The Human by Neal Asher

Author:Neal Asher [Asher, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781509862436
Google: YWa5DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B084QD4CRH
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2020-04-15T23:00:00+00:00

Trike

Tracking the courses of the Client’s thousands of remotes outside the Species living area, Trike saw them taking containers, packed full of Species remains, to a weapon emplacement on the face of the ship’s core. There sat a coilgun that could fire a wide selection of missiles, hardened for acceleration even beyond that of a Polity railgun. These missiles could contain various loads: atomic, chemical, antimatter, invasive technology like Jain tech and a cornucopia of biologicals. Now the remotes used the weapon to dispatch those containers at low speed across to the weapons platform, where EVA handler robots intercepted them and dragged them inside.

After watching the operation for just a minute, he judged that, by the burgeoning number of remotes and the fact they were also preparing another coilgun, the Client would have the job done in a few hours. He considered his options. When the Client finished, she would have no reason to hang around. She would not be able to make a U-space jump but, on conventional drive, she could begin moving away so would be no help against that Jain ship . . . unless forced to be. He next spread his focus from the two coilguns and assessed the other weapons available.

The ship’s core was loaded. Numerous coilguns and railguns dotted its exterior, their variety of ammunition immense. Protruding particle beam weapons could fire particulates with different impact profiles. Another weapon could fire lasers, masers and grasers which he could format for virtual and induction warfare. Disruptors, much more complex than the one whose schematic he had stolen from the Client, were to hand. Their ways of interfering with matter extended well beyond molecular binding forces. These could turn matter fissile to shed energy explosively, or in controlled ways he could program to other forms of virtual warfare. In all, the weapons available numbered twenty times those of a weapons platform and were a great deal more effective.

He turned his attention to defences. The core’s highly advanced armour had demonstrated its resistance to bombardment and energy weapons strikes. Adaptive and self-mending, it had already repaired the damage the Polity and prador fleets had inflicted. However, the field defence did not function as it should. This had been demonstrated during those earlier attacks when it had failed to erect a fully enclosing field. Trike began investigating this and soon found, as with other broken-down systems in the ship, that maintenance had failed. When the whole ship had left the U-space blister, it had jumped, but a back-surge through the U-space engines had wrecked their support infrastructure. Since the engines formed an integrating link, between the hardfield projectors and the underlying U-field twist that stored energy from them, the system simply no longer worked.

Trike gazed through the sensors of organic security robots at the engine itself. The thing hung in a chamber near to the rim of the ship’s core – a small moon of technology a mile across, linked by superconductors to U-space sink vanes all around it.

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