Chevron scooped the dislodged bricks into the manhole, since she wanted to leave as little evidence of her presence here as possible. A squealing and hissing ensued down in the darkness, as creatures fled — ratadiles, almost certainly. She first increased the light amplification of her eyes, then lowered herself onto the ladder leading down — it was fortunately made of ceramic so had not rusted — and, after drawing the manhole cover back into place, descended further. Soon she was in the sewer, which, having been constructed to accommodate the heavy rainfall that occurred locally, was large enough to accommodate her standing upright. There would be some tighter sections to negotiate ahead, but no problem, since she would simply change her shape to suit them.
Chevron advanced, wading through knee-deep sewage, meanwhile opening coded communication links. In a moment, as well as the fetid tunnel ahead, she was gazing upon numerous different scenes fed from within the runcible complex some two miles away on the surface. Some of these views were seen through the eyes of the separatists infiltrating the area, relayed by their augs, others were from cams no larger than pinheads positioned strategically to give her a good view of the action.
‘Akiri, are our people now in position?’ she enquired.
The view witnessed currently through Akiri’s eyes was of an open bar area laid out about what looked like a Caribbean beach in the middle of a wide and crowded concourse.
‘Most of them are,’ confirmed Akiri, ‘but we’ve yet to get the main explosives to the Pillar.’
The methodology was simple. Groups of twenty insurgents each were going for the ten passenger runcibles in operation here, their aim to grab hostages, secure each area and then set explosives on each runcible. This would keep the AI very occupied while the main thrust of their attack got under way against the Pillar — a circular building in which the AI itself was sited at the junction of six concourses.
Chevron checked again through her multiple views. As Akiri had said, the groups intending to attack the passenger runcibles were mostly in place in the main lounge or various sub-lounges, supposedly awaiting their transmission slots some hours hence. The lev-trolley supposedly loaded with discs of amber, which were in fact explosives, was on its way in. Chevron noted that the person now guiding the trolley along the concourse was not the same one originally given this task. She checked recorded data supplied from the sensors she had hidden in just about every separatist base and home in this city, and was gratified to witness the original trolley pusher being garrotted and then shoved into a sewer rather similar to this one. The woman had apparently had second thoughts about her assignment, her chances of survival and the fallout for her two children… and people didn’t live to have third thoughts within Chevron’s organization.
‘When do we start?’ Akiri asked.
‘I’ve mined the north wall of the runcible complex,’ Chevron replied, lying as smoothly as ever, ‘but I need to shift the ship into position to get you out, which should take me about another forty minutes.’
‘Seems a shame to run after such a victory.’
‘But necessary.’ Chevron halted for a moment, noting that the ratadiles were starting to lose their nervousness of her. ‘You simply cannot remain on the world where you killed a runcible AI. You would spend the rest of your life running and be of no real value to the cause thereafter.’
‘Okay.’ Akiri was obviously getting nervous. ‘What about groundside and orbital defences?’
‘As I told you before, most of them will go down with the AI, and when I bring in an ECS Rescue ship, the rest will ignore it.’ Chevron eyed a big ratadile humping up its ridged back nearby like an angry cat and shuffling forward. ‘You’re not having second thoughts are you, Akiri?’
‘No, Chevron.’
‘Then do your duty and I will do mine. Now I’ve got to get this ship off the ground. Out.’ She abruptly closed down the link.
The ratadile raised its long jaws out of the muck and chose that moment to go for her. It surged forward in writhing bounds, then pounced. Chevron’s hand shot up and closed on its throat, stopping dead a ton of pseudo-reptile in mid-air. Its body crashed into her, jaws wide open just before her face, but she was as solid as a girder, nano-filaments having bound her feet to the slippery stone below, and her body as dense as lead. Its neck had snapped with the impact and she gazed for a moment into its zebra-patterned gullet before twitching her hand from side to side to listen to the crunching of its neck bones, then tossed it to one side. She moved on, hearing its kin behind her coming out of hiding to sniff at their dead fellow. She was a hundred yards further along the sewer when she heard the splashing and snarling that told her they had finally realized her victim had made the transition from alpha pack leader into convenience food.
Chevron pondered on the fact that it was usually only the older ratadiles that attacked humans descending into their domain, which was because of the bloody history of this place before the Polity subsumed it. The creatures had grown used to a regular diet of those who had earned the displeasure of the city governors. That was how humans lived when there wasn’t an AI about to show them what to do.
Three more attacks from ratadiles ensued before Chevron grew bored with this game and turned on her chameleonware. Anyway, sections of the sewer wall here were low-friction plasticrete, or tunnel compression-glass baked out of the surrounding sandy soil by the machines that had bored the tunnels, which meant she was now entering the area of sewers repaired and strengthened to withstand the weight of the runcible complex above. With her visual acuity now set at maximum and special scanning programs running, she soon began to spot the occasional sensor the size of a pinhead and one or two old-style holocams like metal fingers suspended in small gimbals hanging from the ceiling. Here and there ran ducts for optics and superconducting cables, also the occasional pipe for water or liquid hydrogen, through which ran lines of old S-con that required cooling — a past solution for supplying fuel and electricity from the same source.
Soon Chevron arrived at a point where the remnants of the old sewers ended. At the juncture of five old tunnels stood a cylindrical chamber with walls of plasticrete. Numerous sensors were mounted here, and from the ceiling depended a saucer-shaped security drone whose purpose, doubtless, was to keep vermin from crawling into the numerous shiny pipes that debouched here.
Chevron studied a row of six of them protruding from the wall. Fresh clean water was pouring from three, but luckily not from the one she required. No raw sewage made it out of the runcible complex, even though thousands of humans passed through there. All of it was processed by engineered bacteria, dried, and then transported out in compacted blocks to be used as fertilizer by the agricultural concerns of this same world. A small proportion of the water removed from that waste was purified and fed into fusion plants, or recycled, but since this was such a busy complex, there was always an excess, and this was where it drained away.
Chevron walked over to the pipe she wanted and knew that now was the time to really set things in motion. She opened a channel to her ship, where it was sitting underneath the ocean some two hundred miles away from her. The vessel’s machines had now made twenty-eight thermonuclear imploders — one more than required — and was right now detaching from the mycelium that penetrated down through the seabed below it. She gave it further instructions and watched as the quarter-mile-long grub of a vessel shook off years of detritus and begin to drift towards the surface of the orange sea. Once Chevron was in position, she wanted the ship in position too, and as fast as possible. There was no telling how quickly other Polity resources might respond to her attack.