‘You go first,’ said Trove. ‘You’re the hero of the hour.’
Apparently, according to Calder, they were to be featured live on ETV, whereupon the ratification of their full pardon by the delegates of Earth would be broadcast. This would be followed by a communication from Serene Galahad herself. Clay felt a momentary resurgence of his optimism about that. Maybe Scotonis would somehow be able to locate where she was broadcasting from and drop his ship on her? Next, in the ensuing chaos, Clay could tell this Calder about how Scotonis had forced them, under the threat of railguns, to approach the station without telling anyone the captain was still alive and in control of the Scourge. Then Clay could top that off by revealing the true source of the Scour . . .
He moved ahead of Trove, patting a hand against his laptop, and came to another airlock door, where he first checked the pressure reading. After a moment he noted an orientation arrow, and walked up the apparent wall to stand horizontal to his previous orientation, before palming the door control. It thumped up on seals and slid aside, the pressure differential gusting a breeze into his face, redolent of machine oil and some slight hint of a familiar perfume. Clay passed on through into a bay area swarming with people. On either side of him rows of security personnel with shouldered Kalashtechs stood stiffly to attention. Other security personnel were positioned at critical points all over, sharpshooters covering various sectors of the bay and guards at each of the doors. So all this was for him, and for the data he was bringing? Clay felt hope dangerously stir inside him.
‘Shit,’ exclaimed Trove.
Clay straightened up and stepped forwards, noting two large floating cams directly ahead, and others scattered about the immediate vicinity, some of them plain but some definitely bearing the letters ETV on their cowlings. He glanced to one side and saw a screen displaying his arrival, and he could just about hear the familiar voice of an ETV commentator. As he moved forwards, the picture abruptly changed to show an enormous conference room packed with self-important looking people, who had to be the delegates of Earth. Just maybe, he thought, I am going to survive this.
Then the group of people beyond the honour guard suddenly parted, and the figure who had been issuing instructions to them turned towards Clay, smiling as brightly and with as much falsity as a painted clown. He now realized Trove’s exclamation had not been about the guard or the security, but that she had already recognized the woman ahead of them. Here stood Serene Galahad herself.
‘Welcome back, Clay Ruger,’ she said, striding forwards.
Clay heard Trove cursing behind him and glanced round to see she had been grabbed by two of the honour guard, and was now being expertly disarmed. He swung back to confront that painted smile.
‘A live broadcast?’ he asked, not really caring.
‘A five-minute delay,’ said Galahad, ‘which is standard so the footage can be edited before broadcast.’ She paused, waved a hand dismissively. ‘Now, I am compromising my safety by allowing it to be known that I am here. So I hope you will see the risk I am taking as a token of my sincerity.’
‘Sure,’ he said, but suddenly he wasn’t so sure at all. Maybe she did mean to pardon him and allow him to take his place again within Earth’s administration. He felt a bubble of laughter in his chest. What a hilarious joke, but so utterly irrelevant now. She had compromised her own and everyone’s safety here just perfectly.
‘Your pardon has been ratified by the delegates of Earth,’ she continued, ‘and now, for all our sakes and without delay, you must begin transmitting the Gene Bank data.’
Clay glanced down at the weapon secured to his stomach. All this security wasn’t here for him but for her, and if he reached for the gun one of the sharpshooters would deal with him, doubtless maiming him but definitely not killing him. But, of course, he no longer needed that weapon now.
‘I, of course, trust you implicitly,’ he said, reaching down slowly to unhook his laptop and opening it. He input his code and began the transmission. He held the laptop up to show her that the transmission had begun, then sent it spinning through the air, away from him. Galahad turned to a woman behind her, who now checked something on a screen that one of two young blond men was holding, before nodding a confirmation. Galahad turned to face him again and now, with avidity and cruelty plain in her expression, he just could not help himself.
He convulsed, choked, and burst into hysterical laughter.
Argus
As she entered the Meat Locker behind Dr Raiman and his assistant, Hannah noted how, for over twenty hours, she had felt both scared and angry, but also how that her treacherous friend, her panic attacks, had now gone into hiding. Admittedly the drugs had reduced their impact hugely, but they were always waiting for an opportunity; waiting to leap out and provide fear when none was needed.
She paused just inside the cryogenic complex and looked around. Nobody else was here since all human personnel were still under lockdown, still strapped in chairs or on couches, with suits on and visors ready to be closed, tired of the terror twisting their bowels as they now just numbly waited. But for this, she too would have been as safe as possible in her apartment in Arcoplex Two. Shitty timing, she felt, but apparently the process could not, with cryogenic storage technology at its present development, be put on hold. Da Vinci would be, if all the readings were correct, waking up in the middle of a fucking war.
Raiman and his assistant used the handholds fixed to the walls to navigate their course towards Da Vinci’s cryogenic pod, which was now already protruding from the honeycomb wall providing storage for all the other pods. Saul had given no warnings of imminent course changes, but they probably did not want to be caught in mid-transit across open space like this, should he suddenly decide to apply acceleration. All aboard were learning that lesson too. Though Saul did always give warnings, sometimes the interval between them and the need for action was only a short one, and they now realized that he deemed their personal safety very much secondary to that of his ship. Hannah, nevertheless, propelled herself directly from the airlock towards the pod, landed clumsily but managed to grab hold of one edge before she could be sent bouncing away, and had opened the bag she carried and taken out the VC suit even before the other two arrived.
‘He would have been safer just staying inside here,’ Raiman grumbled, while checking the pod’s mini-screen then hitting the latch control.
‘You know we can’t allow that,’ said Hannah reproachfully.
‘I know,’ Raiman agreed.
The lid hinged open to reveal Da Vinci lying inside. His skin was bone-white and for a moment Hannah feared he wasn’t breathing, until she discerned the infinitesimal rise and fall of his chest. Then, as Raiman and his assistant began removing the visible sensors, the man’s eyes snapped open.
‘Something wrong?’ he asked gummily.
Raiman helped him sit upright and continued removing sensors.
‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ Hannah replied. ‘It worked.’
He gazed at her steadily, his eyes surprisingly clear considering that he had been taking a cruise on the river Styx just twenty minutes earlier.
‘Interesting,’ he stated. ‘I didn’t think I would experience nightmares.’
With the assistance of the other two, he climbed out of the pod and the final sensors were swiftly removed. Raiman handed him a flask, which Da Vinci opened and sucked on, rapidly gulping down a warm mixture of vitamins, electrolyte and certain specially tailored drugs. When he had finished that, she handed him his VC suit.
‘So what kind of nightmares did you have?’ Hannah asked.
He waved a hand dismissively, took hold of the suit and began the laborious task of putting it on. ‘Massive demons folded up like asteroids and moving through darkness, and my terror of being crushed by them, and bodies floating about in vacuum.’ He shook his head. ‘All perfectly apposite, of course.’
How true, Hannah felt, and how much closer to current reality than when he stepped into tha
t cryopod. Were his nightmares just the usual mental clearing of detritus and sorting of the mental filing system, or could something have been bleeding through from surrounding reality via the hardware in his skull? That was something she would have to check.
‘So did I miss anything?’ he asked, finally closing up his VC suit.
‘With nightmares like that,’ Hannah replied, ‘probably not.’
Right on cue, Saul addressed the entire ship through the PA system. ‘Course change in eight minutes – full fusion thrust.’ Then, just for the ears of those in the Meat Locker, ‘Hannah, go and use the primary control centre and medical bay at the end of the Locker. It contains eight acceleration chairs.’
‘What’s going on?’ Da Vinci asked as they all at once began heading to the nearest end of the Meat Locker.
‘Your massive demons are ripping each other apart,’ Hannah replied.
Jupiter wanted his ship; wanted to suck it down along with all the solar system debris it had swallowed over its billions of years. Saul reapplied the thrust of the Traveller engine to fling his ship into close orbit, vast plains of cloud sliding below and seemingly no curve to the horizon ahead. They were very close to the gas giant now, too close, since its pull was interfering with the vortex generator, and the magnetic fields slinging the mercury around inside it were limited to sustaining its present speed rather than increasing it to what was actually required. However, Saul now needed the speed for, upon spotting the Command arrive outside the Jovian system, he had decided to change his target.
The Fist was obviously the more heavily armed, heavily built, and it possessed more fusion drive potential. From studying images of it, Saul had also ascertained that it probably carried troops aboard and, unlike the Command, was capable of limited atmosphere engagement and even of landing on low-gravity worlds. Obviously the designers had factored in the option of Saul’s own ship crashing onto some solar system body but still remaining functional enough to blow landing craft out of the sky. It was a big powerful ship, then, and one to be completely avoided if at all possible.
His ship fell in an arc around Jupiter, still under drive from the Traveller engine, but with the Mach-effect drive at its minimum, since there was now even more of a chance of his enemy detecting it. The increased density of gas here was heating the hull appreciably, with occasional flickers of incandescence running over it. Induction from Jupiter’s magnetic field was increasing the power entering Casimir storage, while also blowing components with monotonous regularity. Saul could feel the structure straining all around him and observed his knuckles whiten as he gripped the arms of his chair just like everyone else aboard, just like all the humans. He relaxed his grip, took a drink from his suit spigot and considered for a moment some purely human concerns, such as how he had not eaten solid food for over a hundred and fifty hours. He then dismissed them: such physical needs he could deal with later, if he still had a living body to feed.
Tense hours passed and he noted some of the personnel moving about carefully, seeing to their own human requirements: emptying the urine packs of their suits, using toilets, finding something to eat. Fear was a limited, genetically programmed reaction impelling one to fight or flight, so it had no place in space warfare, where engagements could last for days, weeks or even years. Perhaps this was something Saul should ponder on for the future, because he had no doubt whatsoever that the aggression humans had taken with them into space was not unique – if he had a future.
Saul’s next announcement sent those wandering about back to their acceleration chairs, for it was time to snap their gravitational tether to Jupiter. Using a combination of Mach-effect – mostly to kill the gyroscopic effect of the vortex generator – and steering thrusters, he turned his ship, the combination of thrust and Jupiter’s pull increasing to the point of blackout for some. This lasted for an hour, then the slingshot snapped, and they were away, arcing out from Jupiter and on course to intercept the Command, even while the Fist’s course was taking it out of sight behind the gas giant.
Saul cut the Traveller engine, floated light against his straps, and made one slight correction with steering thrusters. Inevitably, with the amount of debris drifting in Jovian space, something slammed through the hull like a bullet going through a soda can. This object, massing at no more than ten kilograms, turned partially to plasma on striking an inner lattice wall and hosed the shell of Arcoplex One with fire. There were no injuries and the structural damage was minimal, a result which couldn’t last. He watched the moon Lysithea slide by far to one side, then adjusted his course slightly to an optimum to miss the numerous moonlets lying a further ten million kilometres out.
Measuring a slight downward fluctuation in the speed of its tangential approach in-system, Saul calculated on the Command having fired something in the region of ten railgun missiles back towards him. Realizing that Saul was avoiding the Fist and was now pursuing the Command, the commander of the latter ship had fired probing shots to drive him away from direct convergence; like light taps delivered by a boxer assessing an opponent.
‘Brigitta,’ Saul began. The Saberhagen twin had just woken up from a long sleep in her acceleration chair, while her sister was still sleeping. Both of them had been using stimulants for some time but had at last succumbed to the needs of their bodies.
‘What?’ she asked blearily.
‘I am taking control of your railguns,’ he replied
She just nodded numbly and without surprise as he usurped control. He needed greater than human accuracy now. Amalgamating in one mental program the Mach-effect drive, steering thrusters, gyroscopic stability, astrogation data and the infinitesimal changes to his ship’s vector caused by railgun launches, he fired one shot every three-point-six seconds for just over a minute, adjusting his aim incrementally after each shot. Seventeen railgun missiles sped towards the Command, each with a calculated impact probability of twenty-three per cent, but only if it did not alter its course. He could manage no better than that due to the inaccuracies in targeting, and noted to himself how the steering racks of the railguns needed to be coated and microscopically polished, and some Vernier adjustment added. After that, a nudge with a steering thruster took his ship to the periphery of the fusillade from the other ship. He did not want to stray any further away, since complete avoidance would defeat his purpose in coming out here in the first place. And the situation was such that he could not avoid both these ships until the Rhine drive was ready again.
As the ships drew closer together, the Command used one of its side-burners to shift course abruptly to avoid the seventeen approaching missiles, and from that action he was able to assess the capabilities of its detection gear. The Command’s instruments would be able to detect major Mach-effect shifts in Saul’s own ship, but whether the crew might be looking out for something like that was another matter entirely. Small shifts would not be noticed, which was handy now as Saul reached the periphery of the fusillade coming back from the Command.
A small nudge with Mach-effect and a brief flare of steering thrusters altered his course just so. The two railgun missiles that had been on target now dropped to one. This struck fifty metres down from the top pole of the ship, punched through the hull and sliced through most of the intervening structure before turning into an explosion of white-hot ceramic and molten steel as it peeled away part of the internal space dock and took off the back end of the Mars-format space plane. This resulting detritus, still having lost little of its momentum, travelled down parallel to the axis of the ship, through lattice walls finally to blast out forty metres to one side of the Traveller engine, leaving an impressive plume.
With diagnostics and structural sensor data running straight into his extended mind, Saul noted just a small loss in the redundancy within structural integrity, some damage to the EM shield and Mach drive, already being tended to by a proctor and its herd of robots, and generally, just a fractional loss in battle readiness. The two who had been working in the space plane, and
who had been using its acceleration chairs, died too fast for their backups to register the moment of their deaths – turned into white-hot gas in less than a second. Their memory would be one of just sitting in acceleration chairs, and their next conscious experience would be either some interaction through the ship’s system or waking up inside new clone bodies. Saul had yet to decide on which but, for the interim, the backed-up copies of dead human minds were kept in a state of unconsciousness.
‘Further acceleration,’ he announced, firing up the Traveller engine for another course change, while also noting that only half its fresh fuel remained.
The reaction followed just minutes after, as the Command changed the orbital spiral of its course inward for better convergence. Those aboard it were now thinking that their single hit had been enough to dissuade him from his attack run, that he realized he was heading into a fight he could not win, and they were therefore moving to block him. He turned his ship again to take it up out of their plane, as if he wanted to head out and over them away from Jupiter, but also increasing orbital convergence. They moved to block again, firing their railguns back at him once more. Saul returned fire, but also fired ahead of both ships at a moonlet called Hermippe, knowing that the debris cloud would push the other ship even nearer to him. It would be a slugging match now as their courses drew closer together, rather like ancient battleships pummelling each other.
‘Brigitta,’ he declared, ‘soon you’ll get the chance to try out your new toy.’
‘About damned time,’ she replied, before sipping from a flask of coffee.