Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three metres to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.
Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and fired five times. One shot punched a hole through Skellor’s forehead, the next four hit him in the face, snapping his head back each time and forcing him against the wall. Skellor flickered, but his chameleon-ware would not function and, as Cormac realized, with his own perception so changed it would not matter if it did—Cormac would still see the hole in existence the man occupied. He fired two more shots into the man’s chest, targeted his knees as he tried to spring, blew apart a hand that reached back to press against the wall.
Beside Skellor, Cento unpeeled himself from metal, scissored his legs around the biophysicist’s waist and clamped them there. The Golem then tore away wall panels to reveal an I-beam, which he embraced.
‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.
Cormac loaded another clip and, backing towards where Cento had blown out the screen, continued to pump shots into Skellor. He had to move fast: the Golem would not hold Skellor for long. The clip now empty, Cormac slapped the weapon down against a stick patch at his belt and dived through the missing screen, snagging up the APW as he went. Outside, he glanced down past the truncated ship to where the rest of it continued to fall towards the dwarf star, accompanied in its descent by the ripped-away engine pier and nacelle. Both these objects he could see were distorting, rippling. He found steps, hauled himself up along the curving hull and saw one grapple clenched hard on wreckage where the pier had torn away, the other closed on the next nacelle.
The cables were woven monofilament, hugely strong, but few materials could withstand a concentrated proton blast. High above he saw the attack ship: blades of fusion engine flame cutting down from it to his left. He needed to hit both cables quickly, before that ship fried him. Hopefully that would be enough, because if King of Hearts was like the Jack Ketch, the two grapples—one from each of its weapons nacelles—were all it would have ready. And by the time it readied some more, what remained of the Ogygian would be beyond its reach.
Cormac stepped across to the nearest grapple, climbed up onto it, and sat down with his legs on either side of the massive cable. Should the attack ship fire at him now, it stood a good chance of destroying its own cable—a fact which might make it hesitate for long enough. Cormac aimed at the other cable, with the APW setting at its highest, and pulled the trigger. The beam transformed his target into a white-hot bar, then it just dissolved in violet fire. Ogygian tilted underneath him as he brought the weapon to bear on the cable right next to him, then suddenly he was weightless and instinctively clinging on. The second grapple had torn away, holding wreckage like a fistful of hair grasped from someone narrowly escaped. Ogygian dropped away down an invisible lift shaft to hell. Above, the cable slackened in a long arc through space, then began to straighten out again. Cormac clung on for all he was worth. When the cable tautened, about ten gees compacted his spine down onto the grapple. The APW became too heavy to hold and tore from his grasp. He felt his vertebrae cracking and things ripping inside him, but still he clung on. Thoughts he had briefly entertained of taking action against the ship should the cable be reeled in, died then.
When the acceleration finally ceased, he coughed, spattering his visor with blood. But when he looked down he was satisfied to see no sign of the Ogygian. The cable did then reel him in until he was only twenty metres from the lethal ship’s left-hand weapons nacelle. Ports were opening before him, annihilation a breath away.
‘Now that has really pissed me off,’ the King of Hearts’ AI informed him.
Consciousness crept up on him and inserted itself into his perception. Coming out of black nothingness, Anderson slowly realized he was awake. He was lying in the lee of a slab, which was a conglomerate of fossilized worms and bivalve shells the shape of kidneys. He reached up to ensure his skull was in one piece, found a wadded blanket supporting his head. Warily he rolled to one side, wincing as his body informed him of its injuries, and sat upright to look around.
Bonehead was a dome nearby—everything utterly retracted. Looking at the hog’s damaged shell where the saddle and lance framework had been torn away, Anderson thought he would need to make a lot of repairs with epoxy—and should not ride the hog for some time, until the shell had healed internally. Now he turned his attention to where the others stood beside what it took him a moment to identify as the fallen droon, his lance still impaling it. He stood up a little unsteadily and walked over, noting that the brass man was gone.
‘You’re recovered.’ Tergal spotted him first.
Anderson wondered about the tone of resentment he sensed, and recognized that Tergal had not found these latest adventures to his liking.
‘As best as can be expected,’ Anderson replied.
Arden and Thorn now turned towards him, too. He gazed past them to where the vulture perched on the wide deflated head of the droon. During his reading, in the library of Rondure, he had never come across the word ‘vulture’, but he recognized this creature as an uglier version of some pictures he had seen of things called ‘birds’.
‘The conquering hero returns,’ said the vulture.
Anderson did recollect reading how some birds were good mimics, but that did not sound like mimicry to him. In fact it sounded very like Unger Salbec. He winced at this reminder—another complication to add to the What now? malaise he seemed to be suffering.
‘Tergal told me your trial has lasted twenty years.’ Arden studied him with some amusement. ‘And you also told me our friend here would be dragon enough.’ She pushed a foot against one sprawled-out limb, which looked like a twisted and torn I-beam projecting from the wreckage of some collapsed building. Anderson stepped back a pace, remembering one particular third-stage sleer in a hailstorm.
‘It’s enough,’ said Anderson.
‘So you’ll return to Rondure?’ she asked.
Anderson shrugged. If he returned anywhere, it would be to Bravence, where Unger Salbec awaited him. But he was not the kind of person who returned anywhere. He glanced at Tergal. ‘What do you think?’
Tergal shook his head. ‘I have debts to repay, if you’ll allow me.’
Anderson nodded, turned to Thorn. ‘What about you?’
‘That remains to be decided,’ said Thorn. He studied the weapon he held, pulled out the empty clip and stared inside it almost accusingly, before slapping it back into place. He then pointed over Anderson’s shoulder.
They all turned to watch the blimp approach.
In utter frustration, Skellor withdrew from Cento. It was like the Occam Razor—that AI burn. But he had encountered no other Golem possessing the ability to destroy its own mind. He supposed Cento had prepared himself for this—having assessed the dangers Jain tech represented to one of his kind. Skellor pushed the Golem away. No matter—he really, really had more important concerns.
The brown dwarf’s tidal swathe was hitting with metronomic regularity, splitting and tearing apart Ogygian all around him. Bound together by internally generated diamond fibres and with what remained of his human nervous system shut down, Skellor tried to bend with the flow, distorted, the fibres snapping inside him, other structures breaking. But he rebuilt them, bound himself together with more fibres, and concentrated all his resources on constructing inside his torso the gravitic generator that would power him to survival.