The shipmaster spoke to her? Skade asked.
Clavain answered. [It was a warning, Skade, telling her to back off or face the consequences.]
And did she?
Remontoire fed her the freighter’s vector. It was headed straight into the atmosphere of the Jovian, just like the Demarchist ship ahead of it.
That doesn’t make any sense. The shipmaster should have destroyed her for violating a Contested Volume.
Clavain responded. [The shipmaster threatened to do just that, but Bax ignored her. She promised the shipmaster she wasn’t going to steal hydrogen, but made it pretty clear she wasn’t about to turn around either.]
Either very brave or very stupid.
[Or very lucky,] Clavain countered. [Clearly the shipmaster didn’t have the ammunition to back up her threat. She must have used up her last missile during some earlier engagement.]
Skade considered this, anticipating Clavain’s reasoning. If the shipmaster really had fired her last missile, she would be desperately keen to keep that information from Nightshade. An unarmed ship was ripe for boarding. Even this late in the war, there were still useful intelligence gains to be made from the capture of an enemy ship, quite apart from the prospect of recruiting her crew.
You think the shipmaster was hoping the freighter would do as she said. She detected Clavain’s assent before his answer formed in her head.
[Yes. Once Bax shone her radar on to the Demarchist ship, the shipmaster had no choice but to make some kind of response. Firing a missile would have been the usual course of action — she’d have been fully within her rights — but at the very least she had to warn the freighter to back off. That didn’t work — for whatever reason Bax wasn’t sufficiently intimidated. That immediately put the shipmaster in a compromised position. She’d barked, but she sure as hell couldn’t bite.]
Remontoire completed his line of thinking. [Clavain’s right. She has no missiles. And now we know.]
Skade knew what they had in mind. Even though it had already begun to dive into the atmosphere, the Demarchist ship was still within easy range of Nightshade’s missiles. A kill could not be guaranteed, but the odds were a lot better than even. Yet Remontoire and Clavain did not want to shoot the enemy down. They wanted to wait until it had emerged from the atmosphere, slow and heavy with fuel, but still no better armed than it had been before. They wanted to board it, suck data from its memory banks and turn its crew into recruits for the Mother Nest.
I can’t consent to a boarding operation. The risks to Nightshade outweigh any possible benefits.
She sensed Clavain trying to probe her mind. [Why, Skade? Is there something that makes this ship unusually precious? If so, isn’t it a little odd that no one told me?]
That’s a matter for the Closed Council, Clavain. You had your chance to join us.
[But even if he had, he wouldn’t know everything, would he?]
Her attention flicked angrily to Remontoire. You know that I’m here on Closed Council business, Remontoire. That is all that matters.
[But I’m Closed Council and even I don’t know exactly what you’re doing here. What is it, Skade — a secret operation for the Inner Sanctum?]
Skade seethed, thinking how much simpler things would be if she never had to deal with old Conjoiners. This ship is precious, yes. It’s a prototype, and prototypes are always valuable. But you knew that anyway. Of course we don’t want to lose it in a petty engagement.
[There’s clearly more to it than that, though.]
Perhaps, Clavain, but now isn’t the time to discuss it. Allocate a spread of missiles for the Demarchist ship, and spare another for the freighter.
[No. We’ll wait for both ships to come out the other side. Assuming either survives, then we’ll act.]
I can’t allow that. So be it, then. She had hoped it would not come to this, but Clavain was forcing her hand. Skade concentrated, issuing a complex series of neural commands. She felt the distant acknowledgement of the weapons systems recognising her authority and submitting to her will. Her control was imprecise, lacking the finesse and immediacy with which she addressed her own machines, but it would suffice; all she had to do was launch a few missiles.
[Skade… ?]
It was Clavain; he must have sensed that she was overriding his control of the weapons. She felt his surprise at the fact that she could do it at all. Skade assigned the spread, the hunter-seeker missiles quivering in their launch racks.
Then another voice spoke quietly in her head. [No, Skade.]
It was the Night Council.
What?
[Release control of the weapons. Do as Clavain wishes. It will serve us better in the long run.]
No, I…
The Night Council’s tone became more strident. [Release the weapons, Skade.]
Furious, feeling the sting of reprimand, Skade did as she was told.
Antoinette reached her father’s coffin. It was lashed to the cargo-bay storage lattice, precisely as it had been when she had shown it to the proxy.
She placed one gloved hand on the upper surface of the casket. Through the glass of the viewing window she could see his profile. The family resemblance was quite evident, though age and gravity had shaped his features into an exaggerated masculine caricature of her own. His eyes were closed and the expression on his face, what she could see of it, was almost one of bored calm. It would have been typical of her father to snooze through all the excitement, she thought. She remembered the sound of his snoring filling the flight deck. Once she had even caught him peering at her through nearly closed eyelids, just pretending to be asleep. Watching to see how she handled whatever crisis was in progress; knowing that one day she would have to do it all herself.
Antoinette checked the rigging that bound the coffin to the lattice. It was secure; nothing had come adrift during the recent manoeuvres.
‘Beast…’ she said.
‘Little Miss?’
‘I’m down in the hold.’
‘One is uncomfortably aware of that, Little Miss.’
‘I’d like you to take us subsonic. Call me when we’re there, will you?’
She had steeled herself for a protest, but none came. She felt the ship pitch, her inner ear struggling to differentiate between deceleration and descent. Storm Bird was not really flying now. Its shape generated very little aerodynamic lift, so it had to support itself by vectoring thrust downwards. The vacuum-filled hold had provided some buoyant lift until now, but she had never planned on going deep with a depressurised hold.
Antoinette was acutely aware that she really should have been dead by now. The Demarchist shipmaster should have shot her out of the sky. And the pursuing spider ship should have attacked before she had time to dive into the atmosphere. Even the dive should have killed her. It had not been the gentle, controlled insertion she had always planned, but more of a furious scramble to get beneath the clouds, riding the vortex that the Demarchist ship had already carved. She had appraised the damage as soon as level flight had been restored, and the news was not good. If she made it back to the Rust Belt, and that was a big ‘if — the spiders were still out there, after all — then Xavier was going to be very, very busy for the next few months.
Well, at least it would keep him out of trouble.
‘Subsonic now, Little Miss,’ Beast reported.
‘Good.’ For the third time, Antoinette made sure that she was bound to the lattice as securely as the coffin, and then checked her suit settings again. ‘Open the number-one bay door, will you?’
‘Just a moment, Little Miss.’
A brilliant sliver of light cracked open at her end of the lattice. She squinted against it, then reached up and tugged down the bottle-green glare visor of her suit.
The crack of light enlarged, and then the force of the in-rushing air hit her, slamming her against the lattice’s strut. Air filled the chamber in a few seconds, roaring and swirling around her. The suit’s sensor analysed it immediately and st
ernly advised against opening her helmet. The air pressure had exceeded one atmosphere, but it was both lung-crackingly cold and utterly toxic.
An atmosphere of choking poisons and shocking temperature gradients was, Antoinette reflected, the price you paid for such exquisite coloration when seen from space.
Take us twenty klicks deeper,‘ she said.
‘Are you certain, Little Miss?’
‘Fuck, yes.’
The floor pitched. She watched as the suit’s barometer ticked off the increments in atmospheric pressure. Two atmospheres; three. Four atmospheres and rising. Trusting that the rest of Storm Bird, which was now under negative pressure, would not fold open around her like a wet paper bag.
Whatever else happens, Antoinette thought, I’ve probably blown the warranty on the ship by now…
When her confidence had risen, or rather when her pulse had dropped to something like a normal level, Antoinette began to inch along towards the open door, dragging the coffin with her. It was a laborious process, since now she had to fasten and unfasten the coffin’s moorings every couple of metres. But the last thing she felt was impatience.
Looking ahead, now that her eyes had adapted she saw that the light had an overcast silver-grey quality. Gradually it became duller, taking on an iron or dull bronze pall. Epsilon Eridani was not a bright star to begin with, and much of its light was now being filtered out by the layers of atmosphere above them. If they went deeper it would get darker and darker, until it was like being at the bottom of an ocean.
But this was what her father had wanted.
‘All right, Beast, hold her nice and steady. I’m about to do the deed.’
‘Take care now, Little Miss.’
There were cargo-bay entrance ports all over Storm Bird, but the one that had been opened was in the ship’s belly, facing backwards along the direction of flight. Antoinette had reached the lip now, the toes of her boots hanging an inch over the edge. It felt precarious, but she was still safely anchored. Her view above was obstructed by the dark underside of the hull, curving gently up towards the tail; but to either side, and down, nothing impeded her vision.
‘You were right, Dad,’ she breathed, quietly enough that she hoped Beast would not pick up her words. ‘It is a pretty amazing place. I think you made a good choice, all things told.’
‘Little Miss?’
‘Nothing, Beast.’
She began to undo the coffin’s fastenings. The ship lurched and swayed once or twice, making her stomach twist and the coffin knock against the lattice’s spars, but by and large Beast was doing an excellent job of holding altitude. The speed was now highly subsonic relative to the current airstream, so that Beast was doing little more than hover, but that was good. The wind’s ferocity had died down except for the odd squall, as she had hoped it would.
The coffin was almost loose now, almost ready to be tipped over the side. Her father looked like a man catching up on forty winks. The embalmers had done a superlative job, and the coffin’s faltering refrigeration mechanism had done the rest. It was impossible to believe that her father had been dead for a month.
‘Well, Dad,’ Antoinette said, ‘this is it, I guess. We’ve made it now. Not much more needs to be said, I think.’
The ship did her the courtesy of saying nothing.
‘I still don’t know whether I’m really doing the right thing,’ Antoinette continued. I mean, I know this is what you once said you wanted, but…‘ Stop it, she told herself. Stop going over that again.
‘Little Miss?’
‘Yes?’
‘One would strongly advise against taking too much longer.’
Antoinette remembered the label of the beer bottle. She did not have it with her now, but there was no detail of it that she could not call immediately to mind. The brilliance of the silver and gold inks had faded a little since the day when she had lovingly peeled the label from the bottle, but in her mind’s eye they still shone with a fabulous rare lustre. It was a cheap, mass-produced item, but in her hands, and in her mind, the label had assumed the significance of a religious icon. She had been much younger when she had removed the label, only twelve or thirteen years old, and, flush from a lucrative haul, her father had taken her to one of the drinking dens that the traders sometimes frequented. Though her experience was limited, it had seemed to be a good night, with much laughter and telling of stories. Then, somewhere towards the end of the evening, the talk had turned to the various ways in which the remains of spacefarers were dealt with, whether by tradition or personal preference. Her father had kept quiet during most of the discussion, smiling to himself as the conversation veered from the serious to the jocular and back again, laughing at the jokes and insults. Then, much to Antoinette’s surprise, he had stated his own preference, which was to be buried inside the atmosphere of a gas-giant planet. At any other time she might have assumed him to be mocking his comrades’ proposals, but there was something about his tone that had told her that he was absolutely earnest, and that although he had never spoken of the matter before, it was not somehing he had just conjured out of thin air. And so she had made a small, private vow to herself. She had peeled the label from the bottle as a memento, swearing that if her father should ever die, and should she ever be in a position to do anything about it, she would not forget his wish.
And for all the years that had followed it had been easy to imagine that she would hold to her vow, so easy, in fact, that she had seldom thought of it at all. But now he was dead, and she had to face up to what she had promised herself, no matter that the vow now struck her as faintly ridiculous and childlike. What did matter was the utter conviction that she believed she had heard in his voice that night. Though she had been only twelve or thirteen, and might even have imagined it, or been fooled by his poker-face facade of seriousness, she had made the vow, and however embarrassing or inconvenient, she had to stick to it, even if it meant placing her own life in jeopardy.
She undid the final restraints, and then budged the coffin forwards until a third of its length projected over the edge. One good shove and her father would get the burial he had wanted.
It was madness. In all the years after that one drunken conversation in the spacer’s bar he had never again mentioned the idea of being buried in the Jovian. But did that necessarily mean it had not been a heartfelt wish? He had not known when he was going to die, after all. There had been no time to put his affairs in order before the accident; no reason for him to explain patiently to her what he wanted doing with his mortal remains.
Madness, yes… but heartfelt madness.
Antoinette pushed the coffin over the edge.
For a moment it seemed to hang in the air behind the ship, as if unwilling to begin the long fall into oblivion. Then, slowly, it did begin to fall. She watched it tumble, dropping behind the ship as the wind retarded it. Quickly it diminished: now a thing the size of her outstretched thumb; now a tiny, tumbling hyphen at the limit of vision; now a dot that only intermittently caught the weakly transmitted starlight, glinting and fading as it fell through billowing pastel cloud layers.
She saw it one more time, and then it was gone.
Antoinette leant back against the rig. She had not expected it, but now that the deed was done, now that she had buried her father, exhaustion came crushing down on her. She felt suddenly the entire leaden weight of all the air pressing down from above. There was no actual sadness, no tears; she had cried enough already. There would be more, in time. She was sure of that. But for now all she felt was utter exhaustion.
Antoinette closed her eyes. Several minutes passed.
Then she told Beast to close the bay door, and began the long journey back to the flight deck.
Chapter 3
FROM HIS VANTAGE point in an airlock, Nevil Clavain watched a circular part of Nightshade’s hull iris open. The armoured proxies that bustled out resembled albino lice, carapaced and segmented and sprouting many specialised limbs, sensors and weapons.
They quickly crossed the open space to the enemy ship, sticking to her claw-shaped hull with adhesive-tipped legs. Then they scuttled across the damaged surface, hunting for entry locks and the known weak spots of that type of ship.
The proxies moved with the random questing motion of bugs. The scarabs could have swept through the ship very quickly, but only at the risk of killing any survivors who might have been sheltering in pressurised zones. So Clavain insisted that the machines use the airlocks, even if that meant a delay while each robot passed through.
He need hardly have worried. As soon as the first scarab made its way through, it became clear that he was going to encounter neither resistance nor armed survivors. The ship was dark, cold and silent. He could almost smell death aboard her. The proxy edged its way through the enemy craft, the faces of the dead coming into view as it passed their duty stations. Similar reports came back from the other machines as they scuttled through the rest of the ship.
He withdrew most of the scarabs and then sent a small detachment of Conjoiners into the ship via the same route the machines had used. Through the eyes of a scarab, he watched his squad emerge from the lock one at a time: bulbous white shapes like hard-edged ghosts.
The squad swept the ship, moving through the same cramped spaces that the proxies had explored, but with the additional watchfulness of humans. Gun muzzles were poked into hideaways, equipment hatches opened and checked for cowering survivors. None were found. The dead were discreetly prodded, but none of them showed the slightest signs of faking it. Their bodies were beginning to cool, and the thermal patterns around their faces showed that death had already occurred, albeit recently. There was no sign of violent death or injury.
He composed a thought and passed it back to Skade and Remontoire, who were still on the bridge. I’m going inside. No ifs, no buts. I’ll be quick and I won’t take any unnecessary risks.
[No, Clavain.]