He thought of that upstart barrow-thief Miz Gattse Kuma and that snotty aristocrat with her laughing, dismissive eyes. Want to use me to get our treasure? he thought, still smiling, his heart beating faster. Think you can buy just my robe and my cooperation without buying the man inside, with his own desires and ambitions and plans? Well, he thought. I have a little surprise for you, my friends!
The Abyssal Plain Nodule Processing Plant Mobile Repair Module woke up at one second before midnight, its circuits and sensors quickly establishing its location, internal state and external circumstances, as well as its programmed instructions.
It was on Golter, in a shallow lagoon off the coast of Piphram, under the floating city called the Log-Jam; it was fully functional and recently overhauled, with all reservoirs, tanks, magazines and batteries registering 99 per cent capacity or above; a subset of instructions refamiliarised it with the extra equipment and weaponry it had been fitted with, finding those fully ready too.
Its cupola sensor was at a true depth of 27.1 metres; its tracks, two metres lower, were sunk into soft mud to a depth of forty centimetres. Assuming its chronometer to be correct, the tide should be halfebbed. The keel of a large stationary vessel lay eight metres above it. Light was scarce, seeping in from the occasional gap in between distant ships in shafts that barely illuminated the surrounding mud; the light signature indicated it was artificial. There was a faint current, only a few millimetres per second. The seabed was quiet; the water itself was filled with a distant, inchoate rumble of sound, an amalgam of noises coming from the ships that stretched for kilometres in all compass directions.
Water quality was brackish, oxygen-poor and moderately polluted with a broad spectrum of contaminants, though it was comparatively transparent. There was a confusing jumble of mostly metallic junk and wreckage lying under the surface of the mud at levels from nine metres down to barely submerged. Magnetic fields lay in static patterns all around; distant fluctuations were motors. Electrical activity was dispersed and ubiquitous in the ships above it.
Radiation was normal, for Golter.
Its instructions were clear. It readied itself, then adjusted its buoyancy by dropping two large weights from its flanks; they fell a few centimetres and embedded themselves in the mud, barely disturbing the surface. The mud still held it, but its motors would break that grip. It carried out the quietest possible start, flutter-feeding its motors so that it moved away at first much slower than the current, coming up and out of the mud as its buoyancy brought its tracks to the seabed’s surface.
Using its tracks and impellers, it accelerated smoothly and almost silently up to a slow crawl, and began a wide turn that would take it towards the destination it could already sense; the keel of a long vessel whose girth, allied with the angle of taper from beam to stem and stem, as well as the depth of water the craft was drawing, indicated that it was, or had been, a large capital ship; probably a battleship.
High in the superstructure of a five-hundred-metre liner which had once plied the lucrative trade routes between Jonolrey and Caltasp, Ethce Lebmellin entered the state suite where the reception was in noisy full swing. He was dressed in full ceremonial robes; cumbersomely sumptuous clothes of red, gold and blue covered in designs of extinct or mythical sea creatures that made his every step a battle of colourful monsters.
Lebmellin’s aides started introducing him to the guests. He heard himself making automatic replies as he went through the motions of greeting, inquiry and ingratiation. Two decades of training for and taking part in receptions, banquets and patties, at first in the academies and colleges of Yadayeypon and later in the Log-Jam itself, had given Lebmellin ample reserves of exactly the sort of flawlessly unthinking politeness such occasions demanded.
He could see Kuma at the far side of the room, introducing people to the aristocrat and his other two new friends; the man called Dloan - as bulky and quiet as any bodyguard Lebmellin had ever seen - and his bewitchingly attractive sister.
People seemed pathetically anxious to meet the noblewoman, who-in perhaps only a few days’ time-would be running for her life, trying to escape the Huhsz. The aristocrat, standing under the bright coloured lights near the centre of the reception room, had taken off her shoes; her naked feet were half submerged in the thick pile of the room’s richly patterned carpet. Lebmellin loathed such aristocratic affectation. He had to suppress a sneer as he shared a joke with a popular and influential courtesan it would have been foolish to antagonise.
He laughed lightly, putting his head back. Good; Kuma was just introducing the Franck woman to the Chief Invigilator.
A few minutes after midnight, routine repair work on a factory ship a couple of vessels away from what had once been the Imperial Tilian Navy’s flagship Devastator resulted in a small explosion in the manufacturing vessel’s bilges.
The Repair Module sensed the faintest of alterations to the dim hanging shape of a distant ship, then registered the shockwave as it passed through the attached hulls above, and finally heard and felt the explosion pulsing through the water around it as it trundled quietly and softly across the mud towards the old battleship.
The gas detonation fractured several of the factory ship’s outer plates and ruptured the insulation of a main power cable, so that when the water rushed in through the gaps in the ship’s hull it shorted out the electricity supply for several dozen ships near the heart of the Log-Jam. That part of the city sank into darkness.
The Module sensed the electrical fields immediately around fade and die, leaving only the magnetic signatures of the fabric of the ships themselves.
Emergency lights burned on the ships for a few seconds until their stand-by generators took up the strain, so that, one by one, the vessels flickered into brightness again. The Log-Jam’s power supply centre - tapping the reactors of dozens of old submarines and four of the eight nuclear-powered carriers which made up Carrier Field -instituted checks to determine where the power line had shorted, before it started to re-route electricity to the affected area.
The power supply in the Devastator took a little longer to re-establish while its alarms were checked. When the old battleship’s systems did fire up again, much of the emergency wiring - replaced only a few months earlier as part of the vessel’s rolling refit programme by an electrical company very distantly owned by Miz Gattse Kuma - promptly melted, starting numerous but small fires throughout the old ship. The system was shut down again. Duty engineers on the Devastator -who, after the guards, made up the bulk of the old battleship’s fifty or so night staff -worked to reroute the generator supply while battery-powered fire control systems tackled the fires; most were put out within a few minutes.
The Module half-ploughed, half-floated gently on, approaching the dark space under the silent battleship, whose wide, flat bottom hung suspended just a handful of metres above the floor of soft, black mud.
Lebmellin fought the desire to look at his timepiece or ask an aide the hour. He watched the Chief Invigilator as the older man fell under the spell of the golden-haired Franck woman. The aristocrat was quite outshone in her company. Zefla Franck glowed; she filled the space about her with life and beauty and an attraction you could almost taste.
The Sharrow woman had a sort of quiet, dark beauty, understated despite the strength of her features and forbidding, even if one had not known she was from a major house; she was like a dark, cloud-covered planet clothed in quiet, cold mystery.
But the Franck woman was like Thrial; like the sun; a radiance Lebmellin could feel on his face as she joshed and joked with his immediate superior. And the old fool was lapping it up, falling for it, falling for her.
Mine, thought Lebmellin, watching her as she talked and laughed, savouring the way she put her head back and the exquisite shape it gave that long, inviting neck. Mine, he told himself, fastening his gaze on her hand when it went out to touch the ornately embroidered material on the arm of the Chief Invigilator’s robe.
You’ll be mine, Lebmellin told her piled mass of shining golden hair and her wise-child laughing eyes and her perfect, agile, ever minutely swivelling and shifting figure and her luxurious, enveloping, softly welcoming voice and mouth. Mine, when this is over, and l can have whatever I want. Mine.
The Chief Invigilator offered to show the Francks the Log-Jam from his yacht. She accepted; her brother declined gracefully, to the obvious relief of the Chief Invigilator. He swept off with her on his arm, taking only his two bodyguards, private secretary, butler, chef and physician with him and leaving the rest of his entourage behind to look briefly discomfited, then relax and enjoy themselves.
The mains power was reconnected by a different route before the Devastator’s generator could be hooked into the circuit. When the battleship’s circuits came alive again, many of the alarms went off. There were still dozens of small fires burning aboard, and though they too were extinguished shortly after the power returned, there was smoke in many of the ship’s spaces, only gradually being pulled out of the vessel as its ventilation system rumbled back to life.
The alarms continued to sound, refusing to be reset without triggering again. The engineers and guard techs scratched their heads and ran various checks.
It was a few minutes before they realised that they weren’t dealing with a set of persistent and interlinked false alarms, and that something really was wrong.
By that time the Module had used a thermal lance to cut its way through the battleship’s mine-armour just a little to port of the vessel’s keel, directly under the Addendum Vault. It trundled back a little to let the three-metre disc of white-heat-edged metal thump onto the mud and disappear, then powered through the thick plume of disturbed mud until it was just underneath the hole. It reconfigured its tracks and motor chassis for minimum-cross-sectional shape and vertical large-bore pipe-working, then floated up into the flooded bilgespace.
The Crownstar Addendum lay in what had been the Devastator’s B-turret magazine. The magazine and the turret above had been designed to rotate as a unit to train the-three forty-centimetre guns on their targets; it had been heavily armoured to start with, and on its conversion from magazine to vault had been reinforced with extra titanium armour, as well as having all its entrances but one sealed up, so that once it had been swivelled away from the matching aperture in the magazine cylinder’s sleeve, the only way in was through at least a metre of armour plate.
The Module placed a shaped charge rather larger than any projectile the Devastator had ever fired under the base of the magazine vault, then crawled to one side of the flooded compartment, withdrew all its surface sensors into its armoured carapace and switched its listening devices off entirely.
The detonation shuddered through every single one of the Devastator’s sixty thousand tonnes. It raised eyebrows and clinked ice cubes in glasses on adjoining ships. Two senior
technicians in the battleship’s security control room looked slowly at each other and then reached for the Maximum Alert panic button. Every alarm on the ship that hadn’t gone off already proceeded to.
Lebmellin got the call about a third after midnight; he was waiting for it, so sensed his communications aide’s stillness as she listened to something more important than the chatter of world news and jam systems reports which usually spoke to her wired eardrum. She closed one eye, checking her lid-screen.
The Chief Invigilator’s comm man was already talking into a brooch phone.
Lebmellin’s aide tapped his elbow once, and spoke the code he was expecting. ‘Sir; a Court representative has arrived unexpectedly. He’s aboard the Caltasp Princess.’
‘Oh dear,’ Lebmellin said. He turned back to the industrialist he’d been talking to, to make his apologies.
‘It’s on F deck!’ the security chief said, slamming the console and looking round the smoke-misted atmosphere of the control room, where lights flashed from most surfaces and every seat was occupied with people punching buttons, talking quickly into phones and thumbing through manuals. ‘Oh, sorry, ViceInvigilator,’ he said, standing quickly.
Lebmellin left his aides in the corridor and strode into the centre of the room, his gaze sweeping round the boards and walls of flashing lights. ‘Well now,’ he said in his best calm-but-determined voice. ‘What is going on, eh, chief?’
‘Something’s broken into the vault, sir. Straight up and in after a power cut; it’s only two bulkheads - fairly thin bulkheads -away from the central chamber now. The last-ditch stuff ought m activate, but as nothing else has stopped it . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It’s jammed the vault sir, but it can’t get away; we have two microsubs under the hole and four - soon six - crawler units standing by at the side of the hull, plus the duty submarine on its way to the nearest practicable space with divers ready, and all deck surfaces within two hundred metres under guard. We’ve informed the City Marines and they have aircraft and more men standing by. The Chief Invigilator is-’
`Indisposed, I believe,’ Lebmellin said smoothly.
`Yes, sir. Unavailable, sir, so we contacted you:
‘Very good, chief,’ Lebmellin said. ‘Please return to your post.’
The Module broke through into the central vault in a cloud of smoke, its carapace glowing red hot. A machine gun opened up, sprinkling the Module with fire; it lumbered on regardless, dragging a wrecked track behind it. One of its arms had been torn off and its casing had been dented and scarred in various places.
Gas gushed into the circular space, filling it with unseen fumes that would have killed a human in seconds. The machine trundled and squeaked to the centre of the chamber where a titanium sleeve had descended from the ceiling to cover the transparent crystal casing around the Addendum itself.
The Module mortared a shaped-charge fusing pin at the point where the titanium sleeve disappeared into the ceiling, piercing the armour and jamming the sleeve in position. A pulse weapon fired, filling the hazy, gas-choked chamber with sparks but failing to scramble the Module’s photonic circuitry.