Line War (29 page)

The inner door of the airlock opened and Bludgeon scuttled through, raising his blind head towards her. A brief informational exchange ensued, almost a mathematical greeting, then Bludgeon turned and headed towards the interface sphere as Orlandine stepped into the airlock of
Heliotrope,
maybe for the last time. The airlock evacuated quickly - the air it contained being pumped into a reserve tank, for though
Heliotrope’s
present occupants had no need of it, it could be used for cooling too. Orlandine clambered outside and pushed herself off from the ship heading towards the war runcible. For a moment she considered using the reaction jets located at the wrists of the suit, then abruptly decided against that. Trying to keep busy with such minor details just to avoid painful speculation could lead to disaster. She really needed to pause now and think hard about what she was doing, so she closed down all contact with both
Heliotrope
and the war runcible, and allowed herself a still moment in which to ask herself some salient questions.

Was Fiddler Randal working against Erebus, or was he merely something Erebus had fashioned to lure her into a trap? Further confirmation of everything he had so far told her had come with the methodology of Erebus’s attack upon the Polity, for it was perfectly in accord with the plans Randal had shown her earlier. It occurred to her that to assume this was some sort of trap for her was utter arrogance on her part. Surely she wasn’t that important to Erebus? Then again it seemed she was clearly important enough for Erebus to attack a world of ‘no tactical importance’ just to kill her brothers. It all seemed very odd, and she felt that Randal, who she kept locked up in that secure virtuality, had not yet told her everything. However, she felt this all to be worth the risk. Here at this rendezvous the war runcible would not be able to deliver its full potential but, unless a USER was quickly deployed, they still had a good chance of escaping any treachery. At their final destination, even if that was a trap, Erebus might find that it wasn’t a strong enough one. The war runcible, she hoped, would come as a rather unpleasant surprise.

Orlandine bent her legs to absorb her own impact against the hull of the war runcible while simultaneously initiating the ‘gecko’ function of her boot soles to stick herself in place. She then reached out with one arm of her assister frame to grab a rung of the ladder curving round the hull towards the nearby airlock. Now at her destination, she once again made contact with the ever-spreading Jain-tech network within the massive device, and ordered it to open the lock for her. As she entered, she saw the fusion drives wink out and, glancing to one side, she could just about see, with her human eyes, the asteroid they had been heading for turning slowly in vacuum some hundreds of miles away. Soon she was fully inside the war runcible and opening her helmet to the breathable air that for some time now had been displacing the original inert preserving gas. She could walk easily now, since all the gravplates within the device were fully operational, which was perhaps not entirely to Knobbler’s taste, since equipped with all those tentacles, he seemed specially designed for moving in zero gravity. He had also been designed to move speedily through corridors wider than those available here. His multiple limbs and big body leaving scratches and dents on the walls, Knobbler came into sight ahead of her, finally clattering and crashing to a halt and totally filling the corridor.

‘After the test it will take Bludgeon five days to reach Anulus,’ the big drone observed.

‘No problem,’ Orlandine replied. ‘Once Erebus takes the ECS forces out of play, it will take some time for it to marshal its own forces. Erebus won’t want to come out of the end of the corridor to Earth with anything less than full strength because there’ll still be plenty of resistance between the end of the corridor and Earth itself.’

With a surprisingly fast and sinuous twist, Knobbler moved on ahead - one sensor-tipped tentacle still pointing back towards her.

She strode along behind him, mentally checking all the repairs and modifications that had been made to the war runcible. The other drones were getting all the weapons up to speed since, for her plan to work, the runcible at least needed to survive in order to implement it. She sent signals to the interface sphere she had installed in this particular segment’s control blister, preparing it for its final component: herself.

* * * *

Azroc felt a moment of extreme frustration at not being presented with all the information and analysis available to the others present in this dodecahedral chamber, but then that would have defeated the object of him being here. He observed the cloud of magma now spreading out from the misshapen planetoid in the Caldera system and reflected that its effect upon the two Caldera worlds would be minimal. Then he pondered his earlier warning to Jerusalem about the wormships that had been orbiting that planetoid. Wormships that were now toast. He had said he was certain they must be up to something out there - that their attack upon the Caldera worlds was being delayed for some purpose, just like that other attack involving asteroid bombardment.

‘So what did you use,’ he asked. ‘A stealthed missile or were there attack ships out there?’

‘Neither,’ Jerusalem replied unhelpfully.

‘Is it necessary for me
not
to know what happened?’ Azroc asked.

‘When you have a loose cannon, it is best to give it a target and stand back, rather than try to control it,’ Jerusalem supplied.

Obviously the cannon in question was not Azroc himself. ‘The nature of this cannon?’

‘You have doubtless heard of a homicidal Golem called Mr Crane - the one some refer to as the brass man?’

‘I thought he was Skellor’s sidekick - working for the bad guys.’

An information packet arrived instantly and Azroc studied the Golem’s potted history. Mr Crane: a Golem Twenty-Five prototype corrupted for use by separatists, and then destroyed by Cormac’s troops on the planet Viridian. Resurrected by Skellor using Jain technology and turned into something even more dangerous than Golem. Then sent by Skellor as an envoy to Dragon on the planet Cull - after Jain-tech extraction, since Dragon would not allow such tech anywhere near itself. Dragon had repaired Crane’s corrupted and fragmented mind but, as with all things Dragon did, the nature of that repair was questionable. It was certain the brass man now contained Dragon technology, as opposed to Jain-tech.

Jerusalem added, ‘I question whether Mr Crane’s nature can now be assessed with any accuracy.’

‘So why did Mr Crane blow up a planetoid to wipe out the best part of fifty wormships and, more importantly, how?’

‘The “why” is simple. Mr Crane had become the unofficial protector of the sleer-human hybrids on Cull, which Erebus wiped out, so he is now out for vengeance. The “how” is complicated. We allowed him to use Polity vessels and runcibles to go in pursuit of the wormship used to kill those hybrids, which was then down on a small moon. He first obtained a spaceship from certain arms dealers on the Line, then went after the wormship and killed its legate captain.’

‘I see,’ said Azroc. ‘And this is how you know that the worm-ships are captained.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Then?’

‘Mr Crane next sought further information about the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which we supplied. Possessing a legate’s vessel enabled him to gain access to Erebus’s com and to use chameleonware that would be ignored even if it was detected in use, being Erebus’s own chameleonware. At the Caldera planetoid he analysed Erebus’s intentions to a quite remarkable degree, then used stolen detonation codes and a CTD imploder to the devastating effect you yourself just witnessed.’

‘Definitely a loose cannon to have on one’s side then,’ Azroc admitted, curious to know more about this lethal brass Golem. But that wasn’t relevant to his present task, so he returned his attention to the overall battle. ‘Wormship fleets are now disengaging at seventeen different locations,’ he observed. ‘It seems the shape of this attack is changing.’

‘Evidently.’ The reply came across flat and toneless, which meant Jerusalem was applying its processing power elsewhere and that a hastily fashioned sub-mind was now responding. But, even so, such a sub-mind probably possessed an IQ of an order of magnitude higher than Azroc’s own.

Azroc gazed from all vantage points at the model of the attack now hanging in virtual space inside his own mind. He once again modelled the Polity infrastructures beyond it - supply routes and manufacturing worlds, military bases and shipyards - but still could see no correlation. What was Erebus after?

‘Erebus hasn’t employed USERs at any point of attack,’ he noted. ‘This leaves him vulnerable to us bringing in reinforcements, but allows him to bring in reinforcements too, and thus keep his attack protean.’

Stating the obvious,
Azroc thought. And his words seemed almost a prophetic commentary as those same fleets Erebus was withdrawing began to join attacks on other worlds. Azroc stared in frustration at the model he had created. Only twenty hours ago it had seemed that Erebus was preparing for ground assaults to capture about eight worlds, leaving the rest either depopulated or destroyed. Yet now some of those ground assaults were being abandoned, as were some of the other more destructive attacks. Even those wormships that had been engaged in accelerating the big asteroid towards one target world were now abandoning their position.

‘There are more wormships arriving in the Caldera system than elsewhere,’ he observed, though it seemed a trite comment to make considering the devastation there. Wormships were swarming out of U-space and hurtling down towards the twin Caldera worlds with almost careless abandon. The sun mirrors, previously used for energy generation, had now been turned into weapons and were busy frying wormship after wormship. Space in that zone was no longer black, and it seemed as if the conflict was being enacted inside a block of amber.

Azroc tried to step back from it all. What did Erebus want? Let Azroc suppose the entity wished, for whatever psychotic reasons, to either smash or take over the Polity, how would he, Azroc, achieve such an aim if he controlled the same resources? He would infiltrate the Polity, deploy his forces into critical places throughout it, and then initiate a surprise attack. Yet Erebus had done nothing of the kind. Instead it had first revealed its forces
outside
the Polity, giving ECS time to prepare, then at leisure had begun attacking the very periphery, even though it had the option to U-jump right inside and launch an attack there.

Azroc decided that there must be some critical piece of information still missing. He withdrew from his models and returned to utilizing ordinary human sensation and comprehension of his surroundings. The hologram at the centre of the hedron now displayed a montage of battle schematics intermixed with occasional gravity maps.

‘Any news yet from your agent about the attack on Klurhammon?’ Azroc enquired, swinging his attention across to those working at the concentric rings of consoles occupying the adjacent floor.

‘There has been no—’ The voice began in that same flat tone used by the sub-mind, then abruptly cut off. Then the real Jerusalem continued, ‘It would seem that Agent Cormac and the
King of Hearts
were given new orders.’

‘It would
seem?’
Azroc noted that some of the personnel manning the consoles were now getting up and abandoning their posts.

‘Yes,’ said Jerusalem. ‘Apparently I myself wanted him to proceed to Ramone and there capture a legate.’

‘What?’

‘Cormac and his ship are currently down on the surface of Ramone, though details of his progress are sparse. Communications are intermittent, since encryption needs to be changed frequently by the groundside defence forces there.’

Azroc noted that those abandoning their posts had occupied an area around one particular individual. Azroc saw to his surprise that this was a Golem.

‘Now,’ said Jerusalem.

A length of console and a circular section of deck exploded into the air. At that precise moment all but the Golem threw themselves to the floor. A great ribbed pipe two metres across terminating in a massive four-fingered claw and numerous ports and lethal-looking protuberances shot out of the hole, curved over whip-fast, and slammed down on the Golem. Cryogenic gas exploded out at the contact point, as the claw closing on the Golem tore up part of the console and the metal flooring underneath. Miniature lightning flared and earthed, and there came the bright flashes of particle beams cutting within the mass. Then a glowing white explosion blasted the claw into the air, and an ensuing arc-fire melted both the Golem and everything lying within a few feet of it. The wrecked claw seemed to pause in frustrated hesitation, then retracted itself back down into the hole it had made.

‘Damn,’ said Jerusalem.

‘And precisely what happened then?’ asked Azroc.

‘I was just trying to capture one of the enemy in our camp,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘The same one who gave Cormac and the
King of Hearts
those false orders.’

Like the impact of a boulder falling, Azroc
felt
a large mass of fresh information fall suddenly within his remit.

‘I have already analysed this data for other similar false orders,’ Jerusalem explained, ‘and, oddly, it seems there have been no others issued. Yet Erebus’s agent here was in a position to cause us maximum damage by doing so. Now, see what else you can find.’