The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [68]
Or was it about the guilt? Rosa’s death had planted a seed of guilt in him and its fruit was bitter. The Construct, for all its sophistication and millennia of accumulated knowledge, seemed to express no guilt or remorse over the destruction of its servants. The Godhead, however, had certainly been affected by the mass suicide of its creatures, the Tanenth – did that make it morally superior to the Construct?
The minimised bar of the holoplane began to pulse then expanded back to full. From an angled frame within it, the smiling face of the ambassador sim gazed out at him – a closer look revealed that this was a rendered image, rather than a realtime feed. Robert laughed.
‘So you copied yourself into the ship, then,’ he said.
‘Curiosity is part of my persona profile,’ the sim said. ‘I wanted to get a closer perspective on those planetoids … and I have now stabilised our attitude and ignited the thrusters. We should reach the anomaly in ten minutes.’
The undifferentiated darkness outside the viewport began to change as enhancement layers went to work. The barren, eroded, hollowed-out planetoids slowly came into view, complete with his route, a dotted line winding through them.
‘I am receiving an interesting burst of data from the Heracles,’ the shipboard sim said. ‘Visuals of the mega-creatures that are chasing them.’
Another frame expanded to take up most of the secondary screen. It showed a succession of shots from the Heracles’ hull cams, shots that zoomed in on the immense creatures, panned from one to another, and cut to other views. Robert stared in fascinated horror, recognising their long shapes, their undulant motion.
‘Vermax!’
He had encountered them on his first journey into the depths of hyperspace, in the lithosphere of Abfagul then later while riding in a sentient machine called Conveyance 289. Only they were arm-length horrors while these things were … gargantuan, serpentine monsters so black their forms seemed to blur into each other.
‘Indeed, yes. We know that the small ones are sent by the Godhead and its servants – I doubt that the same applies to those leviathans. At this depth they may even be the remnants of some ancestral species. Their presence here, however, offers a clue about those planetoids … ’
The ship sim paused, its screen image frozen for an instant before reanimating.
‘It appears that not all of the megavermax dashed off in pursuit of the Heracles. We have managed to attract the attention of one and it is heading for us.’
On the viewport’s data-layer a second line of dashes stabbed in from the side to intersect with their own route.
‘Increase speed?’ said Robert.
‘We are already approaching this vessel’s nominal maximum but our pursuer is easily matching it.’
‘So what does it want with us?’ Robert said with growing irritation.
‘Vermax are technivores,’ said the sim. ‘Anything composed of refined materials and laced with energy sources would be a tasty meal. And in a denuded tier like this we are like a sandwich to a starving man.’
The planetoids were coming up fast but the megavermax was gaining by the second. Hull cams got it in shot and enhancement revealed its colossal size, bearing down on the Construct ship like the grandfather of all whales chasing a minnow.
‘Do something, anything!’ Robert said in a strangled whisper. ‘It’s only seconds away!’
‘When forced to take drastic action,’ said the sim, ‘the trick is to make it work for you.’
The view through the viewport swung round wildly. Robert held on to the arms of the couch, even though he was safely strapped in.
‘We cannot outrun it in a straight race, but undertaking a spiral dodge around its body – turn one – forces it to abandon that considerable forward momentum in favour of twisting and turning in its pursuit of us. After the second loop we can use our superior acceleration to reach the anomaly with enough time to send you on your way … and that is turn two.’
Ahead a group of eroded planetoids swam into view while the