The light of the main screen bathed my face, showing me the hole we’d punched between this tunnel and the next.
I cleared my throat.
“Are you ready?”
The Trouble Dog’s avatar appeared on the screen, overlaying the view like a newsreader standing before the scene of a natural disaster.
“I believe so,” she said. She didn’t look entirely sure, but I couldn’t be certain whether she was putting that on for my benefit. Sometimes I had to remind myself that the avatar was a construct, and all of its expressions and body language were consciously chosen rather than unconsciously displayed. A look of uncertainty on her part could, rather than reveal a genuine timorousness, simply indicate she hadn’t fully calculated the odds of success. It was a fine line, but one worth remembering. As with any other human, you could only infer so much from her appearance.
“Then let’s give it a try.”
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I felt the ship quiver like an animal rousing itself from hibernation. Manoeuvring jets fired along her length. And slowly she eased backwards, withdrawing her nose from the trench it had gouged in the dead rock of the tunnel floor. Then, when her stern was almost pressed up against the barrier of fallen debris blocking the tunnel, she fired laterally. Her streamlined bow inched sideways. Pieces of loose rock rattled down from her upper surfaces. But sluggishly, she began to turn. The point of her bow passed through the ragged hole and scraped against the far wall of the new tunnel. I gripped the arms of my chair, fearing we’d be wedged sideways. Then, with a splintering of rock fragments, the ship’s nose broke free and swung around, dragging her stern out and around, until she found herself entirely in the new tunnel, and facing the opposite way—back towards the hangar bay through which she’d originally entered.
Sitting there on the bridge, feeling the distant vibration of her engines, I felt a surge of overwhelming pride. The Trouble Dog might be dinged-up, but she was still in the game. And whatever became of us in the next few minutes and hours, at least we’d be taking the fight to our tormentors rather than waiting for death to excavate us from this sterile vault.
As the jets whined back into silence, I opened a channel to the crew lounge, where I knew everyone save Nod and its brood were now waiting. Even Lucy had left the bridge and gone down to be with her friends.
“We’re in position,” I told them.
Johnny Schultz acknowledged. Preston and Addison sat to his left, and Lucy sat to his right. I watched him slide a brotherly arm around her shoulders, as if she were nothing more than a real human girl.
“Okay, kid,” he said to her in his studied port-hero drawl. “Time to do your stuff.”
She looked up at him with an unreadable expression, her face somehow concurrently youthful and ancient.
“Right you are, dearie.” She scrunched her eyes and rubbed her palms together, like a child making a birthday wish.
I looked at the main screen. The walls of the tunnel seemed to shiver. Dust fell from cracks in the ceiling, raining down on the Trouble Dog. I heard a fist-sized chunk of rock bounce from her hull armour.
“It’s working,” Schultz said.
Beside him, Lucy opened her eyes. Her smile was one of wicked glee. She said, “You’d better believe it’s working.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
ONA SUDAK
Surface detonation, the ship reported. Minimal internal damage.
Bochnak and I were in the spherical chamber at the white ship’s heart. On the forward wall, the Restless Itch filled the view like a black cliff. The most recent impacts presented as softly glowing blemishes. For some reason, the sight of them caused me to recall a fragment of one of the first poems I’d written in the immediate aftermath of the war. It wasn’t even a good poem, just a couplet imagining past misdeeds as needle marks tattooed on the soul. Yet combined with the sight of those ember-like craters, it disturbed me in a way I couldn’t properly elucidate, even to myself. I tried to shrug away the feeling, but it only tightened its grip. Every volley I launched felt like a desecration. I was shelling another race’s holy site, and I found myself silently cursing Sally Konstanz for making me resort to such extreme measures.
And then all the alarms went off at once.
We’re registering a huge build-up of power, the ship said, speaking directly into my brain.
“What is it?” Bochnak grabbed my sleeve. “What’s going on?”
I shook him off. A penumbra of blue fire flickered into life, ringing the dark bulk of the ancient ark.
“I don’t believe it. I don’t fucking believe it.” I hooked myself into the Fleet’s sensorium, searching for hard data to confirm what I was seeing.
“What?”
Targeting lasers bounced off rock. The measurements came back.
“They did it. Christ knows how they managed it, but they got the engines online.”
Bochnak gaped. “They’re moving that thing?”
“Right at us.”
He took a step back. “Shouldn’t we, you know, get out of the way?”
I smiled. “Don’t worry. We’re backing off at the same rate it’s advancing. It’s a floating mountain; it’s not going anywhere fast.” I checked the weapons systems to make sure they were maintaining a steady lock on the hangar in which the Trouble Dog lurked.
“Besides,” I said, “they’ll be lucky if those engines don’t explode. The last time those things were fired, the Crusades were still raging and America remained undiscovered.”
Bochnak raised his wiry eyebrows. “And I thought I was the historian.”
I gave a shrug. “I specialised in military history at the Academy.”
“And now you’re making it.” Although his tone sounded gloomily resigned, the thought strengthened the sinews of my resolve.
“Yes,” I said, “I am.”
For his part, Bochnak didn’t look so convinced. He had the hangdog air of the terminally put-upon. I had the impression that could he have fled back to his life of comfortable academia, he wouldn’t have hesitated.
“So,” he inclined his head at the slowly accelerating alien vessel, “what are we going to do about it?”
“What can we do? That thing masses at least a hundred million tons. Just imagine the inertia. We could fire every missile we had and it wouldn’t make an appreciable difference. It certainly wouldn’t slow her down.”
“What happens if it hits us?”
“I’m confident we can move backwards faster than it can move forwards.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“We move sideways.”
Bochnak frowned, clearly still troubled. He reached beneath his hockey jersey, into the pocket of his jumpsuit, and produced a red handkerchief, which he used to dab his forehead.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “All this trouble just to destroy one ship. I mean, how much of a threat can they be?”
I turned and fixed him with a stare I’d learned on the parade ground.
“I don’t know how things work where you come from, Mr Bochnak, but I came here to do a job and I’m not leaving until I’ve achieved my objective.”
The old man stuffed the hankie back into his pocket and glared at me with his yellowish, vein-spidered eyes.
“And what exactly is that objective, Captain Sudak?”
He looked like a belligerent, wild-haired old hermit roused from his solitude. But before I could reply, the ship broke in, slamming its words directly into our minds with the force of non-verbal hammer blows.
Our primary objective was to ascertain if the enemy was involved in the wreck of the Lucy’s Ghost. This we have done. Our secondary objective remains the pacification of all combat-capable human craft, including and especially the Trouble Dog.
Bochnak put a hand to his temple, wincing with the impact of those words. “But why?” he asked. “How can they hurt you now?”
In the past, the Trouble Dog has linked with the Fleet. She has spoken to us
directly. She has seen into our collective heart. However remote the possibility, she might have divined a physical or strategic weakness. Therefore, of all human ships, she represents the greatest threat to the accomplishment of our mission, and must be destroyed.
Bochnak shook his head. “This isn’t right,” he said. “This is madness.”
It is necessary.
“Defiling a sacred relic? Provoking a war in order to kill an already wounded ship?” His hands pulled at his unruly hair. “Oh yes, because that makes perfect sense.”
He glared at the ceiling but the ship declined to reply. It had apparently said all it wanted to say. Slowly, the old man lowered his gnarled hands and looked at me.
“This is bullshit,” he said. “You know that, right?”
I shook my head. The Fleet’s methods might be clumsy and unorthodox, but I still believed they were sincerely trying to save humanity from itself and from the dragons that swam in the hypervoid. To stand against them on this would be to declare myself an enemy of my species. A traitor. This transition period might be painful, but it would ultimately lead to peace and security for generations to come. I couldn’t let myself agree with Bochnak. I couldn’t let his liberal scruples ruin what would ultimately be the greatest thing to ever happen to the human race. I knew that somewhere in the depths of my being, securely locked away, the part of me that had once been a poet raged and wept. But I didn’t need her anymore. I was a soldier now, and I had a mission, and I’d be damned if I’d let my discarded cover identity, or this ridiculous old academic, stand in my way.
I interlaced my fingers.
“Alexi,” I said. “Please go to your quarters and stay there until further notice.”
He blinked at me in surprise.
“You’re confining me to my cabin?”
“For the time being.”
“You can’t do that.” He looked flustered. “I mean, what’s the point? There’s only the two of us here.”
“I’m finding your constant doubts counterproductive.”
“What does that even mean? Are you afraid of a dissenting opinion?”
With my hands still woven together, I stretched out my arms until my knuckles gave a satisfying crackle.
“I’m not afraid of anything. I just think things would be better if you restricted yourself to your own personal space.”
I watched his cheeks mottle with anger.
“That’s crap,” he blustered. “You’re just scared you’re wrong.”
“No,” I snapped, fixing him with the wintriest glare I could muster. “I’m not. But I have a mission to complete, and I’d rather be free to concentrate on it without your constant interruptions.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
JOHNNY SCHULTZ
I left Lucy talking to the Trouble Dog, and followed Addison down to the galley for coffee. I don’t think either of us was under any illusions that we might die in the next hour or so. I certainly noticed the way she kept tugging her hair behind her right ear.
“Are you all right?” I picked up a cup and waited while she filled hers.
“Not really.” She spoke without looking around.
“It’s been a rough couple of days.”
“Rough?” Now she glanced at me. “Rough doesn’t even cover it. I can’t even… I don’t want to think about it.”
“Yeah.” I knew what she meant. The only way for us to keep functioning was to keep shying away from the memories of what had happened to us, and to the people we’d lost.
“Can you believe what’s going on at home?” She was trying to change the subject.
“With the Fleet?” I scratched the back of my neck. “It’s insane. What are they trying to achieve?”
Riley sniffed the steam rising from her cup. “I think you may have to put your fifteen-cat plan on hold for a while.”
“Lucy’s going to be pissed.”
“Do you really think she wants to settle down and be part of a family?”
“I think she does.” Lucy had been a young girl when she died. Now she had more than a century of memories of tramping around the Generality as a freighter—not to mention the part of her that had once been a millennia-old Nymtoq colony vessel. “Despite her age, she’s like a child. She’s learning how to be human.” I put my hands in my pockets and shrugged. “And I guess kids need someone to look out for them.”
Riley’s forehead crinkled as she raised her eyebrows. “You want to be her dad?”
I scuffed a shoe against the deck. “Big brother, maybe.”
She laughed. “That’s… I was going to say crazy, but actually it’s kind of sweet.”
I felt my cheeks flush. “She saved our lives, several times. It’s the least I can do.”
Riley was still smiling, but there were tears in her eyes. She put her hand on my arm. “Don’t mind me. I’m not laughing at you. I just never thought I’d see Johnny Schultz grow up and start acting responsibly.”
“I guess we all have to do it sometime.”
Her smile guttered like a dying candle. “Well, given that civilisation seems to be collapsing around us,” she said quietly, “some might say you’ve left it a little late.”
“Better late than never.”
“I suppose.”
She walked over to the nearest table and I followed. Like the infirmary and most of the other communal areas on the Trouble Dog, the galley had been designed to cater to the needs of a crew of three hundred. Sitting there, surrounded by empty tables and plastic chairs, felt like sitting in a café in an out-of-season seaside resort—the only things it would have taken to complete the illusion were a set of misted-up windows and the vinegary smell of chips.
Riley placed her coffee on the tabletop and leaned back in her seat, eyes closed and palms resting on either side of her cup.
“God,” she said. “How did it all unravel so quickly? I thought with the war over, things were starting to get back to normal.”
“Nobody could have anticipated this.”
She opened her eyes. “They had that Fleet sitting around Camrose for a year. Couldn’t they have done something during that time? Quarantined them or something?”
“I don’t know.”
A polite cough came from the room’s main screen. The Trouble Dog’s avatar had joined us: a skinny, androgynous-looking woman with short black hair, a white shirt and a thin black tie.
“I’m afraid things are worse than you know,” she informed us. “I’ve been monitoring higher dimensional message traffic, and it seems the Fleet of Knives has progressed from destroying purely military targets. As of a few hours ago, all interstellar travel has been embargoed.”
Riley groaned and ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. “And so we’re screwed,” she said. “As a species, I mean. There’s no way the Generality can hold together with those things policing us. We’ll end up as a couple of hundred insular, isolated planets living on the whim of our so-called protectors.”
On the screen, the Trouble Dog tried to look sympathetic. “If it’s any consolation,” she said, “our chances of surviving the next couple of hours are vanishingly remote.”
Riley gave a snort. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s a colossal help.”
“You’re welcome.” The avatar bowed, and then shimmered away into nothingness, leaving us staring at each other. And suddenly, neither of us knew what to say. The only topic we had left was the one we least wanted to tackle. After all, what use are words when your world’s falling apart?
We looked down at our hands and listened to the hum of the air-conditioning. The quiet clangs and hisses of a working starship.
After a while, Riley said, “Do you think your idea will work?”
I honestly didn’t know how to answer. Lucy had been keen to give it a try, and Captain Konstanz and the Trouble Dog seemed to think it was worth a shot.
“I guess we’ll know soon enough.”
I looked at her and suddenly saw her as if through
a stranger’s eyes. In place of the professional, no-nonsense loadmaster from the Lucy’s Ghost, I now saw a tough, capable survivor, and felt closer to her than to anyone else I’d ever known. I slid my hand into the middle of the table. Riley looked down at it, as if unsure what was being offered. Then, without meeting my eye, she placed her own hand over the top of mine, and gave it a hesitant squeeze.
I drank in the light shining on her cheek, the way her hair fell around her face like fine copper wire, and the glimmer of the shiny gold stud in her right eyebrow.
“I have some conditions,” she said.
“Name them.”
She glanced up at me. “Firstly, everything you said about growing up, I need that to be true. Not just for me, but for Lucy too.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. No more hunches, no more showing off. No more ‘Lucky’ Johnny Schultz. Things are different now.”
“I know. What else?”
She dragged her front teeth across her bottom lip. “Just promise me this is real. That it’s not a result of shock or fear or post-traumatic stress. That you really want to be with me, despite everything else that’s going on.”
I turned my hand over so I could hold hers. We’d been through hell together, and I knew that no matter what, we were going to be together for the rest of our lives—even if the rest of our lives amounted to little more than a few minutes.
“I promise.”
An alarm sounded. Riley got to her feet. “Thank you,” she said. And together in silence, we walked back to the crew lounge and strapped ourselves in for the coming battle.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
TROUBLE DOG
The Restless Itch might have been slow off the blocks, but the old rock’s engines were huge and powerful, and she was soon moving quickly, and increasing her speed with every second that elapsed. When she reached three quarters of the speed necessary for a dimensional transition, I began to accelerate along the tunnel that led to the hangar at her bows. Thanks to her boost, I’d be moving almost fast enough to jump as soon as I emerged into empty space, thereby minimising the time Sudak’s knife ships would have to target me. With luck, I might have the accumulated velocity to be away before they even realised I’d escaped.
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