Free The Line of Polity by Neal Asher Page B

He looked up also, and immediately saw how the metal was twisting across its entire length.
    "What do we do?" he asked her.
    Another crash ... the ship slewing sideways... people's belongings flying through the air. His mother tilted her head to listen to the distant sounds of distorting and shattering metal, screaming, explosions.
    "Something's tearing this ship apart," she said, more puzzled now than fearful. "It must be in gee ... a black hole? They can't have got too close to a planet. Even they could not be so incompetent."
    The ceiling then split, and something surged through: a tentacle as thick as a man's body, and terminating in a flat cobra head with a single blue eye where a mouth might have been.
    "Dragon," said his mother. " Run! " But where was there to run to? Apis saw it happen, along with many others: the buckling and splitting of the ceiling had pulled open the back doors of the bay. Beside his mother, Apis was one of the first to reach those doors.
    "Soldiers," he said, after sticking his head through the gap, and seeing uniformed men half running and half dragging themselves down the corridor by the evenly spaced handrails. Turning to his mother he said, "They don't have grav-plates out there."
    "Primitive," she replied as other Outlinkers pushed up behind them. They all turned and looked up, as another pseudopod squirmed through the split in the ceiling. The ship shook once again; emergency lights began flashing in the corridor. Apis checked the corridor once more and saw the last of the soldiers disappearing around a bend in it. Again the ship lurched, sending people floating — observed by the blue eyes of Dragon — towards the broken ceiling.
    "We can go through!" Apis yelled, and hauled himself into the corridor.
    "No, not yet!" his mother yelled too late.
    Apis was halfway to the bend when the others began to follow. His mother reached him ahead of the crowd. Most of them did not reach him. To one side, something distorted and broke, and fire spewed through — flame hanging in the air like layers of fog, with no gravity to give it shape. Apis heard screaming, saw shapes...
    "Come on." His mother grabbed his shoulder and pulled him onwards. With others, they reached a side shaft that ran through the ship. Uniformed people were floating and propelling themselves up it, aiming for an access way above.
    "They'll be heading for craft to escape in," she said. They flung themselves up the shaft, and followed the crowd. No one took any notice of them. Terror had become a taste in the air. Vacuum could claim them all at any moment. The access way opened in another corridor leading to an airlock. Apis and his mother followed the uniformed personnel through it. Three others also in uniform followed them, before a sucking explosion and the sudden slamming of the airlock. One got halfway through, but he did not stop the lock from closing.
    The hull of the landing craft clanged as the clamps let go, and all was free-floating chaos as it dropped away from the mother ship. Orders were bellowed and soldiers pulled themselves down into seats and strapped themselves in. Apis and his mother did the same, and only now that the craft was moving away from the ship did they get some strange looks. Glancing back he took in the soldiers there, the mixture of uniforms — in some cases the lack of a uniform, in other cases uniforms soaked with blood. Forward, some sort of commander floated between the passenger area and the cockpit, surveying the cabin. Behind him the pilot and navigator sat at the controls, the curved chainglass screen before them displaying pinpricks of stars and the occasional hurtling pieces of wreckage. Apis stretched himself up to try to get a view of the camera-fed screens below this — those that showed other views. He glimpsed fire, and the hardly recognizable shape of the ship that had ostensibly come to rescue them from Miranda, a chaotic tangle of pseudopods, and the dark-scaled moon that was