“Are you launching another combat wasp?” Liol asked.
“Not yet,” Joshua said. He datavised the bitek array for a link to the exploration team. “Where are you?”
“Coming up to level two,” Monica replied. “The ramp is sealed behind us, so if we don’t get ambushed, we’ll be at level one in another twelve minutes.”
“Okay, thanks, Monica. Syrinx, we’d better start finalizing our next move.”
“Agreed. We must assume the blackhawk will try and follow us again.”
“I can throw it off with multiple consecutive jumps. Can you do something similar?”
“No problem. Designate a rendezvous coordinate.”
“That’s trickier. This bloody diversionary battle has screwed around with our vector. I can get a rough alignment on the second planet with a small burn. We’ll slingshot around it, and re-align on the Orion nebula. After that, we can lose the hellhawk.”
“Very well. Oenone will swallow out to the second planet as soon as we’ve picked the team up. See you there.”
The second level cavern housed a gigantic fusion generator, three pale metal spheres standing one on top of the other, eighty metres high. Arching buttresses of pipes and cables were wrapped around the main section like mechanized viaducts, sinking away into the walls and floor. A quintet of heat exchangers surrounded it. Fluids had leaked from their valves and feed tube junctions, dribbling down the casings to solidify in colourful multi-layered ribbons. The cavern’s irradiated rock kicked off datavised Geiger warnings as soon as the exploration team bounded in from one of the corridors.
“This is it,” Samuel datavised. “Our shortcut.”
“It will be very short with this radiation level if we’re not careful,” Monica datavised. “This is as bad as a fission core meltdown. What kind of fuel did they use?”
“Heaven only knows.” Samuel scanned his sensors across the pipes that disappeared into the curving apex overhead. “Any of those three.” His suit’s tactical program datavised the designation icon to the others, highlighting the pipe he’d chosen. “According to the file Oski pulled from the control offices it’s a thermal gas duct. The exchangers transferred some of their heat along it to keep the level-one lakes warm. It’s an express route straight there. All we have to do is slice it open.”
Monica didn’t argue with him, despite the sudden doubts. She’d stayed with Oski and Renato in the archive, leaving details of their withdrawal to Samuel. That was teamwork. And it was as though he’d been her partner forever. They knew they could rely on each other now. She took the stumpy laser rifle from her belt, datavised its control processor for a continual burn, and lined it up on the pipe he’d designated.
Five ruby red beams stabbed out, puncturing the pipe. Bright molten metal droplets drizzled down slowly, losing their radiance before they reached the ground. Monica’s radar caught the movement just before the maser beam hit her suit. A couple of homing grenades fired immediately from her dispenser, looping through the three dimensional maze of pipes to smash the corridor entrance where the Tyrathca soldier was lurking.
Backwash from the EE blast rolled her across the ground to clang against the base of a heat exchanger. Her infrared sensor caught a blur of motion away on the other side of the chamber. Radar was useless, there was too much machinery in the way.
“They’re in,” she warned.
“Oski, Renato, finish cutting the pipe open,” Samuel ordered. “We’ll take care of them.”
One of the Tyrathca cannon fired, blowing a hole in the side of the fusion generator. Monica grabbed her missile launcher, and fired off a pair of smart seekers. Samuel was kangaroo jumping up the side of a heat exchanger. Homing grenades spat out of his dispenser, zipping away to pummel the corridor entrances. Maser beams slashed at him. Monica’s sensors triangulated their origin, and she launched more smart seekers in retaliation. Explosions ripped round the chamber as the corridor entrances were closed.
“Pipe’s open,” Oski datavised.
“Go straight in,” Samuel datavised. “We’ll cover you.”
Monica dived under a buttress, scanning at ground level. The lower section of four hot Tyrathca spacesuit legs was visible ahead of her, below a coil-wound beam. She chopped them with the laser, slashing straight through the fabric. Large globs of weird purple gel burped out, oscillating wildly as they bounced off the floor and machinery. The Tyrathca stumbled and fell. Monica slid the laser along its flank. A tidal wave of gel blobs erupted. Then the body went into explosive decompression.
Oski’s manoeuvring pack fired at full power, lifting her towards the apex of the cavern. Every suppresser program she had that could squash down on her fear was in primary mode. They must have worked, she was quietly delighted at how calmly she was reacting to being shot at. Guidance programs bent her flight around the clutter of arching pipes as she rose higher and higher. She actually passed a two metre section of the pipe on her way up, its edges still glowing pink as it tumbled end over end.
A maser beam struck her legs. The suit’s tactical program shot a homing grenade down in response. Then she was concentrating solely on her flight, arrowing for the gaping hole they’d sliced in the pipe. Its rim flashed past her, catching her shoulder, and scraping along her arms. Then she was completely inside. Radar was the only sense which functioned in here, showing a rigid, featureless tube stretching out above her for nearly three hundred metres. Her manoeuvring pack thrusters throttled down, slowing her to a less reckless speed as the gravity dropped off. A second armour suit slid into the pipe below her.
“Hell of an escape route,” Renato datavised.
Etchells had no warning that the Oenone was going to swallow away from the twin moons. The crew were still boring him crazy with their promises and propaganda when it happened. But he felt it go, a massive tear in the uniformity of his distortion field.
What are you doing?he asked. the tyrathca ships were still hours away.
We’re leaving now,ruben said. Why don’t you go home? Think about what we’ve been saying.
There was a momentary lapse in the affinity contact. Etchells observed the amount of energy Oenone applied to open the wormhole interstice, determining the terminus location. They had returned to that damn arkship!
Why are you here?he demanded. What’s so special about that ship?
If you join our efforts to solve this crisis, then such questions will be answered for you,syrinx said.
Fuck your psychobabble bullshit.he sent the energy flashing through his patterning cells, uncomfortably aware of how much he had expended in warding off impacts from the Lagrange point particles. A wormhole opened, and he dived down it, emerging into real space again, barely twenty kilometres from the arkship.
The Oenone was probing the ancient vessel very thoroughly with its distortion field (an act which Etchells didn’t understand). And the large Tyrathca ship was firing its secondary drive, moving up from its holding position at the front of Tanjuntic-RI. Etchells didn’t really want to go into combat against the xenocs at this point, especially not with uncertain allies like the Edenists.
Oenone was performing another swallow manoeuvre.
You can’t elude me,etchells said.
Fine,syrinx replied with icy superiority. Follow us in, then.
Etchells derived the voidhawk’s wormhole terminus. Which was impossible. They were swallowing inside the arkship. There were cavities in there, he could feel them. Tenuous bubbles within the hard rock. So very small.
He didn’t dare. That kind of accuracy was staggering.
The Tyrathca ship had risen above the arkship’s horizon. It launched fifteen combat wasps straight at him. He swallowed away fast.
The level-one cavern was quickly and silently saturated with light, revealing the cyclorama of frozen water. Ripples and waves were caught in mid-swell, drained of colour as they had been of heat. The endocarps were different. Flat cliffs of rock, rimmed with ledges of metal just above the ice. One of them boasted a tiny pinprick of warmth. Five armour-suited figures hovered in front of it, watching the light source expand; twisted fragments of starlight threaded through the length of the wormhole to spray out at random. There was no other indication of the terminus opening.
As the light dimmed it shone across Oenone ’s marbled blue hull, glinting off the crew toroid. The huge voidhawk swept round the lake’s curvature towards the exploration team, skirting the rickety old axial gantry with simple grace.
You’ve no idea how good it is to see you,samuel said, accompanying the statement with a wash of gratitude and relief.
You too,Oenone replied. I knew I could do this.
Etchells conceded defeat. He wasn’t going to find out why the two starships had come here, not now. Oenone was inside the arkship for less than five minutes before swallowing away again. Its wormhole terminus opened out above the star system’s second planet. The Adamist ship jumped there as well.
Etchells joined them, at a non-threatening distance, observing the Adamist ship fly round the planet on a tight slingshot trajectory. When it jumped, Etchells tried to follow. But it must have used multiple consecutive jumps, because he couldn’t find it anywhere near the emergence coordinate. With his energy patterning cells badly depleted, and his nutrient reserve getting low, he began the long, lonely trip back to New California. It was time to hand the whole problem over to Kiera and Capone.
Candles shaped like dark lily pads bobbed about over the bath water, never managing to touch the two bodies resting in the middle. Several of them had become mired in the burgs of apple-scented bubbles, their wicks sizzling as the flames struggled to stay alight. More candles were flickering gamely along the bath’s marbled rim, half a metre tall; they were cemented into place by thick rivulets of wax. As the only source of light in the suite’s dilapidated bathroom, their weak yellow flickers bestowed an appropriately dingy appearance.
For years the Chatsworth had been one of central Edmonton’s most renowned five-star hotels, attracting the wealthy and the famous. But successive changes of management and ownership had seen it decay badly over the last two decades as too much of its cash flow had been diverted from maintaining standards to inflating shareholder dividends. Eventually it was trading solely on its name, and that could never last. Now it was closed for a much needed refurbishment and re-launch. But the work crews and their mechanoids hadn’t even started stripping the old fittings out when New York’s problems with the possessed hit the AV news. After that, most of Earth’s long-term commercial investment projects were put on hold while the financiers and entrepreneurs waited to see what the outcome would be. The Chatsworth included.
Quinn had taken it over with quiet efficiency to use as his home base in the arcology. The three-man caretaker team left inside were possessed, and every last connection to the outside world was severed: power, water, data, air conditioning. He knew that police and government security forces tracked the possessed by the glitches they caused, but they could only do that when there was working processor-governed machinery nearby. So he and his loyal followers made do with the water left in the hotel tanks, cooked on camping gear in one of the ritzy function rooms, and used candles. Bath water was heated purely by energistic power. The soaps and oils were stolen from a local mall. Along with booze.
Quinn reached for the bottle of Norfolk Tears chilling in an ice bucket among the candles, and poured the pale liquid over Courtney’s glistening breasts. She giggled as her nipples hardened from the cold, and arched herself further out of the water. There were bruises and teeth marks on her gold-tanned skin, evidence of Quinn’s recent predilections. She didn’t mind the kind of sex he wanted; it was kind of interesting, the physical things he could do with his new black magic. That kind of misused power really turned her on, further proof of his omnipotence. He didn’t have to worry about censure, or being caught. He wrote the rules now. And there was never much pain, nor did it last long. He didn’t have to hurt her to confirm their relationship; he knew she had submitted herself completely to him and the cause. Joyfully, too. By embracing the serpent beast in its dark lair, Courtney’s life had changed, becoming so much better. Hotter. Brighter. She got all the stuff like clothes and AV fleks she wanted now; and she didn’t have to take shit from anyone anymore, either. Not bad going for a sect whore.