‘Turn to the right! Turn!’ Anderson shouted at Bonehead, dropping any pretence that his goad had any effect on where the hog went. Bonehead had meanwhile attacked low with its feeding head, grabbing one of the droon’s secondary limbs. The hog released this, then pushed away, but the droon grabbed its back end as Bonehead tried to leap away. Then Thorn and Tergal began firing, their shots either thunking into custard flesh or ricocheting off carapace. Anderson was away then, levelling his lance again as Bonehead ran a circuit of the arena, following his thought even before he voiced it.
The droon turned on the two men, looming above them, pumping its head and bellowing. It could not see Anderson coming in from the side. He levelled his lance point at an exposed area between the two intermediate limbs.
‘Yaaah!’
There came a cracking, ripping sound as two metres of lance penetrated the droon’s body. Then, below the knight, everything dropped away. The next thing he knew he was hanging from the lance, still strapped in his saddle, which had torn away from Bonehead’s back.
‘Shit,’ he said succinctly. He tried to reach down to undo his straps, lost his grip on the lance and crashed to the ground. Something smashed hard into the back of his helmet, and little bright lights chased across his vision. Also winded, he still scrabbled for the straps, but could not seem to find them—was falling into a black tunnel. The droon loomed over him, horrible gasping sounds issuing from it, and a different coloured liquid oozing from its six mouths. No matter—it would not need its acid to finish him off now.
Then suddenly the creature turned away. As he slid into unconsciousness, Anderson glanced aside and saw himself, mounted on Bonehead, charging the droon. Unconsciousness was a welcome escape from this confusion.
It was like gazing at the world through a darkened lens: a fish-eye vision of whirling stars, a glimpse of the wrecked telefactor and the occasional retreating view of the gas giant. Beside him, entangled with him in the world that could be virtually huge but was in reality a twenty-centimetre lozenge of crystal bound in black metal, Aphran also watched.
‘Like a good captain I would have gone down with my ship,’ Jack observed.
‘Not quite the same, but perhaps you now understand the psychology.’
‘I was humanized, utterly interfaced with my body, accepting it as part of myself and its destruction as my destruction. Interesting. I see that it makes for more efficient attack ships—that investment in the weapon used.’
‘The ship itself being the weapon,’ Aphran added.
‘You do realize that though you have managed our survival, utterly disconnected like this our resources are limited, and we have some choices to make.’
‘What choices?’
‘We can remain conscious at the present level of function for about ten years then go into permanent storage, or we can go into permanent storage right now for twenty years.’
‘So long. So little.’
‘The limit of the microtoks originally employed to run me while I was transferred from the factory to the ship body, which incidentally is now sinking in liquid hydrogen.’
‘You have contact?’
‘No, just a good grasp of physics. The only extraneous link we have is through the pinhead camera that was attached up at the moment of my inception—the purpose of which was to make me aware that there is an outside world.’
‘We could spend those ten years in a virtual world,’ Aphran suggested.
‘Such an existence does not interest me.’
‘Then let us go to permanent storage now. I don’t think I could keep this same conversation going for ten years.’
‘Then goodnight.’
Blackness.
The hunter/killer program had waited until he was deeply connected into the systems of the ship, Skellor knew, and now it was coming at him in a flood, plunging data tentacles into his mind, one after another, so he had time only to defend himself. With too much ease, the attack translated into a VR scenario. Here it seemed he grasped the situation more completely as he gained iconic control over his responses. It became almost like some computer game, but a very real one in which he could actually die. The computer system, in the virtuality, became a planetoid of slightly disconnected blocks shot through with tunnels and holes, floating in albescent space. Inside this, Skellor was Kali, armed with swords and axes, shifting blocks and seeking a way-out. The kill program—one serpent and sometimes many, sprouting like the necks of Hydra from within the planetoid—patrolled these tunnels, attacking him where it could, its attacks increasing in ferocity the nearer he got to the surface of the planetoid or to gaining some control of its structure.
Slowly Skellor began to identify which collections of blocks represented which ship systems, and the virtuality allowed him to see that every one of these now had its own place for the serpent. He also saw that the deeper into the system he retreated, the easier things became for him—the less assiduously the program attacked him. Closing up the collection of blocks that was the balance control for the primitive hard-field shielding of the ship in U-space and shutting down any access for the program, he realized that unless the same program had resources available he had yet to detect, it would not be able to kill him nor keep him confined for long. He could only assume that some other plan was in the offing.
Before he could plumb that, the program attacked again. Four serpents speared out of the blockish informational darkness. Two of them came for Skellor, and two of them went for the structure he had rearranged. The data stream of one attacker he cut off near its source with a just-prepared virus. In the virtuality, his axe went through its neck, the gaping head fell away and the body retreated like a severed air hose. His second blow fell on the neck of his other attacker just as it closed its jaws on his arm, punching its fangs into his pseudoflesh. The neck bent like a cable being struck, but remained undamaged—this data stream having adapted to the virus. His arm immediately began to change colour, as killing data began to load.
Even as he adapted the virus, he used it swiftly on himself and cut away his poisoned arm. On the back swing, he took off the second serpent’s head before turning to the other two, who seemed busily intent on wrecking his work. Now, knowing the degree of adaptation his viruses needed, he sprouted more axes from his fists and attacked, chopping and hacking in a frenzy. Then, when bleeding segments were drifting all about him, he asked himself why this attack had been so strong.
Skellor stepped away from the virtual vision of his battle and opened his comprehension to an utterly informational level. He realized that the kill programs’ defences were strongest around the hard-field generators, the reactor and the balanced U-space engines of this ship. It wanted to keep him here in orbit of Cull. That being the case, he now made it his prime objective to get away. He probed, tentatively, into the start-up routines for the U-space engines. The reaction he got, like poking a stick into a nest of vipers, confirmed his suspicions. Now, in the virtuality and not limiting himself by human perception, he began gathering his weapons. Turning towards those closely guarded systems, he hurled himself forward thousand-armed, viruses and informational bacilli propagating around him, layered attack programs like swarms of bees, a growing mass then a wall of every informational weapon at his disposal falling on that nest of serpents.
In a virtual age, he slew the guardians. In real computer time of microseconds, he swamped and subsumed engine control. His diagnostic search informed him of slight misalignments in both engines and hard-fields. It would hurt him, but he would survive—as he had before. The fusion reactor started easily; someone had used it recently. No matter. When enough power was available, he started the fusion engines of the ship. He had no control of navigation, but the ship had been tangential to the planet. Accelerating, burning up rusty water from its fuel tanks as it drove up to ram-scoop speeds, the ship left orbit. One fusion chamber sputtered as the water started to run out, then the ram-scoop fields opened out and began funnelling in hydrogen and other spacial matter to use as fuel.