Polity Agent

As the great ship finally passed through the cloud of enemy ships, and began to go into a curve around the ice giant planet, it seemed from a distance to be leaving a vapour trail behind it. Closer viewing revealed this phenomenon as a mass of pursuing ships. While Azroc watched, an enemy-subsumed Polity dreadnought evaded the few remaining mines and slammed itself into the armoured side of the huge ship. The impact knocked the Battle Wagon sideways, tore away one of its coil-guns, and scattered a line of wreckage through space. On other displays Azroc could see the ship radiating, unable to disperse the heat from the continuous beam strikes made upon it. Three CTDs, or maybe plain nukes, struck it all at once, shattering weapons turrets and spraying debris and boiling fire from glowing craters. All around the Battle Wagon, this intense assault obliterated all those attendant ships that guarded its attack run. Like a wounded buffalo it lumbered on, now swinging round above the ice giant’s rings, adding its own substance to those rings as it shuddered constantly under strike after strike. Ahead of it rod-ships swarmed in the process of forming a wall, holes continuously punched through it by the Wagon’s remaining weapons. But in the end there were too many of them. Soon it lay at the centre of another storm, but rod-ships now reached its surface, melting in, and spreading through its systems.

A comment from the Battle Wagon’s AI came over general com. ‘Mmm, I should have done this earlier.’

The view blanked—no sensors able to handle any longer the sleet of radiation emanating from that direction. Two, three, four seconds… then, finally able to discern something through the sensors of Brutal Blade, Azroc saw the Battle Wagon was gone, a massive cloud of incandescent gas spreading in its place. Even the ring system of the ice-giant planet disrupted, losing its definition and blurring around that orb. Though the destruction of enemy ships was high in number, more than eighty per cent of them still remained. Meanwhile over half of the Polity ships had been destroyed, and Azroc estimated that only an hour of life remained to those surviving.

* * * *

The shuttle bay inside the King of Hearts contained few comforts, and the AI had locked them out of all its systems. From this it seemed evident that King did not relish the presence of humans aboard, nor apparently did the AI enjoy conversation with them for, after its initial communication, it had said nothing more since its escape from the planet, nor during the drop into underspace and their subsequent violent expulsion from that continuum.

‘I take it your U-jump was curtailed,’ said Cormac.

No reply, yet again. From where he sat with his back against a cold ceramal wall, Cormac studied the few survivors contained with him in this armoured hold: four dracomen including Scar, the four Sparkind: Andrew Hailex and three Golem, besides Arach and himself. But out of how many originally? The figures lay easily accessible in his gridlink, but Cormac felt no urge to inspect them. He just knew that far too many lives had passed through the meat grinder. Rather than inspect the past to find errors of judgement so he could revel in guilt, Cormac concentrated his attention on the now. He tried again to communicate with the King of Hearts’s AI using his gridlink, and when that channel again ended up against a blank wall, he inspected in detail the personnel files recorded in his gridlink.

The three dracomen, other than Scar, were called Pick, Anan and Scythe, and without using cognitive programs he could not tell them apart. But, then, these three being no more than a year old, they had yet to acquire distinguishing characteristics like Scar possessed. The three Golem were named Ursach Candy Kline, Bellmouth and Hubbert Smith. The former two had the appearance of human females: the first blonde and elfin to the extent of possessing pointed ears, the second with cropped yellow hair and lacking one side of her face—gleaming skull exposed underneath. Hubbert Smith was in an even worse condition, now being completely devoid of syntheflesh—just a shiny ceramal skeleton, whose emulation had been male. Cormac classified all three similarly: strong, intelligent, loyal… product. He turned his attention to the larger file concerning Arach, and there found much to amuse and sometimes dismay him over the ensuing hour. Then, without warning, an armoured iris door squealed open in one side of the hold.

Hubbert Smith ducked his skull through it then after a moment turned back to address them. ‘Facilities provided. It would seem King does not intend to let you die.’

‘That would rather defeat the object of rescuing you all in the first place,’ replied the AI itself through a telefactor that now drifted in from the room beyond.