After four hours he had realized that spending time in his cabin indulging in such introspection took his focus away from the reality of the ship around him, which was why he went off to find his remaining companions.
‘Stick me down for five,’ said Arach, his playing cards fanned out before his gleaming ruby eyes.
Cormac peered closely at the spider drone, then increased the magnification of his own eyes to record the reflected image from those red eyes and cleaned it up in his gridlink… that device in his skull that apparently was not even functioning. But he had decided it would be best to forget that assertion and just pretend it was.
Now, perfectly lined up in his mind, he apparently knew what cards Arach was holding. He was suspicious, however, since the last time he had tried this Arach’s eyes had immediately turned matt so there was no reflection. The present image therefore had to be false. Cormac now set about analysing why the drone had chosen those particular cards for this false image.
‘I’ll go two,’ said Smith, his cards face down on the table and his hand poised over them, detectors in the skin of his hand primed to pick up any sneaky scanning. Had these been normal playing cards there might have been some need for this, but they were sensitized and would scream if scanned, unless by extremely sophisticated means. Also, had these been normal cards, there would have been no point in even playing the game, since everyone around this table was capable of memorizing the order of the pack even as the cards were picked up and shuffled, and thus capable of analysing most of the resultant probabilities. But these cards electronically shuffled themselves, changing their face value at the end of each game, and the usual fifty-two cards were played, but chosen out of twenty suits of two hundred and sixty cards.
While Smith’s call automatically appeared in the grid displayed in the glass tabletop, Cormac examined the Golem and wondered about those alterations made to Henrietta Ipatus Chang’s record. It seemed evident to him that the black op she was involved in must have originally been something to do with Erebus but, since her abrupt reappearance in that wormship on the surface of Ramone, this connection had been abruptly covered up. Why so, he was not entirely sure, but he was beginning to indulge in some nasty speculations. Certainly Earth Central had known about the threat long before it became apparent. But how? And what had been going on back then?
Frowning, Cormac returned his attention to the others seated around the table. He would have expected them to choose a game like poker, or maybe one of those derivatives of chess in which the pieces actually fought each other on the table top and died messily. That they chose to play contract whist seemed odd to him. He shifted his attention to the next player and found he still felt slightly unnerved by its presence.
He guessed it wasn’t unexpected that an attack ship AI that had named itself King of Hearts might be interested in such a game. What unnerved him was how the AI chose to manifest itself. Hunched over his cards, the ship’s avatar had adopted the external appearance of one of those sleer-human hybrids from the planet Cull, though its internal construction was doubtless based around a Golem chassis. In form it was a male human with silvery faceted eyes and pincers curving from the jawline in front of its beaked mouth.
‘Three,’ it lisped.
Now it was Cormac’s turn to declare how many tricks he intended to win. In the light of the previous bids, he again studied his hand, though not the actual cards but the images in his gridlink. He felt himself becoming the focus of much attention and wondered what the others might be trying to read from him. He deliberately raised his heart rate and made random small movements. Unfortunately he could not alter his pheromonal output, but hoped that would give nothing away. About to go for a safe zero, he suddenly had a sharp perception of himself seated at this table, with the others nearby, and the whole of U-space bearing down claustrophobically.
Something…
King’s avatar dropped its cards, then slowly bowed over until its pincers clinked against the glass table. Cormac received the impression of something like a hemispherical shock wave hurtling towards the ship. It passed through and he felt the vessel ejected up into the real. His chair slid back and he oophed as if someone had just gut-punched him, then the ship bucked and rang with a sound like a blow delivered against some massive porcelain bowl.
‘Oh bollocks,’ said Arach, tossing down his cards.
In a moment they were all on their different kinds of feet and heading for the bridge.
‘That felt like a USER,’ said Smith.
Cormac could not comment on that since he very much doubted his own feelings bore any relation to anyone else’s.
‘Could be Erebus,’ suggested Arach hopefully. ‘Or this Orlandine?’ The two hatches on his abdomen opened tentatively.
‘Could be,’ Cormac conceded. He didn’t know why the drone seemed so happy since, if they had just inadvertently encountered one of those two before safely joining the Polity fleet out of Salvaston, Arach’s only involvement with any fight would be his addition to an expanding vapour cloud that had once been the King of Hearts.
Soon they were clattering into the bridge — where Cormac quickly noted that King had added a couple more sculptures to his collection. One was of Scar, a monument or an exercise in tasteless insensitivity? Hard to tell. The other one was a Prador second-child brandishing a multi-barrelled rail-gun much like the weapons Arach currently sprouted from his back.
‘King, what’s happening?’ Cormac asked.
U-space was distant from him now, but still there. It seemed to be heaving underneath the real, like a sea in motion underneath a mat of sargassum, but what this meant Cormac had no clear idea.
‘There has been a major disruption throughout U-space,’ King replied.
‘No shit?’ said Arach dryly.
Cormac glared at the drone. It wouldn’t do to irritate King now, since the attack ship AI did have an inclination to sulkiness. ‘A USER?’ he suggested.
King continued as if the drone hadn’t even spoken. ‘The effect has been similar but is much more chaotic. I am still analysing the data.’
‘Does this mean we are trapped out here?’ wondered Smith.
That thought had not even occurred to Cormac. He gazed out through the ersatz dome at the stars winking in the blackness. Certainly the King of Hearts had been knocked up into the real of interstellar space, so if travelling through U-space had ceased to be an option, he would probably soon have to be making use of a cold-coffin. This idea did not appeal, since who knew what his frigid dreaming mind might do with his body the moment travelling in U-space once again became possible.
‘We were knocked out of underspace by what appears to be some kind of shock wave and, unless there are further waves, we should be able to return to it within the next few minutes.’
‘A shock wave from what and where?’ Cormac asked.
‘Still analysing.’ King paused for a moment, whereupon gridded spheres expanded from numerous surrounding stars to crowd up against each other. Next, grid lines appeared across the starscape, sinking away directly ahead to sketch out a funnel shape running through the intersecting spheres till its neck closed down to almost nothing. This image then became clearer when the whole scene went photo-negative. Cormac blinked at the brightness, since the starscape was now represented as black dots in a white firmament.
‘What am I seeing here?’ he asked.
‘We were merely knocked out of U-space by a side effect of the main event. U-space disruption has expanded from between twenty and thirty different locations, in each case encompassing a volume of twenty light years,’ said King. ‘It seems evident that Erebus has instigated a runcible-based multiple attack against the Polity.’