The road was over eighty years old; coastal winters had washed soil away from under it and frozen the surface, flexing it up and down until it snapped. There wasn’t a single flat stretch anywhere, a fact disguised by fancifully windsculpted drifts of snow. Alkad’s car lumbered along at barely more than walking pace as the suspension rocked the body from side to side.
They’d driven into the yard at a dangerously high speed along the roadway. A fifth car had been wiped out behind them, then the blasts of energy from space seemed to stop. Alkad datavised the car’s control processor to turn off at the first junction. According to the map she had loaded into her neural nanonics memory cell, the Disassembly Sheds were strung out across the yard’s northern quadrant.
But as she was rapidly discovering: the map is not the territory.
“I can’t see a bloody thing,” Voi said. “I don’t even know if we’re on a road anymore.”
Eriba peered forwards, his nose almost touching the windshield. “The Sheds have to be out there somewhere. They’re huge.”
“The guidance processor says we’re heading north,” Alkad said. “Keep looking.” She glanced out of the back window to see the car following her bouncing about heavily, its headlight beams slashing about through the snow. “Can you sense Baranovich?” she asked Gelai.
“Faintly, yes.” Her hand waved ahead and slightly to the left. “He’s out there; and he’s got a lot of friends with him.”
“How many?”
“About twenty, maybe more. It’s difficult at this distance, and they’re moving about.”
Voi sucked her breath in fiercely. “Too many.”
“Is Lodi with them?”
“Possibly.”
A massive chunk of machinery lay along the side of the road, some metallic fossil from the age of greater ambitions. Once they’d passed it, a strong red-gold radiance flooded over the car. A faint roar made the windows tremble.
“One of the smelters,” Ngong said.
“Which means the Disassembly Sheds are on this side.” Voi pointed confidently.
The road became smoother, and the car picked up speed. Its tyres began to squelch through slush that had melted in the radiance of the smelter. They could see the silhouette of the furnace building now, a long black rectangle with hangarlike doors fully open to show eight streams of radiant molten metal pouring out of the hulking smelter into narrow channels which wound away deeper into the building. Thick jets of steam were shooting out of vents in the roof. Snowflakes reverted to sour rain as they fell through them.
Alkad yelled in fright, and datavised an emergency stop order to the car’s control processor. They juddered to a halt two metres short of the canal. A segment of ironberg was sliding along sedately just in front of them, a tarnished silver banana shape with its skin pocked by millions of tiny black craters.
The sky above turned a brilliant silver, stamping a black and white image of the canal and the ironberg segment on the back of Alkad’s retina. “Holy Mother Mary,” she breathed.
The awesome light faded.
“My processor block’s crashed,” Eriba said. He was twisting his head around, trying to find the source of the light. “What was that?”
“They’re shooting at the cars again,” Voi said.
Alkad datavised the car’s control processor, not surprised when she couldn’t get a response. It confirmed the cause: emp. “I wish it was only that,” she told them, marvelling sadly at their innocence. Even now they didn’t grasp the enormity of what was involved, the length to which others would go. She reached under the dashboard and twisted the release for the manual steering column. Thankfully, it swung up in front of a startled Eriba. “Drive,” she instructed. “There’ll be a bridge or something in a minute. But just drive.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Sarha grumbled. “Here we go again.”
Lady Mac ’s combat sensor clusters were relaying an all-too-clear image of space above Nyvan into her neural nanonics. Ten seconds ago all had been clear and calm. The various SD platforms were still conducting their pointless electronic war unabated. Ships were moving towards the three abandoned asteroids, two squadrons of frigates from different nations were closing on Jesup; while Tonala’s low-orbit squadron was moving to intercept the Organization ships. This orbital chess game between the nations could have gone on for hours yet, allowing Joshua and the others plenty of time to get back up to the ship, and for all of them to jump the hell away from this deranged planet.
Then the Organization frigates had started shooting. The voidhawks accelerated out of parking orbit. And space was full of combat wasps.
“Velocity confirmed,” Beaulieu barked. “Forty gees, plus. Antimatter propulsion.”
“Christ,” Liol said. “Now what do we do?”
“Nothing,” Sarha snapped. So far, the conflict was ahead of them and at a slightly higher altitude. “Standby for emp.” She datavised a procedural stand-by order into the flight computer. “Damn, I wish Joshua were here, he could fly us out of this in his sleep.”
Liol gave her a hurt look.
Four swarms of combat wasps were in flight, etching dazzling strands of light across the darkened continents and oceans. They began to jettison their submunitions, and everything became far too complicated for the human mind to follow. Symbols erupted across the display Sarha’s neural nanonics provided as she asked the tactical analysis program for simplified interpretations.
Nyvan’s nightside had ceased to become dark, enlivened by hundreds of incandescent exhausts blurring together as they engaged each other. It was the fusion bombs which went off first, then an antimatter charge detonated.
Space ahead of Lady Mac went into blazeout. No sensor was capable of penetrating that stupendous energy release.
Tactically, it wasn’t the best action. The blast destroyed every combat wasp submunitions friend or foe within a hundred kilometres, while its emp disabled an even larger number.
“Damage report?” Sarha asked.
“Some sensor damage,” Beaulieu said. “Backups coming on-line. No fuselage energy penetration.”
“Liol!”
“Uh? Oh. Yeah. Flight systems intact, generators on-line. Attitude stable.”
“The SD platforms are launching,” Beaulieu warned. “They’re really letting loose. Saturation assault!”
“I can get us out of here,” Liol said. “Two minutes to jump altitude.”
“No,” Sarha said. “If we move, they’ll target us. Right now we stay low and inert. We don’t launch, we don’t emit. If anything does lock on, we kill it with the masers and countermeasure its launch origin. Then you shift our inclination three degrees either way, not our altitude. Got that?”
“Got it.” His voice was hot and high.
“Relax, Liol, everyone’s forgotten about us. We just stay intact to pick Joshua up, that’s our mission, that’s all we do. I want you cool for a smooth response when it comes. And it will. Use a stim program if you have to.”
“No. I’m all right now.”
Another antimatter explosion obliterated a vast section of the universe. Broken submunitions came spinning out of the epicentre.
“Lock on,” Beaulieu reported. “Three submunitions. One kinetic, two nukes. I think; catalogue match is sixty per cent. Twenty gees only, real geriatrics.”
“Okay,” Sarha said, proud to find how calm she was. “Kick-ass time.”
A deluge of light from the second antimatter explosion revealed the Disassembly Sheds to all the cars speeding across the foundry yard. A row of blank two-dimensional squares receding to the horizon.
“Go for it!” Alkad urged.
Eriba thumbed the throttle forwards. The snow was abating now, revealing more of the ground ahead, giving him confidence. Furnaces glowed in the distance, coronas of slumbering dragons smeared by flurries of grey flakes. The battered road took them past long-forsaken fields of carbon concrete where ranks of sun-bleached gantries stood as memorials to machinery and buildings aborted by financial reality. Pipes wide enough to swallow the car angled up out of the stony soil like metallized worms; their ends capped by rusting grilles which issued strange heavy vapours. Lonely wolf-analogues prowled among the destitute technological carcasses, skulking in the shadows whenever the car’s headlights ventured close.