Jain-tech tendrils had wound up over the skids and now bound the craft firmly to the attack ship. Portions of the little craft were missing and inside the cockpit silver worms revolved like a bait ball of fish. Flatworms were in sight beyond it, and others still coming up behind her.
‘Throw yourself from the ship, Mika.’
Mika squatted, turned off the gecko function of her boots, then launched herself out into vacuum. Behind her the flatworms speared up like spiral towers, and began to straighten and narrow, extending towards her. Then bright light flared all around them and they beaded like heated wire solder. The ensuing blast flung her through hot smoky gas and fragments burning like fuse paper, and she saw a giant chunk of Jain coral tumbling past her. More snaky things stabbed into view, snapping closed on her like the arms of a hydra, then pulled her fast down to the surface of the draconic moon that now loomed into view.
Mika lay there pinned tight by Dragon’s pseudopods as a volcano of white fire erupted in a ring extending perhaps half a mile across all around her. She was forced against the restraining pseudopods by sudden acceleration and, through smoke, flame and a storm of coral fragments, watched the Trafalgar and its grisly contents recede.
She felt safe now, but it wasn’t until Dragon drew clear of the disintegrating blooms of coral that she learned the cost of that safety. The other part of Dragon hung scarred and burned in accretion-disc fog, hardly recognizable as a sphere so severe was its damage, and beyond lay the hollowed-by-fire remains of a whole host of giant biomechs like the first that had attacked. That other half of Dragon looked decidedly dead to her
‘Now you talk to him,’ said Dragon.
For a moment Mika had no idea what the alien entity was referring to.
Cormac gazed upon the scene with a feeling of impotent frustration.
Individually the wormships were no match for the Cable Hogue or Jerusalem, but there were hundreds of them. He watched as one of Erebus’s fleet abruptly accelerated towards the two huge ships, beam weapons and DIGRAW blasts lashing out to hit the swarm of missiles earlier launched by the Hogue. Thousands upon thousands of explosions ensued, lighting up the fleet of wormships as if they were a shoal of sea creatures moving out into sunlight. They began launching their own missiles and rod-forms that must have come from their own stocks since they had destroyed all the free-floating ones. Space distorted between the Hogue and the wormships as the big ship employed the same weapon Cormac had seen it use at Ramone. He saw two of the alien vessels enveloped in spacial distortion before being slammed sideways into their fellows, the ensuing detonation scattering numerous others in the formation.
‘I cannot get through to either Jerusalem or Cable Hogue,’ said Vulture.
For a moment Cormac could not understand why he felt so uneasy about that.
‘Perhaps it would be better if you waited,’ he suggested, but he wasn’t sure why.
‘Why?’ the AI inevitably asked.
Cormac watched a wormship unravel as if dissolving in vacuum, numerous detonations within its compartmentalized structure steadily cutting it to pieces. He observed millipede chunks writhing away, trailing fire from each end; saw coppery rings, like slices from a pipe, spilling from one ship-thread hollowed out by some bright fast-burning incendiary. He had seen no missile hit the vessel, nor any other initial evidence of beam or gravity-weapon strikes. This destruction must have been the result of some electronic warfare device like the one the Hogue used to take out those first three wormships. Whatever, it was very effective — troublingly so.
‘It would be best if those two AIs did not learn of our presence here,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how they can ever win against a force like this, so if they are captured and any information reamed from them, Erebus will then know we are here.’
It was a completely plausible explanation, and it was also a lie. Something had kicked in with Cormac almost at a level below conscious analysis. Though Erebus was definitely the enemy, he simply did not sufficiently trust his own side. He wanted to step back to assess, and know more, before he committed himself to any new action.
The drones, he remembered.
Cormac used his U-sense to gaze back into the Harpy’s cargo hold and there observed the surviving drones: a great mass of metal insects occasionally shifting, here a claw opening and closing, there legs flexing against the ceiling, elsewhere some complex glittering appendage probing a com panel, all crammed together like the contents of an insectivore’s stomach. These armoured killers were comfortable in conditions no human could have tolerated or perhaps survived. He sought com contact with them, and it was Knobbler who replied, acting as spokesman for them all.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Cormac asked.
‘I heard.’
‘Will you hold off from trying to get in direct contact with those two?’
‘Didn’t have any intention of trying,’ Knobbler replied. ‘Never trusted any of those like that, and I trust ‘em even less now.’
‘Why?’
‘Too much don’t add up,’ the drone replied, then added, ‘We acted alone out here for a good reason.’
‘That being?’
‘Big leak in the Polity: some AI or AIs, just like them out there, was on Erebus’s side. Orlandine never said it outright, but she implied that if Erebus’s attack plan here had been known in the Polity, Erebus would have been stopped, but would have escaped to attack again, and again.’
‘But those two out there are attempting to destroy what remains of Erebus,’ said Cormac, testing.
‘Yeah, so it would appear.’
Knobbler cut the link.
More of Erebus’s ships were unravelling and burning. Was this really the result of EM warfare? Or was the process of destruction Erebus had begun before the two Polity ships arrived still ongoing? This struck him as foolish, for surely Erebus could not afford to lose valuable ships like this in the midst of a battle.
Now the wormships were finally upon the Hogue and Jerusalem. Massive detonations ensued a hundred miles out from the Hogue as ship after ship slammed into its hard-field defences. Multiple detonations flung debris from the big ship’s surface as doubtless hundreds of shield generators imploded. Missiles swarmed and the beams from particle cannons latticed through intervening space. A gas cloud began to thicken, now picking out the courses of numerous previously invisible beam weapons. Jerusalem took a hit, an explosion peeling up part of the ring formation about it, its ragged end trailing a line of fire through the void. Then the two big ships were through and decelerating. Behind them the wormships were slowing too and swinging round. Like two knights after a first charge in which shields and lances had shattered, the opponents were coming round to charge once again.
Cormac now reassessed the odds. Running a counting program in his gridlink, he found that nearly half of Erebus’s forces from that first charge were gone, and they certainly had not all been destroyed by enemy fire. And as the remainder accelerated towards the two Polity ships, it seemed that their self-destruction was accelerating too.
‘The Hogue’s up to something,’ said Arach, his sharp metal spider feet rattling a tattoo on the Harpy’s consoles.
Cormac flicked his attention back to the Hogue and observed it launching swarms of missiles, which did not seem that unusual.
‘What do you mean “up to something”?’ he enquired.
Abruptly, feedback shrieked from the Harpy’s consoles, but it wasn’t that which caused Cormac to slam his hands against his head. Subliminally he saw both Polity ships decelerating again and turning as their new missiles sped away, but he was too busy trying to shut things down in his supposedly dead gridlink as carrier signals, amplified tenfold, tried to ream out the inside of his skull. Arach went over on his back and even Mr Crane scooped up his toys, pocketed them, then reached up with both hands to pull his hat low and hunch forward. From the hold there came a crashing and clattering as the war drones writhed under the increased intensity of all signals. Cormac could not see them, for his U-sense was now blind.