When they were just under a hundred klicks out, the two ships slowed and split up, one of them arrowing around to the other hemisphere before resuming its approach. Clavain studied the magnified visual grab of the closest ship. The image was fuzzy — Storm Bird’s optics were not military quality — but it was enough to disperse any doubts they might have had about the ship’s identity. The view showed a wasp-waisted civilian vessel a little smaller than Storm Bird. But it was night-black and studded with grapples and welded-on weapons. Jagged neon markings on the hull suggested skulls and sharks’ teeth.
‘Where do they come from?’ Clavain asked.
‘No one knows,’ Xavier said. ‘Somewhere in the Rust Belt/Yellowstone environment, but beyond that… no one has a fucking clue.’
‘And the authorities just tolerate them?’
‘The authorities can’t do dick. Not the Demarchists, not the Ferrisville Convention. That’s why everyone’s so shit-scared of the banshees.’ Xavier winked at Clavain. ‘I tell you, even if you guys do take over it isn’t going to be a picnic, not while the banshees are still around.’
‘Luckily it isn’t likely to be my problem,’ Clavain said.
The two ships crept closer, pinning Storm Bird from either side. The optical views sharpened, allowing Clavain to pick out points of weakness and strength, and to make a guess at the capability of the enemy ships’ weapons. Scenarios tumbled through his head by the dozen. At sixty kilometres he nodded and spoke quietly and calmly. ‘All right, listen carefully. At this range you have a chance of doing some damage, but only if you listen to me and do precisely what I say.’
‘I think we should ignore him,’ Xavier said.
Clavain licked his lips. ‘You can, but you’ll die. Antoinette: I want you to set up the following firing pattern in pre-programmed mode, without actually moving any of your weapons until I say. You can bet the banshees have us in their sights, and they’ll be watching to see what happens.’
She looked at him and nodded, her fingers poised over the controls of the weapons plinth. ‘Say it, Clavain.’
‘Hit the starboard ship with a two-second excimer pulse as close to amidships as you can get it. There’s a sensor cluster there; we want to take it out. At the same time use the rapid-fire slug gun to put a spread over the port ship, say a megahertz salvo with a hundred millisecond sustain. That won’t kill them, but it’ll sure as hell damage that rack launcher and probably buckle those grapple arms. In any case it’ll provoke a response, and that’s good.’
‘It is?’ She was already programming his firing pattern into the plinth.
‘Yes. See how she’s keeping her hull at that angle? At the moment she’s in a defensive posture. That’s because her main weapons are delicate; now that they’re deployed she won’t want to bring them into our field of fire until she can guarantee a kill. And she’ll think we’ve hit with our heaviest toys first.’
Antoinette brightened. ‘Which we won’t have.’
‘No. That’s when we hit them — both ships — with the Breitenbach.’
‘And the single-use graser?’
‘Hold it back. It’s our medium-range trump card, and we don’t want to play it until we’re in a lot more danger than this.’
‘And the Gatling gun?’
‘We’ll keep that back for dessert.’
‘I hope you’re not bullshitting us, Clavain,’ Antoinette warned.
He grinned. I sincerely hope I’m not bullshitting you, too.‘
The two ships continued their approach. Now they were visible through the cabin windows: black dots that occasionally pulsed out white or violet spikes of steering thrust. The dots enlarged, becoming slivers. The slivers took on hard mechanical form, until Clavain could quite clearly see the neon patterning of the pirate ships. The markings had only been turned on during their final approach; at that point, needing to trim speed with thruster bursts, there was no further prospect of remaining camouflaged against the darkness of space. The markings were there to inspire fear and panic, like the Jolly Roger of the old sailing ships.
‘Clavain…’
‘In about forty-five seconds, Antoinette. But not a moment before. Got that?’
‘I’m worried, Clavain.’
‘It’s natural. It doesn’t mean you’re going to die.’
That was when he felt the ship shudder again. It was almost the same movement he had felt earlier, when the foam-phase slug had been fired as a warning shot. But this was more sustained.
‘What just happened?’ Clavain asked.
Antoinette frowned. ‘I didn’t…’
‘Xavier?’ Clavain snapped.
‘Not me, guy. Must have been the…’
‘Beast!’ Antoinette shouted.
‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but one…’
Clavain realised that the ship had taken it upon itself to fire the megahertz slug gun. It had been directed towards the port banshee, as he had specified, but much too soon.
Storm Bird shook again. The flight deck console lit up with blocks of flashing red. A klaxon began to shriek. Clavain felt a tug of air, and then immediately heard the rapid sequential slamming of bulkheads.
‘We’ve just taken a hit,’ Antoinette said. ‘Amidships.’
‘You’re in deep trouble,’ Clavain said.
Thanks. I gathered that.‘
‘Hit the starboard banshee with the ex—’
Storm Bird shuddered again, and this time half the lights on the console blacked out. Clavain guessed that one of the pirates had just hit them with a penetrating slug equipped with an EMP warhead. So much for Antoinette’s boast that all the critical systems were routed through opto-electronic pathways…
‘Clavain…’ she looked back at him with wild, frightened eyes. ‘I can’t get the excimers to work…’
‘Try a different routing.’
Her fingers worked the plinth controls, and Clavain watched the spider’s web of data connections shift as she assigned data to scurry along different paths. The ship shook again. Clavain leaned over and looked through the port window. The banshee was looming large now, arresting its approach with a continuous blast of reverse thrust. He could see grapples and claws unfolding, articulating away from the hull like the barbed and hooked limbs of some complicated black insect just emerging from a cocoon.
‘Hurry up,’ Xavier said, looking at what Antoinette was doing.
‘Antoinette.’ Clavain spoke as calmly as he could. ‘Let me take over. Please.’
‘What fucking good…’
‘Just let me take over.’
She breathed in and out for five or six seconds, just looking at him, and then unbuckled herself and eased out of the seat. Clavain nodded and squeezed past her, settling by the weapons plinth.
He had already familiarised himself with it. By the time his hands touched the controls, his implants had begun to accelerate his subjective consciousness rate. Things around him moved glacially, whether it was the expressions on the faces of his hosts or the pulsing of the warning messages on the control panel. Even his hands moved as if through treacle, and the delay between sending a nerve signal and watching his hands respond was quite noticeable. He was used to that, though. He had done this before, too many times, and he naturally made allowances for the sluggish response of his own body.
As his consciousness rate reached fifteen times faster than normal, so that every actual second felt like fifteen seconds to him, Clavain willed himself on to a plateau of detached calm. A second was a long time in war. Fifteen seconds was even longer. There was a lot you could do, a lot you could think, in fifteen seconds.
Now then. He began to set the optimum control pathways for the remaining weapons. The spider’s web shifted and reconfigured. Clavain explored a number of possible solutions, forcing himself not to accept second best. It might take two actual seconds to find the perfect arrangement of data flows, but that would be time well spent. He glanced at the short-range radar sphere, amused
to see that its update cycle now looked like the slow beating of some immense heart.
There. He had regained control of the excimer cannons. All he needed now was a revised strategy to deal with the changed situation. That would take a few seconds — a few actual seconds — for his mind to process.
It would be tight.
But he thought he would make it.
Clavain’s efforts destroyed one banshee and left the other crippled. The damaged ship scuttled back into darkness, its neon patterning flickering spas-tically like a short-circuiting firefly. After fifty seconds they saw the glint of its fusion torch and watched it fall ahead of them, back towards the Rust Belt.
‘How to win friends and influence people,’ Antoinette said as she watched the ruined one tumble away. Half its hull was gone, revealing a skeletal confusion of innards belching grey spirals of vapour. ‘Good work, Clavain.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s two reasons for you to trust me. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have to faint.’
He fainted.
*
The rest of the journey passed without incident. Clavain was unconscious for eight or nine hours after the battle against the banshees, while his mind recovered from the ordeal of such a protracted spell of rapid consciousness. Unlike Skade, his brain was not built to support that kind of thing for more than one or two actual seconds, and he had suffered the equivalent of a massive and sudden heatstroke.
But there had been no lasting ill effects and he had earned their trust. It was a price he was more than willing to pay. For the remainder of the trip he was free to move around the ship as he pleased, while the other two gradually divested themselves of their outer spacesuit layers. The banshees never came back, and Storm Bird never ran into any military activity. Clavain still felt the need to make himself useful, however, and with Antoinette’s consent he helped Xavier with a number of minor in-flight repairs or upgrades. The two of them spent hours tucked away in tight cable-infested crawlspaces, or rummaging through layers of archaic source code.
I can’t really blame you for not trusting me before,‘ Clavain said, when he and Xavier were alone.
‘I care about her.’
‘It’s obvious. And she took a hell of a risk coming out here to rescue me. If I’d been in your shoes I’d have tried to talk her out of it as well.’
‘Don’t take it personally.’
Clavain dragged a stylus across the compad he had balanced on his knees, rerouting a number of logic pathways between the control web and the dorsal communications cluster. ‘I won’t.’
‘What about you, Clavain? What’s going to happen when we get to the Rust Belt?’
Clavain shrugged. ‘Up to you. You can drop me wherever it suits you. Carousel New Copenhagen’s as good as anywhere else.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’ll hand myself over to the authorities.’
‘The Demarchists?’
He nodded. ‘Although it’d be much too dangerous for me to approach them directly, out here in open space. I’ll need to go through a neutral party, such as the Convention.’
Xavier nodded. ‘I hope you get what you’re hoping for. You took a risk as well’
‘Not the first, I assure you.’ Clavain paused and lowered his voice. It was unnecessary — they were many dozens of metres away from Antoinette — but he felt the need all the same. ‘Xavier… while we’re alone… there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
Xavier peered at him through scuffed grey data-visualisation goggles. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I gather you knew her father, and that you handled the repair of this ship when he was running it.’
‘True enough.’
‘Then I suppose you know all about it. Perhaps more than Antoinette?’
‘She’s a damned good pilot, Clavain.’
Clavain smiled. ‘Which is a polite way of saying she’s not very interested in the technical aspects of this ship?’
‘Nor was her father,’ Xavier said, with a touch of defensiveness. ‘Running a commercial operation like this is enough trouble without worrying about every subroutine.’
‘I understand. I’m no expert myself. But I couldn’t help noticing back there, when the subpersona intervened…’ He left the remark hanging.
‘You thought that was odd.’
‘It nearly got us killed,’ Clavain said. ‘It fired too soon, against my direct orders.’
‘They weren’t orders, Clavain, they were recommendations.’
‘My mistake. But the point is, it shouldn’t have happened. Even if the subpersona had some control over the weapons — and in a civilian ship I’d regard that as unusual, to say the least — it still shouldn’t have acted without a direct command. And it definitely shouldn’t have panicked.’
Xavier’s laugh was hard and nervous. ‘Panicked?’
‘That’s what it felt like to me.’ Clavain couldn’t see Xavier’s eyes behind the data goggles.
‘Machines don’t panic, Clavain.’
‘I know. Especially not gamma-level subpersonae, which is what Beast would have to be.’
Xavier nodded. ‘Then it can’t have been panic, can it?’
‘I suppose not.’ Clavain frowned and returned to his compad, dragging the stylus through the bright ganglia of logic pathways like someone stirring a plate of spaghetti.
They docked in Carousel New Copenhagen. Clavain was prepared to go on his way there and then, but Antoinette and Xavier were having none of it. They insisted that he join them for a farewell meal elsewhere in the carousel. After giving the matter a few moments’ thought, Clavain happily assented; it would only take a couple of hours and it would give him a valuable chance to acclimatise before he commenced what he imagined would be a perilous solo journey. And he still felt he owed them thanks, especially after Xavier allowed him to take whatever he wanted from his wardrobe.
Clavain was taller and thinner than Xavier, so it took some creativity to both dress himself and not feel that he was taking anything particularly valuable. He retained the skintight spacesuit inner layer, slipping on a bulging high-collared vest that looked faintly like the kind of inflatable jacket pilots wore when they ditched in water. He found a pair of loose black trousers that came down to his shins, which looked terrible, even with the skintight, until he found a pair of rugged black boots that reached nearly to his knees. When he inspected himself in a mirror he concluded that he looked odd rather than bizarre, which he supposed was a step in the right direction. Finally he trimmed his beard and moustache and neatened his hair by combing it back from his brow in snowy waves.
Antoinette and Xavier were waiting for him, already freshened up. They took an intra-rim train from one part of Carousel New Copenhagen to another. Antoinette told him that the line had been put in after the spokes were destroyed; until then the quickest way to get about had been to go up to the hub and down again, and by the time the intra-rim line was installed it could not take the most direct route. It zigzagged its way along the rim, swerving and veering and occasionally taking detours out on to the skin of the habitat, just to avoid a piece of precious interior real estate. As the train’s direction of travel shifted relative to the carousel’s spin vector, Clavain felt his stomach knot and unknot in a variety of queasy ways. It reminded him of dropship insertions into the atmosphere of Mars.
He snapped back to the present as the train arrived in a vast interior plaza. They disembarked on to a glass-floored and glass-walled platform that was suspended many tens of metres above an astonishing sight.
Beneath their feet, thrusting through the inner wall of the carousel’s rim, was the front of an enormous spacecraft. It was a blunt-nosed, rounded design, scratched, gouged and scorched, with all its appendages — pods, spines and antennae — ripped clean away. The spacecraft’s cabin windows, which ran around the pole of the nose in a semicircle, were shattered black apertures, like eye-sockets. Around the coll
ar of the ship where it met the fabric of the carousel was a congealed grey foam of solidified emergency sealant that had the porous texture of pumice.
‘What happened here?’ Clavain asked.
‘A fucking idiot called Lyle Merrick,’ Antoinette said.
Xavier took over the story. ‘That’s Merrick’s ship, or what’s left of it. Thing was a chemical-rocket scow, about the most primitive ship still making a living in the Rust Belt. Merrick stayed in business because he had the right clients — people the authorities would never, ever suspect of trusting their cargo to such a shit-heap. But Merrick got into trouble one day.’
‘It was about sixteen, seventeen years ago,’ Antoinette said. ‘The authorities were chasing him, trying to force him to let them board and inspect his cargo. Merrick was trying to get under cover — there was a repair well on the far side of the carousel that could just accommodate his ship. But he didn’t make it. Fluffed his approach, or lost control, or just bottled out. Stupid twat rammed straight into the rim.’
‘You’re only looking at a small part of his ship,’ Xavier said. ‘The rest of it, trailing behind, was mostly fuel tank. Even with foam-phase catalysis you need a lot of fuel for a chemical rocket. When the front hit, she went clean through the carousel’s rim, deforming it with the force of the impact. Lyle made it, but the fuel tanks blew up. There’s one hell of a crater out there, even now.’
‘Casualties?’ Clavain asked.
‘A few,’ Xavier said.
‘More than a few,’ said Antoinette. ‘A few hundred.’
They told him that suited hyperprimates had sealed the rim, with only a few deaths amongst the emergency team. The animals had done such a good job of sealing the gap between the shuttle and the rim wall that it had been decided that the safest thing to do was to leave the remains of the ship exactly where they were. Expensive designers had been called in to give the rest of the plaza a sympathetic face-lift.