In a quickly dispersing bubble of air and crystals of ice, the craft burst from the body of the General Systems Vehicle, swooping into vacuum and star-washed darkness at last. Behind it, a force field slammed across the hole its passage had created in the doors of the General bay. Horza felt the plasma motors stutter as their supply of outside air disappeared, then the internal tanks took up the slack. He was about to cut them and slide gently into the start-up procedure for the craft's warp engines when the speakers in his headrest crackled.
"This is Evanauth port police. All right, you son of a bitch, just keep on that heading and slow right down. Evanauth port police to rogue craft: halt on that heading. A-"
Horza pulled on the controls, taking the CAT on a huge accelerating arc up over the stern of the GSV, flashing past the outside of the kilometre-square exit he had been heading for earlier. Wubslin, moaning now, bumped around the inside of the bridge as the CAT lifted its nose to head straight up, towards the maze of abandoned docks and gantries that was Evanauth port. As it went it turned, still twisting slightly from the spin it had picked up from the vortex of air bursting from the General bay. Horza let it twist, steadying it only as they approached the top of the loop, the port facilities coming up fast then sliding underneath as the craft levelled out.
"Rogue ship! This is your last warning!" the speakers blared. "Stop now or we'll blow you out of the sky! God, he's heading for-" The transmission cut off. Horza grinned to himself. He was indeed heading for the gap between the underside of the port and the top of the GSY. The Clear Air Turbulence flashed through spaces between traveltube connections, elevator shafts, graving dock gantries, transit areas, arriving shuttle craft and crane towers. Horza guided the ship through the maze with the fusion motors still blazing at maximum boost, throwing the small craft through the few hundred metres of crowded space between the Orbital and the General Systems Vehicle. The rear radar pinged, picking up following echoes.
Two towers, hanging under the Orbital like upside-down sky-scrapers, between which Horza was aiming the CAT, suddenly blossomed with light, scattering wreckage. Horza cringed in his seat as he corkscrewed the ship into the space between the two clouds of debris.
"Those were across the bows," crackled the speakers again. "The next ones will be straight up your ass, boy racer." The CAT shot out over the dull grey plain of slanting material that was the start of the Ends" nose. Horza turned the CAT over and dived down, following the slope of the vast craft's bows. The rear radar signal stopped briefly, then reappeared.
He flipped the ship over again. Wubslin, his arms and legs waving weakly, was dumped onto the CAT's bridge ceiling and stuck there like a fly while Horza did a section of an outside loop.
The ship was racing, powering away from the Orbital port area and the big GSV, heading for space. Horza remembered about Balveda's gear, and quickly reached over to the console, closing the vactube circuit from there. A screen showed that all the vactubes had been rotated. The rear screen showed something flame inside the twin plumes of plasma fire. The rear radar pinged insistently.
"Goodbye, stupid!" the voice in the headrest speakers said. Horza threw the ship to one side.
The rear screen went white, then black. The main screen pulsated with colours and broken lines. The speakers in Horza's helmet, as well as the speakers set into the seat, howled. Every instrument on the console flashed and wavered.
Horza thought for a second they had been hit, but the motors were still blasting, the main screen was starting to clear, and the other instruments were recovering, too. The radiation meters were bleeping and flashing. The rear screen stayed blank. A damage monitor indicated that the sensors had been knocked out by a very strong pulse of radiation.
Horza started to realise what had happened when the rear radar didn't start pinging again after it recovered. He threw back his head and laughed.
There had indeed been a bomb in Balveda's kitbag. Whether it had gone off because it was caught in the CAT's plasma exhaust or because somebody — whoever had been trying to keep the ship on board the GSV in the first place — had detonated it remotely the instant the fleeing craft was far enough away from the Ends not to cause too much damage, Horza didn't know. Whatever; the explosion seemed to have caught the pursuing police vessels.
Laughing uproariously, Horza angled the CAT further away from the great circle of brilliantly lit Orbital, heading straight out towards the stars and readying the warp engines to take over from the plasma motors. Wubslin, back on the deck, one leg caught on the arm of his own chair, moaned distantly.
"Mother," he said. "Mother, say it's only a dream…"
Horza laughed louder.
"You lunatic," breathed Yalson, shaking her head. Her eyes were wide. "That was the craziest thing I've ever seen you do. You're mad, Kraiklyn. I'm leaving. I resign as of now… Shit! I wish I'd gone with Jandraligeli, to Ghalssel… You can just drop me off first place we get to."
Horza sat down wearily in the seat at the head of the mess-room table. Yalson was at the far end, under the screen, which was switched into the bridge main screen. The CAT was proceeding under full warp, two hours out on its journey from Vavatch. There had been no further pursuit following the destruction of the police craft, and now the CAT was gradually coming round to the course Horza had set, into the war zone, towards the edge of the Glittercliff, towards Schar's World.
Dorolow and Aviger were sitting, plainly still shaken, to one side of Yalson. The woman and the elderly man were both staring at Horza as though he was pointing a gun at them. Their mouths were open, their eyes were glazed. On the other side of Yalson the slack form of Perosteck Balveda was leaning forward, head down, her body pulling against the restraining straps of the seat.
The mess room was chaotic. The CAT hadn't been readied for violent manoeuvring, and nothing had been stowed away. Plates and containers, a couple of shoes, a glove, some half-unravelled tapes and spools and various other bits and pieces now lay strewn about the floor of the mess. Yalson had been hit by something, and a small trickle of blood had dried on her forehead. Horza hadn't let anybody move, apart from brief visits to the heads, for the last two hours; he'd told everybody to stay where they were over the ship PA while the CAT headed away from Vavatch on a twisting, erratic course. He had kept the plasma motors and laser warm and ready, but no further pursuit came. Now he reckoned they were safe and far enough away to warp straight.
He had left Wubslin on the bridge, nursing the battered and abused systems of the Clear Air Turbulence as best he could. The engineer had apologised for grabbing at the controls and had become very subdued, not meeting Horza's eyes but tidying up one or two bits of loose debris on the bridge and stuffing some of the loose wires back under the console. Horza told Wubslin he had nearly killed them all, but on the other hand so had he, so they would forget it this time; they'd escaped intact. Wubslin nodded and said he didn't know how; he couldn't believe the ship was virtually undamaged. Wubslin wasn't undamaged; he had bruises everywhere.
"I'm afraid," Horza said to Yalson once he had sat down and put his feet up, "our first port of call is rather bleak and underpopulated. I'm not sure you'll want to be dropped off there."
Yalson put the heavy stun pistol down onto the table surface. "And just where the hell are we going? What's going on, Kraiklyn? What was all that craziness back on the GSV? What's she doing here? Why is the Culture involved?" Yalson nodded at Balveda during this speech, and Horza kept looking at the unconscious Culture agent when Yalson stopped, waiting for an answer. Aviger and Dorolow were looking at him expectantly, too.
Before Horza could answer, the small drone appeared from the corridor leading from the accommodation section. It floated in, looked round the mess room, then sat itself bodily on the table in the middle. "Did I hear something about it being explanation time?" it said. It was facing Horza.
Horza looked away from Balveda, to Aviger and Dorolow, then to Yalson and the drone. "Well, you might as well all know that we
are now heading for a place called Schar's World. It's a Planet of the Dead."
Yalson looked puzzled. Aviger said, "I've heard of those. But we won't be allowed in."
"This is getting worse," the drone said. "If I were you, Captain Kraiklyn, I would turn back to The Ends of Invention and surrender yourself there. I'm sure you'd get a fair trial."
Horza ignored the machine. He sighed, looking round at the mess, stretched his legs and yawned. "I'm sorry you're all being taken, perhaps against your will, but I've got to get there, and I can't afford to stop anywhere to let you off. You've all got to come."
"Oh we do, do we?" said the small drone.
"Yes," Horza said, looking at it, "I'm afraid so."
"But we won't be able to get anywhere near this place," Aviger protested. "They don't let anybody in. There's some sort of zone around them they don't let people into."
"We'll see about that when we get there." Horza smiled.
"You're not answering my questions," Yalson said. She looked at Balveda again, then down at the gun lying on the table. "I've been zapping this poor bitch every time she flicks an eyelid, and I want to know why I've been doing it."
"It'll take a while to explain it all, but what it boils down to is there's something on Schar's World which both the Culture and the Idirans want. I have… a contract, a commission from the Idirans, to get there and find this thing."
"You really are a paranoid," the drone said incredulously. It rose off the table and turned round to look at the others. "He really is a lunatic!"
"The Idirans are hiring us — you — to go after something?" Yalson's voice was full of disbelief. Horza looked at her and smiled.
"You mean this woman', Dorolow said, pointing at Balveda, "was sent by the Culture to join us, infiltrate… Are you serious?"
"I'm serious. Balveda was looking for me. Also for Horza Gobuchul. She wanted to get to Schar's World, or to stop us from getting there." Horza looked at Aviger. "There was a bomb in amongst her gear, by the way; it went off just after I rotated it out the tubes. It blew the police ships away. We all got a blast of radiation, but nothing lethal."
"And what about Horza?" Yalson said, looking grimly at him. "Was that just some trick, or did you really meet him?"
"He is alive, Yalson, and as safe as any of us."
Wubslin appeared through the door from the bridge, still with an apologetic look on his face. He nodded at Horza and sat down near by. "All looking fine, Kraiklyn."
"Good," Horza said. "I was just explaining to everybody else about our journey to Schar's World."
"Oh," Wubslin said. "Yeah." He shrugged at the others.
"Kraiklyn," Yalson said, leaning forward on the table and looking intently at Horza, "you just about got us all killed fuck knows how many times back there. You probably did kill quite a few people during those… in-door aerobatics. You've saddled us with some secret agent from the Culture. You're practically kidnapping us to take us towards a planet in the middle of a war zone where nobody's even allowed in, to look for something both sides want enough to… Well, if the Idirans are hiring a decimated bunch of second-rate mercenaries, they must be pretty desperate; and if the Culture really was behind the attempt to keep us in that bay, they must be scared stiff to risk violating the neutrality of the Ends and breaking some of their precious rules of war.
"You may think you know what's going on and think the risk is worth it, but I don't, and I don't like this feeling of being kept in the dark at all, either. Your track record recently's been crap; let's face it. Risk your own life if you want to, but you don't have any right to risk ours, too. Not any more. Maybe we don't all want to side with the Idirans, but even if we did prefer them to the Culture, none of us signed up to start fighting in the middle of the war. Shit, Kraiklyn, we're neither… equipped nor trained well enough to go up against those guys."
"I know all that," Horza said. "But we shouldn't be encountering any battle forces. The Quiet Barrier round Schar's World extends far enough out so that it's impossible to watch it all. We go in from a randomly picked direction, and by the time we're spotted, there's nothing anybody could do about it, no matter what sort of ship they have. A Main Battle Fleet couldn't keep us out. When we leave it'll be the same."
"What you're trying to say is," Yalson said, sitting back in her seat, " "Easy in, easy out"."
"Maybe I am," laughed Horza.
"Hey," Wubslin said suddenly, looking at his terminal screen, which he had just taken from his pocket. "It's nearly time!" He got up and disappeared through the doors leading to the bridge. In a few seconds the screen in the mess changed, the view swivelling round until it showed Vavatch. The great Orbital hung in space, dark and brilliant, full of night and day, blue and white and black. They all looked up at the screen.
Wubslin came back in and sat in his seat again. Horza felt tired. His body wanted rest, and lots of it. His brain was still buzzing from the concentration and the amount of adrenalin it had required to pilot the CAT through and out of The Ends of Invention, but he couldn't rest yet. He couldn't decide what was the best thing to do. Should he tell them who he was, tell them the truth, that he was a Changer, that he had killed Kraiklyn? How loyal were any of them to the leader they didn't yet know was dead? Yalson the most, perhaps; but surely she would be glad to know that he was alive… Yet she was the one who had said that perhaps they weren't all on the Idirans" side… She had never shown any sympathy for the Culture before when he had known her, but perhaps she had changed her mind.
He could even Change back; there was a fairly long journey now during which it shouldn't be beyond him, perhaps with the help of Wubslin, to change the fidelities in the CAT's computer. But should he tell them — should he let them know? And Balveda: what was he going to do with her? He had had some idea of using her to bargain with the Culture, but it looked as though they had escaped now, and next stop was Schar's World, where she would at best be a liability. He ought to kill her now, but he knew, first of all, that that might not go down well with the others, especially Yalson. He also knew, although he didn't like to admit it, that he would find it personally painful to kill the Culture agent. They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult.
Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake. He opened his mouth to ask Yalson to stun the Culture agent again.
"Now," Wubslin said.
With that, Vavatch Orbital started to disintegrate.
The view of it on the mess-room screen was a compensated hyperspace version, so that, although they were already outside the Vavatch system, they were watching it virtually in real time. Right at the appointed hour the unseen, unnamed, very much still militarised General Systems Vehicle which was somewhere in the vicinity of the Vavatch planetary system started its bombardment. It was almost certainly an Ocean class GSV, the same one which had sent the message that they had all watched some days ago on the mess screen, heading in towards Vavatch. That would make the warcraft very much smaller than the behemoth of The Ends of Invention, which was — for war purposes — obsolete. One Ocean class could fit inside either of the Ends" General bays, but while the larger craft — by that time an hour out from the Orbital — was full of people, the Ocean class would be packed with other warships, and weaponry.
Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, flashing once over its whole surface until the sensors coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture would just splash the gridfire all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn't do that; instead a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent dest
ruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy, plucked from nowhere and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital, boiling the Circlesea, melting the two thousand kilometres of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometre breadth.
Vavatch, that fourteen million kilometre hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut.
There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the source of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity, was now the very force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometres per second, Vavatch was throwing itself into outer space, unwinding like a released spring.
The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working its way methodically round the Orbital from where the original burst had struck, neatly parcelling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-five thousand kilometres to a side, each containing a sandwich of trillions upon trillions of tonnes of ultradense base material, water, land and air.
Vavatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling from each immense flat square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapour to ice. The ocean itself, no longer held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material, becoming ice and swirling away into space.
The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reverse-spin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still spinning sections of the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light — light from outside the normal fabric of reality.
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