Context (119 page)

It can flick me from existence.

Instead, the ground shook with
massive vibration, and a gout of dust rose from the exit as it filled with
rubble, the tunnel collapsed in ruins.

Trapped.

‘How do we...’ Even Thylara’s
voice shook as she looked upwards.

Gently, Tom’s arm enclosed the
sticky-tagged bag containing Eemur, cradling the long-dead Seer’s head against
him, knowing he could not lose her now. He locked the tension in his arm.

‘There’s only one way,’ he said.

Thylara
whooped as the arachnasprite sprang upwards. It leaped to the wall, and they
flew vertically up towards the surface, ducking as they sped past blackness.

No, no, no, no, no...

Something clutched at Tom’s heart
but then they were past the void, hurtling upwards, the ‘sprite whipping its
tendrils in a blur across faces and limbs and twisting torsos of the boiling
human hive. Between Tom’s legs the arachnasprite shook and whined as Thylara
pushed it far past normal limits, knowing they had seconds to live if she
failed.

The shaft, the writhing people,
flowed past.

A downward glance. The blackness
was spreading, yet not pursuing.

Multitudes cried out, as the
arachnasprite continued its hellish climb. The sound became a roar, a tidal
pressure wave. Tom’s ears popped.

The world grew silent.

Burst eardrums.

Tendrils a blur.

Half a million grasping hands
fell away.

Whiteness...

And they sprang upwards into a
place of blazing light.

~ * ~

66

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422

Nova-bright,
it shone around them. Thylara swerved the ‘sprite, took a new course, and they
danced upwards along the glassine structure. They were inside the great blossom
which was now alive with focused light.

Five seconds to reach the apex.

The whiteness grew on every side.
It was as though the crystalline structure was no longer the energy’s source;
instead, the very air seemed to be on fire, a pulsing white globe with a life
of its own.

Then they were on the clear roofs
outer rim where Tom expected Thylara to slow, but if anything the ‘sprite moved
faster as they tipped over, and danced down the convex outer wall until they
reached the ground, and the temporary illusion of safety.

Tom’s heart beat so fast he
thought it might burst. In the bag he was still clutching, did long-dead Eemur
feel fear of her own?

Now Thylara paused, checked her
lased-in her-eyes-only display, then gunned her arachnasprite into motion once more,
and the grass flowed by beneath them like an emerald torrent which rushes
towards the wild and massive ocean, birthplace of life, saltwater cradle of all
existence, something which Tom had never seen for real.

There
was an invisible war, unseen but deadly: femtophages and pseudatomic lattices,
borne in smartmists and virtual bursts, battling against each other. Attack and
counter-measure formed a finely balanced conflict; with limits on evolutionary
capability, to prevent wildfire leaps to unforeseen sections of morphological
phase-space, the appearance of new forms which would prove as deadly to the
human originators as to the intended targets.

It was self-interest, the ancient
decision to limit the way femtotech was used for violence: a way of avoiding
the immolation of the species. But everyone in the know among Corduven’s forces
had been afraid, since the Blight might have removed all restrictions and
produced who knew what devilish creations.

But the war was waged, and
fizzled out.

And the archaic forms of
hand-to-hand conflict came to the forefront yet again.

The
arachnasprite danced across a field of blood and mud, passed wounded soldiers—who
reached out, might have called to Tom had he ears to hear them—and butchered
corpses. Overhead, Corduven’s flyers and the Blight’s armoured drones, many
hundreds of them now, filled the air with their own form of battle.

Down here, grey-uniformed
companies of Dark Fire forces—human allies, not Absorbed, from what Tom could
see—marched against the ground troops the flyers had landed. The élite forces,
trained in holo-caverns to fight in the agoraphobic vastness of ground level.

I didn‘t expect this.

Only Corduven could have
mobilized such vast numbers, and even then they must have been on instant
standby. He must have been waiting personally for Tom’s signal; had instantly
seen the significance of the Blight’s reaching out to Anomalies of other worlds—if
that was truly the purpose of the great crystalline structure.

But Tom had not thought the
agoraphilia-conditioned forces included the Clades Tau, or any ‘sprite clans,
and he wondered whether the nomad riders had made surface forays of their own,
over the years. How else could Thylara function up here?

Graser-burst, and all the
tendrils along the arachnasprite’s right side gave way, and they fell.

Both Tom and Thylara rolled clear
by reflex.

They were almost beyond the
battlefield, and Thylara tugged Tom in the right direction, plodding now across
unbroken heath, while the silent—to Tom—cacophony of light and death played out
behind him. There was no point in looking back: if they were pursued, they were
dead. Neither he nor Thylara had weapons to speak of.

They walked, and Eemur’s Head in
its bag banged against his right thigh on every other step, but Tom had a
feeling that she would voice no complaint, even if she had the ability.

And then they were scrambling
down a slope, into a small dell, where Corduven had set up a command post
inside a transparent armoured bubble-tent. His strategy advisers clustered
around him, and one of them was lean and cheerful—even in these circumstances—the
light of magical genius dancing in his eyes.

Avernon!

Tom went to grasp forearms in the
noble fashion, but Avernon embraced him like a long-lost brother, shouting
words of joyful greeting which Tom could not hear.

Flyers passed by overhead,
accelerating towards the battle.

‘Can
you hear me?’ Tom pointed to his ears. ‘I’m deaf. Does my voice sound right?’

Avernon nodded.

Tom explained how he had summoned
Corduven’s forces, with a microtransmitter which utilized any power source it
could: he assumed it had vaporized with the overload after the first
message-burst.