‘How long to the landing area?’ Cormac asked.

‘Five minutes,’ Blegg replied.

Over com Cormac said, ‘I repeat: no delays once you’re down—we’ve got incoming.’

Thorn replied, ‘Yeah, we see them.’

Three of the rod-ships pursued the two Sparkind shuttles while the other six turned towards Blegg’s ship and the remaining dracoman shuttle. Cormac created then loaded a search-and-destroy program into six missiles, and fired them one after another. That left him with just twelve explosive missiles, the pulse-cannons and a laser. Some EMP knocked three of the missiles from the sky, and Cormac tried to re-acquire them as they fell. The three remaining missiles impacted, bursting rod-ships in actinic explosions and scattering their debris across the sky. He managed to stabilize two of the falling missiles a hundred yards from the jungle canopy and brought them back on target. He then considered instructing Blegg to close up on the rod-ship now hurtling towards the dracoman shuttle, but Blegg anticipated him and turned their vessel. Cormac brought the pulse-cannons online, and they roared steadily. The first fusillade blackened the rod-ship with burn holes, but only briefly slowed it. Two more such hits and it began to pour out smoke, then it abruptly dropped from the sky. By then the two returning missiles found their targets. Blegg brought their own vessel up through the smoke and a sleet of debris, like burning skin, and accelerated towards the other three attackers, which now closed rapidly on the two lead shuttles.

Cormac selected and fired another six of the remaining missiles, target acquisition locked, and identification programs running so they would not mistake the escaping shuttles for enemy craft.

‘Can this bucket go any faster?’ he asked.

‘We’ll overshoot if we do, and lose manoeuvrability.’

‘Okay.’

The missiles he fired moved ahead of the ship quite slowly. Cormac focused beyond them, pulling up images in his gridlink and on one of the subscreens. One of the rod-ships had drawn very close to the rearmost shuttle—less than fifty yards away from it. At present relative speeds, no missile would reach the assailant before it reached its target. Perhaps it would be forced to slow, as laser strikes were turning its front end blue-black and it trailed smoke and occasionally belched oily flame from splits in its surface. Suddenly, however, the attacking object surged ahead, as if finding some grip on the very air. It thumped down on the shuttle and stuck to it. Cormac instantly cancelled it as a target.

Com: ‘Shuttle Two, gravharnesses now. Get out of there!’

Shuttle and rod-ship began to plummet. Cormac tracked them tightly and kept focused in. The rod-ship deflated as it extruded a hundred rootlike growths to wrap around the shuttle.

‘The lock’s jammed, screens covered,’ came Bhutan’s reply. ‘Will attempt to blow—’ Just then the beleaguered shuttle’s drive abruptly cut out and, encompassed in a mass of organic growth, it began tumbling through the sky. Screams issued over com, and Cormac listened only briefly before he shut down the connecting comlink and instantly sent transmissions to the other shuttles instructing them to accept nothing further on that channel. Sparkind did not scream easily, but Cormac knew just how quickly Jain technology could take control of a human being. Then, in the time it took him to blink, the white flash then massive blast of a tactical CTD erased the shuttle. Someone aboard had retained enough presence of mind to know they would not be getting out of there alive, and took the enemy with them.

Belatedly, two further explosions as a pair of the missiles destroyed the last two attackers.

‘That could have gone—’ Cormac began, but suddenly a shadow drew across the sky, and under it a bright light flared. Before the sound of the explosion impinged, horizon and jungle were already whipping past the screen. Then came the massive blast and Blegg’s vessel was spinning and falling through burning debris. Cormac considered warning the dracomen to brace themselves for impact, and rejected the idea. It seemed pointless to state the obvious.

The bacilliform ships did not shoot back, though they kicked out a huge amount of EM interference which increased as they conjoined. It seemed they were designed to initially blank out communication, then, if a ship drew close enough to one of those walls they formed, to completely disrupt its systems, including the AI mind inside. Jack suspected they served some other purpose as well, for individually they kept trying to make close contact with the Centurions—something none of them had yet managed to do. The lens-shaped ships deployed plenty of weaponry, but in a one-on-one fight were no match for the Centurions and were soon disabled or destroyed. Those accretions of hundred-foot-long metal worms, once they untangled, became lethal highly intelligent missiles themselves. But the remaining five big ammonite spiral ships remained the greatest danger, for they carried all the armament of a Polity destroyer—the wormish things being one weapon they deployed—and all the processing power of a runcible AI, for they quickly found solutions to the Centurions’ chameleonware. Each new program deployed lasted no more than half an hour—no time at all during a space battle.

Duelling with hardfields against a mile-wide lens-shaped vessel using telefactored warheads, Haruspex seemed in danger of being swamped by a rapidly forming wall of the bacilliforms. Jack sent a coded transmission to Haruspex then swung round in a sharp 400 gravity turn to put the NEJ behind that threatening wall. He fired a combined CTD and EM warhead at the rod-ships then, after a delay, followed it with a fusillade of near-c rail-gun projectiles. Haruspex immediately dropped out of the fight. The missile detonated amid the rod-ships, cutting a hole in the wall they created. The rail-gun projectiles shot through the hole, following the wave of EM radiation. The big lens’s instruments could detect nothing but the EM, so did not react quickly enough to the following projectiles. A hundred impacts collapsed one side of the lens like a punctured balloon. Both the NEJ and the Haruspex then used their chameleonware to cover their run towards the spiral ship pursuing Coriolanus.

‘I have the USER located,’ Coriolanus reported and sent coordinates.

Jack scanned and confirmed, and Haruspex agreed. During the recent battle they had managed to take readings of the interference strength of the device. It was located on a small moon orbiting the cold world—half the planetary system away from their present position.

‘We have to make the run,’ Jack informed the other two ships.

‘That will mean abandoning those on the planet,’ Coriolanus informed him.

Jack scanned in that direction and saw some of the enemy ships deployed down inside atmosphere. ‘My assessment of our current situation is that by running from the system on conventional drives we could survive. If we stay to protect Cormac and co, we will eventually be destroyed. The greatest hope for them is if we destroy that USER, then return to fight a delaying action until the dreadnoughts arrive. We can only hope our erstwhile passengers manage to survive on the surface.’

After a short pause, the other two ships concurred.

The moment his boots hit the soft ground, Thorn’s envirosuit muttered warnings in his ear and flashed them up on his visor. He turned those persistent warnings off, since he did not need the suit to tell him he occupied a highly radioactive area. The incinerated terrain ahead stretched for five hundred miles along the base of the mountains, and seemed likely to be the result of multiple nuclear explosions. However, in this heavy rain, he could see only a few yards ahead—in the planet’s lower gravity the raindrops falling slowly were twice the size of those on Earth, and also were turbid with ash as a consequence of explosions that had occurred here.