“I’m here to get those weapons, Felka. Everything else, no matter how well intentioned, is just a detail.”
“That’s what I thought,” Felka said.
Clavain knew that it was better that he say nothing in answer.
In silence, they watched the violet flames of the attack ships fall towards Resurgam, and the Triumvir’s starship.
“Ilia, listen to me. We have a serious fucking problem.”
Volyova emerged from contemplation of her battlescape. The icons floated within the squashed sphere of the projection like dozens of bright frozen fish. The view had changed since the last time she had seen it, Khouri was certain.
“What is it, child?”
“It’s the holding bay, where we have the newcomers.”
“Continue.”
“It’s not designed to deal with the ship moving under thrust. We built it as a temporary holding bay, to be used while we were parked. It’s spun for gravity so that the force acts radially, away from the ship’s long axis. But now that’s changing. The Captain’s applying thrust, so we’ve got a new source acting along the axis. It’s only a fifth of a gee at the moment, but you can bet it’s going to get worse. We can turn off the spin, but that won’t change things. The walls are becoming floors.”
“This is a lighthugger, Khouri. This is a normal transition to starflight mode.”
“You don’t understand, Ilia. We’ve got two thousand people crammed into one chamber, and they can’t stay there. They’re already freaking out because the floor is sloping so much. They feel as if they’re on the deck of a sinking ship, and no one is telling them anything’s wrong.” She paused; she was a little out of breath. “Ilia, here’s the deal. You were right about the bottleneck. I told Thorn to get things moving faster at the Resurgam end. That means we’re going to be getting thousands of people arriving very soon indeed. We always knew we’d have to start emptying the holding bay. Now we’ll just have to start doing it a bit sooner.”
“But that would mean . . .” Volyova appeared unable to complete the thought.
“Yes, Ilia. They’re going to have to get the tour of the ship. Whether they like it or not.”
“This could turn out very badly, Khouri. Very badly indeed.” Khouri looked down at her old mentor. “You know what I like about you, Ilia? You’re such a frigging optimist.”
“Shut up and take a look at the battle display, Khouri. We are under attack—or we will be very shortly.”
“Clavain?”
The merest hint of a nod. “Zodiacal Light has released squadrons of attack craft, around a hundred in total. They’re headed here, most of them at three gees. They won’t take more than four hours to reach us, no matter what we do.”
“Clavain can’t have those weapons, Ilia.”
The Triumvir, who now looked far older and frailer than Khouri ever remembered, shook her head by the barest degree. “He isn’t going to get them. Not without a fight.”
Clavain readied his response. “Sorry. Unacceptable. I need those weapons very badly.”
He transmitted it and was only slightly startled when the Triumvir’s answer came back three seconds later. It was identical to his own. There had not been enough time for her to see his response.
THIRTY-FIVE
Volyova watched five of the thirteen remaining cache weapons assume attack positions beyond Nostalgia for Infinity. Their coloured icons floated above her bed like the kinds of bauble that were used to amuse infants in cots. Volyova raised a hand and poked it through the ghostly representation, pushing against the icons, adjusting the positions of the weapons relative to her ship, using its hull for camouflage wherever possible. The icons moved stubbornly, reflecting the sluggish real-time movements of the weapons themselves.
“Are you going to use them immediately?” Khouri asked.
Volyova glanced at the woman. “No. Not yet. Not until he forces my hand. I don’t want the Inhibitors to know that there are more cache weapons than the twenty they already know about.”
“You’ll have to use them eventually.”
“Unless Clavain sees sense and realises he can’t possibly win. Maybe he will. It isn’t too late.”
“But we don’t know anything about the kinds of weapons he has,” Khouri said. “What if he has something equally powerful?”
“It won’t make a blind bit of difference if he has, Khouri. He wants something from me, understand? I want nothing from him. That gives me a distinct advantage over Clavain.”
“I don’t . . .”
Volyova sighed, disappointed that it was necessary to spell this out. “His strike against us has to be surgical. He can’t risk damaging the weapons he so badly wants. In crude terms, you don’t rob someone by dropping a crustbuster on them. But I’m bound by no such constraint. Clavain has nothing that I want.”
Well, Volyova admitted to herself, almost nothing. She had a vague curiosity concerning whatever it was that had allowed him to decelerate so savagely. Even if it was nothing as exotic as inertia-suppression technology . . . but no. It was nothing she needed desperately. That meant she could use all the force in her arsenal against him. She could wipe him out of existence, and her only loss would be something she was not even sure had ever existed.
But something still troubled her. Clavain, surely, could see all that for himself? Especially if she was dealing with the Clavain, the real Butcher of Tharsis. He had not lived through four hundred or more dangerous years of human history by making tragically simple errors.
What if Clavain knew something she didn’t?
She moved her fingers through the projection, nervously reconfiguring her pieces, wondering which of them she should use first, thinking also that, given Clavain’s limitations, it would be more interesting to let the battle escalate rather than taking his main ship out instantly.
“Any news from Thorn?” she asked.
“He’s en route from Resurgam with another two thousand passengers.”
“And does he know about our little difficulty with Clavain?”
“I told him we were moving closer to Resurgam. I didn’t see any sense in giving him anything more to worry about.”
“No,” Volyova said, agreeing with her for once. “The people are at least as safe in space as they’d be on Resurgam. At least once they’re off the planet they’ve got a hope of survival. Not much of one, but . . .”
“Are you certain you won’t use the cache weapons?”
“I will use them Khouri, but not a moment sooner than I have to. Haven’t you ever heard of the expression ‘whites of their eyes’? Perhaps not; it’s the sort of thing only a soldier would be likely to know.”
“I’ve forgotten more about soldiering than you’ll ever know, Ilia.”
“Just trust me. Is it so much to ask?”
At first, that was exactly what happened. She did not even have to ask it of the Captain. He was privy to the same tactical information as Volyova, and appeared capable of arriving at the same conclusions. She felt the faint yawing and pitching, as if her bed was adrift on a raft on a mildly choppy sea, as Nostalgia for Infinity moved, shifting with short, thunderous bursts of the many station-keeping thrusters which dotted the hull.
But she could do better than that.
With the long-range grabs of the railguns and the electromagnetic launch signatures, she could determine the precise direction in which a particular slug had been aimed. There was a margin of error, but it was not large, and it amused Volyova to remain exactly where she was until the last possible moment, only then moving her ship. She ran simulations in the tactical display, showing the Captain the projected impact point of each new slug launch, and was gratified when the Captain revised his strategy. She liked it better this way. It was far more elegant and fuel-efficient, and she hoped that the lesson was not lost on Clavain.
She wanted him to become cleverer, so that she could become cleverer still.