Line War (50 page)

‘Yeah, but what if there are any caches of energy here?’ she said tightly.

‘There are,’ Dragon replied, ‘but my remote contains sophisticated scanning equipment, so I will warn you in plenty of time if there is any danger.’

‘Great.’

Mika checked through the screen display until she found ‘gecko function’, and then initiated it. As if it had descended with glue on its runners, the craft stuck in place. She killed its lights, the light amplification of her visor still providing her with an adequate view of her surroundings, though the ghosting effects were numerous. Using the controls at her belt, she called up the visor display and checked the options available. Her suit possessed its own lights, apparently, though she had not noticed them when putting it on. Complemented by the light amplification, they were very low intensity, which was just fine right now. She turned them on and immediately her surroundings became sharp and clear. It took her a little while to determine that the light was provided by photo-emitters located on her chest: a series of glassy discs which she had noticed earlier but assumed to be sensors of some kind. She inspected them, placing her fingers over their brightness and observing the shadows cast. Then abruptly she shook herself: no more procrastination.

Mika hit the door control and waited while the cabin automatically purged - blowing a cloud of vapour outside, which drifted off like a crippled spectre. The door then opened, and she unstrapped herself and stepped out, using her visor menu to again select ‘gecko function’, this time for her boot soles. Taking a few paces away from the craft, she felt as if she was walking through treacle. Halting, she gazed at a spot where Jain-tech had torn a hole through the attack ship’s hull from the inside and then slithered out to spread over the exterior. She could probably squeeze her way in through there but, no matter what Dragon said, she wanted to actually touch that stuff as little as possible. Mika started heading for the airlock situated further along the hull, then paused and turned upon noticing sudden movement.

The remote had eased itself down the side of her craft and, with a ripple passing through its body from nose to tail, propelled itself out into vacuum. Mika thought for a moment that it must have made some sort of mistake, for surely it now had no way of getting itself back to the attack ship, but it flapped its skate wings and changed direction, as if it was actually flying through air.

‘How the hell is it doing that?’ asked Mika.

‘Doing what?’

‘Flying.’

‘In the sense that you mean, it is not flying,’ Dragon replied. ‘For the duration of your journey here it has been converting much of its material structure to reaction mass, which it is now ejecting through numerous pores on its wing surfaces.’

Now Mika noticed the fog of vapour spreading out from the remote, and how the flapping of its wings did not seem to correlate with its motion. After a moment the flapping ceased as it brought itself to a full stop and focused its stalked eyes towards her. As she continued towards the airlock, it followed her like a pet bat.

No matter how modern a ship might be, airlocks were always provided with a simple manual option in case the power should fail. Of course, had there been air inside this ship it would have been impossible for her to open the inner, manual, part of the lock from the outside, for it hinged in and the air pressure would have held it in place. Judging by the holes she could see in the ship’s hull she very much doubted there was any air left, though there was always the possibility of some being trapped inside the lock itself.

The lock door was flush with the hull, and the manual lever lay underneath a cover that detached easily once she pressed in the catches either side of it. She tossed the cover away and watched it tumble towards the surrounding dark forest. Grabbing the handle she pressed in the safety release, which moved easily, then pulled the handle around the length of its traverse, and felt the
clonk
of the locking mechanism through her feet. She shoved against the lock door, but it would not move. Probably the seal was stuck. Standing upright, she stamped down on the door with one foot, being careful not to detach herself totally from the hull. The door hinged in enough to make it distinct from the rest of the hull. Another stamp dropped it an inch further. Crouching down, Mika lodged the fingers of one hand under the edge of the frame and with her other hand pushed down on the door. It resisted for a moment, then something ripped and it hinged all the way inside. She noted chunks of hardened breach foam floating about within the airlock and realized what had happened. The damage to the ship had distorted the shape of the door frame, so sealant had been automatically injected. That probably hadn’t helped those still inside the ship. Mika peered down further into the airlock and found confirmation of that last suspicion.

The orange suit was immediately recognizable since she had seen another less than an hour ago. It was stuck to one side of the airlock, bound in place by Jain tendrils. Mika pushed herself down inside the lock and took a closer look. Behind the visor the mouth of the mummified face was wide open as if frozen in a last scream, and inside she could see small spikes of Jain coral. She shuddered and moved on.

No problem getting through the inner door - it seemed the distortion that had caused her problems with the outer one did not extend here. Beyond was a small chamber for spacesuit storage and recharging. Mika pressed her gecko soles down against the floor and walked across the area to a sliding door. Again she had to pull the cover from a manual control - a handle that folded out to wind the door back on a rack and pinion. The remote drifted up behind her as she peered into the corridor this opened onto.

Jain growth crowded the floor, walls and ceiling as if this were some jungle cave filled with roots and lianas. She stepped through and, it being zero gravity in here, propelled herself along the corridor, trying her best to not bring a foot or hand down on any of this insidious stuff. However, she had to adjust her course slightly, and there was so much growth she could not avoid touching it. It did not react, however, and it was like pressing her hand against whorled stone.

‘Head for the bridge,’ Dragon suggested.

‘That’s what I am doing,’ she grumped back.

A few hundred yards along the corridor she halted her progress by grabbing a door jamb, and gazed inside at a macabre sight. Here stood a serpentine tangle rather like a fig vine, and bound within it was a freeze-dried woman. She was naked, indicating the Jain-tech had caught her by surprise. Mika moved on.

Eventually she reached a drop-shaft, which soon opened into a short corridor terminating against the doors accessing the bridge. Some minutes of hard effort started the double sliding doors opening, and air hissed out to fog the corridor around her. In this mist she noted black bits like flecks of soot. Reaching out she grabbed some out of the air and inspected them closely. Common houseflies. Dead.

When the doors were finally open enough, she entered the bridge and looked around her. It appeared some of the ship’s crew had fled here, for the bridge was an ossuary, with skeletons scattered across the floor. She inspected the dead with a critical eye. These were clothed, their envirosuits more durable than the flesh they had contained. It occurred to her then, by the position of the bones, that they had all died before the gravity failed, for they were stuck to the floor by a frozen grey adipocere thick with fly chrysalises, dead flies and even dead maggots. Obviously a few flies had managed to get aboard at some previous port of call and to survive, and this bridge must have remained warm and oxygenated for some time. The ship’s AI? All of the corpses here showed charred bone and burns through gaps in their clothing. Laser burns, probably from the ship’s internal defences. Either the AI itself had been killed and those defences taken out of its control, or it had been melded with Erebus, and carried out this slaughter itself.

‘I wonder why the life-support kept on running?’ Mika looked around for the blue-eyed remote and saw it stuck to the wall right above the doors. ‘You’re scanning?’

‘I am.’

‘What about this ship’s AI?’

‘Smashed - so obviously it wasn’t a willing participant in this.’ Dragon then added, ‘I see that it separated life-support here from itself and concealed a trickle feed to it from one of the reactors. It tried its best to hide these people. After taking control of internal defences and killing them all, Erebus must have missed the feed or just ignored it as of no consequence.’

So what the ship’s AI had done to try to save them had ultimately allowed them to rot away.

‘Is there anything here of use to us?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps something can be learned from their augs and grid-links,’ suggested Dragon.

Mika peered at the array of bones and saw one skull had a bean-shaped aug still attached behind where its ear had once been. She reached down and twisted the aug hard, snapping its bone anchors, then pulled it away. The skull shifted, its jawbone falling loose, and the aug came away trailing fine hairlike strands – the nano-filaments that had connected it to the brain inside. Mika collected four augs in all and dropped them into her belt pouch. Any gridlink would require her either opening up a skull to get to it, or carrying about with her the skull it was in. Both notions seemed too ghoulish.

‘I suggest you now head for the docking tunnel to
Trafalgar?
Dragon opined.

Despite her macabre surroundings Mika did not want to go there. While her own craft had been heading into this huge Jain structure, and while exploring this vessel and wondering what had happened aboard it, she had been struggling to keep from her mind the true reason for her being here. She had come here to wake up the Jain AIs and deliver to them the information inside her head. She could feel herself right beside where things got really thin and knew that somehow those AIs awaited her aboard
Trafalgar.

* * * *

Orlandine eyed the spider war drone. Its antecedents were similar to those of the drones on this station, and as such it was damned dangerous. Having already scanned it carefully, she knew it was similarly packed with weaponry, but she had prepared programs to seize control of it the moment it tried to employ its hardware. Then she studied the man and the brass Golem in turn. She wasn’t entirely sure which was the more dangerous. This man, this Ian Cormac, was a tough-looking individual with cropped silvery hair, an olive complexion and sharp striking features. His eyes were noticeably grey and cold. He was an agent of ECS, so that certainly meant he was trained to kill - and fast - but he was also a human capable of doing something as yet unheard of: transmitting himself through U-space. And that wasn’t all, for Orlandine had scanned him too. Certainly he was a human being and not some kind of machine, yet the gridlink inside his skull was activating by some means she had not encountered before. It seemed to be connected to some sort of mycelium laced throughout his bones - a structure not dissimilar to Jain-tech.

‘I take it you two have met?’ she said.

Then there was this Golem. She knew the story of the prototype that was stolen from Cybercorp, even though the theft had taken place before she was born. She knew about the tapestry of legend that had grown up about this same killing machine. But the reality of it was even more worrying. Mr Crane was heavily armoured, and what lay inside him was mostly impenetrable to scan, but what she could see hinted that he had been severely remodelled and contained some kind of technology definitely not developed in the Polity. Then there was the other stuff she had received on informational levels. His communications were mostly machine code and almost incoherent in their brevity, yet behind that she got the sense that she was communicating with something as complex and powerful as a major AI, like Jerusalem, Geronamid or even Earth Central itself.

‘Yes, we’ve met,’ said Cormac, still gazing at the Golem. ‘Mr Crane was trying to kill me at the time.’

‘Then perhaps you know that Dragon helped repair his mind.’ Orlandine smiled at him. ‘He’s all better now.’

Cormac turned and focused on her, and something about his poise worried her. She knew she could move very fast, but wondered if she might be quite fast enough if he tried anything. Then she dismissed the idea: nothing could be
that
fast, here.

‘You broke my link to the CTD,’ he observed.

‘You won’t be needing it.’

He carefully reached into his pocket and took out the dart, and Orlandine felt her throat constrict. Earlier he had taken it out of his pocket and asked her about her brothers, and she had then instantly made the connection.

‘When my mother Ariadne and I were on Europa she missed Ermoon and Aladine a great deal. She saw two of the dart guns for sale in a shop - they use them there in the underground sea -and immediately bought them for my brothers.’

‘She then sent the guns to them on Klurhammon,’ Cormac suggested.

‘Yes.’

‘Where Erebus killed both of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I did not use the Jain node he gave me for the purpose intended - I fled with it both from him and from the Polity AIs.’

‘To cover your escape you murdered someone - a haiman called Shoala, I believe.’

‘I’m not proud of that.’

‘Continue,’ said Cormac, the tone telling her that she had been judged for that act and found wanting.