So Vile a Sin (18 page)

‘Do this,’ said Sister’s Son, ‘do that, good Ogron, bad Ogron –

all gone now. We go flying, Chris. OK?’

Chris nodded. ‘Try a quick strafing run to distract them, and then pull away. And watch your ass out there.’

‘Can’t,’ said Sister’s Son, glancing down at the straps.

‘I meant –’ The Ogron was rumbling with subsonic laughter.

Chris grinned. ‘Just be careful, OK?’

It took Chris two minutes to get back to the bridge, where Vincenzi was in charge of the engagement. Chris looked at the tactical schematic, a circle of computer graphics on the forward viewscreen.

Immediately, he knew something was wrong.

‘Sister’s Son’s fighter,’ Chris said. The icon was crawling across the screen, away from the
Victoria
. ‘He launched already.

He wasn’t supposed to launch for another two minutes!’

The Doctor was watching the screen, intently. Everyone else had their heads down in their displays.

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Chris said, ‘There’s been a mistake or something. We have to call them back.’

‘I can’t raise either of our fighters,’ said CommOps.

‘The
Pequot
have launched their fighters, sir. Iphiko class –

eight Wings. Proton cannons, no missiles,’ said TacOps.

‘Too late,’ Vincenzi told Chris, with a shake of his head.

Sister’s Son, thought Chris, what the hell have you decided?

‘Five seconds to intercept. Second fighter launching on schedule.’

The icon marking Sister’s Son’s ship flared. The data beside it turned from green to red.

‘First Wing destroyed. Second fighter firing missiles.’

‘He rammed it,’ said Chris. ‘He shot right past the Wings and rammed the
Pequot
.’

‘Goddess,’ said Vincenzi. ‘With a full complement of missiles still in their launch tubes.’

‘Severe structural damage to the
Pequot
,’ said TacOps calmly.

‘Her port engine is afire.’

The Doctor, at least the Doctor who had stayed on the bridge, was staring at the screen in disbelief.

The inverted triangles that represented Son of My Father’s ASDACs converged with the blips marking the first wave of Wings. Three of the enemy fighters flared and dropped off the display.

‘He didn’t launch too early,’ said Roz. ‘He planned to ram the frigate from the start, didn’t he?’

Captain Sokolovsky nodded.

‘Still no answer from our remaining fighter,’ said CommOps.

‘If only there was something we could do,’ said Chris.

Son of My Father’s missiles hit the remaining two fighters, destroying both. Chris heard Roz swear softly.

‘They’re not breaking off,’ said TacOps.

‘With that much damage, they may not be able to. The
Pequot
will try to launch a second flight,’ said the captain.

Do this, do that, good Ogron, bad Ogron – all gone now.

‘They’re not going to get the chance,’ said Chris.

‘But they’re
Ogrons
,’ said the Doctor. ‘Ogrons don’t do this.’

But Chris knew in his guts that some Ogrons did.

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‘Good rock,’ said Roz. ‘Bad rock.’

The
Pequot
flared and died.

‘Goddess,’ said Sokolovsky. He turned to the trooper who was standing in as SensOps. ‘Survivors?’

‘No sir,’ said the trooper.

Vincenzi said, ‘We’re OK again. They’ve bought us the time to get the repairs done and get the hell out of here.’

Chris leant on a console. ‘Geez,’ he said.

The Doctor turned to look at them. ‘Am I the
only
one who’s surprised by this?’

‘Engine burn,’ said SensOps. ‘Make that two, no three engine burns in Orestes GSO.’

‘Ident?’ asked Sokolovsky.

‘Working, sir.’

Should have been right away but Sokolovsky remembered the man was just a grunt, cross trained to near competence but a grunt nonetheless.

It had been half an hour since the
Pequot
had broken apart under the impact of the second fighter. Someone back at Agamemnon Command would have made a decision by now.

He crossed to the second SensOps board and ran an ident sequence himself. Hadn’t done that in a while. It took him all the way back to Black Body 27 and the remembrance of real fear.

Ident said that one of the bogies was a Magritte-class heavy cruiser, probably the
Giacometti
, the other two were a Dog-class and a Jaguar-class destroyer –
Dingo
and
Cougar
. That made sense, the three most modern ships left in the task force. Sent to sort out whoever’d killed the
Pequot
.

The Magritte-class carried
soldinosc
, really big, high-V

missiles with a thirty-six-megaton warhead. Given a long run they could hit a fair percentage of lightspeed and still make the terminal manoeuvres to hit a moving ship.
Giacometti
would wait until it cleared Clytemnestra’s debris ring and loose off a pair of them at the
Victoria
. Weapons like that arriving at relativistic velocities could ruin your whole day.

He turned back to the Doctor.

‘Now would be a convenient time to go to warp.’

136

The Doctor looked startled. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s fixed, we can go any time you want.’

137

Interlude – March to April 2982

Dhaulagiri, Nepal – 2 March 2982

The mountains made Thandiwe think of home. Mama said they used to be covered in snow, all year round. She tried to imagine it, white Earth snow like fluffy water, covering all the rock.

Thandiwe stood on the bed in her room. They’d be going home tomorrow; Mama was staying up late, talking to the soldiers.

Usually when they went on trips, they stayed at the new place for longer. A week or even two weeks. But these days they went somewhere for just one night and one day, and Mama talked instead of skiing or buying things.

One of the soldiers, Joanna, had put Thandiwe to bed. The Fat Monster Eater was an irregular shape under the covers, keeping the bed warm. It was the only toy Thandiwe had been allowed to bring.

Outside was very dark. Thandiwe could trace the shapes of the mountains by where they poked up into the sky, hiding the stars.

There wasn’t anything in her room, not even a terminal, just shelves and shelves of books.

She got back under the blankets with the Fat Monster Eater, which made a deep chuckling noise and cuddled up to her.

After lunch that day, Thandiwe had gone for a walk through the seminary (which was a school for priests), the Eater trailing along behind her like a big balloon. The 138

building was big and cold and quiet, and there weren’t many people around.

Most of them were in a big hall she found. They were chanting, sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking very fast. She couldn’t make out the words. It sounded like singing, like music. She watched them for a while, peeking over the top of the railing and looking down into the hall.

She tried climbing up on to the railings for a better look, but it made the Eater nervous, rolling around at her feet. It always did that when she did anything dangerous.

She hugged it, whispering. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s go in here.’ The Eater wobbled and bounced away across the floor into the new room.

It was a long hall, with a big table and lots of paintings around the walls. There were rooms like this at home. Thandiwe went up to one of the paintings. It showed a soldier from the old days, a woman in very heavy armour. The frame was incredibly fancy, gold and red and covered in squiggles and leaves. Thandiwe reached out to touch it, instinctively looking around.

Too late, she realized there was a woman in the room, getting a book down from a shelf. Thandiwe hid behind a chair, but the Fat Monster Eater was too big and round to hide. The woman looked at it in astonishment, and then her eyes found Thandiwe. ‘Hello there,’ she said. She had coppery hair and wore the same simple green clothes as everyone else here.

‘Hello.’ Thandiwe was aware of the Eater, snuggling up to her.

It was always nervous around new people.

‘My name’s Joanna. You must be Baroness Forrester’s little girl. You’ve been exploring, have you?’

‘Yes.’ There was writing under the portrait, a short sentence in a language that Thandiwe didn’t recognize. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘It’s a saying of the first Brigadier,’ said Joanna. ‘One of the nineteen calls to action.’

‘I can’t read it.’

‘I’m not surprised, it’s in British, a sub-dialect of Ancient American.’

‘What does it say?’

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‘“Shoot the winged man with five quick bullets”.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Ah,’ said Joanna, ‘I’m afraid that it rather depends on which school of interpretation you follow.’ She held out her hand to Thandiwe. ‘Would you like some tisane?’

‘Yes please,’ said Thandiwe. 'Will there be cakes?’

‘I dare say cakes can be arranged.’

Joanna led Thandiwe to a large room she called the mess hall where there were tables and chairs. They chose a seat by a window so that they could look out over the broken grey shapes of the mountains.

Thandiwe took a cake and bit into it. She swallowed and said,

‘Where are the priests?’

‘We’re all priests,’ said Joanna.

‘I thought you were soldiers.’

‘We are. Unitatus soldiers think it’s a good idea if we don’t just know how to fight – we should think about why we’re fighting, too, and think about whether fighting’s a good idea at all.’

Thandiwe nodded, taking a second cake. ‘Mama said you were like an extra army, in case someone tried to attack Earth.’

‘That’s right. The Empress lets us keep our own fleet of ships, and sometimes we fight alongside her army. Our mission is to protect Earth from alien invasions. Not that many of those happen these days… it’s more likely to be Earth invading someone else’s…’ She trailed off. ‘Good heavens,’ she said, softly.

Thandiwe sat up in her seat. It was snowing. ‘I thought it wasn’t supposed to snow here,’ she said.

Joanna looked back at her. Her eyes were big and round. ‘It hasn’t snowed here for over a century.’

‘That’s not snow,’ said Thandiwe. ‘Snow is yellow.’

Joanna looked back out of the window. ‘This isn’t sulphur snow, or whatever you’ve got on Io. It’s real water snow. It’s a miracle,’ she breathed.

‘No,’ said Mama. They both looked around. She’d come into the mess hall while they’d been staring through the window.

There were more of the soldiers with her. ‘This is no miracle. The 140

reclamation projects I’ve funded have the potential to restore this whole planet to its former state.’

Joanna had looked at her the same way she’d looked at the snow. Mama had said, ‘Imagine that. The whole Earth, returned to its former splendour.’

It was hours later, and the snow was still coming down.

Thandiwe snuggled up to the Eater. She imagined the snow covering up all the rock like a big white blanket.

Spaceport Five Undertown – 11 March 2982

Look for a garden, he’d been told, a garden in the forest.

The Reserve was a huge stretch of open land in the middle of Spaceport Five Undertown. Simon had assumed it was a city park, a patch of countryside restored using low-level terraforming techniques, but the tour guide said it had never been built over.

There weren’t even walkways stretching overhead, just blue sky, truncated at the edges by the floating shapes of the city. It was like standing at the bottom of a well.

Simon wondered how many strings had been pulled over the last millennium or so to keep this place from being used for real estate.
Keep off the grass.

The map he had been given had a red line drawn on it, enclosing a shaded, oddly shaped space, maybe ten square kilometres.

Simon watched from the window of the flitter as it ambled over the Reserve, mentally following his map. Every so often they put down in a designated tourist zone and went for a walk, the tour guide pointing out interesting plants and insects. One more stop, and they’d be as close to the red shaded area as they were going to get.

Getting away from the tour party was easy. The tour guide led his little group through a patch of forest, naming each species of tree. Simon took some photos, gawped at the canopy, straggled, and slipped behind an
Ulmus procera
.

He waited ten minutes for the tourists to move out of sight. The tour guide’s pleasant voice diminished slowly, merging with the 141

sounds of the forest. Simon leant against the elm and risked closing his eyes for a moment.

Rooftop parks didn’t sound like this. You couldn’t hear the wind making a sound like rushing water through the leaves, the tiny sounds of insects, the intermittent, soft bird calls. Or maybe you could hear them in the roof parks, and your brain just couldn’t sort them out from the chatter, screaming kids and blaring portable playbacks.

He slung his camera around his neck and moved off down the hill. If he was caught, he was a tourist who’d foolishly followed a robin in the hope of a better picture and had been wandering in increasing panic ever since, too embarrassed to call for help.

He stuck to the forest, avoiding anywhere he’d be easily visible from the sky, following his mental map without thinking. He felt an almost tangible sensation as he entered the red-shaded zone, waking him out of his murmuring thoughts. Somewhere in here, in these ten square klicks, there was a garden.

It took him another two hours to find it. He emerged from the forest into a wide, cleared area. It took him almost a minute to pick out the shape of the house. The lines of roof and wall suggested by the squiggle of vines and moss and shrubs.

Somebody had got there first.

There was a flitter parked in a hollow above the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible among the dead trees littering the slope of the hill. It let Simon get within three meters before warning him that it was authorized to use deadly force to resist theft.