The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [95]
In thousand-strong formations, combat vessels swept towards each other, energy weapons stabbing out like a forest of bright spears moments before the flying arrays met each other, cut into each other. Warships hurtled past each other, some as close as a dozen metres, others too close, their collisions sending both careening off to spread the destruction wider. Projector beams burned into hulls, forcefield shields strobed, flared and overloaded, missiles were subverted by countermeasure virals and turned on their ships of origin.
And as before, Robert watched it all from a godlike point of view. The Garden of the Machines was a fabulously detailed miniature, while the starship formations were like tightly coordinated shoals of mechanical fish. The defenders were the Aggression, the Construct’s AI machines, and they were facing a combined force of Vor and Shyntanil craft. The former had black or purple hulls that were rounded, faintly organic in shape with bifurcated or trifurcated prows, blunt tines that emitted beams and webs of jagged energy. The latter had larger wedge-shaped hulls, angular profiles and a greater variety of weapons. As the battle unfolded it seemed that the attackers were more likely than not to employ risky gambits in mid-manoeuvre to gain an edge on the next pass.
Robert recalled what he had heard from the rogue Shyntanil a few days ago. The Godhead had rescued their people, some from internecine skirmishing, others from obliteration at the hands of deep-level horde creatures, and still others from disease and inward-turning obsessions. Given promises of glory and domination of hyperspace, they reunited and with the Godhead’s help recovered and rebuilt many of their ships, then set about bringing many of that fading race’s ancestrals back to the pseudo-life of the Twiceborn, through the techniques of technotrophic regeneration. The Vor, on the other hand, were a species of usurper symbiotes that had been on a long horizontal journey across the overlapping tiers of hyperspace in search of new races to dominate. The Godhead’s messengers had found them and persuaded them to return and take part in a grand assault on a variety of hyperspace civilisations and powers, especially the Construct and its forces.
Now his boat, a titanic hulk next to those tiny ships, was slowly coming up on the Garden of the Machines itself on a course that would pass close by. As it did so, Robert saw a Shyntanil cryptship appear in a quivering burst of hyperspace radiance and assume a trajectory towards the Construct’s headquarters. Wave after wave of insectlike interceptors were launched from the ducts in the flanks of that big diamond-shaped vessel. In response, clouds of tinier objects emerged from the Garden’s buildings, drones, mechs, droids, all coming out to fight the invaders. They moved out to meet them, coalescing in clusters that darted towards individual craft. It was all too small for Robert to make out the details, but there were sparks and flashes of weaponsfire, brief white flares and large yellow ones. After a minute or two it appeared that the Shyntanil interceptor attack had been stalled by the ferocity of the defending mechs. By now his viewpoint, from his own vessel, was passing the upper floors of the Garden of the Machines, with the Construct’s pinnacle towers and domes practically within reach. He gazed at the open windows, in at the white rooms, and wondered if some tiny Construct or even a Rosa-sim was in there somewhere …
‘Well, that was fun, seeing those creaking relics put to flight. If there’s one thing worse than an organic sentient, it’s an organic sentient that’s been brought back from the dead.’
Robert turned to see a drone hovering about an arm’s length away. It was shaped like a pair of metre-wide flattened shells separated by some kind of shielded assembly – in fact, there was a distinct clamshell appearance to it. The voice, however,