'She'll get there a day ahead of us,' I said. 'Even if we pull twenty gees.'
'And probably gone to ground by the time you get there too.'
'Should we try a live capture?'
Yarrow backed me up with a nod. 'It's not exactly been possible before.'
The delegate bided her time before answering. 'Admire your dedication, ' she said, after a suitably convincing pause. 'But you'd only be postponing a death sentence. Kinder to kill her now, don't you think?'
Mouser entered kill-range nineteen hours later, a wide pseudo-orbit three thousand klicks out. The splinter - seventeen by twelve klicks across - was far too small to be seen as anything other than a twinkling speck, like a grain of sugar at arm's length. But everything we wanted to know was clear: topology, gravimetrics and the site of the downed ship. That wasn't hard. Quite apart from the fact that it hadn't buried itself completely, it was hot as hell.
'Doesn't look like the kind of touchdown you walk away from,' Yarrow said.
'Think they ejected?'
'No way.' Yarrow sketched a finger through a holographic enlargement of the ship, roughly cone-shaped, vaguely streamlined just like our own thickship, to punch through the Swirl's densest gas belts. 'Clock those dorsal hatches. Evac pods still in place.'
She was right. The pods could have flung them clear before the crash, but evidently they hadn't had time to bail out. The ensuing impact - even cushioned by the ship's manifold of thick - probably hadn't been survivable.
But there was no point taking chances.
Quackheads would have finished the job, but we'd used up our stock. Mouser carried a particle-beam battery, but we'd have to move uncomfortably close to the splinter before using it. What remained were the molemines, and they should have been perfectly adequate. We dropped fifteen of them, embedded in a cloud of two hundred identical decoys. Three of the fifteen were designated to dust the wreck, while the remaining twelve would bury deeper into the splinter and attempt to shatter it completely.
That at least was the idea.
It all happened very quickly, not in the dreamy slow motion of a neurodisney. One instant the molemines were descending towards the splinter, and then the next instant they weren't there. Spacing the two instants had been an almost subliminally brief flash.
'Starting to get sick of this,' Yarrow said.
Mouser digested what had happened. Nothing had emanated from the wreck. Instead, there'd been a single pulse of energy seemingly from the entire volume of space around the splinter. Particle weapons, Mouser diagnosed. Probably single-use drones, each tinier than a pebble but numbering hundreds or even thousands. The defector must have sown them on her approach.
But she hadn't touched us.
'It was a warning,' I said. 'Telling us to back off.'
'I don't think so.'
'What?'
'I think the warning's on its way.'
I stared at her blankly for a moment, before registering what she had already seen: arcing from the splinter was something too fast to stop, something against which our minimally armoured thickship had no defence, not even the option of flight.
Yarrow started to mouth some exotic profanity she'd reserved for precisely this moment. There was an eardrum-punishing bang and Mouser shuddered - but we weren't suddenly chewing vacuum.
And that was very bad news indeed.
Antiship missiles come in two main flavours: quackheads and spore-heads. You know which immediately after the weapon has hit. If you're still thinking - if you still exist - chances are it's a sporehead. And at that point your problems are just beginning.
Invasive demon attack, Mouser shrieked. Breather manifold compromised . . . which meant something uninvited was in the thick. That was the point of a sporehead: to deliver hostile demons into an enemy ship.
'Mm,' Yarrow said. 'I think it might be time to suit-up.'
Except our suits were a good minute's swim away, into the bowels of Mouser, through twisty ducts that might skirt the infection site. Having no choice, we swam anyway, Yarrow insisting I take the lead even though she was a quicker swimmer. And somewhere - it's impossible to know exactly where - demons reached us, seeping invisibly into our bodies via the thick. I couldn't pinpoint the moment; it wasn't as if there was a jagged transition between lucidity and demon-manipulated irrationality. Yarrow and I were terrified enough as it was. All I know is it began with a mild agoraphilia: an urge to escape Mouser's flooded confines. Gradually it phased into claustrophobia, and then became fully fledged panic, making Mouser seem as malevolent as a haunted house.
Yarrow ignored her suit, clawing the hull until her fingers spooled blood.
'Fight it,' I said. 'It's just demons triggering our fear centres, trying to drive us out!'
Of course, knowing so didn't help.
Somehow I stayed still long enough for my suit to slither on. Once sealed, I purged the tainted thick with the suit's own supply - but I knew it wasn't going to help much. The phobia already showed that hostile demons had reached my brain, and now it was even draping itself in a flimsy logic. Beyond the ship we'd be able to think rationally. It would only take a few minutes for the thick's own demons to neutralise the invader - and then we'd be able to reboard. Complete delusion, of course.
But that was the point.
When something like coherent thought returned I was outside.
Nothing but me and the splinter.
The urge to escape was only a background anxiety, a flock of stomach butterflies urging me against returning. Was that demon-manipulated fear or pure common sense? I couldn't tell - but what I knew was that the splinter seemed to be beckoning me forwards, and I didn't feel like resisting. Sensible, surely; we'd exhausted all conventional channels of attack against the defector, and now all that remained was to confront her on the territory she'd staked as her own.
But where was Yarrow?
Suit's alarm chimed. Maybe demons were still subjugating my emotions, because I didn't react with my normal speed. I just blinked, licked my lips and stifled a yawn.
'Yeah, what?'
Suit informed me: something massing slightly less than me, two klicks closer to the splinter, on a slightly different orbit. I knew it was Yarrow; also that something was wrong. She was drifting. In my blackout I'd undoubtedly programmed suit to take me down, but Yarrow appeared not to have done anything except bail out.
I jetted closer. And then saw why she hadn't programmed her suit. Would have been tricky. She wasn't wearing one.
I hit ice an hour later.
Cradling Yarrow - she wasn't much of a burden in the splinter's weak gravity - I took stock. I wasn't ready to mourn her, not just yet. If I could quickly get her to the medical suite aboard the defector's ship there was a good chance of revival. But where the hell was the wreck?
Squandering its last reserves of fuel, suit had deposited us in a clearing amongst the graveyard of ruined wasps. Half-submerged in ice, they looked like scorched scrap-iron sculptures, phantoms from an entomologist's worst nightmare. So there'd been a battle here, back when the splinter was just another drifting lump of ice. Even if the thing was seamed with silicates or organics, it would not have had any commercial potential for either side. But it might still have had strategic value, and that was why the wasps had gone to war on its surface. Trouble was - as we'd known before the attack - the corpses covered the entire surface, so there was no guessing where we'd come down. The wrecked ship might be just over the nearest hillock - or another ten kilometres in any direction.
I felt the ground rumble under me. Hunting for the source of the vibration, I saw a quill of vapour reach into the sky, no more than a klick away. It was a geyser of superheated ice.
I dropped Yarrow and hit dirt, suit limiting motion so that I didn't bounce. Looking back, I expected to see a dimple in the permafrost, where some rogue had impacted.
Instead, the geyser was still present. Worse, it was coming steadily closer, etching a neat trench. A beam-weapon w
as making that plume, I realised - like one of the party batteries aboard ship. Then I wised up. That was Mouser. The demons had worked their way into its command infrastructure, reprogramming it to turn against us. Now Mouser worked for the defector.
I slung Yarrow over one shoulder and loped away from the boiling impact point. Fast as the geyser moved, its path was predictable. If I made enough lateral distance the death-line would sear past--
Except the damn thing turned to follow me.
Now a second flanked it, shepherding me through the thickest zone of wasp corpses. Did they have some significance for the defector? Maybe so, but I couldn't see it. The corpses were a rough mix of machines from both sides: Royalist wasps marked with yellow shell symbols, ours with grinning tiger-heads. Generation thirty-five units, if I remembered Mil-Hist, when both sides toyed with pulse-hardened optical thinkware. In the seventy-odd subsequent generations there'd been numerous further jumps: ur-quantum logics, full-spectrum reflective wasp armour, chameleoflage, quackdrive powerplants and every weapon system the human mind could devise. We'd tried to encourage the wasps to make these innovations for themselves, but they never managed to evolve beyond strictly linear extrapolation. Which was good, or else we human observers would have been out of a job.
Not that it really mattered now.
A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in. Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso tremor of the drumming ground.
Then steel gripped my shoulder.
She said we'd be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who might be able to do something for Yarrow.
'If you weren't defecting,' I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel into the splinter's crust, 'what the hell was it?'
'Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realised Tiger's Eye didn't want us back.' Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. 'Which is when we decided to head here.'
'You almost made it,' I said. Then added: 'Where were you trying to get home from?'
'Isn't it obvious?'
'Then you did defect.'
'We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace.' In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. 'It was a long shot, conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger's Eye to say we'd been defecting.'
'Bullshit.'
'I wish.'
'But you sent us.'
'Not in person.'
'But your delegate--'
'Is just software. It could be made to say anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own execution as a traitor.'
We paused to switch on our suit lamps. 'Maybe you'd better tell me everything.'
'Gladly,' Wendigo said. 'But if this hasn't been a good day so far, I'm afraid it's about to go downhill.'
There had been a clique of high-ranking officers who believed that the Swirl War was intrinsically unwinnable. Privy to information not released to the populace, and able to see through Tiger's Eye's own carefully filtered internal propaganda, they realised that negotiation - contact - was the only way out.
'Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of my adversaries wanted us dead before we even reached the enemy.' Wendigo sighed. 'Too much in love with the war's stability - and who can blame them? Life for the average citizen in Tiger's Eye isn't that bad. We're given a clear goal to fight for, and the likelihood of any one of us dying in a Royalist attack is small enough to ignore. The idea that all of that might be about to end after four hundred years, that we all might have to rethink our roles . . . well, it didn't go down too well.'
'About as welcome as a fart in a vac-suit, right?'
Wendigo nodded. 'I think you understand.'
'Go on.'
Her expedition - Wendigo and two pilots - had crossed the Swirl unchallenged. Approaching the Royalist cometary base, they had expected to be questioned - perhaps even fired upon - but nothing had happened. When they entered the stronghold, they understood why.
'Deserted,' Wendigo said. 'Or we thought so, until we found the Royalists. ' She expectorated the word. 'Feral, practically. Naked, grubby sub-humans. Their wasps feed them and treat their illnesses, but that's as far as it goes. They grunt, and they've been toilet-trained, but they're not quite the military geniuses we've been led to believe.'
'Then--'
'The war is . . . nothing we thought.' Wendigo laughed, but the confines of her helmet rendered it more like the squawking of a jack-in-the-box. 'And now you wonder why home didn't want us coming back?'
Before Wendigo could explain further, we reached a wider bisecting tunnel, glowing with its own insipid chlorine-coloured light. Rather than the meandering bore of the tunnel in which we walked, it was as cleanly cut as a rifle barrel. In one direction the tunnel was blocked by a bullet-nosed cylinder, closely modelled on the trains in Tiger's Eye. Seemingly of its own volition, the train lit up and edged forwards, a door puckering open.
'Get in,' Wendigo said. 'And lose the helmet. You won't need it where we're going.'
Inside I coughed phlegmy ropes of thick from my lungs. Transitioning between breathing modes isn't pleasant - worse than usual since I'd breathed nothing but thick for six weeks. But after a few lungfuls of the train's antiseptic air, the dark blotches around my vision began to recede.
Wendigo did likewise, only with more dignity.
Yarrow lay on one of the couches, stiff as a statue carved in soap. Her skin was cyanotic, a single, all-enveloping bruise. Pilot skin is a better vacuum barrier than the usual stuff, and vacuum itself is a far better insulator against heat loss than air. But where I'd lifted her my gloves had embossed fingerprints into her flesh. Worse was the broad stripe of ruined skin down her back and the left side of her tail, where she had lain against the splinter's surface.
But her head looked better. When she hit vac, biomodified seals would have shut within her skull, barricading every possible avenue for pressure, moisture or blood loss. Even her eyelids would have fused tight. Implanted glands in her carotid artery would have released droves of friendly demons, quickly replicating via nonessential tissue in order to weave a protective scaffold through her brain.
Good for an hour or so - maybe longer. But only if the hostile demons hadn't screwed with Yarrow's native ones.
'You were going to tell me about the wasps,' I said, as curious to hear the rest of Wendigo's story as I was to blank my doubts about Yarrow.
'Well, it's rather simple. They got smart.'
'The wasps?'
She clicked the steel fingers of one hand. 'Overnight. Just over a hundred years ago.'
I tried not to look too overwhelmed. Intriguing as all this was, I wasn't treating it as anything other than an outlandish attempt to distract me from the main reason for my being here, which remained killing the defector. Wendigo's story explained some of the anomalies we'd so far encountered - but that didn't rule out a dozen more plausible explanations. Meanwhile, it was amusing to try and catch her out. 'So they got smart,' I said. 'You mean our wasps, or theirs?'
'Doesn't mean a damn anymore. Maybe it just happened to one machine in the Swirl, and then spread like wildfire to all the trillions of other wasps. Or maybe it happened simultaneously, in response to some stimulus we can't even guess at.'
'Want to hazard a guess?'
'I don't think it's important, Spirey.' She sounded as though she wanted to put a lot of distance between herself and this topic. 'Point is, it happened. Afterwards, distinctions between us and the enemy - at least from the point of view of the wasps - completely vanished.'
'Workers of the Swirl unite.'
'Something like that. And you understand why they kept it to themselves, don't you?'
I nodded, more to keep her talking.
'They needed us, of course. They still lacked something. Creativity, I guess you'd call it. They
could evolve themselves incrementally, but they couldn't make the kind of sweeping evolutionary jumps we'd been feeding them.'
'So we had to keep thinking there was a war on.'
Wendigo looked pleased. 'Right. We'd keep supplying them with innovations, and they'd keep pretending to do each other in.' She halted, scratching at the unwrinkled skin around one eye with the alloy finger of one hand. 'Clever little bastards.'