"Yeah," said Cormac, glancing back at Gant. "But Skellor got control of the doors, so how long before he gets control of the weapons systems?"
All of them gazed at the screens as the craft's thrusters propelled it with painful slowness from the vast ship, so that they rose almost like a drifting balloon from a metal plain. Cormac wondered how long it would take. Tomalon had said Skellor now controlled the Occam's engines, so he could trundle along behind them while he got the dreadnought's weapons online. In fact he probably wouldn't even need to move the Occam — they weren't exactly escaping at any great speed.
"Perhaps we should have stayed in there?" Gant suggested.
Difficult calclass="underline" if they had stayed, the Golem would have killed them; escaping like this the Occam's weapons would kill them. With his emotions under a mental boot heel, Cormac realized he had lost, and that he and these people with him were soon to die.
Then something occluded their horizon: a moonlet of scaled flesh rolled down on them and engulfed them in wombish blackness. Momentarily they were slammed from side to side, and the landing craft groaned as if it might break. Then there was that familiar dislocation, that strange sideways pull into the ineffable, and Cormac knew they had entered U-space. He reached out to the console before Apis, and clicked down the button for external com.
"I thought you'd lost your ability for trans-stellar flight," he said.
"I lied," Dragon replied.
Enough of what it was to be human remained in him for the need to verbalize orders rather than assume complete control of their recipients. He gazed down at the Occam Razor's Captain and saw that the man had managed to crawl as far as the door since being dethroned, leaving a snail trail of blood and plasma.
"Kill that," Skellor instructed, and both Aphran and Danny walked across to the man and fired into his body simultaneously. Tomalon hardly moved — perhaps he had died already.
Skellor now gazed down at himself and realized that he would have to be permanently enthroned so long as he wanted to control this ship. Initially the Jain substructure had sent filaments into the connections, and down the optic cables and ducts that spread from this point, to control the disparate elements of the Occam Razor. But as he had sought to refill those spaces where the burn program had taken out essential AI subsystems, it had been necessary for him to thicken those filaments for the transference of information and power — to grow outwards into the ship. Now he sat enfolded in thick ligneous growths, like some woodland statue long abandoned in the roots of an oak. With every effort he made to take control of a system, this structure grew and thickened.
He looked up at Aphran and Danny. The boy wore no expression as, even though not directly linked, he was now a part of the structure — of Skellor. Aphran, however, bore an expression of barely contained horror.
"Go and find those of your group who have survived, and return with them here," he instructed, then silently watched as they turned to the doors. With a microscopic part of himself, he opened those doors ahead of them. That had been one victory, one small system he had overcome. But not enough.
Still Skellor struggled to worm through the hardwired security that remained in place throughout the ship — integral to the control of the weapons systems — and still he was not quite there. So Cormac and his companions had escaped — just when he thought he had them, they had slipped from his grasp. And that both angered and scared him.
Skellor understood that no one must ever know of what he had done. ECS would hunt him down forever, and thus he would never be able to settle and find his strength. All those who had escaped must die — including Dragon. But before he killed them, he must first gain full control here. Connecting to cameras one after the other, he tracked the progress of Aphran and Danny through the ship, just as he tracked them from the inside through their augs. It occurred to him then that the two Separatists were operating like submind-directed ship's drones, and that this was a much more efficient option than him trying to completely control everything. He could have called the remaining Separatists to himself, but that would have required him to personally direct each one here, which used up processing space. Yes, a certain amount of self-determination in those units underneath him was a good thing; that would free him up to concentrate on other tasks. He understood that there was a limit to just how much he could be aware of. It was not so much a case of processing power and memory space, but almost one of having some sort of emotional investment in every situation or system he controlled or viewed.
Turning his head as much as the Jain structure allowed, Skellor viewed the other chairs in this bridge pod, and understood what he must do — there was a rightness to it, almost as if preordained. Seven chairs — and through Aphran and Danny's augs he sensed that — including themselves — seven of the Separatists remained alive.
With an effort that momentarily blinded him to the continuous input of information from that part of the ship he did control, he grew spurs from those roots of Jain structure below the floor. He felt them rapidly growing, feeding on and converting the surrounding material as they did so — insulation, plastics, metals, chainglass. From the skein of optics he was already tracking out to the navigational instruments scattered about the surface of the ship, he sent a spur to one of those chairs. From the monitoring systems for the engines, another. From weapons control, life-support, internal security, ship's maintenance, and shield control. Other smaller systems he attached where appropriate — structural integrity to ship's maintenance, a split spur for control of the ship's reactors to all of them… Command was totally his own, but each of the others would possess what autonomy he allowed them. Glancing down he watched these growths breaking through the floor below the seven seats and spreading underneath them. Then he stared at the doors and waited for his command crew to appear.
The utter stillness was familiar and Thorn immediately became aware that he was waking from cold-sleep. Running through mental routines inculcated into him over the many years of his training, he tried to remember just what his and Gant's assignment was this time and, as had happened before, he remembered that Gant was dead. Confusion reigned for a moment as he tried to place himself — to remember where he was and what he was doing. Moving forward from the moment of Gant's death, he remembered his return to Earth and the attempts by a Sparkind general to dissuade him from transferring out, next the retraining in both VR and the field for undercover duties in ECS, and a couple of infiltration missions in the Sol system before shipping out to Cheyne III. Then he remembered what had happened there.
There came a buzzing click, then a crack, and a pale line of light cut down to the left of him. Knowing what came next in no way ameliorated the sudden feeling of pins and needles as the nerve-blocker detached from his neck — it felt as if someone had been rolling him in cactus spines. The lid of the cold-coffin swung away from him — a man-shaped impression in hoared metal. This being a coffin that was upright in relation to ship's gravity, handles extruded from the metal on either side of him and he grabbed them as soon as he was able to move his arms. The needles retracted, to be replaced by the sensation of his skin having been rubbed raw — burnt even. He gasped his first breath, fluid bubbled in his lungs, and he coughed and swallowed. Looking to his left, he saw John Stanton step out of his own coffin and begin isometric exercises — obviously the man was a veteran of travelling this way. It took Thorn a while longer, as he lifted each leg alternately and flexed it, stretched his back and neck, then stepped out as if onto ice, with one hand still gripping a handle for support.