About once every eight hours Antoinette opened the airlock door long enough to pass him food and water. Clavain took what she had to offer gratefully, remembering to thank her and to show not the least sign of resentment that he was still a prisoner. It was enough that she had rescued him and that she was taking him back to the authorities. He imagined that in her shoes he would have been even less trusting, especially since he knew what a Conjoiner was capable of doing. He was much less her prisoner than she believed.
His confinement continued for a day. He felt the floor pitch and shift under him as the ship changed its thrust pattern, and when Antoinette appeared at the door she confirmed, before passing another bulb of water and a nutrition bar through to him, that they were en route back to the Rust Belt.
‘Those thrust changes,’ he said, peeling back the foil covering the bar. ‘What were they for? Were we in danger of running into military activity?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘What, then?’
‘Banshees, Clavain.’ She must have seen his look of incomprehension. ‘They’re pirates, bandits, brigands, rogues, whatever you want to call them. Real badass sons of bitches.’
I haven’t heard of them.‘
‘You wouldn’t have unless you were a trader trying to make an honest living.’
He chewed on the bar. ‘You almost said that with a straight face.’
‘Hey, listen. I bend the rules now and then, that’s all. But what these fuckers do — it makes the most illegal thing I’ve ever done look like, I don’t know, a minor docking violation.’
‘And these banshees… they used to be traders too, I take it?’
She nodded. ‘Until they figured out it was easier to steal cargo from the likes of me rather than haul it themselves.’
‘But you’ve never been directly involved with them before?’
‘A few run-ins. Everyone who hauls anything in or near the Rust Belt has been shadowed by banshees at least once. Normally they leave us alone. Storm Bird’s pretty fast, so it doesn’t make an easy target for a forced docking. And, well, we have a few other deterrents.’
Clavain nodded wisely, thinking that he knew exactly what she meant. ‘And now?’
‘We’ve been shadowed. A couple of banshees latched on to us for an hour, holding off at one-tenth of a light-second. Thirty-thou klicks. That’s pissing-distance out here. But we shook ’em off.‘
Clavain took a sip from the drinking bulb. ‘Will they be back?’
‘Dunno. It’s not normal to meet them this far from the Rust Belt. I’d almost say…’
Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘What — that I might have something to do with it?’
‘It’s just a thought.’
‘Here’s another. You were doing something unusual and dangerous: traversing hostile space. From the banshees’ point of view it might have meant you had valuable cargo, something worthy of their interest.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I swear I had nothing to do with it.’
‘I didn’t think you did, Clavain — I mean, not intentionally. But there’s a lot of weird shit going down these days.’
He took another sip from the bulb. ‘Tell me about it.’
They let him out of the airlock eight hours later. That was when Clavain had his first decent look at the man Antoinette had called Xavier. Xavier was a rangy individual with a pleasing, cheerful face and a bowl-shaped mop of shiny black hair that gleamed blue under Storm Bird’s interior lighting. In Clavain’s estimation he was perhaps ten or fifteen years older than Antoinette, but he was prepared to believe that his guess might be seriously wrong and that she might be the older one of the partnership. That said, he was certain that neither of them had been born more than a few decades ago.
When the lock opened he saw that Xavier and Antoinette were still wearing their suits, with their helmets hitched to their belts. Xavier stood between the posts of the lock’s doorframe and pointed at Clavain.
‘Take your suit off. Then you can come into the rest of the ship.’
Clavain nodded and did as he was told. Removing the suit was awkward in the confined space of the lock — it was awkward enough anywhere — but he managed it within five minutes, stripping down to the skintight thermal layer.
‘I take it I can stop now?’
‘Yes.’
Xavier stood aside and let him move into the main body of the ship. They were under thrust, so he was able to walk. His socked feet padded against the cleated metal flooring.
‘Thank you,’ Clavain said.
‘Don’t thank me. Thank her.’
Antoinette said, ‘Xavier thinks you should stay in the lock until we get to the Rust Belt.’
‘I don’t blame him for that.’
‘But if you try anything…’ Xavier started.
‘I understand. You’ll depressurise the entire ship. I’ll die, since I’m not suited-up. That makes a lot of sense, Xavier. It’s exactly what I would have done in your situation. But can I show you something?’
They looked at each other.
‘Show us what?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Put me back in the airlock, then close the door.’
They did as he asked. Clavain waited until their faces appeared in the window, then sidled closer to the door itself, until his head was only a few inches from the locking mechanism and its associated control panel. He narrowed his eyes and concentrated, dredging up neural routines that he had not used in many years. His implants detected the electrical field generated by the lock circuitry, superimposing a neon maze of flowing pathways on to his view of the panel. He understood the lock’s logic and saw what needed to be done. His implants began to generate a stronger field of their own, suppressing certain current flows and enhancing others. He was talking to the lock, interfacing with its control system.
He was a little out of practice, but even so it was almost childishly simple to achieve what he wanted. The lock clicked. The door slid open, revealing Antoinette and Xavier. They stood there wearing horrified expressions.
‘Space him,’ Xavier said. ‘Space him now.’
‘Wait,’ Clavain said, holding up his hands. ‘I did that for one reason only: to show you how easy it would have been for me to do it before. I could have escaped at any time. But I didn’t. That means you can trust me.’
‘It means we should kill you now, before you try something worse,’ Xavier said.
‘If you kill me you’ll be making a terrible mistake, I assure you. This is about more than just me.’
‘And that’s the best defence you can offer?’ Xavier asked.
‘If you really feel you can’t trust me, weld me into a box,’ Clavain said reasonably. ‘Give me a means to breathe and some water and I’ll survive until we reach the Rust Belt. But please don’t kill me.’
‘He sounds like he means it, Xave,’ Antoinette said.
Xavier was breathing heavily. Clavain realised that the man was still desperately afraid of what he might do.
‘You can’t mess with our heads, you know. Neither of us has any implants.’
‘It’s not something I had in mind.’
‘Or the ship,’ Antoinette added. ‘You were lucky with that airlock, but a lot of the mission-critical systems are opto-electronic’
‘You’re right,’ he said, offering his palms. I can’t touch those.‘
‘I think we have to trust him,’ Antoinette said.
‘Yes, but if he so much…’ Xavier halted and looked at Antoinette. He had heard something.
Clavain had heard it too: a chime from somewhere else in the ship, harsh and repetitious.
‘Proximity alert,’ Antoinette breathed.
‘Banshees,’ Xavier said.
Clavain followed them through the clattering metal innards of the ship until they reached a flight deck. The two suited figures slipped ahead of him, buckling into massive antique-looking acceleration couches. While he searched for somewhere to anchor himself, C
lavain appraised the flight deck, or bridge, or whatever Antoinette called it. Though it was about as far from a corvette or Nightshade as a space vessel could be in terms of capability, function and technological elegance, he had no difficulty orientating himself. It was easy when you had lived through so many centuries of ship design, seen so many cycles of technological boom-and-bust. It was simply a question of dusting off the right set of memories.
There,‘ Antoinette said, jabbing a finger at a radar sphere. Two of the fuckers, just like before.’ Her voice was low, evidently intended for Xavier’s ears alone.
Twenty-eight thousand klicks,‘ he replied, in the same near-whisper, looking over her shoulder at the tumbling digits of the distance indicator. ’Closing at… fifteen klicks a second, on a near-perfect intercept trajectory. They’ll start slowing soon, ready for final approach and forced hard docking.‘
‘So they’ll be here in… what?’ Clavain ran some numbers through his head. Thirty, forty minutes?‘
Xavier stared back at him with a strange look on his face. ‘Who asked you?’
‘I thought you might value my thoughts on the matter.’
‘Have you dealt with banshees before, Clavain?’ Xavier asked.
‘Until a few hours ago I don’t think I’d ever heard of them.’
Then I don’t think you’re going to be a fuck of a lot of use, are you?‘
Antoinette spoke softly again. ‘Xave… how long do you think we’ve got before they’re on us?’
‘Assuming the usual approach pattern and deceleration tolerances… thirty… thirty-five minutes.’
‘So Clavain wasn’t far off.’
‘A lucky guess,’ Xavier said.
‘Actually, it wasn’t a lucky guess at all,’ Clavain said, folding down a flap from the wall and strapping himself to it. ‘I may not have dealt with banshees before, but I’ve certainly dealt with hostile approach-and-boarding scenarios.’ He decided they could stand not knowing that he had often been the one doing the hostile boarding.
‘Beast,’ Antoinette said, raising her voice, ‘you ready with those evasion patterns we ran through before?’
The relevant routines are uploaded and ready for immediate execution, Little Miss. There is, however, a not inconsiderable problem.‘
Antoinette sighed. ‘Lay it on me, Beast.’
‘Our fuel-consumption margins are already slender, Little Miss. Evasive patterns eat heavily into our reserve supplies.’
‘Do we have enough left to throw another pattern and still make it back to the Belt before hell freezes over?’
‘Yes, Little Miss, but with very little…’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Antoinette’s gauntleted hands were already on the controls, ready to execute the ferocious manoeuvres that would convince the banshees not to bother with this particular freighter.
‘Don’t do it,’ Clavain said.
Xavier looked at him with an expression of pure contempt. ‘What?’
‘I said don’t do it. You can assume these are same banshees as before. They’ve already seen your evasive patterns, so they know exactly what you’re capable of doing. It may have given them pause for thought once, but you can be certain they’ve already decided that the risk is worth it.’
‘Don’t listen…’ Xavier said.
‘All you’ll do is burn fuel you might need later. It won’t make a blind bit of difference. Trust me. I’ve been here a thousand times, in about as many wars.’
Antoinette looked at him questioningly. ‘So what the fuck do you want me to do, Clavain? Just sit here and lap it up?’
He shook his head. ‘You mentioned additional deterrents earlier on. I had a feeling I knew what you meant.’
‘Oh no.’
‘You must have weapons, Antoinette. In these times you’d be foolish not to.’
Chapter 19
CLAVAIN DID NOT know whether to laugh or cry when he saw the weapons and realised how antiquated and ineffective they were compared with the oldest, lowest-lethality weapons of a Conjoiner corvette or Demarchist raider. They had obviously been cobbled together from several centuries’ worth of black market jumble sales, more on the basis of how sleek and nasty they looked than on how much damage they could really do. Apart from the handful of firearms stored inside the ship to be used to repel boarders, the bulk of the weapons were stowed in concealed hull hatches or packed into dorsal or ventral pods that Clavain had earlier assumed held communications equipment or sensor arrays. Not all of the weapons were even functional. About a third of them had either never worked or had broken down, or had run out of whatever ammunition or fuel-source they needed to work.
To access the weapons, Antoinette had pulled back a hidden panel in the floor. A thick metal column had risen slowly from the well, unfolding control arms and display devices as it ascended. A schematic of Storm Bird rotated in one sphere, with the active weapons pulsing red. They were linked back into the main avionics web by snaking red data pathways. Other spheres and readouts on the main panel showed the immediate volume of space around the ship at various magnifications. At the lowest magnification, the banshee ships were visible as indistinct radar-echo smudges creeping closer to the freighter.
‘Fifteen thousand klicks,’ Antoinette said.
‘I still say we should pull the evasive pattern,’ Xavier murmured.
‘Burn that fuel when you need it,’ Clavain said. ‘Not until then. Antoinette, are all those weapons deployed?’
‘Everything we’ve got.’
‘Good. Do you mind if I ask why you were unwilling to deploy them earlier?’
She tapped controls, finessing the weapons’ deployment, reallocating data flows through less congested parts of the web.
‘Two reasons, Clavain. One: it’s a hanging offence to even think of installing weps on a civilian ship. Two: all those juicy guns might just be the final incentive the banshees need to come in and rob us.’
‘It won’t come to that. Not if you trust me.’
‘Trust you, Clavain?’
‘Let me sit there and operate those weapons.’
She looked at Xavier. ‘Not a hope in hell.’
Clavain leaned back and folded his arms. ‘You know where I am if you need me, in that case.’
‘Pull the evasive…’ Xavier began.
‘No.’ Antoinette tapped something.
Clavain felt the entire ship rumble. ‘What was that?’
‘A warning shot,’ she said.
‘Good. I’d have done the same.’
The warning shot had probably been a slug, a cylinder of foam-phase hydrogen accelerated up to a few dozen klicks per second in a stubby railgun barrel. Clavain knew all about foam-phase hydrogen; it was one of the main weapons left in the Demarchist arsenal now that they could no longer manipulate antimatter in militarily useful quantities.
The Demarchists mined hydrogen from the oceanic hearts of gas giants. Under conditions of shocking pressure, hydrogen underwent a transition to a metallic state a little like mercury but thousands of times denser. Usually that metallic state was unstable: release the confining pressure and it would revert to a low-density gas. The foam phase, by contrast, was only quasi-unstable; with the right manipulation it could remain in the metallic state even when the external pressure dropped by many orders of magnitude. Packed into shells and slugs, foam-phase munitions were engineered to retain their stability until the moment of impact. Then they would explode catastrophically. Foam-phase weapons were either used as destructive devices in their own right, or as initiators for fission/fusion bombs.
Antoinette was right, Clavain thought. The foam-phase slug cannon might have been an antique in military terms, but just thinking of owning such a weapon was enough to send one to an irreversible neural death.
He saw the firefly smudge of the slug crawl across the distance to the closing pirate ships, missing them by mere tens of kilometres.
‘They’re not stopping,’ Xavier said, several minutes later.
/> ‘How many more slugs do you have?’ Clavain asked.
‘One,’ Antoinette said.
‘Save it. You’re too far out now. They can get a radar lock on the slug and dodge it before it reaches them.’
He unstrapped himself from the folding flap, clambering down the length of the bridge until he was immediately behind Antoinette and Xavier. Now that he had the chance he took a better look at the weapons plinth, mentally assaying its functionality.
‘What else have you got?’
‘Two gigawatt excimers,’ Antoinette said. ‘One Breitenbach three-millimetre boser with a proton-electron precursor. Couple of solid-state close-action slug guns, megahertz firing rate. A cascade-pulse single-use graser, not sure of the yield.’
‘Probably mid-gigawatt. What’s that?’ Clavain pointed at the only active weapon she had not described.
‘That? That’s a bad joke. Gatling gun.’
Clavain nodded. ‘No, that’s good. Don’t knock Gatling guns; they have their uses.’
Xavier spoke. ‘Picking up reverse thrust plumes. Doppler says they’re slowing.’
‘Did we scare them off?’ Clavain asked.
‘Sorry, no; this looks exactly like a standard banshee approach,’ Xavier replied.
‘Fuck,’ Antoinette said.
‘Don’t do anything until they’re closer,’ Clavain said. ‘Much closer. They won’t attack you; they won’t want to risk damaging your cargo.’
‘I’ll remind you of that when we’re having our throats slit,’ Antoinette said.
Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what they do?’
‘Actually, that’s at the nice humane end of the spectrum.’
The next twelve minutes were amongst the most tense Clavain could remember. He understood how his hosts felt, sympathising with their instinct to shoot at the enemy. But it would have been suicidal. The beam weapons were too low-powered to guarantee a kill, and the projectile weapons were too slow to have any effectiveness except at very short range. At the very best they might succeed in taking out one banshee, but not two at once. At the same time Clavain wondered why the banshees had not taken the earlier warning. Antoinette had given them plenty of hints that stealing her imagined cargo would not be easy. Clavain would have thought that they would have decided to cut their losses and move on to a less nimble, less well-armed target. But according to Antoinette it was already unusual for banshees to foray this far into the zone.