The Revelation Space Collection (295 page)

‘Clear of
Zodiacal Light
, Antoinette.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I think I can start breathing again.’

Through the flight deck windows the lighthugger still loomed enormously large, extending in either direction like a great dark cliff, chiselled here and there with strangely mechanistic outcrops, defiles and prominences. The docking bay
Storm Bird
had just cleared was a diminishing rectangle of gold light in the nearest part of the cliff, the huge toothed doors already sliding towards each other. Yet even though the doors were sealing, there was still adequate room for smaller vessels to make their departures. She saw them with her own eyes and on the various tactical displays and radar spheres that packed the flight deck. As the armoured jaws slid towards closure, small skeletal attack ships, little more than armoured trikes, were able to slip between the teeth. They zipped out, riding agile high-burn antimatter-catalysed fusion rockets. They made Antoinette think of the mouth-cleaning parasites of some enormous underwater monster. By comparison,
Storm Bird
was a sizeable fish in its own right.

The departure had been the most technically difficult she had ever known. Clavain’s surprise attack demanded that
Zodiacal Light
sustain a deceleration of three gees until its arrival within ten light-seconds of
Nostalgia for Infinity
. All the attack ships in the current wave had been forced to make their departures under the same three gees of thrust. Exiting any spacecraft bay was a technically demanding operation, most especially when the departing ships were armed and fuel-heavy. But doing it under sustained thrust was an order of magnitude more difficult again. Antoinette would have considered it a white-knuckle job if Clavain had demanded that they exit at a half-gee, the way rim pilots arrived and departed from Carousel New Copenhagen. But three gees? That was just being sadistic.

But she had made it. Now she had clear space for hundreds of metres in any direction, and a lot more than that in most.

‘Cut in tokamak on my mark, Ship. Five . . . four . . . three ... two . . . and
mark
.’ Through years of conditioning she tensed, anticipating the tiny thump in the seat of her pants that always signified the switch from nuclear rockets to pure fusion.

It never came.

‘Fusion burn sustained and steady. Green across the board. Three gees, Antoinette.’

She raised an eyebrow and nodded. ‘Damn, but that was smooth.’

‘You can thank Xavier for that, and perhaps Clavain. They found a glitch in one of the oldest drive-management subroutines. It was responsible for a slight mismatch in thrust during the switch between thrust modes.’

She switched to a lower-magnification view of the lighthugger, one that showed the entire length of the hull. Streams of makeshift attack craft - mostly trike-sized, but up to small shuttles - were emerging from five different bays along the hull. Many of the craft were decoys, and not all of the decoys had enough fuel to get within a light-second of
Nostalgia for Infinity
. But even knowing that it still looked impressive. The huge ship appeared to be bleeding streams of light.

‘And you had nothing to do with it?’

‘One always tries one’s best.’

‘I never thought otherwise, Ship.’

‘I’m sorry about what happened, Antoinette . . .’

‘I’m over it, Ship.’

She couldn’t call it Beast any more. And she certainly couldn’t bring herself to call it Lyle Merrick.

Ship would have to do.

She switched to an even lower magnification, calling up an overlay that boxed the numerous attack craft, tagging them with numeric codes according to type, range, crew and armament, and plotted their vectors. Some idea of the scale of the assault now became apparent. There were around a hundred ships in total. Sixty or so of the hundred were trikes, and about thirty of the trikes actually carried assault-squad members - usually one heavily armoured pig, although there were one or two tandem trikes for specialist operations. All of the crewed trikes carried some form of armament, ranging from single-use grasers to gigawatt-yield Breitenbach bosers. The crew all wore servo armour; most carried firearms, or would be able to disengage and carry their trike’s weapon when they reached the enemy ship.

There were about thirty intermediate-sized craft: two- or three-seater closed-hull shuttles. They were all of civilian design, either adapted from the ships that had already been present in
Zodiacal Light’
s holds when she was captured, or supplied by H from his own raiding fleets. They were equipped with a similar spectrum of armaments as the trikes, but also carried the heavier equipment: missile racks and specialised hard-docking gear. And then there were nine medium-to-large shuttles or corvettes, all capable of holding at least twenty armoured crew and with hulls long enough to carry the smallest kind of railgun slug-launchers. Three of these craft carried inertia-suppressors, extending their acceleration ceiling from four to eight gees. Their blocky hulls and asymmetric designs marked them as non-atmospheric ships, but this would be no handicap in the anticipated sphere of combat.

Storm Bird
was much larger than the other ships, large enough that its own hold now contained three shuttles and a dozen trikes, along with their associated crews. It had no inertia-suppression machinery - the technology had proven impossible to replicate
en masse
, especially under the conditions aboard
Zodiacal Light
- but by way of compensation, Antoinette’s ship carried more armaments and more armour than any other ship in the assault fleet. It wasn’t a freighter now, she thought. It was a warship, and she had better start getting used to the idea.

‘Little . . . I mean, Antoinette?’

‘Yes?’ she asked, gritting her teeth.

‘I just wanted to say ... now . . . before it’s too late ...’

She hit the switch that disabled the voice, then eased out of her seat and into her exoskeleton. ‘Later, Ship. I’ve got to inspect the troops.’

Alone, with his hands clasped tightly behind his back, Clavain stood in the stiff embrace of his exoskeleton, watching the departure of the attack ships from an observation cupola.

The drones, decoys, trikes and ships gyred and wheeled as they left
Zodiacal Light
, falling into designated squadrons. The cupola’s smart glass protected his eyes against the savage glare of the exhausts, smudging the core of each flame with black so that he saw only the violet extremities. In the distance, far beyond the swarm of departing ships, was the brown-grey crescent face of Resurgam, the whole planet as small as a marble held at arm’s length. His implants indicated the position of Volyova’s lighthugger, though the other ship was much too distant to see with the naked eye. Yet a single neural command made the cupola selectively magnify that part of the image so that a reasonably sharp view of
Nostalgia for Infinity
swelled out of darkness. The Triumvir’s ship was nearly ten light-seconds away, but it was also very large; the four-kilometre-long hull subtended an angle of a third of an arc-second, which was well within the resolving capabilities of
Zodiacal Light’
s smallest optical telescopes. The downside was that the Triumvir would have at least as good a view of his own ship. Provided she was paying attention, she would not be able to miss the departure of the attack fleet.

Clavain knew now that the baroque augmentations he had seen before and dismissed as phantoms added by the processing software were quite real; that something astonishing and strange had happened to Volyova’s ship. The ship had remade itself into a festering gothic caricature of what a starship ought to look like. Clavain could only speculate that the Melding Plague must have had something to do with it. The only other place he had seen transformations that even approximated what he was seeing now was in the warped, phantasmagorical architecture of Chasm City. He had heard of ships being infected with the plague, and he had heard that sometimes the plague reached the repair-and-redesign machinery which allowed ships to evolve, but he had never heard of a ship becoming so thoroughly
perverted
as this one while still, so far as he could tell, being able to continue functioning as a ship. It made his skin crawl just to look it. He hoped that no one living had been caught up in those transformations.

The sphere of battle would encompass the ten light-seconds between
Zodiacal Light
and the other ship, although its focus would be determined by Volyova’s movements. It was a good volume for a war, Clavain thought. Tactically, it was not the scale that mattered so much as the typical crossing times for various craft and weapons.

At three gees, the sphere could be crossed in four hours; a little over two hours for the fastest ships in the fleet. A hyperfast missile would take fewer than forty minutes to span the sphere. Clavain had already dug through his memories of previous battle campaigns, searching for tactical parallels. The Battle of Britain - an obscure aerial dispute from one of the early transnational wars, fought with subsonic piston-engined aircraft - had encompassed a similar volume from the point of view of crossing times, although the three-dimensional element had been much less important. The twenty-first century’s global wars were less relevant; with sub-orbital waverider drones, no point on the planet had been more than forty minutes away from annihilation. But the solar system wars of the latter half of that century offered more useful parallels. Clavain thought of the Earth-Moon secession crisis, or the battle for Mercury, noting victories and failures and the reasons for each. He thought of Mars, too, of the battle against the Conjoiners at the end of the twenty-second century. The sphere of combat had reached far above the orbits of Phobos and Deimos, so that the effective crossing time for the fastest single-person fighters had been three or four hours. There had been timelag problems, too, with line-of-sight communications blocked by huge clouds of silvered chaff.

There had been other campaigns, other wars. It was not necessary to bring them all to mind. The salient lessons were there already. He knew the mistakes that others had made; he knew also the mistakes he had made in the earlier engagements of his career. They had never been significant errors, he thought, or he would not be standing here now. But no lesson was valueless.

A pale reflection moved across the cupola’s glass.

‘Clavain.’

He snapped around with a whirr of his exoskeleton. He had imagined himself to be alone until then.

‘Felka ...’ he said, surprised.

‘I came to watch it happen,’ she said.

Her own exoskeleton propelled her towards him with a stiff, marching gait, like someone being escorted by invisible guards. Together they watched the dregs of the attack squadron fall into space.

‘If you didn’t know it was war ...’ he began.

‘ ... it would almost be beautiful,’ she said. ‘Yes. I agree.’

‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?’ Clavain asked.

‘Why do you ask me?’

‘You’re the closest thing I have left to a conscience, Felka. I keep asking myself what Galiana would do, if she were here now . . .’

Felka interrupted him. ‘She would worry, just as you worry. It’s the people who don’t worry - those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right - they’re the ones that cause the problems. People like Skade.’

He remembered the searing flash when he had destroyed
Nightshade
. ‘I’m sorry about what happened.’

‘I told you to do it, Clavain. I know it was what Galiana wanted.’

‘That I should kill her?’

‘She died years ago. She just didn’t . . . end. All you’ve done is close the book.’

‘I removed any possibility of her ever living again,’ he said.

Felka held his age-spotted hand. ‘She would have done the same to you, Clavain. I know it.’

‘Perhaps. But you still haven’t told me if you agree with
this
.’