TWENTY-NINE

 

 

WE GIVE ANDRADE’S team a running start. Eight shells and a handful of operators in Werewolf-black, a hundred and fifty marines. They follow side tunnels and redundant ducts, forgotten compartments and airlocks that only cycle when you add muscle. The path they take is not on any map that we can find, but they know which direction they need to go, and what to look for along the way.

They move aft, along the spine of the ship.

When our turn comes, we head towards the skin. Back towards the wind.

Bor leads us partway along the corridors that carried us in. The rest of her wingmates are with Andrade, but she’s the best the Werewolf has for what we need. She takes us through shortcuts and into hidden chambers, stepping around hollow mechanisms and flagging the clever double-blinds that keep the survivors out of sight. From there, between armour plates, and through a torpedo magazine, then into the network of tubes and exhaust channels meant for launching them.

We follow a sloping tube, walking first, then climbing as the incline forces us to look for grip. We follow handholds made for maintenance machines, covering ourselves in fuel residue and radioactive ash.

At the summit, the launch silo cuts away to open air, the doors long since locked back and out of the way.

Bor’s machine leans over the edge, catching streamers on the breeze and Eye-light on her plates. She looks back at us. “Remember the way we came,” sends the Decatur, dusted grey by the climb. “We delete the records now. Geometry, pathing, compass logs. Any visuals.”

I hadn’t noticed before, but there’s a little of Hasei’s richness in her voice, the accent thicker when she whispers.

“Anything the hollows could use to trace our steps?” asks Salt, somewhere below us. “Christs,” he mutters, “that’s bleak.”

Bor looks back from her perch, right on the silo’s lip. “You get used to it.”

We turn to follow her gaze, past Hail’s borrowed Decatur, and Salt’s silhouette behind it. “To crawling around in the dark?” he asks. “Or to the chance that your machine will lose its mind?”

Bor offers a feathered shrug.

A little blip flows along the net; a confirmation that her files have been scrubbed and overwritten with static. “Bury as deep as you can.”

Hail replies with a confirmation of her own. “Records deleted.” Salt isn’t far behind.

But the Juno and I have to lie.

Decaturs can wipe whole memory sectors on command, steamroll times and places with junk and semirandom noise. Memory is what they call it, but it doesn’t have much to do with remembering. Their minds are empty vessels, waiting to be filled with feeds from their eyes, the movements of their internal compasses, the calculations that keep them moving.

We aren’t so lucky. The things we’ve done are part of us now. We could burn them away, cauterise the parts of ourselves that hold the thoughts, but there’d be collateral. We’d lose more than just the things we chose to forget.

We send a message just like Hail’s, just like Salt’s and Bor’s and exactly what you’d expect; a list of all the files we would have destroyed, with file-signatures and storage addresses to match. We still remember the path we took to get here, the checkpoints we cleared, and every little trick the survivors have to keep themselves safe.

If we were younger we’d have had to find a way to hide it all, but the memory is a tiny spark on a horizon that’s centuries-wide, and clouded with all of the dark thoughts we’ve had along the way. If the hollows take us, they’ll have to beat our nightmares before they can find anything worth remembering. If they can manage that, they’ll have to sort the things we’ve done from the things we’ve dreamt, and we’re not sure we could even do that ourselves.

The others don’t seem to catch the lie, but they wouldn’t. We really did delete a log. In fact, we took an entire sector and wiped it clean, filled the empty space with the strangest sounds we could imagine.

We deleted a log, it just wasn’t ours.

Hail’s Spirit still rides with us, but we haven’t touched anything she’d need to hear it in her head again. A complete mind-state rests somewhere in a Wolf-issue server, locked up and left to bother Andrade’s technicians. A ghost copy is still plugged into the side of our cockpit. It lives inside us, still missing a body. Now missing a few hours in the Eye-light and a few mindless observations as it flew, buried in noise, extinguished forever.

We’ll give it back to you, we whisper to the little silver box. As soon as this is all over, we say, where no one else can hear.

If the Spirit understands, it doesn’t respond.

“Good,” says Bor. “From here, tightline only.”

Her machine cuts itself off from our nets and turns back to face the wind. Her armour draws froth and condensation where the currents find her, feathers twitching as they adjust against the drag. Her hands hold steady on the silo doors on either side, and her feet spread across the lip.

A little further out, and she’s down to toes and fingertips, stretching out over nothing so she can take a measure of the drop.

Stay close, sends the dusty shell, just as it disappears.

We climb to where she was standing, but it isn’t as easy as she made it look. The silo cuts away to open air almost without warning. When we finally make it all the way to the edge, we have to lock a foot down on the armoured lip, let it carry our weight while we reach for the old sliding doors.

We’re shorter than the Decatur, and our arms don’t reach as far. When we turn to look where she’s gone, we have to stretch our whole body out, fighting the urge to spread our wings.

A vicious gale runs between the dreadnought’s cliffs and gulleys, and it whips at us as soon as we clear the edge. Reflex works our flaps and feathers, deflecting the worst of it, biting into the airflow to help us keep our grip.

Bor is most of a K below, standing on a narrow ledge formed on the seam between two of Horizon’s huge primary plates, the heat from her engines already carried away on the breeze.

We lean back into the curve of the hull and start bleeding pressure from our legs. A thought warms our reactor and feeds sparks into our engines. We spread our passives wide and set our eyes on the sky, checking for anything that might come hunting the heat.

Nothing stirs above us, even as we feel the chill in our hull replaced with nova glow. We’re alone with the light and the air and the open valleys between the clouds.

If only we could stay.

We kill the locks on our soles and let our fingers slip, feel our weight begin to tip. We release ourselves to the breeze, and for a few heartbeats, we fly.

We spit fire at the last moment, kill enough momentum that our feet don’t ring when they find the steel below. We stand straight, hold ourselves still a moment longer, listening for echoes underneath us and flaring our plates to the currents, the wind wrapping around our hull.

We pluck our weapon from its mounts, flinching at the glare of its new barrel in the light. Avery’s knuckledragger crew should’ve sprayed it matte, but repairs are repairs, and they were making do with jury-rigs and abandonware. We’re just lucky to have something that was made to fit.

We roll up behind Bor’s Decatur, already scanning the air for hollows. If there was any doubt that she used to be Hasei, it’s gone now; she came down without a sound, heavy steel carried on whispers and fingertips.

We brace for Hail. She might have been Sigurd once upon a time, but we’ve been around her long enough now; she flies like there are NorCol patents on her genes, and she doesn’t have her Spirit anymore. Heavy Decatur’s ready to bring the rain.

We sweep our aim across the cloud tops, watching for shadows and heat-ghosts. From there, into the crags in the hull ahead of us, up and down, looking for any sign of hollow machinery.

We don’t see Hail lean out, but we hear a single augur-ping as she measures the fall.

We’re still looking out when we feel her subtle steps behind us, and the faint warmth of her weapons charging. There are no echoes, no landing-wash, no sign of any living shell until her machine flicks us a line.

Stacking up, like a breath against our ear.

We’d smile, if we could.

Not so NorCol after all.

Salt hits harder, and has to fight his fall with burn. Not that we’d expect much else. We’ve had enough airtime with him to know that anything he does comes wrapped in weight and fire. Just be sure that you’re out of the way.

His machine straightens from a cloud of condensate, exhaust slowly carried away on the breeze. He has the same red markings as Bor and Hail do, fresh spray-lines across chest and shoulder to make sure that we don’t take him for a hollow.

Sorry, he sends, once he’s had a moment to cool off.

But no one complains. His echoes fade quickly, and nothing rises from the cloud.

We’re clear, sends Bor. Come.

She leads us along the ridge, takes us on a slow climb around another silver-grey continent, open froth below us. From there into a massive scar that could only have been carved by another dreadnought. The impact turned metal to liquid, splashed it out around the edges, and left a crevice in the plate that’s wide enough to fit us all, if we crouch and pull our wings in close.

Back out again, and we drop onto a spur crusted with antennae and ranging equipment, pockmarked by driftwood and deformed by angry currents. Past that, we crest a sudden cliff looking out across a stretch of open air, the froth turned to eddies between us and the wall of steel in the distance.

Bor crouches on the edge. Watch the sky for me, she sends, engines warming.

Her outlets blink supernova bright, a shock-flash and a sudden rush of heat, but by the time our optics adjust, she’s already curving away. She comes down in a trail of sparks, already fading into the dark of another ravines. We follow, low and quiet as the two Decaturs make the leap behind us.

Hail sends a warning across the tightline, and herds us closer together in the shadows.

What is it? we send.

Her shell aims a finger straight up where our narrow sky begins and ends, just metres at its widest. A hotspot breaks the outline of the plates above us, then another. A pack of hollows, drifting in the currents, blinking as the Eye-light finds them.

We’re made of the same stuff as the plains around us; hard to see if we keep to the shadows, hard to detect if we’re cold and quiet and standing completely still. All that, and it would still only take one stray eye to pick us out—to catch a moment’s movement, or a pale silhouette, or the spot of bloody burgundy between peaks of silver-grey.

The hollows keep drifting, and Bor hustles us as soon as they’re out of sight. She takes us in through a broken loading hatch, back inside the ship, following a line of dead compartments, incomplete or badly damaged, some still open to the wind.

From a distance, Horizon has the look of something solid—the broken bones of planets, dropped into starlight furnaces and moulded into a monolith. That might have been true, once upon a time, but up close it’s all patchwork and scar tissue, bolts and rivets and weld-lines that could almost have been made by hand.

When we clear the hull a third time, it’s along the walkways of an ancient scaffold, welded to the plating around another massive wound, never repaired. From the inside, it’s a cage of piles and crosshatch, lined with scrap and abandoned equipment. We look out at a checkerboard sky, and catch angular shadows where the Eye-light makes it through.

Bor brings us to rest where the grids are thickest, and guides our eyes through the places where we can see all the way to the other side. This is where her squad watched Andrade’s attack on Hangar D—the assault that saved my ground crew, killed a third of his shells and blew two holes between hangar blocks.

Even when he knew he was leading a suicide run, the Werewolf was playing for information. He left a squad on the sidelines, as calm and quiet as possible, to track and tag and learn from all the carnage.

Now Bor is back again.

She uses tightlines to set a waypoint in our eyes: a pair of smaller dawns in the distance, flickering in and out of sight. Two NorCol hulls break the cloud.

Here they come.

 

 

ACCORDING TO ITS silhouette, the shape in the distance is called Astaria Ali, and there’s no way you could miss it. We can feel the engine burn from here, hear its ranging systems clear their shrouds and lock a collar on every machine in sight.

A cloud of hollows falls from the plates above us, rushing to meet the sound, but the Ali crackles and flares, solid slugs zipping past just a little slower than the light of the muzzle sparks that sent them on their way. The destroyer’s gun crews make their first kill right above us; a Decatur reduced to cinders and driftwood so fast our refresh-rate nearly loses the picture between frames.

A second contact rises from the cloud behind the Ali, above and a little to port. It’s less a silhouette and more a statement of intent: the angles of its hull meet like a blade-point, straight and level and coming right for us. This is the Harriet Lane, and it’s a monster. Andrade called it a destroyer, but it barely deserves the title: it would be a carrier if it had flutes or open decks, or a battleship if it had ventral guns. As it is, it’s only a little way short of trading punches with dreadnoughts.

It certainly has lungs like one.

Huge arrays come to life across its hull, filling the air with augur strobes and wideband wash from its PHADAR. A Decatur will make your ears ring if it aims its hardware just right, but it has to catch you first, and put all of its energy into one directed stream. The Lane is everywhere, rippling across the sky and returning giant echoes from the silver-grey cliffs around us. It reverberates around inside the cavern of our skull, and follows every line and chamber in our hull.

For half a second, it deafens us, our systems fighting to recover from the rush of noise and static. Another swell rises just as the first one peters out, and another after that. In less than thirty seconds, three huge pulses map the sky down to vapour trails and dust motes, every scrap of steel for a hundred K singing back for the Lane to hear.

The Ali is already taking hits, holding the line while the Lane gets ready for the next step. Condensing streaks mark the paths of railshot, and tracers follow arcs of auto fire. Hollows crowd the breaks and crags above us, skipping out into the breeze, filling every channel with howls and incoherence. We count a hundred machines in seconds, and that’s just with our eyes and passives.

Exactly as planned.

The Ali is all bare knuckles. Heavy accelerators extend from its upper decks, but there are only a few, and they’re made for shots across bows and long-gun salutes. Its crews claim a fair share of kills, but it wasn’t built for this kind of fight. The Ali is all about getting up close and bloody.

Stubby turrets cling to every flat surface, jutting like blisters. They whir in place, meeting incoming missiles with curtains of flak and spears of hypervelocity ball. They fight railshot with accelerated heavy metals of their own, surrounded by spark cones and crackle as they make interceptions just moments from the hull. The Ali flies through shrapnel and a headwind that’s quickly turning thicker with munitions, but it takes the hits just as easily as it churns them out. Huge deflector surfaces wear the worst of it, and ferrofluids creep across its plates like mercury, shoring up anything that can’t take the heat.

All to buy the Lane time to think.

Now it’s done; the bigger ship has tagged everything on the wind, accounted for anything with wings out or engines hot, nets open or augurs spitting. The Lane sees everything.

Tiny silos open up across its skin, thirty thousand hatches rolled clear of pores in the metal. Inside each one is a missile the size of a shell’s little finger, warming up to launch. A sudden glow warms the clouds around the destroyer, clothing every part of the ship in silver fizz and heat-shimmer, carrying the tiny warheads it’s manufactured on demand.

They aren’t like the long projectiles a Decatur carries in its tubes; those are made for capping other machines and whole-body kills. The Lane’s attack flows out in a swarm thirty thousand thick, a new stormfront described in propellant and condensation. The next wave ripples out a minute later, thrusters flickering like lightning.

Sixty thousand.

Ninety thousand, each little missile arcing for a target.

The hollows can see it just as well as we can, and most come about as the first volley closes in, spewing flares and screamers and unspent ammunition. Not that it helps. The Lane tracks each one, updating old contacts as the shells try to hide behind bursts of chaff and sound.

A few machines dig in, working their weapons overtime as they try to keep the hot wind from closing in around them. The Lane takes them first, impacts growing from sparks to blossoms to blistering gales as the little warheads find their marks, hundreds piling on in moments. Thirty-eight shells die in the first barrage, and a forth salvo is already headed for launch.

The two destroyers don’t wait to see what comes. They haven’t stopped burning since they came into view, and now they dive, tearing back through the cloud tops. We’ve got just enough magnification to see the strikes against their hulls, but even with the Ali swatting everything in reach, the hollows are everywhere, and they haven’t stopped shooting yet.

But the destroyers have done what they came to do. The Lane keeps heads down and hostile machinery fighting for its existence, too busy pulling gee to watch for a couple of extra shells in their midst. The Ali kept it covered, gained the hard yards with grit and raw steel.

Bor flashes us. Get ready.

A giant pulse turns our eyes back to the sky. At first, we’re expecting another wave from the Lane’s arrays, but these are from its comms. A shriek of pain and surprise, rendered in distress protocols and crowded emergency channels.

We work our lenses, finding the big destroyer just as a pair of hollows come down across its spine. They’ve barely touched it when the ship’s wide engines begin choking in their cones, the scales of its missile-hatches quivering in the light. Its guns roll around in their turrets, choking as their magazine feeds begin to seize. The destroyer is going haywire.

More machines drop in as the ship loses thrust.

But the Lane won’t give itself away.

Fire traces the outlines of its hull as scuttling charges wake, clouding our eyes with static as reactors lose containment, every chamber cracked wide in an instant. A sudden flash takes the place of hull and engine-glow, a few hundred souls turned to vapour halfway between one heartbeat and the next.

Bor doesn’t give us time to think. A tightline rushes in through our receivers, hot with priority codes.

GO GO GO.

 

 

WE FOLLOW BOR along a path she mapped in advance, kept open in case Andrade’s crews ever needed a route back into occupied territory. First at a sprint, then on solid thrust when we run out of gangway. It runs through the scaffold grids, too tight for wings, too tight for anything but hope that we can make the turns with just the burn.

Bor sets the pace as only a former Hasei could, gee so heavy that we can hear the groans of the body in our saddle, wheezing under pressure, cockpit systems working hard to keep it breathing through the turns.

We hit open air in seconds, catching turbulence from the rush of thrust and munitions still screaming past. The Lane’s missile swarms have lived longer than their source, and they’re still hunting, cutting through waves of hollow machinery. The little missiles turn and curdle around us, but they don’t reach for anything their mother hadn’t already marked for them to find.

If the hollows have time to look for us, we don’t see it. We’ve got eyes on a tear in the wall of Hangar D, between blocks 91 and 92, right where Bor said it would be.

There’s a hollow Spirit in the way. It clambers up through the break in Horizon’s hull, using the cracks for handholds, its injured engine sparking and mangled wings flexed, hoping for a way back into the wind. We unfold a hand, control our drag long enough to reach our weapon, but Salt’s machine is already on it. We’re too close to see the slugs, but the impacts are hard to miss. The Spirit’s shoulder explodes as a shot finds a way between collar and chest-plate.

The second slug is right behind the first, slamming in through the machine’s soft muscle and following its back-plate along the inside, tumbling and tearing and splashing out between its shoulderblades. The third shot hits centre-of-mass, dead in the middle of the shell’s hard primary strike-faces, hard enough to knock it loose.

Bor clears the gap just as the hollow falls away, and we follow close enough that we can feel the Spirit’s shattered plating patter against our skin. Hail and Salt hit targets behind us, but we can’t look back.

We zip through the crack where block 91 used to join the hull, the sub-hangar resting on the block below it.

Taking the narrow gulleys at speed, we thread a crowded skyline flipped through ninety degrees and blurring in the corners of our eyes. It lasts barely long enough to think; just as quickly as they rise, they fall away, leaving us in the open caverns near D’s arched ceiling. Far below, past the tops of the sky-scraper blocks, are the monorail yards and giant elevator shafts that lead deeper under the deck.

We spot it first; one huge square, locked to the floor level, and marked with a stencil that reads 10-6 in bright yellow across it, rimmed with hazard strips. We reach for the emergency frequencies we’d chosen exactly for the purpose and drop a marker for the other three to see.

Bor turns immediately and follows us down. The elevator isn’t much more than a piece of mobile deck, made for carrying shells and spare parts up from the foundries under the hangar. We could try to find a way to wake it up, to tell its motors to send it down below, but we’d need to find the right nodes on the hangar’s widenets, and that’s assuming the hollows didn’t own them already.

So we take aim, drop hammerblows alongside Bor’s bright lightning bolts.

Two shots down, and we’ve buckled the platform. Bor’s slugs sever the hydraulics, and the locks that keep the lifter-assemblies tethered to this deck.

The elevator doesn’t fall, not yet, but we don’t want it to. We cruise above it and cut our thrust, timing our fall to Bor’s. The two of us hit the platform together, shattering the last connections to this floor. There’s a jerk as steel tears, and the shaft rushes up around us, surrounding us with sparks and low-grade shrapnel.

Hail and Salt drop in after us, their weapons still hot and their augurs still bouncing noise off the wall.

We fall sixteen levels in half as many heartbeats, flaring just before the platform slams into the bottom, and clearing the shaft as the other two shells come down. The four of us pull away from the light, two into the halls opening up on either side of us, two watching the sky.

Clear? we ask.

Clear, say the others.

The other jockeys pause, but not that you’d notice. Adrenaline fuels them nearly twice as fast as human standard, and their machines polish any mistakes they might be making along the way. They’re still meat and muscle, though. Still scrolling through the map that Avery made for us to follow.

The Juno and I don’t need to check. We remember everything.

Come, we send, not looking back.

We push through the vaults that hold D’s foundries, following a feed tunnel. Armoured elevator housings rise around the main drop-shaft, brightly coloured hatches marking the places where ammunition rises from the shot-lockers deeper in. All around us are the huge conveyors from gunshops and forges, and loading zones where abandoned flatbeds wait for replacement plating and new-forged joints. Racks of Decatur spares fill cavernous warehouses, carried into the light by long-legged cranes and thick cables in the gantries above. We slow at vibrations in the floor, sweep our weapons over half-built hollows still trapped in repair jigs, broken machinery glaring at us or shrieking over the nets, but they can’t do anything to hold us up. A few cycle their weapons at us, but the knuckledraggers kept every magazine dry.

We leave every machine where we find it, following a long turn that takes us even deeper. We step wide over a decommissioned Spirit splayed across a maintenance bay, sacrificed to keep stragglers fit to fly upstairs. The future is jagged edges and odd geometry—the Spirit series is just a memory, hidden down here while the company goes about forgetting it.

Beyond those bays are others, already faded. The light runs out before we’re far past the first bulkheads, and the shipwide networks fall away soon after. Rust runs through everything, bubbling under the ancient paint and cracking under our footsteps, leaving a record of our path in dust and oxides. Abandoned silhouettes rest in corners or lie spread across the floor. Even in the low-light, we can’t tell much past the centuries of grime.

Shell-sized hatches mark both sides of the passage, but judging by the swollen metal around their locks and the flaking rot around their hinges, there’s every chance we’d need to shoot our way in. Thankfully, we don’t have to.

A line of glow-globes follows the corridor, wired into the ship’s main supply and strung along by hand. They don’t come up to our ankle, but the low-light picks them out easily enough. They lead us past a disassembled shape that used to be a Juno.

Behind it is a door that’s still open from the last time it was used. Avery couldn’t get it shut after he came scratching for our sword.

In here.

Salt hesitates at the sight of the skeletal shell, but a glance over his shoulder gets him moving again. A hollow has just come down the elevator shaft, fast and hard enough to echo.

We slip through the doorway and find a space exactly like the one Avery said we’d find—a bay that used to serve an active population of shells, now down to a pair of bony corpses that several generations of ’draggers have been stripping for parts, cannibalised to keep a single Juno alive and flying.

Another sword-blade rests against the wall, exactly like our own but for the ragged edge that interrupts it barely halfway from its grip. An oilcloth pyramid stands to one side, outlines of crates showing through, an old carbine resting on top, made to fit our hands. Behind everything else is one last barrier—a perfect vault door, covered in dust, but still unmarked silver underneath. It’s the only thing in this place that doesn’t seem to have turned to rot.

This is it, we send.

The other three sign back. They turn around and take up positions around the bulkhead door that used to seal this place off, now jammed wide open. Salt touches the door itself and the hinges sing, make us all flinch at the sound.

Sorry, he sends, but Bor waves it off.

Quiet, she replies.

The three Decaturs settle, waiting for the sounds of their steps and the vibrations of their reactors to fade. They can’t do much about the heat that they’ve built up along the way, not without wind and space for it to drift away, but they can manage something like quiet so long as they don’t move too much and keep their augurs stowed. In here, their ears are keen enough.

They’re coming, sends Hail. Estimate 1.9 K and closing. Unknown number of contacts. There’s a pause, half an eye over her shoulder. Are you sure this is it?

We are. More than anything we can remember.

A plaque rests in the middle of the vault-door, brass on silver, letters finely set into the metal.

 

2nd MACHINE INTELLIGENCE GROUP

TRIAL 0017

CLUSTER α

 

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