Line War (30 page)

As Azroc began checking through the files and logs the enemy’s Golem agent had been using, he felt a surge of emotion, again from that point somewhere below emulation. This time, though, he recognized
fear.
The fact that one of Erebus’s minions had managed to penetrate here, right to the heart of the
Jerusalem,
told him this was a war that the Polity might actually lose.

* * * *

The antigravity tank was a disc-shaped affair with a ceramal skirt below and a wide turret jutting above from which protruded twinned particle cannons. Now only one of the cannons was capable of delivering its usual destructive potential. The other had been modified so its accelerating coils could be used to propel helium superfluid doped with iron particles, a supply of which resided in two cylindrical tanks welded to the tank’s skirt. Anything hit by a jet of this stuff would be frozen solid in a second, since the fluid’s temperature was only fifty degrees above absolute zero.

‘Remember,’ said Cormac to Hubbert Smith. ‘If you get a legate in your sights, you nail it immediately.’

Smith nodded briefly and climbed the steps leading to the open hatch in one side of the tank, and then lowered himself inside. Watching him go, Cormac continued to reflect on whether this was all a complete waste of time. Yes, the superfluid would certainly freeze Jain-tech hardware, but it could not freeze electric or photonic signals, so if the legate they targeted happened to contain some sort of explosive device that could survive the freezing process there would still be nothing to prevent it sending the detonation signal. It struck him that Jerusalem was either prepared to expend personnel for minimum gain, or this mission he was about to undertake was an act of desperation, and Cormac hadn’t thought things were going so badly.

‘Three wormships landed and decohered on the surface,’ said Remes. His tone had become leaden since the destruction of the AI Ramone, the one who had brought him into being. Maybe Remes was missing his parent.

Cormac studied the aerial shots showing the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which Remes was now relaying direct to his gridlink. The segmented objects looking like organic trains that had first led the enemy attack had now withdrawn and formed defensive lines two hundred miles long. Further back, behind them, were three Jain-tech substructures like huge spiky mollusc shells bonded together with tar that seemed likely to form the cores of each wormship. The nearest one lay twenty miles straight out from their present position here at the end of the grounded atmosphere ship. And there, he hoped, he would find his legate captain.

‘We’ll start with this nearest one,’ said Cormac. ‘You’ll hold back from hitting all three of the ship cores for the moment, in case we don’t find what we want in this one?’

‘We have cancelled the main assault,’ Remes confirmed. ‘Now that the wormship fleet has withdrawn, there will be no need to expend any further lives - except in support of your mission.’

Comforting,
Cormac thought. Without him here, the ground forces would have needed only to maintain city defence while awaiting bombardment of the enemy by ECS capital ships. With the
Cable Hogue
looming up, he supposed it wasn’t surprising that the remaining wormships had retreated. However, information was now becoming available that this was not unique, for Erebus’s forces were being redeployed elsewhere throughout its concerted assault on the Line worlds.

‘Is that atmosphere gunship on the way yet?’ Cormac enquired.

Remes pointed back towards the city, before turning away and heading for the antigravity platform upon which they had arrived. Glancing where indicated, Cormac observed another massive ship like the one here on the ground drifting towards them like a skyscraper uprooted and turned on its side. Then he glanced round to check the disposition of his own small force.

Two of the bargelike troop carriers were loaded with fifty soldiers each, including twelve dracomen and numerous Golem. All the human soldiers contained those ‘little doctors’. He wasn’t sure why he had asked for such troops specifically, though he had a horrible suspicion he had chosen them because they seemed less human and therefore of less value. He didn’t want to examine his own motivations too closely.

The AG tanks were to go first, after the atmosphere gunship had done its work. The carriers were to follow, surrounded by a selection of gun platforms. Cormac glanced across at Scar, who was strolling back from some sort of draco-conference with a group of his brethren, then he crooked a finger at Arach, who was gazing out intently at their destination from fifty feet up on the side of the grounded atmosphere ship. The spider drone ran straight down the sheer armoured surface, bounced on the ground leaving a small crater, then hurtled across towards him.

‘I don’t need to give you specific instructions,’ Cormac explained to both the dracoman and the spider drone. ‘Everything is fair game, except a legate if we’re lucky enough to come across one. Let’s go.’ He led the way over to a flying gun platform on which a pulse-cannon was gimball-mounted. Since the gun seat was intended for a human, Cormac took possession of that while Scar stood by the control pillar. After hesitating for a moment, Arach grabbed a box containing an extra supply of the ordnance he used, climbed aboard securing the box behind him, then raised one leg, the glimmer of razor chainglass extruding along one edge of it. With two quick swipes he removed a large chunk of the safety rail, then settled himself down at the very rim of the platform. Opening his abdomen hatches he raised into position his two Gatling-style cannons and swivelled them to point off at right angles to each other. Then, as the shadow of the huge atmosphere gunship drew across them, Scar took them up into the air.

The moment the shield wall opened to allow the gunship through, it seemed like someone had opened a hatch onto a howling thunderstorm. Immediately, munitions began to impact on the gunship’s hard-fields as they first filled the gap in the wall, then eased out ahead of the vessel. Some missiles, coming in at acute angles, penetrated the narrow gaps in shielding, but were soon mostly tracked and obliterated by autogun fire. Some, however, blew cavities in the ship’s armour. One of them dipped down directly towards Cormac’s little force. Immediately gridlinking to his pulse-cannon, he transferred targeting to his own visual field, placed a frame over the missile, acquired it and gave the instruction to fire all at once. The cannon swung up and to the side -consequently dropping then swinging his seat in the other direction - and fired. The missile exploded, raining chunks of white-hot ceramic over the troop carriers. Having nearly been thrown from his seat, Cormac now strapped himself in securely and grabbed the cannon’s guiding handles.

Once beyond the shield wall, the gunship accelerated and the tanks began to follow it out. They floated along only a few feet above the ground so that they could slam down at any moment, for stuck like limpets to the ground they were less vulnerable to many forms of attack and also attained a stable firing position. The two troop carriers followed, gun platforms rising up around them like flies about cattle. But there were no further attacks for the gunship was scouring the ground ahead.

Missiles and beam weapons kept stabbing down from the huge vessel at targets moving about in the churned wasteland below. Cormac caught subliminal glimpses of rod-forms with Jain growth spread all about them, objects like steel cockroaches and others like long flat coppery leeches, before they disappeared in explosions or else some beam weapon tracked across them. He saw a gun turret shoot up like an iron mushroom from the earth before a massive blast excised the whole area to leave a smoking crater. The top part of the turret glanced off the underside of the gunship and began to drop again, before a particle cannon beam turned it to vapour. Always there came the sounds of metal smacking on metal and the glassy crunch of ceramic armour giving up, amid deafening explosions and high-energy shrieks. Cormac had almost forgotten how severe this all could be. He applied a program in his gridlink to optimize his hearing, toning down the worst of the racket to enable him to hear what he needed to hear, but even if he survived this mayhem, he knew his eardrums might require some doc-work.

Ahead of them multiple detonations were raising a massive firestorm that blotted from view the segmented lines of the enemy. Behind this hard-fields shimmered and flickered like the scaly flank of some translucent giant beast. Then parts of the enemy hard-field wall began to blink out. The Polity assault was too concentrated for it to withstand, and enemy shield generators burned out one after another. Then came another massive explosion, flinging up numerous lengthy wormship sections.

‘Looks like someone dropped a firecracker into a tin of mealworms,’ said Smith, over com.

This choice of description was unusual enough for Cormac to do a quick search of his internal library to find ‘mealworms’. The quickly glimpsed images he was provided with seemed appropriate.

The gunship slid on over the carnage it had already wrought and began firing at targets beyond. Cormac’s forces accelerated and spread out to optimum dispersement. He himself concentrated on familiarizing himself with the pulse-cannon, since until they reached their destination there was little else he could do to influence events.

A quick check showed him that the pulse-cannon possessed no autogun capability. Its processor had been removed because its unsophisticated shielding could not defend it against Jain worms or viruses and had been supplanted by some pretty basic hard wiring. It seemed that, in an utterly old-fashioned way, he would have to be this weapon’s
mind.

Running recognition software so that that he would not commit any friendly fire, his gridlink cued to cut weapon fire should his targeting frame fall upon other Polity vehicles or personnel. Keying himself to react fast to anything moving close by that wasn’t any of his own force, he found himself overreacting to flames and smoke until further refining the program. He placed his finger ready both on real and virtual triggers, and then his hindbrain and the weapon became conjoined as an autogun. All was turning to carnage around him as, with fast robotic precision, he fired the cannon while only glimpsing his insectile targets amid the smoke of explosions. It occurred to him then that he really ought to have more personal investment in all this, so he used cognitive programs to get the rest of his brain up to speed. Around him the action seemed to slow down, but seemed no less deadly for that.

Soon they were passing through an area where segments of wormship lay scattered like discarded egg cases, and where hollow rod-forms smoked in the scorched earth. Even though the atmosphere ship had scoured a path through, still a few armoured monstrosities swarmed out into the light. The weapon he controlled firing intermittently, Cormac realized he was nailing only about one in fifty of them, and probably only the ones Arach allowed him to, for the spider drone was very enthusiastic indeed in demonstrating the capabilities of a hundred-year-old war drone. Eventually Cormac accepted the futility of his own meagre input so just turned the pulse-cannon off. He noted the human gunners on nearby platforms putting their weapons aside too, content to watch Arach dance about blasting Erebus’s finest into scrap. Cormac allowed himself a smile, but only a brief one - the reward for complacency on the battlefield was usually a body bag.

Ahead of them the atmosphere gunship rose high out of the smoke and focused on fighting a duel with something directly below it. Just beyond the scattered segments of wormship, the churned-up soil sloped down towards a murky boiling lake. Cormac instantly forced himself to greater alertness, since anything could be lurking under the water’s surface. Arach was also doubly on his guard, ceasing temporarily to reload from his ammo box and peering intently over the edge of the gun platform. The discshaped tanks, in a maneouvre Cormac had seen before, turned on their edges, pairs of them mating up at their bases so they seemed to roll above the lake surface like wheels. However, there came no attack from below, so Cormac U-sensed into the depths. Obviously whoever was running the gunship had also considered this a likely ambush risk and already made it safe. He perceived things still glowing deep down in the water as great globular bubbles of steam rose to the surface, and he wondered if the intense heat down there would eventually boil the lake away.

The upslope beyond the lake looked like the back of some spined beast, for here a forest had been reduced to spiky shards of wood, all evenly coated with black mud. The tanks maintained their wheel formation, which seemed the best strategy since great numbers of attackers kept erupting into the open from underground. Not much to hit on the slope beyond, however, and the few assailants there were of a different nature, designed for another environmental niche. Floating silver worms writhed out of the mess and speared upward, only to disappear under multiple weapon fire and fall away like aluminium confetti.

Beyond the shattered treeline at the top of the slope, a few miles ahead, lay the wormship core still enclosed in a geodesic dome of hard-fields, the nearer side of which the atmosphere gunship was pounding. The occupant of that mass of Jain substructure must have realized the danger now represented by Cormac’s force, for mushroom gun turrets sprouted from the ground lying beyond the hard-fields, and were almost as quickly obliterated from above. Then a gap opened as the defence there began collapsing, and they drove for it without hesitation. Missiles and semi-living predators started to hammer down on the attackers from every direction. A nearby blast sent a troop carrier nosing into the ground ploughing up a bow wave of mud. Cormac glimpsed a pair of AG tanks hurtling apart like flying hubcaps; he saw a gun platform hanging canted, a burning man falling from it. Soldiers poured from the crashed troop carrier towards the tangled wall of Jain substructure, pairs of tank separating to cover their attack. The other carrier landed nose-first against that wall and discharged its passengers too.