Steel Frame, page 36
I kill the window before the shooting starts. Without the sync to make me feel what I can see, it tugs at my stomach and adds a spin to the corners of my eyes.
I have my eyes back in time to see the dust light up across the horizon: the fringes of a stormcloud, now wide awake.
Hail watches everything.
At first, I think we may have to let her drift. Give her half a minute to find herself in all the noise. But her eyes find us, staring past the flicker in her helmet-glass. Our reflections distort across the front of her visor, but she’s still riding the Spirit’s feed, half watching a pair of disembodied hands do work that she’d rather do herself.
“We have to leave,” she says. Her words are flat and distant; not all of her is here.
Her machine is still holding, and will for a few minutes yet.
“Spirit’s buying us time and space to do this properly,” I say. It’s harsher than I’d like, but there it is. We’re one seat short in a three-ass parade, and there’s no reason to cut that down to two. No reason to catch any more munitions than we have to.
But Hail doesn’t give a millimetre. “No. We need to get back. Right now.” She’s standing tall, easy on her feet when she should be swaying.
“Why?” I ask. “Sigurd took a beating here, Hail.” I nod downrange. “Hell, there’s a quarter of their flagship right over there, just lying in the dust. The hollows broke something out of this place, but it isn’t the only one. They’re going to grind themselves up on the next one. Won’t even make it past the pickets.”
“That’s the problem,” she replies, deep as the sea. “They nearly broke themselves on this place.”
“Christs,” mutters Salt. “The fucking scouting party.”
She nods, eyes a little clearer now, and blinks to clear the feed. “Those two Decaturs you fought—they weren’t much of an attack, damaged or otherwise.”
“Didn’t have to be.”
She weighs it out. “All they needed were eyes.”
I take a breath, let it out. “Dammit. Of course.” I wish I could rub my face, force some of the sleep and sand away. “They don’t need to worry about losses when they can just fill the ranks again.”
“And there’s no better place to fill them.”
...than the biggest ship ever built.
Big and old and palsied, but with some of the widest guns ever fitted to anything, and an entire fleet locked away inside its hangars. If the hollows were headed anywhere, that’ll be it.
Don’t let them touch you.
I have to ask, just so someone will say it out loud.
“They’re going to take Horizon, aren’t they?”
TWENTY-SIX
THERE’S A SCRATCH just on the edge of hearing—another one, eighty seconds after the last one. It happened eighty seconds before that; and eighty seconds from now, the disembodied Spirit will have another moment’s panic, and send us a little query, desperate for the feel of its jockey.
For the first few hours we were in the air, the Decatur could fill the blanks, dropping recordings of Hail’s heartbeat and blood pressure across the net. Without a pilot to sync with or jacks to handle the connection, it was the best we could do. Close enough to the real thing to buy us some quiet.
But we’ve been radio-silent for the last hundred and thirty-six minutes, and doing everything we can to keep our approach hidden in the froth. We’re passing Horizon’s outstations, and starting to thread the avenues between its long-range augur channels. We keep our burn low and our networks shuttered, sparing the tightline for things we can’t live without.
Another eighty seconds down, and the Spirit sends query one hundred and two. We wait a moment, pretending that we’re getting a line from outside, and then we fudge our hundredth answer. A sample of one of the original recordings, mixed in with noise and static and semi-random variation. The Spirit might be short a body, but it’s smart enough to need tricking.
It’s our hundredth lie. We brushed the first requests away, but a shell’s first priority is its operator. Eighty seconds after every response, we get another ping, twice as loud and just as insistent. It knows that she’s still out here, and still a very long way from home. This is all we can do to keep the volume down.
Ninety-eight times, we’ve thought about pulling the plug and leaving the damn thing to drift, to bother the wind with its insecurities. We’ve filled the last two requests without a fight.
Truth is, we’d miss the company.
Part of us would, anyway. Other parts have done this all before. We might be making for a hollow dreadnought, charging down the barrels of Horizon’s guns, but this is just another fire in the distance, more sparks and pain and noise in a history so thick with them that it almost blurs together. Almost.
We’re uncomfortable in the quiet. Hail and Salt weren’t saying much before we cut our comms, but it’s worse now that the best we can do is sterile light and plaintext.
Any other day, and they’d probably be sleeping anyway—trying to get a few hours in the dark before the sky lights up again. They aren’t, or rather, Salt isn’t. His shell hasn’t registered a switch to internal logic yet, and the machine still shifts and corrects like there’s meat at the reins.
We can’t get a read on Hail, but she’s sitting somewhere near the back of Salt’s cockpit, cooped in a nerve-dead seat and isolated from anything that might interfere with his pilot-sync. Sharing thoughts between machine and jockey is hard enough without another mind looking in.
There’s another scratch, not from the Spirit.
The Decatur drifts into view, froth rolling from its plates. It aims its lenses at us. You feel that? it asks in tightline flashes.
We do, but only just. A signal pitched so the reach was wide, but with volume just enough to beat the background noise.
I’m collecting, we send back. It’s messy. Looks like cipher output.
Even through the gibberish, we can feel NorCol’s fingerprints all over it.
Salt’s already thought of that. Doesn’t translate through the standard crypto, says the Decatur. Changing to unorthodox.
But he’s wasting his time.
No need, we reply. It’s one of the oldest tricks in NorCol’s book, even if most jockeys never see it used. Normally, you can tightline a message you mean only one person to read, aiming that little thread of light directly into their thoughts, but that means line of sight. In Open Waters, that’s easy.
In a place like this, you need to get creative.
How far out are we?
Two hours, he replies.
If you can’t see the target, you can’t flash them. If you can’t flash them, the best you can do is shout into the wind and hope there isn’t too much noise to drown you out. Most of the time, that would get the job done. Company ciphers are as close to unbreakable as you can get without their own machines being locked out of the loop, but that’s the problem. A hollow Decatur can read company code just as well as it could if it were whole.
Ask Hail for her saddle numbers.
The pale shell is quiet for a moment. We can almost hear Salt playing it back to himself and trying to understand.
Saddle hash is meaningless to anyone who doesn’t have to sit in the thing every day. They’re three lines of serial numbers: one for the seat, one for the jacks, and one for the sync-surfaces. You call them out when spares come in, and use them to find hardware from the same foundries, or better yet, from the same batches as the parts you’re replacing. Each foundry unit has its own character, its own set of tiny imperfections, so small you’d never see them. It’s not about finding something flawless, just making sure you get the same flaws as you had before. Every jockey knows their numbers back to front, even if each line is sixteen digits long.
A ’dragger chief will usually have hands on all three, but you might have to beat it out of them. You could badger a lowly flight tech for the old spares, or an admin for the manifests, but that’s the kind of thing that gets you tailed to your bunk, maybe an awkward conversation in an unmarked room.
It’d be easy work for a Werewolf, though.
This is bad, decides the pale shell, isn’t it?
We’d smile at that, if we could. The Authority might have something similar, but even if it didn’t, Salt’s already working through it. You don’t need to be NorCol to know that a saddle-coded cipher is desperation talking. The puddle at the bottom of the last ditch.
If we’re down this far, at least one NorCol shell’s been hollowed out, if not more; taken body and soul and ciphers intact.
Another few seconds pass.
No dice. Any other ideas?
Hail knew Andrade before the rest of us, but if it isn’t hers—
Try mine, we send, files attached.
There’s a pause.
Hail’s got a clean fit. Decipher in progress.
The Spirit’s mind-state buzzes in the background, as if it can hear us whisper her name.
Rook?
Hail?
Read you, she replies. How did you guess that it was saddle-coded?
We had to do something similar on a place called Rotahn, lost in an electric storm. Twice before that during the original operations against Sanctuary, every channel hot with Sigurd jamming. Six times between that and our first taste of civil war. The first time we went flying with NorCol’s colours, back when their shells wore red and silver.
I got lucky, we reply. Remembered reading about it somewhere.
Good call.
We signal an acknowledgement, the closest we can manage to a shrug. What have you got?
The flashes get thicker coming back, straining to carry a payload across the narrow line. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a landing path.
We open it, and watch a holographic corridor map itself out in three dimensions. The route coils and twists, dives between clouds and plates and shadows in Horizon’s sensor-net.
Little red pinpricks light up across the holographic model of a dreadnought, marking where augurs and PHADAR have been damaged or disabled, turning orange where they’re running slow or underpowered. Others have been nudged a few degrees out of alignment, set to watch stretches of open air and Eye-light noise.
Green highlights show the zones where the net is still working as intended, but the path adds awkward turns and sudden breaks, all so we’ll keep to where the feeds don’t overlap. Where the sensor bands are stretched thin, and struggling to beat the wind.
A way back home.
Someone’s been busy.
If you want to call it that, comes the reply, probably from Hail. Just having a map like this is court-martial material.
I’d smile, if I could. Been there, done that.
Not like this. This’ll get you pressed up against a bulkhead.
For having it, or not reporting the faults?
A bit of both, assuming they didn’t try to pin the whole thing on you in the process. There’s a pause. This took work. Months, maybe a year or two.
Or longer, if you were using it already.
A HULK BREAKS the cloud cover, mirrored steel and Sigurd’s odd glyphs and stencils a dozen decks tall. A huge strike-face stands out amidships, carrying the company’s logo where it’s impossible to ignore. A sword and coiling serpent, bone-white on reflective black.
The last letters of DEMIURGE catch the light.
Every part of it is dreadnought-big, oversized in ways that don’t make sense until you’ve seen it all move together. Even then, it’s smaller in every dimension than the plains of NorCol steel opening up in the distance. Horizon has mass and density, but the Demiurge is all odd edges and rounded corners.
Or it would be, if it wasn’t also open in places. The froth flows in through massive tears in its hull and out between the girder grids that form its skeleton. Armour peels back from its ribcage, and the upper decks stand ragged where they’ve been skinned, struts and honeycomb air-gaps exposed to the wind. Two of its giant engine-cones are missing, and most of its engineering levels are void and molten decking.
We’ve seen that kind of damage once before, but never on a ship this size. It’ll be Horizon’s offensive magnetics that did it—huge arrays inside NorCol’s dreadnought, used to break the electromag chains that held stars captive inside the Demiurge. The holes are where reactors used to be. Three of them, their casings evaporated along with every deck in reach.
The Demiurge should never have gotten close enough for that. Hell, it should have died ten times over in the first minute of the engagement. The ship should be more air than steel, withered where tungsten blizzards found it, and snapped in half under the weight of Horizon’s planet-crackers.
But instead of engaging the threat, NorCol’s old tub did exactly what we’d expect. The outstations would’ve seen it first: another dreadnought in the water, and heading straight for them. Instead of calling back, though, they did that damned double take reserved for instruments full of ghosts and fluke harmonics. They probably cycled their PHADAR through a full reset, maybe sent a crew outside to clean their receivers.
By the time they worked out what was happening, they’d have had pickets howling at them, and a giant shadow already drifting past their windows. By the time they got a line on Tower, Horizon could probably see it for themselves. Another minute lost to surprise and horror, and a couple more trying to understand what they were looking at.
Sigurd’s dreadnought at full steam, burning so hard it was melting its own skin in the waste-heat. By the time NorCol’s gun crews were on the case, the Demiurge was already blurring in their scopes.
It hit so hard that the two ships fused together, merged at the point of impact. Any survivors aboard the hollow ship would’ve died in an instant, not that it would’ve noticed a few more stains across its walls.
No human crew would fly like that, but no human crew would expect it to work, either.
The dark ship is dead. Its superstructure is cracked in every place that hasn’t shattered, twisted and crumpled in ways its engineers could never have anticipated, let alone designed for.
Horizon is still intact, but its ancient systems belong to something else now. You can feel it in the air, and hear it if you wake your passives for a second or two.
It’s a buzz like swarming insects, cut through with shrieks and screams and noise from open channels, death rattles and networked chaos as machines fail and operators die. Emergency bands cut short as whole decks void themselves at once, or seal their doors and drown their occupants in fire suppressant.
We fly through it, slow and quiet, keeping the Eye behind us and the froth around our plates. We can’t see Hail and Salt, but we aren’t looking. The big, hot shell is giving us a head start, and time to trip over anything that Andrade couldn’t fit into his signal. Our little heartbeat means that we were always going first, ready to break and flare if there’s anything out of place. We just have to hope they’d see it if we did.
It’s loud out here.
Sparks light the air above and below, cast shadows across the crags. Shells butcher each other, NorCol on NorCol on Sigurd and things that’ve had their markings scrubbed off altogether. We watch machines chased down by their old wingmates, tackled, pinned and shivering while their jockeys die inside. Gun-blisters rake each other with fire up and down the ship, and some of the old broadside keeps running, mechanical drumbeats running loud and hot as they try to shove the broken dreadnought loose. Missiles streak out into the open, curving back into the cliffs above and below.
Long streams of fire curve and crackle as point-defence batteries defend themselves. The PD guns run on networks of their own, hardened against anything that might slow their reaction times, and so packs of hollows track them down, surround each one in turn and tear them to pieces.
We stay far away. We’re worn from the flight, and bruised from our tangle in Sigurd’s graveyard, on the doorstep of that prison. Even if there was something we could do to help, two shells don’t turn a tide like this. We bury the ache and keep our eyes on the path.
Horizon was built to take a beating, and the flood seems to know that. For all the noise and fury, the old ship is still alive, and still dangerous enough.
Where we can, we run our engines on slow-burn. Where we can’t, we loop and turn and do things that would stall us if we had wings and atmosphere to worry about. We cut our thrust to nothing for a while, letting the wind carry us past a live interceptor block, a nest of barrels all twitching in their sockets. It takes us under a wing of gibbering machines, NorCol’s turquoise flying alongside mirror-black and a few captured Hasei rigs in hot orange, engines so bright that they cast shadows across the crags. Trailing behind them are a pair of Locusts, brown and tan and silver, twitchy just like the others.
They turn together, thirteen machines as one, with more of them converging as they follow Horizon’s hull. If we didn’t already know that every jockey was dead, we’d see it now: they don’t move like a flight of shells. But then, they don’t move like a flight of anything. If they had humans riding saddle, they’d shift and correct, or come about when instructions changed, when units merged or fissured. These things don’t.
They swarm.
They move as though around a second Eye—but there is no endless dawn, no storms or wind-walls. Instead, our lenses find a sinuous shape standing near a massive breach in Horizon’s topside plate. Four arms stretch and four wings guide the wind. Mirror-black armour trails streamers of froth. Massive steps carry it through the ruin where Tower used to be.
The observer.
It seems to stir at the feel of our optics. A huge head turns.
Shit.
We feel the augur first, thrust before PHADAR locks can follow. We dive back into the cloud, burning as hard as we can manage. Hollow shapes fling themselves from the steel cliffs above us, break away from the coiling swarm. We make thirty contacts in a moment, all bearing down on us.
