“Five and a half?” Anaplian said.
“Turned one away when I saw the third was getting through; saved it, rehoused it. Half an engine charge left.”
“Most conservationary of you,” Anaplian said. “Hippinse; anything?”
“Yes, I’m into a Nariscene hardened military news channel,” the avatoid said. “Shit, the Oct and Aultridia really are at war. The Oct ships above the open Towers were spotted and the Nariscene closed them off. The Oct blame the Aultridia for the Hyeng-zhar explosion. The Aultridia suspect a plot to increase Oct control. After the blast at the Falls some Oct craft tried to force their way into the open Towers but got ripped apart. Between them the Nariscene, Oct and Aultridia have closed off every Tower.”
“Are we still doing the right thing heading where we’re heading?”
“Looks like it. Two-fifty seconds to go.”
Four minutes later they plunged back into the atmosphere. This time the suits stayed sleek and silvery and barely slowed at all as they hit the gases. They left a trail of glowing, ionised air behind them bright enough to cast shadows from kilometres up. They slowed so fast it hurt and arrived feeling even more bruised at the grassy, fluted base of a Tower. When they landed the ground cover sizzled and burned beneath their feet and steam came spluttering up around them. The suits stayed mirrored.
A section of the green slope nearby was already rearing out of the ground, spilling turf and earth as a cylinder ten metres across slid up and out. A circle appeared on its curved surface as it slowed, then fell forward to form a ramp when the cylinder stopped rising. Anaplian stepped forward, leading the others. Turminder Xuss came banging out of the sky as the ramp door started to rise again. Seconds later the cylinder began to descend.
“Identify!” a voice rang out within the cylinder’s still damp interior.
“I am Culture Special Circumstances agent Djan Seriy Anaplian, originally of the royal palace, Pourl, in Sarl. I am accompanied by my brother the rightful king of Sarl, Ferbin, and an avatoid of the Culture ship Liveware Problem. Be advised that there is an Iln Shellworld-destroying machine loose. I repeat: an Iln Shellworld-destroying machine is here within Sursamen. It is heading for or is already in the Core with the very likely intention of destroying the world. Broadcast this, disseminate as widely as possible, informing the Nariscene and the Morthanveld as a matter of extreme and absolute priority.”
“Release control of cylinder.”
“No. Do as I say. There is an Iln Shellworld-destroying machine present within Sursamen. It has already killed everybody at the Hyeng-zhar and is now heading for, or is already in, the Core. It intends to destroy the world. Tell everybody. Everybody!”
“Insist! Release cylinder control instantly! No! Stop! Release control of corridor environment! Replace fluids immediately! Warning! Aultridian proxies deeming! Apprehension awaits!”
The cylinder was slowing, drawing to a stop in a few seconds. “No,” Anaplian said, walking like some strange silvery dream to stand before the circular door. “I have no time to waste with you. Get in our way and I will kill you. Broadcast all I’ve said as widely as possible at maximum urgency. I insist.” Anaplian detached a handgun from the left hip of her suit. The weapon was silver too. Turminder Xuss rose to hover at the very top of the door, also shining like mercury.
“Release control of door!” the voice wailed as the door started to open, lidding down like a drawbridge. “Apprehension awaits!”
Anaplian rose quickly to float level with the top of the doorway, levelling the gun. The tiny mirror-bodied shape of Turminder Xuss glinted and was gone. A few flashes reflected off the vaulted ceiling of the corridor outside, then the door was thudding down.
Anaplian was already descending and moving forward. She put the gun back to her hip as her feet hit the floor just beyond the door. She stepped out over the twitching bodies of a dozen well-armed Oct, all of them sliced into halves or smaller fractions. Their weapons had been cut up too; a couple of the gun-parts lay on the floor still sputtering and sparking, raising fumes from puddles. Xuss’ monofil warps clicked back into its body as it flicked about and powered down the tunnel. Ahead, a large circular door was already rolling back into the wall. Fluids a metre deep surged out and were soon washing about Anaplian’s legs. Alarms keened and somebody was shouting something in Oct.
“Keep up,” Anaplian said over her gleaming shoulder. Hippinse, Ferbin and Holse stepped smartly from the cylinder, tried to avoid stepping on Oct body parts as the flood of fluids washed them towards them. They followed Anaplian down the tunnel.
A minute later, a few more Oct deaths later, they stood watching another circular door roll away; more knee-deep fluids rushed out past them. They stepped into the resulting chamber. The door closed behind them and they listened to the air whistling out.
“We’ll be in vacuum again from this point on,” Anaplian told them, unhitching her CREW from the back of her suit and quickly checking it. Hippinse mirrored her actions. Ferbin and Holse looked at each other then did the same. Djan Seriy restowed the laser weapon where it had been; it moulded into the dorsal section of her suit while she reached over her shoulder and pulled on another of the long strakes on her back, producing yet another glossily black weapon. She let it unfold itself and checked that too. Ferbin caught his sister’s gaze and she nodded. “I shall lead with this particle buster; you use the kinetic rifle, Ferbin. Holse; you and Hippinse lead with the CREWs. Don’t want us all using the same stuff.” Her mask unmirrored long enough for her to smile briefly at them, and wink. “Just shoot at what we do.” Then the suit was fully mirrored again.
We are all mirrors, Ferbin thought. Reflecting each other. We are here and these strange suits of armour turn back all light but somehow, despite that, we are nearly invisible; the gaze is redirected from each contact with our surfaces, sliding away until we see something of whatever surrounds us, as though only that is real.
Turminder Xuss lowered to hover in front of Anaplian, level with her sternum. A couple of slim shapes like spike-daggers drifted up from Anaplian’s calves and also floated just ahead of her. “Also, we have a long way to drop.”
“This an open Tower, ma’am?” Holse asked.
“No,” Anaplian said. “We are one Tower away from an open Tower, the one that the ship will be using. If this thing’s left anything behind to ambush anybody coming after it, the opens are where they’ll likely wait. The ship has no choice but to use an open; we do, but we can keep close enough to where the ship will appear to offer support. Even then, we won’t be leaving by the main Tower shaft.” She glanced at the two Sarl men. “We are the infantry here, in case you hadn’t guessed, gentlemen. Expendable. Sacrificeable. The ship is the knight, the heavy artillery, however you wish to express it.” She looked at Hippinse as the door ahead of them twitched. “Anything?”
“Not yet,” Hippinse said. Two small mirrored things like tiny daggers floated up to station themselves level with his shoulders. Another pair of mercurially glinting shapes slid away from Ferbin and Holse’s suits too and floated up to cluster round Turminder Xuss.
“If you don’t mind, gents,” the drone said casually.
“Be my guest,” Ferbin told it.
“Didn’t even know they were there,” Holse said.
The door rolled silently to one side, revealing utter darkness. The drone turned soot black and darted ahead, disappearing along with the four other smaller missiles.
The humans floated across a tube Hippinse said was only thirty metres wide; a scendship shaft. Beyond, a circular hatch had just completed irising open. They floated through to the main Tower interior.
As they started to drop, they moved away from each other until they were nearly half a kilometre apart.
I really never thought to be doing this, Holse thought. He was frankly terrified, but elated too. To be dropping towards the WorldGod, with mad aliens, to meet up with a talking, eccentric spaceship that could stride between stars like a man
strode between stepping stones, to go in search of an even more insane Iln that wanted to blow up or crumple down the whole world; that was the kind of thing he’d not even started to dream of when he’d been back on the farm, mucking out stables and following his dad around the frost-rimed gelding pen carrying the gently steaming ball bucket, ear still smarting from the latest slap.
He had the worrying feeling that he and Ferbin were along as little more than decoys, but in a way he didn’t care. He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behaviour in some other field.
Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He’d always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be.
Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, though rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.
But once you weren’t living hand-to-mouth, and had some ease, you had the leisure to contemplate what life was really all about and who you really were. And given that you had to die, it made sense to seek a good death.
Even these Culture people, bafflingly, mostly chose to die, when they didn’t have to.
With freedom from fear and wondering where your next meal was coming from or how many mouths you’d have to feed next year and whether you’d get sacked by your employer or thrown into jail for some minor indiscretion – with freedom from all that came choice, and you could choose a nice quiet, calm, peaceful, ordinary life and die with your nightshirt on and impatient relatives making lots of noise around you . . . Or you could end up doing something like this, and – however scared your body might feel – your brain rather appreciated the experience.
He thought of his wife and children, and felt a twinge of guilt that they had been so absent from his thoughts for so long recently. He’d had a lot to think about and so many new and utterly bizarre things to learn, but the truth was they seemed like beings from another world now, and while he wished them only well, and could imagine – if, by some miracle, they survived all this – going back to them and taking up his old duties again, somehow that felt like it was never going to happen, and he’d long since seen them for the final time.
A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?
They hovered above a gigantic door composed of great dark curved sections like scimitar blades all pressed together to make a pattern like the petals of a flower. The drop had taken nearly half an hour and in that time they had passed another five levels, where, according to the suit, things called Variolous Tendrils, Vesiculars, Gas Giant Swimmers, Tubers and Hydrals lived. The final level above the Machine space was empty of life, full of oceanic water under kilometres of ice. Now they were directly above the Machine space level where, according to both legend and convention, the workings of the world as it had originally been conceived still sat, lifeless but mighty.
“This is Secondary, isn’t it?” Anaplian asked, staring down at the vast shutter.
“Yes,” Hippinse said. “Openable.”
Hippinse floated over the very centre of the three-kilometre-diameter door, his outline in the visors of the others fuzzy, barely hinted at even by the astoundingly sensitive sensors of the suits. He detached something from his suit and left it lying right in the door’s centre, where the great blades met.
They followed Anaplian back up a kilometre to a huge oval hole in the side of the vast shaft, entered the hundred-metre-diameter tunnel which it led to and floated straight down. Behind, above them, something flashed. The suits registered tiny but ponderous long-wavelength vibrations in the fabric of the tube around them.
Anaplian beckoned them together and when they touched said, “The main door should have opened the one at the bottom of this too, so we can fall straight out. Xuss and the four suit missiles are going first.”
“Look,” Ferbin said, staring down. “Light.”
A flickering blue-grey circle widened quickly as they fell towards it. Beyond, beneath, dimly glimpsed far below, vast shapes loomed, all curved and swooping, sharp and bulbous, pocked and ribbed and serrated. It was like falling into a vast assemblage of blades the size of storm systems, all lit by lightning.
“Clear,” Turminder Xuss announced. “Suggest staying apart, though; signalling less a risk than a tight target.”
“Copy,” Anaplian said tersely.
They dropped beneath the ceiling of the Machine level and hung, hundreds of metres apart, over a drop of about fifty kilometres to the vast blade systems lying still in the gloom below. A few tens of kilometres off, a colossal vaned shape like an enormous toroidal gear wheel filled the view, its topmost edges ridging up to the level ceiling. It seemed to sit on top of and mesh with other titanic spheres and discs all linked to still further massive shapes, and far in the distance, hundreds of kilometres away – their lower reaches obscured by the relatively near horizon of spiralled bladed complexes like immense, open flowers – enormous wheels and globes the size of small moons bulked in the darkness, each seeming to touch the undersurface of the shell above.
Hell’s gearbox, Djan Seriy thought when she saw it, but did not choose to share the image with the others.
The flickering blue-grey light – sporadic, sharp, intense – came from two almost perfectly opposed bearings, partially obscured by intervening machinery in both directions.
“That’s battle light,” Hippinse said.
“Agree,” Anaplian said. “Any ship signals?”
There was a pause. “Yes, got it, but . . . Confused. Broken up. Must be the other side, getting reflections,” Hippinse said, sounding first relieved then worried.
“Our direction?” Anaplian asked.
“Follow me,” Hippinse said, heading off.
“Xuss; ahead, please,” Anaplian said.
“Already there,” the drone said.
The suits tipped them so that they raced across the ghostly landscape far below with their feet leading, though the view could be switched easily enough to make it look as though one was flying head-first. Holse asked about this. “Not streamlining,” the suit replied. “We are in vacuum, so not required. This orientation presents smaller target profile in direction of travel and prioritises human head for damage limitation.”
“Ah-ha. Oh, yes; also, what holds the world up?” Holse asked. “There’s no Towers.”
“The large machines present within this space retain the structural integrity of the ceiling above.”
“I see,” Holse said. “Righty-ho.”
“Steer clear of the open Tower base,” Anaplian told them, leading them away from a great disc of darkness above. Petals of material nearly a kilometre long hung down from the edges of the gap, looking so symmetrical that at first they didn’t realise they were the result of something breaking through from above. “The ship?” Anaplian asked.
“Looks like it,” Hippinse said. He sounded puzzled, and worried again. “Supposed to leave a drone or something here.”
They flew on for another minute until Turminder Xuss said, “Trouble up ahead.”
“What is it?” Anaplian asked.
/> “Somebody’s fighting; high-frequency CREWs, particle beams and what looks like AM by the backsplash. From the signatures, we’re outgunned. Pull to here,” the drone told them, and their visors indicated a line across the long summit of one of the kilometres-high vanes at the top edge of one of the gigantic spheres. Light flashed immediately beyond, bright enough to trip the visors’ sight-saving function. They drifted to a stop metres beneath the ridge line of the vane, each a kilometre or so apart from the other.
“Seeing this?” the drone asked, and imposed a view on their visors of a great dark gulf of space beyond, between more of the level-filling spheres and side-tipped concave torus shapes, lit by glaring bursts of light.
The view became shallowly triangulated, offered from three different points of view, then four and five as the four smaller drones all added their perspective to that of Xuss. Three different sources of pinpoint light and sudden, harsh detonations lay between sixty-five and ninety klicks distant. Much closer, only ten kilometres from them and four down, a single object was trading fire with the three faraway sources. The co-ordinated views suggested something only a few metres across was darting in and out behind the cover of great serrated blades on a vast cogwheel beneath, firing and being fired at by its three distant adversaries.
“Those three read as ours,” Hippinse said urgently. “They’re having to fall back.”
“Can we surprise that thing just underneath?” Anaplian asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Ping one of the distants, make sure we have this right,” Anaplian said. “Xuss?”
“Done,” the drone replied. “They’re the LP’s; three remaining of four combat drones it left behind under the forced open Tower. They’re damaged, retreating.”
“The fourth?”
“Dead,” Hippinse said. “Slag in the trench between us and the hostile.”
“Tell them to keep doing exactly what they’re doing. Xuss; those five and a half AM missiles? Prep all but two.”
“Armed.”