Where to next? Wolff had her conurin, whatever his intentions for it were, and she must track him down in order to recover it. Had he taken it merely as insurance? Did he intend to give it back when he returned? What if he did not return? Was he holding her up to ransom? At last, rage overpowered fear, and Jed pulled herself up from the crate and climbed back up the rungs on shaky hands. How could she find him? Would she have to go out into the Satigenaria Circumfercirc, and physically separate herself from the
Shamrock
, and go where people might see her? No, she could not! The metal of the shield walls would block her radio contact with the ship. She would be blinded, and that in itself was unthinkable.
She returned to the bridge. The
Shamrock
had to be free. She could not think, immured like this. With a command, she separated the
Shamrock’s
airlock from the circumfercirc’s docking aperture. As she diverted power to the synchrotron cannon, she knew deep within herself that she was acting irrationally, running blind, but there could be no other way. She could not sit here and wait to see if Gerald Wolff would return with her conurin.
Pure white light exploded from the cannon’s mast, thrusting its dazzling knife into the shielding seam and casting acute spiny shadows from the ship’s wings onto the interior walls of the dendrite cover. With the external sensors, Jed felt the slam of disrupted air against the
Shamrock
as the vacuum ripped into the chamber. Incandescent filaments spun into the darkness, glowing before resolidifying, and she held the cannon’s onslaught. Whole mutilated panels of metal fell away beneath a glare of pure energy. Jed shut down the synchrotron cannon. A ragged hole had been torn in the wall, and its red-hot semi-solid edges wilted from the vacuum, coagulating to form a smoother rim around the point of destruction.
With a roar of ballast thrust, the ship tore forward and through the gap. Jed chewed hard on one precious cube of conurin and felt herself lift from the moorings, the outer transport ring a perfect line of etched silver. Below the
Shamrock
, the Satigenaria Circumfercirc was a wall of rutted darkness filled with holes of light.
He was here somewhere. He would not make sport of Jed of the
Shamrock
.
She turned, so the
Shamrock
’s prow pointed toward the circumfercirc stratum, and cut the thrust. With a single prompt, the communicator was open. “Carck-Westmathlon, this is the
Shamrock
. I demand the man who walks among you, Gerald Wolff, be returned to my custody immediately!”
A moment later, a cold voice rang through the bridge of the
Shamrock
. “
Shamrock
, this is the Castellan Viprion. You have destroyed the stormshield. This I can only interpret as an act of aggression against the circumfercirc.”
“Hand over Wolff or I shall not hesitate to inflict more damage.”
* * * *
Viprion slowly turned to face Wolff. “You heard her. I cannot risk further damage from that ship.”
“I understand perfectly.” Wolff turned to the door. “I shall need my conurin case back, first.”
“We had an agreement!” Rh’Arrol shrieked.
“Be silent! You think I intend to dishonour it?”
Rh’Arrol shut up.
“The morran will go with you to a lesser transport shuttle,” said Viprion. “And so shall I.”
“What?” Wolff stared at the castellan.
Viprion’s face had become blank. The gem-like object he’d stuck in his forehead became a clouded green. “There’s a battleship out there. Where did it come from? Clear the transmission.”
“This is the
Bellwether
. As your scanners have no doubt informed you, our weaponry array is capable of boring straight through the stratum of your circumfercirc. Our scanners indicate an Archer ship in close vicinity. Our demands are that you moor it intact and surrender it to this vessel.”
“What?” Viprion exclaimed. “The
Bellwether
? It doesn’t have clearance to be here.”
The console operator pointed to a screen. “That’s it! It’s come in undetected during the blackout in the ion storm!”
The screen showed a massive, blunt-headed shape. Wolff reached over and switched the communicator back to Jed’s frequency. “
Shamrock
?”
“Filth!” was the Archer’s response.
“Jed, there’s a battleship by the name of the
Bellwether
in pursuit of you, about half a parsec to the north-east. They’ve ordered Carck-Westmathlon to capture the
Shamrock
.”
* * * *
“What folly is this?” Jed augmented a second transmission band, directly to the large ship she saw where Wolff directed her. “I demand you make clear your intentions.”
“This is the
Bellwether
, Archer. We intend to capture your vessel. You would do well to come quietly.”
Jed thought she detected a very subtle change in the transmitted voice between the words ”capture” and “your,” almost as if the first part of the sentence had been audially recorded and the second part tacked on afterward, but this seemed of little relevance at the present juncture. She “saw” the
Bellwether’s
twelve-mile hull, weaponry bristling on the wing defenses, sensed the force this battleship wielded.
“You shall not have this ship alive.”
Far below, a magnetic harpoon deployed from one of Carck-Westmathlon’s engineering towers. Jed fired both auxiliary thrusters, trying to clear her ship from its range. The harpoon struck on the main propulsion funnel, pulling the
Shamrock
down by the tail and rotating its prow, where the synchrotron cannon was mounted, away from the circumfercirc and so removing her primary line of defense.
Jed re-opened the channel to Carck-Westmathlon. “Release this vessel!”
As if to defy her, a second harpoon fired and struck the
Shamrock
on the aftmost section of the dorsal surface, the dull ring of its impact conducting through the ship’s shielding. Jed increased the power to the auxiliary thrusters, up to maximum, but the ship was still being drawn back toward the circumfercirc, straining like a pike on a fishing line.
Jed thought quickly. Already a fear had been stirred in her—a fear not only of being powerless in the hands of men such as Wolff and Taggart, but even of being dragged from her ship and taken where she could not interface with it, of people touching and staring at her, and a sense of going insane as the
Shamrock
’s acuity was wrenched from her senses. She would not have that. She would sooner destroy her ship than be taken to such a fate. She thought of the hydrogen fuel tank, and of initiating a closed fusion avalanche in the drive chamber. That would wipe out the
Bellwether
, herself, and the entire Carck-Westmathlon section of the circumfercirc.
That would not be necessary. There was another way. She ran a fast calculation, working on the strength of the hypertensile alloy filament and the force an uncontained fusion explosion could employ. It would cost her nearly an eighth of the fuel tank’s contents, but it would unleash just enough thrust to break free.
She opened the fuel gates. Supercritical hydrogen boiled into the reactor tubes and tore into a fusion frenzy. She felt the furnace burning like acid in the
Shamrock
’s viscera, an almost palpable pain compelling her to release the contents of the fusion chamber before it damaged the ship, but she held on, until the precise fraction of a second before venting the critical gas by breaking the ion exhaust mechanism. The hot gas ripped into the vacuum, exploding like a solar flare. The blast front carried the
Shamrock
forward, tearing away the harpoon cables.
Behind, the explosion left a faint pinkish shell of hydrogen and helium residue, still expanding and cooling.
* * * *
A sudden intense light flared outside the tower viewport. “Castellan! Something has exploded. Its traces are similar to those left by a dirty hydrogen bomb.”
Viprion’s head turned to the window, a faint ragged trace where the
Shamrock
had been. An instant later a concussion shook the floor beneath their feet. “Lashback from the winch recoil,” said Viprion. “How much damage?”
The speaker checked a screen. “Looks like a lot of the communications rigging is down, and two of the larger prominences have sustained damage. The computer predicts more damage to the communication systems of Carck-Westmathlon and the surrounding boroughs as the ion shell produced by the expansion reaches the circumfercirc.”
Wolff moved closer to a window that slanted to offer a view of the protruding towers and bridges of the circumfercirc cityscape. A cloud of debris glittered above the stratum, falling away into the interplanetary void under its own centrifugal inertia. The dispersion of the fragments and the revolution of the circumfercirc’s orbit left no clue as to where, precisely, the damage had been done.
“The ship?” Wolff asked. “Did the Archer’s ship self-destruct?”
“Unlikely,” snapped Viprion. “If that had been the case the explosion would have blown out this side of the circumfercirc and probably have triggered a solar storm strong enough to break up the remainder of it. It looks like she just blew out her ion exhaust.”
“Oh.” Wolff saw small ships coming in close to the towers. Little white shapes were drifting down on threads from them like ghostly four-limbed spiders, and breaking in through the hole the
Shamrock
had made in the docking dendrite shield. Four gunships lurked within the scope of the viewport. “You appear to be under siege,” he added.
Rh’Arrol shrieked. “I live in that dendrite!”
“What?” Viprion looked out. “How did those gunships get in here? And that vessel, the
Bellwether
, appears to be a grade-A battleship. Access this far in-system is offlimits to it. It shouldn’t have been allowed clearance past the Kuiper belt.”
“The Kuiper belt proves a weak link again,” Wolff said.
“Instigate a communication to the
Bellwether
,” Viprion ordered.
“Channel open.”
“
Bellwether
, this is Viprion, castellan of Carck-Westmathlon. State your intentions.”
“Marcus Taggart walks among you. We will speak only to him.” The voice issued, thin and tinny, from a grid in the console.
“He’s found me!” Viprion said.
Wolff stared at him. “Who?”
“The seignior! I’m intruding on his control.” Viprion gripped the bolt in his forehead with both hands, trying to pull it out.
Wolff leant over the operator and put his thumb to the communications switch. “Marcus Taggart is dead. Your mission has failed! Now go away!”
Wolff felt a sublime shift in focus, and when he took his hand away from the console, Viprion, Rh’Arrol, and the console operator all stared at him.
Viprion had pulled the device out of the hole in his forehead. Angry fear coloured his face. “You fool!”
Wolff looked past him, and realised with an unpleasant shift of perspective that the
Bellwether
was visible through the window as a vast hammerhead-shaped gap in the stars. Something in the hulk was
moving
. A light glowed in the concavity of the prow, and glowing lumps of matter precipitated from it and clumped into a ball, suspended above the foresection of the ship. The light shrank, a dense darkness forming in its center, around which the form of the ship and the light of the stars behind buckled and lensed. The knot of matter began to draw back toward the
Bellwether’s
prow, toward a mast as though affected by some unseen force, and Wolff saw with horror that the hammerhead-shape at the front of the ship was bending back, like the limbs of some titanic catapult.
“Steel and Flame!” Viprion cried.
The catapult limbs straightened in an instant, hurling the missile. Wolff saw the circumfercirc a few leagues away punctured and caved in silently, the stratum collapsing and rippling like a thin sheet of metal foil, a second before the lights in the observation deck failed and a violent concussion threw him to the floor. A hideous sound reverberated through the walls, penetrating every nerve of his body. Through the window, a sphere of light ripped out from the point of impact. A noise like a thunderclap and a turbulence, followed by the sound of airlock doors slamming, reached the observation deck.
A sullen sort of light came into being with a snap. His limbs throbbing with adrenaline, Wolff looked across a room strewn with loose objects and torn-out fittings, bathed in areas of inky shadow.
Viprion got to his feet, and he stood on a slope down toward the point where the missile had hit the circumfercirc. “This is bad,” he said, looking at the floor, his voice calm but unease showing in his face. He looked at the object in his hand then slowly slid the spike into his forehead. His eyes closed in concentration. “The ring stratum has been deformed, probably even broken. You, send word to the castellans of the other radians.”
The console operator pulled herself up from the floor and began bashing at console keys. Screens flickered.
“What does that mean?” Wolff sought about the room for Rh’Arrol, and found the morran curled in a ball under the windowsill.
“The very principle of a piece of material occupying a whole orbit is an unstable one. The circumfercirc is subject to harmonic vibrations. It absorbs the tidal forces to which the stratum is subjected by a standing wave across the ring. If the ring is broken, the standing wave fails, and the ring fragments and falls victim to its own centrifugal inertia.” Viprion spoke irritably, and had already set off down the slope toward the door.