Flight of the Vajra (74 page)

Cioran: —
I imagine that goes for more than just
me now!

Me: —
Listen. if I were you, I’d keep yourself
ensconced in whatever IPS-approved panic room Kallhander and his merry man have
you squirreled away in. Everything Mylène a/k/a Marius fed us was most likely a
crock. That said . . . if everything is not in too many pieces by
sunup tomorrow, and we haven’t been torn too many new orifices by Lord Nancelares
or whatever title he prepends in front of his name, I have the feeling a lot of
people will be only too happy to have a concert to take their mind off things.

Enid: —
And you’ve got me in there with you as
well. That hasn’t changed!

Cioran: —
A pleasure to know some things will
endure!

Enid:
—Well, as soon as I get one of my props
back, that is.

That was the way the two of them thought about
everything, I thought. With them it’s always
when
and not
if.

I watched as Enid and Cioran (she was now sharing
their CL space with me) exchanged a fierce hug. They can’t come out and say it,
but they know the stakes are now very high. Better to say it this way.

A contingency plan or three would stand us all in
good stead, I told myself, but one look at the feeds told me otherwise. Planetwide
flight control had grounded all traffic long before we’d ever gotten to the
Vajra
.
Even terrestrial air was shut down, and they’d been closing roads to everything
but IPS ground vehicles ever since our own car had flipped over. The only place
we could conceivably go was into the ocean—assuming we could even get out of
dock, which of course we couldn’t thanks the dock itself being completely
enclosed. And they probably had the water scoped out, too; and if they didn’t,
they had damn well better do it. IPS would still have all its mobile units and
individual forces, but until they got the power back on they’d be a bit
hamstrung.

At T minus two minutes Ioné entered the cabin and
put Enid’s p-knife on the panel next to her.

“I thought you said you were going to err on the
side of caution,” I said.

Her smile was uneasy. “That was an older
definition of caution.”

Enid put the knife in the arm pocket of her suit.
She didn’t look like a kid with a toy, or even a performer with a preferred
prop; she looked a child soldier. Not an image I wanted associated with her.

At T minus one minute I lost the IPS link—they
went dark early to sanitize their own communications systems—and felt
Angharad’s hand cover mine. She had seated herself between Enid and I, and I
watched as her lips moved silently.

At thirty seconds I heard Ioné’s main armament
clicking as it came online. At twenty seconds, I CLed the gunvest to arm itself
and give me a 360° tactical of both the inside and outside of the ship based on
all the available sensory surfaces. The surfaces in the docking bay itself were
already going offline; the ship was my only eyes and ears now.

“At least we won’t be out for more than, what, a
couple of minutes?” Enid said. She undid the seal on her arm pocket flap,
re-did it, undid it again.

“If even that,” Ioné said.

“I probably should have doped out a gun for you
while I was at it,” I said to Enid.

Enid shook her head. “I hate guns.”

I guess you know that now after having experience
with one, I thought. Even if only indirectly.

Angharad’s mouth moved to form words I knew well:
In
the mirror of Creation, I see myself reflected in all things. For all things,
they are also reflected in me—

At four seconds, the deck vibrated like a
drumhead. I saw nothing outside, just bare curved walls—walls that were shaking
once every couple of seconds now, even if only just enough to register on the seismograph
surface: 0.04 . . . 0.07 . . . 0.15 . . . 0.21
. . . 0.8 . . .

“Angharad,” I said, “get into the vault.”

She lifted her hands from mine at the exact moment
a jagged rupture shot across the wall of the docking bay, where it met the
floor. By the time she was lowering herself into the hole in the floor, a hole
of at least that same size burst open in the docking bay wall. Chunks of
protocrete bashed into the hull; cracks shot across the floor of the bay.

“Keep your seatbelts on!” I shouted over my
shoulder, as I ran upstairs and hurled myself through the deadlight that irised
open at the top of the ship. I could have CLed, but I needed to shout with my
own mouth.

I didn’t have to go very far outside
.
All I had to do was squat on the hull, just high enough to draw a bead on
whatever it was that was squirming in the hole in the far wall of the docking
bay. Thanks to the sensory surfaces in the ship I had a full panorama of the
outside and the inside. At the very least an ambush would be difficult—where
could we be ambushed
from
that wasn’t somewhere in my field of vision?

Down below I saw Ioné and Enid stand right on top
of the floor vault door (which had melded shut and was now just a part of the
deck) as they put their backs against each other. Enid gripped the p-knife in
both hands and tugged at it in opposite directions, like she had found Dad’s
antique fountain pen and was tugging the cap off. The p-knife gave off a whole
farrago of tiny but resonant pingings and clickings, and then I head the faint sound
of Type C “metal” scything against itself as the knife slid apart into two sub-tools.
Each knife flicked and squirmed between her fingers, both finally settling on becoming
a pair of blades barely big enough to whittle with. Maybe she knows how to get
something out of them that I don’t know, I thought. I once again regretted not
extruding a gun for her and all but tying it into her hand.

Something was squirming in the hole in the wall.
No, a whole riot of multi-jointed somethings, all intertwined like greasy white
cables. Each was about a meter long and as thick around as both of my legs
together, segmented and ribbed, glistening with heavily overlapped scales the whiteness
and reflectivity of a wet titanium oxide laminate. When they weren’t squirming
around each other and extending each other’s lengths and girths, they were
scaling the walls with spiky, black, hard-edged little legs that either found
or created crevices to climb with. Each alone could move with the sinewy grace
of a greyhound or a cheetah, which they used to bound individually across the
floor right at us, very, very fast.

One of the nice things about a gunvest is how
little waste there is. All you have to do is look at a few of the things you
want to shoot, think at the gunvest about the properties of those things, and
everything that resembles what you were thinking about is auto-targeted. The
first dozen rounds pounded out in the space of a couple of seconds, reducing
the squirmers (I had no better word for them) nearest me to slivers of Type C
tinsel and gobbets of Type D pseudo-musculature. Some of them took a hit,
subdivided, and pressed on even closer: they weren’t single squirmers, but
several of them braided together into a single fat white rope. Some of those
composite squirmers took my bullets face-on and only lost the first few
segments of their bodies. They made a sound like the slithering and switching
of a thousand of Enid’s p-knives.

If we just shoot them, I thought, we’ll hold our
own, but that’s about it. And it won’t last.

I polled the
Vajra
’s protomic stores. Not
much of anything left. Instead of blasting away, I thought, I should figure out
how to plug that hole. I could have tried firing into it to maybe drill through
to the adjoining bay, but last I remembered the walls in these bays were meters
thick at their thinnest points and the ammo was best used for saving our necks.
I was also grateful I hadn’t done something like tinker with the hull to allow
weapons to be extruded straight out through it—it would have taken too long to
do that just now, and it might well have created structural defects that I
wouldn’t have been able to repair without access to a whole reservoir of
substrate.

That’s when I realized where all the little slaggers
were coming from.

The reservoirs
, I thought. Not just the
ones dozens of meters below the floor of the docking bays, but every single one
throughout the city big enough to do the job. Marius had probably squirreled
away rogue manufaxture stations
inside
the reservoirs themselves for
weeks or months now, and he’d used Mylène’s access controls to conceal their
presence—
and
lie about how much substrate was being used up, too, so
his/her departmental budget audits wouldn’t raise eyebrows. Even if the
reservoirs were drained now, who knew how many of those things had already been
instantiated and were just sitting around waiting for a deadman command. And of
course no one had thought to drain them anyway, because that would have just
crippled us all the more.

—
Ioné, batten down. I’m going to turn on the
repulsor field.

Taking a page from Arsèni’s book, are we? I told
myself.

—Henré, no,
Ioné CLed back
. These walls
are built to withstand a repulsor discharge from a ship with at least four
times the output of this one. If you do that in a space this confined, you
could end up collapsing the ship and killing us all anyway.

And even if I did bust through, I thought, there
was the chance something else might be
above
us, and we’d either be
crushed or end up killing someone else.

—
Then get hold of traffic control,
I CLed
.
Tell them to get these bay doors open, or we’re going to be gobbled up. And get
a message out to IPS. Tell them the reservoirs have all been compromised. And
have them send over whoever they can spare!

—
I haven’t been able to get a response from anything
for some time now, Henré. None of the control or input surfaces for the entire docking
bay appear to be online. I think those . . .
things
are
jamming both the mesh and local networks. I’m looking for a mechanical
override; there’s usually one that can be worked from either the outside or inside.

—
If you can’t find anything in the next minute
I’m going to use what we have to patch that hole. And while you’re at it, get
up here. I could use another gun.

She was out through the deadlight in the next
couple of seconds, and fired a round from her main armament into the protocrete
of the ceiling just over the hole. The blast dropped a chunk of the stuff into
the hole—which was bulldozed out of the way seconds later by yet another
four-ply squirmer. I was smart enough by then not to try and shoot down that
thing’s throat, but it still sent a whole bushel of its little offspring right
up to the landing gear. The two of us were barely firepower enough to keep them
off the hull.

—
Found it,
Ioné CLed.
There’s a manual
service port on the starboard side of the ship, against the near wall.

—
Wait—that little niche thing?

—That’s right; it goes back a ways. Inside
there’s a standard D5 winch plug, so all we have to do is put a driver bit
attachment on the end of the ship’s service coupling and stick it in there.

—Normally I’d do that remotely, but if one of
those things gets near a remote umbilicus it they’ll snip it in half. Can you
keep them busy for me long enough to plug it in?

—I don’t think so, Henré. This is at least a
two-gun job.

—Enid? Did you get all that?

—I most definitely did,
Enid CLed. Through
her eyes I saw her standby-sheathe her two p-knife blades into her forearm
pockets, then run down towards the little cargo-hold entrance I was already
remote-opening for her and pointing her towards. I really, really should have
given her a gun, I thought, but she hurtled herself through the service little
doorway with such ease that I wondered if those squirmers would even be able to
draw a bead on her. I fed Enid the same 720-degree panorama I was getting from
the outside, so she didn’t wind up sliding right into some critter’s lap.

A third wave of them began to spew out of the hole
just as Enid ejected herself through the bottom of the hull with the service
coupling slung over her shoulder—a plug of metal about twice the size of an
adult fist, with a cable leading out behind it as thick around as her arm. It
carried everything from substrate to plain old electricity, and the end of it
could sport all kinds of attachments. From what she’d fed me, Enid had snagged
the D5 winch from the rack next to it, collared the cable in her armpit and
snapped the attachment onto the end of it with one good twist.

Ioné and I laid down as much covering fire as we
could—which, between the two of us, turned out to be a lot—while Enid ran the
cable over to the socket in the wall and shoved it in. I started the winch up,
and from somewhere, under the gunfire, both Enid and I felt and heard machinery
mesh with itself and begin to move.

The far door moved a meter or so—and froze. The
floor and walls shook.

Ioné: —
They’ve found their way into the door
mechanism. I think they’ve jammed it from within.

Me: —
Enid, get back inside!

Enid turned and saw one of the squirmers under the
Vajra
, shoving itself up against the bottom of the hull. The end pressed
against the ship had peeled open like an omnivorous flower, and inside we could
briefly see more of the things that looked like legs but which I was sure now
did a lot more than just locomote. The entire end of the squirmer began to
spin, sawing a circle into the hull and littering the floor of the landing bay
with a shower of protomic tinsel.

I didn’t even have time to shout at Enid a second
time. She yanked one of the halves of the p-knife out of her shoulder pocket,
and from the tugging between her hand and her shoulder I realized the p-knife
was now attached to a flexible power lead. The pocket doubled as a charging
dock for her suit, which had batteries an order of magnitude or so bigger than
whatever the p-knife itself could contain.

She flung her hand outwards and sent the p-knife
spearing between two of the plates on the squirmer’s side closest to the scolex
it was drilling with.

A split second later there was a
snap
and a
dozen different burning smells. The squirmer’s mouth-petals peeled open so far
it doubled back against its own skin, and it fell to the ground with its scales
flaring, then curling like dead flower petals. Enid gave the cable a sharp tug
and snapped the p-knife back into her hand.

Okay, I thought, so maybe she does just fine
without a gun.

Ioné and I barely managed to blast apart another squirmer,
right before it dragged away the dead one and presumably picked up where it had
left off.

—
That thing was going to drill right into the
vault where Angharad is
, Enid CLed as she retreated back into the ship
through the service panel.
I looked at the seven-twenty you sent me. That’s
the shortest distance through the hull to her.

A toss-up whether they’re trying to kill her or
take hostages, I thought.

Something rumbled. The cracks from the edges of
the hole in the corner were now infesting the ceiling.

WARNING: HULL INTEGRITY!
Oh, beautiful
, I
wanted to shout at the alarm the
Vajra
was currently shooting through my
skull. Evidently those few seconds of drilling on the skin of the ship had done
enough damage to make using the repulsor field a very bad idea. The field
depended on the conductive layer in the hull being all of a piece, and the
squirmer had apparently sawed deep enough to breach it. Repairing it would take
both time and substrate we didn’t have right now.

The
Vajra
couldn’t tell me definitively if a
hull breach of that size and shape would make the repulsor field useless or
just very, very wobbly. My gut told me it would be wobbly, and that wobbly was
better than nothing.

—
Ioné,
I CLed,
if we don’t turn the
field on, we’re either going to be crushed from the top or eaten alive from
underneath. You’ve got five seconds to give me a better plan before I go
through the hole that’s about to open up above us.

The cracks parted and rained protocrete dust down
on the hull. All of the floor near the hole in the wall was now paved with
squirming white scales.

—
Use your plan!
Ioné CLed at me as she dove
below through the deadlight.

I fired a few more parting shots in the carpet of
squirmers before following suit.

The deadlight never finished irising shut. A whole
bevy of legs that resembled a giant’s overgrown albino nose hair shoved
themselves in around the edges of the iris and tore out its leaves. I fired
back up at it, hitting something again and again, but all the same I saw and
felt at least one long pale thing slither straight past me and into the cabin.

Something heavy hit the hull, then something
heavier. Pieces of the ceiling were peeling loose, one of them landing (to my
grim satisfaction) square on the head of the biggest of the squirmer-colonies
lumping its way towards the
Vajra
.

Field on, I thought. Liftoff. Straight up and out.

I’d once seen
a scale demonstration of
what happens to a ship when there’s incomplete coverage in a repulsor field’s
conduction layer. It’s like someone blowing fire into a house through a broken
window, or down the chimney. A whole funnel of charged plasma ends up
back-flashing in through the breach, wherever it may be.

If you’re lucky, you end up with nothing more than
some cooked bulkheads. If you’re unlucky, your ship’s baked like a yam under a pile
of burning leaves.

I’ve never been a believer in letting luck bail me
out, so I threw myself out of the way of the plasma that spewed out of the
deadlight and triggered the cylindrical pressure door that sealed off the whole
accessway. It kept the fire from spewing into the main cabin—although the
Vajra
was still reporting a pressure breach in the bulkhead between the hull and the
safe . . . which would mean the safe would heat up like an oven.
So
either she gets roasted in there or chewed up out here by those things—