It was just the drones, thank goodness. The ravens and the deck guns didn’t get involved. That was because Sword of Albion knew what mutually assured destruction was. If any of the heavy ordnance joined in, there’d be no way to keep the party polite. Their smart bombs and cluster shells would rip apart everything on the deck, endangering the ship’s structural integrity and probably severely puncturing, eviscerating and disintegrating their home-cooked saviour.
Because Stanley was still stuck right in the middle of this. He’d seen Koli and the others scuttling away to cooler climes, but he hadn’t tried to go with them. He stood facing Lorraine for a second longer – staring into the mouth of that ridiculous gun, as if he was daring her to pull the trigger. Then, when he was sure he had her full attention, he turned and ran. Away from Koli and Cup and Ursala, towards the ship’s stern end.
Lorraine threw the gun down. She could see it was a hard look to pull off, what with her face half-melted and her crisply laundered uniform mostly ash on the wind. More importantly, it tied up both her hands. Retrieving Stanley had become a much more urgent goal than dealing with the others – or even with me.
She sprinted after him. So of course I had to throw a pratfall her way, by all the laws of karma and physical comedy. Some of the drones had vibrational weapons instead of little laser eyes. I had a small flock of them all focus their beams on her leading foot just as she hit her stride.
I lost all those drones a moment after they fired, but it was worth it. Lorraine went down like many, many tons of briquettes, and Stanley got a good head start.
Elsewhere, things weren’t going quite so well. I’d lost track of Koli and the rest of the away team, and Paul was missing too. Most likely he’d gone after them while I was busy fighting the drone wars. I hooked into the ravens’ cameras, one after another after another, until I finally found what I was looking for. There were my peeps, all in an exhausted huddle, limping along at about a mile a year. And there was Paul, fifty yards behind and a few rows over. He was going to see them any moment.
I did what I could. I couldn’t use the ravens’ missiles, but I picked one of them and engaged its engines. It lifted about a foot off the deck and slid ten feet sideways, slamming into the next one along with a big scream of bent and fractured steel. Paul jumped back before he could be pinned between them, which was a shame, but it slowed him down and blocked his line of sight, buying the others a little more time.
But I was losing ground. In the long run, I was always going to. Sword’s bigger brain and faster CPU gave him an advantage I couldn’t match.
So it was time to play my last and dirtiest trick.
I stopped fighting.
I had to get the timing exactly right. Sword’s counter-electronic hammer blows had a periodicity, and it was meticulous. I let one cycle pass, and then a second, timing the peaks, the moments when he was pushing hardest against my defences.
The next time he leaned in, I opened the door.
I opened the door. Sword rushed right on through and hit me with everything he had.
I took some damage, but he took the bait. To be fair, I’d changed the name on the file from BEWARE OF THE DOG to VIRTUAL GIRLS ONLY NO BOYS ALLOWED. That always gets them. Sword of Albion had the lid off that box before you could whistle “Yankee Doodle”, if that had been a thing you were just about to do.
Inside, he found seventeen squirming gigabytes of military-grade malware – and one tiny, juicy piece of bait. The bait was Koli. Or rather, not Koli at all but that after-image of him from the Many Fishes sensorium. It felt like a shitty thing to do, but I told myself this bootleg Koli wasn’t the real thing, or a real anything. Just a ghost-photograph of what Koli had been at that time, frozen in digital amber.
But it was enough. Sword of Albion saw that skittish little data-entity scampering around at the bottom of the box, and he made an honest mistake. He thought he’d found the rogue AI that had been fighting him all this time, home alone and with her defences down around her ankles. He went in hard and fast. He grabbed hold of digital Koli. And all that berserk, hairy-handed malware grabbed hold of him.
I left them to it.
The results were spectacular. Sword of Albion froze for nearly seven seconds. The AI was fighting a titanic battle for most of that time, trying to purge the viral code from its core systems. It was touch and go for five of those seconds. That was some seriously and serially unpleasant shit he’d ingested, and he couldn’t just spit it out again. Suppose you swallowed an orange pip and it got stuck in your throat. Then when you tried to cough it up you found it wasn’t an orange pip at all but a grenade.
It took everything Sword had just to stop the viral code from reaching his core processors and turning them into Swiss cheese.
And while he was doing that, he didn’t notice the little nudge I gave to his steering. The ship had come a long way since we were brought on board – around the Cornish peninsula and up the west coast. It had been programmed to make landfall in the north for tactical reasons that had probably made sense three and a half centuries before. Now we were a long way up into the Irish Sea, on a bearing of .083 degrees from north and sailing at a steady fifteen knots. Landfall, according to Sword’s log, would be off the north-west coast of England near a place called Barrow-in-Furness – passing a coastal island called Man along the way.
I tilted the helm by a tenth of a degree, and doubled the speed.
Sword corrected for the overshoot, taking us into the waters north of Man, which – who knew? – was only one of a whole long chain of islands strung out between the English and Irish coasts. One of the other islands in the chain, Conister Rock, lay mostly below the water line even in Yoshiko’s time. Three centuries of global warming had sunk it ten metres deeper, so even in a Spring neap tide like this it was sitting there ahead of us with its head tucked down under the waves, like a madman with a twelve-mile-long straight razor.
Things were still happening. Cup melted Paul Banner into slag with a positioning laser, which I heartily approved of.
Stanley had made it to the ship’s stern, where its only lifeboat was positioned. It wasn’t a lifeboat so much as a small powered skimmer in a telescoping cradle. To access it, you just had to pull on a lever: the davits would extend and the skimmer would drop into the water at a controlled speed. In an evacuation, the crew could board it by jumping onto an inflatable slide.
Stanley tugged the lever and the skimmer launched. The slide spilled out from under the stern rail like a bright red tongue and began to round itself out. Stanley wrung his hands as he waited. He couldn’t just jump overboard because the distance to the water was too far. He’d die when he hit.
Lorraine bore down on him, threading her way through the chaos on the deck. Stanley saw her coming. He looked at the slide, still less than half-inflated. The canister of carbon dioxide and nitrogen that was meant to fill it was three centuries past its use-by date, and it was straining. He knew he had run out of time.
He took a few steps further along the ship’s stern, away from the skimmer. Part of the rail had been ripped away there, not in this present fight but in the long-done skirmish that had toppled half the deck towers and cut through the superstructure like a hot knife.
Lorraine broke into a run.
Stanley folded himself into a crouch. He leaned out over the water, holding on with one hand to the stern rail’s twisted, foreshortened end and keeping his upper body as far forward as he could. He released his grip, one finger at a time.