The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [66]
‘Well, after the missile attack and the subsequent Spiral gunship assaults the Heracles was a near-wreck, going by the logs. A third of the generators were junk and another third were offline, as were the battle systems. Velazquez’s emergency jump was an act of pure desperation which damaged his hyperdrive and plunged them down into hyperspace. By the time I found them nearly half the ship had been surrendered to vacuum due to hull breaches and failed environment systems. Luckily, the Construct provided me with a holdful of energy and shield modules and a few combat drones which I modified to maintain shield strength at the weak points. When we arrived to collect you from the cryptship, the double- and in some places triple-layer shields made Heracles almost invulnerable. For a limited period, that is.’
‘How are the repairs going?’
‘Let us say that it’s a work in progress.’
Robert glanced over at the captain. ‘Velazquez looks a little vexed.’
‘We are deep in the tiers of the Abyss,’ the sim said. ‘From my ship I sent a spy-probe on ahead to our target destination and it has just returned. The data gathered presents a daunting picture.’
‘Your ship?’
The sim nodded. ‘The Construct provided a fast scout for my journey. It is berthed in the Heracles’ main hold and may soon play a crucial role in what lies ahead.’
‘Okay, I’m curious,’ Robert said with a smile. ‘What did the probe discover?’
‘Lifeforms, gigantic lifeforms,’ the sim said. ‘Some kind of multilevel signal block prevented the probe from engaging the full range of its sensors, but it did get something before it was forced to pull out.’
The ambassador sim fingered a few bead controls on the holoplane between them and a dark image sprang into being. It was so dark that for a moment Robert thought he was looking at nothing. Then the sim adjusted the enhancement and an uneven, curved surface emerged from the gloom and as his sight acclimatised he saw that it was a planet, barren and airless. More details became apparent, great pits in the planet’s surface, terrible cracks and gouges, then the edge of one fissure kept on widening until it took up a huge area. Larger than a canyon, larger than a lake, an immense shadowy crater torn out of the planet’s face.
The sim altered the image a little more and suddenly Robert saw it – the planet was hollow and the immense crater was actually a huge gap in its crustlike shell. The cracks and hole he had noticed earlier were just visible from the inside.
And beyond it were the faint outlines of other rough, pitted and holed globes.
‘Dead worlds,’ he murmured. ‘Were they once inhabited?’
‘That is doubtful. These are smaller bodies, more like satellites or planetoids with masses insufficient to retain an atmosphere. Before the probe could carry out detailed scans it detected several huge objects moving straight towards it … ’
In the holoplane the image suddenly swung round to encompass what looked like uniform darkness – until Robert saw immense black and shapeless silhouettes drifting across the shadowy distance. Then the holoplane went blank.
‘Those were the source of lifesigns, according to the sensors, but the probe was unable to scan for more. After that it returned,’ the sim said. ‘From the sensor data we know that there are roughly fifty planetoids like the one you saw, and that there is some kind of gravitational anomaly inside one of them, at the coordinates you got from the Tanenth machine. The lifeforms, unfortunately, number well over a hundred, which is the cause of the good captain’s worries.’
‘The solution seems clear,’ said Robert. ‘Put me in your scout, have the Heracles decoy the beasts away from the anomaly, allowing me to sweep in, disembark and enter the mind of the Godhead.’
‘I agree,’ said Captain Velazquez as he came round to join them. ‘The question hangs over how much stress will be generated by decoy manoeuvres and how much the chassis plates can stand. Ambassador, you said that these combat drones are the Construct’s most advanced models – do they have need of inertial dampeners?