharp rocks and being kicked down a steep mountainside studded with boulders.
“The knife missiles in use here are from the Miniaturised Drone Advanced Weapon System,” Berdle told her as floor, the shelves and the air itself all seemed to shake and quiver and beat. “Though it bears mention that it was ‘Advanced’ rather a long time ago. Still. And AM power is very crude, really. Raw, ragged stuff. Not really suitable for this kind of civilian-environment, in-structure work — far too battlefield — but it was all I had. Interestingly, the nanomissiles doing the damage are only a millimetre long and a tenth of that in diameter; too small to see for most unaided eyes; astonishing what you can do with anti-matter. There. Oh. Here—” Just as the battering seemed to be tailing off, there was another single, thudding, titanic impact, then Berdle said, “Ouch. Bet that hurt. Oh well, down you go…”
The view came back. The elevator shaft and the lit corridor beyond were full of dust and smoke. The doorway where the combat arbite had been standing was no longer a neat rectangle; it was practically circular, and most of the shattered, ragged edges were glowing. One or two shattered bits of machinery lying smoking, flaming or sputtering on the floor of the corridor might have been parts of the arbite. Of the man in the glittering suit, there was no sign. Something flashed briefly in the shaft.
“Yes, I wouldn’t go sticking your head into the lift shaft,” Berdle said, over a distant cacophony of alarm noises and some deep booming noises coming from the shaft. “Colonel Agansu is down there, largely disabled but patently still capable of firing.” Berdle stepped out of the compacted debris of the shelves they’d smashed into, taking Cossont with him. He peeled her arms away, then turned to face her as she stood, swaying slightly. She suspected the suit was doing most of the work involved in keeping her upright.
She focused on the avatar. The whole front of his chest was a shallow silver bowl. It swam back into shape only slowly. “Hmm,” the avatar said, looking down at this as another bright flash lit up the elevator shaft behind him. “Powerful laser your man had.” He stooped, came back up holding the shoulder bag with the cube in it. “Here.” He tied a knot in the burst strap, almost too quickly for her to see. “You okay?” he asked.
Cossont cleared her throat, nodded. “Fucking peachy.”
Berdle looked innocently pleased. “Good. Well, there don’t appear to be any other forces wishing to engage with us, so we may be through the worst of it.” There was another flash of light in the shaft behind.
“Shouldn’t you be finishing off this colonel guy?” Cossont asked.
Berdle shook his head. “No need. I have a scout missile down there with him, monitoring. He shouldn’t cause us any more trouble.”
“What about Parinherm?”
“I’ve tried contacting; he’s powered down. We’ll try and Displace him too when the ship gets back. Walk this way.”
Cossont, following the avatar, stepped shakily into a debris-strewn corridor between towering shelves. It seemed to stretch for ever into the distance. Something zipped past her from behind, coming through the smoke at head height and making her flinch. The thing stopped right alongside Berdle.
It was a thin cylinder about as thick as a thumb and as long as a hand, its front end shaped like an angular, blunted arrowhead and its dull silver surface marked with hair-fine dark lines and tiny dots. Berdle cocked one silvery eyebrow at it and said, “Yes, well done. So that Ms Cossont might be included in the conversation. Oh, both our lives. Inelegant use of rather too many nanos, though. Well, so you say, but it could have been accomplished more economically. Even so; had there been a whole section of those things, could you successfully have taken on all of them too? Well, there you are then.”
The missile moved off so fast it was as though it was a shell in a perfectly transparent gun barrel; it just disappeared, leaving behind only an after-image and the vaguest of impressions it had headed away in the direction its sharp end had been pointing. Berdle’s head jerked back in the blast of air and Cossont was only saved from being blown off her feet by the avatar reaching back with one silvery hand and grabbing her by the bag’s strap again. The thunder-clap echoed off the surrounding shelves and the ceiling.
Berdle shook his head as he resumed walking. “Knife missiles,” he said over his shoulder, with what sounded like affection.
“Yeah, knife missiles,” Cossont agreed, like she knew what she was talking about. She glanced back, but could see little through the smoke. “You sure there’s nobody else coming after us?”
“Not completely, no,” Berdle admitted, “but there doesn’t seem to be.” He sounded thoughtful. “The Gzilt ship present here is at least a sixth-level heavy cruiser, possibly a seventh-level battle-cruiser; that’d mean between one and three platoons of marines available, at least, but they aren’t being used. So that might say something about the secrecy and… well, authorisation of the mission involved.” He shrugged. “Anyway. Onwards; I should warn you there will be some tramping, and we may have to hide.”
The ship was led a merry dance, trying to get sufficiently close to the microrbital for long enough to get its avatar and the human off. Quickly getting the measure of each other, and each correctly guessing that its opposite number had no intention of being the first to open fire, neither ship resorted to serious targeting behaviour or the sort of hair-trigger weapon-readiness status that might have led to a misunderstanding. The whole tussle was conducted without signalling, as though neither vessel wanted to admit it was actually happening.
Eventually the Mistake Not… outwitted/out-field-managed the Gzilt ship and snapped the two humanoid figures off the habitat and back inside itself. It saw the Gzilt ship Displace/disloc one human-size entity off the little world a moment later. Having successfully retrieved its two primary Displace targets, the Mistake Not… tried to get a lock on the remains of the android Eglyle Parinherm, but found it had been beaten to it; a disloc field from the Gzilt ship was already starting to envelop the creature’s crushed and broken body at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
Before the Gzilt vessel could complete the operation, the Mistake Not… applied a spatter of plasma fire to various parts of the android’s body, cauterising all processing and memory/data storage nodes within the machine.