Polity Agent

No more rail-gun projectiles now—instead explosive missiles curved into an intercept course. Jack ignored them, once again feeding power to the DIGRAW. Three hundred miles from the ammonite spiral ships he finally activated the weapon.

The wave sped from the NEJ’s rear nacelle, rippling through the very fabric of space. It struck and then passed through the two spiral vessels, and left them shattered and leaking metallic entrails across vacuum. One of them began to unravel like a putty spiral — perhaps some survival technique—the other began to glow as nuclear fires cored it from the inside. The wave continued on towards the bacilliform wall and slammed through it. Many of the rod-ships simply burst apart. Others took on distorted forms like molten lead splashed into cold water. However, many of them still seemed operational, and they began to reform. Jack shot past the remains of the two big ships and punched through the damaged wall, just in time to see the gravity wave hit the moon itself raising dust from its surface and drawing it out in a streamer. No power for weapons now as he applied everything to his engines to swing himself away from collision either with the moon or the ice-giant planet beyond. He hit atmosphere, hull turning white hot, an immense vapour trail behind him. An actinic flash impinged, and he received an information package from Coriolanus. Images only of missiles slamming down into the moon, gigantic explosions, islands of rock parting company from each other.

Then the USER went down.

‘Yeehah!’—from Coriolanus.

Jack rose away from the planet, the two other ships soon following him.

‘Jack—’ Coriolanus speaking again, but abruptly cut off. An explosion behind, and now only one ship there.

You cheered too soon, thought Jack.

* * * *

‘There is no escape,’ said Blegg matter-of-factly.

Cormac turned towards him angrily, but then let it go. He supposed it might be both disconcerting and disheartening to discover that you were not super-human after all, but just some tool used by a superior AI. He scanned those around him, assessing their capabilities, then focused on the two human Sparkind who, along with himself and Blegg, were the weakest of the group.

‘How many gravharnesses do we have?’ he asked.

‘Three,’ replied the man called Donache—Cormac now retained the names of all their small surviving group at the forefront of his mind. It seemed essential to him that he know them all after so many had died.

Cormac did not have time to ask why there were so few harnesses; somehow most of them must have been lost during the initial attack. At a push a gravharness could carry two people of average weight. Including Arach there were fifteen of them here, and he knew dracomen and Golem were by no means of average weight. He gazed up at the rocky wall above them, where a hundred yards up there seemed to be another protruding ledge. As the skeletal Golem stepped up beside him, he reflected on the capabilities of Golem, and of dracomen. They would not require gravharnesses.

Cormac pointed up at the ledge above and addressed Andrew Hailex and Donache. ‘You two and Blegg go up first, then I want one of you to bring the two spare harnesses back down. The other one of you I want to run lines down to us here.’

There came a stutter-flash and a thrumming explosion. Two of the dracomen opened fire at something down in the fissure.

‘Arach, you’re not armed for this, so start climbing!’

‘What!’ the drone protested.

‘Go. Now.’

The drone reluctantly withdrew its chainglass blades back into its forelimbs, dropped back down on all eight limbs, then leapt up to grab onto the wall above. It hung there seeming disinclined to climb any higher. The two human Sparkind and Blegg donned the gravharnesses, and rose smoothly into the air. Cormac looked around at those left: seven dracomen and six Golem. He gestured to the dracomen. ‘Four of you better start climbing.’ They did not hesitate. Four leapt smoothly up after Arach, easily finding holds in the rock face and managing to climb even more swiftly because of their reverse kneed gait. Arach scuttled after them. Cormac unslung his carbine, and through his gridlink loaded a program to Shuriken, just as something nosed its way out of the fissure.