meet the larger grey shape at the centre of their pattern, silently joining with it, seeming to slide partway into it.
The resulting shape hung steady in the air. Echoes slowly died, to leave utter silence within the great chamber.
Then the shape roared something in a language the humans present could not understand, sounds crashing off the walls like surf. Tyl Loesp cursed at the sheer piercing volume of it and clapped his hands to his ears like everybody else. Some of the other men fell to their knees with the force of the sound. Only pride prevented tyl Loesp from doing the same. While the echoes were still dying away, the Oct seemed to startle and move, almost as one. Dry whispering noises, like small twigs just starting to catch fire, began to fill the chamber.
The sound was drowned out as the grey-dark shape hanging in the centre rumbled out again, this time in Sarl.
“Thank you for your help,” it thundered. “Now I have much to do. There is no forgiveness.”
A filmy spherical bubble seemed to form around the shape, just great enough in extent to enclose it completely. The bubble went dark, black, then quicksilver. As tyl Loesp and the others watched, a second bubble flickered into existence enclosing the first, forming two metres or so further out from the inner silvery one. A blink of light, brief but close to blindingly bright, came from the space between the two spheres before the outer one went black. A humming noise built quickly, a vast thrumming sound which issued from the black sphere and rapidly grew to fill the entire chamber, cramming it with a tooth-loosening, eyeball-vibrating, bone-shaking bassy howl. The Oct fell back, rolling to the floor, seemingly flattened by the storm of noise. Every human present put their hands to their ears again. Almost all turned away, stumbling, bumping into their fellows, trying to run to escape the pulverising, flesh-battering noise.
The few humans unable to look away – Poatas was one, on his knees, stick fallen from his hand – remained transfixed, watching the colossally humming black sphere. They were the only ones to witness, very briefly, a scatter of tiny pinprick holes speckling its surface, loosing thin, blinding rays.
Then the outer sphere blinked out of existence.
A tsunami of wide-spectrum radiation filled the chamber in an instant as the thermonuclear fireball behind it surged outwards.
The blast of light and heat incinerated Oct and humans indiscriminately, vaporising them along with the inner lining of the chamber, blowing its single great spherical wall out in every direction like a vast grenade and bringing what was left of the building above and the surrounding plaza crashing down upon the glowing wreckage.
The first waves of radiation – gamma rays, neutrons and a titanic electromagnetic pulse – were already long gone, their damage done.
The silvery sphere lifted slowly, calmly out of the smoking debris, perfectly unharmed. It drifted through the kilometre-wide hole in the city’s plaza level and moved slowly away, dropping its film of shields and altering its shape slightly to that of a large ovoid. It turned to the direction humans called facing and accelerated out of the gorge.
27. The Core
They stood on the edge of the kilometre-wide crater left in the plaza level. The suit visors made the scene bright as day. Ferbin clicked the artificial part of the view off for a few moments, just to see the true state of it. Dim, cold greys, blacks, blues and dark browns; the colours of death and decay. A Rollstar was due to dawn about now, but there would be no sign of it this deep in the gorge for many days yet and no melting warmth to restore the Falls until some long time after that.
There was still a faint infrared glow visible through the suit’s visor, deep inside the crater. Steam lifted slowly from the dark depths; the vapour rose and was shredded to nothing by the cold, keening wind.
Anaplian and Hippinse were checking readouts and sensor details. “Something like a small nuke,” Djan Seriy said. They were communicating without touching now, reckoning the need for silence was over. Even so, the suits chose the most secure method available, glittering unseen coherent light from one to the other, pinpointing.
“Small blast but serious EMP and neutrons,” the ship’s avatoid said. “And gamma.”
“They must have been fried,” Djan Seriy said quietly, kneeling down by the breach in the plaza’s surface. She touched the polished stone, feeling its grainy slickness transmitted through