When the Harpy was sufficiently distant from the sun, it dropped into underspace. Cormac left the cockpit and went to find the cold-sleep facilities aboard. At least there he wouldn’t dream.
Mr Crane removed his coat, folded it neatly and placed it down on the slab of basalt jutting from the foreshore. The Golem then carefully unlaced his boots and removed them too, placing them beside the coat. Last, almost reluctantly, went his hat: reverently placed on top of the folded coat, with a stone on the brim to stop it blowing away. Cormac had to sometimes wonder about the big brass Golem’s priorities. Now Crane hoisted a backpack Cormac knew to contain a heavy and dangerously unstable power supply. This was in turn linked by a superconducting cable to a weapon cobbled together out of six proton carbines. It seemed an appropriately massive and lethal device for its bearer.
Cormac turned his attention from the Golem and gazed up at the sky, trying to remember how many years had passed since he had seen that shade of blue but could not quite recollect when last he was here. Certainly there had not been so much traffic up there then, for now the sky was filled from horizon to horizon with lines of gravcars, monolithic atmosphere ships and other free-floating structures he would have felt more comfortable about had they been down on the ground. Tiredly he lowered his gaze to that gleaming cube of ceramal, over a mile and a half along each side, windowless and planted on the shore of Lake Geneva.
Earth Central.
He contemplated that place for a long moment, briefly skimming his U-sense inside, then turned his attention to the lake and noted that the massive weapons on the bed of it remained somnolent, nor was there any sign of activity from those other things buried in the rock of the mountains hedging in this little cove. Thus far the draconic virus Crane had used against the security systems in this area remained undiscovered, but such a breathing space would not last. So heavily layered was the security for miles around that they could not go unnoticed for long. Now he returned his attention to the big building itself, to locate his target.
He stared hard at the vessel that contained the ruler of the Polity, extending and focusing his U-sense within it. Thousands of humans, haimen and AIs worked in the complexes situated in the outer skin of this huge building, but he peered through them to the core where AI Earth Central itself squatted. The intensity of his focus revealed precisely what he had expected: spaces packed with optics and large data processors, layer upon layer of scanners and detectors, armour and high-powered security drones. The drones and their like were not to guard against an attack from outside, for should such an attack have got past the massive stations of Solar System Defence and the things buried around here, a few drones and lasers would have been no obstacle. The inner defences were a precaution should any of those actually working within take it upon themselves to attack the ruling AI. Cormac knew that a lone human attacker’s lifespan in that environment would be measured in seconds only, which was why he needed help.
He assessed everything he was seeing, tracked energy feeds from armoured drones back to various reactors, built a schematic in his gridlink with all the danger points highlighted and then assigned them. He estimated timings down to fractions of a second, knew that from the point of penetration they would have just three minutes to reach the core, then ten minutes more before remaining security reconfigured and closed on them.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘As always, boss,’ said Arach, opening up the hatches on his abdomen.
Cormac had wondered where the spider drone’s brain was located, for there seemed no room for one there amid the power supplies and ammunition caches. He glanced over at Crane, who was holding one hand over his bald skull as if embarrassed by its nakedness. Seeing inside the Golem was both worrying and bewildering, for he was densely packed with technology much like Jain-tech, and some areas in there were even blurry to Cormac’s U-sense. As if sensing this scrutiny, Crane quickly lowered his hand then nodded.
On the shore Cormac heaved himself to his feet and trudged across the stones. To his two companions he transmitted the building schematic and the plan of attack before onlining perceptual programs in his gridlink to slow down his perception of time. He sent a signal to his envirosuit, which was of the combat variety, and it injected straight into his bloodstream a cocktail of battlefield stimulants, fast-acting sugars and potassium nerve-accelerants. Now his physical speed could keep up with his perceptual speed, which should enable him to survive for just long enough.
Crane stepped forward and loomed over him. Arach moved in close and rose up onto his hind legs. Cormac reached out and gripped a brass biceps and a chromed spider forelimb, then turned his two companion through U-space, out over Lake Geneva, through layers of ceramal armour and thousands of work stations — straight to the heart of Earth Central.
The place was one of four vast halls that starred off from the building’s core, their curved ceilings all but concealed by fibre optics and armoured S-con cables. All around was gloom-crammed technology. As his feet hit the ceramal floor, Cormac upped the light amplification of his eyes, then fell forward into a roll, simultaneously setting loose Shuriken. Crane meanwhile was stooping, his fuck-you gun angled down towards the floor; Arach squatting then leaping. The spider drone landed on one curved wall tangled with cooling pipes at the same moment as Crane opened fire, molten metal spraying all about him, the six-fold beam of field-accelerated protons punching down through power lines to hit the casing of a reactor, which shut down immediately once breached. From the ceiling, behind and ahead, armoured saucer drones folded down on jointed arms, trailing power cables. Arach’s Gatling cannons were now facing in opposite directions and thundering red fire along the hall to smash the drones before they could access new power supplies. One drone, hanging broken, still turned nevertheless. Cormac flung himself aside as a stream of rail-gun missiles folded up the floor and sharp metal sprayed everywhere. Shuriken screamed overhead, slammed through the drone’s mounting, and it fell, incinerated in mid-air by Crane.
‘Sorry, boss,’ said Arach, now scuttling ahead of him along the ceiling through smoking cables and heat-distorted metal.
Second blast from Crane, up at an angle through the ceiling, another reactor closed down, power lines shorting out like huge welding rods in the structure above. Cormac was then up and running onto a grated floor with pieces of metal spraying up around him. Rail-gun fire from below. Drones fast repositioned. Crane firing again, then again. Smoke belching from ventilation ducts, and something clattering along behind the right-hand wall.
‘Golem!’ Cormac shouted, though these weren’t unexpected.
The first was a silvery blur shooting up behind Crane. Without looking round the big brass man chopped out with one hand and the skeletal Golem folded over it with a clang. He turned, slammed it into the wall, stepped back and fired, the thing flicking about in proton fire until it came apart. Skeletal fingers came up through a grating ahead of Cormac. He stepped carefully aside then shielded his face as that area of floor disappeared. Leaping the burning cavity Arach had excavated, he glanced down to see more skeletals crawling up through quadrate internal structure, then Crane was right behind him, firing down. The big brass Golem leaped after him, landing with a crash, burned through the wall to the left, to the right, then up at one o’clock. That should have shut down all the reactors here. Firing came from ahead as Arach entered the core area, then from behind as Crane turned. Cormac slowed to a walk, gazed through Shuriken’s sensors as the throwing star slammed into the chest of the skeletal on the other side of the adjacent wall. He held out his hand as he stepped into the core area, whereupon Shuriken rounded a partition, folded in its smoking blades and settled on his palm. He retained the device for in a moment he would need it again.