Surface Detail

She brought the bulky helmet over her head, checked it was working on visual and audio and that there was air in the mask component, then left it in place for added protection as much as anything while the gun’s ancient control comms established direct links with her neural lace; systems designed and code written millennia apart met, made sense and established rules and parameters. It was a strange, invasively unpleasant feeling, like a spreading itch inside her skull she could not scratch. She felt the lace using her drug glands to jink her already quickened senses and reactions up to one of her pre-agreed maxima. Felt like the setting was deterioration within minutes and burn-out in less than a quarter of an hour. Ah, the very quickest, the all-out emergency mode. That wasn’t encouraging; her own lace was giving her just a handful of minutes to be of use as a fully functioning component of the Orbital’s last-ditch defence.

Outside, grippings and pressings all over her body, like being nuzzled by a few dozen small but powerful animals, confirmed that the gun control blister’s protective armour had enfolded her. She and the gun were as ready as they’d ever be for what came next.

She stared out into the darkness, senses enhanced to the point of nearly painful distraction as she searched for anything that wasn’t basically Culture stuff getting wasted. Nothing visible, appreciable at all. She established hardened comms links with a few other people and drones, all of them within the limit of this section’s original plate boundary. Her fellow warriors were shown as a line of blue tell-tale lights on a screen at the lower limit of her field of vision. They quickly determined that none of them knew what was happening and nobody could see anything to fire at. Almost immediately, there was a hoarse scream, quickly cut off, and one light turned from blue to red as a compromised high-kinetic cannon picked off another plasma turret a thousand kilometres away. Five hundred klicks spinward a drone controlling a Line-gun with links to a skein-sensing field reported nothing happening on the skein either, save for the fallback waves following the initial pulses that had wrecked the ship Minds.

“Whoever it is they want the O,” one of the humans said as they watched the spread of detonating sparks that were just a few of the nearby in-system craft meeting their ends. The ships’ deaths outshone the stars, replacing the familiar constellations with bright but fading patterns of their own. Her lace stepped her awareness speed down to a level where something like normal speech was possible.

“Grunts on the ground,” another agreed.

“Maybe they’ll just drop into the surface, displace onto the interior,” Yime suggested.

“Maybe. Edgewall stuff emplaced for that.”

“Anybody in touch with any Edgewall firepower?”

Nobody was. They had no contact with the O’s interior at all, or with any independent craft or with anybody manning the defences anywhere else. They busied themselves with scanning with what senses they had access to, checking and readying their own weaponry and trying to establish contact with survivors further afield. In the darkness, the wrecks of the last in-system craft winked out, brief fires exhausted. Around Yime’s position a few traveltube cars dropped away into the night as people tried to save themselves by using the cars as lifeboats. On average they got about ten klicks out before they were picked off too, quick tiny eruptions of light pinpricking the black.

“Anything-” somebody began.

– Got something, the drone with the skein sense sent, too quick for speech. Her lace kicked her awareness speed up to maximum so quickly the last syllable of the previous speaker’s word went on for many seconds, providing an impromptu soundtrack to what was happening in the skies beyond.

The ships were popping into existence just a few thousand klicks out, travelling at between one and eight per cent of lightspeed. No beaconry, IFF or any signal at all; not even trying to pretend they were anything else but hostile.

– Thinking these are targets, somebody communicated. Over the still-open voice comm channels came a high-pitched whine like something charging.