‘Evidently.’ The reply came across flat and toneless, which meant Jerusalem was applying its processing power elsewhere and that a hastily fashioned sub-mind was now responding. But, even so, such a sub-mind probably possessed an IQ of an order of magnitude higher than Azroc’s own.
Azroc gazed from all vantage points at the model of the attack now hanging in virtual space inside his own mind. He once again modelled the Polity infrastructures beyond it — supply routes and manufacturing worlds, military bases and shipyards — but still could see no correlation. What was Erebus after?
‘Erebus hasn’t employed USERs at any point of attack,’ he noted. ‘This leaves him vulnerable to us bringing in reinforcements, but allows him to bring in reinforcements too, and thus keep his attack protean.’
Stating the obvious, Azroc thought. And his words seemed almost a prophetic commentary as those same fleets Erebus was withdrawing began to join attacks on other worlds. Azroc stared in frustration at the model he had created. Only twenty hours ago it had seemed that Erebus was preparing for ground assaults to capture about eight worlds, leaving the rest either depopulated or destroyed. Yet now some of those ground assaults were being abandoned, as were some of the other more destructive attacks. Even those wormships that had been engaged in accelerating the big asteroid towards one target world were now abandoning their position.
‘There are more wormships arriving in the Caldera system than elsewhere,’ he observed, though it seemed a trite comment to make considering the devastation there. Wormships were swarming out of U-space and hurtling down towards the twin Caldera worlds with almost careless abandon. The sun mirrors, previously used for energy generation, had now been turned into weapons and were busy frying wormship after wormship. Space in that zone was no longer black, and it seemed as if the conflict was being enacted inside a block of amber.
Azroc tried to step back from it all. What did Erebus want? Let Azroc suppose the entity wished, for whatever psychotic reasons, to either smash or take over the Polity, how would he, Azroc, achieve such an aim if he controlled the same resources? He would infiltrate the Polity, deploy his forces into critical places throughout it, and then initiate a surprise attack. Yet Erebus had done nothing of the kind. Instead it had first revealed its forces outside the Polity, giving ECS time to prepare, then at leisure had begun attacking the very periphery, even though it had the option to U-jump right inside and launch an attack there.
Azroc decided that there must be some critical piece of information still missing. He withdrew from his models and returned to utilizing ordinary human sensation and comprehension of his surroundings. The hologram at the centre of the hedron now displayed a montage of battle schematics intermixed with occasional gravity maps.
‘Any news yet from your agent about the attack on Klurhammon?’ Azroc enquired, swinging his attention across to those working at the concentric rings of consoles occupying the adjacent floor.
‘There has been no—’ The voice began in that same flat tone used by the sub-mind, then abruptly cut off. Then the real Jerusalem continued, ‘It would seem that Agent Cormac and the King of Hearts were given new orders.’
‘It would seem?’ Azroc noted that some of the personnel manning the consoles were now getting up and abandoning their posts.
‘Yes,’ said Jerusalem. ‘Apparently I myself wanted him to proceed to Ramone and there capture a legate.’
‘What?’
‘Cormac and his ship are currently down on the surface of Ramone, though details of his progress are sparse. Communications are intermittent, since encryption needs to be changed frequently by the groundside defence forces there.’
Azroc noted that those abandoning their posts had occupied an area around one particular individual. Azroc saw to his surprise that this was a Golem.
‘Now,’ said Jerusalem.
A length of console and a circular section of deck exploded into the air. At that precise moment all but the Golem threw themselves to the floor. A great ribbed pipe two metres across terminating in a massive four-fingered claw and numerous ports and lethal-looking protuberances shot out of the hole, curved over whip-fast, and slammed down on the Golem. Cryogenic gas exploded out at the contact point, as the claw closing on the Golem tore up part of the console and the metal flooring underneath. Miniature lightning flared and earthed, and there came the bright flashes of particle beams cutting within the mass. Then a glowing white explosion blasted the claw into the air, and an ensuing arc-fire melted both the Golem and everything lying within a few feet of it. The wrecked claw seemed to pause in frustrated hesitation, then retracted itself back down into the hole it had made.
‘Damn,’ said Jerusalem.
‘And precisely what happened then?’ asked Azroc.
‘I was just trying to capture one of the enemy in our camp,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘The same one who gave Cormac and the King of Hearts those false orders.’
Like the impact of a boulder falling, Azroc felt a large mass of fresh information fall suddenly within his remit.
‘I have already analysed this data for other similar false orders,’ Jerusalem explained, ‘and, oddly, it seems there have been no others issued. Yet Erebus’s agent here was in a position to cause us maximum damage by doing so. Now, see what else you can find.’
As Azroc began checking through the files and logs the enemy’s Golem agent had been using, he felt a surge of emotion, again from that point somewhere below emulation. This time, though, he recognized fear. The fact that one of Erebus’s minions had managed to penetrate here, right to the heart of the Jerusalem, told him this was a war that the Polity might actually lose.
The antigravity tank was a disc-shaped affair with a ceramal skirt below and a wide turret jutting above from which protruded twinned particle cannons. Now only one of the cannons was capable of delivering its usual destructive potential. The other had been modified so its accelerating coils could be used to propel helium superfluid doped with iron particles, a supply of which resided in two cylindrical tanks welded to the tank’s skirt. Anything hit by a jet of this stuff would be frozen solid in a second, since the fluid’s temperature was only fifty degrees above absolute zero.
‘Remember,’ said Cormac to Hubbert Smith. ‘If you get a legate in your sights, you nail it immediately.’
Smith nodded briefly and climbed the steps leading to the open hatch in one side of the tank, and then lowered himself inside. Watching him go, Cormac continued to reflect on whether this was all a complete waste of time. Yes, the superfluid would certainly freeze Jain-tech hardware, but it could not freeze electric or photonic signals, so if the legate they targeted happened to contain some sort of explosive device that could survive the freezing process there would still be nothing to prevent it sending the detonation signal. It struck him that Jerusalem was either prepared to expend personnel for minimum gain, or this mission he was about to undertake was an act of desperation, and Cormac hadn’t thought things were going so badly.
‘Three wormships landed and decohered on the surface,’ said Remes. His tone had become leaden since the destruction of the AI Ramone, the one who had brought him into being. Maybe Remes was missing his parent.
Cormac studied the aerial shots showing the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which Remes was now relaying direct to his gridlink. The segmented objects looking like organic trains that had first led the enemy attack had now withdrawn and formed defensive lines two hundred miles long. Further back, behind them, were three Jain-tech substructures like huge spiky mollusc shells bonded together with tar that seemed likely to form the cores of each wormship. The nearest one lay twenty miles straight out from their present position here at the end of the grounded atmosphere ship. And there, he hoped, he would find his legate captain.