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‘Here, now!’ Thorn shouted, holding his platform in position. Scar opened fire on substructure spiralling out of the wall towards them. Thorn saw the impaled dracoman being lifted, struggling, up into the air. A shot from one side cut that tendril at floor level. The dracoman dropped and, as if wrestling with a snake, pulled it from his body and was up and ru
As Thorn slowed the platform to weave his way between the twisted ceramal beams, two humans leaped aboard. Pulse-gun fire into Scar’s stomach, the other one wielding a jag of metal like a sword. Instant reaction: the man with the pulse-gun hurled straight over the side, the other opened neck to crotch with his own weapon—close combat with dracomen being worse than the kind engaged at a distance. Thorn glimpsed the second man slumping back against the rail, his gaping torso fast closing and filling up with pinkish growth, bloodless, before a couple of dracomen hauled him up and flung him over the side. Neither of the humans had uttered a sound.
Out into the particle-beam-cut gap, things uncoiling from the wreckage all around, still groping for the AG platform which lurched under its heavy load. Then Azroc’s forces opened up and they planed off through a cavern of fire, smoke and ash belching all around them. When finally they landed, troops quickly surrounded them, the presence of the dracomen assuring them no Jain tech had been brought across. Thorn noted how Scar showed no signs of damage, though he had taken at least three shots directly in the stomach. The dracoman penetrated by a Jain tendril stood for a while with head bowed, with two others of its kind watching it carefully. Eventually it straightened up and looked around, whereupon the other two moved off unconcerned.
‘Well, that went well,’ said Thorn. What a complete and dangerous waste of time.
Just then, Jack’s voice issued from his comlink.
‘I have just received a signal which, knowing its source, I handled with some caution…The hunter-killer program is in, and it is searching for Thellant N’komo.’
Thorn whistled, gri
Two big transports were down—titanic landers resembling the inverted hulls of ocean liners—a third still hovered in the sky, casting a massive shadow. Thorn sca
To one side a line of AG platforms and grav-transports flowed like train carriages. These contained the injured, and those wearing Dracocorp augs who were now stu
‘What are the figures now?’ Thorn lowered the monocular.
Via Thorn’s comlink, Jack replied, ‘Coloron informs me that the runcibles here have been kept open-port to the Isostations for a week. Capacity sixty thousand every hour, but it rarely reaches that. Eight million in that first week. Runcible technicians have moved fast to set up another five runcibles on a less populated world undergoing terraforming. The population there is low, about ten million. Earth Central made the calculation that risking ten million lives there, it might save many more from here. EC is also opening up more of the big shipyards to turn into Isostations and Coloron has brought three more runcibles online here. Nearly twenty million via that route thus far.’
‘What about that liner?’Thorn enquired.
‘The Brita
‘Spit in a rainstorm,’ muttered Thorn, watching one of the landers launch. Just contemplating the figures involved was nightmarish. In two weeks the AI had managed to move off-planet only two per cent of MA’s billion population. One per cent a week at the present rate. Two solstan years minimum, to accommodate them all working on that basis, it was hopeless. ‘Anything else?’
‘Other ships are arriving, including a dreadnought within a few days. This means a wider area can be covered by orbital weapons. Coloron has extended the perimeter, as you can probably see from where you stand. That reduces the evacuation time here, considerably. Had we two weeks to spare, we could get most inhabitants clear of the arcology.’
‘How long do we have?’ Thorn asked.
With a cold exactitude, Jack replied, ‘Being optimistic: one week. By then the Jain substructure will have spread throughout the entire arcology, but it will reach the runcibles before then. And before then it’ll be subsuming those still remaining inside.’
Letting his monocular hang by its strap around his neck, Thorn gripped the rail tight. He felt sick. As a Sparkind trooper on Samarkand he had witnessed the results of a catastrophe in which 30,000 died. On Masada and its surrounding cylinder worlds, and in Elysium, that figure rose to a million. Here, already, the estimated number of deaths exceeded 100,000. A week? Maybe another 10 million through the runcibles, and maybe half the surviving population safely outside the arcology. What then? Thorn’s problem was that he knew precisely ‘what then’. The moment Jain tech got close to the runcibles, they would be blown. At some point Coloron or Earth Central would declare the risk of Jain tech spreading planetwide too high. The calculation would probably be made to a hundred decimal places. Then MA would be incinerated down to the bedrock. Unless the projection changed drastically, there would still be half a billion people remaining inside. The magnitude of it was unbearable.
‘Still nothing from the HK?’
‘No, nothing at all.’
The sun was shrouded in the cloud generated by the titanic destruction of the Cassius gas giant, though that fug occasionally revealed drifting structures, glittering scaffolds of pseudomatter, immense space stations and swarms of vessels—all evidence of the massive million-year construction project taking place here. The ship surfaced from U-space one astronomical unit out, and travelling at three quarters the speed of light, it used ramscoop to decelerate: opening out orange wings radiating from the abundant hydrogen being dragged in around it, soon followed by the sun-bright ignition of a fusion drive. This vessel bore none of the sleek lines of other Polity ships, seeming more like some ancient vehicle’s engine block, greatly enlarged and transported out into space. It was in fact mostly engine: a leviathan tugboat for hauling moon-sized masses. The arrival of such a ship here at the Cassius project being a common occurrence, it was merely noted by the humans, haimans and AIs directly concerned with it, and slotted into the vast calculation of construction as a nail might be slotted into a similar calculation for a house. Just a few noted, and dismissed, the slight discrepancy between ship and U-space field. Fewer still observed the other object that came through with it and rapidly veered away from its course: it was too small, too inconsequential seeming in a project of this scale.