19

Modification Status Report:

Pain inside. The boy grows at a phenomenal rate and the early scans show that his growth is optimal. I feel his carapace hard in my womb when he moves, and twice already he has interfaced through my spinal cord. Watching Amanita build her machines, the stunted tendrils moving on her face, I wonder what the relationship between the two of them will be. Will they be friends? Will he consider her his inferior, even though it was only through studying her that I was able to achieve him? Her mind is complex and quite evidently her intelligence is high, but she is very much a human girl. When he interfaced with me I glimpsed a mind equally as complex, but frighteningly alien. But my reaction I put down to my hormonal imbalance. I should not fear this perfection I have achieved.

Sauros, a metallic sphere drawing a tail of bright energy between grey and black surfaces—inverted through vorpal vision, it was poised in the flaw of a vast gem, infinite surfaces falling away from it, while it was supported by a fountain of energy and cut by the surfaces of a hypersphere. But Goron did not need this second view to know they were heading into deep shit. Like a bullet reaching the end of its ballistic arc, the great city was now ploughing down into the midnight sea in which awaited the organic Mandelbrot patterns of endless layers of beast.

‘We’ll have no fields! It’ll tear us apart!’ That was Theldon, playing his hands over his console like a virtuoso finding he has gone deaf.

‘All weapons systems are still enabled. We’re getting no energy loss there. I am reading organic mass on the other side.’ Silleck: grim, determined, fatalistic.

‘Put tactical nukes out ahead of us—as close as you dare. Have them detonate on the other side of the interface,’ Goron instructed, which was about the only instruction he could give in the circumstances, though he knew they were flea-biting an elephant.

The real world rolled in around them, distorted over hyper-surfaces. The triple flash of detonation momentarily blackened all screens, and Sauros resettled, groaning, to its bones in the midst of a firestorm.

‘Incursion right inside us!’ Silleck yelled, before even Theldon, who was supposed to be searching for such, could yell a warning.

Goron called up a view, into the abutment chamber, and saw the huge flaw opening and the defence rafts moving in to attack. He saw a feeding mouth come out, like a gargantuan striking cobra, and slam itself closed on the stern of one raft, before the second raft opened fire and severed the neck. But then another mouth hurtled out, then another… then a second incursion began to open.

‘Bastard! It was local fauna—we got nothing!’ Theldon’s hands were now motionless on his console.

Goron called up an external view, while with one eye he continued watching the battle in the abutment chamber. His people were dying in there, all due to him. Outside he observed a macabre landscape of seared dinosaur fauna. The torbeast had driven these creatures ahead of it to take the brunt of Sauros’s first defensive measures. Goron did not like the intelligence that revealed. Beyond the carnage he saw a line of incursions closing in.

‘Hit them with everything we’ve got,’ he instructed.

‘All of them?’ Silleck asked. ‘They are all around us.’

More views, and Goron observed the ring as it closed.

‘Do what you can,’ he said, now operating controls that had been set in the control pillar ever since Sauros had been built, but had never been used. Now he watched missiles hammering out from the city, hitting the incursions—some of those nacreous whirlwinds collapsing, but always others moving into their place.

‘We’ve lost it, we’ve fucking lost it!’ Theldon protested, turning from his console and staring at Goron.

Goron gestured to the rear of the chamber. ‘Get to the displacement generator. It’s set to drop us ten kilometres away, which should put us outside the beast’s immediate reach. I doubt it’s much interested in us, anyway—there’s a bigger prize at the other end of the tunnel.’

‘OK,’ said Theldon, turning back to his console.

In a flash Goron understood why Silleck had picked up on that first incursion before Theldon had. Quickly he shifted virtual controls and saw that somehow Theldon had gained access, through equipment made for external and internal monitoring and some adjustment of internal systems, to the abutment controls. Using yet another control protocol he had never revealed to anyone but Palleque, the Engineer shut off Theldon’s console.

Theldon turned. ‘Maybe, if we—’

‘Nothing we can do,’ Goron interrupted, his face expressionless. ‘We blow the abutments and New London goes anyway. Get out of here.’

Theldon turned back to his console, stared at it for a moment, then slapping his hands against it, stood and, without meeting Goron’s gaze, headed for the generator. Goron watched the displacement sphere flick the man away from Sauros. Blowing the abutments would certainly close the mouth of the wormhole and prevent the beast reaching New London, and just as certainly the feedback energy, and that projected from the sun tap, would fry the city. Goron returned his attention to more exigent concerns now the man was gone.

‘This is Engineer Goron,’ he said over the public address system. ‘All personnel head for your nearest displacement generator and get out of here. We have lost Sauros.’

He saw that many were not responding to his order. Some were fighting feeding mouths that were shooting up like trains from the corridors leading into the abutment chamber. Others seemed to be doing nothing at all, perhaps preferring to die with their city.

‘This is Engineer Goron. I am now leaving this city. You must all come with me.’

This finally motivated many to head for the generator points. But, just then, most of them were thrown off their feet as the city lurched.

‘What the hell was that?’

‘I can’t keep them out!’ from Silleck.

An outside view showed Goron a wide-open incursion in which atomic fires burned and were swamped by the roll of megatonnes of flesh. From this extended the neck of a giant feeding mouth that was now chewing on the city wall. Lasers burnt grooves in it, and missiles blew away chunks of it the size of houses. Its neck broke then separated, the mouth end attached to the city crashing down and by its sheer weight causing Sauros to tilt. But then another of the giants hammered in from the other side of the city.

‘Put a tactical into it,’ Goron suggested, knowing Silleck’s answer even as he spoke.

‘I can’t—we’ve got nothing left.’

‘This is Engineer Goron. Everybody get out—get out now! This order includes all technicians vorpally interfaced. You must abandon this place. It is not worth your lives!’

‘Silleck,’ he said in quieter tones, ‘that means you too.’

A display on the control pillar informed him that at least this latest order was being generally obeyed. The other controls there, having gone through their detachment sequence some minutes before, had freed a section of the pillar. He pulled the section away and stepped back, holding a control sphere and viewing sphere with all the vorpal tech that connected them together. Tucking under his arm this item, which looked like the severed head of a huge praying mantis fashioned of glass, he turned towards where the displacement generator was located. Then he heard the crashing hiss of monstrous progress coming up the lift shaft. Looking to those still trying to separate from their vorpal interfaces, he knew there was just no time left.

‘Silleck…’ he said, but could not go on. Abruptly he turned towards the generator.

The sphere enclosed him instantly, flicked him out between nightmare incursions and deposited him on a denuded mountainside, along with many other citizens of the place he had ruled. He spotted Palleque walking towards him, the other escapees too shocked to even feel motivated to attack the man. When Palleque reached him, both he and Goron turned to look back at the city.