Deprez slammed to a halt in the shadow of the entrance we’d come through, eye bent to the sighting system of his weapon. The barrage of covering fire he laid down boiled up and down the edges of Schneider’s ambush point and—I narrowed my eyes—did absolutely no damage to the material of the exitway. Jiang rolled under the strafing beam and got a narrower angle on the corridor beyond. He fired once, squinted into the glare and shook his head.
“Gone,” he said, climbing to his feet and offering me his hand.
“I, uh, I, thanks.” I got upright. “Thanks for the push.”
He nodded curtly, and loped off across the chamber. Deprez clapped me on the shoulder and followed. I shook my head clear and went after them. At the exitway I pressed my hand against the edge where Deprez had fired. It wasn’t even warm.
The induction rig speaker fizzled against my throat. Hand’s voice came through in static-chewed incoherence. Jiang froze ahead of us, head cocked.
“…vacs, an… me—… ow.—peat, re… ow…”
“Say. Again?” Jiang, spacing his words.
“—saiiii…—port no…—”
Jiang looked back at me. I made a chopping gesture and knocked my own rig loose. Finger stab forward. The ninja unlocked his posture and moved on, fluid as a Total Body dancer. Somewhat less graceful, we went after him.
What lead Schneider had on us had lengthened. We were moving more slowly now, edging up to entrances and exits in approved covert assault fashion. Twice we picked up movement ahead of us and had to creep forward, only to find another wakened machine ambling about the empty chambers chuntering to itself. One of them followed us for a while like a stray dog in search of a master.
Two chambers out from the docking bay, we heard the Nagini’s drives powering up. The covert assault caution shattered. I broke into a staggering sprint. Jiang passed me, then Deprez. Trying to keep up, I doubled over, cramping and retching, halfway across the last chamber. Deprez and the ninja were twenty metres ahead of me when they ducked around the entrance to the bay. I wiped a thin string of bile away from my mouth and straightened up.
A shrilling, ramming, detonating scream, like brakes applied fleetingly to the whole expanding universe.
The Nagini’s ultravibe battery firing in a confined space.
I dropped the Sunjet, had both hands halfway to my ears and the pulse stopped as abruptly as it had started. Deprez staggered back into view, painted bloody from head to foot, Sunjet gone. Behind him, the whine of the Nagini’s drives deepened to a roar as Schneider powered her up and out. A bang of disrupted air at the atmosphere baffles, barrelling back down the funnel of the docking bay and buffeting my face like a warm wind. Then nothing. Aching silence, tautened with the high-pitched hum of abused hearing trying to deal with the sudden absence of noise.
In the whining quiet, I groped after my Sunjet and made it to where Deprez was slumped on the floor, back to the curving wall. He was staring numbly at his hands and the gore that coated them. His face was streaked red and black with the same stuff. Under the blood, his chameleochrome battledress was already turning to match.
I made a sound and he looked up.
“Jiang?”
“This.” He lifted his hands towards me, and his features twisted momentarily, like the face of a baby not sure if it’s going to cry. The words came one at a time, as if he was having to stop and glue them together. “Is. Jiang. This is.” His fists knotted up. “Fuck.”
At my throat, the induction rig fizzled impotently. Across the chamber, a machine moved and sniggered at us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A Man Down is not a Man Dead. Leave No Stack Behind.
Most tight spec ops units like to sing that particular song; the Envoy Corps certainly did. But in the face of modern weaponry it’s getting harder and harder to sing it with a straight face. The ultravibe cannon had splashed Jiang Jianping evenly across ten square metres of docking bay deck and containing wall. None of the shredded and shattered tissue was any more solid than the stuff dripping off Luc Deprez. We walked back and forth through it for a while, scraping streaks in it with our boots, crouching to check tiny black clots of gore, but we found nothing.
After ten minutes, Deprez said it for us both.
“We are wasting our time, I think.”
“Yeah.” I lifted my head as something belled through the hull beneath our feet. “I think Vongsavath was right. We’re taking fire.”
“We go back?”
I remembered the induction rig and hooked it back on. Whoever had been yelling at us previously had given up; there was nothing on the channel but interference and a weird sobbing that might have been a carrier wave.
“This is Kovacs. Repeat, this is Kovacs. Status please.”
There was a long pause, then Sutjiadi’s voice crashed in the mike.
“—pened?—e…—aw… launch. Schnei—…—ay?”
“You’re breaking up, Markus. Status please. Are we under attack?”
There was a burst of distortion and what sounded like two or three voices trying to break in over Sutjiadi. I waited.
Finally, it was Tanya Wardani that came through, almost clear.
“…—ack here,…—acs…—afe. We…—ny,…—ger.—peat, no… da…—ger.”
The hull sang out again, like a struck temple gong. I looked dubiously down at the deck beneath my feet.
“Safe, did you say?”
“—essss…—o dang—…—ack immedi—…—afe.—peat, safe.”
I looked at Deprez and shrugged.
“Must be a new definition of the word.”
“Then we go back?”
I looked around, up at the stacked snake-body tiers of the docking bay, then back at his gore-painted face. Decided.
“Looks that way.” I shrugged again. “It’s Wardani’s turf. She hasn’t been wrong yet.”
Back on the platform, the Martian datasystems had settled to a brilliant constellation of purpose, while the humans stood beneath it all and gaped like worshippers getting an unexpected miracle.
It wasn’t hard to see why.
An array of screens and displays was stitched across the space around the central structure. Some were obvious analogues of any dreadnought’s battle systems, some defied comparison with anything I’d ever seen. Modern combat gives you a familiarity with compound datadisplay, an ability to glean the detail you need from a dozen different screens and readouts at speed and without conscious thought. Envoy Corps conditioning refines the skill even further, but in the massive radiant geometries of the Martian datasystem, I could feel myself floundering. Here and there, I spotted comprehensible input, images that I could relate back to what I knew was happening in the space around us, but even amongst these elements there were chunks missing where the screens gave out frequencies for unhuman eyes. Elsewhere, I couldn’t have told if the displays were complete, defective or totally fried.
Of the identifiable dataware, I spotted real-time visual telemetry, multi-coloured spectrograph sketches, trajectory mappers and battle dynamic analytical models, blast yield monitors and graphic magazine inventory, something that might have been grav gradient notation…
Centre screen in every second display, the attacker came on.
Skating down the curve of solar gravity at a rakish side-on angle, she was a slim, surgical-looking fusion of rods and elliptical curves that screamed warship. Hard on the heels of the thought, the proof dumped itself in my lap. On a screen that did not show real space, weaponry winked at us across the emptiness. Outside the dome, the shields our host had thrown up shimmered and fluoresced. The ship’s hull shuddered underfoot.
Meaning…
I felt my mind dilate as I got it.
“Don’t know what those are,” said Sun conversationally, as I arrived at her side. She seemed entranced by what she was watching. “Faster-than-light weaponry at any rate; she’s got to be nearly an astronomical unit out and we’re getting hit instantaneously every time. They don’t seem to do much damage, though.”