‘I will use them Khouri, but not a moment sooner than I have to. Haven’t you ever heard of the expression “whites of their eyes”? Perhaps not; it’s the sort of thing only a soldier would be likely to know.’
‘I’ve forgotten more about soldiering than you’ll ever know, Ilia.’
‘Just trust me. Is it so much to ask?’
Twenty-two minutes later the battle began. Clavain’s opening salvo was almost insultingly inadequate. She had detected the signatures of railgun launchers, ripples of electromagnetic energy designed to slam a small dense slug up to one or two thousand kilometres per second. The slugs took an hour to reach her from their launch points near Zodiacal Light. At the very limit of her resolution she could make out the skeletal cruciform shapes of the launchers themselves, and then watch the pulse of sequenced matter-antimatter explosions that drove the slugs up to their terminal velocities, gobbling up the railguns in the process. Clavain did not have enough railguns to saturate the immediate volume of space around her ship, so she could avoid being hit simply by making sure she — or rather the Captain — kept Nostalgia for Infinity in a constant random-walk pattern, never entering the volume of space where it had been an hour earlier, which was where any arriving railgun slug would have been aimed.
At first, that was exactly what happened. She did not even have to ask it of the Captain. He was privy to the same tactical information as Volyova, and appeared capable of arriving at the same conclusions. She felt the faint yawing and pitching, as if her bed was adrift on a raft on a mildly choppy sea, as Nostalgia for Infinity moved, shifting with short, thunderous bursts of the many station-keeping thrusters which dotted the hull.
But she could do better than that.
With the long-range grabs of the railguns and the electromagnetic launch signatures, she could determine the precise direction in which a particular slug had been aimed. There was a margin of error, but it was not large, and it amused Volyova to remain exactly where she was until the last possible moment, only then moving her ship. She ran simulations in the tactical display, showing the Captain the projected impact point of each new slug launch, and was gratified when the Captain revised his strategy. She liked it better this way. It was far more elegant and fuel-efficient, and she hoped that the lesson was not lost on Clavain.
She wanted him to become cleverer, so that she could become cleverer still.
Clavain watched as the last of his railguns fired and launched, destroying itself in a cascade of quick, bright explosions.
It was an hour since he had begun the attack, and he had never seriously expected that it would do more than occupy the Triumvir’s time, diverting her attention away from the other elements of the attack. If one of the slugs had hit her ship it would have delivered about a kilotonne of kinetic energy on impact; enough to cripple the lighthugger, perhaps even to rip it open, but not enough to destroy it entirely. There remained a chance of success — four slugs were still on their way — but the Triumvir had already shown every indication that she could deal with this particular threat. Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle. He suspected that the Triumvir felt likewise.
Felka and Remontoire were floating next to him in the observation cupola, which was decoupled from the spinning part of the ship. Now that Zodiacal Light had slowed to a halt on the edge of the battle volume they no longer had need of their exoskeletons, and Clavain felt oddly vulnerable without his.
‘Disappointed, Clavain?’ asked Remontoire.
‘No. As a matter of fact I’m reassured. If anything feels too easy, I start looking for a trap.’
Remontoire nodded. ‘She’s no fool, that’s for certain, no matter what she’s done to her ship. You still don’t believe that story about an evacuation attempt, I take it?’
‘There’s more reason to believe it now than there was before,’ Felka said. ‘Isn’t that right, Clavain? We’ve seen shuttles moving between surface and orbit.’
‘That’s all we’ve seen,’ Clavain said.
‘And a larger ship moving between orbit and the lighthugger,’ she continued. ‘What more evidence do we need that she’s sincere?’
‘It doesn’t necessarily indicate an evacuation programme,’ Clavain said through gritted teeth. ‘It could be many things.’
‘So give her the benefit of the doubt,’ Felka said.
Clavain turned to her, brimming with sudden fury but hoping that it did not show. ‘It’s her choice. She has the weapons. They’re all I want.’
‘The weapons won’t make any difference in the long run.’
Now he made no attempt to hide his anger. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘Exactly what I said. I know, Clavain. I know that everything that is happening here, everything that means so much to you, to us, means precisely nothing in the long run.’
‘And this pearl of wisdom came from the Wolf, did it?’
‘You know I brought a part of it back from Skade’s ship.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And that means I have all the more reason to disregard anything you say, Felka.’
She hauled herself to one side of the cupola and disappeared through the exit hole, back into the main body of the ship. Clavain opened his mouth to call after her, to say something in apology. Nothing came.
‘Clavain?’
He looked at Remontoire. ‘What, Rem?’
‘The first hyperfast missiles will be arriving in a minute.’
Antoinette saw the first wave of hyperfast missiles streak past, overtaking Storm Bird with a velocity differential of nearly a thousand kilometres per second. There had been four missiles in the spread, and although they passed around her ship on all four sides, they converged ahead an instant later, the flares of their exhausts meeting like the lines in a perspective sketch.
Two minutes later another wave passed to starboard, and then a third slipped by to port, much further out, three minutes after that.
‘Holy shit,’ she whispered. ‘We’re not just playing war, are we?’
‘Scared?’ Xavier asked, pressed into the seat beside hers.
‘More than scared.’ She had already been back into the body of Storm Bird, inspecting the ferociously armoured assault squad she carried in her ship’s cargo bay. ‘But that’s good. Dad always said…’
‘Be scared if you aren’t scared. Yeah.’ Xavier nodded. ‘That was one of his.’
‘Actually
They both looked at the console.
‘What, Ship?’ asked Antoinette.
‘Actually, that was one of mine. But your father liked it enough to steal it from me. I took that as a compliment.’
‘So Lyle Merrick actually said…’ Xavier began.
‘Yes.’
‘No shit?’ Antoinette said.
‘No shit, Little Miss.’
The last wave of slugs was still on its way when Clavain escalated to the next level of his attack against Volyova. Again, there was no element of surprise. But there almost never was in space war, where hiding places and opportunities for camouflage were so few and far between. One could plan, and strategise, and hope that the enemy missed the obvious or subtle traps buried in the placement of one’s forces, but in every other respect war in space was a game of total transparency. It was war between enemies who could safely each assume the other to be omniscient. Like a game of chess, the outcome could often be guessed after only a few moves had been made, especially if the opponents were unevenly matched.
Volyova tracked the trajectories of the hyperfast missiles as they streaked across space from the launchers deployed by Zodiacal Light They accelerated at a hundred gees, sustaining that thrust for forty minutes before becoming purely ballistic. Then they were moving at slightly less than one per cent of the speed of light — formidable targets, but still within the capabilities of Nostalgia for Infinity’s autonomic hull defences. Any starship had
to be able to track and destroy rapidly moving objects as a normal part of its collision-avoidance procedures, so Volyova had barely had to upgrade the existing safeguards to make full-scale weapons.
It was a question of numbers. Each missile occupied a certain fraction of her available hull weapons, and there was always a small statistical chance that too many missiles would arrive at the same time for her — or the Captain, who was doing all the actual defending — to deal with.
But it never happened. She ran an analysis on the missile spread and concluded that Clavain was not trying to hit her. It was within his capability to do so; he had some control over the missiles until the moment they stopped accelerating, enough to correct for any small changes in Infinity’s position. And a direct hit from a hyperfast, even one with a dummy warhead, would have taken out the entire ship in a flash. Yet the missiles were all on trajectories that stood only a small chance of actually hitting her ship. They slammed past with tens of kilometres to spare, while roughly one in twenty went on to detonate slightly closer to Resurgam. The blast signatures suggested small matter-antimatter explosions: either residual fuel, or pinhead-sized warheads. The other nineteen missiles were effectively dummies.
A close blast would certainly damage Infinity, she thought. The five deployed cache weapons were robust enough not to worry her, but a close matter-antimatter blast could well incapacitate her hull armaments, leaving her wide open to a more concerted assault. Not that she was going to let it happen, but she would have to expend a good fraction of her resources in preventing it. And the annoying thing was that most of the missiles she had to destroy posed no actual threat; they were neither on intercept trajectories nor armed.
She did not go so far as to congratulate Clavain. All he had done was adopt a textbook saturation-attack approach, tying up her defences with a low probability/high consequence threat. It was neither clever nor original, but it was, more or less, exactly what she would have done under the same circumstances. She would give him that, at least: he had certainly not disappointed her.
Volyova decided to give him one last chance before ending his fun.
‘Clavain?’ she asked, broadcasting on the same frequency she had already used for her ultimatum. ‘Clavain, are you listening to me?’
Twenty seconds passed, and then she heard his voice. ‘I’m listening, Triumvir. I take it this isn’t an offer of surrender?’
‘I’m offering you a chance, Clavain, before I end this. A chance for you to walk away and fight on another day, against a more enthusiastic adversary.’
She waited for his reply to crawl back to her. The delay could be artificial, but it almost certainly meant he was still aboard Zodiacal Light
‘Why would you want to cut me any slack, Triumvir?’
‘You’re not a bad man, Clavain. Just… misguided. You think you need the weapons more than I do, but you’re wrong, mistaken. I won’t hold it against you. No serious harm has yet been done. Turn your forces around and we’ll call it a misunderstanding.’
‘You speak as someone who thinks they hold the upper hand, Ilia. I wouldn’t be so certain, if I were you.’
‘I have the weapons, Clavain.’ She found herself smiling and frowning at the same time. ‘That makes rather a lot of difference, don’t you think?’
‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I think one ultimatum is enough for anyone, don’t you?’
‘You’re a fool, Clavain. The sad thing is that you’ll never know how much of a fool.’
He did not respond.
‘Well, Ilia?’ Khouri asked.
‘I gave the bastard his chance. Now it’s time to stop playing games.’ She raised her voice. ‘Captain? Can you hear me? I want you to give me full control of cache weapon seventeen. Are you willing to do that?’
There was no answer. The moment stretched. The back of her neck crawled with anticipation. If the Captain was not prepared to let her actually use the five deployed weapons, then all her plans crumbled to dust and Clavain would suddenly seem a lot less foolish than he had a minute earlier.
Then she noticed the subtle change in the weapon’s icon status, signifying that she now had full military control of cache weapon seventeen.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ Volyova said sweetly. Then she addressed the weapon. ‘Hello, Seventeen. Nice to be doing business with you again.’
She pushed her hand into the projection, pinching the floating icon of the weapon between her fingers. Again the icon responded sluggishly, reflecting the dead weight of the weapon as it was brought out from the sensor shadow of Infinity’s hull. As it moved it was aligning itself, bringing its long killing axis to bear on the distant, but not really so distant, target of Zodiacal Light. At any time, Volyova’s knowledge of the position of Clavain’s ship was twenty seconds out of date, but that was only a minor annoyance. In the unlikely event that he suddenly moved, she was still guaranteed a kill. She would sweep his volume of possible occupancy with the weapon, knowing that she was sure to hit him at some point. She would know when she did; the detonation of his Conjoiner drives would light up the entire system. If anything was guaranteed to prick the interest of the Inhibitors, it would be that.
Still, she had to do it.
Yet Volyova trembled on the verge of execution. It felt wrong: too final; too abrupt; too — and this surprised her — unsporting. She felt she owed him a last chance to back down; that some final, direly urgent warning should be given. He had come such a long way, after all. And he had clearly imagined himself to be in with a chance of gaining the weapons.
Clavain… Clavain… she thought to herself. It should not have been like this…
But it was, and that was that.
She tapped the icon, like a baby poking a bauble.
‘Goodbye,’ Volyova whispered.
The moment passed. The status indices and symbols next to the cache weapon’s icon changed, signifying a profound alteration in the weapon’s condition. She looked at the real-time image of Clavain’s ship, mentally counting down the twenty seconds it would take before the ship was torn apart by the beam from weapon seventeen. The beam would chew a canyon-sized wound in Clavain’s ship, assuming it did not trigger an immediate and fatal Conjoiner-drive detonation.
After ten seconds he had not moved. She knew then that her aim had been good, that the impact would be precise and devastating. Clavain would know nothing of his own death, nothing of the oblivion that was coming.
She waited out the remaining ten seconds, anticipating the bitter sense of triumph that would accompany the kill.
The time elapsed. Involuntarily, she flinched against the coming brightness, like a child waiting for the biggest and best firework.
Twenty seconds became twenty-one… twenty-one became twenty-five… thirty. Half a minute passed. Then a minute.
Clavain’s ship remained in view.
Nothing had happened.
Chapter 36
SHE HEARD HIS voice again. It was calm, polite, almost apologetic.
‘I know what you just tried, Ilia. But don’t you think I’d already have considered the possibility of you turning the weapons against me?’
She stammered an answer. ‘What… did… you… do?’
Twenty seconds stretched to an eternity.
‘Nothing, really,’ Clavain said. ‘I just told the weapon not to fire. They’re our property, Ilia, not yours. Didn’t it occur to you for one moment that we might have a way to protect ourselves against them?’
‘You’re lying,’ she said.
Clavain sounded amused, as if he had secretly hoped she would demand more proof. ‘I can show it to you again, if you like.’
He told her to turn her attention to the other cache weapons, the ones that she had already thrown against the Inhibitors.
‘Now concentrate on the weapon closest to the remains of Roc, will you? You’re about to see it stop firing.’
It was a different kind of war after that. Within an hour the first waves of Clavain’s
assault force were reaching the immediate volume of space around Nostalgia for Infinity. He watched it at the dead remove of ten light-seconds, feeling as distant from the battle he had initiated as some antiquated hill-top general gazing at his armies through field glasses, the din and fury of combat too far away to hear.
‘It was a good trick,’ Volyova told him.
‘It wasn’t any trick. Just a precaution you should never have assumed we wouldn’t have taken. Our own weapons, Ilia? Be serious.’
‘A signal, Clavain?’
‘A coded neutrino burst. You can’t block it or jam it, so don’t even think of trying. It won’t work.’
She came back with a question he had not been expecting, one that reminded him not to underestimate her for an instant.
‘Fair enough. But I would have thought, assuming you have the means to stop them from working, that you’d also have the means to destroy them.’
Despite the timelag he knew he only had a second or so to concoct an answer. ‘What good would that do me, Ilia? I’d be destroying the very things I’ve come to collect.’
Volyova’s response snapped back twenty seconds later. ‘Not necessarily, Clavain. You could just threaten to destroy them. I presume the destruction of a cache weapon would be fairly spectacular no matter which way you went about it? Actually, I don’t need to presume anything. I’ve already seen it happen, and yes, it was spectacular. Why not threaten to detonate one of the weapons still inside my ship and see where that takes you?’
‘You shouldn’t give me ideas,’ he told her.
‘Why not? Because you might do it? I don’t think you can, Clavain. I don’t think you have the means to do anything but stop the weapons from firing.’
She had led him into a trap by then. He could do nothing but follow her. ‘I do…’
‘Then prove it. Send a destruction signal to one of the other weapons, one of those across the system. Why not destroy the one you’ve already stopped?’
‘It would be silly to destroy an irreplaceable weapon just to make a point, wouldn’t it?’