The street poet gave him a panicked glance. Why?
Because now would be a good time to find out.
The bastards come back?
More than one.
Tolton twisted the throttle urgently, nudging the speed up to over forty kilometres an hour. The wheel hub motors started making erratic buzzing soundsnormally they were completely silent. Dariat used affinity to watch the visitors approach. The personality had activated the seven lasers and two masers emplaced around the rim of the counter-rotating spaceport. As before, there was no radar return from any of the visitors.
The first ones began their final dash from the shifting fringe of the nebula through the clear space to the habitats shell. They were condensing the darkness around themselves now, twirling sharp horns of light in kaleidoscopic arcs. Optical sensors locked on, aligning the energy weapons on one of the giveaway distortion swirls. Nine intense energy beams pinioned the visitor. Its sole response was to spin faster, wriggling wildly along its trajectory as it plummeted in towards the shell. The radial spires of distorted luminescence flared brighter and higher. Then it was falling behind the tips of the starscrapers, beyond the weapons elevation. They slid back to find another target. It, too, was unaffected by the energy strike.
The personality stopped firing. Anxiety spread like a mental virus among Rubras descendants as they waited to see what the visitors would do next. The personal weapons theyd prepared were distributed and primed. Not that anyone held out much hope. If the spaceport lasers couldnt harm them, then rifles (however large the calibre) were going to be completely useless. Not that anybody refused them. Having a hefty chunk of destructive hardware you could grip in your hands was always a nice psychological boost.
The Orgath led a swarm of its eager kith towards the giant living object, soaking up the blaze of heat which it threw away so casually. They had come to pre-empt the absorption that was the fate of all beings in the dark continuum, gorging on as much of its life-energy as they could before it reached the mlange. Once that happened, so many of the entities entombed within would be empowered to resurrection and individuality that the whole mlange would be loosened, possibly even breaking apart for a short while. But there would never be enough energy to return them all to the place from which theyd fallen. That privilege could only be granted to those who empowered themselves before the dispersal.
That was why it had called upon the others, the strongest of their kind, able to fly far and long from the mlange. Together they might successfully storm the object where one had failed. To be rewarded with enough energy to elevate themselves out of the dark continuum was worth any risk.
The Orgath swooped closer. Huge waves of thought rippled through the layer of life energy below the objects surface, focusing on it. Pillars of energy lashed out from the dead section at the far end; a kind unusable by the Orgath. It closed its boundary against the flow, letting the power splash apart harmlessly. The pillars of energy vanished when it dove down close to the surface. Its kith were following it down, hungered by the abundant energy, crying victoriously among themselves.
Ahead now were the hollow spindles protruding from the objects midsection. The Orgath increased its speed, hardening itself with a reckless expenditure of energy. It remembered the sheet of transparent matter it had landed on before. Easy to identify amid the thousands of other identical sheets inlaid along the length of the spindle, a dead section, drained of life-energy and heat. This time, the Orgath didnt slow down.
The window of Horners bar detonated inwards with a terrifyingly violent explosion. Craggy shards of crystal blasted into the bar, scything through the furniture. Frozen, ice-cloaked tables and chairs disintegrated into billowing clouds of glossy silvery fragments. Then the entire maelstrom reversed its flow, and howled out through the shattered window. The badly shredded main door into the vestibule buckled and collapsed, allowing the air to rush through.
Emergency pressure locks all across the twenty-fifth storey started to slide shut. They were mechanical systems, self-powered, activated by simple failsafe pressure sensors. The majority of them were unaffected by the malaise inflicted by the dark continuum. Only a minority of the starscrapers muscle membranes reacted to the potentially lethal development.
The personality concentrated hard, ensuring that the muscle membranes around the Djerbas lobby were shut, then tried to reach the floors immediately below that. Its thought routines encountered a tide of exhaustion that grew worse the further it inserted itself into the starscraper. Only the vaguest images from the twenty-fifth floor were available.
The Orgath gripped the rim of the bars window with several appendages, waiting until the gale subsided. Bottles detonated in mid flight as they were swept across the room, their exotic liquor solidifying in weird bulbous shapes the instant they broke free of the glass. Anything which struck the Orgath simply bounced off, gyrating away into the void outside. As soon as the roar of air began to ebb, it moved into the starscraper. The wall around the empty door simply burst apart as it went through.
Still there was no clear image of it as it moved along the vestibule; all the sensitive cells could discern before they died was a tumour of darker shadow within the lightless chamber. And now the habitat personality was having to divert its attention to the rest of the Orgath swarm that were slamming their way through other starscraper windows. Emergency pressure locks and muscle membranes were closing throughout the deserted structures, desperately trying to contain the atmospheric breaches.
The Orgath continued to surge forward into the starscraper, hunting round for concentrations of life-energy to consume. It was spread thinly here, nothing like as rich as the layer beneath the objects outer surface. Instinctively, the Orgath barged upwards towards that mammoth source. Flat planes of matter splintered as it hammered through them. Further harsh gusts of gas whistled past. Then it found what it wanted, a solid stream of liquid suffused with life-energy pouring along the core of the starscraper. It moved as close as it could, siphoning the heat out of the thick wall of matter surrounding the stream until the outside began to crack. Then it bored through with a couple of appendages, and immersed their tips in the current. Sweet, vital life-energy flowed back into the Orgath, replenishing it after its considerable exertions. It settled down and began consuming the apparently infinite torrent, growing in a way impossible before.
Three trucks approached the ring of dilapidated hovels encircling the Djerbas lobby. Each vehicle had two people inside, a nervous driver and an even more nervous lookout armed with a heavy calibre rifle. They began to nudge along the muddy tracks between the precarious walls, heavy wheels squelching cans and empty sachet wrappers into the ground.
Past the hovels, they pulled up short of the lobby. As with all Valisks internal buildings, it was an elaborate edifice, a dome shape from gradually inclined tiers of long white polyp window arches with a circular apex of amber-tinted crystal. Inside, it had the kind of furniture nests and large marble floors endemic to any human travel station. A few cracked windows along the bottom tier, and smashed furniture smeared across the floor, was the only evidence of past battles between Kiera and Rubra.
Tolton gave it all a jaundiced look. God, I really didnt expect to be coming back here, he grumbled.
Youre not alone, Dariat told him.
Erentz climbed down out of the passenger seat, keeping her rifle trained squarely on the lobby. The visitors had been in Valisk for thirty hours now. In all that time, not one of them had emerged from a starscraper, nor made any hostile move. If it hadnt been for the broken windows and closed emergency locks there would be no evidence of their incursion at all. After their desperate efforts to gain entry, such inactivity had everyone troubled and confused. The personality was determined to discover what nefarious activity they were cooking up in the starscrapers.