Polity Agent

‘Up!’ Blegg spun him round, drew a carbide commando knife, and in one quick movement levered the hot metal from his arm. ‘Not too bad,’ he observed

With movement returning to that arm, Cormac drew his thin-gun and fired off to his left with that, while simultaneously firing with the carbine past Blegg. The tracking and targeting program he was using was sending him cross-eyed. A whumph as a rod-ship crashed down amid them, crushing foliage and ejecting tendrils as thick as falling trees. Cormac saw another dracoman caught up as he himself concentrated fire on the deflating but spreading rod-ship. Spearing towards him, the ground lumped up like a worm track. He aimed downwards just as tendrils exploded from the earth and wrapped around his leg. Severing them with fire, he subliminally saw the captured dracoman slammed hard against the ground and discarded. Not even a complete thought sent Shuriken whirring over above the dracoman while it shook itself like a dog and staggered upright again.

Something else arced through the air, its source Arach, and its terminal whine familiar. Cormac ducked down as this missile landed amidst the spreading tendrils and exploded, spreading something like phosphorus across the ground. The blast seemed to propel Cormac through an area of new growth, where shoots like giant red asparagus speared up from the incinerated remains of stalks. He stumbled through a mass of red vines writhing under painfully bright sunshine, and out onto charred ground scattered with smaller blood-red shoots of new growth. Dracomen emerged either side of him, then Blegg came stepping out backwards concentrating fire up into the face of some attacker. Arach came last, two cannons swivelling and targeting independently, the shots ripping into fast-moving silvery opponents, the flash of his particle cannon stabbing out regularly like a fiery tongue. Without that drone, Cormac realized, this would have been over very quickly. He swiftly counted—eighteen dracomen surviving—then turned round to see mountain slopes ahead.

‘I’ve got you now,’ came Thorn’s voice over com.

Running down like silver dogs came four Polity autoguns. Drawing close, they squatted obediently and poured violet fire into the jungle.

17

USER (underspace interference emitter): this device works by rhythmically inserting and removing a massive singularity through a runcible gate. The U-space interference this causes will knock any ship within its vicinity back into realspace. The singularity is contained by an inverted gravity field which is in turn powered by tidal drag, since the singularity is spinning very fast. The containment field necessarily collapses in the U-continuum and reinstates when out of it again. Huge forces and huge amounts of energy are employed, most of it generated by the singularity’s spin, therefore, that spin gradually slows. When it drops below a certain threshold, the USER must be returned to an as yet unrevealed military complex—rumoured to be sited in orbit around a black hole — where titanic magnetic accelerators spin the singularity back up to optimum again. It is also rumoured that this technology has been available for some time, but AIs were loath to employ it because by artificially creating singularities (black holes, essentially), they are shortening the life span of the universe. Evidently they intend sticking around for a while, and the fact that USERs are now being employed might suggest the AIs have found a way to deconstruct black holes.

- From ‘Quince Guide’ compiled by humans