Читать книгу Belt Three - John Ayliff - Страница 7

Keldra put the cuffs on Jonas’s wrists and marched him to the transit hub, once again jamming the nerve gun into his back. The transit module could take half a dozen people, but she dismissed her servitors and entered with Jonas alone. He noticed a slave-spike among the tools hanging from her belt as she strapped herself into the acceleration harness opposite him. He had no idea why she didn’t use it.

He felt the gravity drop away as the module travelled up to the ship’s spine, then return as it moved outwards to the first ring. There were no servitors waiting when the door opened, and Jonas saw none as Keldra prodded him along a corridor to the bridge.

Jonas had seen a Salamander’s bridge before so he could tell that this one was heavily modified. All but one of the crew terminals had been ripped out, making the room seem larger than it normally would, and it was dominated by the holo-screen taking up the front wall. Right now the screen showed an external view centred on the red-brown dot of LN-411.

In the centre of the room was what Jonas could only think of as a nest. A chaotic arrangement of screens and control boards formed a half-circle around a battered captain’s chair, whose padding leaked through splits unevenly patched with black tape. The control boards were stained, and every empty surface held a foil food tray or empty stim pill packet.

The ceiling was painted dark blue with streaks and splotches of pale grey. He thought, for a moment, that it was an abstract pattern, before he realized what it depicted: clouds. The sky of old Earth, or at least Keldra’s guess of how it would have looked. The paintwork was rough, with great scrawled brush strokes, not like the neat work of a servitor painting programme. Jonas was sure that she had painted it herself.

Keldra glanced at one of the screens on her control nest. ‘We’re just in time.’

The view on the bridge screen zoomed in. The familiar crags of LN-411 loomed large, dotted with the docking scaffolds and solar panel arrays of Jonas’s abandoned mining operation. Beside the rock floated the fragile-looking white ovoid of a Scriber Immolation ship. Keldra hadn’t touched the controls. Her full name had indicated she was Engineer-caste, but she must be controlling the ship using a pilot implant.

Beyond LN-411 another object was visible, much larger than the rock but totally black. Its shape was hard to make out against the stars, but Jonas knew what it was. A regular dodecahedron, a little more than fifty kilometres across, each face a flat plane composed of an exotic material that absorbed almost all radiation, leaving it utterly black and cold. He felt a chill run through him. He had seen recordings, but he had never been this close to a Worldbreaker before.

Keldra had climbed into her nest and was leaning forward in the chair, a grin of anticipation on her face.

‘You like to watch them eat?’ Jonas asked. ‘That’s sick.’

Keldra didn’t react to the insult. Whatever was going through her head was more important to her than being angry with him.

‘Any moment now,’ she said.

A spot of pale green light appeared in the middle of the dark mass and spread into a thin five-pointed star, whose arms began to thicken. One of the Worldbreaker’s faces had split into five triangular petals that were opening outwards, and the light was shining from inside, creating a tenuous beam in the rock dust surrounding LN-411. The beam began to sparkle as bits of the rock broke off and streamed into the Worldbreaker’s flickering pentagonal maw. Jonas watched the Scriber ship as it drifted into the beam and vanished in a puff of orange flame.

After about ten seconds the near surface of the rock glowed green and then crumbled inwards, the solar panels shattering. The Worldbreaker beam had worked its way through, obliterating in moments the installations that Jonas’s workers had taken months to carve out of the rock. The last few fragments fell into the Worldbreaker’s mouth and disappeared, and the light shut off. Dimly, Jonas could see the five petals starting to close.

‘Now watch this.’ Keldra raised her hand with two fingers extended, miming a gun, and pointed it at the Worldbreaker. ‘Pow!’ She fired, swinging her arm expansively.

A white rocket trail flared on the bridge screen and receded, gathering speed towards the Worldbreaker. Through the glare, Jonas could just make out the missile itself: ugly and asymmetrical, looking as though it had been made out of scavenged parts. The shell looked like one of the Reinhardt Industries uranium ore canisters.

Jonas frowned. The sight of a uranium symbol on a missile reminded him of something from Planetary Age history. ‘Is that a nuclear missile?’

Keldra shot him a momentary approving look. She seemed excited. ‘I told you. You should have fought!’

The missile dwindled to a white point that curved into the Worldbreaker’s mouth. The petals were still closing slowly. Jonas’s heart pounded. What if the Worldbreaker turned its beam on them? But Worldbreakers never reacted to people. Keldra was staring at the screen, teeth bared like some prehistoric hunter, waiting for the moment…

There was a bloom of white light from inside the throat, and then the Worldbreaker cracked open. Massive pieces of debris spun away, and from the centre, a cloud of glowing green gas spilled out and began to fade. Keldra punched the air.

‘Yes!’

Jonas stared in disbelief. ‘You killed it.’

‘I’ve killed six of them now.’ She glanced between Jonas and the screen and spoke rapidly, her words tumbling over one another in her excitement. ‘There’s a window, after the beam shuts off but before the mouth closes. Normal weapons weren’t enough, so I found out how to build a nuke. I’ve got my own enrichment plant here on the ship.’

‘You killed it,’ Jonas said again. The green cloud had faded away now. The Worldbreaker and LN-411 were both gone, their remains visible only as a flickering blackness where the debris passed in front of the stars. Jonas watched in silence as it dispersed.

Keldra tapped at a couple of her control boards and the ship began to turn, aligning itself to a new course. Still radiating triumph, she swung herself out of the control nest and grabbed the enslavement spike from her belt.

‘All right, show’s over.’

Jonas sighed, and let his shoulders droop, relaxed. He’d been resigned to this since he’d seen Ayla’s shuttle explode. ‘At least I got to see a Worldbreaker die.’

She put a hand on Jonas’s shoulder and pressed the spike to the back of his neck, where his skull met his spine. He felt a sharp pain as the implant spike broke the skin, then dizziness, then his vision blurred and he blacked out.

Keldra’s face swam back into focus. Jonas flexed his fingers and found that they responded. He blinked, trying to clear his head. ‘You didn’t wipe me,’ he said.

‘The implant’s in dormant mode. I just need to say the word and you’re wiped.’

He rubbed his wrists. The cuffs were gone.

‘There are some other triggers too,’ Keldra continued. ‘If you try to hurt me, even indirectly, it’ll knock you out. If you’re off the ship for more than twenty-four hours without my say so, it’ll kill you.’

‘Sounds pretty foolproof,’ he said. With his mind still foggy he couldn’t think of a way around the restrictions, and those were just the restrictions Keldra was telling him about. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘You nearly killed me. I’ve got a system in place to monitor my vitals, so servitors came and revived me. But you nearly beat me. That means you’ve got skills I can use.’

He nodded slowly. That was true, but he didn’t think it was the real reason. ‘And you want someone to talk to,’ he said.

That threw her. She glared at him, but said nothing.

‘You want someone to talk to, and you want someone to watch. Don’t you? Killing that Worldbreaker was sweeter because someone saw you do it.’

She glanced up at the painted clouds. ‘They stole from you as well.’ She put her hand on the nerve gun at her hip, and a sideways jerk of her head directed him to the door.

Keldra took Jonas around the ring to the crew living area. They went through a lounge, where a threadbare couch faced a big wall-screen, and a dining room with a doorway through which a cluttered kitchen was visible. The next corridor had eight cabin doors leading off it, and they looked like part of the original ship design, not later modifications. Being pilot as well as captain was meant to burn people out with the overload of responsibilities, but he thought Keldra must be doing the jobs of half a dozen other people, as well.

She bundled him into one of the cabins. ‘I’ll be back for you later.’ She shut the door, and he heard the mechanism click as the hard lock engaged.

The cabin was not much larger than the prison cell, but it had more comforts. There was a padded bunk built into the wall, and a water-conserving shower. There was a desk terminal, but it didn’t respond when Jonas pressed its power button. He checked under the desk and found that the terminal had been gutted, the parts no doubt finding their way into Keldra’s nest or some other modification project elsewhere in the ship.

He sat at the useless desk and idly fingered the back of his neck where Keldra had injected the implant. He thought he could feel something, numbness, or an irregularity of the skin, but he knew it was his imagination. An implant injection wound was undetectable.

He had to find some way to escape from her, and now it meant escaping from the implant’s control as well. He wondered briefly if some of the implant programming she mentioned had been a bluff, but dismissed the idea. He knew enough implant engineering to know that everything Keldra had said was possible, and he didn’t think that she was one to bluff, not for any length of time. It wasn’t that she was honest, but he didn’t think she was subtle, either.

He needed to escape from her, and, more than that, he wanted to defeat her, to avenge the deaths of his crew. He tried to channel that anger, to make something useful of it, to formulate a plan, but he couldn’t concentrate. All he could think of was the sight of the Scriber ship vanishing into the green beam, and the Worldbreaker cracking apart.

An hour later the door lock clicked and Keldra opened it without knocking. When Jonas got up, she threw a bundle into his arms. Frayed blue servitor overalls, with the logo of some minor freight company on the shoulder.

He tossed the clothes onto the bed. ‘You want me to get changed now?’

‘No. Come with me.’

He followed her into the corridor as she stalked off. ‘You can’t win, you know,’ he called after her.

‘What?’

‘You can’t beat the Worldbreakers. I did some calculations. From what my ship was carrying, you couldn’t have enriched enough weapons-grade uranium for a warhead that size. I don’t know if you got it all from mining ships or bought it on the black market, but that missile must have burned through your loot from a dozen kills.’ Keldra didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t good at bluffing; Jonas could tell he was right. ‘You can’t even attack until they’ve finished eating, so you couldn’t defend a city from one. You’ve killed six Worldbreakers. Do you know how many there are?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘There are tens of thousands, and for all we know they’re making more of themselves, down beneath the veil. Even if every city used all its resources to build nukes to fight them, they would still keep coming. This isn’t a war you can win. This isn’t a war at all, and if it ever was then the Worldbreakers won it a long time ago.’

Keldra grabbed the front of his shirt and pushed him into the wall, just as she had in the shuttle bay. ‘You don’t talk to me like that.’

Jonas looked into her eyes, not blinking, not even raising his voice. ‘You killed my crew and God knows how many other people. You can wipe me, or I’ll talk to you howsoever I like.’

‘They should have fought.’

‘They didn’t fight because they couldn’t win, and they knew that. Do you really think you’re justified in murdering people because they won’t join in with your futile gesture of defiance?’

‘I don’t care what you think of me.’

‘I think you do. Otherwise why do you want me around?’

‘Shut up and follow me. I’ll give you the tour.’