‘Jack!’Thorn bellowed. ‘Factor!’
The telefactor descended on him like a falling rock. He felt a strange lightness and twisting sensation as its AG field came over him. Reaching up he grabbed one of its limbs. A second limb closed about his chest.
‘Drop me on the balcony. Then you take the roof!’
As the telefactor brought him up level with the balcony, Thorn fired into the room beyond, then kicked himself off from the machine’s skin just as it released him. His foot came down once on the balcony platform, then he dived straight into the room beyond and rolled. A figure to his left, something bouncing across the floor. Thorn surged to his feet and flung himself through the nearest doorway. He kicked the bedroom door shut, dived for the bed, grabbing up the edge of the mattress as he went and pulling it over him. The subsequent blast slammed him into a fitted wardrobe and, when he peered out from behind the mattress, the door was gone, along with most of the partition wall. Wisps of insulating foam floated through the air, and something was burning. As he climbed out over rubble, he targeted an object moving through the smoke, but then identified it as a small spherical robot on four skinny legs, which was spraying fire suppressant at a pool of sticky liquid burning on the floor. He headed for the door through which he had seen the figure retreat, and cautiously peered round it. His head jerked back just in time as something smashed into the door jamb. His comunit began vibrating against his breastbone — security signal. Thorn pulled out the comunit’s earpiece and placed it in his ear.
‘Three… of them,’ Scar immediately alerted him, his sibilant voice only just audible over a constant crackling. ‘Two heading for the roof, and one below… us… between us… autogun… corridor.’
‘I know about the autogun,’ Thorn replied, then asked, ‘Jack, what’s this interference?’
‘EM emitter,’ the AI replied.
‘That’s why it missed me.’
Thorn glanced around the room and focused on the robot. The autogun would not be very sophisticated, as Separatists hated anything with even a hint of AI to it. He stepped back, raising the setting of his pulse-rifle to its maximum, then he picked up the robot and tossed it into the corridor ahead of him. Immediately a projectile weapon began firing, smashing holes into the floor as the robot rose up on its legs. Thorn leaned round the door-jamb. The gun was mounted on a tripod: a servo-aimed belt-fed machine gun with a simple motion detector mounted on top. He aimed at it and fired in one, then quickly ducked back under cover as the gun’s ammo box exploded and filled the corridor with shrapnel. As he darted out into the corridor, he saw the fire robot, completely unharmed, returning diligently to its task.
Reaching a stairwell, Thorn knocked his weapon back down to stun. Just then an explosion shook the entire building.
‘They carry grenades and will die rather than be captured,’ Scar informed him.
‘Problem?’ Thorn enquired.
‘It will wash off.’
Jack now added, ‘The other two are on the top floor, one level up from you. I think they spotted the telefactor.’
Thorn began climbing the stairs, his weapon aimed straight up at the half-landing. This was not a good place to be if someone decided to toss a grenade down, but they had no time for delay if these people would prefer to die rather than be captured. No one visible on the stairs. Reaching the top he peered through an open arch and saw that the top floor contained a swimming pool, some gym equipment, and an old-style VR suit suspended in gimbals. Potted palms offered some cover, as did low partitions around the bar area beyond.
‘I don’t fucking think so!’ someone shouted suddenly.
A pulse-gun fired and a figure spun out from behind a pillar and landed in the pool. Then came the detonation, blowing the same figure up out of the water in tatters, drenching the chainglass ceiling and all surroundings. Thorn quickly moved in—only one opponent left here. He spotted Scar running in from the other side of the pool, levelled his weapon. The ceiling abruptly transformed into a white shower of debonded chainglass as the remaining telefactor dropped through. A black gloved hand speared out from behind the pillar, suspending on one finger a gas-system pulse-gun by its trigger guard.
‘Okay, you’ve got me!’
The gun clattered to the floor and a woman with cropped brown hair stepped out from behind the pillar, her arms held out from her sides, gloved hands wide open. Thorn considered stunning her anyway, but the shattered body in the pool told him all he needed to know. Aphran’s voice, issuing from the telefactor, confirmed this:
‘Freyda, I take it you are not quite prepared to die for the cause?’
5
The Sparkind are an elite ECS military force, given a name derived from the Spartans (citizens of an ancient Greek city who were noted for their military prowess, austerity and discipline), though they cannot trace their ancestry back so far. Sparkind are rather the direct descendants of the Special Forces that came into being during the Earth-bound wars towards the end of the second millennium: the Special Boat Service, the Special Mr Service, Navy SEALS and the like. Candidates for the Sparkind must first serve five years in conventional military or police service. Their ensuing training program, both in reality and virtuality, is not designed to weed out the physically unable, because with today’s boosting and augmentation technologies, anyone can be physically able. But a certain strength of mind is sought: will, a toughness of spirit and a degree of wisdom. A Sparkind has to know what he, she or it is fighting for, has to be able to make life and death decisions, and has to be trusted with weapons capable of annihilating entire cities. Operating in four-person units, usually consisting of two Golem and two humans, they have been involved in some of the most violent and dangerous actions the Polity has ever faced. But the Sparkind, though an elite fighting force, are usually never the first in. Which brings me to the ECS agent, or Polity Agent…
— From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein
The latest eruption dumped a layer of ash an inch thick, pocked with large spatters of cooling magma. Blegg stepped down off one of the ceramal beams glued in a gridwork across the Atheter artefact, stooped, and brushed away more ash. The cutting machines inevitably left swirls of stone stuck all over the surface since they had been programmed to hold back from actually digging into the object itself. However, some stone flaked away by itself to reveal translucent green crystal underneath. Blegg considered what all this meant.
This green substance was some form of memcrystal similar to that used in the Polity today. The most basic form of memcrystal — the sort that did not use crystal-interstice quantum processing, or etched-atom processing as it was sometimes called—could still store huge amounts of information. Just a piece of such a memcrystal the size of the last joint of a man’s thumb could model the function of and store the memories of a human mind over a period of twenty-five years—though those who possessed memplants would upload more often than that just to keep their Soulbank copy up to date, thereby freeing up space in the crystal implanted inside their heads. If only of that kind, what could a single mass of crystal this size potentially contain? The mind of a god? The stock market transactions of an entire galactic civilization? Alien porn tapes and family albums? Atheter blogs?
With information technologies it was accepted that crap naturally expands to fill the space available—that recording media and the media it recorded always somehow outpaced memory storage. The whole new science of information archaeology was based on that truism. But this object was alien, so everything it contained would be new, unfamiliar and worthy of lengthy study. Even information that would be considered dross in human storage would inevitably reveal things never before known about the constructors of this huge item.