That was the machine's weakness.
Marx launched a pair of counterdrones. He flew them straight for the interceptor's fuel cache. At the same time, he brought his craft's rotary wing to full speed, dragging the smaller nanomachine behind him like a kid's balloon.
Soon, other interceptors were in pursuit, following the trail of mechanopheromones the interceptor spilled to mark its prey. They couldn't catch him at this speed, but Marx's own fuel was being quickly depleted. One of his counterdrones missed, fell into the wake of the chase and fought a quick, hopeless battle to delay the pursuers. The other counterdrone struck at the interceptor's midsection, its ram spar penetrating the soft belly of the machine. It injected its poison, an ultrafine sand of silicate molecules that would clog the fuel reserve. Now, the machine was dependent on fuel from the uptake of its rotary wing.
But the interceptor was trapped in the wake of Marx's craft, running too fast and hard to catch the fuel that dotted the air. Soon, it began to stutter, and die.
Marx launched another drone, a repair nano that set to work cutting off the claw of the dying interceptor, which could no longer defend itself. When detached, it fell back, still spilling prey markers in its death throes, and the trailing interceptors fell on it, sharks upon a wounded comrade.
Marx's craft was safe. His stabilizer was damaged and fuel was low, but he was past the densest part of the interceptor cloud. He brought his Intelligencer around a corner out of the sun-drenched hall—back into darkness—and through the crack under a door, where the rest of his squadron waited, bobbing in a slight draft.
Marx checked a schematic of the palace and smiled.
"We're in the throne wing," he reported to Hobbes. "And I think we've got a tailwind."
DOCTOR
"Just
breathe,
sir!" the marine sergeant shouted.
Dr. Mann Vecher yanked the tube from his lips and shouted back, "I'm trying, dammit, but it's
not air!"
True, Vecher grimly added to himself, the green stuff that brimmed the tube had a fair amount of oxygen in it. Considerably more O
2
than the average lungful of air. But the oxygen was in suspension in a polymer gel, which also contained pseudo-alveoli, a rudimentary intelligence, and godspite knew what else.
Green and vaguely translucent, the substance looked to Dr. Vecher like the dental mouthrinse ground troops used in the field. Not the sort of stuff you were supposed to swallow, much less
breathe.
Vecher shifted in his unfamiliar battle armor as the marine sergeant stalked away in disgust. The armor didn't fit anymore. He hadn't worn it since it had last been fitted, three years before. Imperial Orbital Marine doctors weren't supposed to jump with the grunts. In normal situations, they stayed shipside and treated the wounded in safety.
This was not a normal situation.
Of course, Dr. Vecher did know the intricate workings of the suit quite well. He'd cut quite a few of them open to expose wounded soldiers. He had witnessed the suit's life-saving mechanisms: the padding on the back of the neck held hyper-oxygenated plasmanalog that was injected directly into the brain in case a marine's heart stopped. The exoskeletal servomotors could immobilize the wearer if the suit detected a spinal injury. There were local anesthesia IVs every hundred square centimeters or so. And the armor could maintain a terminated marine's brain almost as well as a Lazurus symbiant. Vecher had seen soldiers twenty hours dead reanimate as cleanly as if they'd died in a hospice.
But he hadn't remembered how
uncomfortable
the damn suits were.
And the discomfort was nothing compared to the horror of this green stuff. The planned jump was a high-speed orbital insertion. The marines would be going down supersonic, encased in single-soldier entry vehicles packed with gee-gel. The forces on impact would collapse your lungs and crush your bones to powder if you weren't adequately reinforced.
Vecher understood the concept all too well. The idea was to make the entire body equal in density, so that nothing could puncture anything else, an undifferentiated bubble of fluid, at one with the gel inside the entry vehicle. That was the theory, anyway. Bones were always the tricky part. Vecher hadn't saved a high percentage of marines whose insertions had failed. Most never even became risen. Exotic injuries such as skeletal disintegration, hearts splattered against ribcages like dye bombs, and cranial collapse foiled even the afterlife.
Vecher hadn't minded the skeletal reinforcement injections, actually. Standard procedure. He'd had his marrow replaced before, after a viral infection. The lung-filling, however, you had to do yourself; you had to
breathe
this shit.
It was inhuman.
But there had to be a doctor with the first wave of this mission. The Child Empress was hostage. To refuse this jump wouldn't mean mere dishonorable discharge. It would clearly be an Error of Blood.
That thought steeled Dr. Vecher's will. If breathing a quasi-intelligent, oxygenated goo was unpleasant, plunging a dull blade of error into one's own abdomen would certainly be worse. And at his rank, Vecher was assured elevation sooner or later, even if he didn't die in battle. From immortality to ignominious suicide was a long plummet.
Vecher put the tube to his lips and took a deep, unbearably slow breath. Heaviness spread through his chest; the stuff had the exothermic cool of wet clay against the skin. It felt like a cold hand clenching Vecher's heart, a sense of foreboding made solid.
He moved his tongue around in his mouth before taking another horrible breath. Bits of the goo were caught between his teeth, salty and vaguely alive like a sliver of oyster. They had even flavored the stuff; it tasted of artificial strawberries.
The cheery taste just made the experience more horrible. Were they
trying to
make this awful?
PILOT
The squadron looked down into the council chamber from the high vantage of an air vent. There were three craft left.
Pilot Ramones had lost her Intelligencer to automatic defenses. The Rix had installed randomly firing lasers in the hallways surrounding the council chamber, and one had gotten extremely lucky. Strong enough to kill a man, it had vaporized Ramones's craft.
Below the squadron, the forms of humans, both hostages and Rix commandos, were vague. The Intelligencers' cameras were too small to resolve large objects at this range. The squadron would have to move closer.
The air in the room was full of interceptors. They hung like a mist, pushed back from the vent by the outflow of air.
"I've got reflections all the way through the room, sir," Hendrik reported. "More than one interceptor per cubic centimeter."
Marx whistled. The Rix certainly had numbers. And these interceptors were larger than the ones his squadron had faced in the hallway. They had seven grasping arms apiece, each suspended from its own rotary wing. The relatively large brain and sensory sack hung below the outstretched arms, so that the craft looked like an inverted spider. Marx had faced this type of small craft before. Even at a tenth this density, this swarm would be tricky to get through.
"We'll fight our way across the top," Marx decided. "Then drop down blind. Try to land on the table."
Most of the hostages were seated at the long table below. The table would be sound-reflective, a good base for listening In Marx's ultrasonar its surface shone with the sharp returns of metal or polished stone.
The three small craft moved forward, clinging to the ceiling. Marx kept an eye on his fuel level. His machine was down to the dregs of its power. If it hadn't been for the brisk tailwind down the last sixty meters of the ventilation system, he doubted his Intelligencer would have made it this far.
The ceiling passed just above Marx's ship, an inverted horizon. Rix interceptors dotted his view like scalloped clouds.
"Damn! I'm hooked already, sir," Woltes announced, twenty seconds into the move.
"Go to full extension," Marx commanded. "Die fighting."
Marx and Hendrik sped forward, leaving behind the throes of Woltes's destruction. Their way seemed clear. If they could make it to the middle of the room, they might be able to make the drop undetected.
Suddenly, Marx's craft reeled to one side. To his right a claw loomed, attached to the lip of his craft. Two more of the interceptor's arms flailed toward his machine.
"Hooked," he announced. He briefly considered taking control of Hendrik's craft. If this mission failed, it would be his Error of Blood, after all.
But perhaps there was another way to make this work.
"Keep going, Hendrik," he said. "You stick to the plan. I'm going straight down."
"Good luck, sir."
Marx extended his Intelligencer's ram spar. He bore into the attacking nanomachine, fighting the strength of its arms. With the last of his battery power, he urged his craft forward. The spar plunged into the central brain sack. Instantly, the interceptor died. But its claws were frozen, still attached to his machine, and a deadman switch released prey markers in a blizzard that enveloped both craft.
"Got you, at least," Marx hissed at the dead spider impaled before him.
Now the fun began.
Marx tipped his machine over, so that the rotary wing pulled his craft and its lifeless burden downward. He furled his sensor posts to half-length, his view becoming blurry and shaky as AI tried to extrapolate his surroundings from insufficient data. The two nanocraft fell together, quickly now.
"Damn!" Hendrik shouted. "I'm hooked."
Marx switched to his second pilot's view. She was carrying two interceptors, and another was closing. He realized that his craft was the only hope.
"You're dead, Hendrik. Make some noise. I've got a new plan."
He released a counterdrone every few seconds as his small craft plummeted downward. Hopefully, they would pick off any interceptors pursuing the prey markers. In any case, his burdened Intelligencer was falling faster than his enemies could. Unpiloted, with a brain the size of a cell, they wouldn't think to turn their rotary wings upside down.
He watched the altimeter. Above him, Hendrik grunted as she fought to keep her craft alive, the sound receding into the distance as he plummeted. Fifty centimeters altitude ... forty ... thirty...
At twenty-two centimeters above the table, Marx's craft collided with another interceptor. Three of the enemy ship's rotary wings tangled in the dead arms of his captor, their thin whiskers of carbon muscle grinding to a halt. He released the remainder of his counterdrones and prayed they would kill the new interceptor before its claws reached his craft. Then he furled his sensor posts completely, and dropped in darkness.
He counted twenty seconds. If his ship had survived, it must be on the table by now. Hendrik's Intelligencer had succumbed a few moments ago, her transmission array ripped into pieces by a medusa host of hungry grapples. It was up to Marx.
A wave of panic flowed over him in the darkened canopy. What if his ship was dead? He'd lost dozens of craft before, but always in acceptable situations; his record was unblemished. But now, everything was at stake. Failure would not be tolerated. His
own life
was at stake, almost as if he really were down in that tiny ship, surrounded by enemies. He felt like some perversely self-aware Schrödinger's Cat, worrying its own fate before opening the box.
Marx sent the wake-up order.
Optics revealed the dead interceptor draped across Marx's craft. But he had escaped the others. He murmured a quick prayer of thanks.
The Intelligencer confirmed that it was resting on a surface. Echolocation returns came from all directions; an oddly symmetrical crescent moon arched around him. The reflections suggested that Marx's craft had fallen near the inside edge some kind of circular container. In the cameras, the landing area was perfectly flat and highly reflective; the view surrounding Marx sparkled. The landing surface was also moving, pitching up and down at a low frequency, and vibrating sympathetically with the noises in the room.
"Perfect," Marx whispered to himself. He checked the data again. He could scarcely believe his luck.
He had landed in a glass of water.
Marx brought the Intelligencer up onto its landing legs, lifting it like a water-walking lizard to clear the rotary wing from the liquid. At this scale, the surface tension of water was as sound as concrete. He skimmed the surface, approached the side of the glass. Down here, there were no interceptors. They typically maintained a few centimeters altitude so that they wouldn't stick to surfaces as useless dust.
At the glinting, translucent wall, Marx secured the ship, hooking its landing spars into the microscopic pits and crags that mark even the finest glass. He ordered the craft into its intelligence-gathering configuration. Sensory threads spread out in all directions, creeping vines of optical fiber and motile carbons. A listening post lowered to the water below; it rested there, coiled upon the surface tension.
Usually, several Intelligencers were required to fully reconnoiter a room of this size, but the glass would act as a giant gathering device. The curved sides would refract light from every direction into the craft's cameras, a huge convex lens that warped the view, but with simple, calculable geometries. The water would vibrate sympathetically with the sound in the room, a vast tympanum to augment the Intelligencer's high-frequency hearing. Shipside software began to crunch the information, building a picture of the room from the manifold data the craft provided.
When the Intelligencer's full sensory apparatus had deployed, Marx leaned back with a satisfied smile and called the executive officer.
"ExO Hobbes, I believe I have some intelligence for you."
"Not a moment too soon," she answered.
Marx piped the data to the bridge. There was a moment's pause as Hobbes scanned it. She whistled.
"Not bad, Master Pilot."
"A stroke of luck, Executive Officer," he admitted.