“Now,” she whispered. “Now…”
She was not disappointed. Perhaps, on some level, it would have been better if her weapon had been destroyed in that moment—but then she would have been denied the thrill of seeing it react, and react with all the efficacy she had intended. The armaments in the bridgehead’s circular rim erupted into life, tracking, lasering and bosering each of the glints before many of them had touched the conic weapon’s hyperdiamond carapace.
The bridgehead accelerated now, covering the final two kilometres in a third of a minute, the crust around the wound constantly blistering and releasing glitter, the bridgehead parrying the strikes. There were craters in the weapon’s hull now, where a few of the glitter-spore had impacted with brief pink radiance, but the bridgehead’s operational integrity remained uncompromised. The needle-sharp tip pushed below the level of the crust, accurately positioned in the middle of the wound.
Seconds passed, and then the widening haft of the weapon began to brush against its ragged periphery. The ground began to rupture, fracture lines racing away. The blisters were still sprouting, but now at a greater radial distance from the wound, as if the underlying mechanisms were damaged or depleted within that circumference. The bridgehead was now hundreds of metres into Cerberus, shockwaves radiating out from the entry point and haring up the weapon’s length. The piezoelectric crystal buffers which Volyova had integrated into the hyperdiamond would damp those shocks, converting their energy into heat which would then be channelled into the defensive armaments.
“Tell me we’re winning,” Sylveste said. “For God’s sake, tell me we’re winning!”
She speed-read the detailed status summaries spilling onto her bracelet. For a moment there was no antagonism between them; only a shared curiosity. “We’re coping,” she said. “… Weapon is now one kilometre in; maintaining steady descent rate at one kilometre every ninety seconds. Thrust level increasing to maximum; that must mean it’s encountering mechanical resistance…”
“What is it passing through?”
“Can’t tell,” she said. “Alicia’s data said the fake crust was no more than half a kilometre deep, but there are few sensors in the weapon’s skin—they would have increased its vulnerability to cybernetic attack modes.”
What showed on the armillary, relayed from the ship’s cameras, was a piece of abstract sculpture: a cone sliced off midway and positioned with its narrowest end resting on a scabrous grey surface. Anguished patterns were playing over the surrounding terrain, blisters spewing spore in random directions, as if their underlying targeting had gone awry. The weapon was slowing now, and though the scene was playing in absolute silence, Volyova could imagine the awful grinding friction; what it would have sounded like, had there been air to carry the sound and ears to be deafened by that titanic scraping roar. Now her bracelet told her, the pressure on the tip had fallen drastically, as if the weapon had finally punctured all the way through the crust, and was now probing into the relative hollowness beneath: the domain of the snakes.
Slowing.
Skull-and-crossbones symbols danced on her bracelet, signifying commencement of molecular weapon attack against the bridgehead. Volyova had expected as much. Already, antibodies would be oozing through the carapace, meeting and matching the alien attackers.
Slowing… and now stopping.
This was as deep as they were going to get. One and one-third of a kilometre of the cone still projected above the cracked surface of Cerberus; what it looked like was some kind of top-heavy cylindrical fortification. The rim armaments were still lancing away at the crustal countermeasures, but now the spore discharges were coming from tens of kilometres away, and it was clear that no immediate threat was posed, unless the crust was capable of improbably rapid regeneration.
The bridgehead would now commence anchoring itself, consolidating its gains, analysing the forms of the molecular weapons being used against it, devising subtly matched reverse strategies.
It had not let Volyova down.
She pivoted her couch round to face the others, noticing—for the first time in ages—that her fist was still locked around a needle-gun.
“We’re in,” she said.
It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.
In the hours immediately after the weapon’s anchoring, Khouri stayed in close consultation with Volyova, reviewing the constantly changing status of the sluggishly fought battle. The geometric forms of the two protagonists reminded her of a conic virus dwarfed by the much larger spherical cell which it was in the business of corrupting. Yet she had to keep reminding herself that even that insignificant cone was the size of a mountain; that the cell was a world.
Nothing very much seemed to be happening now, but that was only because the conflict was being waged primarily on the molecular level, across an invisible, near-fractal front which extended for tens of square kilometres. At first, and without success, Cerberus had tried to repel the invader with highly entropic weapons; trying to degrade the enemy into megatonnes of atomic ash. Now its strategy had evolved towards one of digestion. It was still trying to dismantle the enemy atom by atom, but systematically, like a child deconstructing a complex toy rather than smashing it to pieces, diligently placing each component into its assigned compartment so that it could be used again in the future, in some as yet undreamt-of project. There was logic to this, after all; a few cubic kilometres of the world had been annihilated by the cache-weapons, and Volyova’s device presumably consisted of matter in much the same elemental and isotopic ratios as that which had been destroyed. The enemy was a huge potential reservoir of repair material, obviating the need for Cerberus to consume its own finite resources in the process. And perhaps it always sought motherlodes like this, to repair the inevitable damage wrought by millennia of meteorite strikes and the constant ablative toll of cosmic ray bombardment. Perhaps it had seized Sylveste’s first probe more because it was hungry than out of a misguided sense that it was preserving its own secrecy; as much acting out of blind stimulus as a Venus flytrap, with no thought for the future.
But Volyova’s weapon was not designed to be digested without putting up a struggle.
“See, Cerberus is learning from us,” she said from her bridge seat, graphing up schematics of the several dozen different components in the molecular arsenal which the world was now deploying against her weapon. What she was showing looked like a page from an entomology textbook: an array of metallic, differently specialised bugs. Some of them were disassemblers: the front line of the Amarantin defence system. These would physically attack the surface of the bridgehead, dislodging atoms and molecules with their manipulators, tugging apart chemical bonds. They would also engage in hand-to-hand combat with Volyova’s own front-line forces. What matter they succeeded in wresting free they passed back to fatter bugs, behind the immediate battle-front. Like tireless clerks, these units endlessly categorised and sorted the chunks of matter they received. If it was structurally simple, like a single undifferentiated chunk of iron or carbon, they tagged it for recycling and passed it to other even fatter factory bugs which were manufacturing more bugs according to their internal templates. And if the chunks of matter had been organised so that within them was true structure, they were not passed for immediate recycling, but were instead passed to other bugs which dismantled the chunks and tried to figure out if they embodied any useful principles. If so, the principles would be learnt, tailored and passed to the factory bugs. That way, the next generation of bugs would be fractionally more advanced than the last. “Learning from us,” Volyova said again, as if she found the prospect as glorious as it was disturbing. “Unpicking our countermeasures and incorporating their design philosophies into its own forces.”