The grey cloud was all around him like a cloak, his eyes were stinging and starting to close up seemingly of their own volition. He stepped quickly over the blocks, staggered into the water on the far side, then ran as fast as he could into clear air beyond, his lungs feeling as though they were about to burst.
Somehow he managed to delay breathing until he could see no trace of the grey mist either in the air or rising in bubbles from the water. He could hardly see, and the first deep, heaving breath he took stung first his mouth and then his throat all the way down to his lungs. Even the exhalation seemed to sting his nose. He took more deep, deep breaths, standing doubled over with his hands on his knees. Each breath hurt, but stung less than the one before. From up the tunnel, he could hear nothing.
Eventually he was able to breathe sufficiently freely to move without gasping. He looked back into the darkness and tried to imagine the scenes he might find walking back to the breach, once the gas had cleared. He wondered how long that would take. He turned and made his way in the other direction, towards the castle,
*
Guards found him hollering at the far end, where a vertical well shaft descended to a deep pool. Taken before the castle authorities, he informed them that he would tell them anything they wanted to know. He was just a humble tunneller who’d been lucky and resourceful enough to evade the trap which had claimed the lives of his fellows, but he knew of the scheme to tunnel to near the castle and set up some sort of compact but powerful siege engine, and additionally he would tell all that he could about the little he knew of the disposition, numbers and quality of the forces besieging the castle if they would but spare his life.
They took him away and asked him many questions, all of which he answered truthfully. Then they tortured him to make sure he’d been telling the truth. Finally, uncertain where his loyalties might lie, unwilling to support yet another mouth to feed and judging his torment-broken body of little practical use, they trussed him and fired him from the giant trebuchet in the great tower.
By chance he fell to earth not far from the tunnel he had helped dig, landing with a thump that some of his old comrades heard above them as they tramped back to camp after another back-breaking shift stopping up one tunnel and continuing with their own.
His last thought was that he had once dreamed of flying.
Three
It was some time before Yime Nsokyi realised she was the last one left firing.
The Orbital’s Hub had been the first thing to go, blitzed in an instant by a staggeringly bright CAM burst before there had been any warning whatsoever. Then the hundred or so major ships moored beneath the O’s outer surface, contained within Bulkhead Range docks or approaching or leaving the Orbital, had been destroyed in a single synchronised scatter-gun blaze, Minds precisely obliterated by exquisitely focused Line-gun loci, their already cram-packed substrates collapsing into particles more dense than neutron star material, all that prized wit, intelligence and knowledge-almost-beyond-measuring snuffed in every case to a barely visible ultra-dense cinder almost before they had time to realise what was happening to them.
While the shock waves from the gravity-point collapses were still propagating through the victim vessels’ internal structures and hulls, they were slammed with meticulously graded degrees of further destruction, the craft within or very close to the O targeted with small nukes and thermonuclear charges sufficient to destroy the ships themselves without compromising the strategic structure of the Orbital itself, while those further out were simply smithereened with anti-matter warheads, their megatonne bodies slashed across the outboard skies in blinding pulses of energy that threw jagged shadows across the vast internal surfaces of the world.
All of this in a handful of seconds. A heartbeat later the independent high-AI Defensive Nodes overseeing each of the O’s original Plates had been knocked out with pinpoint plasma displacements and simultaneously the few thousand nearby Interstellar-class ships were attacked, meeting their fates in a grotesque parody of size seniority; first the larger, more capable craft vanishing in nuclear or thermonuclear explosions, then the second-rank ships moments later, followed by smaller and smaller vessels until all those were gone and the blossoming waves of annihilation moved on to target the slowest, in-system craft.
Finally the semi-slaved AIs, dotted at random throughout the fabric of the entire bracelet world, had stopped communicating all at once, the weapon systems that they had fallen heir to as the higher-level control processes had been destroyed either subsiding to dormancy or actively starting to attack whatever defensive capability there was left.
Drones and humans taking command of independently controllable weapon and munition delivery systems made up what was left, the few machines and people in the right place at the right time scrabbling to take over from the blitzed machines even as they were struggling to comprehend what was happening to their world. Its end, Yime Nsokyi thought as she’d careened down a drop shaft from the traveltube interchange she’d been in as the attack began. She’d bounced into the little blown-diamond bubble of the ancient plasma cannon’s back-up control blister in time to be almost blinded by a detonating in-system clipper ship less than a millisecond away, the diamond’s outer protective film barely having time to switch to mirror and her own eyes reacting late, leaving her with dots dancing in her eyes as well as the blush of an instant radiation tan warming her face.
Not the end of the world, though, she thought as she settled into the seat and felt the restraints close around her. Not destroying the O itself, just everything about it. Probably the end of my world, though; this doesn’t look survivable. She tried to remember when she’d last backed up. Months ago? She wasn’t even sure. Sloppy. She kicked the gun’s systems out of network and into local control, dumbing its systems down to minimally interferable-with hardened optic communication with atomechanical back-up readied and mirroring, then flicked antiquely solid switches on a control panel, creating a great hum and buzz all around her as the thirty-metre turret woke up, screens bright, controls alive.
She brought the bulky helmet over her head, checked it was working on visual and audio and that there was air in the mask component, then left it in place for added protection as much as anything while the gun’s ancient control comms established direct links with her neural lace; systems designed and code written millennia apart met, made sense and established rules and parameters. It was a strange, invasively unpleasant feeling, like a spreading itch inside her skull she could not scratch. She felt the lace using her drug glands to jink her already quickened senses and reactions up to one of her pre-agreed maxima. Felt like the setting was deterioration within minutes and burn-out in less than a quarter of an hour. Ah, the very quickest, the all-out emergency mode. That wasn’t encouraging; her own lace was giving her just a handful of minutes to be of use as a fully functioning component of the Orbital’s last-ditch defence.
Outside, grippings and pressings all over her body, like being nuzzled by a few dozen small but powerful animals, confirmed that the gun control blister’s protective armour had enfolded her. She and the gun were as ready as they’d ever be for what came next.
She stared out into the darkness, senses enhanced to the point of nearly painful distraction as she searched for anything that wasn’t basically Culture stuff getting wasted. Nothing visible, appreciable at all. She established hardened comms links with a few other people and drones, all of them within the limit of this section’s original plate boundary. Her fellow warriors were shown as a line of blue tell-tale lights on a screen at the lower limit of her field of vision. They quickly determined that none of them knew what was happening and nobody could see anything to fire at. Almost immediately, there was a hoarse scream, quickly cut off, and one light turned from blue to red as a compromised high-kinetic cannon picked off another plasma turret a thousand kilometres away. Five hundred klicks spinward a drone controlling a Line-gun with links to a skein-sensing field reported nothing happening on t
he skein either, save for the fallback waves following the initial pulses that had wrecked the ship Minds.
“Whoever it is they want the O,” one of the humans said as they watched the spread of detonating sparks that were just a few of the nearby in-system craft meeting their ends. The ships’ deaths outshone the stars, replacing the familiar constellations with bright but fading patterns of their own. Her lace stepped her awareness speed down to a level where something like normal speech was possible.
“Grunts on the ground,” another agreed.
“Maybe they’ll just drop into the surface, displace onto the interior,” Yime suggested.
“Maybe. Edgewall stuff emplaced for that.”
“Anybody in touch with any Edgewall firepower?”
Nobody was. They had no contact with the O’s interior at all, or with any independent craft or with anybody manning the defences anywhere else. They busied themselves with scanning with what senses they had access to, checking and readying their own weaponry and trying to establish contact with survivors further afield. In the darkness, the wrecks of the last in-system craft winked out, brief fires exhausted. Around Yime’s position a few traveltube cars dropped away into the night as people tried to save themselves by using the cars as lifeboats. On average they got about ten klicks out before they were picked off too, quick tiny eruptions of light pinpricking the black.
“Anything—” somebody began.
—Got something, the drone with the skein sense sent, too quick for speech. Her lace kicked her awareness speed up to maximum so quickly the last syllable of the previous speaker’s word went on for many seconds, providing an impromptu soundtrack to what was happening in the skies beyond.
The ships were popping into existence just a few thousand klicks out, travelling at between one and eight per cent of lightspeed. No beaconry, IFF or any signal at all; not even trying to pretend they were anything else but hostile.
—Thinking these are targets, somebody communicated. Over the still-open voice comm channels came a high-pitched whine like something charging.
A first glance indicated hundreds of the ships, a second thousands. They filled the sky, darting like demented fireworks in as many different directions as there were craft. Some accelerated hard, some slowed to almost stationary seemingly within seconds; those incoming zipped in and were a few tens of klicks out and closing fast before there was time to get more than a few shots off. The drones, Yime thought. The drones will be reacting fastest, firing first. She swung the ancient plasma turret directly outwards, found a target and felt the antique machine’s senses and hers agree, lock and fire in the same instant. The old turret trembled and twin pulses of light lanced out, missing whatever it was they were aiming at. Plenty more targets, she thought, as she and the gun swung fractionally, retargeted, set for a wider beamspread and fired again. Something blazed within the cone of beam filaments but there was no time to celebrate as she and the gun swung again and again, flicking minutely from side to side and up and down like something trembling, uncertain.
There were more bursts of fire within the targeting focus and there was a certain desperate exultation in just firing, firing, firing, but in some still-calm part of her mind she knew they weren’t getting more than a per cent of the attacking craft, and the rest were still closing or had arrived.
Something at the lower limit of her vision attracted her attention; she watched the last of the little blue tell-tale lights turn red. All gone? So quickly? She was the last one, she realised; the last one left firing.
The view hazed, quivered, started to die. She killed the link systems, swept the helmet back over her head as its screens went blank and – staring out into the night through her own eyes and the invisible diamond blister – yanked the manual controls from the arm squabs and hauled the turret round to fire at a fast-approaching bright dot just starting to take on substance.
There was a thump that somehow felt nearby, back here by the turret, not out there where she was aiming, and the impression of something just outside the diamond bubble. She clicked a switch to let the gun’s atomechanical brain do its own targeting and turned her head.
The things scrabbling towards the turret across the O’s outer surface looked like metallic versions of a human ribcage plus skull, running and bouncing on six multiply jointed legs. Bizarrely, they appeared to be racing across the surface as though they were experiencing the equivalent of gravity drawing them down against it, rather than its exact opposite. She was still reaching for the control seat’s hand weapon when one of the creatures launched itself at the bubble, smashed through it and landed where her lap would have been had she not been swaddled in the turret’s control blister armour. The air in the diamond bubble left in a burst of white vapour that disappeared almost instantly as the skull-faced creature – a machine, she saw – stuck its face up to hers and, despite the lack of atmosphere and no visible method of producing the sound, said very clearly, “Drill over!”
She sighed, sat back, somewhere else entirely, as the shattered control blister, the crippled plasma turret itself and the doomed Orbital dissipated like mist around her.
“It was unpleasant, distressing and of little practical use,” Yime Nsokyi told her drill supervisor sternly. “It was a punishment drill, a simulation for masochists. I saw little point to it.”
“Granted it is about as extreme as they get,” her supervisor said cheerfully. “All-out equiv-tech complete surprise attack just short of total Orbital destruction.” Hvel Costrile was an elderly-looking gent with dark skin, long blond hair and a bare chest. He was talking to her in her apartment via a wall screen; it looked like he was on a sea vessel somewhere, as there was a large expanse of water in the background and his immediate surroundings – a plush seat, some railings – kept tipping slightly this way and that. The screen display was in 2D, by her choice; Yime Nsokyi didn’t hold with things looking too much like whatever they were not. “Instructive, though, don’t you think?”
“No,” she told him. “I fail to see the instructional element implicit in being subject to a completely unstoppable attack and thus being utterly overwhelmed in a matter of minutes.”
“Worse things happen in real wars, Yime,” Costrile told her with a grin. “Faster, more complete destruction.”
“I imagine simulations of those would have even less to teach, apart from the wisdom of avoiding such initial condition sets in the first place,” she told him. “And I might add that I also fail to see the utility of causing me to experience a simulation in which I harbour a neural lace, given that I have never possessed one and have no intentions of ever having one.”
Costrile nodded. “That was propaganda. Neural laces are just useful in that sort of extremity.”
“Until they too are corrupted, and possibly the person invested by the device as well.”
He shrugged. “By that time the game’s pretty much up anyway, you’d imagine.”
Yime shook her head. “One might equally well imagine otherwise.”
“Whatever, they let you back-up really easily,” he said reasonably.
“That is not a life-choice I have chosen to make,” Yime informed him frostily.
“Oh well.” Costrile sighed, then accepted a long drink from somebody just out of shot. He raised it to her. “Till next time? Something more practical, I promise.”
“Till then,” she agreed. “Strength in depth.” But the screen was already blank. She said, “Close screen,” anyway, telling the relatively dumb house computer to kill any link at her end. Yime was entirely untroubled by intelligent house systems, but did not wish to be subject to one. She was happy to admit to feeling a degree of satisfaction that she was by some orders of magnitude the most intelligent entity within her immediate surroundings in general and her own living space in particular. It was not a claim one could convincingly make in very many Culture dwellings.
Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh much preferred to be known only as Yime Nsokyi.
She had moved away from her home Orbital and so her name now lacked utility, no longer working as even an approximate address. Worse; bearing the name of one location while living in another felt to her like something close to deceit. She walked over to the window, picked up a plain but functional brush from a small table and continued to brush her long hair, which was what she had been doing, meticulously, when the emergency militia drill alert had come through on her personal terminal and she had, reluctantly, had to submit to the induction collar and the resulting horribly realistic sim of the Orbital – even if it wasn’t this Orbital but a more standard, less militarily prepared Orbital – being so thoroughly savaged and so easily taken over.
Outside the oval of window she stood at, only very slightly distorted by the sheer thickness of the crystal and other materials forming the glazing, the view was of rolling grassy countryside punctuated with numerous lakes and strewn with forests, woods, copses and individual trees. All the windows in Yime’s apartment looked out in roughly the same direction, but had she been looking from any other apartment on this level, the view would have been much the same, plus or minus hazy views of mountains, inland seas and oceans, with no other buildings visible at all, beyond the occasional distant lake-side villa or drifting houseboat.
Despite this, Yime lived in a city, and although the construction she lived in was fairly substantial – a kilometre tall and perhaps a tenth of that across – it itself was not the totality of the metropolis, forming only a small part of it and being nowhere near the most impressive of its buildings. But then it was nowhere near any of the other buildings of the city. The building was part of a Distributed City, which to the naive or uninformed eye looked remarkably like no city whatsoever.
Most Culture cities, where they existed at all, resembled giant snowflakes, with greenery – or at least countryside, in whatever colour or form – penetrating almost to the heart of the conurbation.