Gridlinked (46 page)

It contained fresh fruit, probably from the station's hydroponics, film-wrapped sandwiches with some sort of meat filling, even a small bottle of a wine that bore the name 'Passion' on its label. As Jarvellis looked up from the bag, it occurred to her that she would not remember the Outlinkers' generosity. After ECS tried her for arms smuggling, and then mind-wiped her, she would remember nothing. She'd be a pregnant mother operating on instinct: a mere animal until they downloaded a personality into her, and - whether construct or real -that personality would never be her own. She closed the bag, stood up, and began walking. In the cabin she could just hear Tull's voice speaking over the intercom. No cameras, then. She knew that the Oudinkers would have some sort of AG shuttle at the centre of the station for their own use. What she now wondered was if any of the station's original shuttles remained in this outer ring.

Dawn flung greenhouse light across the land. It seemed, with this coloration to the light, that the temperature should be high. But the day began wintry and showed no sign of changing as it advanced. Viewed from above, the ruins had the appearance of an impact site in the forest of blue oaks and chequer trees, and perhaps at one time that was precisely what this had been. The two bikes skimmed over crumbling buildings towards the central ring of the broken dome. They came in to land at the edge of the dome, where there was just enough room to fit the sky-bikes close together on apparently firm ground.

Donning their helmets, the four advanced through the wreckage, their boots crunching on broken glass and heat-splintered plascrete. All around, old wiring and the remnants of computer systems were sinking into decay.

Most surfaces were covered with grey and yellow lichens. This ruin could have been thousands of years old, rather than the few hundred it actually was. Soon all four stood at the rim of the dark shaft of one of the underground silos.

Cormac gazed into that dark and contemplated what these ruins meant. This is what happened when worlds seceded from the Polity. This is what happened when base humanity tried to govern itself.

'Cormac,' came Mika's voice over his comunit. 'The dracomen just grabbed the AGC. They're coming your way'

'Shit!'

Cormac looked up at the sky, but could see no craft. What was Dragon up to? What were the dracomen up to? He was tempted to put a hold on the mission until he found out, but, after thinking about the chances of getting some answers out of the dracomen, he decided to go on.

'Thorn, put a shot down there and see what stirs.'

Thorn leant over the edge and fired. The purple flash disclosed the depth of the silo before rubble exploded from it on a hot flash. Something began screeching in the ruins behind them and they turned to see a couple of corvine birds flap raggedly into the sky. Thorn tracked their course for a moment, and then turned back to the silo. The rest of them turned with him and, as smoking stones rained down, they waited expectandy.

Eventually Thorn said, in a bored voice, 'Nothing stirring.'

'Try the next one,' Cormac told him.

They circled the edge of the silo, well back from the corroded metal at its lip. Thorn made adjustments on his weapon.

'If this doesn't work, do we move on to the CTDs?' he asked casually.

'Have to,' said Cormac.

He could see Thorn's smile of satisfaction.

Shortly they reached the lip of the next silo.

'Energy readings… difficult to locate,' said Aiden.

Thorn moved forwards. 'We'll see—'

It shot out of the next silo like a white-hot jack-in-the-box. Cormac's visor polarized, re-adjusted - and before him was the fantastic creation of some godlike glass-maker. It was a dragon, a real dragon. Then, the next moment, it was not.

The Maker seemed to be made of glass supported by bones that were glowing tungsten filaments. It had a long swanlike neck ending in a nightmare head that had something of a lizard and something of a praying mantis about it. Wings opened out, seemingly batlike at first, then taking on the appearance of a mass of sails. A heavy claw gripped the edge of the underground silo, or was it a hand shaped like the body of a millipede, with hundreds of leglike fingers? A glowing bullwhip tail thrashed the air, sprouted sails, fins, light. Cormac froze. The Maker was about five metres high. How had it gotten through a twenty-centimetre hole? Then he realized: it was not matter, it was energy; it could probably be any size. He had just never seen anything like it before. Was it Dragon's ultimate joke to name itself thus, when the kind that had made it looked like this?

'Bastard!' came Thorn's voice over the static on com. He fired. The proton beam hit the Maker and diffused from the other side. It jerked back and a bolt of white light shot from its jaws, splashed into Thorn and wrapped around him. For a moment he seemed to be struggling against snakes of light, then, as if the force of it had only just caught up, he was flung back. Cento and Aiden fired too. In return, two bolts of a different colour hit them. They both sat down with an undignified thump. Cormac lowered his weapon as the creature rose over him. Then an AGC streaked past its head, and it turned to watch the car as it circled and came back. The top of the car had been ripped away, and the dracomen were visible. One of them was firing a laser carbine. Pins of red light were flickering in the Maker's body; beyond this there was no visible effect. The car streaked past again and kept going. The Maker made a sound like the gusting sigh of a strong wind, watching them go, then turned its attention back to Cormac.

Cormac stooped down and placed his weapon on the ground. Over his comunit he could hear strange whistlings and creakings. The Maker brought its head closer to him. He could feel the energy of it; as a tension in his face and a thrumming in his bones. He could see that it possessed three of what seemed to be eyes. Mandibles of glass opened from the sides of its jaws. Cormac looked into the throat of hell.

Again: laser fire flickering inside the glassy body. The dracomen were back. The AGC circled and the draco-man with the carbine fired continuously. The Maker made that wind-sound again, but now there seemed to be to Cormac an element of anger in it. Fire flashed from its mouth and struck the AGC. The car shuddered and pieces of it fell from the sky. It shuddered again and something detonated under its cowling. Trailing black smoke, it went into a dive and eventually fell into the forest to the north of the ruin. The Maker turned its head and looked at Cormac again, its glass mandibles opening and closing as if in indecision, or anticipation. Then, with a surge of power and light, it launched itself into the sky, remained poised there for a moment, then shot down into the trees.

'Oh my God! Ohmegod!'

'Colonel, sir, please respond. The creature—'

'What the fuck?*

'Will you look at that!'

'Shaddup, Goff! Colonel? Colonel?'

Cormac did not want to answer. He could do without those jabbering human voices. There was a stillness here that he wanted to savour. But, as he stood motionless, his sense of duty re-asserted itself. He sighed and returned to the world.

'Cormac here.'

'Sir, an AGC just went down in the forest, a thing… light… It landed where the AGC crashed.'

'What's happening now?'

'Trees… burning… No, it's coming up!'

Cormac stared across the ruins and saw the Maker rise into the sky. It held the two dracomen silhouetted against its body, looking black as if charred by that fantastic light. Suddenly it became an actinic torpedo, blurred, wing-sails grabbing at the air, and then it became a streak of fire to the east.

That it had no AG was obvious at a glance through the dusty portal. Its main body was a flattened cylinder terminating in a full-screen chainglass cockpit. A pair of ion engines was set back on either side of the cockpit, and another pair was set just forward of a stabilizing fin like a huge rudder. Each of the four engines was a sphere with a slice taken off it to expose the grids inside. Each could be moved independently to give a degree of forward and reverse thrust, but only so far as they did not blast into each other. The shuttle might well be fuelled and its small fusion tokomac might still be serviceable, Jarvellis could not tell. The shuttle rested on the floor of the small bay with the doors open before it, and the arc of the station curving away from the top of that opening. If she wished to reach it, she had to cross ten metres of floor through vacuum. That would not have been too much of a problem for the Outlinkers, and maybe she too could have made it. But how long would it take for the lock on this side of the bay to cycle? How long for the lock on the shuttle? And would there be atmosphere inside it?

Jarvellis moved away from the portal and looked around. This worn corridor ran round the bay in an arc, and there were doors behind her. She tried one, pressing the correct button this time. The door slid aside with a low grinding to reveal a wedge-shaped room that was utterly empty. The fifth room she tried contained the lockers and soon she was inspecting a spacesuit that made the one she had owned seem state of the art. It had a bowl helmet of scratched plastiglass: a helmet that was actually breakable. The material of the suit itself was layered, and just that: material. There was no armouring, no sealant layer. Air was provided by an external bottle with a vulnerable pipe that plugged into the neck-ring. She wiped dirt from an old digital readout and saw that the bottle did contain air, though how the pressure reading related to time or suit pressure, she could not say. Laboriously she pulled the suit on, and then tucked the helmet under her arm as she headed for the lock. The inner door, a great thick thing that actually operated on hinges, opened with surprising silence. As she stepped inside, a different noise greeted her.

'Is that you in that lock, Captain Jarvellis?' Tull asked over the intercom.

Jarvellis ignored the voice, put her helmet on and twisted it into place. Maybe the seals would not work so well. Maybe they would work for long enough. She opened the valve on the air bottle and got a hiss of air that was breathable, but had a vaguely putrid smell.

'Captain, please come out of that lock. Very little of the equipment there has been serviced. You could kill yourself… oh, I see… I wouldn't advise trying to use that shuttle. It has no AG, you realize? Those ion eng… you… s…'t…'

The inner lock was irised. It made no noise as it opened, but that was because there was now no air to transmit sound. Neat way of shutting Tull up anyway. Jarvellis stepped out of the lock and hurried over to the shutde. The door she saw was not a door with an airlock. She twisted the two handles at the side of it and hinged it open. It was a single-seal door; only with it closed would the shuttle fill with air. Back when this station was constructed, weight had played an all-important role. A full airlock would have been too much extra. Jarvellis stepped inside and closed the door.

White vapour was now leaking from the folds at the elbow of the primitive suit. It was also leaking out round the neck-seal and painting glitters of frost across the plastiglass.

The cabin of the shuttle was simply a plain box, with spring fixings along the floor to take either chairs or cargo straps. Ahead there was another hinged door. She moved quickly to it and tried to turn the handles. Nothing gave. She put her weight on the handles, and they started to move just before her feet left the floor. She pulled herself down and jammed her foot in one of the spring fixings to try again. Vapour bloomed around the door, then dissipated. She got it open and pulled herself in. Even as she closed the door, she found herself panting for air that was getting increasingly thin. A button.
Cycle.
She hit it and dragged herself to a dusty seat before the console and control column. She searched for a readout and found it above the door. The readout was in bar and she was not sure what was required. She cracked open the helmet when vapour ceased to flow from the seal. No difference now anyway; there was littie left in the suit.

'Captain Jarvellis… Jarvellis… I hope you can hear me. Can you hear me?'

'Yes, I can hear you, Tull,' she said.

'Good,' said the Oudinker. 'Now, just so you don't kill us all by trying to start those ion engines in the station, I'll tell you how to use the magnetic impeller. It'll get you out of that bay and away. Beyond that, you're on your own.'

Jarvellis dropped into the pilot's seat. The padding crunched underneath her and dust circulated in the cockpit. She studied the antique controls and wondered if it might have been better to go meekly to mind-wipe. 'Go on, then, run me through it,' she said.

Aiden and Cento had their heads bowed and their shoulders slumped as if in exhaustion. Cormac saw that their emulations were off as well: not a breath moved their torsos, nor the flicker of an eyelid crossed their eyes. like two marionettes with their strings cut, they sat on the lichen-covered plascrete and broken glass. Their weapons were lying on the ground beside them, ignored.

'Aiden? Cento?'

Was there somedüng there? A shiver of movement? Cormac could not believe that they had been completely disabled. He had previously seen nothing short of a proton gun with that capability.

'Aiden?'

Aiden's head lifted slowly and he stared at Cormac as if he did not recognize him. He blinked once, slowly, and it seemed for a moment as if he was going to ask him something. Then Aiden's shoulders straightened, his breathing emulation restarted, and he slowly stood up.

'Just enough to knock out our systems,' he said, and looked down at Cento. Cento was slower to reassume his guise of humanity. First he practised a grin which was a parody, then his breaming emulation restarted and he too got up. Cormac turned away from them and went over to Thorn.

'Thorn?'

Thorn lay flat on his back, staring up at the sky. There were burns on his clothing and there was a strong smell of burnt hair about him. His beard, Cormac noted, was in need of some reshaping. His helmet lay beside him with its glass still polarized. His weapon lay some distance away. A trickle of blood had congealed below his nose.