Via his gridlink, Cormac watched the beam of photonic matter spring into existence. Orlandine had made no adjustments for C-energy, and what was spewing from the warp of this war runcible was about as bad as it could get. He saw it strike the surface of Erebus’s planetoid and only then did he appreciate the scale of the target, for the beam, though miles across, speared the mass of wormships and Jain-tech like a pencil stabbing into an orange. At the point of impact a circular shock wave spread and wrapped around the orb, blasting a haze of fragments out into space. This was quickly followed by a spreading firestorm. Surely this was not enough, for the target remained complete. Then a massive, expanding, glowing cloud threw the planetoid into silhouette, and he realized that, like a bullet striking flesh, the entry wound wasn’t the biggest hole.
The beam now played back and forth across the face of Erebus, throwing out plumes of incandescent gas like the blaze from a cutting torch. Then it seemed as if the planetoid was pouring out smoke, but this smoke spread unnaturally and began settling into a disc. A close-up view showed it consisted of thousands of rod-forms. The planetoid rolled, exposing its hollowed-out rear, now burning arc-bright. The beam continued to play over it as what remained came rapidly apart, continent-sized chunks of matter spread, began to deform and then write lines of darkness across space, as if dissolving in a solvent. Orlandine kept the beam moving here and there, trying to target as much as possible, but it seemed she could not move it quickly enough, and her weapon was too blunt an instrument now.
Cormac again accessed a magnified view and was greeted with the sight, amid the burning wreckage and coral detritus, of a multitude of wormships now accelerating towards the war runcible. Erebus had taken a severe blow, but seemingly not a fatal one.
Rumbling under Cormac’s feet. Now the other weaponry of the war runcible was firing up. He observed missiles speeding away, one after another, heard the distant familiar scream of a rail-gun. Movement also, and it took some locating, but Cormac finally ascertained that Orlandine was closing the war runcible up again. He guessed this was something to do with maintaining the relative positions of each separate section, which would not be required with the device once again in one piece. The inertial effects of weapons fire could be rapidly compensated for, but maybe the weapon impacts, which were due, could not. The beam began to narrow till it was now hardly hitting anything at all, then abruptly it winked out. Obviously something had gone wrong at Anulus, or maybe the Heliotrope had remained in the fountain for as long as it possibly could.
Cormac unshouldered his proton carbine and gazed at it critically. The sensory data Knobbler had allowed them was now becoming corrupted, so it seemed the runcible was also under informational attack. Arach rose on his legs and tilted his head up to gaze at the glass dome above. The chaos out there was now immediately visible: a spreading cloud of radiant gas against which were silhouetted numerous black flecks. Mr Crane stood up and pocketed his toys.
‘What now, boss?’ wondered Arach.
‘Well,’ Cormac replied, ‘unless I miss my bet, we’re about to die.’
As if to emphasize this point, things began detonating close by and the runcible to shudder like a ship athwart stormy waves. Even if Cormac could have transported himself to any other point aboard, what difference would that make when the runcible was about to become a spreading cloud of gas? Where else then? Maybe he could put himself aboard one of those ships approaching, which were now intermittently flashing within the compass of his U-sense, and with luck end up in an internal space rather than inside part of the ship’s hardware, but how long would he survive aboard? He gazed across at Crane, who was now also peering up at the approaching horde. Then down at Arach again. Perhaps the thing to do would be to grab them and attempt to transport both himself and them out into vacuum. At least space was a big enough target for his wavering U-sense. His envirosuit would keep him alive for a while and, when the air began to run out, he could put his thin-gun to his head, but at least those two, not needing oxygen, might survive.
‘I think the best thing—’ he began, but the decision was taken out of his hands.
Some massive hand grabbed and roughly shook the runcible, and he felt the Skaidon warp wink out. It seemed as if grav went out briefly too, then came on again hard, but this was not actually the case. Grav was out and remained out, and the floor was lifting on some internal explosion. He realized they had been hit with a gravity disrupter weapon. All seemed to be happening in slow motion. Cormac had no memory of initiating them, but he was using cognitive programs to slow down his perception of time and to speed up his own reactions. Columns of fire soared upward and he saw the chainglass dome tumbling away like some leviathan’s discarded contact lens, and falling after it, wrapped in twisted scaffold, went Orlandine inside her interface sphere. He was slammed against one wall, then a hurricane drag took hold of him. It seemed that, whether he wanted to be there or not, he was going to end up out in hard vacuum. Then something closed about his arm and wrenched him to a halt, almost dislocating his shoulder. He peered down at the big brass hand closed around his biceps, then into the face of a brass Apollo with midnight eyes in which motes of light danced.
Heliotrope tumbled away through vacuum, its hull glowing like a chunk of metal destined for the anvil. Cutter crashed against the wall — grav was out and his joint motors were not functioning as they should, nor was his fibre optic connection to Bludgeon. The inside of the vessel was no longer full of smoke, for just about everything that would burn had burned already. The floor, walls and ceiling of the corridor were glowing, and Cutter’s internal hardware was struggling with the temperature. He reached down and caught hold of the upper edge of the entrance into the interface sphere, and hauled himself below. Irrelevantly, as he reached lower and pulled himself down beside Bludgeon, he noticed that his grip had left no marks on the metalwork. It seemed that the heat had even blunted his edges.
What had happened? It was difficult to analyse the data. Systems were collapsing throughout the ship, sensors were offline, and even the Jain-tech was struggling for survival. Some sort of surge maybe? The Skaidon warp in the cargo runcible had winked out, and the immediate ablation of its horns, which had previously been protected by the warp itself, exposed something critical within a second, then they were gone in a chain reaction. Ironically, the explosion had saved them from being incinerated by the fountain by hurling them clear.
‘Bludgeon?’
No response from the little drone.
Cutter then noticed a drop in the error messages signalled from his joint motors. Checking his internal monitors he saw that his temperature had dropped two degrees. Checking external readings, though they kept varying, he estimated an average drop of half a degree within Heliotrope. There was nothing left to evaporate, so he guessed this must be due to the ship itself radiating heat from its hull, and that the heat exchangers and thermal generators set up inside might still be working.
‘Bludgeon?’
The little drone shifted as if stirring in deep slumber. Cutter wondered if his friend had survived. Linked directly into the ship, Bludgeon would have taken the brunt of the power surge when the runcible horns blew. Certainly the inside of the sphere wasn’t looking too healthy, with its slagged fibre optics and other melted hardware.