The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [175]
Part of it sent revised orders to the Rosa squads, another gave new commands to the drones prepping two tierships in the main launch bay, and the rest of it addressed the drone Reski Emantes.
‘I have decided to help you,’ it said. ‘Although you must realise that such a mission has a high chance of failure.’
‘That is hardly a surprise,’ the drone said. ‘Given the various Human-related hazards I’ve had to deal with recently.’
‘We will be travelling aboard a field-boosted tiership,’ said the Construct. ‘The first part of our flight will entail some risk as we will be acting as a diversion while my re-establisher vessel makes good its escape. Once it is safely away, our ship will set course for the Hegemony’s Great Hub. I assume that you would prefer a more robust motility unit than this one.’
‘I won’t really feel safe in anything less than a multiprojector battledrone,’ said Reski Emantes. ‘Something like Perseusystems Ravager 9000 would do nicely.’
‘My apologies, but all that is available are a few type twos and a type three.’
‘I’ll take the type three – at least it doesn’t look like a triangular toy.’
JULIA
Through flicker-lit corridors ice-bitten by vacuum she hauled the last piece of their improvised getaway, a nearly full gas canister. The round-cornered cube was held in a plastic mesh sack snap-locked to a lug on the rear of her housing. It bounced and scuffed against the ridged deck covering but the impacts exerted noticeably less drag than on her previous excursions, proof that the cells powering the deck gravity were running down. She just hoped that they were independent of whatever source was running the recharge stations she had used several times already.
It had been less than twelve hours since she and Nicko, one of Nicodemus’s net-sims, had sneaked aboard the Hegemony supply ship via a low-level stockload datalink. Once in the ship’s active system, Nicko had altered their privileges priority to gain access to a greater range of subsystems. Tapping into the nav-sensor interface, they had skimmed through the views and scans of the immediate hyperspace vicinity, including the branching towers of the Great Hub and the four patrolling Hegemony heavy cruisers. The Great Hub, the master nexus for all AIs in the Hegemony and many of its client states, consisted of a main spindle axis about a kilometre long, and at its midpoint a polyhedral structure roughly a quarter of a kilom across; from many of its grey-silver facets jutted smaller tower spindles like the main axis, all of them branching at regular intervals.
That was their goal – with the supply ship’s comm equipment, Nicko had promised that he could find a way to get them inside, into ‘AI heaven’, as he called it.
That enthusiastic optimism came to an abrupt end when an undetected missile struck the supply ship’s stern, destroying the main thrusters. Nicko had acted without hesitation, employing a crash priority override to have them both transferred down to secondary cores on the maintenance deck. Then he had quickly searched for a maintenance bot with a generous memstore, found one and downported Julia into it. He was in the process of picking out one for himself when a second missile hit the hyperdrive and wiped out the main generators. Nicko had to use what was available, a crawler bot fitted for hold scrubbing.
From Julia’s perspective, her bot was shaped like an upended oval bin with a pair of wheels at the base, a sensor cluster at the top and several toolarm niches spaced around its middle. An unlovely but functional design and certainly strong enough to cope with all the lifting and moving she had done in search of parts for the escape vehicle. With the gas canister scraping along behind her she followed a branch tunnel that curved up towards the upper stern. Minutes later she entered what had been a long compartment set aside for any live crew that came aboard.