Line War by Neal Asher Read Free Book Online Page A

looking for what wasn’t there. In environments like this, where there was little backdrop to hide against, the enemy would find you by locating the inherent errors and holes in your chameleonware. It was time, Orlandine felt, to get the hell out of here.

    Using the mycelium inside her body to brace it, she slammed Heliotrope into a hard turn. She fired off still more chaff missiles and ordnance, then glimpsed the stab of a microwave beam cutting through the chaff cloud to her right. The wormship became momentarily visible, explosions blooming all around it as it defended itself from her missiles. Ahead of her lay one of the rod-forms, on course down toward the moonlet she had just abandoned. She hit it with the high-intensity solid-state laser she’d recently installed in the nose of Heliotrope, between the jaws of its forward pincer grab. The laser, a coherent beam no wider than her wrist but pumping out the kind of energy usually reserved for particle weapons, cut straight through the object, then must have hit something vital for it exploded like a balloon full of liquid. She fell through a cloud of skinlike fragments, then accelerated into a tight orbit about the moonlet itself.

    Beam weapons fired by the wormship turned ice to vapour on the jagged landscape below, burning gulleys through it thousands of miles long. She saw sharp stone exploding from knife-shaped peaks as they heated just too fast for their mineral structure to sustain. Then she was out, accelerating. The wormship, she noticed, had slowed - clearly it, or whatever drove it, had decided not to pursue.

    Orlandine dropped Heliotrope into U-space and fled.

    * * * *

    As Cormac took the shuttle down into Klurhammon’s atmosphere, the U-space journey to this world now seemed like a distant dream. He was relieved to be back in the solid world with its solid facts all around him, unpleasant though they might be, and perhaps the term ‘realspace’ now possessed more meaning for him than for others.

    An occasional blue-green or red flash lit the screen. Briefly, at one point, he spotted a coherent beam punching down to their left through the cloud layer.

    ‘King is certainly getting enthusiastic,’ observed Hubbert Smith.

    ‘Yes,’ replied Cormac acidly, ‘and not showing any inclination to land and grab any of that technology.’

    ‘You’re such a cynic. King doesn’t want any Jain technology -he can give it up any time he likes,’ quipped Smith.

    Cormac glanced over at him. Smith sat in the copilot’s seat, using the instruments there to monitor both general coms and the situation on the planet below.

    ‘What’s the status now?’ he asked tersely, not in the mood for Smith’s humour.

    ‘We’re getting no communication from the surface,’ the Golem replied, ‘but that’s not surprising. Any survivors will now know the dangers of using general com channels.’

    ‘The enemy?’ asked Cormac as cloud engulfed the shuttle.

    ‘Still active,’ Smith reported.

    Cormac glanced back at Arach, but the spider drone was showing enough sensitivity not to do his usual tappity dance at the prospect of a fight. They had all seen the pictures from orbit of the wrecked city, the burned-out homesteads beyond it and the numerous corpses - some still walking. He then looked at Scar, who was squatting beside the spider drone, but the dracoman just wore his usual ferocious expression.

    Smith went on, ‘After taking out the larger concentrations of Jain-tech with warheads King is now targeting the smaller stuff in the vicinity of larger groups of refugees. He won’t get everything, however, and still can’t help our particular small group of survivors.’ The Golem turned towards Arach and winked.

    The shuttle was now vibrating, and soon punched through the underbelly of the overcast. Below stretched a chequerboard of fields scattered with occasional buildings like game pieces - a landscape that much reminded Cormac of the English countryside