Alarming crashes and bangs kept echoing throughout the great ship, and only minutes ago she had heard a distant huge explosion—which Jerusalem calmly informed her was from the implosion of a hard-field generator. Now the entire ship was vibrating like an aeroplane hitting turbulence. Staring at the chaotic swirling grey image on the screen—more like a monochrome image of some creature’s internal organs than anything else—Mika wondered what it all meant. Were they making any headway?
‘Jerusalem, how are we doing?’
‘We have penetrated four years into the USER field. However, in ship-time of thirty hours I will have to drop out of U-space for repairs.’
‘Repairs?’
‘I have ejected three fusion reactors that went out of phase, and seventeen hard-field generators have imploded. A resultant fire killed twelve humans in gel-stasis. Three Golem, five other AIs and two haimans were also killed while making repairs.’
‘Haimans?’ asked Mika.
‘People like D’nissan—those who are seeking synergy with AI.’
And there it was: a piece of information that had entirely passed Mika by, probably because she had never thought to ask. She also noted how Jerusalem had listed those casualties along with the other components of the ship. It was not a comforting thought.
After sleeping for a few hours, she pulled a swing-out console in front of herself and went back to work. When staying in the acceleration chair became too uncomfortable for her, she returned to her work station to discover that in the partial immersion frame the untoward shaking of the vessel did not affect her much. Precisely thirty hours on from her conversation with Jerusalem, the entire ship suddenly jerked as if slapped by some vast hand.
It was unfortunate that Mika had come out of VR just then, to get herself some coffee. She was thrown up against the wall, then down to the floor, her arm breaking with an audible crunch. On the screen revealing the external view, she observed a brown dwarf sun like a polished sphere of mahogany against rashes of stars. Then she went to find herself an autodoc, and actually had to queue before having the bone in her arm welded. She was a lucky one in fact, as that last wrench out of U-space had broken, as well as numerous other limbs, two necks and one backbone, which always took a little longer to repair.
The lander slewed and impacted sideways into a hillock plated with strange yellow-and-white growths. Fethan unstrapped himself and headed for the airlock, thinking himself lucky to be still in one piece. He had seen one lander nose straight into the ground without decelerating, and another crash into the city he had briefly glimpsed earlier. From over the horizon, he could still see the pillars of smoke black against the morning sky, and could hear the occasional rumble of an explosion. Other landers had come down not quite so hard as his own, so he guessed Skellor, if his intention really was to get up to Ogygian, would head for one of those. Fethan was again tempted to wait to get the drop on the man, but no, he had to contact Cormac, tell the agent what was going on, then proceed from there.
Fethan abandoned his space suit, stripping down to a one-piece environment suit made of chameleon cloth, shouldered his APW, and quickly headed away from the landing site. He tried calling on encoded ECS radio bands, but received no reply. He then tried Gant’s specific encoded frequency and contacted a jumbled and hostile something that made him snatch back as if he had just put his hand into a wasps’ nest. He realized that, until he had assessed the situation here, he was putting himself at risk by trying to make contact, so ceased to call and then shut down any auto-response in his internal radio.
Half an hour later he came in sight of the carnage caused by the lander that had crashed into the city. Egg-shaped houses lay broken on the ground amid tangles of scaffolding and collapsed roadways. Some of the houses glowed inside as they burned, but the greatest conflagration occurred in the centre of what looked like a factory complex, where the lander had actually hit. Fethan had seen some strange places, and he had previously been at the scene of disasters, but it took him a moment to understand what was amiss here. People were wandering about in an apparent daze, which was often the case after a tragedy like this, but an hour or more had already passed and there should be some sort of emergency procedure in place by now, or at least some people dragging casualties out of the wreckage. When a vehicle appeared, he thought something like that might be starting, but it merely skirted the ruination and continued out of the city, heading in his direction.
The ATV contained about five people, and towed a trailer filled with more people and their belongings. Fethan raised a hand and walked towards the vehicle. It swerved aside and kept away from him. He had been around long enough to recognize the stunned look of refugees everywhere, though he wondered at the fearful glances being cast in his direction. He noticed these people all wore thick headgear and carried makeshift clubs. Perhaps it was a cultural thing? He subsequently discovered the real reason.
A sheet of metal, burdened by the heavy iron truss to which it had been riveted, had trapped one woman against the ground. She was not the first such victim he had seen, but the first one still moving. Quickly he headed over to where her arms protruded.
‘I’ll get you out of there,’ he said in plain English — just to reassure her with the sound of a voice. There was no response, but then she had not understood what he had said. He grasped the edge of the metal sheet, heaved it up with the truss attached, then forced them sideways into a nearby tangle of wreckage. The woman just lay on her back for a moment, her expression imbecilic. Then she rolled onto her front, rose up onto her hands and knees, and shook herself like a dog. Fethan noticed that there was blood spattered on her collar and some horrible creature clinging behind her ear, though otherwise she appeared uninjured. He stooped to assist, but suddenly she stood by herself and turned to face him.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked in the language used here.
She just stared at him with bloodshot eyes, lips moving as if she was silently reciting. Abruptly tilting her head, she reached out one quivering hand towards him. A second aug creature scuttled out of her sleeve, then leapt from the back of her hand onto Fethan’s neck. He felt it climb up behind his ear and then start boring in through the tough syntheflesh there. The woman lowered her arm, turned aside, and stumbled away mumbling to herself.
For Fethan, pain was something he chose not to experience, as his body possessed much better methods of detecting or diagnosing damage. He reached up to grab the creature, and tore it away. Now he understood. Perhaps, given time, the thing could have bored in through his ceramal skull and finally hit what remained of his brain, which was biogridded and stored at not much above absolute zero. Whether or not it could have taken him over via that route was not something he wanted to discover for sure. He studied the thing he held: slippery with mucus like a cuckoo-spit bug, too many legs, flattened kidney-shaped body, numerous boring tubules extruding from its head. It reminded him of the parasitic scoles that had been used to oxygenate the blood of Masadan pond workers. He tightened his fist and burst the thing, then stooped for some sand to wipe away the mess from his palm.
As Fethan moved further into the city, aug creatures leapt out onto him regularly from their numerous hides in fallen scaffolding, just like ticks waiting in the grass. They clung to his clothing before scuttling up towards the side of his head. He understood then the reason for the hand weapons the refugees had been carrying, for soon he himself had picked up a length of steel tube and became adept at swatting the things in mid-leap — like playing baseball with tomatoes. Every individual he came across now was already a victim of these horrible parasites. This looked like the work of Skellor: it was the kind of ruination the man habitually left behind him.