Storm Bird shuddered again, and this time half the lights on the console blacked out. Clavain guessed that one of the pirates had just hit them with a penetrating slug equipped with an EMP warhead. So much for Antoinette’s boast that all the critical systems were routed through opto-electronic pathways . . .
“Clavain . . .” she looked back at him with wild, frightened eyes. “I can’t get the excimers to work . . .”
“Try a different routing.”
Her fingers worked the plinth controls, and Clavain watched the spider’s web of data connections shift as she assigned data to scurry along different paths. The ship shook again. Clavain leaned over and looked through the port window. The banshee was looming large now, arresting its approach with a continuous blast of reverse thrust. He could see grapples and claws unfolding, articulating away from the hull like the barbed and hooked limbs of some complicated black insect just emerging from a cocoon.
“Hurry up,” Xavier said, looking at what Antoinette was doing.
“Antoinette.” Clavain spoke as calmly as he could. “Let me take over. Please.”
“What fucking good . . .”
“Just let me take over.”
She breathed in and out for five or six seconds, just looking at him, and then unbuckled herself and eased out of the seat. Clavain nodded and squeezed past her, settling by the weapons plinth.
He had already familiarised himself with it. By the time his hands touched the controls, his implants had begun to accelerate his subjective consciousness rate. Things around him moved glacially, whether it was the expressions on the faces of his hosts or the pulsing of the warning messages on the control panel. Even his hands moved as if through treacle, and the delay between sending a nerve signal and watching his hands respond was quite noticeable. He was used to that, though. He had done this before, too many times, and he naturally made allowances for the sluggish response of his own body.
As his consciousness rate reached fifteen times faster than normal, so that every actual second felt like fifteen seconds to him, Clavain willed himself on to a plateau of detached calm. A second was a long time in war. Fifteen seconds was even longer. There was a lot you could do, a lot you could think, in fifteen seconds.
Now then. He began to set the optimum control pathways for the remaining weapons. The spider’s web shifted and reconfigured. Clavain explored a number of possible solutions, forcing himself not to accept second best. It might take two actual seconds to find the perfect arrangement of data flows, but that would be time well spent. He glanced at the short-range radar sphere, amused to see that its update cycle now looked like the slow beating of some immense heart.
There. He had regained control of the excimer cannons. All he needed now was a revised strategy to deal with the changed situation. That would take a few seconds—a few actual seconds—for his mind to process.
It would be tight.
But he thought he would make it.
“How to win friends and influence people,” Antoinette said as she watched the ruined one tumble away. Half its hull was gone, revealing a skeletal confusion of innards belching grey spirals of vapour. “Good work, Clavain.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s two reasons for you to trust me. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have to faint.”
He fainted.
But there had been no lasting ill effects and he had earned their trust. It was a price he was more than willing to pay. For the remainder of the trip he was free to move around the ship as he pleased, while the other two gradually divested themselves of their outer spacesuit layers. The banshees never came back, and Storm Bird never ran into any military activity. Clavain still felt the need to make himself useful, however, and with Antoinette’s consent he helped Xavier with a number of minor inflight repairs or upgrades. The two of them spent hours tucked away in tight cable-infested crawlspaces, or rummaging through layers of archaic source code.
“I can’t really blame you for not trusting me before,” Clavain said, when he and Xavier were alone.
“I care about her.”
“It’s obvious. And she took a hell of a risk coming out here to rescue me. If I’d been in your shoes I’d have tried to talk her out of it as well.”
“Don’t take it personally.”
Clavain dragged a stylus across the compad he had balanced on his knees, rerouting a number of logic pathways between the control web and the dorsal communications cluster. “I won’t.”
“What about you, Clavain? What’s going to happen when we get to the Rust Belt?”
Clavain shrugged. “Up to you. You can drop me wherever it suits you. Carousel New Copenhagen’s as good as anywhere else.”
“And then what?”
“I’ll hand myself over to the authorities.”
“The Demarchists?”
He nodded. “Although it’d be much too dangerous for me to approach them directly, out here in open space. I’ll need to go through a neutral party, such as the Convention.”
Xavier nodded. “I hope you get what you’re hoping for. You took a risk as well.”
“Not the first, I assure you.” Clavain paused and lowered his voice. It was unnecessary—they were many dozens of metres away from Antoinette—but he felt the need all the same. “Xavier . . . while we’re alone . . . there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
Xavier peered at him through scuffed grey data-visualisation goggles. “Go ahead.”
“I gather you knew her father, and that you handled the repair of this ship when he was running it.”
“True enough.”
“Then I suppose you know all about it. Perhaps more than Antoinette?”
“She’s a damned good pilot, Clavain.”
Clavain smiled. “Which is a polite way of saying she’s not very interested in the technical aspects of this ship?”
“Nor was her father,” Xavier said, with a touch of defensiveness. “Running a commercial operation like this is enough trouble without worrying about every subroutine.”
“I understand. I’m no expert myself. But I couldn’t help noticing back there, when the subpersona intervened . . .” He left the remark hanging.
“You thought that was odd.”
“It nearly got us killed,” Clavain said. “It fired too soon, against my direct orders.”
“They weren’t orders, Clavain, they were recommendations.”
“My mistake. But the point is, it shouldn’t have happened. Even if the subpersona had some control over the weapons—and in a civilian ship I’d regard that as unusual, to say the least—it still shouldn’t have acted without a direct command. And it definitely shouldn’t have panicked.”
Xavier’s laugh was hard and nervous. “Panicked?”
“That’s what it felt like to me.” Clavain couldn’t see Xavier’s eyes behind the data goggles.
“Machines don’t panic, Clavain.”
“I know. Especially not gamma-level subpersonae, which is what Beast would have to be.”
Xavier nodded. “Then it can’t have been panic, can it?”