The complex spun around again. Bolts rattled like bullets, narrowly missing her, and the tank flew away—straight up from Taransay’s point of view. For a tenth of a second she saw it dwindle, then it was lost to sight. A dark object shot by above her, massive and only metres away, and so fast she only got a proper image when she ran a rewind on her vision: a millisecond glimpse of a hurtling rock. A moment later she was in free fall again.

  Locke reported.

  A stronger blow rang through the structure. A ball of light expanded overhead, then faded, seeming to retract as it did so. There was a cry from Chun. The mode of Taransay’s proximity sense that tracked the presence of the other fighters showed him moving away at tens of metres per second. Meanwhile, shards of fullerene casing and hot molecules of gas moved outward in all directions a hundred times faster, shockwave shells pulsing through the infrared-visible attenuated sphere at a slower pace.

  Taransay said.

  Chun replied, calmly.

  Taransay said.

  said Chun.

 

  Taransay cautiously, with fingertip thrusts, propelled herself up the side facing her and peered over the top. The penicillium-like fuzz of nanofacturing substrate that covered the module was severely singed, glowing in patches, elsewhere charred, its tiny tendrils curled and carbonised like fibres of burnt carpet. Her radar sense picked up Chun as a flickering dot. His distance was now a kilometre and increasing by the decisecond. A quick zoom gave her visual. The guy she knew in the sim as a big, muscular Australian was, like the rest of them, a half-metre-high robot, now tumbling over and over like a tossed doll. A projection of his path showed nothing but a long, lonely orbit around SH-0, becoming chaotic as the gravity of the primary’s numerous exomoons braided and rebraided its possible course.

  Taransay said.

  Locke broke in.

 

  said Locke.

  Taransay felt wrenched, but she could see the AI’s logic. Whatever happened to Chun in the frame, his personality was safe as long as the module survived. If they wasted time rescuing this version of him, they all risked a more permanent end, or possibly a worse fate. But she couldn’t let him drift away to die, slowly and alone for hundreds of kiloseconds, as his power pack ran down.

 

 

  Taransay asked.

  Chun didn’t hesitate.

  Taransay called.

  said Beauregard.

  said Chun, his tone stoical.

  A laser beam shone. Taransay could see its path by the sparkles of burning particles of dust and debris around the complex. The speck that indicated Chun’s position became a flare of light.

  A wave of disturbance passed around the fighters: a murmur, a rumble of radio waves, inarticulate. They all knew that Chun was, for a dead man, very much alive. Right now, he would be struggling upwards through whatever post-death version of near-death experience matched his brain-stem memory of whatever the bizarre and improbable and no doubt painful terminus of his mortal biological life had been. And then he’d wake up, on the bus from the spaceport, as from a bad dream. Later, if they all finished their tasks successfully and evaded whatever Arcane had to throw at them, he’d be drinking with them in the Digital Touch, somewhere inside the digital processing going on in the gigantic crystalline object around which they all now clung.

  And yet they all felt a pang of loss. Taransay hadn’t yet had the experience of being destroyed in her frame—not that she’d remember it, of course, if she had—and she couldn’t help wondering how it felt to know that you, the present you, this spark of consciousness, was going out forever, and how much if any comfort it was to know that a copy of you as you’d been not so long ago would wake in the sim to soldier on, and live to fight another day. Subjectively it was death you faced, but perhaps in time—if people ever got used to this kind of existence—it would come to seem no worse than going to sleep in the knowledge that you’d wake having lost some memories. Your self had forked, and one instance of it had stopped—that was all.

  An urgent message from Locke crashed her train of thought.

 

  Taransay said wryly to her team. Then sharply to Locke:

  Locke told the team.

  Taransay urged, checking her own revised task list. She had some pipework to reroute, a few metres away.

  As she skimmed the top of the slot she had worked and hid in, Locke came back with a reply.

 

  said Taransay.

  said Locke.

  said Taransay,

  Locke said nothing. Taransay wasn’t put out: humour wasn’t one of the AI’s features. Then:

  it said.

  —Not again! Taransay thought—

 

  Taransay yelled, in chorus with the others. Twenty fucking minutes instead of three hours!

 

  said Beauregard, on a private channel to Locke and Taransay.

 

  said Beauregard, and cut to the shared channel.

  Taransay doubted that would be possible. For one thing, the fusion pods that powered the defensive lasers must be near drained by now, after all the flak they’d had to deal with. But she kept her own counsel. Beauregard’s division of labour made sense: the squad on the scooters had recent dogfight experience, and she, Zeroual and Karzan had experience of ground combat in common—and however inglorious for all of them these experiences had been, in space or on the surface, it was all they had. St-Louis was the only one here not with their own team, but again that couldn’t be helped. So perhaps Beauregard’s bold talk about blowing Arcane out of the sky had substance behind it that she couldn’t see.

  It didn’t.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Close Combat

  The work that Taransay had been assigned wasn’t easy, or trivial. It was to link one of the remaining fuel tanks, via the fractioning device—a mass of nanotech about whose functioning or even basic principles, like that of most of the machinery she’d encountered in her afterlife, she had no clue—to the module’s fusion drive. The drive, too, was incomprehensible to Taransay. It was more complex than the fusion pods that were the commonplace power source in the mission’s world, involving as it did a staggering amount of real-time computation which its flanged and flared appearance and metallic smoothness concealed.

  She and St-Louis completed the last connection about nine hundred seconds after the warning had come in. In that time they’d seen component after component of the complex jettisoned—detached and shoved into space, where they floated slowly away. Meanwhile, bots were breaking up parts of the structure and carrying them to the solid-waste input hatch of the reaction-mass chamber. Every such loss hurt, as a cost to their future. By now the modular complex was down its last nanofacturing tube, which Zeroual and Karzan were, as their final task, at that moment lashing even more firmly into place. Without it, Beauregard’s colonisation scheme—dicey as it was in the first place—would be far slower and more difficult. Growing useful tools and machine parts with whatever superficial patch of nanofacturing fuzzy substrate survived entry and landing would be possible, but painfully slow.

  Meanwhile, the deceleration flare of the approaching Arcane module brightened by the second. Halfway through its journey, it had flipped over, applying the same force to slow down as it had to speed up. The face the module presented to Locke’s defensive radars and lasers was consistently nothing but a mass of rock and dirty ice, on which even a focused beam attack would be wasted. This orientation had to be deliberate. Taransay had wondered as she worked whether that might not be Arcane’s whole battle plan: to keep on coming in, until the jet from the fusion drive could simply be played like a blowtorch over the surface of the Locke complex. It wouldn’t destroy the module, and therefore it would be within the letter of the law, or convention, against wiping out agencies and companies by force, which the Direction still seemed to stick to. But it would burn away every other component, and every fighter and scooter in the vicinity, like so much chaff.

  To make matters worse, something else was coming their way, and it wasn’t slowing down.

  The transfer tug that had left the Arcane complex and been fired upon had now separated from its rock, or from whatever was left of its rock, and was boosting towards the convergence of the Arcane module and the Locke complex at a dizzyingly wasteful acceleration. Taransay had taken this news, delivered just after she’d started, with a sense of what fresh hell is this? She couldn’t spare mental effort to process it, beyond an almost idle speculation that perhaps the mutineers on the Arcane module hadn’t been those who’d fled in the transfer tug, but those who’d fired a missile at it. Perhaps a two-pronged attack by the Arcane module and the transfer tug—replenished, no doubt, with fuel and reaction mass derived from Newton’s erstwhile rock—had been Arcane’s plan all along. But enough. Let the airheads on the news screens in the sim babble speculation. She had more urgent things to do.

  As Locke now reminded her.

 

  added Beauregard, turning Locke’s suggestion into a direct military instruction.

  Taransay gave St-Louis a thumbs-up and turned away, following the virtual markers Locke had laid down for her. The module’s surface was now looking bare of its earlier forest of components. She made her fingertip way across what could have been mossy rock, aware that at any moment some sudden emergency might whip it way from beneath her. The niche she’d been assigned was the slot she’d been in before, still scarred by the traumatic removal of the fuel tank. She gas-jetted down into this crystal trench with an irrational sense of relief.

  A clutch of bots awaited her, some of their manipulators linked so they could huddle wedged against the bottom of the cleft. In their other limbs they grasped a light machine gun, about twice as long as Taransay’s frame. Her arm wouldn’t reach from the stock to the trigger. She was about to ask Locke, in no polite terms, how she was supposed to handle the weapon when she noticed that the bots had already adapted it: the stock was shortened, the barrel had a bipod stand, the trigger had an extension that curved around the guard and back to where her small mechanical hand could grasp it. The extension had evidently been made by the same process as the spanners had been, and like them it looked like a piece of shit. She could only hope it wasn’t the same metaphorically.

  That went double for the gun’s bipod stand—an inverted-V-shaped piece of shit—but the adaptation turned out to be surprisingly effective. Taransay propped the bipod against one lip of the trench. Its feet attached themselves, oozing adhesive nanotech gunk. She wedged herself in, feet against one side, back against the other, behind the stock and gripped the trigger extension in one tiny robot fist. Thus braced, she looked up at the incoming retro-flare and awaited the inevitable. It was now close enough for her to smell the water, with her spectrographic sense if not her chemical receptors.

  She felt about as effective as an anti-aircraft gunner watching the fall of an atomic bomb.

 

  said Taransay. From her display, all the others did, too. She didn’t feel secure at all.

  said Locke.

  The warning came not a tenth of a second too soon. The complex, free-falling since the last evasive actions, suddenly accelerated. It was the most violent so far, reaching 50 G in two seconds. Taransay could feel her frame pressed hard back, and was grateful for two things: that she was facing forward, and that she wasn’t in a human body. A small crash test dummy, she thought. The incoming flare of the Arcane module vanished instantly from above. With her radar sense she saw it far behind, dwindling fast. The transfer tug, still much further away but closing fast under what seemed like continuous acceleration, wasn’t yet visible but if it had been she could have still seen it: its calculated position on her display barely moved.

  The Arcane module’s drive cut. In a moment of free fall, the module flipped around and then the drive started up again, lateral jets flaring from its sides like a fistful of white-hot needles. The distance began to close. Moments later, the Locke complex’s acceleration stopped. Even with the frame’s speedy reflexes, Taransay’s upper body lurched forward in reaction.

  Locke brayed.

  The sky whirled as the complex rolled. There was a lurch as it stabilised. Now Taransay saw the Arcane module just above her ludicrously close horizon, heading more or less straight for her. The contact was barely in visual, but her other senses and plain logic told her she was looking at the module itself, rather than as before at its block of ice and rock through which the fusion drive burned, and which fed its ravening energy.

  said Beauregard. There was an analogue of volume in the messaging mode. If the phrase had been speech, it would have been breathed.

  Almost certainly, Taransay thought, he was confirming an order already given. A missile from one of the fixed scooters shot away, followed by a focused, convergent stab of five anti-meteor lasers. Their beams were invisible in vacuum, but Taransay’s display scribed their path. Five bright hairline tracks met at the Arcane module. A point of light flared and faded, an actinic spark. Then came a far bigger flash, as the missile slammed into the oncoming and still accelerating module.

  The Locke complex rolled again, turned tail and torched.

  As they accelerated away, this time at a less taxing 10 G, Taransay guessed what had happened. The lasers had blinded Arcane’s defences just long enough for the missile to get through. The combined velocities of the collision had added impact to explosive energy. Some damage had been done, for sure.

  But they weren’t to get away that easily—not that she expected it. The Arcane module had reaction mass to burn—Locke’s side didn’t, and Arcane knew it. The Arcane module overhauled them within ten seconds. Locke instantly cut the drive, which left the complex in free fall and Arcane far ahead, overshooting the mark. It didn’t take more than another second for the Arcane module to flip over and ipso facto start decelerating, closing the distance rapidly as the Locke complex free-fell towards its foe. Ahead SH-0 loomed; despite knowing the dynamics as intuitively as counting, Taransay still had a part of her mind that was surprised how close they were to it.

  No time for wonder, even at the most spectacular and complex unexplored object humanity in any form had yet gazed upon.

  And no time or mass left for evasive action, if the Locke crew were ever to do more than look at that astonishing world. The fight was going to be hand-to-hand from here on in. The Arcane module was now well within visual range, five kilometres away, and stationary relative to the Locke complex—and of course free-falling with it straight towards SH-0.

 

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