Felka and Remontoire were floating next to him in the observation cupola, which was decoupled from the spinning part of the ship. Now that Zodiacal Light had slowed to a halt on the edge of the battle volume they no longer had need of their exoskeletons, and Clavain felt oddly vulnerable without his.
“Disappointed, Clavain?” asked Remontoire.
“No. As a matter of fact I’m reassured. If anything feels too easy, I start looking for a trap.”
Remontoire nodded. “She’s no fool, that’s for certain, no matter what she’s done to her ship. You still don’t believe that story about an evacuation attempt, I take it?”
“There’s more reason to believe it now than there was before,” Felka said. “Isn’t that right, Clavain? We’ve seen shuttles moving between surface and orbit.”
“That’s all we’ve seen,” Clavain said.
“And a larger ship moving between orbit and the lighthugger,” she continued. “What more evidence do we need that she’s sincere?”
“It doesn’t necessarily indicate an evacuation programme,” Clavain said through gritted teeth. “It could be many things.”
“So give her the benefit of the doubt,” Felka said.
Clavain turned to her, brimming with sudden fury but hoping that it did not show. “It’s her choice. She has the weapons. They’re all I want.”
“The weapons won’t make any difference in the long run.”
Now he made no attempt to hide his anger. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I know, Clavain. I know that everything that is happening here, everything that means so much to you, to us, means precisely nothing in the long run.”
“And this pearl of wisdom came from the Wolf, did it?”
“You know I brought a part of it back from Skade’s ship.”
“Yes,” he said. “And that means I have all the more reason to disregard anything you say, Felka.”
She hauled herself to one side of the cupola and disappeared through the exit hole, back into the main body of the ship. Clavain opened his mouth to call after her, to say something in apology. Nothing came.
“Clavain?”
He looked at Remontoire. “What, Rem?”
“The first hyperfast missiles will be arriving in a minute.”
Two minutes later another wave passed to starboard, and then a third slipped by to port, much further out, three minutes after that.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. “We’re not just playing war, are we?”
“Scared?” Xavier asked, pressed into the seat beside hers.
“More than scared.” She had already been back into the body of Storm Bird, inspecting the ferociously armoured assault squad she carried in her ship’s cargo bay. “But that’s good. Dad always said . . .”
“Be scared if you aren’t scared. Yeah.” Xavier nodded. “That was one of his.”
“Actually . . .”
They both looked at the console.
“What, Ship?” asked Antoinette.
“Actually, that was one of mine. But your father liked it enough to steal it from me. I took that as a compliment.”
“So Lyle Merrick actually said . . .” Xavier began.
“Yes.”
“No shit?” Antoinette said.
“No shit, Little Miss.”
Volyova tracked the trajectories of the hyperfast missiles as they streaked across space from the launchers deployed by Zodiacal Light. They accelerated at a hundred gees, sustaining that thrust for forty minutes before becoming purely ballistic. Then they were moving at slightly less than one per cent of the speed of light—formidable targets, but still within the capabilities of Nostalgia for Infinity’s autonomic hull defences. Any starship had to be able to track and destroy rapidly moving objects as a normal part of its collision-avoidance procedures, so Volyova had barely had to upgrade the existing safeguards to make full-scale weapons.
It was a question of numbers. Each missile occupied a certain fraction of her available hull weapons, and there was always a small statistical chance that too many missiles would arrive at the same time for her—or the Captain, who was doing all the actual defending—to deal with.
But it never happened. She ran an analysis on the missile spread and concluded that Clavain was not trying to hit her. It was within his capability to do so; he had some control over the missiles until the moment they stopped accelerating, enough to correct for any small changes in Infinity’s position. And a direct hit from a hyperfast, even one with a dummy warhead, would have taken out the entire ship in a flash. Yet the missiles were all on trajectories that stood only a small chance of actually hitting her ship. They slammed past with tens of kilometres to spare, while roughly one in twenty went on to detonate slightly closer to Resurgam. The blast signatures suggested small matter-anti-matter explosions: either residual fuel, or pinhead-sized warheads. The other nineteen missiles were effectively dummies.
A close blast would certainly damage Infinity, she thought. The five deployed cache weapons were robust enough not to worry her, but a close matter-antimatter blast could well incapacitate her hull armaments, leaving her wide open to a more concerted assault. Not that she was going to let it happen, but she would have to expend a good fraction of her resources in preventing it. And the annoying thing was that most of the missiles she had to destroy posed no actual threat; they were neither on intercept trajectories nor armed.
She did not go so far as to congratulate Clavain. All he had done was adopt a textbook saturation-attack approach, tying up her defences with a low probability/high consequence threat. It was neither clever nor original, but it was, more or less, exactly what she would have done under the same circumstances. She would give him that, at least: he had certainly not disappointed her.
Volyova decided to give him one last chance before ending his fun.
“Clavain?” she asked, broadcasting on the same frequency she had already used for her ultimatum. “Clavain, are you listening to me?”
Twenty seconds passed, and then she heard his voice. “I’m listening, Triumvir. I take it this isn’t an offer of surrender?”
“I’m offering you a chance, Clavain, before I end this. A chance for you to walk away and fight on another day, against a more enthusiastic adversary.”
She waited for his reply to crawl back to her. The delay could be artificial, but it almost certainly meant he was still aboard Zodiacal Light.
“Why would you want to cut me any slack, Triumvir?”
“You’re not a bad man, Clavain. Just . . . misguided. You think you need the weapons more than I do, but you’re wrong, mistaken. I won’t hold it against you. No serious harm has yet been done. Turn your forces around and we’ll call it a misunderstanding.”
“You speak as someone who thinks they hold the upper hand, Ilia. I wouldn’t be so certain, if I were you.”
“I have the weapons, Clavain.” She found herself smiling and frowning at the same time. “That makes rather a lot of difference, don’t you think?”
“I’m sorry, Ilia, but I think one ultimatum is enough for anyone, don’t you?”
“You’re a fool, Clavain. The sad thing is that you’ll never know how much of a fool.”