Polity Agent

The bacilliform ships did not shoot back, though they kicked out a huge amount of EM interference which increased as they conjoined. It seemed they were designed to initially blank out communication, then, if a ship drew close enough to one of those walls they formed, to completely disrupt its systems, including the AI mind inside. Jack suspected they served some other purpose as well, for individually they kept trying to make close contact with the Centurions—something none of them had yet managed to do. The lens-shaped ships deployed plenty of weaponry, but in a one-on-one fight were no match for the Centurions and were soon disabled or destroyed. Those accretions of hundred-foot-long metal worms, once they untangled, became lethal highly intelligent missiles themselves. But the remaining five big ammonite spiral ships remained the greatest danger, for they carried all the armament of a Polity destroyer—the wormish things being one weapon they deployed—and all the processing power of a runcible AI, for they quickly found solutions to the Centurions’ chameleonware. Each new program deployed lasted no more than half an hour—no time at all during a space battle.

Duelling with hardfields against a mile-wide lens-shaped vessel using telefactored warheads, Haruspex seemed in danger of being swamped by a rapidly forming wall of the bacilliforms. Jack sent a coded transmission to Haruspex then swung round in a sharp 400 gravity turn to put the NEJ behind that threatening wall. He fired a combined CTD and EM warhead at the rod-ships then, after a delay, followed it with a fusillade of near-c rail-gun projectiles. Haruspex immediately dropped out of the fight. The missile detonated amid the rod-ships, cutting a hole in the wall they created. The rail-gun projectiles shot through the hole, following the wave of EM radiation. The big lens’s instruments could detect nothing but the EM, so did not react quickly enough to the following projectiles. A hundred impacts collapsed one side of the lens like a punctured balloon. Both the NEJ and the Haruspex then used their chameleonware to cover their run towards the spiral ship pursuing Coriolanus.

‘I have the USER located,’ Coriolanus reported and sent coordinates.

Jack scanned and confirmed, and Haruspex agreed. During the recent battle they had managed to take readings of the interference strength of the device. It was located on a small moon orbiting the cold world—half the planetary system away from their present position.

‘We have to make the run,’ Jack informed the other two ships.

‘That will mean abandoning those on the planet,’ Coriolanus informed him.

Jack scanned in that direction and saw some of the enemy ships deployed down inside atmosphere. ‘My assessment of our current situation is that by running from the system on conventional drives we could survive. If we stay to protect Cormac and co, we will eventually be destroyed. The greatest hope for them is if we destroy that USER, then return to fight a delaying action until the dreadnoughts arrive. We can only hope our erstwhile passengers manage to survive on the surface.’

After a short pause, the other two ships concurred.

* * * *

The moment his boots hit the soft ground, Thorn’s envirosuit muttered warnings in his ear and flashed them up on his visor. He turned those persistent warnings off, since he did not need the suit to tell him he occupied a highly radioactive area. The incinerated terrain ahead stretched for five hundred miles along the base of the mountains, and seemed likely to be the result of multiple nuclear explosions. However, in this heavy rain, he could see only a few yards ahead—in the planet’s lower gravity the raindrops falling slowly were twice the size of those on Earth, and also were turbid with ash as a consequence of explosions that had occurred here.

‘Out-spectrum vision—search,’ he instructed his suit.

After a moment a transparent band drew across his visor directly before his eyes, and within that band the rain seemed simply to be erased. However, above and below the band he could still see the downpour. Though accustomed to using this kind of sensory enhancement, he did not trust it, it being too easy to interfere with—already the surrounding radioactivity began to cause flecks across his vision. He now surveyed his surroundings.

The remaining dracoman shuttle from the NEJ was just landing, and the soldiers around him were checking their weaponry and loading up ridiculously large packs, while the four autoguns patrolled around them like hounds anxious for the hunt. No badinage passed between the troops. Many of them had known Bhutan and the others aboard the Sparkind shuttle that didn’t make it here.