Engine City (32 page)

After about half an hour of fighting, the first prisoners began to come back—initially the few armed men on the geostationary forts, then SDF cosmonauts and technicians, then a sudden flood from the Trojan fort and the two lunar stations. The space marines had fought hard, but the sheer surprise and the prisoners’ shock as they arrived in the hangar after being thrown bodily aboard the skiffs made them compliant. As the nearer stations were secured forty-odd soldiers piled into four skiffs that were assigned to the first two asteroid forts, one only five light-minutes away, the other twenty-five. Matt traveled with one pair of skiffs, Telesnikov with the other. The departures were staggered by twenty minutes, so that they would hit each fort simultaneously.

A skiff from the first squad returned, with casualties and prisoners, after about half an hour. One of the prisoners, triumphantly collared by Matt, was Volkov.

The two Cosmonauts came off the skiff still screaming at each other. Blood ran from Volkov’s mouth. Matt’s pistol muzzle had been jammed against his upper lip, but despite that, he was still yelling. What they were saying was hard to make out but Matt’s most oft-repeated epithet was “Murdering commie bastard” and Volkov’s was “Spider-loving scumsucking traitor son of a bitch.” Two Marines rushed up and parted them. Matt used his advantage as he was being dragged off to kick Volkov as hard as he could in the crotch. Volkov gasped and doubled up, almost wrenching himself away from the Marine, then shouted:

“You haven’t won, you bastards! Give up while you still have a chance!”

“Jeez,” said Matt, shrugging off his restraint, “I should kill him now.”

“Do that if you want, you can’t stop us!”

Then Volkov slumped, whether with delayed shock from the kick or in passive resistance it was hard to say, but at least he shut up. He was dragged off and snap-cuffed with the other prisoners.

“What happened?” Susan asked. One of the Marine officers rushed up.

“He got an appeal out before we got him,” Matt said. “A call to the citizens and military of New Babylon to rise against the Spider-infiltrated remnants of the de Zama clique and resist their Illyrian pawns. Don’t know how effective it’ll be, but it may be taken up.”

“Damn,” said the officer. “Civil war and national resistance in the Republic is not what we need.”

Matt jumped back on the skiff at the head of a fresh squad. Both skiffs returned shortly afterward, the station secure. The squad led by Telesnikov came back from the farther station in a bad way. They’d won, but they’d had a struggle getting back through howling, thinning air and then, briefly, vacuum as the defenders suited up and evacuated the air from the areas of fighting. The Multipliers had a lot of repairing and reviving to do.

“They got warnings off,” said Telesnikov. “The third station will be ready for us, they’ll have suited up and blown all the air out and they’ll have armed men in every compartment.”

“How many suits have you got?” the Marines’ CO asked.

“Ten,” said Johnson. “And our people aren’t well-trained in them, let alone for fighting in them. Training up your guys would take too long.”

“Could take the other sides’ suits,” said Susan, looking at some prisoners being taken off the
Investigator
, to which they’d been shuttled by a skiff on site.

Matt and Telesnikov were shaking their heads.

“Same problems, plus sabotage and creative misunderstanding,” said Matt.

“Do we need to take the third station right away?” Ramona asked. “It’s not like it can hit New Earth from the other side of the sun.”

Matt glared at her. “You
know
this? I don’t. It has onboard nukes which I don’t want to see coming our way, even in a couple of months. And it can zap the other stations with its plasma cannon. No way are we going to leave it a minute longer than we have to. We’ll have to nuke it from the outside.”

“We don’t have—” began the Marine commander. Then he grinned. “We do now.”

“You’ll need someone to arm it,” said Ramona.

Matt and Telesnikov stalked off among the prisoners. After a few minutes in a clamor of raised voices, the two returned, to everyone’s surprise, with Volkov. His arms were in their grip and his wrists were cuffed at his back, there was blood on his chin and bruises were swelling on his face, but he still looked defiant and dangerous.

“He has something to tell us,” said Matt. “The others bear him out, for what that’s worth.”

“You’ve got all this wrong,” Volkov said. “The strike on New Babylon did not come from us, I swear. When you have time you can check the stations’ computers, check their arsenals, and you can verify what I say. All the nuclear weapons are there and accounted for. And none of them are small tactical nukes. They’re all multimegaton asteroid-busters. What hit New Babylon today was a large meteor traveling very fast, punching vertically through the atmosphere. Unless it was a quite extraordinary accident, it came from the gods. They are capable of that, we know they are, they can line up orbital instabilities over decades ready to strike at will. There could be more at any moment, or worse. You know they have been preparing something, you’ve seen the comets!”

“Why should they strike now?” Matt asked. “It seems another extraordinary coincidence that they should finally get around to hitting New Babylon decades after you started annoying them and just when we happen to be—”

He stopped. “Oh, shit.”

“Oh shit indeed,” snarled Volkov. “They know you’re here, and they’re fighting on
your side.
” He glared around. “Or you’re fighting on theirs—that’s what all my men concluded when you attacked the only defenses we have!”

“The defenses didn’t work today,” Susan said.

Volkov looked at her curiously. “They’re not much use against something that small and fast. They’re very useful indeed against something bigger and slower. Salasso can tell you all about major impact events.”

The saur responded with a thin smile.

“All right,” said Matt, “but if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t a nuke, why the hell didn’t you say so?”

“I have to admit that we were still considering whether we could wring some political advantage from the misconception,” said Volkov.

Matt let go of Volkov’s arm and stood back. “You know,” he said, “I can believe that. You haven’t changed.”

Volkov nodded. “Be that as it may, I can help you now. If you take me to any of the captured stations, I can use its comms to tell the remaining orbital station what is actually going on, and order them to accept your boarders without resistance.”

“They’ll do that?” said Telesnikov.

“Oh yes,” said Volkov. “One thing you got right, they’ll do what I tell them.”

“Even if it means handing over the station to the enemy?”

Volkov snorted. “New Babylon’s decapitated and in convulsions. Illyria is now the only power that can take charge of space defense—it’s
our side
, not the enemy.”

“Who is the enemy?” Susan asked. Quick, to record this, to get the history . . . 

Volkov’s eyes narrowed. “The Spiders—the Bright Star Cultures may be the enemy. We’ll see how that works out, and I would strongly recommend that these gentlemen”—he nodded at the Illyrian officers—“bear that in mind, whatever the tactical alliances of the moment. But the enemy of the moment and for the future, our certain and eternal enemies, are the gods. And we have good reason to think the gods have more of these strikes lined up. We have to hit back at them immediately and terribly, to make them aware that they cannot hit us with impunity.”

“How can we do that?” Matt asked.

Volkov grinned suddenly. “You were looking for someone who could arm a nuke.”

“This time I’m coming along,” Susan said.

Volkov had been to the nearest orbital station and back, and a positive reply to his message had come back after over an hour’s inevitable delay. They had used this time to mount an asteroid-buster warhead to one of the
Investigator’s
ship-to-ship missiles, and to download the location of an asteroid that, according to Space Defense, had an indwelling god. The plan was for Mr. Orange to plot a jump to within a kilometer of the asteroid, fire off the missile with a hacked one-minute fuse, and jump back instantly to ten thousand kilometers, just ahead of the light.

“You’re not coming,” said Matt.

“It’s not up to you,” said Susan.

Phil Johnson, with some reluctance, was persuaded. Susan followed him, Ann, and Matt aboard. The rest of the crew consisted only of Salasso, Volkov, Mr. Orange, and Obadiah Hynde the rocketeer.

Crouched in the cockpit, videoing through the window, Susan fought the sense of panic and strangeness at jumping from the ground in a human-built ship. The scene in the hangar, with soldiers and revenants and prisoners milling about in the dusk and skiffs blurring in and out of jump, was bizarre enough to make her queasy even without this. The cabin lights were out, so that they could see the asteroid’s night side.

“Coordinates set,” said Mr. Orange.

“Coordinates entered and checked,” said Matt.

“Missile primed and deployed,” came Obadiah’s voice on the speaker.

“Comms open and clear,” said Salasso.

“Jump,” said Phil.

The next thing that appeared in Susan’s viewfinder was a dim-lit wall of rock. The impression that it was falling on them was overpowering.

“Fuse set to one minute and counting down,” said Volkov.

“Release missile grapple,” said Phil.

“Missile released,” said Obadiah. “Holding fire.”

Phil and Ann looked at each other. The first ten seconds of countdown ticked away.

“I can’t make this decision,” said Phil. “Handing over command to First Contact Convener.”

“Nuke the fucker,” said Matt.

“Mr. Hynde,” said Salasso gently, “fire the missile on my responsibility, and on my mark. Is this entirely understood?”

“The missile trigger,” said Obadiah shakily, “is the red-handled knife switch on the left of the control panel.”

Susan was never able to tell from her recording whether it was Matt’s hand, or Salasso’s, or Volkov’s, that reached the switch first.

Blood of Spiders

THE MIST THINNED
. Gaius Gonatus walked a few more steps down the rough trail and found that he was below the cloud, and looking over forested foothills to the moors of southeastern Illyria. The wire of the refugee camp glinted in the valley just a couple of kilometers below. It seemed farther away than the entire journey behind him. He wondered if the perception of distance to be traveled was logarithmic. He wondered if “logarithmic” was the appropriate analogy. Pondering this thought kept him going until he reached “asymptopic” and the gate.

The guard had the green helmet of the Civil Corps. He had watched Gaius’s slow approach without moving to help.

“Welcome to Illyria,” he said, without moving his eyes.

“Fuck you,” said Gaius. “I’m Illyrian.”

He lurched through the open gate and into the reception area. His feet had just been examined for frostbite and treated with disinfectant for blisters and cuts when the Department’s man in the camp found him and loaded him onto a big military autogyro reeking of paraffin and full of North Genean mercenaries. He was back in New Babylon in two hours. The autogyro landed between craters at the main airport. The sound of distant small arms fire came from several directions. The mercenaries deployed to the perimeter. Gaius limped to the terminal building. Illyrian, Lapithian, and Genean League soldiers were everywhere. Attulus met him in the lounge. The window was broken but the bar was open.

“What the hells happened downtown?” asked Gaius, as soon as the first brandy was inside him and the next was in front of him.

“Tactical nuke,” said Attulus. “Volkov is alive, apparently. He ordered the strike from orbit.”

Gaius felt the back of his neck tighten, hunching his shoulders against a blow from above. He straightened up.

“It’s all right,” said Attulus. “Volkov’s safe in our hands. So are the space stations.”

“How?”

“Mingulayan advance guard. It was their skiffs we saw. They came in on our side. They and their furry alien friends.”

Atullus scuttled his fingers across the tabletop. Gaius closed his eyes and opened them again.

“Why did Volkov nuke his own capital?”

“He made an impassioned television broadcast just before he was captured, calling on all good Volkovists to rise.” Attulus waved at the window. “Which they have. He claimed that the central apparat was riddled with people who had sold out to the Spiders, starting at the top. The very top.”

“Good gods above. Where did he get that idea from?”

“You should know, old chap,” said Attulus.

Gaius took a gulp of brandy to stop the hot rise of his gorge. “They tapped my call?”

Attulus grinned thinly. “Nothing so melodramatic. As soon as we got your call we passed every juicy detail, garbled rumor, and reckless speculation to our contacts in the Volkovist old guard in the SDK. I must admit, we didn’t expect to get quite so much detonation for a dinar, but there you go.”

Gaius said nothing. His mouth had dried up completely. A burst of small arms fire echoed from beyond the perimeter.