Tayron snapped at her in Aghyrian. She replied in an equally angry tone.
“I am trying to assist a peaceful solution.” Federza sounded weary. I could only imagine what he had been going through since I’d come here and he had been left behind in the shuttle with the three Aghyrians.
Kando Luczon said, “The solution is that if everyone leaves us alone, there will be no problems and no weapons fired.”
“You can’t go wherever you like. This is not your world anymore.”
“According to your own laws, it is. According to those laws, there is a group of people still waiting for a response to their legal claim against the occupiers.”
Wait. The Aghyrian claim, had the captain been behind it? Had he contacted the zeyshi Aghyrians with promises of riches or land or power? Was that why, despite a few vocal voices, the claim had been largely forgotten since news of the ship had broken?
Holy shit.
I gestured for Veyada to come over. I absolutely needed to have a better witness than just the recording of this conversation, but at that very moment, an officer in the communication division yelled, “Action!”
In various parts of the command centre, people sprang into frenzied activity.
What the hell did that mean?
Ledaya took the projection off the schematic map and showed a live image. The quality was poor, shown at higher magnification than the image was intended for. I had no idea what the bright spots meant. Except they appeared to be moving. A spot in the middle flared with white and four other spots ejected a trail of bright sparks. Damn, the ship’s engines had increased burn.
I whirled at Kando Luczon. “What are you doing?”
“We are resuming our planned course.”
Damned if I understood this man, damned if anyone could get through to him. “There are hundreds of ships here that will fire at you if you come any closer.”
He did not respond to that in his usual non-communicative mood. Did he even understand the concept of war?
“Call the ship to resume its earlier orbit, now,” I yelled at him. “We have one chance to stop a fight.”
Damn it, damn it. The vector already showed that the ship was dropping in orbit, on a direct route to the station. There was no way that anyone could tell me that the Aghyrians didn’t know about the station. This was deliberate and provocative. Someone was going to fire. A lot of people were going to die. . . .
He said, in a dry tone, “Processes have been set into motion. It’s inevitable.”
“Stop those processes! If you’re bound to the ship you have means of communicating with it.”
They might even be aiming for the station. The ship might not have weapons of the calibre to make any impression on Asto’s fleet. But they could use the ship itself, built to safely traverse intergalactic debris clouds at speeds we could not comprehend. They would have no trouble with a space station. Did the military even have enough time and docking space to take their giant workforce off the station? Surely they had some means of changing the path of the station? If they did, would it be agile enough?
This started to sound like Asto all over again.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I pressed the button on my tether and reeled myself in until my knees were firmly jammed against the cargo platform facing the captain. My mind overflowed with the things I wanted to do to him: shoot him, pull him up by that stupid robe of his and punch the teeth out of his mouth, or at least slap him in the face.
But I couldn’t do any of that.
Because I was a negotiator and I never lost my temper. Because, if I would attempt to do those things, I wouldn’t be very good at it. Because it was not my style.
So I just sat there, like a hunting cat ready to spring. I was trembling all over. One day, when Kando Luczon was no longer important to the peace, I was going to go up to his front door, and when he opened, I’d shoot the fucking bastard. Just like that. Until then, I was a coward.
“Cory,” Thayu said, her voice soft. She was floating towards me.
I turned around, and almost lost it at the look of concern on her face. Even though our feeders didn’t work, she acted like she knew what was going on. I loved her so much. I didn’t care what she wanted me to do. I’d do it.
She put her hand on my arm. The warmth of her palm radiated through the fabric of my sleeve.
“Leave them for the time being. The ship will probably move soon, and we have to be secured.”
She accompanied me back to our upside-down mushroom with seats.
The weapons command below my feet was in a state of frantic activity. Ledaya enlarged the view of the Aghyrian ship and surrounding space. A few ships were already lining up, small specks against the behemoth.
“What can they do against anything that size?”
Veyada said, “I suspect they’ll try to create a diversion so that a small crew can break into the ship from the outside and disable the shield.”
I remembered how we had entered the ship, and how the pilot of our shuttle had no control over where we went. How could anyone try to breach the shield? What did they know that we, having visited the ship, hadn’t seen? That ship knew exactly what was going on around it.
A couple of smaller craft flew in formation quite close to the Aghyrian ship.
I thought I spotted a burst of fire from one of them. I presumed it was firing at the big ship, but I couldn’t see whether or not it hit its target. All I could see was the futility of it.
A flash bloomed out from the big ship. That definitely hit the target as the small ship disintegrated. And another one and another one. The small ships had disintegrated into a cloud of debris.
“That seems like a stupid move,” I said, feeling sick.
Thayu said, “Those were drones. There were no crew aboard those ships.”
“Who told you that?”
“Standard engagement manoeuvre. I’m surprised they’re falling for it. Watch what they’re doing down there.”
In the command centre, weapons crew were frantically analysing and calculating. Clearly I had misunderstood the point of the drones. They had been deliberately sacrificed to collect valuable data on the nature of the ship’s weapons. Screens displayed ranges and possible weapon types.
Kando Luczon sat quietly, his back straight, his legs folded and his hands on his knees. Next to him, Tayron sat in exactly the same position. Lilona had slumped over. Her shoulders were shaking and her cheeks glittered with tears. One of her hands lay in her lap, but Federza held the other. Under the soft skin of the underside of her arm, a row of angry red lights flashed. She tried to pull her arm free, but Federza held it firmly.
“Kill me. Just kill me. He’s using my connection to communicate with the crew. I don’t know how long I can hold out. Kill me, now, before he orders them to attack.”
Tayron hit out at her, lightning fast. But he wore a blindfold and missed. He leaned over and grabbed Lilona’s free hand, twisting her arm.
She screamed at him in Aghyrian.
Federza snapped something at Tayron, and Tayron spat at Federza.
I called out, “Hey, that’s not how you treat a crew member.” I pushed off my seat and floated back to the platform.
Thayu was with me. She took her gun out of its bracket, and pushed the end against Tayron’s head. “Do you feel that? Do you know what this is?”
He lifted his chin. “Killing me will have no effect. I’m not bound and my position on the ship is of no importance whatsoever. Kill her, if you need. She has fulfilled her purpose.”
“Is that how you talk about the people who have given you a lifetime’s worth of service?” Thayu poked harder. “The Delegate is very nice and even tempered. If he weren’t here, if it was up to us, you’d be dead many times over. I guess you haven’t come here to be shot by us, so you might like to—”
“Action!” someone shouted.
I turned around so that I could see the projection. Thayu turned around. Crew all th
roughout the command centre went quiet.
The navigator zoomed out. He overlaid the projection of the thousands of little dots, each representing a ship, with an image of light filaments interweaving, all connecting to the same point in space.
The array of nodes blinked and pulsed again. In the split-second before the lights went off and the command room went dark, I saw a bright shape: a second ship had jumped.
We hadn’t even known about a second Aghyrian ship in the system. This was not a visit to their place of origin. It was an invasion. These Aghyrians had lied to us about everything.
Alarms started blaring, voices were more agitated than before. In amongst all the military’s urgent voices, I heard Ledaya’s shouting orders. We had lost contact with Fleet Command, but the weapons people could fire at will.
Why I had had no idea.
We had no defence against these people at all.
Chapter 28
* * *
FIRST THE INTERNAL lights and screens came back on.
The weapons team started up their systems immediately. The crew were tense, with hands on the controls. Waiting for orders, waiting for the outside feed to come back online.
First the viewscreens flickered into life. Without the scope feed, Ledaya couldn’t enlarge the live view, and the unenlarged version was not very informative. Ships were no more than little dots against the starscape, if we could see them at all.
Then the three-dimensional projection in the middle of the command room came back up. Several people took in sharp breaths, but I didn’t understand why.
“What is that thing?” Deyu whispered
I stared at the projection, confused by the mess of trailing jump wake lines that resembled old spider webs strung over bare tree branches. Ledaya enlarged an area further.
A long, stylus-like shape resolved in the projection, visible only because it trailed anpar filaments as if it had just flown through a dense concentration of spider webs.
That shape was familiar.
It looked like—No, it was the military sling.
“How the hell did they end up here?” I asked.
“They must have figured out how to use the array,” Thayu said. “And the Aghyrians, not expecting them to be able to do this, had not closed the line or dampened their wake.”
Sheydu shook her head. “That is a major miscalculation.”
Seated in the command chair, Ledaya balled his fist.
A few of the crew did the same, smiles on faces, and with shining eyes.
There might have been the odd, very uncharacteristic, cheer.
Everyone went back to work. Data scrolled over screens, commands rang around the room.
The sling ship kept a good distance. It was still smaller than the Aghyrian ship but not that much shorter. It went through a series of engine burns that kept it directly behind the Aghyrian ship and that positioned it so that the focus point of the output beam was focused on the ship. It was hard to see that from our position, even in the projection, but Thayu explained it to me.
Space warfare, people had told me on many different occasions, involved long periods of manoeuvring with very short periods of intense action. It also involved extraordinary amounts of physics.
“I don’t understand why the Aghyrian ship doesn’t move away,” I said. “They have to realise that this thing is a weapon.”
Thayu said, “I would stay, too, if I had as much confidence in the integrity of my shields as they seem to have. They would be running calculations to determine where and how they can move through a series of configurations where the sling will always be pointing at one of our ships as well as theirs. Well—I don’t know that they’re doing that, but I would.”
“Maybe you should run a pirate fleet or something.”
She smiled, nervously. We were both nervous. Everyone was nervous. I didn’t like all this waiting. I kept looking at the clock ticking down to the moment the ship would come into range of the station. I trusted that Ezhya was not going to let that happen.
Ledaya held his hand up to get my attention. “Tell the hostages how the new situation stands. One last chance.”
I was still floating next to the platform where the Aghyrians sat. The tether line hung slack. I reeled it in, pulling myself onto the platform.
I faced the captain, who still sat with his back straight.
“A ship has just jumped that will give the Coldi military a big advantage if it were to come to a fight. I plead you to change your ship’s course, or the Chief Coordinator will order to have this weapon fired. I don’t want that to happen. You have a crew of thousands. We have no desire to kill these people.”
“You have a very high opinion of the strength of your weapons.”
“You have a high opinion of the strength of your shield.”
“Yes. I’m not worried. You, on the other hand, are all afraid. You’re afraid that we are going to hit that precious base of yours, and we will. And there is nothing anyone can do about it.”
“You cannot murder all these people yet again!” Lilona yelled at him and continued in Aghyrian.
He replied. I didn’t understand what he said, but the disdain dripped from his voice.
“Why does she allow him to talk to her like that?” Deyu whispered.
Ezhya’s voice came through the loudspeaker. “We have the sling aimed at your ship. Change course, or there will be a warning shot.”
We waited.
Kando Luczon’s face was impassive. Was there any communication between him and the ship going on?
And waited.
No one spoke; barely anyone dared move. All those crewmembers in the command room watched the three-dimensional projection. The Aghyrian ship’s engines remained off. The clock counted down.
Kando Luczon said nothing. Lilona sat silently crying, pulled as far from him as her bonds allowed. She held Federza’s hand.
In the heavy silence, Ezhya’s voice sounded loud. “I do not see a change. I’m out of patience. Fire.”
No one moved; no one spoke. Not even the faintest whisper or beep of a machine broke the silence.
Kando Luczon sat with his chin in the air, as if he were meditating. We had tested all three of them for equipment, and found nothing. Yet I still didn’t believe that nothing was there.
We waited. And stared at the projection. My heart was thudding like crazy.
Too long.
Damn, it didn’t work. The sling was damaged or jammed, or the ship had a counter-weapon that rendered it harmless—
A blindingly bright beam crossed the space from the sling to the behemoth ship. It hit to the side of the shield and would have whizzed past into space if the shield had not been there. Instead, the charge glanced off an invisible barrier that surrounded the ship. For a moment I thought this was it, but then a bright glow spread around the ship. White turned to angry, pulsing red, enveloping the ship before fading slowly.
“All the outside lights have gone out,” Deyu said.
She was right. Not that the ship had been well-lit to begin with, but now it was completely dark.
Thayu whispered to me, “Look.”
She pointed at the projection, where a shape glowed so brightly that it was hard to make out what it was.
“That’s the shield,” she said.
The hit from the sling had created a pulsing anpar field full of angry, pulsing energy. As the ship moved, wisps of energy eddied off into space, but this didn’t reduce the glow noticeably.
We waited. I barely dared breathe.
Below my feet, the weapons team waited ready to respond with a massive display of fire. Our shield was up as well, which blurred the view on the viewscreens.
Ledaya switched the three-dimensional projection to visible light and enlarged it until a replica of the Aghyrian ship hung in the middle of the room. The outside was still dark.
Sheydu frowned. “I can’t imagine that this glancing blow would have killed the ship. They’re acting. Drawin
g out time. They want to destroy the station.”
Ledaya was still waiting.
Kando Luczon sat with his eyes closed. His face looked pale and thin. The Aghyrian crew were all unhealthy, if Lilona was to be believed. Was this some sort of macabre suicide mission?
Thayu whispered, “Look at the clock.”
“That was a warning shot,” came Ezhya’s voice through the loudspeakers. “If you do not change course within the count of thirty, we will aim at the centre of the ship and will keep firing until the shield explodes from the heat.”
The captain’s face remained blank and emotionless.
Bright green numbers started the countdown: twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . . twenty-seven . . .
The space station was already over the horizon. It was not particularly well-armed, I thought.
I didn’t understand why Ezhya left the Aghyrians in this orbit for so long. If I was him, I would have fired immediately and kept the ship a safe distance from the station. If they killed it now, what was the guarantee that the empty hull or debris wouldn’t hit the station? I hoped someone was moving the station to a higher orbit. I hoped that was possible.
Twenty-one . . . twenty . . . nineteen . . .
How many people even lived on the station? I hoped they had been able to evacuate a good proportion of them, but I knew there would barely have been any time.
Fifteen . . . fourteen . . . thirteen . . .
Ledaya sat with his hands on the controls. Watching, ready to spring when the order came.
Twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .
I wiped sweat from my upper lip. Lilona hid her face in her hands. A line of lights flashed angry red under the soft skin of her forearm.
Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .
This was ridiculous. I called out to Kando Luczon, “Come on. You can stop this. They will destroy you. Have you really come here to have your people murdered?”
Six . . . five . . . four . . .
Thayu and Veyada stared at the projection of the ship. The shield glowed as brightly as it had previously, with trailing strands of energy. It was not shedding its energy quickly enough to be able to absorb another hit.
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