Nbaro returned to consciousness in a clamshell. Dorcas was sitting by her, and they were not in the medbay. She couldn’t really turn her head.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ he said. ‘I mean, you can learn all about it on your lace, but I wanted to tell you.’
She nodded.
‘You took a big dose – you and Eyre both. Your back-seaters didn’t, for whatever reason. You are getting a full scrub, right now – there are nanobots working inside your cells. So are Commander Truekner, and a dozen other space crew. There’s too many wounded for medbay, so they opened up what used to be the Hin holding bay.’
She tried to smile.
Dorcas leaned forward. ‘I was so scared for you … Oh, Marca, I’m not good at this.’ He shook his head.
We are united by our lack of emotional communication skills , she thought. Looking at his haggard face, she knew , maybe for the first time, how deeply he felt for her.
Fascinating. Almost worth a sub-lethal dose of radiation.
After he left, she had hours to watch the space battle. She couldn’t do anything. It was odd, as she told Morosini, because she could have stood a watch as Lioness or Tower from her clamshell; the neural lace made her capable of it, and eventually, Morosini allowed her direct access to the Combat Information Centre and its stations, so that she could expand her ‘under-instruction’ watch-standing time in CIC.
The DHC flotilla continued to fall in-system. They were neither accelerating nor decelerating now, declaring no intention. The Hin ship Beautiful War Dance continued to keep station, about two thousand kilometres astern of the Stealthy Change . She continued to broadcast a repeating message in two different Hin dialects. Nbaro had Dorcas’s translation:
‘Currents under the sea bring new sources of food to the careful hunter. Sometimes even the [untranslatable] and the [untranslatable] swim together to hunt.’
‘I told Pisani that’s their version of the wolf lying down with the lamb,’ Dorcas sent via lace.
Nbaro’s head was clearing. She didn’t like the idea of molecular bots racing through her brain, but then, she hadn’t liked the idea of an intrusive neural lace, and she really liked being alive. ‘That’s what I think it says, too. Any direct comms with Nik’ri Put?’
‘Not a word.’
If the message they sent to the Hin was having any effect, she couldn’t see it. The group that had hit them on extraction was gone; two of the small converted freighters had survived to hide in the accretion disc, both damaged; only one of the Hin ships was under power. All three of the former DHC ships were dead, with their crews, without any explanation of why they’d attacked the Athens.
Most of the damage to the Athens had come from a nuclear mine – a proximity device, against every interstellar arms treaty ever written. The Athens had lost two hundred crew in that one explosion, and she was virtually blind without the sensor picture provided by her spacecraft and the data link to the Dubai and the Stealthy Change.
Nbaro saw it now: she saw how they had destroyed the New York and the Hong Kong , wearing them down, taking out the sensors first, then the armaments. Like a siege.
Some of the ships in this system have been here since the death of the Hong Kong. The bastards. How much damage have they done to the DHC?
Darkstar’s boarding exercises in holding on to strong points within the ship made more and more sense.
Nbaro’s thoughts ran around in circles. She went back to watching the battle.
There was a powerful squadron of purpose-built warships watching the insertion point for New India, the edge of DHC Space and a massive, highly populated system. Ultra–Medulla was a border station. New India was as well populated as New London – a first-generation colony from Terra, with millions of people.
Someone didn’t want any traffic interfering until this was over. Those six powerful ships probably thought they were undetected, running silent and cold. Not cold enough.
TAO had tagged them ‘Probable New Texas’.
There were six more, either docked to the Ultra Station in her orbit high over Medulla, or with her in orbit. Also ‘Probable New Texas’. Those were more ships than their latest intel thought New Texas possessed.
And there were Hin throughout the system: sixteen definitely located, twenty-four more possibles, some of which might have been duplicate identifications.
In the asteroid belt, there were fleeting observations of another shoal of small freighters. Their activity didn’t resemble legitimate mining craft. So: more pirates.
Nbaro rolled the holotank over in VR, looking at the system and the various locations and IDs from every angle.
Everyone was waiting. She guessed that the arrival of a second greatship and a PTX heavy cruiser had stunned their opponents, especially as the system was suddenly full of encrypted data flow. Nbaro’s sense was that the two sides were very finely balanced and, the initial minefield and ambush having failed, their enemies would have to face them in the kind of set-piece confrontation in which the greatships had all the advantages: waves of ablative materials; clouds of chaff hiding small craft; closely co-ordinated firing patterns governed by linked AIs.
Nope. Not balanced at all.
The more she looked at it, the more she saw that the greatships had the advantage.
‘Is this what you expected, Morosini?’ She was getting bold; she asked him directly.
‘Yes. Except for the Hin . I never expected so many. No model predicted it. ’
That was more honesty than she really wanted. But if he was in a mood to talk, she wasn’t wasting time on the tactical situation.
‘You said my parents died protecting the AI cores that run the DHC …?’ She was full of questions, and the time was now.
‘Yes. They bought … us … time .’
‘Then why the Orphanage? Where is Sarah? How can you allow—?’
‘How can I allow so much suffering? I am not God, Ms Nbaro. I am a calculating machine. Your suffering is sometimes a coin I’m willing to spend to accomplish my goals. You have to trust me that my goals are, ultimately, yours. ’
‘You don’t sound like the good guy, here.’
‘Consider how I have treated you, and how you were treated at the Orphanage. I find that humans are deeply enamoured of very general principles that often blind them to the reality of their situation. You hated the Orphanage. You are very happy here. ’
This time, she was not going to accept it when he got all philosophical and distant.
‘And Sarah?’
‘To the best of my ability, your Sarah is alive and well. I am not alone – the others of my circle have tried to protect her. But carefully, and when we get to New London, you may wish to … fetch her. ’
‘You sacrificed her!’
‘Yes. Hakon had to punish someone, and I was not ready to move on him yet. His family is close to the root of the conspiracy. ’
Almighty , she thought. And went to sleep. Only later, she wondered if Morosini had put her to sleep.
Nbaro slept, woke, slept again immediately. Dorcas visited her, and she knew for sure she was drugged; she couldn’t really listen to him, couldn’t muster the concentration to operate the neural lace.
She slept again.
Woke.
She felt as sharp as a new blade – more awake than she had been in months.
‘Flight schedule ,’ appeared in her mind. ‘You are released from medbay. ’
Nbaro was not in a clamshell, but lying on a gurney in a Third Deck passageway. So were a lot of other people, and there was no one there to retrieve her – not Thea, not Dorcas. She thought of the other times in medbay: of Steven Yu, and then of all the people she knew who were now dead. There were probably more. Her stomach fluttered. Who had died?
She made herself look. Truekner wasn’t dead. In fact, he was already back at work, although not on flight status. She was good to fly.
She didn’t look any further than her skipper.
She was dressed in a hospital gown and nothing else, but she was clean and everyone else seemed to be asleep. The lighting was reduced. The passageway smelled threateningly of disinfectant, with a background scent of blood and faeces.
She rolled off the gurney. ‘How bad is it?’ she asked Morosini. She had to know.
‘The nuclear mine killed two hundred and three spacers outright, and now we’re dealing with radiation poisoning, burns and casualties from damage control. Medbay is overwhelmed. We have almost a thousand people down. ’
Almighty , Nbaro muttered. Ten per cent casualties. She writhed inside, thinking about that.
Petty concerns distracted her; she really didn’t want anyone to see her in the passageways wearing nothing but a single layer of recycle, so naturally, Petty Officer Locran passed her at the drop-shaft as she walked to the lift. The drop-shaft would be too public, and she’d be effectively naked in zero g .
‘Ma’am,’ he said. He had his boarding-party bag over his shoulder. He raised a hand to stop her, pulled a haze-grey battle blouse out of his bag and tossed it to her.
‘We have a boarding party exercise in forty minutes,’ he said. ‘We’re getting along without you, but it would be mighty nice if you put in an appearance.’ After a delay, he added, ‘Ma’am,’ with a slight smile.
‘I’m flying in three hours. We’re in mid-battle …’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘Shit-hot. Ma’am.’
Nbaro grinned, pulled the knee-length anorak on over her gown, and trotted to her stateroom without further incident.
Forty minutes later she was in her armour, feeling very awake and very alive. But fear gnawed at her; Thea Drake wasn’t there, wasn’t in Small Cargo, and her rack was unmade. Nbaro was afraid to look.
And she was a little ashamed of how good she felt.
‘I needed the sleep,’ she admitted to Locran when she arrived at their Sixth Deck exercise area.
All of her people wore the new anoraks. They were made of a cheap material, the exact colour of the passageways, and they were loose enough to wear over equipment. They broke up the human silhouette. Most had slashes of darker grey across them; a few had fractal patterns in a lighter grey.
Chief Chen joined her. ‘Locran’s idea, but Ramirez designed them and Nagy worked out the patterns on the system. And your Spacer Chu sewed ’em up.’
‘I’m impressed,’ Nbaro said.
Locran shrugged. ‘Ship of heroes,’ he said. She couldn’t tell whether he meant it as wisdom or sarcasm.
Everyone seemed happy to see her – a response she still found remarkable. Spacer Luciano was not present, and neither was Nowak; both, it proved, were dead.
‘Yeah,’ Locran said. ‘We lost a lot of people.’
Spacer Nagy, who worked with Qaqqaq, had been treated for radiation burns.
‘How’s Lieutenant Qaqqaq?’ Nbaro asked.
‘Made of iron, ma’am,’ Nagy said. ‘She’s out on the hull planting antennas. Where I’d be if I wasn’t here.’
Petty Officer Deseronto, whom Nbaro knew from way back, now stood with Chief Chen, a shotgun on his shoulder. He smiled to see her, too.
‘Welcome back,’ Chen said. ‘You need to stop getting hurt, ma’am. We worry about you.’
Locran chuckled, and they sorted the three teams out. They performed a movement to contact flawlessly, did a hostage rescue scenario, and then broke down for some hand-to-hand training. They really didn’t need Nbaro, but she enjoyed it all, enjoyed a long sword bout with Captain Fraser when he came by, and then showered.
She hadn’t felt this good in weeks. The ship was nominally at battle stations, but she could see with a glimpse at her lace that they were almost two weeks from any potential conflict.
She held her breath and looked. Thea Drake was not listed as a casualty. She was out on the hull doing an EVA boarding party mission.
Nbaro was almost light-hearted as she flew a routine maintenance hop in 6–0–7; Maintenance had produced an almost new spacecraft.
‘Try not to put any more holes in her,’ Baluster said, and Nbaro was off the bow, where she could see fifty spacers working like ants on the hull as she shot out of tube 3 at a very low launch speed relative to the ship; she was only doing a once-around the hull and landing and that, for once, was all she did.
She moved from that flight to one with Han. The Pericles had become a sort of engineering ship: she went out every day and tended to the walls of ablative and reflective materials that accompanied the battlegroup as it fell at constant velocity through the system, heading roughly for the station that hung like a miniature planet over the actual planet of Medulla. Medulla had a moon – a large satellite that might once have been a planet locked in a geosynchronous orbit; it wasn’t going to be visible with the naked eye for a week, but Nbaro had seen it on vid. It was a strange system, and Dorcas thought that it had almost certainly been a major system in the Circle Culture, a hundred thousand years before. There were plenty of ruins on Medulla.
And an asteroid belt. Nbaro and Dorcas were beginning to suspect that any asteroid belt in a Goldilocks zone represented a Circle planet destroyed by the Starfish.
Nbaro had time to think all of this while laying fresh ablative materials with Gorshokov. Han was sitting behind them, doing admin work on his tab, as if command of a powerful spaceship was just another office job.
‘I thought I’d never get you back,’ Han said. ‘And I could settle for Davies, but she’s already flying for Flight Two.’
Lieutenant Tabitha Davies had taken the other pinnace from Sahel all the way across DHC space to rendezvous with the Dubai , and had now returned to her duties aboard the Athens. Her heroic journey across the ‘middle stars’ was as epic as anything else on the Athens ’ cruise.
Nbaro shrugged. Her eyes flicked around the instruments; in her head, she used her lace to make sure that their application of ablative material was precise. ‘This isn’t my first job,’ she said.
She couldn’t see Han; he was almost directly behind her. But she could imagine his face. ‘I can wish,’ he said.
Her relationship with Han was odd. She believed he thought highly of her as a pilot. He treated her like a friend – but he wanted her. She could feel it, and it poisoned her time with him. Can’t you just turn it off?
And yet, there was nothing to be said. Does he even know it himself? Am I wrong? That would be classic Marca Nbaro idiocy …
She concentrated on flying.
‘They’re talking about sending Pericles out under AI control,’ Han said bitterly. ‘I’m apparently slated to fly a fighter in Flight Five.’
‘They’re taking losses,’ she said.
Han sighed. ‘I love this ship,’ he said with total sincerity, and she smiled. He really was an excellent officer.
She glanced at Gorshokov, whose face was wooden, and she realised how all this must sound to him. She sighed.
Why are people so complicated?
But after they’d landed and she’d done the port-flight and the debrief, she said to Han, ‘They probably need you. It took a miracle of sub-AI planning for me to fly today.’
Han grimaced. ‘I know. But if I’m going to die out here, I’d prefer to go down on the flight deck of Pericles .’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t think we’ll die out here.’
He looked back at her. ‘Really? Best news all day. You always know this stuff because Morosini loves you. Give!’
She shrugged again. ‘We have the balance of power, not them. That’s all.’
He grinned. ‘You really are something, Ms Nbaro. You know that?’ He was on the verge of saying something – something she didn’t want to hear.
‘Some of my best friends fly in Flight Five,’ she said. ‘Say hi to Cortez.’
She walked away, her back straight, and he didn’t call after her.
And she wasn’t lying: she had a meeting scheduled with her skipper, and she had to hustle to make it.
Flight One and Flight Five had both taken losses in the first fight in-system, but by some miracle, Flight Six hadn’t lost anyone. Nonetheless, replacements were the subject matter when she reported to Truekner.
‘Think Tatlah could handle being a pilot?’ he asked without preamble.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Tench, too.’
‘OK, let’s move ’em both. Flight Eight is sending us some new techs. Tell them today, and start training them.’
‘Right,’ she said. Her feeling of being awake and alive was fading.
‘Oh, and here’s something you’ll like,’ the skipper said, patting his tab. ‘Patel passed his petty officer exam. Not shabby at all. Probably deserves some personal congrats from his division officer.’
She was pleased. ‘I’ll go down now.’
‘That’s the spirit. Good job with Patel. Now he can take on more from Baluster, and start training someone else …’ He looked at her. ‘We’re lucky we didn’t take losses, but I’m getting ready to get hammered in the next exchange. Life goes on.’
What he meant was, Death goes on.
She nodded.
Nbaro went down to see Patel, and shook his hand. He flushed at her praise, and Baluster came over and joined her.
‘About time,’ the chief said laconically, but then he, too, shook Patel’s hand.
‘When does he pin it on, Chief?’
Baluster produced an iron-on petty officer patch. ‘I’d like it on your suit right now.’
Patel glowed.
Nbaro grinned from ear to ear. This is how life should be. Except that people are dying.
On her way up from Maintenance in the lift, she thought about Nik’ri Put. I think I miss her …
Damn.
Then her tab beeped, and she read it and cursed.
A command meeting.
Forty minutes later, she was sitting in a shipboard uniform doing a report on her tab and ignoring the presence of Horatio Dorcas two metres away.
‘I have to do this. I have so much work …’
Dorcas sent, ‘I’m doing a remote with Feather Dancer right now.’
They glanced at each other and both laughed aloud. The other waiting officers all looked at them.
‘Let’s not do that again,’ Nbaro sent.
Pisani came in and everyone shot to their feet – everyone except the holo of Morosini, who remained enthroned, with his cat.
‘At ease,’ the Master said. He looked around. ‘We have a problem.’
He had their attention. Everyone sat, and every face was fixed on his.
He waved and a screen appeared. On it was a handsome man in a black spacer’s jumpsuit.
‘I am Admiral Da Costa of the New Democratic Republic.’ He paused for a moment. ‘All of these stars are ours now. You have been away for a long time, Athens. We hold Ultra and New India and New Bengal and Delhi. Here on Ultra Station, we have taken control. The NDR requests the immediate surrender of the greatships Athens and Dubai without further conflict, or we will take appropriate action. You are heavily outnumbered in this system. The insertion points are mined, as you will have noticed on arrival, and I have forty thousand DHC citizens on this station under my control. You have no way out. Signal your willingness to comply in the next four hours. Da Costa out.’
Pisani waved again and the frame stilled.
He looked around. ‘I take that as a thinly veiled threat to use the population of Medulla Station as hostages.’ He looked at Major Darkstar. ‘Any chance we have a way of retaking the station, Major?’
Darkstar sat back and crossed their very long legs. ‘It could be done. Possibility of heavy civilian casualties.’
Pisani nodded. ‘Morosini?’
‘I very strongly doubt that the New Democratic Republic, if it even exists, holds New India or Delhi or New Bengal ,’ the AI said. ‘I think that this is a tactic of desperation. ’
Dukas put her head in her hands for a moment, then wiped her forehead. The Engineering chief looked haggard, twenty years older than she was. But then she shook her head, as if she’d had an argument with herself. ‘Fucking terrorists,’ she said.
Pisani looked surprised.
Dukas shrugged. ‘I can clear the mines, even if they’re shooting at us. We have mine clearing rigs for the pinnace and the Flight One drop-ships.’
Pisani nodded. ‘In fact, we could clear a path through the mines with a few rounds from the tubes, as Admiral Da Costa ought to know. And I believe that we are looking at the entire combined strength of their alliance.’
Nbaro looked around. She had a question, and she wanted someone else to ask it, but no one did. Finally she raised a tentative hand.
‘Ms Nbaro?’ the Master asked.
‘Sir, if we can clear their mines so easily, and if we have the upper hand in any kind of fight …’ She paused.
Everyone was looking at her.
Yes, I should have kept my mouth shut.
‘… then, if we choose, we can continue transiting the system, and they couldn’t stop us.’ Her voice was almost failing at the end.
Morosini scratched Tom under the chin and then looked at her. ‘Someone over there is no fool, Ms Nbaro. The presence of the second greatship and the PTX cruiser shows them that we have made a detailed plan of attack. ’
Pisani was interested, now, and he followed up. ‘You mean … having provoked us, they’re now trying to bluff us out of a confrontation?’
‘Yes, sir. They have already sensed some change among their Hin allies— ’
Lochiel spoke up. ‘Lot of encrypted traffic between visible Hin assets. Nothing that we can pick out as aimed at the station or any human ship. But we could miss a single laser burst and miss a whole conversation.’
Captain Fraser leaned back, as if to take a longer view. ‘I think I understand your question, Ms Nbaro. Now they know we can defeat them and leave if we so choose, the question becomes – do we believe they’d kill forty thousand DHC citizens, or are they bluffing?’
Pisani nodded. ‘I believe they would. The conspiracy behind this alliance was willing to risk killing millions at Sahel if everything went to hell. Their allies destroyed a station with thousands of people aboard. These are terrible people with a ruthlessness beyond the borders of sociopathy.’
Nbaro had a sudden, terrible thought. She looked at Morosini, and sent a data packet to Dorcas.
‘Are there AIs manipulating our enemy?’ she asked.
Dorcas turned and looked at her, eyes widening. ‘Good God,’ he sent.
She frowned, and thought, Fuck it.
‘Morosini, is the other side also run by AIs?’
‘This is not an immediately profitable line of inquiry ,’ Morosini replied.
‘On the contrary,’ she sent, ‘I think it’s time to put your cards on the table.’
Pisani replied, ‘We are aware of the possibility, Nbaro. But not ready for open discussion.’
That eased some of her mind; if Pisani knew, then it wasn’t some machine conspiracy to destroy humanity.
But then Morosini stood. In all the meetings she’d attended, he’d never stood up. He put his cat down, and turned to them. ‘I have been reminded that the stakes here are very high. I think it only fair you know that I have been planning this confrontation for some time. Four years. And it is possible that we are facing another like me. ’
Human suffering is sometimes a coin I’m willing to pay to accomplish my goals. Morosini had said that, and Nbaro mostly trusted him.
We’re in a war planned by thinking machines on both sides. Almighty. We only exist to them as bytes.
She’d never thought to ask Nik’ri Put why the Hin didn’t have advanced AIs aboard their superb spaceships, but she had a glimmering now.
She shook her head, dismissing the whole problem. Sufficient to the day …
Around the command table, senior officers digested the news and had various reactions: Hughes looked uninterested; Dukas looked angry.
Mpono, the Executive Officer, had been impassive, but now they raised an eyebrow. ‘Master, if I may?’
‘Shoot, XO.’
‘We’re not going to surrender the two greatships, not even with their implied threat of murdering hostages. So … do we provoke a system-wide battle that, as Nbaro points out, we’ll almost certainly win? Or do we sail past them and leave them to their own devices, knowing they can’t stop us? I think those are the options.’
‘I’m for sailing past,’ Fraser said. ‘Never answer the hail, take out the mines and go for Insertion.’
Morosini was an AI. He didn’t writhe. But he did express displeasure. ‘It took years to force our enemy to emerge from the shadows and commit their forces. ’
Hughes was shaking his head. ‘They can’t just blow Medulla and kill forty thousand people. They’d never live it down.’
Pisani cut Morosini off. ‘We’re a long way out, Tom. A long way. They’ll just claim we did it, or that it was a terrorist attack, or that the station malfunctioned. Vids and reports can be faked, and they’ll send messages of sorrow to the families of those lost.’
‘Ugh,’ Hughes said.
Pisani nodded at his XO. ‘You’re right, Smoke. We have two real options – go for Insertion, or force the battle. If we force the battle, what does that look like?’
Tremaine, the space wing commander, waved the holotank into existence. ‘Even now, with so many of their ships in this system, we really can’t force them to fight,’ she said. ‘If they choose to leave, or to evade us, we don’t have the ships to run them down. If we want a fight, we have to make them fight.’
Dorcas said, ‘So we would have to take the station?’
Everyone looked at him. But it was Darkstar who spoke.
‘Mister Dorcas is correct. If we show ourselves prepared to take the station by boarding, they have to fight.’
‘They can just blow it,’ Dukas said with weary cynicism.
‘Not if I have the control bridge before we go in,’ Major Darkstar said. ‘How do you feel about negotiating in bad faith?’
‘This plan is insane,’ Dorcas said. He and Nbaro had made love with a desperate intensity that hid a lot of fear – or maybe it didn’t – and again, with a lot less tension. Now he was rubbing her back, where the acceleration couch had ground into her spine during evasive manoeuvres.
‘Every pilot in the space wing needs you,’ she said.
‘Probably,’ he said, with his usual flat delivery. ‘I’m quite good at massage.’
She rolled her eyes, since she was face down and he couldn’t see her.
‘Why does it trouble you when I say things about myself that are true?’ Dorcas asked, and she snorted into the pillow.
‘You do realise that most of us humble mortals avoid stating our little triumphs and superiorities …’
‘But why?’ he asked. ‘It makes no sense.’
Nbaro just let his hands work, and ignored him for a bit. And then he said, ‘This plan is insane,’ and she snorted.
‘It’s not as bad as that,’ she said. Despite many uncertainties, the plan was precise and workable, and had the advantage – if you were an AI – that if it failed, the DHC battlegroup would have lost very little.
‘Still want to marry me?’ she asked.
‘Yes!’ he said. She felt the reaction through his hands.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘If we get out of this system, I’m yours. You’re mine. We’re ours.’
After that, he didn’t ask her any questions about the mission.
The waiting was brutal. They couldn’t even start the mission for days; Nbaro had to fly routine hops, practise with her boarding party, stand watches. The Master didn’t reply to Admiral Da Costa, despite ever more threatening messages, and the Athens battlegroup continued to move through the system on a course that gave away nothing about their intentions, but got closer and closer to Medulla and the station orbiting it.
Da Costa claimed that the DHC was in negotiations with the ‘New Democratic Republic’, and the Athens didn’t respond. Ships began to move from the other side of the system; the small ships behind them powered up and began to move. On the Athens , Diwali and Christmas decorations appeared and Flight Three sported a passageway dedicated to Hanukkah. The Service called the festival Alliday.
‘You going to Christmas Eve service?’ Thea Drake asked her, and Nbaro laughed.
‘Did I know it was Christmas Eve?’ she asked. ‘No.’ But Thea’s mood was infectious, and Nbaro tabbed Dorcas, and Rick Hanna met them, and they all went in civilian clothes. Nbaro looked at the horrible crucifix from Central America in the Age of Chaos, and spent time on her knees. She wasn’t praying. She was just bringing the dead to mind.
Sarah is alive. Sarah is under the protection of the AIs.
The good AIs …
Is Morosini good?
She had a list of names: Didier, Ko, Indra, Suleimani, Yu and others. But she could think through the names, conjure up a picture of them in her mind, and still her brain ran away with her.
The mission was simple, and desperate. The Pericles would be under Han’s command, carrying a load of Marines, but with Nbaro along because she could work in the datasphere while also fighting. The Pericles would use the stationary moon of Medulla as a shield and drop away, powering with cold thrusters only on a very narrow course right down the throat of the moon’s shadow, until she was within two hundred thousand kilometres of the station. If she wasn’t discovered, she’d then have to cross the final space between Medulla’s satellite and the orbiting station on an exact schedule that would allow her to hide behind the bulk of the planet while she matched velocity. Then fly along the surface, very low, under power; with her stealthy hull, she’d be almost invisible to radar or ladar.
If everything went according to plan, they’d sprint for Ultra Station from about eight hundred kilometres out, and the command elements on the station would have close to sixty seconds to identify them and shoot them down. If they made it alongside the station, they’d deploy sixty Marines straight into an airlock; a tricky bit for Nbaro, and a subroutine of Morosini’s, was to open the airlock as fast as possible. Then it would be up to Major Darkstar to get to the command bridge, take it and hold it.
The entire operation would be covered by a wide range of diversions, from a negotiation phase initiated by Master Pisani, to a course alteration that would fling a small cloud of reflective chaff out ahead of them, covering a critical moment where they crossed a possible deep space radar site on the surface of Medulla’s moon.
Every element of it required stealth, split-second timing, and luck. Darkstar thought it had a one-in-five chance of success.
Nbaro, remembering her dead, could consider all that, and think about the odds, and see that it was reasonable – even to her, and she wasn’t an AI. A one-in-five chance that you paralyse the enemy and deny him the hostages, against four in five that you lose one spacecraft and sixty Marines. Not nothing. Just a worthwhile risk.
She’d knelt for too long. People were starting to look at her; most of them had drinks in their hands.
She got to her feet, and Hanna handed her a glass of something sweet.
‘Sherry?’ she asked. Last Christmas had been the first sherry she’d ever had.
The priest grinned. ‘We’re out of sherry. We’re out of most things. Master Pisani offered his Madeira.’
Nbaro tried it and liked it. ‘I could get very drunk on this,’ she said to Dorcas, who smiled.
‘When we’re married, I’ll import some from Earth.’
She looked up at him. He was almost tall enough to be a ’gyne, and he looked dashing in shipboard boots, breeches and shirt and vest, all very different from the shipboard flightsuits worn by most of the crew. Nbaro and Drake stood out, too, both dressed up for the occasion; Thea wore make-up for the first time in months and she was head-turningly beautiful, and Nbaro admired her. And, after a second Madeira, told her so.
Thea grinned. ‘Well, that’s the idea. Rick and I are going to be married. This is my engagement party, in a way.’ She leaned close. ‘And with what we have in the hold, honey, you and I are never going to be poor again.’
They clinked glasses.
Later, lying in their acceleration couches, Drake said, ‘Merry Christmas, Marca.’
Nbaro leaned over and caught her friend’s hand. ‘Thanks, Thea. Merry Christmas.’
Then she lay in her rack and thought, Dear God, I don’t really believe in you, but please keep Thea Drake alive and well.
She laughed at herself, and then remembered that she was about twenty-two hours from flying a mission with a one-in-five chance of success. And then she was asleep.
Morosini had arranged for Nbaro to stand an under-instruction TAO watch in the hours before her mission; it made sense for her to have the best possible understanding of the tactical situation before she launched. So she went to a briefing with Han and Gorshokov, listened to the mission from the flight perspective, and then went down to Sixth Deck and heard the Marines’ mission brief, and got checked out with a carbine and ammunition. Her role in the Marine briefing took about twenty seconds.
‘And last, Ms Nbaro here will hold her own ship as long as she can. Any fire team that can’t make its objective should fall back to Pericles and help Ms Nbaro secure the perimeter.’
And that was it. Operation Marathon, the mission planners called it.
Nbaro went up to the Combat Information Centre and sat on an empty acceleration couch. She plugged in to the repeater screen, but only out of habit; she could watch everything on her lace, faster and more accurately. She marvelled a little at her increased ability to use it. She really could now do two things at once – even three, if one of them was just observing. And she could dive down almost to the base code, the way Dorcas did – not as effectively, but she could do it.
She was looking at their spread of sensors, and the number of sensors they had left on board: a worrying number.
She got an alert, and then a tidal wave of alerts – so many that it took her a moment to realise what had happened. One of the very few disadvantages of being deep in the datasphere was the difference between reading data and interpreting it. The duty TAO wasn’t anyone she knew – another officer from the command bridge, Commander Vivek Mehrotra.
He said two words.
‘Battle stations.’
Screens flashed red. A voice throughout the ships said, ‘Battle stations. This is not a drill. Battle stations.’ Nbaro could remember when that sound had filled her with dread and adrenaline.
Now, it was routine to every person aboard.
All around her, the ship began to button up. Ships were appearing out at the system’s edge, at approximately the orbit of the inner gas giant. They weren’t coming in from the main route to New India; they were coming in from the far Fringe. In almost real time, she watched no fewer than six New Texas military ships extract into the system. They were positively ID’d as destroyers, a class much smaller than the Athens , but carrying main railgun armaments.
Six enemy ships.
They broadcast a long message on system entry.
Six destroyers.
Mehrotra swivelled to face her. ‘Lieutenant Nbaro. Rumour has it that you have a neural lace.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
‘Can you bring up a schematic on a New Texas Destroyer?’
Nbaro had one ready. ‘A lot of this is speculation based on intelligence more than a year old,’ she said, dropping it to the TAO’s tab.
‘I see they’re much tougher than the three old DHC destroyers we faced a week ago,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Care to speculate on where New Texas got eighteen brand-new destroyers?’
‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘Someone spent a—’ she paused. ‘A lot of money on secret shipyards.’
‘They did. They’re burning hot – going pretty fast, too.’
‘Morosini?’
‘Nbaro. Operation Marathon is aborted before it begins. I’m not entirely sorry. ’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Our enemies may lack some of our subtlety and much of our communications infrastructure, but these newcomers would see you broadside-on as you pushed for orbit. Even the stealth we built into the Pericles wouldn’t get past six different ships. They would catch you in an hour, much less sixteen. ’
‘I’m willing to try,’ she said.
‘No. The odds have changed. The enemy may now commit to a battle. ’
Nbaro was still in the Combat Information Centre, lying inside a buttoned-up acceleration couch, but it was as if she was chatting with Morosini. ‘You are waiting for something else,’ she said suddenly.
Morosini didn’t chuckle, and he had no face to grin, and yet she sensed something like amusement. ‘You know me very well. Yes. I have another trick or two to play. ’
She watched the six new ships light their fires and proceed at maximum acceleration. The battle computer predicted their vectors for the station.
‘They still can’t win,’ Nbaro sent.
‘They can, with Hin. Or hurt us so badly that no one wins. ’ Morosini didn’t have emotions, but if he did, she’d have said he was concerned.
‘You didn’t expect so many warships,’ she said.
Morosini sent, ‘Why do I let you pester me? No, Marca. I didn’t expect so many warships. And that tells me that the enemy has planned this for as long as we have. ’
‘Another AI?’
No response.
She had a moment to contemplate Saladin, the AI on board the Dubai , who must be part of Morosini’s cabal. She imagined thousands, millions, perhaps trillions of people, their lives trapped in a web of planning and plotting by non-human machines.
She didn’t come to any conclusions. But she did calculate the relative velocities and accelerations of all the warships in-system, with the AI’s help, and she ran time forward to the likely moment of contact.
It wasn’t perfectly clear, but the enemy had already committed to a battle. Their plan was simple: a total envelopment of the DHC battlegroup with co-ordinated attack groups coming from a dozen different vectors to overwhelm the battlegroup’s defences. The pirates astern were the farthest behind, and had already begun laying their own ablative shield, filling space with a three-dimensional cloud of reflective dust.
One by one, the warships docked at Medulla Station and the others in orbit launched, and joined up. Once they had their vector, they, too, began to lay sand.
Actual combat was three days away.
The cancellation of her mission left Nbaro with free time. She took it to fence, finding Musashi available. He beat her, but both of them enjoyed it. Then she visited the ready room, where Thulile and Eyre were providing instruction to junior spacer-techs who were about to become back-seaters. She ran a sim for the Pericles. Han was asleep, which surprised her.
She went back to her stateroom, and found Drake just getting up.
‘Boarding party,’ Drake said. ‘There’s no trade, so I’m a full-time trainer.’ She grinned. ‘Which I admit I rather enjoy, however barbarous my mother will think it is!’
‘Your brothers will be jealous,’ Nbaro said.
‘You better believe it!’ Drake scooped a sword off the rack and clipped it to her armour. ‘Off to save the galaxy. Don’t wait up.’
Nbaro sat on the edge of her acceleration couch, trying to decide what to do with herself. Free time was a thing of the distant past.
She went to find Dorcas, who was on Sixth Deck, working on his starfish simulator. She pushed in with Qaqqaq, who was lying on the deck, welding with a tiny laser tool that flashed like lightning. Dorcas was staring at the wall; Nbaro sensed that he was using his neural lace to control the robot, instead of using the controller lying on the table that had once held thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition.
‘Somehow,’ she said, ‘I’m always comfortable in this space.’
Qaqqaq muttered something, or maybe she swore.
Dorcas moved his hand. As he moved, the model starfish moved, and the movement was smooth and even, not jerky like the old robot.
‘Got it,’ Qaqqaq said.
‘And very nice to see you, too, Naisha,’ Nbaro said.
Qaqqaq rolled over, flipped back her welding visor and smiled up at her. ‘I like it here, too,’ she said. ‘Captain Dukas can’t find me. Sometimes I think I’ll just come in here, slip past Lieutenant Smith and catch a nap.’
‘I came to harass Dorcas,’ Nbaro said, ‘But since you’re here, Naisha, you know you’re listed as the flight engineer on the Pericles ?’
Qaqqaq was getting to her feet. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘If there’s ever a flight during which I’m not focused on battle damage, engine room malfunction or Dorcas’s pet robots, I’ll be sure to come and help your completely automated systems do their thing.’
‘In other words, never.’
Qaqqaq shrugged again. ‘I helped design the Pericles . And I’ve done some training with Gorshokov, and I’ve helped Morosini write the engineering sims.’
Dorcas came out of his fugue. ‘Lieutenant Qaqqaq is the most important person on the ship,’ he said, deadpan. ‘Or at least that’s what Captain Dukas tells me two or three times a day.’
‘On this ship of heroes,’ Qaqqaq intoned, ‘some of us are just a little more heroic than others.’ She winked at Nbaro. ‘And while we’re on this, Marca, you have an EVA qual and lots of experience, so how about helping with the antennas out on the hull? I have something like fifteen hundred to replace.’
Nbaro wilted.
‘See what I mean? Now, I’m going to go catch a nap before anyone knows I’m done here. You two …’ She made a gesture. ‘Don’t break anything.’
Nbaro had intended to lead Dorcas astray, but he was deep in his study trance and she got into the spirit of the thing, and helped him move the rebuilt robot up to Third Deck under a tarp, so that the project remained secret. Then Darkstar had to check them through, personally, despite knowing both of them well. Nbaro had to sign yet another non-disclosure statement.
Nbaro had never been in the chamber that held Feather Dancer. It was dark, and she and Dorcas wore infrared goggles. Feather Dancer was asleep, or simply meditative, or depressed – whichever was accurate; it drifted in its cold ammonia.
Dorcas glanced at her. ‘It is asleep, I believe.’
Nbaro nodded. ‘How much have you learned?’
Dorcas made a sign, and both of them switched off their neural laces. It was very likely that there were cameras in here: mics, video recordings. On the other hand, only Darkstar and Morosini would have access.
‘I’ve learned how little I know,’ Dorcas said with real bitterness. ‘In some ways, I understand less now than before we got to Trade Point.’
Nbaro looked at the floating Starfish, and then back at Dorcas. She sat down in one of the observation couches. Dorcas had spent a lot of time here; the space had a bit of his scent, and a few discarded bits of recycle. He wasn’t the tidiest of men.
‘How so?’ she asked.
He looked at Feather Dancer. ‘I’m no longer sure that it was the Starfish who destroyed the Circles,’ he said. ‘ “The Starfish” don’t exist. There are hundreds of Starfish worlds and dozens of polities, which is itself a human concept that has no place in Starfish neural connections. They simply do not have connections to other Starfish in that way. They give birth to new Starfish – and those entities are forever linked. Groups of linked Starfish build ships – a link. Ships plant colonies … They are linked, but distantly. Space is vast, and their groupings change in every generation as old links become too distant and new ones are formed.’
He glanced at her. ‘At least, that’s what I think Feather Dancer said. And unlinked groups prey on each other. Feather Dancer was virtually a slave. It was captured when a new group took Trade Point, perhaps twenty years ago, although … something there doesn’t quite add up yet.’
‘So Feather Dancer’s link used to run Trade Point?’ she said.
‘Exactly. And the invaders – the pirates, if you like – left them behind, destroyed Trade Point, and fled, taking their people with them. Feather Dancer doesn’t know why, but thinks they fear us, and worries that we have an alliance with the Hin.’
‘The wicked flee when no alien pursueth,’ she said.
Dorcas looked puzzled for a moment and then brightened. ‘Ah! Very good. I sometimes forget how intelligent you are.’
She smacked him lightly. ‘You only want me for my body?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Your willpower. Your ambition. Your courage.’ He nodded, and then did one of the conversational volte-faces that made him so difficult for some people. ‘You think our adversaries are AIs?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Evidence?’
‘Only an AI would make plans that allowed for the devastation of an entire advanced world and the deaths of millions to accomplish a local goal,’ she said. ‘Sahel.’
‘You underestimate the cruelty of merely human minds.’
She shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I was taught at the Orphanage that it was impossible, given relativity and the vastness of space, to plan co-ordinated attacks over interstellar distances. But …’ She held up a finger. ‘We know Morosini did. And looking around this system, it looks like someone else did, too. Including carefully timed arrivals.’
Dorcas looked sceptical.
Nbaro shrugged. ‘Look, it’s scary and I don’t really want to think about it, but all the evidence from the beginning has pointed to this being a fight within the DHC. Right? So here’s what I think – two different groups of AIs have gone in two different directions over the future of the DHC and the future of … humanity.’ She didn’t think much of her argument herself, now that she said it out loud.
Dorcas nodded slowly. ‘I understand all of that. But you have seen, as I have, deep into the architecture of our AI. You know, better than most, how it processes data. How could two disagree so sharply as to fight? Based on the same data?’
Nbaro looked at him as if he’d suddenly grown a second head. ‘You underestimate the stupidity of merely human programmers.’
His head snapped back. But then he laughed. ‘Ah, Marca Nbaro …’
She leaned in. ‘No, Horatio, I mean it! Look at how many plans Morosini has made and discarded since Trade Point. He was going to take the Athens out into the Beyond. Then he was going to send the Pericles into the Beyond. Then he was going to slip home … until he found the Dubai. Then he wanted to provoke a battle to level the playing field. He represents the pure scientific method – because the data changes, the situation changes. Right?’
‘I see where you are going.’ Dorcas sounded sad.
‘They’re not gods. They’re fallible. And even if they don’t feel emotion, they can be bound by their assumptions, the same as we are.’ She shook her head. ‘Somewhere inside the DHC is an AI, or a dozen, who are opposed to Morosini and Saladin.’
Dorcas’s face was impassive. ‘Or a conspiracy of humans with good computer support.’
My parents died protecting the bureaucratic cores, the AIs that drive the DHC. Morosini said, ‘They bought us time.’ What does that mean?
‘Are the Starfish part of the conspiracy?’ she asked.
Dorcas smiled thinly. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘No one can speak to them. I can barely manage and no one else has had the contact. Indeed, without Feather Dancer, we’d never have got even this far. And it’s worse than that – I have begun to suspect that their chemical communications and handshakes change like computer protocols, from generation to generation, so that in five or six generations without contact, perhaps they can’t communicate at all. And that means that instead of learning Starfish , I may only be learning to talk to one Starfish. Or one clan. For a while.’
‘Almighty,’ she muttered.
‘Honestly, when I’m feeling depressed, I begin to wonder if I was included in this mission simply so that Morosini could threaten to find a military alliance with the Starfish. The mere threat would provoke—’
She leaned over and kissed him. ‘I already figured that out,’ she said. ‘And I really didn’t need to hear it again.’
He nodded. ‘Kissing is wonderful.’
‘Please explain,’ she muttered.
They both laughed.
Her tablet pinged and Sabina said, ‘New data on the system repeater. ’
Dorcas’s eyes lost their focus, and she dived into the datasphere herself.
Six Hin ships in two pods had extracted, in almost perfect unison. They had come from roughly the same direction as the six human warships; they had better astrogators, and now they were ahead of them. About twenty-seven hours to combat contact.
The TAO didn’t even bother to set battle stations, which Nbaro thought was a tribute to what the Athens had experienced.
Her tab pinged again. Cheerfully, Sabina said, ‘The flight schedule has been completely rewritten. ’
‘Stand by for maximum acceleration in one hour,’ said her tab, her implant, and the ship’s voice.
Dorcas looked as puzzled as she felt.
‘What are we doing?’ she asked.
Dorcas shook his head. ‘It’s what we’re not doing that I regret.’
‘And Thea says you have no sense of humour.’ She laughed. ‘I have to walk to my plane. See you on the other side.’
He grabbed a hand and kissed it, and then she was gone.
In less than an hour Nbaro was in 6–0–7, admiring the latest repairs. She had Tim Eyre as her co-pilot, plus Tench and someone she’d never even met as her back-seaters.
‘Tojo, ma’am,’ said the tall young man. ‘Lamar Tojo. New London.’
She grinned back at him in the middle of her flight checks. ‘Welcome aboard, Mr Tojo. We’re full of fun here.’
Tench snorted. Then there was a click, and Nbaro heard, ‘Nbaro’s OK – she’s actually pretty good. Watch out for Eyre – he’s a bastard.’
Nbaro’s smile grew thin, and she said, ‘Petty Officer Tench, you might want to switch your comms panel to back seat only.’
Silence.
Eyre was laughing. Nbaro liked that. She gave him a little fist-bump.
They prepped for a mass launch. She’d scanned the preflight briefing: they were launching a full, two space wing assault on the collection of privateers, pirates and converted freighters that had begun to chase them from the rings of the inner gas giant. The Athens and her consorts were going to decelerate hard; in the tactical situation, that was the equivalent of accelerating at the enemy behind them.
But there was no timing given. She assumed the ship would flip end for end, to put her engines in line with the deceleration vector before the space wing launched.
She looked at the 3D repeater via her neural lace, did some maths with her augmentation, and saw …
What does Morosini suspect? Why are we running from six Hin?
Backed by six warships …
The Beautiful War Dance was still repeating her song, or line of poetry, but sensors now showed her in direct conversation with the newcomers. They were within a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres – an incredible astrogation job.
Luck? Brilliant planning? Some sort of impossible faster-than-light communications?
Too late to worry about that now.
She was fascinated to find that now that she was faced with imminent combat, her concerns about AIs and Starfish and the genocide of the Circles all faded into nothing. Now was just now – the now in which she was going in harm’s way.
The ship fired all four tubes in rapid succession, towards the rapidly approaching Hin ships, but Morosini and Saladin were waiting for something. Nbaro suspected there were negotiations going on with the station, possibly with the Hin or between the Hin factions.
She would never have believed, before she came into space, that it was possible to be this bored while also being this tense. She wanted it over with: win, lose, draw or die. She wanted to get out there where the adrenaline replaced the anxiety.
Another hour passed. In three hours, they’d be at the outer range for the Hin weapons. The closing velocity between the Hin group and the Athens was terrifying in itself. If there was an exchange at these speeds, everything would be done by computers.
She thought about her parents. According to reports, they’d died here, attacked by pirates. She now knew that wasn’t true, and yet somehow it still affected her.
She used her neural lace to access data stored on board the Athens. In seconds, she knew that when her parents – at least, according to Morosini – died on City Orbital, defending the bureaucratic AI cores from unknown assailants, the Athens was docked at City. So was the Dubai.
They bought us time.
Nbaro stared out into the hangar bay, seeing nothing. Time for what …?
More new arrivals: three ships, extracting very close to the six NDR destroyers, perhaps a hundred thousand klicks further out.
Damn , she thought. The odds just get longer and longer.
The manoeuvre alarm sounded throughout the ship. ‘Rotation in one minute. Stand by. Brace for rotation in one minute. Stand by.’
So, they were running. Either Morosini liked the odds as little as she did, or he had new information …
Out in the asteroid belt, and from the many moons and satellites in-system, dozens of Hin began to emerge from hiding. Most kept their energy shields down – possibly a sign they’d been hiding so long, they were low on fuel.
Possibly not.
Every ship in the system that was under power was headed for the Athens .
‘Everyone buttoned up?’ Nbaro was happy to note that her voice was steady, her gloved hands solid on the yoke. ‘Launching cold and silent.’
‘Roger that,’ Tench said.
They began the end-for-end flip. They’d done it many times; it meant a heavy acceleration at both ends of the ship, and Nbaro felt it through the artificial gravity, even in her spaceframe’s excellent acceleration couch – a disorientating motion in all three dimensions. In the datasphere, she could see the whole battlegroup was flipping end for end. The Beautiful War Dance completed first, and then the Stealthy Change.
The Hin ships behind them accelerated immediately.
The Beautiful War Dance broadcast a new message. Dorcas translated: ‘You hunt in dark waters.’
One of the Hin now behind them replied, ‘Only those that hunt with us will be fed.’
Nbaro lay cushioned in her acceleration couch, feeling the vibration in her bones as the launch tubes fired again and again. She was on the Tower frequency and none of those were space wing launches, which meant … load after load of ablatives and reflectives, or lethal payloads of mass slugs, bomblets or mines. Nbaro wondered about the supplies of such stuff on board and took a peek with her lace. Her stomach knotted.
We resupplied from Dubai and even so, we could run out of sand and we’re very low on mines.
Two hundred kilometres away, the Dubai was doing the same, launching payloads as fast as the railguns would cycle – mostly reflectives.
The end-for-end flip was completed, and the deceleration programme began, as well as the launches. The Athens and the Dubai had created an expanding cloud of reflectives shot off through 180 degrees of slightly off-axis rotation, and each ship had rotated a different way on the y -axis, so that a ball of expanding reflectives expanded behind both ships.
The three newcomers were just far-off ellipses, running silently and cold, barely detectable even on the best of their equipment.
‘Damn,’ Eyre said. ‘Seen that before …’
‘Bubbles?’ Tench asked from the back.
Nbaro’s focus narrowed. The three ellipses behind them were dozens of hours away. The end-for-end flip was bringing their first opponents into battle range.
She had a mission – a very straightforward mission. Strike. With the full power of two greatship space wings.
The launches began. Two Flight Five fighters went off, then a Flight Three Electronic Warfare bird, and then more fighters – the small, close-in ship-defence fighters now flown by Flight Two pilots, or directly by the AI. Nbaro followed them, riding the Tower and Space Ops systems. She saw the Pericles launch, and couldn’t tell whether the frigate was flown by computer or Han. Then more Flight Five, and then, finally, 6–0–2 with the skipper, 6–0–3 with Thulile, 6–0–5 with Storkel …
‘Everyone ready?’ she asked.
They rogered up.
Then Nbaro was moving onto the rails of tube 2, saluting, and they were out into the Deep Black. Adrenaline surged; worry fell away.
They all launched cold, the electromagnets shooting them off the bow towards the privateers, their relative speeds taking them towards the enemy and away from the Athens , even though both were decelerating. The Athens was decelerating at 6 g and that rate was increasing, so that Nbaro and her crew felt the weight come off them as they left the launch tubes.
Their targets were thousands of kilometres away, far outside of any weapons range. Using nothing but minute alterations of course and cold thrusters, the space wing began to form up; on the tactical 3D, now showing only the volume of battle space, the Dubai ’s space wing was also launching. Sensors scattered through the system continued to show the ninety-plus ships manoeuvring: a staggering number of craft even without the space wings.
Nbaro, student and teacher of tactics classes, smiled wryly because, despite a year of discussion and practice, this was the first time they’d actually fight a set-piece battle. The space wings were forming up, in layers, above the plane of the greatships.
She was close enough to the mother ship that she could look back and see the vast, sword-shaped, matt-black mass of the Athens , her cross-guard bridge just visible in the jewel-blue glow of her fusion engines as she slowed stern-first.
It was clear that the gaggle of reconfigured freighters and purpose-built, needle-like privateers had not expected a head-to-head confrontation. Two ships had already flipped and were running. The rest began to spread out.
The enemy launched missiles. Their first salvo was huge: over seventy missiles released in six seconds. Some of the freighters had to have rotary launchers.
Seconds later, a second wave was launched. However, the launching ships were shooting through a cloud of chaff, their missiles on automatic until they could locate a target beyond the cloud.
The main tube railguns finished flinging the space wing at the enemy and began to fire lethal payloads. The ship rotated on its main axis slightly; the slugs it was firing were being aimed by AI at possible enemy locations minutes in the future, limiting their opposition’s manoeuvre options even as more of the privateers either turned to run or started to fly evasively.
Something from one of the earlier Athens payloads broke open, blowing a film of reflective matter across the front of the pirates, about four thousand kilometres out from their desperately manoeuvring hulls.
The All-Sensor Warfare birds lit up, laying a blanket of signal degradation over the privateers as the Pericles shot off a dozen missiles. In seconds, each missile was imitating a ship.
‘Go,’ Captain Tremaine said over the space wing command frequency.
Nbaro was flying as wingperson to Thulile. They didn’t have a specific target, yet, but they were the flankers, ready to catch anyone trying to get around the reflective cloud.
She followed Thulile when she popped up, firing her engines. Their silent running was over.
The space wing went to full throttle behind the expanding cloud of reflectives. The Flight Three ships fired sensor-distorting missiles that, in turn, burst.
The better equipped of the privateers went to active radars, and the Flight Five pilots fired anti-radar missiles from about three thousand kilometres. No one expected hits; they merely forced the enemy to turn off their active dishes. The whole privateer formation, never very solid, began to unravel, with ships turning in every direction, dropping their own reflectives and ablative sand to add to the sensor chaos.
Blind, and slow, the combined private militaries of a dozen Fringe planets and their less savoury privateer allies tried to strike out at the whirling space wing craft. Some of the nearer ships began to fire close-in weapons. Without their radar and ladar they were blind, so they fired at false targets provided by the Electronic Counter-Measures craft, or decoys, or in one terrible instance, at each other.
A small freighter – about one-fiftieth the mass of the Athens – lost its magnetic seal and blew: a flash of pure white.
Nbaro could see the lines of iron slugs reaching for her. Whether the privateer had a radar lock, or was just lucky, the line of slugs rushed towards her like a sweeping broom, and she pushed the yoke down even as Thulile went up.
The line of slugs went by, missing by less than a kilometre – in space, a very near miss.
It didn’t take months of tactics classes to see what was happening. The space wing craft all had datalink information from sensors scattered throughout the system – sensors that peaked around the clouds of chaff. They also had better computers for predicting the location of a temporarily hidden contact.
The enemy ships couldn’t even share data.
Thulile, two thousand kilometres out from a sleek privateer, selected her as a target. She chose an attack vector and then cut her engines, nose-on to present the smallest possible radar cross-section.
Nbaro followed, duplicating course and speed.
The enemy ship was firing; on radar, her six close-in weapons looked like fire hoses spraying lines of foam into the void.
Behind them the enemy missiles began to detonate as the Flight Two fighters engaged them. Not all were nuclear, but those that were, fratricided any missile close enough to have its avionics fried. On the Flight Two frequency, close-in fighter pilots began hunting individual missiles, passing targets verbally.
Now well inside two thousand kilometres, the big Flight Five birds released another wave of anti-radiation and anti-laser missiles that homed in on any preset source that radiated energy.
Nbaro checked her Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) to make sure none of the missiles tried for her.
Thulile shot all four of her torpedoes at a thousand kilometres. Then she turned away, and Nbaro followed, turning so hard that she was on the edge of blacking out all the way through the turn.
Fourteen seconds later, the privateer exploded. Nbaro could barely breathe; she’d never pushed a spaceframe or her own body so hard – 11 g by the end of the turn.
Sixteen ships were taken out in less than a minute, and other ships powered on, their crews all dead. The overwhelming firepower of two space wings left no room for heroics or defiance. Here and there, by luck or skill, a ship survived, and the attack craft took losses … but not many.
‘They’ll be teaching that at the academies for a generation,’ Nbaro said.
Thulile came up. ‘You still have fish?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Take the lead. Pick a target, I’ll watch your back.’
A big freighter had run early, if not very fast. She had heavy armament: dozens of close-in weapons, mostly light railguns, and a welded-on spinal railgun that she used to pile up chaff in her wake. Nbaro could only detect her because there were still functioning sensors farther out-system, left behind days before.
She put her digital tag on the freighter, and got an acknowledgement from Thulile.
Somewhere to starboard, there were flashes, like a lightning storm over the sea at Far Point.
Nbaro didn’t think about the flashes. She located the forward edge of the Athens ’ original chaff launch and flew there; the cloud was still expanding faster than the big freighter could run, and she stayed in it, using the datalink to stay on target.
Then she used the cloud to hide her line-up with the freighter’s vector, so that she was coming right up behind the line of his engine exhaust, where every ship was blind.
Almost every ship.
They were beyond the main combat now. Behind them, the space wings duelled with the last of the privateers; yet further back, the fighters, the All-Spectrum Deception devices and the massive close-in systems of the Athens dealt with the last of the second wave of enemy missiles. But they were alone, hurtling out of a nuclear lightning storm amid a cloud of glowing reflectives intermixed with debris. Nbaro had her line-up.
‘Tench?’
‘Ma’am. I have four ready and hot, looking for lock-on.’
‘Here we go. Buckle up.’
Nbaro fired the main engines and 6–0–7 shot forward out of the cloud.
‘Lock!’ Tench said almost immediately, and Nbaro felt the shudder as the first torpedo tore away.
As the third torpedo launched, something must have given them away. The freighter began a ponderous yaw, instantly unmasking powerful close-in batteries.
Nbaro was flying with her neural lace; the release of the fourth torpedo was followed within milliseconds by the same punishing turn away that Thulile had done, except that Nbaro plotted hers in advance to turn into the line of the freighter’s thrusters, out of her firing arcs.
Thulile followed her, matching courses. They couldn’t turn tightly enough to avoid crossing the enemy stern; more iron slugs reached out for them and both spaceframes rocked with the AI-assisted evasive manoeuvres that punched the crews in the back and left bruises and shaky breathing.
But they were alive, and they went back through the curtain of reflectives, now eighteen minutes old, ahead of the detonation of the freighter’s drives that burned for almost a second like a new sun.
The cockpit was silent, as three space crew contemplated the results of their attack.
Finally, Eyre said, ‘Nice run, ma’am.’
‘Ma’am?’ she snapped. ‘Now? Here?’
In the back, Tojo dared a chuckle. Then Tench said, ‘That was a big ship.’
Nbaro had no reply to that.
The space wing formed a stack at the bow and stern of the Athens and began to land, two at a time. Nbaro and Thulile had run the farthest from the greatship and were late in the pattern, which gave Nbaro time to look at the system through her and the Athens ’ sensors.
So she was watching the 3D holo in her head when the six Hin who’d extracted with such accuracy punched through the Athens ’ expanding cloud of reflectives.
There was a star-like flash of light and one of the Hin ships vanished. Two more nuclear explosions showed that the cloud of reflectives had been sown with the dragon’s teeth of nuclear mines. Four trailing Hin ships turned away; one continued on course.
The Beautiful War Dance sent, ‘Only those who hunt with us will be fed.’
Nbaro winced.
Out in the system, many inbound Hin ships turned away, but three pods continued inbound, all firing off messages by radio and laser aimed at the Beautiful War Dance. Out beyond the inner gas giant, two more Hin pods began firing their energy beam lances at each other, about two hundred million kilometres from the Athens .
The wreckage of twenty-seven human ships was an expanding cloud of radiation and material behind them. A few ships had become preserved tombs. The rest were mostly dust. A handful of survivors pleaded for pickup.
And the three newcomers, whose arrival had prompted Pisani to action, were coming in-system like a stampede. And now they were identified.
DHC Battlecruiser Lepanto. DHC Battlecruiser Noryang. DHC Battlecruiser Huron.
Eyre punched the air. ‘I thought I recognised those sneaky bastards! We had Huron and Lepanto with us the first leg of cruise! Remember, Ma— er … Marca?’
Nbaro wasn’t in a mood to laugh, but she could feel the grim smile on her face, wondering how they could have gotten here. *
The six New Democratic Republic ships that had most recently arrived in-system all turned away, running for the apparent safety of Medulla Station. The ships watching the insertion point for New Bengal abandoned their posts and accelerated inwards for orbits closer to Medulla, joining their comrades – except one. It inserted on a course almost certainly intended for New India.
Nbaro landed. The atmosphere aboard was far from jubilant; in her intel debrief, she asked Lochiel how many people had been aboard the pirate fleet.
‘Five or six thousand,’ he said with a cold shrug. ‘Remember, Nbaro – they came here to break and strip our ships. They’re jackals.’
Nbaro nodded. ‘I know that in my head, but Almighty … we just fried them.’
Eyre nodded, as if he’d thought the same thing.
Whoever planned Sahel was willing to kill millions. But Morosini’s plan is definitely killing tens of thousands.
My taste for glory has been squashed flat. Please take me back to daily trade runs.
An hour later, Nbaro was sitting at the Master’s table, drinking coffee while she read the latest exchanges with Asinpal Las on her tab, with Dorcas trying to over-explain his translation at her shoulder. The department heads were already gathered with an air of anticlimax.
The Master came in, they stood to attention, and he waved them back to their seats.
‘At ease. I have Da Costa’s response and, in summary, he says he’ll blow the station if we don’t turn away. I told him that if he does, I’ll kill him and every one of his crews, and then I’ll render New Texas uninhabitable.’
There was absolute stillness in the room.
Pisani sent Da Costa’s threat to their tabs. ‘I’m absolutely serious. And I expect to be obeyed. If he kills forty thousand DHC citizens, I will take New Texas out.’
Morosini looked up from patting his cat. ‘Vettor, That is an excellent threat. But we will not, however provoked, kill twenty million people to avenge forty thousand. ’
Nbaro was watching closely. Morosini could have sent that message via neural lace instead of publicly slapping down the highest-ranking human aboard this ship. I think this is an act.
Almighty! How many wheels are there inside the wheels?
When Pisani looked at Morosini the rage on his aged face seemed very real.
Then he sagged. ‘Damn. Yes. Of course.’
Morosini nodded. ‘But as a threat, excellent. ’
Lochiel raised a tentative hand. ‘They still have the military power to face us. In railgun throw weight, their eighteen ships are superior to our four – if our Hin allies will even fight.’
Pisani sat back. He was recovering from his anger very quickly; Nbaro found her suspicions reinforced. But why does he want us to believe he would commit such a crime?
Because he thinks someone aboard will pass on the message …?
That makes no sense. He got slapped down …
Almighty … If this is the bluff, then Morosini wants someone to believe we won’t do it when in fact we will?
She took a sharp breath, having missed an exchange on military capabilities.
She looked at Dorcas and raised her hand.
‘Apologies, sir, but my read of the transcripts with our Hin is that they’re successfully forming some alliances in-system. I think the Hin are now mostly neutral, with a scattering of possible support.’ She paused, and took the plunge. She was getting better at speaking her mind to the captains. ‘I think the destruction of the station would be very bad for our diplomatic efforts. Based on my conversations with Nik’ri Put, the Hin have a formal approach to war that avoids civilian casualties.’
‘We’re not the ones threatening to blow the station, Ms Nbaro,’ Pisani said stiffly.
Morosini nodded. ‘No, no, I take her point completely. She means that if we want to preserve this fledgling alliance – a diplomatic coup that will undermine anything the NDR has tried to accomplish on the Fringe – we need to prevent the destruction of the station, which will make humanity look bloodthirsty. ’
Nbaro nodded. ‘And I feel that the recent action against the pirates must be represented as such, so the Hin understand that such unfair and unequal combat is a matter of the rule of law.’
Morosini raised a hand. ‘Mr Dorcas? ’
‘Fully agree,’ Dorcas said. ‘Although, to my eyes, the Hin were very impressed by the show of force, as you no doubt intended.’ He nodded. ‘Followed by the arrival of three battlecruisers. I beg to differ with Lieutenant Lochiel – the advantage is entirely ours now.’
Morosini stroked his holographic beard. ‘I agree with Ms Nbaro – she remains our expert on the Hin. Sentients are complex creatures … They can be impressed and still find our actions abhorrent. ’ Morosini looked straight at Nbaro. ‘As I did. ’
That’s me told , Nbaro thought.
Pisani also looked at her. ‘I’ll take a brisker tone with Da Costa, propose negotiations, and point out that he’s lost the Hin.’
As you always intended.
After some discussion between the captains, it was agreed to turn back for the station, to provide the stick behind the carrot of negotiation.
As people began to leave, Morosini asked her on her neural lace to stay, and she accepted a second cup of coffee.
‘You are concerned with the morality of all this? ’ Morosini said.
‘Yes.’
Morosini nodded. ‘Once they launched their grand battle plan with ships coming at us from all over the system, we had little choice. The arms of their attack were not mutually supporting. We broke one, ruthlessly – the one composed of the worst, most predacious people. We made our point. ’ He waved a hand. ‘Would you rather a close-in battle where we took serious casualties? Truekner? Dorcas? You? ’
Her face burned.
‘I’d rather we weren’t in this position at all,’ she said. ‘And I think you put us here.’
‘I did .’ Morosini nodded. ‘And anything further is supposition. I don’t suppose you’d like to take my word that the alternatives were much, much worse? ’
Nbaro glanced at Pisani. He was fiddling with his earpiece, but he was listening.
‘I almost believe you,’ she said. But what if I’m wrong?
Morosini said nothing, but she guessed he was exchanging data with Pisani.
Pisani nodded to her. ‘Operation Marathon is back on.’
* The short story The Gifts of the Magi in Beyond the Fringe by Miles Cameron will give you a fuller explanation of where these three came from and what they did.
The Athens and her consorts decelerated further, allowing the debris of the battle to sweep past them: wreckage; disabled ships; an expanding cloud of gas; a belt of ablatives and reflectives launched by both sides. It formed an expanding field already more than three thousand kilometres across, and for some hours, Flight Eight rescue ships retrieved survival capsules, including Storkel and his whole crew, all alive, who needed immediate radiation treatment. They’d lost 6–0–5 in the last moments of the fight. Flight Eight also retrieved over a hundred survivors from the enemy squadron.
Storkel wasn’t the only casualty. The waves of enemy missiles had achieved no direct hits, but radiation had penetrated the hull and the medbay was packed, again. More spacers had died aboard the Athens and the Dubai. Both Han and Gorshokov had taken doses. Han had the bad sunburn of a severe dose and was unconscious in a special unit.
As was Rick Hanna, with steam burns over half his body and a dose of radiation.
Nbaro knew all of it through the datasphere, as she and Qaqqaq worked with a dozen techs to bring the damaged Pericles back to fighting trim. Her entire avionics suite was removed and replaced; Nbaro couldn’t leave the tiny bridge because, despite her reservations, she had originally installed a great many of the components.
Major Darkstar appeared in person.
‘Nbaro,’ they said.
‘Tir?’
‘The window of opportunity will close in six hours,’ they said. And then, in a less formal voice, ‘I’m sure you know this, Nbaro, but …’
‘Going as fast as we can, tir.’ Qaqqaq was used to pressure from superiors. ‘Almost every electronic component on this ship was blanked by a close nuclear burst. They all have to be replaced and tested.’
Darkstar towered over the two women, silently.
‘Which I’m sure you already knew, tir,’ Nbaro said.
Major Darkstar gave a grunt that might have been amusement. ‘My Marines will be camping just the other side of your airlock,’ they said. ‘I took the liberty of moving your armour and weapons up. Intel wanted to send a spacer. I told them Locran.’
Nbaro managed a genuine smile. ‘I think we can find room for Locran,’ she said, and went back to it.
Thea Drake was detailed to her, and the three of them lay on the floor, Nbaro and Drake passing black box components to Qaqqaq inside the avionics hatch.
‘Watch the little hydraulics thingy,’ Nbaro warned.
‘It’s the feed line for the acceleration couches,’ Qaqqaq said in mock disgust. ‘Not a “little hydraulics thingy”.’
‘I think she spends too much time with Dorcas,’ Drake said. ‘That was just his tone.’
Qaqqaq was invisible, but her voice carried. ‘I have a limitless supply of indelible blue goo, Ms Drake.’
‘Fair point,’ Drake said. Nbaro wasn’t sure that Drake even knew Hanna was injured. The neural lace was a two-edged sword of information, and now she couldn’t decide … Say something? Let it ride?
Nbaro had set her mind on the mission. She knew that Truekner was safe, and so were Mpono, Drake, Dorcas and Cortez. Hanna, Gorshokov and Han may yet live. She shut the rest out, rotated boxes, inserted components, watched red lights flicker to green.
After two hours, she couldn’t hold it in. ‘Thea,’ she said on a private comms channel.
‘Right here, honey,’ Drake said.
‘Rick took a heavy radiation dose.’ Almighty, I could have put that better.
Thea was silent for a moment, and then she said, ‘I know.’
That was all.
It took four hours. They had trouble linking the sub-AI to some of the sensors; Nbaro remembered that from the first fitting out, and she crawled into the belly and restored the links. The battle to come seemed very distant.
Qaqqaq ran a diagnostics check that seemed to take forever but ran for less than a minute.
‘We’re good to go,’ she said. There was a slight catch in her voice when she said it, then she repeated it with more emphasis. ‘We’re good to go.’
Nbaro began to crawl out of the electronics harnesses in the belly, and she felt something pop at her neck, and then there was a single sweet chime.
She had no space to turn, so she continued her crawl. Only when she was out on the deck did she find that her gold charm was gone.
‘Damn,’ she said. Not a great omen.
‘What’s that?’ Drake asked.
‘I lost my charm,’ Nbaro admitted.
Drake gave her a quick hug. ‘Look at it this way, honey – if it’s really lucky, it’s still somewhere aboard, right?’ She blew her a kiss. ‘Come on, Naisha. There’s a horde of Marines …’
Qaqqaq was wriggling out of her engineering singlet and into an EVA suit. ‘I’m crew,’ she said. ‘I’m going.’
Nbaro used her neural lace to contact Space Operations. ‘Pericles is green and go,’ she sent, even as she stripped and climbed into her own EVA suit.
‘Roger, Pericles. Cargo services is clamping a pod to you now.’
‘Roger, Lioness. I have it. Clamps locked.’ She looked at Qaqqaq, who was decent, and opened the hatch to find Gunny Drun leaning against it.
‘Load,’ she said with a grin.
She knew most of the Marines: twenty-four in all. She’d shot with them, fenced with them, been thrown around in low g by several. Wilson Akunje gave her a thumb’s up as he slipped aft. McDonald managed a smile, and Juarez a fist-bump.
‘Just get us there, ma’am,’ she said.
Towards the end came Darkstar. The tall ’gyne had to bend almost double to get through the hatch. Darkstar, one of the ship’s senior officers, coming in person, increased Nbaro’s fear. This was a high-stakes gamble.
Dorcas came up in the datasphere. ‘Until now I was locked out,’ he sent. ‘I assume you are doing something very important?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Hurry back.’ She could almost see his smile. She wished her skills were better; he probably had the same avatar in the datasphere that he had in VR.
And then he was gone, and she appreciated that, too.
Morosini appeared, which was very odd, as there wasn’t room for his projection in the tiny cockpit. Part of him was projected over Locran, who was just coming aboard.
‘I am making this gamble against my own wishes, Ms Nbaro ,’ he said. ‘If you feel that it is impossible, from a pilot’s point of view, do not hesitate to abort the mission. ’
She smiled. ‘Sure.’
‘I find myself in the curious position of feeling something. Is it merely risk-averse algorithms deep in complexity projections? Or is that what you feel when someone you like goes to a danger you don’t share? ’
Nbaro found she was smiling at the projection of the machine intelligence. ‘Oh, you big softy,’ she said in exactly the tone that Drake would have used. ‘We’ll pull it off.’
Morosini nodded. ‘If you do, we’ll win. Really win – there will be years of peace on the Fringe, new allies, a whole new future. Of that I am confident. If you fail, I’ll do what I can with what I have left. ’
Just for a moment, for the first time, Nbaro felt … it wasn’t pity. It was more like respect. If Morosini was for real, then he had worked selflessly for a human generation to save them from some terrible future.
If.
‘If I survive this, and it works,’ she said carefully, like a legendary hero dealing with a djinn, ‘I want your word that you will explain some things about the past, and the future. I want to understand, as well as my merely human mind can understand, why my parents died, what you did, why we’re here, and where it’s all going.’
Morosini patted his cat. The cat looked at her with eyes of deep understanding.
‘You have my word. ’ And he was gone.
The new flight plan for Operation Marathon was better than the original in almost every way. Nbaro detached them gently, and moved under thrusters into the back of the battle debris cloud, behaving like every other Flight Eight rescue vehicle. That was their window of opportunity: the moving volume of the former battle space, drifting towards the distant planet; the busy Flight Eight rescuers, searching the dense cloud of debris and chaff for survivors.
When she had her course and speed aligned perfectly, she turned everything off. The Pericles had a heat sink, and she got the hull down to the temperature of the debris around her.
They were moving quite fast.
Locran had the engineer’s acceleration couch behind her, Qaqqaq was in the co-pilot’s couch, but when the engines went off and they were in zero g , he unbuttoned and drifted forward. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.
‘Don’t get what?’ she asked.
‘How we’re getting to the station. Ma’am.’
Nbaro built a little holographic projection in the air in front of them. The cockpit had a set of cameras for this; that’s how Morosini projected himself aboard. And she could use it through the lace.
‘Here’s Medulla Station, in orbit around Medulla. Right?’
Locran nodded.
She moved further out. ‘NDR squadron, accelerating towards Athens .’
‘Check,’ Locran said.
‘Hin pods, accelerating much faster towards Athens ,’ she noted, and laid them out: two pods of three red dots.
She waved a hand and squashed the simulation down because she needed more space.
‘Athens ,’ she said. ‘Coming inwards straight at Medulla. Fast. Right?’
‘Check,’ Locran said.
‘The pirates, chasing us in-system.’
‘Got it.’
‘Athens rolls and decelerates …’ She made that happen. ‘We fight. The whole fight takes place at a huge speed while we’re still headed in-system .’ She made the battle volume float through the cabin.
‘Damn. I didn’t get that.’ Locran shrugged. ‘I do now. Now I feel stupid.’
Qaqqaq watched in fascination. ‘I had no idea.’
Nbaro smiled. ‘Tactics class! The battlefield debris moves – and right now we’re hiding in it.’
Did Morosini attack the privateers just to create this debris?
Almighty. I bet he considered it as a factor.
Nbaro caught herself rubbing the bridge of her nose with two fingers – a tic from the Orphanage she thought she’d outgrown.
‘We have a path all the way to orbital re-entry,’ she said. ‘Some of the debris will get caught in the gravity well, and it’s moving so fast that it will hit the planet if it doesn’t burn up. We are heavily stealthed – there’s lots of crap around us that will have a bigger radar cross-section than we have.’
She touched up her holo display. ‘And the NDR ships are all running for the station, narrowing their opportunities to detect us side-on.’ She looked back to see both Drun and Darkstar floating in the access hatch.
Darkstar nodded. ‘Our odds of getting to the boarding action are approaching acceptable levels,’ they said.
You aren’t the one doing the low-level flying across an alien planet , Nbaro thought, but outwardly she nodded. ‘Yes, tir.’
The little ship was ridiculously cramped with so many on board, and the one head was the first thing Qaqqaq had to fix.
‘Shit,’ she muttered. ‘At least the shower works.’
Darkstar rotated their Marines through the four small folding sleeping racks; Nbaro set her acceleration couch to sleep and managed four hours. There was nothing else to do. This was a long, slow, anxious mission with too many things to worry about, and not enough to do to keep any of them busy. She and Qaqqaq took turns fiddling with the heat sink and the stealth programs. She walled off her dead, her parents, Sarah and Dorcas. She was good at that. She slept.
At twenty-seven hours, they passed into the shadow of the geostationary moon. The shadow gave them almost ten minutes, and Nbaro and Darkstar both exchanged tight-beam laser comms with the ship in microbursts.
They were still ‘Go’.
They had less than two hundred thousand kilometres to fall into the atmosphere. The braking would have to be done with engines, and had all been programmed by Morosini – timed to coincide with the burn-up of nearby debris.
Nbaro reviewed it all on her neural lace. Morosini was no longer able to reach them, so she and her sub-AI had to do it all the hard way.
They did it. Sabina interfaced. They chose a nearby item of debris as the median and guessed its burn-up rate.
Nbaro ran the numbers twice. Everything still looked good. They’d have to burn very hard to re-enter. But they’d have the whole bulk of the world between themselves and the station when they did, so the only eyes they had to worry about were the incoming NDR ships and the moon base.
There was nothing she could do about them. She had a stealthy ship and a good plan. The rest was luck.
She ran the numbers again, because she believed firmly that she made her luck by planning.
And I can be an idiot sometimes.
She was deep in a simulation of the first seconds of the burn when an alarm went off inside her head. It was disorientating, because the simulation was so immersive, and her first reaction was that the alarm was in the sim.
Not that lucky. Nbaro surfaced out of the sim, looked at the alarm for a moment, and then dived into the 3D system-wide projection.
The Athens and the Dubai continued to sail on, headed for a rendezvous with Medulla in twenty hours. The NDR forces were manoeuvring to form a battle formation to stop them. Three DHC battlecruisers raced from the other side of the planet, but they were all decelerating now in the expectation of combat. A third Battle of Medulla was sixteen hours away.
The reason for the alarm was obvious. There were, once again, new arrivals: nine ships, one of them big enough to dwarf the Athens.
They’d extracted out beyond the gas giant, almost exactly where the Athens and her consorts had extracted from Artifact Space … they were Starfish ships. They were moving at almost 0.2 c and they were already decelerating.
Nbaro ran the numbers and checked with Sabina: the news was more than six hours old; space was vast, and light wasn’t as fast as people thought.
The incredible acceleration and deceleration capability of Starfish ships made it impossible for her to calculate exactly when they’d enter the combat arena for the various inbound Hin or the Dubai and the Athens.
She desperately wanted to communicate with Morosini, because her first thought was that her mission was no longer of any importance.
Almighty. This was an historic event; the Starfish had never entered Human Space. Not once. Not ever. Nor had they ever committed nine ships …
She thought of Dorcas, and the extinction of the Circles.
And Nik’ri Put and the Hin.
And Feather Dancer.
This was not part of anyone’s plan – not their adversary’s, not Morosini’s or Saladin’s.
Nbaro thought of the power of the weapon the Starfish had deployed back at Trade Point.
Morosini, Feather Dancer, Dorcas, Nik’ri Put, Trade Point.
She changed her mind. If we can present them with a united front … we need to have the station.
‘Major Darkstar?’ she called.
The ’gyne floated forward with a grace that only the spaceborn could manage.
‘Nbaro?’
‘Tir, there’s a Starfish battlegroup extracting in-system. My guess is they’re nine to maybe sixteen hours away from being in range of various allies.’
Locran was following along, accessing data feverishly. Nbaro had forgotten he was, in fact, an intelligence analyst.
Darkstar’s face remained impassive. ‘I understand. Anything else?’
Nbaro thought, absurdly, If I live and get to tell this story, this is the punchline. Darkstar didn’t even twitch. ‘Starfish invading human space? Good. Anything else?’
‘No, tir. My first thought was that we should abort. My second thought was that actually, this just raises the stakes. We need the station. We need to knock the NDR out of the game.’
Darkstar was silent for a remarkably long time. Time enough for Qaqqaq to wake up and stretch, and for Nbaro to fidget.
‘I’ve never seen most of those ship designs,’ Locran said. ‘My guess is they’re Starfish warships.’
Darkstar glanced at Locran. Then back at Nbaro. ‘As long as we’re in space, you are the mission commander,’ they said.
‘I know.’ Nbaro shrugged. ‘I’m consulting you, Major. Your experience is … a lot more than mine.’
Darkstar cracked a very slight smile. ‘A little. None of it concerns events of this magnitude.’ They glanced back at Locran. ‘I concur. Let’s go.’
Nbaro nodded. Ten minutes later, she spoke to their twenty-six Marines.
‘In about ten minutes we’re going to decelerate very hard. Strap in and make it tight. Strap everything down hard. We’re going to burn hard all the way down into a steep dive, and then we’re going to fly pretty tight to the surface of the planet for hours. But this is it – once we hit atmosphere, we’re in all the way.’
There were some grunts and at least one hoo-rah.
Up front, Locran said, ‘I thought you said this ship wasn’t aerodynamic?’
Qaqqaq grunted. ‘Everything is aerodynamic at three thousand klicks an hour. Anyway, the atmosphere is so thin that Mars seems soupy.’
The planet, a virulent orange, filled the windscreen like a malevolent sun. Nbaro could see storms the size of small continents, and mountains. She wasn’t flying; it was all on automation, because absolute precision was essential all the way down. She’d run the numbers four times.
The first piece of debris caught fire and burned within four seconds of the computer prediction.
‘Here we go,’ she said, and let the programmed re-entry run.
It was like being beaten with a hammer. A heavy blow slammed into her, despite the best acceleration couch in Human Space, an EVA suit and armour. She wondered how bad it was for the Marines. She lost vision for a while, and almost lost her dinner. Someone screamed.
Might have been me.
The blow seemed to last forever – about 7 g , or so her interconnections told her. And then they were falling , a distinctly different feeling from being in free fall.
They weren’t even coming down on their thrusters. They’d already turned over so that they were flying – or falling – nose first. The stubby wings of the Pericles extended gradually, almost organically. They began to bite, and provide lift.
They were going very fast, and they weren’t burning up. And no one was shooting at them. Nbaro checked; they were still in their very tight orbital insertion corridor, and the whole spaceframe was vibrating now. Unlike space, air had flaws; nothing here could be taken for granted.
She used her lace to build in an alarm if her craft left the green corridor of safe orbital insertion, and then she looked back up into space. She was appalled to see how blind she was. She couldn’t access much of anything, passively. Even the thin atmosphere of Medulla blocked her comms.
She hadn’t seen that coming.
We won’t know what’s happening out in space for three hours.
She checked her instruments by eye, the old-fashioned way – instrument scan was too much of a habit to drop just because she could ‘live’ inside the plane’s instruments – and they were coming to the end of the orbital insertion corridor, on course and on speed.
Now it was her turn. She would be flying for three hours, at low level, mostly by eye. Because Morosini had calculated that if they hadn’t been caught on orbital insertion, the enemy ships probably didn’t have look-down radars at all. And if they did, a stealthy craft a hundred metres off the deck …
The yoke came alive in her hands, and she was flying. But not with her hands. She dropped in to the datasphere of the Pericles , and she was the Pericles. She took in the data directly, and she responded with her metal and plastic body.
Time passed slowly, yet quickly, in the way of machines; there was a great deal of healthy detail, and not much else. In a very strange way, it was relaxing; for three hours, she felt no fear, worried about nothing, judged nothing. She was simply one with her machine, manoeuvring over the endless orange desert of iron-rich Medulla. She flew over canyons and valleys, and then, as she crossed an invisible shadow line – or information line – that let her see the station, came the hardest part of the mission for the pilot.
The part that required luck.
Her sensors, all passive, looked up at the station and the defending NDR destroyers, searching for traffic. Her antennas listened for spaceport chatter. Out there, above the atmosphere, they were still dealing with the clutter from the battle, orbiting the planet.
It was not Nbaro’s day for luck. Nothing was leaving the planet; there was no NDR destroyer whose shadow she could use.
Neither she nor Morosini had really expected there would be. But it would have been nice.
They’d be naked for the last three thousand kilometres. Heavily stealthed, presenting the smallest possible radar and ladar cross-section. And out in space, if Morosini was still on plan, Pisani would present a new package of conditions simultaneously with a mass launch of two space wings, forming up for battle.
Every eye and lens and antenna should be focused that way.
Nbaro pointed her nose at the distant station and began to let air resistance slow her craft. She felt absolutely exposed. Anyone who had the means to look could see her craft, and she might as well have walked to the horrible showers at the Orphanage naked – that’s how this felt. Daring the creeps and the bastards to come and hurt her.
It didn’t help that they were decelerating all the way to their target.
It did help that Medulla Station, a Bernal sphere, had been built by the DHC, and maps of every metre of her hull and corridors were available for planning.
‘Thirty minutes, folks,’ she said to her passengers.
And if someone caught them here, they were dead, and no amount of brilliant piloting would save them.
Gunny Drun came forward to see her, and grinned.
‘We’re going to do it, ma’am. Even though Juarez just puked her guts out for three hours.’
‘Almighty!’ Nbaro said. They were high enough now that she could almost see space.
Drun smiled. ‘I’m here to remind you that all you have to do is secure our retreat, ma’am.’
‘I understand.’
‘No, you don’t, ma’am. I am not going to sugar-coat this. In every single exercise and sim we’ve run in the last five months, you’ve died every fucking time. You never learned, in any exercise we ran. You just can’t stop yourself from taking a risk. But we ain’t got a backup pilot if this goes pear-shaped, so please don’t do anything that comes naturally to you. Do not rush the bad guys. Do not win more medals. Do not come and save me if my arse is hanging in the wind. That is not your fucking job. Your job is to save as many as you can if it all blows up . Am I making myself clear, ma’am?’
Nbaro just looked at the Marine, her mouth slightly open.
Drun nodded. ‘Ma’am, you have my absolute respect, but if it was up to me, I’d take your weapons and armour to ensure you couldn’t leave the ship.’
Now she had to smile. ‘Am I that bad, Gunny?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, you are. Now, did you hear what I just said?’
‘Yes, Gunny, I did.’
‘Good.’ He grinned. ‘I live for the moments when I get to ream officers.’ His grin turned cold. ‘Almost there. When we’re down, just let us do it.’
‘Roger that, Gunny.’
He nodded sharply and turned away.
Qaqqaq raised her eyebrows. ‘You know you outrank him, right?’
‘Not really,’ Nbaro replied.
Locran laughed aloud. ‘I was going to say the same to you,’ he put in ‘Morosini sent me to restrain you. Drun put it well.’
‘That’s me told,’ Nbaro said.
They were seven minutes out. Her nerves were good.
At four minutes out they were interrogated by an automated IFF transponder. Locran had already provided a false ID code.
‘Dirtside cargo hauler,’ he said into the silence. ‘Food for the station.’
It must have been accepted, because no one fired at them.
Station Control came up. ‘Ibex , this is Medulla Station, over?’
There was a very tricky piece of flying coming up, and they were forty seconds from passing into the shadow of the station and being almost undetectable.
Nbaro nodded to Locran.
He keyed his mic. ‘Medulla Station, this is Ibex , over. Agricultural products for station consumption, ready to transmit lading.’
Nbaro dropped back into the Pericles ’ datasphere. She became her ship.
They’d slowed to match the orbit and rotation of the station-sphere. It was like a small moon floating in orbit over the major settlement, and it spun on its axis, providing different levels of gravity. The bridge was a magnificent xenoglas bubble at the station’s north pole. She couldn’t see it, because they were coming up from almost directly underneath, but it must have a superb view.
‘Roger, Ibex ,’ Station Control said. ‘Ready to receive.’
Locran smiled; Nbaro was aware of his almost feral grin as he jabbed a button on his console, and the contents of a very nasty piece of custom-built military software were dumped into the station’s computers.
Nbaro had the exact temperature and pressure of the station atmosphere from data; she set their cabin pressure to match, and her ears popped.
‘Ninety seconds,’ she said.
‘Hook up!’ Drun called.
‘Entry team ready.’
She was flying them along the surface of the station like an ant crawling over an orange. She suspected that they’d been seen now, if only by people looking out into space. But seeing them, and the transmission of that information to someone who could do something, were two different things.
‘Ibex , you have left docking parameters? Please respond, over?’ The station sounded calm despite losing them from radar.
Slower.
The bridge bubble appeared over the horizon of the station.
Nbaro was flying about two metres above the station at close to one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour relative to the surface.
Suddenly the spacecraft began to handle very badly.
‘Thirty seconds,’ she said. Everything read as green; the port-side engine showed a little extra thrust to maintain stability, and suddenly they were slewing …
She was the Pericles. With a thought, she shut down the port-side fusion engine and calculated the use of all her manoeuvring thrusters, cold and hot, to balance being on one engine. It was as instant as thought, like magic.
They weren’t going for the apogee of the dome, because it was too high. They wanted a spot perhaps three metres up the side, where it projected above the metal surface of the station, at the base of the dome.
‘Brace!’ she roared, and flipped them end for end. She fired her thrusters, everything calculated by computer.
At exactly the planned speed and angle, her craft came to rest against the side of the sphere.
‘Down!’ she called.
The base of the Marine compartment locked to the sphere with a resin that was used in xenoglas industrial applications. It was given three seconds to cure, then the shaped charges inside the seal fired all together.
A six-metre circle of xenoglas blew inwards along fracture lines, and the atmosphere of the station mixed with the atmosphere aboard the Pericles .
‘Go, go, go!’ Darkstar called, and the Marines dropped straight through the roof and onto the bridge. The cargo pod containing the Marines was now sealed off from the rest of the Pericles . If Nbaro had to leave, those seals would hold, at least for a while.
‘There’s some fluctuation in the port-side fusion plant that I don’t like,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘Is that why you killed it?’
Nbaro glanced at her. ‘Yeah.’ She was out of the Pericles ’ datasphere and now her hands were shaking.
‘I’m going to check it out.’ Qaqqaq slapped down her visor and went aft. Her boots sounded loud against the metal deck.
Below them, men and women fought and died. Nbaro hated it, but Drun’s words were burning in her ears, and she knew he was right.
After several minutes of inaction, Locran put a hand to his ear. ‘I think we have Da Costa,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’
Nbaro nodded. She popped the hatch and he dropped through into the command bridge of the station.
While she was dogging the hatch again, Qaqqaq appeared from the stern.
‘I need to go outside,’ she said.
Nbaro thought about it. They were in combat, perched atop a huge space station, and however lucky they’d been so far, soon someone was going to act against them.
‘How bad is it?’ she asked.
Qaqqaq looked harried. ‘No idea until I look outside.’
Nbaro muttered something about a combat EVA, but she trusted Qaqqaq absolutely; the Inuit woman was like a rock – always reliable.
She thought about opening the airlock, and instead, checked her suit, closed her visor, vented all the cabin air into bottles, and opened the airlocks straight to hard vacuum.
Qaqqaq – small, compact and brilliant at EVA – slipped out. She wasn’t wearing a harness and she took no precautions.
Nbaro checked comms, using low-power helmet radios.
Qaqqaq came right up. ‘Got you,’ she said.
After an agonising two minutes, Qaqqaq said, ‘Something must have hit us. The insertion vanes …’
‘Can you fix it?’
‘Ask me in five minutes.’
After about one minute, Darkstar came up on their encrypted command channel. ‘Phalanx, we have secured the command bridge and we have access to their encrypted comms. The counter-attack is inbound. I’m sending Locran and some prisoners for evac in case we lose the perimeter. Do you copy?’
‘Roger, Miltiades, this is Phalanx, copy all. Be advised, we have some issues. We’re working on them.’
‘Copy that, Phalanx. Get it done. Out.’
Nbaro flipped back to helmet comms. ‘Naisha?’
‘We have a problem,’ Qaqqaq said.
‘Lost the engine?’
Qaqqaq took a shaky breath. ‘Remember that lecture Drun gave you?’
Nbaro didn’t laugh. She was already reaching for her carbine. ‘Yeah?’
‘We have two sticks of EVA-suited troopers moving along the outside base of the dome.’
Nbaro took a deep breath, and apologised to the absent Drun. Then she checked the boarding pistol at her waist and the energy pack in her gauss carbine.
‘Where?’ she asked Qaqqaq.
‘On the port side, or I’d never have seen them.’
Qaqqaq didn’t even have a pistol.
Nbaro tabbed the command channel. ‘Miltiades, be advised, you are under attack from outside – two sticks, shaped charges.’
Darkstar’s voice was calm and natural. ‘Understand.’
‘I am responding,’ Nbaro said, and turned the channel off. In her head, she responded to her court martial. My craft was inoperable. There were no other armed personnel.
But in her head she heard Drun. Do not rush the bad guys. Do not win more medals. Do not come and save me if my arse is hanging in the wind.
‘It’s got to be me,’ she said to no one. Or perhaps, to Drun, and Dorcas. She climbed through the open hatch to the surface of the ship on the starboard side, keeping the nose cone between her and the enemy. Her beautiful custom-made EVA suit made her graceful and fast. She used the bow of the Pericles for cover, moved forward along the starboard side, peeked out over the nose, about nine metres above the surface of the station.
The attackers were still fifty metres away, moving in bounds, with more caution than Nbaro would have used.
They are undertrained in EVA.
That’s too bad.
Nbaro could barely breathe. Her heart was hammering. She was only going to get one chance at this.
She thought it over for perhaps one second and decided to use their caution against them. She leaned out, the surface of the station already very cold against her armoured chest, turned on the weapon’s optics, picked her target, and shot him.
Gauss carbines have no muzzle flash. She took out the last trooper she could see. Then she shot the trooper in front, and then the next.
She got four before they realised they were under fire.
Number five dropped flat. She killed him despite the slight curvature of the hull. They still didn’t know where the fire was coming from.
Another good lesson from all those exercises.
One of the remaining troopers guessed her location and threw a grenade. With her augment and her rifle and all its electronics, Nbaro shot it as it sailed through the vacuum.
Unfortunately, that gave away her position. She got another of them, and then a well-aimed EMP burst got her optics and her magnets, and the carbine was reduced to a complex club.
She turned on her reserve radio and turned the command channel back on.
‘Militades, I have seven hostiles pinned on the hull. I believe I got the shaped-charge guy. They just EMP’d me.’
‘On the way, Phalanx.’
Nbaro was now afraid to peek out. The aerodynamic antenna she’d used as part of her cover was being chewed away by slugs. She backed away again, deeper into the shadow of the hull.
She was in zero g , with no up or down, which gave her a crazy idea. She backed further along the hull, and radioed Qaqqaq. ‘Bad guys incoming.’
‘Shit,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘I’m not through here.’
Nbaro didn’t have time to think it through. She bounced along the hull, switched her boots from magnetic to sticky , mentally thanking Mpono for showing her where to buy good EVA boots, and landed on the dome. Close up, she could see that it wasn’t all xenoglas; it had crystal viewing panels set into the xenoglas. She got to one of the metal ribs, clicked her boots back to magnetic, and ran all the way to the apex. She almost overshot and just avoided hurtling off the top into space.
There was no room for hesitation. Nbaro guessed where the back of the enemy stick was, along the edge of the dome of which she was now at the top. She could only hope they were all watching the Pericles ’ hull for her. She chose a descending rib – one that she hoped came down a few metres behind the last enemy trooper – and drew her boarding pistol.
Then she ran down the rib. She no longer had her fancy optics, but the EMP hadn’t got her neural lace, and she let it do the calculations as she crested the horizon of the hemisphere of the bridge dome.
She saw them, crouched against the dome, unmoving.
Too hesitant , she thought, but then, she was the one who had died in every exchange.
She shot the heavy pistol at a range of perhaps fifteen metres without thinking, without consciously aiming, and a trooper died messily, the top of his helmet exploding out with most of his head. Another step forward exposed the next and she shot the woman in the back. Bad luck, or bad tactics, sent her heavy bullet through the woman’s EVA pack, through her back, out of her front and into the EVA pack of the man in front of her, so that her victim fell forward, spraying air and blood, and he turned …
They were very close, because Nbaro was still running down the dome, leaping, shooting on the bounce, so that the recoil drove her back into the dome, bouncing back into space with an outbound vector.
She took a round in the back that spun her around, but her armoured EVA pack shed the small-calibre round.
She wasted one of her own bullets driving herself back into the station, using it as a propellant to get a new vector. She’d never left the station by more than two metres, but floating was floating. She landed on her feet and her magnetic boots bit in, and she was hit again – a punch in the gut that meant her armour had held. She shot back, a range of perhaps three metres, as she’d been taught, a reflex honed in months of boarding exercises.
This time luck was with her; her shot didn’t break the other man’s armour, which was clearly better than his mates’, but it drove him back, and three of them fell, bounced, rolled. She shot one without thought, and got hit again, spun, bounced, and lost her pistol.
On a positive note, she was now a few metres further around the sphere. She backed away, her hand reaching for her sword hilt. Her pistol was gone; she couldn’t see it anywhere, and she had no time …
‘Phalanx? This is Taxi?’
‘Gunny? I’m behind them. They’re all looking my way … I think.’
‘Roger that,’ Drun said.
Nbaro stood flat against the surface of the dome, presenting the smallest target she could manage, with her sword in her hand, for ten long seconds, and then ten more.
And then ten more.
And then Wilson Akunje was standing in front of her. ‘Ma’am?’ he said, helmet to helmet.’
‘Very glad to see you, Wilson,’ she managed.
‘Might want to put the sword away, ma’am,’ Akunje said. ‘Is this your pistol?’
Twenty-six DHC Marines, no matter how well trained, could not hold a station designed for fifty thousand people, but Locran’s best guess was that the NDR hadn’t placed insurgents among the population, all of whom were locked down.
The more immediate problems were the four NDR destroyers in close orbit and the admiral’s flagship physically docked to the station. Locran and Nbaro had the skills and the neural lace to make sure the ship’s crew couldn’t get back on to the controls; their cyber experts were locked out of all systems in seconds.
‘Four hundred sailors aboard,’ Darkstar opined.
‘Just call for their surrender,’ Nbaro said. ‘We’re perhaps nine hours from a general action, and they’re doomed. All five of these are too far into the gravity well to survive battle.’
‘My thoughts exactly, Lieutenant.’ Darkstar didn’t give away whether they approved or disapproved of Nbaro’s contribution. They looked at Drun. ‘Can Connelly do anything to interfere with their onboard systems?’
Connelly was the Marine data specialist. She was crouched over a terminal with Locran – a New Texan in the DHC Marines.
Wonder what’s going on inside her head? Nbaro thought. They were facing New Texan sailors, mostly.
She looked back at her officer. ‘I think we just shut down their environmental systems. Their supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) defences are pitiful, and I’m about to start flashing the lights.’
For the first time, Darkstar’s lips formed a smile. ‘Excellent,’ they said. ‘Comms?’
Locran pointed at someone, tapped his earpiece, gave a thumbs up.
Darkstar stood straight. ‘All units of the New Democratic Republic, this is Major Darkstar of the DHC Marines. We are in full possession of Ultra Station and we request the immediate surrender of all military units in-system.’ They looked at Nbaro and winked – something Nbaro had never seen the major do. ‘We have possession of the station railguns, NDR. You have five minutes to surrender.’
‘Station railguns?’ Nbaro asked.
‘Absolutely. You don’t think we built a frontier station without teeth?’ Darkstar shrugged. ‘Apparently the NDR techs couldn’t unlock them. Whereas Locran …’
Out on the hull of the station, pop-up turrets began to deploy.
Millions of kilometres away, the Starfish group powered in-system. There was movement almost everywhere in the system, but most of it was opaque to Nbaro and the Marines, and more than half the symbols on her laced VR screen were ellipses or unidentified blips.
What Nbaro could see was that the Hin ships continued to engage one another, but several had run, inserting in non-human directions and at non-human speeds. Three pods dashed towards a rendezvous with the Beautiful War Dance. As they came up, they formed a battle globe, a Hin formation of multiple ships that no human had seen before.
Some of the outer NDR ships had surrendered; it was clear from their manoeuvres. Others turned and ran.
Morosini surprised Nbaro and let them go. He didn’t give chase, even though the DHC battlecruisers had the angle to do so. Instead, they passed the fleeing NDR ships, almost close enough for engagement, and ignored them as if they were annoying children. The battlecruisers continued on course.
The DHC battlegroup flipped end over end again, facing the Starfish. And then, using their big engines, the two greatships powered up, decelerating faster than the Hin as the Hin formed up. The human battlegroup passed through the Hin formation and expanded, interposing itself directly between them and the incoming Starfish.
Nbaro watched, her heart in her mouth, five minutes behind the action at relay speed. By then they had near-real-time communications with the Athens and the Dubai ; someone thoughtful was posting some of the Hin communications.
Honourable Blood Wa-Kan Asinpal Las complained formally to Master Vettor Pisani that he was blocking her lines of fire to her enemies.
All four forces manoeuvred for another hour. Pisani kept the DHC ships between the Starfish and the Hin.
And then the Athens began to broadcast messages.
Feather Dancer appeared on vid, its words translated into Hin and Anglatin. Their Starfish was apparently using the correct data stream to transmit chemical codes.
In translation, it said, ‘This space is human space. We welcome you to visit and trade, but your conflicts have no place here. If you attempt violence, we will retaliate.’
That’s what the translation claimed it said. In fact, Feather Dancer went on for quite a long time.
The Hin was fluent, and Nbaro even understood a few words.
‘These waters are ours to hunt. Come to trade, but hunt elsewhere.’
Locran surmised that these were the same Starfish they’d seen at Trade Point. The ones that Dorcas called the Pirates.
At a hundred thousand kilometres from the Hin formation, the Starfish flotilla began to slow, decelerating at their usual 17 g . Their formation spread, clearly looking for a line of engagement.
A lone NDR destroyer had actually joined the DHC formation, and she, like the other DHC ships, chose a line of action and manoeuvred there.
The Starfish continued to close.
The Dubai and the Athens had now deployed virtually every able spacecraft, a cloud of deadly attack craft behind literal clouds of reflectives that filled a vast volume of potential battle space.
Gradually, the Starfish coasted to a stop with a wall of sand and ablative clutter between them and their hereditary foes, punctuated by the DHC ships and their allies.
Another of the NDR destroyers left its brethren and joined the Stealthy Change on a vector. Otherwise, thirty-six ships from three races floated in space, watching one another, fingers or tentacles or rhinophores on triggers.
On the bridge of Medulla Station, no one spoke.
And then, as suddenly as they’d come, the Starfish began to leave, accelerating smoothly back to their insertion point. All except one ship, which tossed an object into orbit over the inner gas giant before accelerating to Insertion twelve hours later.
By the time the package had been retrieved and identified as a small cargo of xenoglas, Nbaro was back aboard the Athens , hugging Thea Drake.
New India was magnificent in every way: the beauty of the planet; the sheer opulence of her incredible station-side hotel; the food, and the unending work.
‘You’d think we’d lost the battle,’ Thea complained. Because New India was one of the DHC’s most important, most valuable, and most highly populated planets, the cargo load there was as hard as it had been at Sahel. New India had an orbital elevator; in fact, it had two, because it was in many ways the hi-tech rival to Sahel, far out across DHC space to Spinward, and New India was happy to spend trillions of credits to show her advances.
But the planet had just spent almost a quarter of a year under a New Texan military government, and the New Democratic Republic had practised some very old-fashioned plundering, the marks of which could be seen in the corridors of the stations and dirtside.
Station-side liberty was complicated by the defection of three NDR destroyers to the DHC forces back at Medulla. They were now allies, and they had certainly held the line in the critical moments with the Starfish, but no one trusted them, and their spacers were not made to feel welcome on the docks or in the bars.
It was further complicated by the nine Hin ships that now, apparently, viewed themselves as close allies and trading partners. Fifteen degrees around the massive wheel of Simla Orbital, construction crews were showing off New India’s economic and technological muscle by constructing a station area for the Hin. It was already flooded and under water pressure; Hin engineers had provided the chemical mix for the water, and humans and Hin were working together to install shops and hostels. Nbaro had supported Dorcas in this effort while flying four to six sorties a day, carrying delicate components all over the system, and down to the sprawling cities dirtside.
Thea Drake had worked around the clock for seven days. One unexpected consequence of her hunt for the hidden nuclear bomb, months before, was that she now had an unusual command of the lading lists and the locations of cargoes throughout the ship. She was in charge of collating battle damage to their cargo – a job that started with computerised lists and ended with Thea walking along dark corridors in the holds, looking with her helmet lights to ascertain the state of a cargo. A 30 mm iron round from a Hin gauss cannon did surprisingly little damage to sixty-four cubic metres of rice, and a great deal more damage to a two-metre cube of blown glass from Madagascar.
‘There are hundreds of lawsuits already,’ Thea said, throwing herself into the incredibly deep cushions of a massive chair. They had two, looking out over the planet. ‘Only no one knows how to litigate against the NDR or the Hin.’
Nbaro was drinking a glass of something sticky and very alcoholic. ‘Good luck to ’em,’ she said.
Thea leaned out of her very comfortable chair to clink glasses. ‘Are we going to have any ducats left after three days in this palace?’
Nbaro shrugged. ‘You tell me. You’re the brains of the outfit.’
Drake downed her drink and stretched her legs. ‘I think just combat pay will cover it. We’re not touching our capital or our xenoglas.’
Some of the spacers lucky enough to have bought into consortiums of xenoglas were already selling here at New India, at very high prices. Captain Hughes, the head of Cargo, had let it be known that he wanted the rest of the cargo to go to New London.
The news from New London was bleak. The DHC messenger service was down; the messenger pods had been taken out by NDR privateers until New London stopped sending them. But ships came through, some with the NDR’s blessing and some covertly, and there was some news. Nbaro thought about it, savouring the sweet taste of her mixed drink, looking down at the blue and green and white magnificence of one of humanity’s most successful colonising efforts. The news of their two-week long battle and its aftermath wouldn’t reach New London for weeks – maybe months, if the messenger service couldn’t be restored. But she could imagine the news moving through space with ripples of activity and change spreading in its wake.
And the news reaching them was mostly bad. Some said there’d been a coup against the DHC government; others said the coup had failed. No one could agree on who had backed the coup.
‘How’s Rick?’ Nbaro asked. She’d meant to be more sensitive, but the booze hit hard, and so did the rumour that Eli Sagoyewatha, the chairman of the Directorate of Human Corporations, had been assassinated. Nbaro could remember him, speaking to everyone in the DHC sphere about the death of the New York.
‘Better,’ Thea said. The single clipped word indicated a great deal of worry and not enough news. Rick Hanna was badly burned and had radiation sickness; he was also sedated, so that Thea was denied even the kind of chatter that Nbaro and Dorcas had managed. And his condition was critical. ‘Christ, Marca, I just want him to wake up. I don’t give a fuck what he looks like.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Nbaro hated the hollowness of her words, but had learned they were better than nothing.
‘Me too, honey,’ Drake said. And then, with brittle humour, ‘Let’s just get drunk and not talk about it, OK?’
They sat, watching the planet turn beneath them, and drank too much. Nbaro thought Thea was right; it wasn’t a bad way to spend an evening with a friend, and screw the universe.
She fell into the endless luxury of her station-side bed, with thick satin sheets and an apparently elastic mattress, but despite the bed – or perhaps because of it – she had some trouble sleeping; dead people, nuclear lightning, tentacles and the chapel at the Orphanage filled her dreams. And Dorcas …
For a few days after Operation Marathon, she’d taken Dorcas like a drug. But now he was working around the clock, and she was here …
… feeling sorry for herself.
The next day Dorcas was still working, so she and Thea cruised the station, visiting the shops, which were superb and disgustingly expensive, and met with Tad Dworkin and Storkel by chance. They ended up in a dockside wine bar with officers from DHCS Lepanto. Storkel brought a round of drinks.
‘Here’s to being alive.’ Storkel’s rich voice said it without disrespect to those who weren’t alive. It was just a fact.
‘Right you are,’ Drake said. ‘Alive and probably rich.’
‘Except that the DHC is in the middle of a fucking civil war …’ Dworkin said bitterly.
‘It’s not that bad …’
‘There were riots!’ Nbaro said. ‘They used DHC Marines against rioters!’
Drake waved for more drinks. The exclusive wine bars all had human waitrons, an incredible display considering New India’s degree of automation. ‘The so-called rioters tried to assassinate the Doje. They may even have succeeded!’
Wrong target , Nbaro thought. The Doje doesn’t run the DHC – the AIs run us.
Do I really believe that?
I should stop drinking.
The four of them looked at one another, raised their drinks and changed the subject.
An alarm went off, and Nbaro was groggy. Her mouth was like sandpaper, and she’d been snoring, and she was still in her flightsuit …
She rolled, felt a wave of nausea, and the opulence of her surroundings hit her. For a long minute she hadn’t known where she was. Medbay? Acceleration couch?
She was on Simla Station, in the fabulous Star Mountain Hotel, and the alarm … was her tab, on the bedside table. It sounded like the shipboard collision alarm, and she wanted to swat at it, but she was still very fond of her tab and her sub-AI Sabina, who had saved her many times.
‘Sabina?’ she asked.
‘Mr Dorcas has tried to reach you three times, and this time he said it was urgent. ’
Nbaro touched the small ceramic weapon she wore under her arm, and tried to ignore the dull ache in her head. ‘Call Mr Dorcas.’
‘Marca!’ Dorcas said. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m station-side having a romantic tryst with Thea,’ Nbaro said.
As usual, she watched Dorcas process this, first accepting it at face value and then registering the attempt at humour. She could already tell that his urgency was not life-threatening.
‘All the better,’ he said, deadpan. ‘Nik’ri Put is asking for you, by name. We’re a couple of hours from opening the station to the Hin, and Nik’ri Put insists on your presence. You might as well bring Ms Drake.’
‘Er …’ she began.
He smiled. ‘Drink lots of water.’ He sent her co-ordinates for meeting up. He waved and cut the connection.
She went to Drake’s room, as opulent as her own. Drake had managed to get undressed, but hadn’t made it into her sleeping robe. She was snoring. Nbaro grabbed an ankle and pulled.
‘What the fuck!’ Drake swore, snapping awake. ‘Oh, God!’ She put a hand to her head. ‘Go the fuck away, Rick!’
‘It’s Marca,’ Nbaro said. ‘And we’re needed to make some history.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Thea said, rolling over and trying to hide her head under a pillow.
Nbaro retreated to the shower, stripped, and was surprised how much better she felt after a hot shower with beautiful soap. Then she poured a crystal glass full of cold water, went into Thea’s room, and poured it over her friend.
‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ Drake sputtered.
Two hours later, their hangovers hidden inside EVA suits, the two women joined political representatives from New India, as well as Master Pisani and Horatio Dorcas, as part of the official welcoming party.
‘You realise that we’re about to swim our way into a flood of your furry octopuses,’ Thea said on a private channel.
‘Almighty,’ Nbaro said aloud. She hadn’t really thought about it. But the space was huge this time, and the volume of water must have been vast; the engineering feat to make this possible might be unrivalled in human history, but then, the Hin were about to be the first aliens ever welcomed into a human habitation.
The docking iris opened, and they came in. There were more than fifty, and they were in no sort of order. Seeing them gave Nbaro a queasy moment, but no one latched on to her suit or her mask, and after the much more agile Hin danced around them for a little, the speeches began.
Drake said, ‘I should never forgive you for the cold water this morning, but I’m a nice girl, so … set your helmet to pure oxygen. It’ll blow your hangover away.’
And later, Nbaro swam through the enormous volume of red-orange water with Nik’ri Put by her side. Nik’ri Put was wearing a device that modulated her sound into the frequency of human hearing before putting it out as a radio signal.
‘You are well, my KePoja ?’ Nik’ri Put asked.
‘I am well, my dear Tse-Tsu ,’ Nbaro answered.
She didn’t have to turn her head to see that they were being watched by dozens of pairs of eyes, both Hin and human.
‘We are famous, you know,’ Nik’ri Put said in Anglatin. ‘I expect that there will be poetry about our meeting.’
Nbaro hadn’t thought about that. She smiled. ‘I think I like that,’ she admitted.
‘Me, too,’ Nik’ri Put said. ‘You know? Yes, and also yes. When you took me … I was afraid. Hyuk in te ! I could barely control myself. Dark … everything so dry, instant death if my suit cracks … and you … You looked like a monster.’
Yes , Nbaro thought. Yes, I’m definitely the monster here.
‘We learn about the old enemies, you know. And you umani look like Venit … the old Venit , eh? Yes. And also yes.’
‘The Venit ?’ she asked, but she knew the name. No one was allowed to forget information gleaned from aliens and passed to Intel. Venit was the Hin name for the Circles, or so Dorcas thought.
‘You fought the Venit ?’
‘Everyone fought the Venit ,’ Nik’ri Put said with a tentacle flick, dismissing the subject. ‘But that was long ago, and pffft , thou art not the Venit , my good human.’
They entered a bar. That is, Nbaro knew it was a bar because she’d seen a mock-up before the ceremony. Everything had been fabricated in a hurry, but Nik’ri Put gave a bubble stream of pure pleasure, and moved to one of the dozens of elegant brass and xenoglas machines that looked like hookahs. The walls were a deep red plush that waved slightly in the currents, and there were several other Hin spacers, bodies orientated in every direction, sucking away at the hookahs and talking away in their dolphin squeaks. Nbaro was the only human.
‘If we were home,’ Nik’ri Put said, ‘there’d be osah swimming in the water, so that we could take them and eat if we wanted. There’s a game …’ Tentacles flicked.
‘I think we’re a little short on osah fish,’ Nbaro said. And then, ‘You know, I was scared, too.’
‘This is good, and also must be true,’ Nik’ri Put said. ‘And needs to be in my poem. I wish we could drink and take drugs together, like shipmates.’
Nbaro laughed. ‘I had a little too much last night.’
‘Ah!’ Nik’ri Put said. ‘This is also good.’ She sucked greedily at her long, flexible straw. ‘Ah! This is good. You umani are clever. A waterside port? Hin will want to come here. Your Fringers never offered us a port before.’
Nbaro laughed. ‘They wanted military allies, not trading partners.’
Nik’ri Put jetted bubbles. ‘Listen, I am being promoted. And I will go home. All the way home – a long way. My captain–mother’s pod has been in space three lives-of-elders. We have much to report, yes and also yes?’
Nbaro noted Nik’ri Put’s fluency; the alien had been speaking Anglatin, probably without pause, for weeks. She wondered if Dorcas could match her in her own language, and wondered, too, what the dangers were to only hold these conversations in human languages.
And she thought, How far is it to your home? How many insertions?
Nbaro hadn’t been briefed on any of this, but she knew her lines. ‘Will your people accept that we won’t allow you to hunt Starfish in our space?’
Nik’ri Put took a long pull on her straw, and some coloured bubbles rose. Nbaro had time to note that Nik’ri Put used a sidelong glance in a very human way. How similar are our brains?
‘You know now we have many … groups. Factions. Nations. Umani have so many words to describe rival social entities. So do we, but ours all begin with family and relation–allies. Even then …’ Tentacles shifted restlessly. ‘I lack the words. My mother–captain and her sisters and cousins, and the Dodock-Geerlan lineage are …’
Another pull. More dark-coloured bubbles, rising …
‘We agree that we should treat your DHC’ – she said DHC as if it was an Italian word, dieci : dee-aych-ee – ‘as an ally. You and I … we now have an honourable relationship. This is not binding like marriage or offspring shared, but it is binding. Please, do you understand?’
Nbaro tried to nod, but her helmet wasn’t built for nodding.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But to be fair, Tse-Tsu , we are not the same species and I’m not wired the way you are.’
‘Pfft! We were the first breath of fresh water against the fur. Now there is the pull of a whole tide. We have hunted together, rescued each other, shared much. Is this so different from your people?’
‘No,’ Nbaro said. ‘You are talking about loyalty.’
‘Of course! A beautiful word. Something we share.’
Nbaro wished she had a drink. Do AIs feel loyalty? Do human political entities feel loyalty? Do the Hin have a word for enlightened self-interest?
But she let it go. She couldn’t see anything to be gained by pursuing humanity’s many failings. ‘Will you come back?’ she asked.
Nik’ri Put’s tentacles rose and fell, the balletic movement that seemed to accompany happiness. ‘This is what I am telling you, yes! And emphatically yes. I may even have my own ship. I will come with cargo, to trade.’
Nbaro felt a surge of affection for the tentacled little monster. ‘I will look forward to that,’ she said. ‘What will you trade?’
Tentacle flick. ‘That is my secret for now. We have many things that humans should want – you have things we will want.’ She sounded smug, but Nbaro wasn’t sure that was a human reading of an alien’s words.
They talked for a while about promotion – something that seemed to cross all boundaries – and then each told the other a tale of their life before meeting. Nbaro talked about the Mombasa Orbital and their plan to raise a pod of whales, because it involved sea creatures; Nik’ri Put discussed visiting planets with various non-Hin life forms.
Finally, the humans were leaving, the ceremonies over. Nbaro took a deep breath and dared to ask the big question: the one that Darkstar and Morosini and the whole DHC would want to know the answer to.
‘When will you return?’
Tentacle flick, as if it was a question of little importance. ‘Wait while I calculate according to your somewhat odd reckoning.’ Nbaro had spent enough time with Nik’ri Put and Dorcas to know that both Starfish and Hin calculated time based on a particular pulsar’s millisecond rotational period. Terran years were incredibly irregular by comparison.
Nik’ri Put didn’t use a tab or a calculator, either. She just did the maths.
‘Perhaps as little as five years, four months, sixteen days, nine hours and some seconds. Perhaps twice that.’
‘I may not be here,’ Nbaro said, ‘but I’ll come when I hear you are inbound.’
‘May I touch you?’ Nik’ri Put said.
Nbaro hoped her hesitation didn’t show. ‘Yes,’ she managed.
Nik’ri Put embraced her with eleven appendages. Gently, Nbaro squeezed back, trying not to shiver. The Hin’s tentacles were very strong; Nbaro couldn’t pretend it was a comfortable hug.
And yet …
‘Rick tabbed me,’ Thea said, and she wrapped her arms around Marca, and then they both hugged Dorcas. The three of them were sitting in their beautiful suite. They toasted Hanna’s recovery, and Thea babbled for a while and then fell silent, a tribute to how much she had worried. The three of them sat in friendly silence for several minutes.
‘I think Feather Dancer is preparing to replicate,’ Dorcas said, as if that were the natural next step in the conversation.
Nbaro had drunk enough to become interested in the black marble floor with veins of something very green running through it; she was following the veins, trying to decide if the whole was a computer creation or real marble. It seemed to repeat, but then, perhaps they’d cut slices off a slab with a laser …
She sat up. ‘What?’
She had been lying across Dorcas, and Thea was in one of the deep chairs, gazing out at the cosmos. The rotation of the station’s wheel had taken the view of the planet away and replaced it with the infinite.
Dorcas swirled his amber liquid in a crystal tumbler and stared at it as if it was the result of a vital chemical experiment. ‘I said—’
Nbaro cut in. ‘Replicate how?’
Dorcas smiled. ‘Ah … Well, we were wrong about their reproductive systems, but then, we didn’t have much to go on. The oddly shaped appendages? Apparently, they can bud a new Starfish.’
Thea Drake looked interested. ‘Which oddly shaped appendages?’
‘The rhinophores?’ Nbaro asked.
‘Rhino-whats?’ Drake laughed.
‘Actually, the cerata, although it is possible that the transmission of genetic-analogue material takes place through the rhinophores …’
‘I just love it when you talk science to me,’ Drake said in an exaggerated purr.
‘Cerata is a plural, from the ancient Greek Keras meaning a horn,’ Nbaro said. She felt she had to, if only to prevent Dorcas from saying the same thing.
He smiled at her.
‘I thought you turned your neural lace off when you were on the beach,’ Drake said.
‘I do,’ Nbaro said. ‘Some things you just learn,’ she added, looking at Dorcas.
Drake giggled. ‘Get a room!’ she said. ‘OK, they have horns. They’re horny!’
Dorcas raised an eyebrow.
Nbaro giggled, and the two women, slightly the worse for drink, began to laugh uncontrollably.
Dorcas waited them out. ‘It appears that small sacs of genetic-analogue material are forming at the tips of Feather Dancer’s cerata. My intuition says it is replicating. My observation says it is about to produce about four hundred offspring.’
‘Almighty,’ Nbaro said, after a queasy moment. Then she thought about it.
It was not just a leap into the void, separated forever from its race. She was too drunk to think it through, but it looked as though …
‘Have we promised Feather Dancer a home?’ she asked. Dorcas drank off his amber liquid.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Nbaro winced. ‘We live in interesting times.’ She didn’t have to use her neural lace to know that humanity had access to dozens, if not hundreds, of methane-ocean worlds. Or would it be easier to just ruthlessly dispose of Feather Dancer now, rather than create … a subject population of Starfish .
‘Gack,’ she said.
Thea looked at her. ‘I’m not supposed to know any of this, right?’
Dorcas shrugged.
Drake sipped her drink. ‘Fuck, just when you think everything is looking better.’
The cargo loading was every bit as hard as the unloading had been, and the suite of rooms on Simla Station became a fading memory. Nbaro was flying cargo runs around the clock as co-pilot, with Tatlah under instruction in the pilot’s seat, a nice inversion of her own early days. New India’s automated systems made her feel unnecessary, and she had time to consider the impact of all the technological change she’d seen in one cruise. It was only a matter of time before atmospheric cargo-haulers were … just robots.
New India had automated factories, automated space mining and automated exploration drones. She saw them on sortie after sortie, and when she ditched sleep for time with Dorcas, they went dirtside to see alien ruins between two six-hour flights. They had twelve hours together.
Dorcas hadn’t booked them a room. Instead, he had a list of things he wanted to do.
She smiled, thinking of her first dirtside liberty with Rick Hanna. They were very different men.
One day of exploration dirtside revealed that New India had magnificent cities, a fabulously preserved section of Circle xenoarchaeology in what Dorcas thought was an ancient river delta, and sprawling shanty towns of desperately poor people who had neither DHC citizen rights nor any share of the riches being generated by automation.
‘This isn’t going to end well,’ Dorcas commented.
‘The poverty?’ Nbaro was looking at a shanty town that ran right up to the security fence of the xenoarchaeology site.
Dorcas was looking at the interlocking circles. ‘The Venit civilisation was destroyed,’ he said. ‘All of them died, I’d guess.’
She nodded.
He looked at her. ‘Before this cruise, humanity had a cosy sense that we’d got past the Age of Chaos and we were home free. Maybe a couple of planets would fight a stupid war, but never the DHC or the PTX.’ He shrugged. ‘Now, it’s like we’re living through someone else’s age of chaos, and we’re not even important players.’
‘But …’ she began, and he shook his head.
‘And the shanty town. No one in the DHC should be this poor. We tend to blame New Texas for everything, but look at this. Who let this happen?’
Nbaro wasn’t ready to handle the DHC’s many failings, because she was still working through the deaths: her shipmates, and the thousands of spacers she’d helped kill. But she did agree that the universe looked much more dangerous than it had on the day she’d climbed the boarding tube to the Athens airlock.
The Taj Mahal was tiny compared to the size of the city around it, but beautiful and stunning and remarkably human . She and Dorcas stood and looked at it for fifteen minutes, and Dorcas was silent.
‘How did they ever get it here?’ Nbaro asked.
‘You could look that up on your tab.’
‘It’s more of a rhetorical question,’ Nbaro put in. ‘I’ve seen Qaqqaq at work. Engineers … they probably enjoyed the whole thing.’
They shared a meal – wonderful, fresh, complex, spicy food – with Captain Fraser and Captain Mpono, who they met by chance at the exit from the xenoarchaeology site. Mpono was on edge, clearly appalled by the poverty. Fraser was more phlegmatic.
‘This isn’t New London,’ he said.
‘They built a second sky hook to out-construct Sahel,’ Mpono spat. ‘They can fucking take care of their people.’
Heads turned.
‘It’s disgraceful,’ Mpono said loudly.
There was a thick silence around them.
Dorcas said, ‘I agree.’
They left through the silence and stares of the local elite. On the way back up to the ship, in Mpono’s private barge, they turned to Nbaro. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Marca. You have changes coming.’
‘Changes?’ Nbaro felt cold.
‘I need you to fly the Pericles when we leave here. At least until Han is operational again, which is weeks away.’ Mpono waved a hand, and Nbaro thought it was surprisingly like Nik’ri Put’s tentacle flip, brushing objections away. ‘I’ve already spoken to Truekner.’
‘But—’
‘But nothing. We have reason to believe there’s bad guys several systems ahead. Someone took out all the messenger drones. Someone took down some passenger ships between here and Tamil Nadu.’ Mpono leaned back.
Marca rubbed the bridge of her nose. ‘Shit, I thought that part was done.’
‘Welcome to the new world,’ Mpono said. ‘This won’t be done for a generation.’
The last cargo was loaded, the last farewells said, the last hypocritical devotion to the DHC sworn. New India’s puppet NDR government had fallen the instant the two greatships came in-system, but no one was fooled. There were people on New India who were very happy to be out of the DHC, but no one could say so with so much military force in-system.
Pisani, now the commander of the whole flotilla, ordered the Lepanto and both of the defector NDR destroyers to stay. He didn’t even give a reason.
Nbaro had a farewell with her former captive. She swam in a wetsuit with just a respirator, and it was the bravest thing she’d ever done, because at the end of the swim they shared an embrace, and Nbaro almost relaxed.
And she thought, The Starfish don’t have a chance, if the Hin understand hugs. All of humanity will prefer the Hin .
And in that moment, a thought hit her …
I wonder if Feather Dancer knows how to manufacture xenoglas?
They were three insertions from Tamil Nadu, but first they had to boost outwards to the insertion point and bid farewell to the PTX heavy cruiser Stealthy Change.
With commendable openness, Captain Jiang Shunfu informed Master Pisani that he knew about the route that allowed long-jump-capable DHC vessels to cross the middle of DHC space from Draconis to New India. From Captain Fraser’s obvious consternation in the wardroom a few hours later, Nbaro gathered that it had been one of the great secrets of the DHC’s commercial empire.
Captain Jiang was courteous enough to request permission to use the route. Pisani granted it with grace, and after some messaging back and forth, the Stealthy Change signalled her intention to depart and then took on a different vector, inserting two full days earlier than the Athens and the Dubai.
Nbaro was Tower for the extraction at Deng’s Star and Lioness for the extraction five weeks later at HR 6426, a dull red dwarf in a system that looked like it had been stirred with a stick. All of the DHC navigation beacons had been destroyed, as if to remind them that they were still in something like a war. The two-greatship group deployed a heavy screen on system entry, every time; at HR 6426, Nbaro deployed her space wing in perfect synchronicity with the Dubai , thanks to practice and a neural lace. There followed four weeks of tedious searches and patrols, as the system offered a great many places to hide, but it was empty.
By the time they extracted at Li’s Star, the glories of New India were a distant memory, and speculation was rife about the situation at Tamil Nadu, one of the most important systems in the DHC sphere. Would they find NDR resistance? Would they have to fight again?
Would there be shore leave? It was still almost a year to home.
They were transiting Li’s system, deep in the boredom of the Deep Black, and Dorcas said, ‘We should get married now.’
‘Now?’ Nbaro asked.
Dorcas shrugged. ‘We could live in the same quarters, and Morosini would be forced by regulation to make our duty cycles match.’
Nbaro had been reading a manual on her tab, and Dorcas was reading somebody’s xenoarchaeology paper, the two of them lying in opposite directions on Dorcas’s acceleration couch. Practice had shown that if they lay in the same direction, eventually, someone gave in to temptation and no work got done.
She rolled over. ‘That’s very practical,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘I could tell you that you’re brilliant, and that you’re properly snarky, and that your hair is fascinating …’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ she shot back. But she was laughing.
‘But mostly … I’d like to do it.’
She smiled, then frowned. ‘You know that when we get back to New London, you’ll be the husband of the Orphanage cadet who had sex in the chapel, right? Thornberg will have that vid everywhere.’
Dorcas spread his hands. It wasn’t one of his usual arsenal of gestures. ‘I thought we’d destroy Thornberg,’ he said.
Her eyes widened. She could feel it. ‘We will?’
Dorcas wore an expression she’d only seen a few times: once when he watched the video of the murder of the assassin on Madagascar; once when Feather Dancer described the treatment of its people by the pirate faction.
It wasn’t anger or rage. It was a reptilian stillness. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘First, for our own interest. Second, because he and his faction have committed terrible crimes. And finally, I think you have proved to me that we are Morosini’s tools, and that will be our task.’
‘It doesn’t sound so great, when you put it that way.’
Dorcas crawled to the other end of the acceleration couch and put his arms around her. ‘One victory does not win a war.’
‘Do not patronise me, Mr Dorcas, just because I intend to marry you.’
She felt him laughing.
‘But my point remains. The other side, whether it’s a group of AIs or a consortium of petty tyrants, were willing to kill millions and end the DHC to expand their own power. I guarantee that none of them were aboard any of the ships we destroyed. In many ways, nothing will have changed.’
‘But everything has changed,’ she said. ‘We have our own Starfish. We will have a new trade deal with the Starfish and with the Hin. The PTX has the technology to go to Trade Point or anywhere else they want – in a decade, everyone will have it. And … I’m making a leap here, but surely Feather Dancer knows how to make—’
Dorcas’s hand came over her mouth. ‘Not even here.’
She nodded, and he nuzzled her neck.
She leaned back and then said, ‘And you think we have to participate, instead of, say, buying a small ship and running off to New Shenzen to be independent traders.’
She felt his chuckle. ‘I had the same thought.’
Nbaro smiled. ‘It’s Storkel,’ she said. ‘He’s selling it as a retirement plan.’
Dorcas shrugged. ‘Honestly? I will if you want. But I think I am enough of a patrician to believe it is my duty to stay and fight.’
‘You will have to teach me all that,’ Nbaro said. ‘Any patrician I ever had in me got kicked out at the Orphanage. I’m not even sure that I think the patrician class is a good idea.’
‘I can’t wait until you’re on the Great Council,’ Dorcas said.
For the insertion to Tamil Nadu, Nbaro had the Pericles with Qaqqaq and a mostly recovered Gorshokov. She’d been flying quite a few missions with the Pericles , but not so many that she wasn’t keeping in qualification with Flight Six, and Truekner never mentioned it.
No one opposed them, and the first ship to hail them was an armed DHC merchant, the Cardinal Richelieu.
At Tamil Nadu, the NDR had never taken control. A privateer fleet had swept through and destroyed some comms stations and the messenger relay, but a pair of armed DHC merchants had pursued and engaged them, and the war – if it had really been a war here – had moved out Fringeward to New Kyiv and never come back.
What was more, the messenger station had been repaired, and for the first time in more than two years, the Athens and the Dubai were back in the DHC information bubble. Tamil Nadu to New London was at least nine insertions – even for a long-jumper, a journey of a year. But the messenger ships were just engines and computers and a single human pilot; they would leap from system to system, transmitting the moment they were clear of their own extraction radiation. The next messenger would pick up the transmission, delete whatever elements weren’t meant for its target system, and head for Insertion. There were never enough messenger ships to go around, so messages could be delayed, but when the system was working a message from New London could reach Tamil Nadu in as little as three weeks, and never took more than about ninety days. Old-timers called it the Pony Express and messenger pilots were a breed apart, flirting with the Flying Dutchman effect with every insertion.
At Tamil Nadu, the past and future caught up with them. Nbaro had quite a volume of correspondence from the City Investigative Branch of Special Services about the attack on her person (kidnapping, aggravated assault). The DHC promoted openness in its various civil services, and she was presented with details of the investigation, including the in-detention murder of the man apprehended for the attack.
‘Almighty,’ she muttered. She showed it all to Dorcas, and then, at his prompting, to Lieutenant Smith, who made clucking noises like a mother hen.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Someone didn’t want him to talk, I’d say.’
And later that afternoon, as they fell in-system towards Tamil Nadu and its beautiful oceans, Nbaro was summoned to the Master’s briefing room.
Everything had been restored. There was a magnificent table – perhaps it wasn’t really wood, but something wood-like from New India – with beautiful matching chairs that were comfortable and yet severe in design. The landscape of the river and trees was gone forever, but in its place was another, of a sun setting over a nearly limitless plain. The artist had caught the vista, somehow making the savannah’s extent nearly infinite even inside the frame. The tag said ‘Sunset on the Serengeti’.
‘Lieutenant Nbaro,’ Pisani said.
She had reached out to touch the painting, and she snatched her hand back.
Morosini appeared on his throne.
‘This is a private conversation ,’ Morosini said. ‘I’m not recording it. The Master is here as the only witness, so that you will not feel this is some devious plot. ’
Nbaro felt as if a hand was choking her.
Morosini flicked his fingers and an image appeared: documents. He riffled through them, too fast for her to read. His cat raised its head.
‘Let me be brief. Working from within the Great Council and in alliance with at least one of the City bureaucratic AIs, either our adversaries discovered or Hakon Thornberg informed someone of your demerits. You were ordered dismissed from the Service. ’
Nbaro hadn’t worried about this for so long that the blow came in under her armour.
She choked and fought tears. And made herself say, ‘I understand.’
Pisani said, ‘I told you this was the wrong way to go about this.’
Morosini was a blur, her eyes were so full of tears.
‘No, no ,’ he was saying. ‘You cannot imagine I would allow you to be dismissed from the Service. ’
Nbaro snuffled. She hated her weakness, but she felt as if her head would explode.
‘Your recommendations for a fistful of medals crossed with the orders for your dismissal. The recommendations were erased. ’ Morosini shrugged. ‘And then the conspirators attempted to seize the bureaucratic AI cores and made an attempt to kill the Doje. This will all be common knowledge soon enough. ’
She could see again, and Morosini looked smug.
‘They did what you expected?’ she managed.
Morosini laughed. ‘You are too good to be believed, sometimes, Ms Nbaro. ’ He patted Tom, who purred. ‘Yes. They walked into a trap. In the very complex aftermath, your medals were re-evaluated by a less biased judge. ’
‘Or perhaps differently biased …’ she said with some bitterness.
‘The point is that several prominent patricians were arrested for treason, and you, my good and loyal lieutenant, are confirmed in your rank and will receive the Starburst as soon as you pass your lieutenant’s exam. ’
‘Pass the …’
Pisani was shaking his head. ‘Morosini, you may be the kingpin of the DHC, but you still don’t manipulate people as well as you think. Marca, Morosini set you up for rapid promotion, and he’s using your level to leapfrog you past lieutenant, but you have to pass the exam so your promotion becomes permanent, and we can pin the medal on you and make you a lieutenant commander.’
Nbaro couldn’t think of anything to say. She did realise that Truekner had tried to tell her this – not once, but twice, but not in so many words.
‘So I’m in the Service?’ she asked.
Morosini nodded. ‘For now . I’m hoping you will agree to run for the Great Council in the spring elections. ’
‘We won’t be home for a year!’ she said.
Morosini nodded. ‘You are about to become the greatest DHC military hero of all time ,’ he said. ‘That fame will last about five months and then it will be forgotten. ’
Pisani laughed. It was a good laugh – the laugh of an old man who’d seen too much and survived it. ‘Oh, Morosini, I find it very unlikely that anyone will forget Marca Nbaro.’
Nbaro passed her lieutenant’s exam along with Andrei Gorshokov and Thea Drake, Tim Eyre and forty others, some of whom were still midshippers and some of whom were acting lieutenants. One unexpected consequence of a three-year cruise full of heavy cargo movement and combat was that everyone passed; there wasn’t a midshipper aboard who hadn’t had to perform most of the testable scenarios in real life, and under pressure.
So when they finally had the long-awaited awards ceremony, the ship no longer had any midshippers, but some forty newly minted lieutenants. The list of awards meant that the ceremony would have lasted for seven hours if the Master hadn’t elected to present them in batches. The messenger boat from home had held dispatches that should have reached them at Draconis.
Nineteen weeks later they did it all again as they entered HR 724 and received the next batch of dispatches, with awards confirmations and promotions following the actions at Trade Point and Ultra–Medulla. Then Nbaro heard the roll called of all their dead – heard the bravery of Ko and Suleimani extolled – and then was called forward herself to receive the DHC’s highest honour. She really didn’t hear the words as Pisani read off her citation; it all felt as if it was happening to someone else.
Afterwards she hugged Thea, and Dorcas, and even Rick Hanna, who was up and functioning, if still in pain. And Fuju Han, who was now a commander, set to be the executive officer of Flight Three; Cortez, who had medals of his own and was engaged to Klipac; Storkel and Dworkin; Mpono, now a full captain, and Musashi, now a commander, about to take command of Flight Five. Chu had been promoted to Chief Petty Officer, and so, in spite of his test-taking problems, had Patel; both were going to training commands. By the end of the cruise, most of her original back-seaters – those who had survived – were pilots and officers.
They still were weeks out from home, but in a way their cruise was already over, as people made plans for the future: commands, changes, resignations. Storkel was leaving the Service, going back to Terra. He was pulling strings and using his new fame to try to convince the DHC to sell him the Single Star , still strapped to the underside of the Athens , if slightly the worse for wear after several months of combat. He’d taken to eating with Nbaro since their shared liberty on New India; he and Qaqqaq had struck up a friendship that sometimes looked as if it might be romantic.
‘You have a Starburst and a new promotion,’ Nbaro said over pie. ‘Why get out?’
Storkel rubbed his chin. ‘I killed five hundred people,’ he said. ‘I don’t really regret it. But I don’t ever want to do it again.’
She accepted that. His ice-blue eyes said he meant it.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I joined up to make enough to buy my own ship.’ He shrugged. ‘I got a piece of Hanna’s piece of your xenoglas syndicate, so I’ll do the DHC Merchant thing – get the government to pay a third, and I’ll have a bird. Maybe I’ll come out to the Fringe? Who knows?’
Qaqqaq shook her head. ‘He wants the Single Star ,’ she said. ‘She’s riddled with dead systems, and she’s taken hundreds of CIWS rounds from being strapped to our hull.’
Storkel spread his hands. ‘She has big engines and lots of secrets,’ he said. ‘My ancestors were Vikings.’
Everyone laughed.
Mpono had already been selected to command the Athens as Master on their next mission. Mpono and Fraser joined their juniors at the usual table, and everyone congratulated them. Mpono looked strained. But they didn’t say anything about their reservations until the others were clearing away their plates.
‘I thought of saying “no”,’ Mpono said.
Nbaro nodded her understanding.
‘Big patrician now, me,’ Mpono said, aping their family’s patois, and then, in a much primmer tone, ‘I really cannot disappoint my mother.’ They shrugged. ‘Besides, there’s never been a ’gyne Master before.’
‘You are the best officer I’ve ever served with,’ Nbaro said suddenly. It was spontaneous, and it shot out of her like a missile launch.
Mpono looked at her.
Nbaro grinned. ‘It’s true. You’ll make everything better.’
Mpono looked at her. ‘You are something else,’ they said. ‘Where did all the sharp edges go? You used to be such a little hard case.’
The changes rolled on. Truekner was promoted to Captain, but he was retiring; Thulile got permanent promotion to Commander and was taking the squadron, and all her spacers were being promoted, some to other flights. Nothing would ever be the same. Nbaro missed it already, and the last weeks had a curious air, as all of them felt nostalgia for a life they were still living.
The work was still hard, even as they all prepared for home. Everyone let their hair grow; cargo operations returned to the forefront of every decision, and by Montreal, it was half a year since Nbaro had flown any spaceframe with a weapons package uploaded.
Five insertions from New London, at Montreal, the DHC’s third-largest system, she and Dorcas were married. There were dozens of marriages, and Montreal Wedding was a service euphemism for the relationships that had formed out in the Deep Black. It was somewhat anticlimactic, as they’d been together for almost two years by the time they were married.
It was odd, leaving the cabin she shared with Drake, and so she didn’t, really. Many mornings in their dwindling store of precious ship days, she’d go to her old cabin and have coffee with Thea, and both of them would watch the interstellar DHC xenoglas markets. As the two greatships, loaded to the gills with fresh glas, headed towards New London, the prices went up and up.
But the work never stopped, and so, two days after her military wedding, for which she had worn a dress uniform and a sword, Nbaro was seated with Truekner, handling comms while he took re-entry and dived into an Earth-like atmosphere, through clouds, and then rain, to land on a water-slick runway on a vast ground starport outside New Quebec.
‘Aren’t you going to miss this?’ she asked. They had to taxi forever; it took longer to reach their assigned loading hangar than it had to come down from orbit.
‘What – taxiing?’ Truekner said. ‘No. I won’t miss it.’
‘Command?’ she asked. ‘Flying?’
He made a face. ‘When I’m on the beach, and I’ve had a few drinks, I’ll probably imagine that I miss it.’ He turned his helmeted head and his eyes met hers, and she had a visceral memory of their first long flight together. His mouth twitched towards a smile. ‘I liked being a glorified merchant officer. I think that’s over, though. I think we’re about to be a navy. The navy of an empire.’
Nbaro chewed on that while they unloaded cargo, and while she meticulously checked everything that was going into the belly of her spaceframe. Then they were taxiing out to their launch point with a full fuel load and cargo, and she said, ‘Yes. Yeah, skipper, everything is going to change. But we need you.’
He smiled and started the preflight checks. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I’ve done my turn. Anyway, Morosini asked me to run your campaign for the Great Council.’
She acknowledged to New Quebec Tower, got a launch window, and passed it to Truekner. He scanned his instruments; she adjusted the flow of hydrogen to her engines with her neural lace.
He sat back, allowing the full engagement of his acceleration couch, and she did the same.
‘Now this part never gets old,’ he said. ‘Launching from a planet into space. This, I will miss.’
‘Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7, you are go for launch,’ said New Quebec ATC.
‘Roger, Tower,’ she said, and they rose on a column of fire.
The Great Council chamber wasn’t in the reconstruction of the Doge’s palace, mostly because you couldn’t fit three thousand patricians into a building constructed in the fourteenth century, no matter what anachronisms you allowed. The council chambers were in their own xenoglas bubble in one of City’s two outer rings. Even though a great many councillors only attended by holocast, there were still more than a thousand attending in person, and many of them were there to see Lieutenant Commander Marca Nbaro-Dorcas, hero of what some politicians were already calling the Non-War.
She and her newly elected friend, Thea Drake, were in uniform, their midnight blue and gold especially striking in the chamber light. She wasn’t as tall as people expected; Thea Drake was, but the taller woman didn’t have quite the same air. Nbaro’s husband came in behind her; all three of them were now great councillors, and he was dressed as a patrician, his hair in a queue, his brocaded long-coat almost brushing the ground.
As the foremost hero of the now-famous Athens voyage, Nbaro had been invited to speak. She gave quite a good speech, about unity, about the Hin and the Starfish, and the opportunities that the DHC had to be ready to grasp. She received a standing ovation, but then, as one wag put it, they’d have given her a standing ovation if she’d vomited on the podium, such was the power of fame.
At the end, she said what she wanted to say.
‘Our society, and indeed, any society, depends on the faith of its people in the ideals of their social contract. When that faith is eroded, the ideals themselves wither, and the social contract is damaged. Those of us who fought the Non-War have seen the consequences of the greed and selfishness of a few. We will never forget our dead, nor the deaths we were forced to inflict to win a future for the DHC. It is my hope that, going forward, every citizen will look to the selfless sacrifice of hundreds of DHC merchant spacers, many of them my friends … my hope that all of us will remember them, and keep faith with them. We who remain must polish our ideals and make the DHC better.’
Many seats were empty, because so many councillors had chosen to holocast in, and a thousand pairs of eyes watched the three new councillors walk up the main aisle, but Nbaro led the way and she seemed sure of where she wanted to sit.
‘Hakon Thornberg,’ she said. She made herself smile.
Thornberg had watched her come up the aisle. She knew that. But he was still surprised.
She sat at her new desk and smiled at the man who’d tried to ruin her life.
‘If you attempt any kind of retaliatory action …’ he began.
Nbaro flicked her hand a fair copy of a Hin tentacle flick. ‘Hakon,’ she said, as if they were old friends.
He stopped talking.
She leaned over. ‘Do whatever you like,’ she said softly. ‘Anything. See what happens.’ She gave him her best wide grin. ‘I thought it was best to say that in person. Save your threats. Just do … whatever you want. And accept the consequences.’
She smiled.
Dorcas smiled.
Thea smiled.
Hakon Thornberg rose from his seat in the Great Council and left the hall.
Nbaro began to type on her tab.
Drake looked at her. ‘That was fun. What are we doing next?’
‘Next?’ Nbaro said. ‘I thought we’d get Mombasa Orbital a pod of whales.’
Miles Cameron and Gollancz would like to thank everyone at Orion who worked on the publication of Deep Black .
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By Miles Cameron from Gollancz:
The Traitor Son Cycle
The Red Knight
The Fell Sword
The Dread Wyrm
The Plague of Swords
The Fall of Dragons
Masters & Mages
Cold Iron
Dark Forge
Bright Steel
Arcana Imperii
Artifact Space
Deep Black
The Age of Bronze
Against All Gods
Storming Heaven
Breaking Hel
Writing as Christian Cameron from Orion:
The Chivalry Series
The Ill-Made Knight
The Long Sword
The Green Count
The Sword of Justice
Hawkwood’s Sword
The Emperor’s Sword
The Tyrant Series
Tyrant
Tyrant: Storm of Arrows
Tyrant: Funeral Games
Tyrant: King of the Bosporus
Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities
Tyrant: Force of Kings
The Commander Series
The New Achilles
The Last Greek
The Long War Series
Killer of Men
Marathon
Poseidon’s Spear
The Great King
Salamis
Treason of Sparta
Tom Swan
Tom Swan and the Head of St George Parts One–Six
Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade Parts One–Seven
Tom Swan and the Last Spartans Parts One–Five
Tom Swan and the Keys of Peter
Other Novels
Washington and Caesar
Alexander: God of War
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Gollancz
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Miles Cameron 2024
The moral right of Miles Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 978 1 399 61506 8