Angry Robot (www.angryrobotbooks.com) has offered up 5 daily sample chapters from Winter Song, by Colin Harvey!
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One
Karl
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Karl was dreaming of his clone-wife on distant Avalon when the plasma bolt slammed into Ship’s engines.
One moment he was bathing with Karla in iodized springs beneath Jodi’s Falls, soaping her up-tilted breasts in the warm sunlight of Delta Pavonis, the next a giant was sitting on his chest while alarms screeched in the emergency lighting.
The pressure lifted and he floated naked in his bed-web on the bridge, a voice calling ever louder, “Karl, we are under attack.” That Ship’s too-perfect alto was gravelled by static showed how mortal the blow might be. His interface wasn’t working; none of the usual displays were scrolling down his field of vision, and with no data feeding directly into his brain he was forced to use archaic Voice. “What – what’s the damage?” He smelled the acrid tang of smoke and the monitors – used only by passengers – were blank.
He coughed, his eyes stinging, and a smooth wall opened and out popped a freshly-grown mask connected to an air-pack.
“I’m not wearing that,” Karl muttered between coughs. “I hate putting things on my face.”
“You’re enhanced, not invulnerable,” Ship snapped. “Put it on!”
Muttering, Karl complied.
“Thank you,” Ship said. “We have lost all but emergency power in this third. In the central third we have intermittent power. The rest is undamaged. When waves from the gravity generator threatened to crush you, I had to take the engines down, and can’t restart them. I’m attempting to dodge a second incoming bolt with lateral power, but it’s already expanded, and complete evasion is unlikely. Time to impact is four minutes.”
Karl tried to digest the news that he was probably dead. “They must have fired as soon as they dropped out of fold-space.”
Ship didn’t answer directly. “The second bolt came from different co-ordinates, indicating another ship, though it’s difficult to scan through the asteroid belt. I’ve registered a third ship nearby.” It sounded sheepish; “They must have identified us before I could see them. The first I knew was their plasma bolt coming at point-nine-cee. I had barely three minutes warning. I’m sorry, Karl.”
“Forget it,” Karl said.
That meant there would be no respite while the others re-charged their capacitors. Even if by a miracle they dodged this second bolt, and one from the third ship, the first would have recharged and be ready to fire.
He slipped free of the amniotic safety of the bed-web. “Are they the Aye ships we spotted earlier?” Unlikely, he knew. The ships that were each individual Artificial Intelligences rarely interacted with the Flesh-bound, who held little interest for them. He floated over to one of the screens. “Can you get this working?”
Ship paused for so long that Karl wondered if it had died.
“Yes,” it said.
