It was all a distraction, of course. Skade might have slipped through the Demarchists’ final line of defences, but in the last three days she had become aware that her difficulties were not entirely at an end. There was something following her, coming out of the Yellowstone system on a very similar trajectory.
It was time, Skade decided, to share this news with Felka.
Nightshade was silent. Skade’s footsteps were all she heard as she made her way down to the sleep bay. They rang hard and regular as hammers in a foundry. The ship was accelerating at two gees, the inertia-suppressing machinery running smooth and quiet, but walking for Skade was effortless.
Skade had frozen Felka shortly after news reached Skade of her most recent failure. At that point it had become clear, following scrutiny of news items around Yellowstone, that Clavain had eluded her again; that Remontoire and the pig had not succeeded in capturing him but had themselves fallen victim to local bandits. It would have been attractive at that point to assume that Clavain himself was dead, but she had made that mistake before and was not about to fall into the same error again. That was precisely why she had kept Felka back, as leverage to be used in any future negotiations with Clavain. She knew what he thought about Felka.
It wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter.
Skade had intended to return to the Mother Nest on completion of the mission, but the failure to kill Clavain forced her to reconsider. Nightshade was capable of continuing into interstellar space, and any minor technical issues could be dealt with on the way to Delta Pavonis. The Master of Works did not need her direct supervision to finish building the evacuation fleet either. Once the fleet was flight-ready and equipped with inertia-suppressing machinery, part of it would follow Skade towards the Resurgam system, while the rest would set off in a different direction, loaded with sleeping evacuees. A single crustbuster warhead would finish off the Mother Nest.
Skade would attempt to recover the weapons. If she failed on her first attempt, she would have only to wait for her backup fleet to arrive. Those were much larger starships and they could carry larger armaments than Nightshade, up to heavy relativistic railguns. Once she had obtained possession of the lost weapons, she would rendezvous with the rest of the evac fleet in a different system, in the opposite half of the sky from Delta Pavonis, as far away from the Inhibitor encroachment as they could get.
Then they would set off into even deeper space, many dozens, perhaps even hundreds of light-years into the galactic plane. It was time to say goodbye to local solar space. None of them were very likely to see it again.
The constellations will shift, Skade thought; not just by a few small degrees, but enough to wrench them out of shape. For the first time in history they would live under truly alien skies, uncomforted by the mythic shapes of their childhood, those chance alignments of stars which human consciousness had imprinted with meaning. And at the same time they would know those skies to be cruel, as infested with monsters as any enchanted forest.
She felt her weight shift, as if she had been on a sea vessel in a sudden squall. Skade steadied herself against the wall and established a link to Jastrusiak and Molenka, her two inertia-suppression systems experts.
Something up?
Molenka, the female of the two, responded to Skade’s query. [Nothing, Skade. Just a small bubble instability. Nothing unexpected.]
I want to know if anything untoward happens, Molenka. We may need much more out of this equipment, and I want to have absolute confidence in it.
Now it was Jastrusiak’s turn. [We have everything under control, Skade. The machinery is in a perfectly stable state-two condition. Small instabilities are damped back to the mean.]
Good. But try to keep those instabilities in check, will you?
Skade was about to add that they terrified her, but thought better of it. She must not reveal her fears to the others, not when so much depended on them accepting her leadership. It was difficult enough to make members of a hive mind submit to her will, and the one thing that would have undermined her control would have been the faintest hint of doubt in her own abilities.
There were no more irregularities in the field. Satisfied, Skade continued her journey to the sleeper bay.
Only two of the reefersleep caskets were occupied. Skade had instigated Felka’s wake-up cycle six hours earlier. Now the nearer of the two caskets was easing open, exposing Felka’s unconscious form. Skade softened her approach to the casket, crouching down on her metal haunches until she was level with Felka. The casket’s diagnostic aura told her that Felka was merely sleeping now, in a mild REM state. Skade observed the tremble of her eyelids and placed a steel hand on to Felka’s forearm. She squeezed gently, and Felka moaned and shifted.
Felka. Felka. Wake up now.
Felka came around slowly. Skade waited patiently, doting on Felka with something close to affection.
Felka. Understand me. You are coming out of reefersleep. You have been frozen for six weeks. You will feel discomfort and disorientation, but it will fade. You have nothing to fear.
Felka opened her eyes to a pained squint, affronted even by the dim blue lighting of the sleep bay. She moaned again and tried to get out of the casket, but the effort was too much for her, especially under two gees.
Easy.
Felka mumbled and slurred a series of sounds, over and over, until they formed recognisable words. ‘Where am I?’
Aboard Nightshade. You remember, don’t you? We went after Clavain, into the inner system.
‘Clavain…’ She said nothing more for ten or fifteen seconds, before adding, ‘Dead?’
I don’t think so, no.
Felka succeeded in opening her eyes a little wider. ‘Tell me… what happened.’
Clavain fooled us with the corvette. He made it to the Rust Belt. You remember that much, I think. Remontoire and Scorpio went in after him. No one else could go — they were the only ones who stood a chance of moving covertly through Yellowstone space. I wouldn’t let you go, for obvious reasons. Clavain cares about you, Felka, and that makes you valuable to me.
‘Hostage?’
No, of course not. Merely one of us. Clavain is the lamb that has left the fold, not you. Clavain is the one we want back, Felka. Clavain is the prodigal son.
They went to Nightshade’s flight deck. Felka sipped a chocolate-flavoured broth laced with restorative medichines.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
Skade showed Felka a display of the rear starfield, with one dim yellow-red star outlined in green. That was Epsilon Eridani, two hundred times fainter than it had been even from the remote vantage point of the Mother Nest. It was now ten million times fainter than the sun that burned in Yellowstone’s sky. They were truly in interstellar space now, for the first time in Skade’s life.
Six weeks out from Yellowstone, over thirteen hundred AU. We’ve been maintaining two gees for most of that time, which means that we’ve already reached one-quarter light-speed. A conventional ship would be struggling to reach an eighth of the speed of light by now, Felka. But we can do better than this if we have to.
Which was true, Skade knew, but there would be little practical advantage in accelerating harder. Relativity ensured that. Arbitrarily high acceleration would compress the subjective duration of their journey to Resurgam, but it would make almost no difference to the objective time that the journey consumed. And it was that objective time which was the only relevant factor in the wider picture: it would still take the same amount of time to reach Resurgam as measured by external observers, and more decades still to rendezvous with the other elements of the exodus fleet.
Still, there were other reasons to consider an increase in acceleration. And at the back of Skade’s mind was a dangerous and alluring possibility that would change the rules entirely.
‘And the other ship?’ Felka asked. ‘Where is that?’
Skade had already told her about the vessel behind them. Now a second circle bisected by two cros
s hairs appeared on the display almost exactly centred above the one that demarked Epsilon Eridani.
That’s it. It’s very faint, but there’s a clear tau-neutrino source there, and it’s moving on the same course as us.
‘But a long way behind,’ Felka said.
Yes. Three or four weeks behind us, easily.
‘It could be a commercial ship, Ultras or something, on a similar heading.’
Skade nodded. I’ve considered that possibility, but I don’t find it likely. Resurgam isn’t a very popular destination for Ultras, and if that ship were headed for another colony in the same part of the sky, we’d have seen lateral motion by now. We haven’t — she’s dead on our tail, Felka.
‘A stern chase.’
Yes, deliberately following us. They have a modest tactical advantage, you see. Our flame points towards them; theirs points away from us. I can track them because we have military-grade neutrino detectors, but it is still difficult. But they need no finesse to spot us. I have separated our thrust beams into four components and given them a small angular offset, but they need only detect a tiny amount of leaked radiation to fix our position. We are neutrino-quiet, however, and that will give us a definitive advantage after turnover, when we have to point our flame towards Resurgam. But it won’t come to that. That ship can’t ever catch us, no matter how hard it tries.
‘The ship should be falling behind already,’ Felka said. ‘Is it?’
No. So far she has maintained two gees all the way out from the Rust Belt.
‘I didn’t think normal ships could accelerate that hard.’
They can’t, not usually. But there are methods, Felka. Do you know the story of Irravel Veda?
‘Of course,’ Felka said.
When she was pursuing Run Seven she modified her own ship to manage two gees. But she did it the crude way — not by improving the efficacy of her Conjoiner drives, but by stripping her ship down to a skeleton. She left all her passengers behind on a comet to save mass.
‘And you think that other ship must be doing something similar?’
There’s no other explanation. But it won’t help them. Even at two gees they cannot close the gap between us, and the gap will widen if we increase our inertia-suppression effect. They cannot match three gees, Felka; there is only so much mass you can strip out of a ship before you haven’t got a ship at all. They must be very near the limit already.
‘It must be Clavain,’ she said.
You seem very certain.
‘I never thought he’d give up, Skade. It just isn’t his style. He wants those weapons very badly, and he isn’t going to let you get your cold steel hands on them without a fight.’
Skade wanted to shrug, but her armour would not allow it. Then it confirms what I have always suspected, Felka. Clavain is not a rationalist. He is a man fond of gestures, no matter how futile or stupid they might be. This is merely his grandest and most hopeless gesture to date.
Clavain ran into the first of Skade’s traps eight hundred AU from Yellowstone, one hundred light-hours into the crossing. Clavain had been expecting her to try something; he would, in fact, have been disappointed and a little alarmed had she not. But Skade had not let him down.
Nightshade had sown mines behind it. Over a period of weeks, Skade had dropped them from her ship’s stern: small, automated, highly autonomous drones stealthed for maximum invisibility against Clavain’s forward-looking sensors. The drones were small enough that Skade could afford to manufacture and deploy them by the hundreds, littering Clavain’s forward path with hidden obstacles.
The drones did not have to be very clever or have great range. Skade could be quite certain of the trajectory that Clavain would be obliged to follow, just as he could be quite certain of hers. Even a small deviation away from the direct line between Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis would cost Clavain precious weeks, further delaying his arrival. He was already lagging behind, and would not wish to incur any further hold-ups if he could help it. So Skade would have known that Clavain would remain on the same heading except for short-term deviations.
That still meant she had a lot of space to cover. Explosions were not an efficient means of inflicting harm on space vessels at anything other than extreme close range, since vacuum did not propagate shock waves. Skade would know that the odds of one of her mines coming within a thousand kilometres of Clavain’s ship were so small as to be negligible, so there would be no point putting crustbuster-class warheads in them. Clavain expected, instead, that the mines would be designed to identify and fire at his ship across a typical range of light-seconds. They would be single-use launchers, particle beams, very probably. It was exactly what he would have done if he were being chased by a similar ship.
But Skade had used crustbusters. She had inserted them, so far as Clavain could judge, into every twentieth mine, with a statistical bias towards the edge of her swarm. The warheads were primed to detonate as soon as he came within one light-hour of them, as near as he could tell. There would be a distant prick of hard blue light, shading into violet, red-shifted from Clavain’s rest frame by a few hundred kilometres per second. And then, hours or tens of hours later, another would detonate, sometimes two or three in close succession, stammering out of the night like a cascade of fireworks. Some were closer than others, but they were all much too distant to do any harm to Clavain’s ship. Clavain ran a regression analysis on the spread pattern and concluded that Skade’s bombs had only a one in one thousand chance of damaging his ship. The chances of a destructive strike were a factor of one hundred less favourable. Clearly, they were not meant for that purpose.
Skade, he realised, was using the crustbusters purely to increase the targeting accuracy of her other weapons, flooding Clavain’s ship with strobelike flashes which nailed its instantaneous position and velocity. Her other mines would be sniffing space for the backscatter of reflected photons from his own hull. It was a way of compensating for the fact that Skade’s mines were too small to carry neutrino detectors, and were therefore reliant on outdated positional estimates transmitted back from Nightshade, many light-hours further into interstellar space. The crustbusters smoked Clavain’s ship out of darkness, allowing Skade’s directed-energy weapons to latch on to it. Clavain did not see the beams of those weapons, only the flash of their triggering explosions. The yields were about one hundredth of a crustbuster burst, which was sufficient to power a particle beam or graser with a five-light-second extreme kill range. If the beam missed him, he never saw it at all. In interstellar space there were so few ambient dust grains that even a beam passing within kilometres of Clavain’s ship would suffer insufficient scattering to reveal itself. Clavain was a blind and deaf man stumbling across no man’s land, oblivious to the bullets zipping past him, not even feeling the wind of their passage.
The irony was, he probably wouldn’t even know it if a beam hit.
Clavain evolved a strategy that he hoped might work. If Skade’s weapons were firing across typical distances of five light-seconds, they were dependent on positional estimates that were at least ten seconds out of date, and probably more like thirty seconds. The targeting algorithms would be extrapolating his course, bracketing his likely future position with a spread of less likely estimates. But thirty seconds gave Clavain enough of an edge to make that strategy enormously inefficient for Skade. In thirty seconds, under a steady two gees of thrust, a ship changed its relative position by nine kilometres, more than twice its hull length. Yet if Clavain stuttered the thrust randomly, Skade would not know for sure where in that nine-kilometre box to direct her weapons. She would have to assign more resources to obtain the same probability of a kill. It was a numbers game, not a guaranteed method of avoiding being killed, but Clavain had been a soldier long enough to know that this was, ultimately, what most combat situations boiled down to.
It appeared to work. A week passed, and then another, and then the smaller bursts of the particle beams ceased. There remained only the occasion
al, much more distant flash of a crustbuster. She was keeping her eye on him, but for now she had abandoned the idea of taking him out with anything as simple as a particle beam.
Clavain remained watchful and nervous. He knew Skade.
She wouldn’t give up that easily.
He was right. Two months later a fifth of the army were dead, with many more injured and likely to die in the weeks ahead. The first hint of trouble had been innocuous indeed: a tiny change in the pattern of light that they were detecting from Nightshade. It seemed impossible that such a trifling change could have any impact on their own ship, but Clavain knew that Skade would do nothing without excellent reason. So once the change had been verified and shown to be deliberate, he assembled his senior crew on the bridge of the stolen lighthugger.
The ship — Scorpio had named her Zodiacal Light, for obscure reasons of his own — was a typical trade lighthugger, manufactured more than two hundred years earlier. The ship had been through several cycles of repair and redesign in the intervening time, but the core of the vessel remained mostly unchanged. At four kilometres long the lighthugger was much larger than Nightshade, her hull voided by cavernous cargo bays large enough to swallow a flotilla of medium-sized spacecraft. The hull itself was approximately conic, tapering to a needle-sharp prow in the direction of flight, with a blunter tail to stern. Two interstellar drives were attached to the hull via flanged spars flung out from the cone’s widest point. The drives were barnacled with two centuries’ worth of later accretions, but the basic shape of Conjoiner technology was evident beneath the growth layers. The rest of the hull had the dark smoothness of wet marble, except for the prow, which was cased in a matrix of ablative ice sewn through with hyperdiamond filaments. As H had said, the ship itself was essentially sound; it was the former crew’s business methods that had made them insolvent. The army of pigs, trained not to harm anything irreplaceable, had succeeded in minimising damage during the capture itself.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 195