7

There were thousands of information packets to access, thousands of sensors to gaze from, all this information arriving by U-space transmitter with only a delay of a few seconds. Azroc gazed upon space battles fought at AI speeds and observed logistical overlays that seemed made to disassemble spaceships, to disassemble lives. He observed AI combatants — who had to be fully aware of their chances of survival — throwing themselves, without even microseconds of hesitation, at wormships and then being obliterated. They adhered to battle plans utterly, some of them already certain of their own destruction in the execution of those same plans. It was admirable, but Azroc was wary of AI pride. For humans were quite capable of behaving the same.

In this latest scene, now viewed from spy satellites and stealth drones, twelve Polity dreadnoughts and twenty attack ships fought to keep forty-two wormships away from an inhabited world with a population of over a billion. Half an hour before there had been seventeen dreadnoughts, but five of them were now just so much debris and cooling gas, as were five of the wormships. Three wormships were already down on the surface of Ramone, unravelling into giant millipede forms and spewing out other war machines to advance on the Megapolis Transheim. Seeing these millipede forms, Azroc was rather reminded of hooders, those lethal life forms found on the planet Masada. Seeing the advancing whole it seemed tame to call it an army — infestation being a much better word.

ECS forces were arrayed against this attack: AG tanks advanced to form lines, autoguns strode out on silver legs, crowds of soldiers proceeded on foot or in gravharnesses, while troop and gun platforms filled the skies above. Battle had already been joined as jets and the flying skyscrapers of atmosphere gunships bombarded Erebus’s forces. While Azroc watched, one enormous gunship tilted, smoke belching from a hole excavated in its side, and fell with horrible grace towards the enemy. Beam weapons and projectiles flashed against its hard-fields till it seemed to be falling through layer upon layer of smoky glass. A particle beam finally stabbed through its defences, cutting it from stem to stern, and it exploded, raining burning debris on its killers.

The whole scene possessed a horrible inevitability. The forces on the ground were not enough, and simple mathematics told Azroc that, beyond this planet, the remaining Polity dreadnoughts and attack ships could not stop further landings — and that, without intervention, they were doomed. However, intervention was already arriving. Azroc flicked away to another scene nearly half a light year distant.

The two hammerhead troop carriers, in shape resembling steel waterfowl with those eponymous heads, were preparing for the run towards Ramone. Gathered about them were forty of the new Centurion-class attack ships, and this would hopefully be enough to get the carriers down on the surface, after which the Centurions could engage directly with the wormships. Maybe the extra troops would be enough to swing the land battle, but the extra Centurions wouldn’t be able to defeat the wormships, which was why something else was on its way.

‘Even I wasn’t sure ships like that existed,’ Azroc said as, right on cue, something massive folded out of U-space just beyond the troop carriers.

‘You did not need to know,’ Jerusalem informed him. ‘But you did see the Battle Wagon?’

‘Well I didn’t know about that either.’ The craft mentioned was the capital ship of the fleet Erebus had first devastated, but in its death throes Battle Wagon had taken out a large proportion of Erebus’s forces. A cylinder eight miles wide and twenty miles long, it was yet a minnow compared to this new arrival.

The Cable Hogue was a vessel that could not safely orbit worlds with any crustal instabilities or oceans, simply because its sheer mass could create devastating tides or earthquakes. It was spherical, like a mobile moon with weapons capable of breaking planets, and was the biggest ship presently available to Jerusalem. Azroc wondered if it might in fact be the biggest ship in the Polity, or if there was something else he didn’t yet know about.

‘Erebus managed to hijack some fleet vessels,’ Azroc cautioned.

‘That is a risk we must take, since there was nothing else I could get there quickly enough to be effective.’

‘I see.’ Azroc switched views to another solar system and now gazed upon an image, enhanced from a distance, of a hot planetoid being orbited by a line of wormships. But they had done nothing more there since their arrival, so he switched views again to see glimpses of an occasional wormship and an occasional asteroid. He then reduced distances by a factor of a thousand, which showed him wormships cruising amid a belt of asteroids, and a fleet of Polity vessels, led by something very similar to Battle Wagon, heading out from the inner inhabited world of that solar system towards the asteroid belt.

‘Any idea of what they are doing there?’

Jerusalem showed him another view of six wormships, these ones partially unravelled and wrapped around a chunk of stone a hundred miles across. The stars of fusion drives were currently igniting all over the stone’s surface, their ionization slowly forming into a cometary tail. Evidently the wormships were intent on moving the asteroid.

‘Bombardment?’ Azroc suggested.

‘It seems likely,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘Or else they are using it as just part of an attack plan. If its vector is right, even breaking it up will divert a lot of the Polity fleet there and many of our ships will have to run cover to intercept any of the chunks heading planetwards.’

‘I see,’ said Azroc again, but he wasn’t feeling entirely sure that he did. He flicked back to an overview of the Line area under attack, and closely observed the positions of the target worlds. He then ran an overlay of Polity logistics, supply routes, major population centres, weapons caches and major manufacturing centres. Though these worlds formed a pattern, he could not see how that strategy related to an attack on the Polity as a whole.

Another world under attack: here wormships and Polity ships swirled about each other like two distinct species of fish, and every now and again space seemed to distort when some craft on either side managed to position itself satisfactorily to use some directed gravity weapon without taking out other ships on its own side. The planet currently being defended had already suffered numerous strikes, and since the last time Azroc looked its colour had changed. A massive CTD had landed in the world-encompassing ocean, hit a subduction zone in an oceanic trench and cracked it right open. The ocean was now boiling, pouring up billions of tons of water into the atmosphere in the form of steam. Another strike had turned a minor oceanic city, with a population of eight million, into a boiling ruin. And now the wormships seemed intent on dropping something on the main population centre here. Meanwhile, the Polity ships were hamstrung by the need to intercept missiles instead of attacking their source.