The departure had been the most technically difficult she had ever known. Clavain’s surprise attack demanded that Zodiacal Light sustain a deceleration of three gees until its arrival within ten light-seconds of Nostalgia for Infinity, All the attack ships in the current wave had been forced to make their departures under the same three gees of thrust. Exiting any spacecraft bay was a technically demanding operation, most especially when the departing ships were armed and fuel-heavy. But doing it under sustained thrust was an order of magnitude more difficult again. Antoinette would have considered it a white-knuckle job if Clavain had demanded that they exit at a half-gee, the way rim pilots arrived and departed from Carousel New Copenhagen. But three gees? That was just being sadistic.
But she had made it. Now she had clear space for hundreds of metres in any direction, and a lot more than that in most.
‘Cut in tokamak on my mark, Ship. Five… four… three… two… and mark.’ Through years of conditioning she tensed, anticipating the tiny thump in the seat of her pants that always signified the switch from nuclear rockets to pure fusion.
It never came.
‘Fusion burn sustained and steady. Green across the board. Three gees, Antoinette.’
She raised an eyebrow and nodded. ‘Damn, but that was smooth.’
‘You can thank Xavier for that, and perhaps Clavain. They found a glitch in one of the oldest drive-management subroutines. It was responsible for a slight mismatch in thrust during the switch between thrust modes.’
She switched to a lower-magnification view of the lighthugger, one that showed the entire length of the hull. Streams of makeshift attack craft — mostly trike-sized, but up to small shuttles — were emerging from five different bays along the hull. Many of the craft were decoys, and not all of the decoys had enough fuel to get within a light-second of Nostalgia for Infinity. But even knowing that it still looked impressive. The huge ship appeared to be bleeding streams of light.
‘And you had nothing to do with it?’
‘One always tries one best.’
‘I never thought otherwise, Ship.’
‘I’m sorry about what happened, Antoinette…’
‘I’m over it, Ship.’
She couldn’t call it Beast any more. And she certainly couldn’t bring herself to call it Lyle Merrick. Ship would have to do.
She switched to an even lower magnification, calling up an overlay that boxed the numerous attack craft, tagging them with numeric codes according to type, range, crew and armament, and plotted their vectors. Some idea of the scale of the assault now became apparent. There were around a hundred ships in total. Sixty or so of the hundred were trikes, and about thirty of the trikes actually carried assault-squad members — usually one heavily armoured pig, although there were one or two tandem trikes for specialist operations. All of the crewed trikes carried some form of armament, ranging from single-use grasers to gigawatt-yield Breitenbach bosers. The crew all wore servo armour; most carried firearms, or would be able to disengage and carry their trike’s weapon when they reached the enemy ship.
There were about thirty intermediate-sized craft: two– or three-seater closed-hull shuttles. They were all of civilian design, either adapted from the ships that had already been present in Zodiacal Light’s holds when she was captured, or supplied by H from his own raiding fleets. They were equipped with a similar spectrum of armaments as the trikes, but also carried the heavier equipment: missile racks and specialised hard-docking gear. And then there were nine medium-to-large shuttles or corvettes, all capable of holding at least twenty armoured crew and with hulls long enough to carry the smallest kind of railgun slug-launchers. Three of these craft carried inertia-suppressors, extending their acceleration ceiling from four to eight gees. Their blocky hulls and asymmetric designs marked them as non-atmospheric ships, but this would be no handicap in the anticipated sphere of combat.
Storm Bird was much larger than the other ships, large enough that its own hold now contained three shuttles and a dozen trikes, along with their associated crews. It had no inertia-suppression machinery — the technology had proven impossible to replicate en masse, especially under the conditions aboard Zodiacal Light — but by way of compensation, Antoinette’s ship carried more armaments and more armour than any other ship in the assault fleet. It wasn’t a freighter now, she thought. It was a warship, and she had better start getting used to the idea.
‘Little… I mean, Antoinette?’
‘Yes?’ she asked, gritting her teeth.
‘I just wanted to say… now… before it’s too late…’
She hit the switch that disabled the voice, then eased out of her seat and into her exoskeleton. ‘Later, Ship. I’ve got to inspect the troops.’
Alone, with his hands clasped tightly behind his back, Clavain stood in the stiff embrace of his exoskeleton, watching the departure of the attack ships from an observation cupola.
The drones, decoys, trikes and ships gyred and wheeled as they left Zodiacal Light, falling into designated squadrons. The cupola’s smart glass protected his eyes against the savage glare of the exhausts, smudging the core of each flame with black so that he saw only the violet extremities. In the distance, far beyond the swarm of departing ships, was the brown-grey crescent face of Resurgam, the whole planet as small as a marble held at arm’s length. His implants indicated the position of Volyova’s lighthugger, though the other ship was much too distant to see with the naked eye. Yet a single neural command made the cupola selectively magnify that part of the image so that a reasonably sharp view of Nostalgia for Infinity swelled out of darkness. The Triumvir’s ship was nearly ten light-seconds away, but it was also very large; the four-kilometre-long hull subtended an angle of a third of an arc-second, which was well within the resolving capabilities of Zodiacal Light’s smallest optical telescopes. The downside was that the Triumvir would have at least as good a view of his own ship. Provided she was paying attention, she would not be able to miss the departure of the attack fleet.
Clavain knew now that the baroque augmentations he had seen before and dismissed as phantoms added by the processing software were quite real; that something astonishing and strange had happened to Volyova’s ship. The ship had remade itself into a festering gothic caricature of what a starship ought to look like. Clavain could only speculate that the Melding Plague must have had something to do with it. The only other place he had seen transformations that even approximated what he was seeing now was in the warped, phan-tasmagorical architecture of Chasm City. He had heard of ships being infected with the plague, and he had heard that sometimes the plague reached the repair-and-redesign machinery which allowed ships to evolve, but he had never heard of a ship becoming so thoroughly perverted as this one while still, so far as he could tell, being able to continue functioning as a ship. It made his skin crawl just to look it. He hoped that no one living had been caught up in those transformations.
The sphere of battle would encompass the ten light-seconds between Zodiacal Light and the other ship, although its focus would be determined by Volyova’s movements. It was a good volume for a war, Clavain thought. Tactically, it was not the scale that mattered so much as the typical crossing times for various craft and weapons.
At three gees, the sphere could be crossed in four hours; a little over two hours for the fastest ships in the fleet. A hyperfast missile would take fewer than forty minutes to span the sphere. Clavain had already dug through his memories of previous battle campaigns, searching for tactical parallels. The Battle of Britain — an obscure aerial dispute from one of the early transnational wars, fought with subsonic piston-engined aircraft — had encompassed a similar volume from the point of view of crossing times, although the three-dimensional element had been much less important. The twenty-first century’s global wars were less relevant; with sub-orbital waverider drones, no point on the planet had been more than forty minutes away from annihilation. But the solar system wars of the latter half of that century o
ffered more useful parallels. Clavain thought of the Earth-Moon secession crisis, or the battle for Mercury, noting victories and failures and the reasons for each. He thought of Mars, too, of the battle against the Conjoiners at the end of the twenty-second century. The sphere of combat had reached far above the orbits of Phobos and Deimos, so that the effective crossing time for the fastest single-person fighters had been three or four hours. There had been timelag problems, too, with line-of-sight communications blocked by huge clouds of silvered chaff.
There had been other campaigns, other wars. It was not necessary to bring them all to mind. The salient lessons were there already. He knew the mistakes that others had made; he knew also the mistakes he had made in the earlier engagements of his career. They had never been significant errors, he thought, or he would not be standing here now. But no lesson was valueless.
A pale reflection moved across the cupola’s glass.
‘Clavain.’
He snapped around with a whirr of his exoskeleton. He had imagined himself to be alone until then.
‘Felka…’ he said, surprised.
‘I came to watch it happen,’ she said.
Her own exoskeleton propelled her towards him with a stiff, marching gait, like someone being escorted by invisible guards. Together they watched the dregs of the attack squadron fall into space.
‘If you didn’t know it was war…’ he began.
‘… it would almost be beautiful,’ she said. ‘Yes. I agree.’
‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?’ Clavain asked.
‘Why do you ask me?’
‘You’re the closest thing I have left to a conscience, Felka. I keep asking myself what Galiana would do, if she were here now…’
Felka interrupted him. ‘She would worry, just as you worry. It’s the people who don’t worry — those who never have any doubts £hat what they’re doing is good and right — they’re the ones that cause the problems. People like Skade.’
He remembered the searing flash when he had destroyed Nightshade. ‘I’m sorry about what happened.’
‘I told you to do it, Clavain. I know it was what Galiana wanted.’
‘That I should kill her?’
‘She died years ago. She just didn’t… end. All you’ve done is close the book.’
‘I removed any possibility of her ever living again,’ he said.
Felka held his age-spotted hand. ‘She would have done the same to you, Clavain. I know it.’
‘Perhaps. But you still haven’t told me if you agree with this.’
‘I agree that it will serve our short-term interests if we possess the weapons. Beyond that, I’m not sure.’
Clavain looked at her carefully. ‘We need those weapons, Felka.’ ‘I know. But what if she — the Triumvir — needs them as well? Your proxy said she was trying to evacuate Resurgam.’
He chose his words. ‘That’s… not my immediate concern. If she is engaged in evacuating the planet, and I’ve no evidence that she is, then she has all the more reason to give me what I want so that I don’t interfere with the evacuation.’
‘And it wouldn’t cross your mind to think for a moment about helping her?’
‘I’m here to get those weapons, Felka. Everything else, no matter how well intentioned, is just a detail.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Felka said.
Clavain knew that it was better that he say nothing in answer.
In silence, they watched the violet flames of the attack ships fall towards Resurgam, and the Triumvir’s starship.
When Khouri had finished responding to Thorn’s latest message she arrived at a troubling conclusion. Walking was even harder than it had been before, the apparent slope of the floor even more severe. It was exactly as Ilia Volyova had predicted: the Captain had increased his rate of thrust, no longer satisfied with a mere tenth of a gee. By Khouri’s estimation, and the Clavain beta-level agreed with her, the rate was now double that and probably climbing. Previously horizontal surfaces now felt as if they were sloping at twelve degrees, enough to make some of the more slippery passages difficult to traverse. But that was not what was concerning her.
‘Ilia, listen to me. We have a serious fucking problem.’
Volyova emerged from contemplation of her battlescape. The icons floated within the squashed sphere of the projection like dozens of bright frozen fish. The view had changed since the last time she had seen it, Khouri was certain.
‘What is it, child?’
‘It’s the holding bay, where we have the newcomers.’
‘Continue.’
‘It’s not designed to deal with the ship moving under thrust. We built it as a temporary holding bay, to be used while we were parked. It’s spun for gravity so that the force acts radially, away from the ship’s long axis. But now that’s changing. The Captain’s applying thrust, so we’ve got a new source acting along the axis. It’s only a fifth of a gee at the moment, but you can bet it’s going to get worse. We can turn off the spin, but that won’t change things. The walls are becoming floors.’
‘This is a lighthugger, Khouri. This is a normal transition to starflight mode.’
‘You don’t understand, Ilia. We’ve got two thousand people crammed into one chamber, and they can’t stay there. They’re already freaking out because the floor is sloping so much. They feel as if they’re on the deck of a sinking ship, and no one is telling them anything’s wrong.’ She paused; she was a little out of breath. ‘Ilia, here’s the deal. You were right about the bottleneck. I told Thorn to get things moving faster at the Resurgam end. That means we’re going to be getting thousands of people arriving very soon indeed. We always knew we’d have to start emptying the holding bay. Now we’ll just have to start doing it a bit sooner.’
‘But that would mean…’ Volyova appeared unable to complete the thought.
‘Yes, Ilia. They’re going to have to get the tour of the ship. Whether they like it or not.’
‘This could turn out very badly, Khouri. Very badly indeed.’
Khouri looked down at her old mentor. ‘You know what I like about you, Ilia? You’re such a frigging optimist.’
‘Shut up and take a look at the battle display, Khouri. We are under attack — or we will be very shortly.’
‘Clavain?’
The merest hint of a nod. ‘Zodiacal Light has released squadrons of attack craft, around a hundred in total. They’re headed here, most of them at three gees. They won’t take more than four hours to reach us, no matter what we do.’
‘Clavain can’t have those weapons, Ilia.’
The Triumvir, who now looked far older and frailer than Khouri ever remembered, shook her head by the barest degree. ‘He isn’t going to get them. Not without a fight.’
class="first">They exchanged ultimatums. Clavain gave Ilia Volyova one last chance to surrender the hell-class weapons; if she complied he would recall his attack fleet. Volyova told Clavain that if he did not recall his fleet immediately, she would turn the thirteen remaining weapons against him.
Clavain readied his response. ‘Sorry. Unacceptable. I need those weapons very badly.’
He transmitted it and was only slightly startled when the Triumvir’s answer came back three seconds later. It was identical to his own. There had not been enough time for her to see his response.
CHAPTER 35
Volyova watched five of the thirteen remaining cache weapons assume attack positions beyond Nostalgia for Infinity. Their coloured icons floated above her bed like the kinds of bauble that were used to amuse infants in cots. Volyova raised a hand and poked it through the ghostly representation, pushing against the icons, adjusting the positions of the weapons relative to her ship, using its hull for camouflage wherever possible. The icons moved stubbornly, reflecting the sluggish real-time movements of the weapons themselves.
‘Are you going to use them immediately?’ Khouri asked.
Volyova glanced at the woman. ‘No. Not yet. Not u
ntil he forces my hand. I don’t want the Inhibitors to know that there are more cache weapons than the twenty they already know about.’
‘You’ll have to use them eventually.’
‘Unless Clavain sees sense and realises he can’t possibly win. Maybe he will. It isn’t too late.’
‘But we don’t know anything about the kinds of weapons he has,’ Khouri said. ‘What if he has something equally powerful?’
‘It won’t make a blind bit of difference if he has, Khouri. He wants something from me, understand? I want nothing from him. That gives me a distinct advantage over Clavain.’
‘I don’t…’
Volyova sighed, disappointed that it was necessary to spell this out. ‘His strike against us has to be surgical. He can’t risk damaging the weapons he so badly wants. In crude terms, you don’t rob someone by dropping a crustbuster on them. But I’m bound by no such constraint. Clavain has nothing that I want.’
Well, Volyova admitted to herself, almost nothing. She had a vague curiosity concerning whatever it was that had allowed him to decelerate so savagely. Even if it was nothing as exotic as inertia-suppression technology… but no. It was nothing she needed desperately. That meant she could use all the force in her arsenal against him. She could wipe him out of existence, and her only loss would be something she was not even sure had ever existed.
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