Line War by Neal Asher Page B

building.

    Arach, too, was now positioned where Cormac wanted him. Himself reaching the burning corpses, Cormac stepped quickly round to one side when he noticed snakish movement in the carnage. Finally reaching the turning that led into the second long building, he halted. ‘Arach?’

    ‘Two subverted haimen. They’ve got pulse-rifles and assister frames. They’re up in the ceiling beams, just below me.’

    ‘Smith, do you have yours covered?’ he asked.

    ‘Four raggety-looking things, but they’ve enough intelligence to keep their heads down now. Our three survivors are hiding behind a big automated packing machine. One of them is wounded and the others are running low on ammunition. They’ve got only one simple shotgun and a couple of pulse-rifles between them.’

    ‘Scar.’

    ‘Covered. Two of them. One’s a haiman.’

    Cormac again turned on his view through Shuriken and saw, in dim shades, the pair of feet belonging to a man inching along through the vent. Then this view turned into a red and pink explosion, and Shuriken shot out the other side of the corpse shaking splinters of bone from its chainglass blades. One enemy less now for Scar to cover. In a moment the star hit another grating, cut through and shot out of it to hover above three individuals. One of them lay flat on the ground, her right arm missing below the elbow, while another knelt beside her applying a tourniquet.

    ‘Ah shit,’ said the one still standing, as he raised his pulse-rifle to target Shuriken.

    Cormac spoke. ‘Put it down. We’re here to rescue you.’

    The man hesitated, lowered his weapon. He was a haiman, Cormac noticed. There seemed to be quite a concentration of them on this world.

    ‘Okay, Scar, you can burn out those vents now,’ Cormac instructed. ‘The rest of you, take them down.’

    The sound of weapons fire became a constant drumming while a glare lit up the huge interior of the building. Drawing his thin-gun, Cormac turned the next comer in time to see two burning shapes slam to the floor and fly apart. He glimpsed a head sheathed in flame and pieces of a haiman assister frame scattered here and there. A steady thumping of thermal grenades then began. All along one wall fire belched from air-conditioning vents. Scar’s three targets were now incinerated in the vents they had been using to creep up on the survivors.

    ‘Smith?’ Cormac queried laconically.

    ‘One did get past,’ the soldier admitted. ‘But there’s now pieces of him all over the floor, with that weapon of yours hovering above them.’

    ‘Any of them still moving?’ Cormac queried generally.

    When there came no reply, he holstered his gun and headed over to where the survivors were located. Nothing to learn here from the enemy, but maybe those three would have something to say.

    * * * *

    The two Dragon spheres hung in space seemingly indifferent to the buzz of activity surrounding them. Ensconced in VR, Mika was apparently standing out on some invisible floor suspended over vacuum, observing the new conferencing unit being brought by two grabships towards the Dragon sphere that had first been able to break its Maker programming. To those seeing them for the first time, both these incarnations of Dragon were indistinguishable, being just spheres of fleshy alien technology now each extending three miles wide. They had grown by taking in asteroidal matter and processing it into something internally. Mika herself could distinguish between them because she recognized the scars on their surfaces. Of course she could, because she had been present when the two had inflicted the wounds upon each other.

    The conferencing unit itself was a domed pressurized accommodation structure five hundred feet across and packed with technology for scanning, research and much else besides. The two grabships released it about a mile away from the first sphere and then quickly departed, like acolytes after leaving an offering for some