Mika noted how the wormships in this conflict did not resort to their rod-form weapons — perhaps realizing they would not prove effective against the Dragon spheres. Soon enough it seemed that nothing was. The chaos lasted less than ten minutes before the two spheres were coasting peacefully along together, with only occasional explosions around them as their white-light lasers picked off the odd stray missile or a large chunk of wormship debris.
‘How many of them were there?’ Mika finally asked.
‘Five,’ Dragon replied.
‘You should be working with Polity forces,’ she suggested.
‘Better to kill the disease itself than a few bacteria.’
Before Mika could question that remark further Dragon dropped back into U-space, and all she could think of was coiling up in a ball and wishing the reality out there away.
The cargo runcible assembled around Heliotrope’s pincers was now complete, as was all the other equipment packed aboard, and testing could begin once Bludgeon came across to link himself up. Ship and war runcible had nearly reached the rendezvous point before the fire in one of the U-space engine rooms had truncated their journey, and both were now using their fusion engines to cover the remaining distance. Orlandine gazed through her sensors at what lay ahead: a black asteroid field, perhaps resulting from some long-ago cataclysm and set loose to roam interstellar space, was strewn out in front of them for the best part of a billion miles. The chunks of rock lay millions of miles apart, but the one immediately ahead would do. Extending about a quarter of a mile across, it would be adequate for a test of the weapon she now controlled, and it would be insurance should it turn out that Randal had been lying about the one coming here to provide her with Erebus’s new recognition codes and chameleonware formats, for this in fact could be a trap intended entirely for her.
Finding herself now at a loose end after hours of labour, Orlandine felt a sudden panic. It was at times like this that her guilt about the murder of her lover Shoala resurfaced. It was at times like this that she felt guilty about the tens of thousands who had died on Klurhammon and a particularly hard twist of grief for two of those lives. She clamped down on it quickly, and queried the war runcible about Bludgeon’s location. Learning that the drone was already on his way out to Heliotrope, she turned her attention to the appropriate airlock on the war runcible.
Bludgeon, the blind iron bedbug a couple of yards across, was already outside the war runcible airlock, and while she watched he leaped from the hull and glided over towards Heliotrope. Good. Orlandine disengaged herself from her ship’s interface sphere, which was not too much of a business, since some hours before she had physically disengaged from all the Jain-tech aboard so now only needed to disconnect from the Polity-tech. Once out into the corridor beyond, she eyed the new ducts carrying wrist-thick superconducting cables and networks of coolant pipes towards the nose of the ship. She noted how this passage was just wide enough to allow Bludgeon through, though the drone would have to cut away part of the interface sphere to gain access to it. But that was no problem; in the unlikely event of Bludgeon not possessing the right tools for the job, he could call on Cutter who, remaining onboard, possessed enough sharp edges and slicing energy weapons to rapidly dice the entire ship.
Reaching what remained of her living area, Orlandine hesitated. Even though she could at any time halt the plan she had set in motion, this moment nevertheless seemed like a point of no return. She moved on towards the airlock, past sections where walls had been torn out and two spherical reactors — spares from the war runcible — squatted at the end of a line of large cubic machines sprouting manifold pipes and S-con cables. Also spares from the war runcible, these cubes were high-powered refrigeration and thermal-conversion units. She could only hope all of these, along with the tanks of evaporant now distributed throughout the Heliotrope, would be enough.
Cutter crouched beside the airlock, folded up in a way no natural mantid could possibly manage and displaying a lethal mass of sharp-edged insectile limbs, the ports and protuberances of energy tools and two bulbous unknowable eyes.
‘You’ll look after him and keep everything on track?’ Orlandine asked, confining herself to human speech.
‘I will,’ Cutter replied, his mandibles sawing emphatically.
Orlandine had only recently learned that the partnership of these two drones had lasted even longer than she had lived. They were friends. They looked after each other. She tried to be reasonable about this because friendships between drones were not that remarkable, yet she still felt a stab of jealousy.
After a clattering from outside announced Bludgeon’s arrival on the hull, the airlock began to cycle. Orlandine closed up her suit, the chainglass visor sliding up to engage with the main helmet rising from behind. She now remembered thinking about replacing the chainglass visor with a shimmer-shield, but had since decided that if anything went wrong with the suit, a shimmer-shield might just blink out whereas chainglass would remain in place. The Jain-tech inside her body should enable her to survive any exposure to vacuum, but still she was reluctant to rely on that entirely. Perhaps, understanding the dangers she would soon face, she was getting a bit paranoid, but she knew that ignoring even such tiny precautions could get a person killed.
The inner door of the airlock opened and Bludgeon scuttled through, raising his blind head towards her. A brief informational exchange ensued, almost a mathematical greeting, then Bludgeon turned and headed towards the interface sphere as Orlandine stepped into the airlock of Heliotrope, maybe for the last time. The airlock evacuated quickly — the air it contained being pumped into a reserve tank, for though Heliotrope’s present occupants had no need of it, it could be used for cooling too. Orlandine clambered outside and pushed herself off from the ship heading towards the war runcible. For a moment she considered using the reaction jets located at the wrists of the suit, then abruptly decided against that. Trying to keep busy with such minor details just to avoid painful speculation could lead to disaster. She really needed to pause now and think hard about what she was doing, so she closed down all contact with both Heliotrope and the war runcible, and allowed herself a still moment in which to ask herself some salient questions.
Was Fiddler Randal working against Erebus, or was he merely something Erebus had fashioned to lure her into a trap? Further confirmation of everything he had so far told her had come with the methodology of Erebus’s attack upon the Polity, for it was perfectly in accord with the plans Randal had shown her earlier. It occurred to her that to assume this was some sort of trap for her was utter arrogance on her part. Surely she wasn’t that important to Erebus? Then again it seemed she was clearly important enough for Erebus to attack a world of ‘no tactical importance’ just to kill her brothers. It all seemed very odd, and she felt that Randal, who she kept locked up in that secure virtuality, had not yet told her everything. However, she felt this all to be worth the risk. Here at this rendezvous the war runcible would not be able to deliver its full potential but, unless a USER was quickly deployed, they still had a good chance of escaping any treachery. At their final destination, even if that was a trap, Erebus might find that it wasn’t a strong enough one. The war runcible, she hoped, would come as a rather unpleasant surprise.
Orlandine bent her legs to absorb her own impact against the hull of the war runcible while simultaneously initiating the ‘gecko’ function of her boot soles to stick herself in place. She then reached out with one arm of her assister frame to grab a rung of the ladder curving round the hull towards the nearby airlock. Now at her destination, she once again made contact with the ever-spreading Jain-tech network within the massive device, and ordered it to open the lock for her. As she entered, she saw the fusion drives wink out and, glancing to one side, she could just about see, with her human eyes, the asteroid they had been heading for turning slowly in vacuum some hundreds of miles away. Soon she was fully inside the war runcible and opening her helmet to the breathable air that for some time now had been displacing the original inert preserving gas. She could walk easily now, since all the gravplates within the device were fully operational, which was perhaps not entirely to Knobbler’s taste, since equipped with all those tentacles, he seemed specially designed for moving in zero gravity. He had also been designed to move speedily through corridors wider than those available here. His multiple limbs and big body leaving scratches and dents on the walls, Knobbler came into sight ahead of her, finally clattering and crashing to a halt and totally filling the corridor.