…
Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three yards to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.
Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and began to fire.
…
‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.
…
Cento, now impacted on the surface of a dark sun, along with Skellor.
…
Gasping a warm damp breath of the cave’s air, Cormac jerked into the present. Checking the time readout in his gridlink he realized that though those events aboard the ancient spaceship Ogygian took very little time, it had taken just over an hour for him to incorporate them in his mind. But what a vast difference his knowledge of them imposed on his thinking.
He had suffered horribly at Skellor’s hands, his mind just as ripped up as his body at the end. But he had translated himself through U-space—something always considered an impossibility for a human being, which was why he had never really believed Blegg to be human. But now Blegg claimed to be the avatar Cormac had accused him of being, and could not translate himself through U-space, yet it seemed Cormac could.
Cormac heaved himself up from the boulder he was propped against, phantom pains shooting through his body as it remembered old injuries, and his mind muggy and seemingly dislocated within his skull. Glancing across the cave he saw one of the Sparkind attaching a CTD to the underside of the autogun. It would be set to detonate the moment that weapon ran out of ammunition. Spikes had since been driven into the rocky lip of the fissure down which they intended to exit, and dracomen and the other Sparkind were checking the cable winders attached to their belts. For a moment Cormac experienced a surge of painful memory: that time on Samarkand when he, Thorn, Gant, and the two Golem, Cento and Aiden, had prepared similar gear for their descent into a shaft cut down into the ground. And how Gant died there—the first time.
‘What has the memory given you?’ Blegg, standing at his shoulder.
Without turning, Cormac replied, ‘I don’t really know. I now look around this cave and it seems to me all this rock is as insubstantial as mist, yet I know that if I try to step through it the most probable result will be concussion.’ Now he turned to face Blegg fully. ‘I am not the same person I was then. Jerusalem needed to subsequently rebuild much of my body and my mind, since I was neither whole nor, I think, entirely sane.’
‘Perhaps… in a moment of extremity…’
‘Perhaps.’
Cormac now observed the flesh-stripped Golem crouching over the badly burnt soldier. The Golem removed the autodoc, took some thumb-sized bloody object from one of its manipulators and put it to one side, then pressed some control so that the autodoc folded away all its surgical gear. He then returned it to its case.
‘They wouldn’t have been able to get him safely through the fissure,’ Blegg explained. ‘And he remained lucid enough to make his wishes known… via his aug.’
‘He chose to die?’ Cormac asked.
‘He was memplanted.’ Hence the bloody object just extracted.
‘Oh that’s all right then.’ Cormac felt a surge of anger return, then immediately stamped on it because again he realized its source. The wounded soldier would have been an encumbrance they could ill afford. And in a horrible way he felt grateful that the sheer lethality of the weapons used against them had left so few wounded, yet also horrified about how many they had killed. Including Thorn. He turned towards the survivors, seeing they only awaited his instructions. ‘Okay, we go now. No point waiting here until the enemy start coming through the walls. You Golem run the lead lines down and the rest of us will follow. Arach’—he turned to locate the drone, which came scuttling from a side cave—‘I take it you don’t need a line?’
‘Nah, these extra legs have their compensation,’ the drone grated.
Cormac nodded. ‘Myself and Blegg will go down last on the lines. I want you to remain here until we’ve reached the bottom. I want you to detach any lines up here that don’t auto-detach, then follow us down.’
‘Sure thing, boss,’ the spider-drone replied.
Cormac eyed Arach, then headed over to the fissure. As he approached, the leading Golem pulled end-rings from the cable winders on their belts, unreeling monofilament cables apparently as thick as climbing ropes as the winders sprayed them with orange cladding—providing both easier grip and to protect the unwary from filament thin enough to slice through flesh. The Golem then attached the rings to the spikes driven into the stone lip before abseiling down. The rest followed, attaching their belt winders as they went. Scar followed his dracomen down, then Cormac waved Blegg ahead of him. The old Oriental nodded and almost reluctantly joined the descent.
‘Arach, what are you going to do?’ Cormac asked as the spider-drone stepped delicately up beside him. ‘You can’t follow us all the way once down below.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
It seemed to Cormac the drone danced a little, almost gleefully. He knew it relished the prospect of battle, but did it want to die?
‘I could always stay with you,’ Cormac suggested, and wondered where the hell that had come from.
Just then the rock about them shuddered and stalactites within the cavern crashed to the floor, shattering like porcelain.
‘I thought they were hours away from us,’ Cormac said.
‘That was nothing to do with the burrowers,’ Arach replied. ‘I just detected a gravitic anomaly.’
Cormac felt heartened by this. The ECS Centurions contained gravtech weapons, and the brief quake he had just felt indicated they might be using them.
‘Time we were on our way?’ Arach pointed down into the fissure with one sharp leg.
Cormac walked over, then turned to scan all around inside the cave before lowering himself down. He clipped the line into its slot in his belt winder, which governed its friction setting to how fast he moved. At first he abseiled down the slope, but when its angle altered to make this impossible, he had to walk backwards down it. Away from the lights up in the main cavern, he turned on his envirosuit light. Time dragged by without the others yet coming in sight, and he thought that those below him must be moving faster, so he accelerated. The slope began to level out further when Scar and Blegg became visible to him. He could see them ducking as the fissure began to close up. By the time he reached them, the cave floor had levelled and the party stood grouped together.
‘Time to detach those lines,’ he suggested.
Crouching its way past, a Golem moved to the rear and sent up the signal to open the connector rings. With a high whine the monofilament wound in to belt winders, stripped-off cladding showering the floor like orange-coloured chipping from an auto-plane. Only a few yards behind the open rings at the ends of the returning lines came Arach.
Scar moved up beside Cormac. ‘We will soon have to crawl through a very narrow section.’ The dracoman gestured at the drone. ‘The drone’s body is ten inches too thick.’
Arach gave a wide spiderish shrug. ‘Guess I’ll have to leave it for our friends then.’ Abruptly the drone jumped, flipping over, the tips of its legs finding purchase in ceiling crevices. There came a low-pitched grating sound and from between the spider drone’s body and the ceiling, a talc of rock dust showered down. Then came a couple of clonks and a hydraulic hiss, as Arach eased forwards and dropped from his abdomen, spinning round to land on his legs again. After a moment the abdomen, remaining attached to the ceiling, opened its hatches and lowered the two gatling cannons.