One of the wormships had landed on the surface of the hot planetoid. It had spread out and was growing in the intense heat, but beyond that it was difficult to see what it was doing down there, since the other wormships in orbit were throwing up a lot of electromagnetic interference.
All the ship receivers were open, and the flow of information they were picking up seemed to pass like a perpetual speeding train through the Harpy’s systems. Vulture mentally flitted around it all, not daring to directly sample even the smallest portion of this traffic, for it would be just like trying to peck at said speeding train. It would rip his head off. Mr Crane, however, was linked into the systems by Jain, or perhaps draconic, nanofilaments bonding through the one hand he rested on the console before him. On an informational level Vulture was very aware of the Golem’s mind interlacing the network like taut-strung piano wires. Crane was sampling the traffic — snatching a bit here, diverting a bit there — and Vulture snapped up these morsels and gleaned from them what he could. Crane’s instruction, when it came, was terse:
Closer.
Vulture felt like physically flinching as he nudged Harpy closer to the circling wormships. The chameleonware was working well, but one slip could be disastrous. There were enough weapons out there to convert the two conjoined ships he controlled into less than atoms.
‘They’re deliberately concealing this,’ remarked Vulture. Being this close, they were managing to obtain a lot of detail. Much more than would be available to the various Polity ships now arriving in this same solar system and forming defences around the two inhabited worlds — known as the Caldera worlds. Odd that, for surely the best form of defence here would be to attack?
Closer.
Vulture took the ship even closer, now edging just below the orbit of the wormships. Any nearer than this and he would have to employ AG to stay up, or else increase orbital acceleration. Both methods were risky, for both could reveal their presence despite the chameleonware. Now, however, the sensors were picking up less interference, and Vulture could see something more of what was occurring below. The wormship down on the surface had distributed itself about the planetoid and was creating installations around the equator like a string of pearls, and yet other installations along the edge of one continental plate. What purpose these served, Vulture could only guess, but he reckoned they wouldn’t be healthy for the two inhabited worlds orbiting further out, on the other side of the sun.
‘Why the hell aren’t there ECS ships here attacking?’ Vulture voiced his concerns.
Certainly no ECS ship would be able to sneak this close, since only by using the same Jain-tech chameleonware as Erebus did had they themselves managed to remain so well concealed. Chameleonware was never perfect, but what it did not conceal in their case was being ignored by the nearby wormships, for they saw it simply as part of the same entity as themselves. But that would last only as long as the codes Crane had stolen from the legate craft remained current. And yes, it made sense for ECS to concentrate first on setting up defences around the two inhabited worlds, but Vulture reckoned ECS could at least have sent something in to take a closer look here, and maybe launch a few missiles at these buggers. Then a thought suddenly occurred to him: perhaps ECS had already sent something.
Scan -
Luckily, this planetoid being so hot and emitting radiation across the spectrum, it was not necessary to use a particularly high level of active scan, which again might have revealed their presence. Those equatorial pearls, it transpired, weren’t bombs, as Vulture had assumed; they were cooling spheres. They acted like slowly expanding refrigerators, dumping heat outside themselves and maintaining an internal temperature below minus a hundred and ninety degrees Celsius.
‘Very odd,’ observed Vulture.
Geo-scan and model.
The data began to fall into new configurations, and Vulture started building a model of this world: detailing the composition of its often broken rocky crust, volcanic vents and magma chambers, its chrome-iron core and thick polar caps of iron-oxide-loaded rocks, and even the faults lying along the edges of continental plates.
Enough.
Crane jerked the model away from Vulture’s control. New data began to input. The circlet of cold spheres fell into place, along with tubular interlinking structures. The installations along the continental rift also dropped into place, but with a question mark over their purpose. Intercepted data was added, and Vulture watched as, in the model, the spheres began to dump their frigid contents into the connecting tubes. The entire ring contracted, the sudden massive temperature change turning the crust below it frangible. The planetoid’s rapid spin and misbalance between poles had always applied a torsion force that reached its maximum around the equator. That same force now twisted the planetoid in half. A sudden addition of further data included massive detonations along the continental rift. The model expanded. Vulture watched the planetoid throw almost half its internal substance into vacuum: trillions of tons of matter. Stones, boulders, asteroidal chunks of rock, and an ocean of magma travelled away at thousands of miles per second: a plume of matter spewing out for millions of miles.
A slight alteration of the timescale put the two inhabited worlds in the path of this efflux. It would certainly kill millions of the inhabitants but, most importantly for the wormships, it would render any defences based on the solar mirrors ineffective, for this plume of debris would block out the sun.
‘Smart,’ said Vulture and, checking the timescale, saw that the optimum time for this colossal act of demolition was about forty hours away, with it taking a further twenty hours for the plume to reach the two Caldera worlds.
Abruptly, the model went into reverse, the timescale dropping back to zero, back to the present. Now bewildering arrays of grids overlaid and penetrated the planetoid, and different views of it began clicking up at a rate of tens for every second. Mr Crane was obviously looking for something, and within a couple of minutes he found it: an area just over from where the rift installations intersected that equatorial ring of cooling spheres.
‘Are you still in contact with ECS?’ Vulture enquired.
Crane removed his hand from the console; it came away trailing strands as if it had just been pressed in treacle. The model blinked out and the Golem stood and made his way back through the ship, where he picked up the big CTD imploder — which, this time, Vulture suspected the Golem would not be using for some elaborate bluff.
‘Are you going to answer me?’
Yes came the Golem’s reply and, frustratingly, Vulture did not know whether that answer was to his first or second question. He observed Crane open the airlock leading down into the legate vessel, then, with the CTD tucked under his arm, climb down inside.
‘What are you doing?’
The other vessel detached and fell away, but Vulture found himself still able to access the departed ship’s systems. Dropping towards a hot acidic atmosphere, the legate vessel quickly left the Harpy and the wormships high above. Because the physical conjoining was now broken, Vulture checked the integrity of his chameleonware, but then stopped himself, knowing that if anything went wrong now he might have only a few microseconds in which to draw up his last will and testament. Returning his attention to the other vessel, he saw Crane begin to use the landing thrusters, making their firing pattern mirror eruptions below whenever possible. The vessel passed through volcanic clouds, yellow sulphur crystallizing on its hull, then turning brown and flaking away. A shimmering umber desert became visible below, then a line of jagged black mountains rose into view. At the foot of these, to the left, one of the spheres reared up through haze like a massive power station. Coming over the mountains, Crane put the vessel into a leaden glide towards one of the rift installations — a nondescript cylindrical bunker perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking a sea of magma, dead Jain-tech strewn all around it like driftwood. Inside the vessel, Mr Crane, ignoring controls he had already preset, began undressing. He removed his hat and coat, baggy and threadbare pullover, boots — meticulously unfastening them and putting them neatly to one side — worn trousers and then, ridiculously, a pair of long Johns.