Jed searched with the
Shamrock’s
scope. “Yes. Above water. Thirty-eight of them.”
“Can they detect us?”
“Unlikely. The water is full of debris and the ship is giving out little heat in its current state.”
“Perhaps it would be better to remain here in that case.”
“Idiot!” Jed snapped. “The longer I tarry here, the longer they have to assemble a strategy to get down here and locate us!”
“Can you outrun them?”
Jed scowled. “You would presume to instruct me on tactical manoeuvres?”
“You intend to breach and run?”
“You question my judgment?”
Wolff didn’t answer.
“The exhaust mechanism of this ship is damaged,” Jed explained after an uncomfortable pause. “I blew out the ion trap escaping from the ambush on Carck-Westmathlon. Acceleration will be impaired by both that and the viscous drag of the water. Neither staying nor moving will likely prove a good option.”
“Can the ion trap be repaired?”
“That it can, but the robots that maintain the exterior are designed to work in vacuum or air, not in water, and not while moving.”
“Then we must choose.”
“You will choose nothing. Your only use is for making statements of the obvious.” Jed glared at Wolff.
The morran edged forward nervously. It made a quick movement of its head, rattling the armour on its neck, and a peculiar mauve colour flickered over the quills on its flanks. “Archer,” it said in a pious, ingratiating tone of voice. “I think you must know that this man is wanted by the authorities of Carck-Westmathlon.”
“Arrol!” Wolff exclaimed.
“If you hands him over,” Rh’Arrol continued, “perhaps they permits you to leave unmolested. The man who seeks him is none other than the Castellan Viprion.”
Wolff was standing with his hands held up and his mouth open as though he was about to say something. Before he could, Jed demanded, “Is this true?”
“To an extent, it is,” Wolff said. “But that is not the whole truth—”
“Then I will surrender you to them, and your morran with you, for I have no need of urchins, let alone backstabbing quislings.”
Rh’Arrol lowered its body beneath its knees and drew back its head.
“You must listen to me!” Wolff argued. “For it was not Castellan Viprion who ordered the attack on the
Shamrock
, but the marauding gunship that calls itself the
Bellwether
. Those men down there are of the Kuiper belt, and they are ravaging this civilisation and killing indiscriminately all who stand in their way, whether they’re of the Blood or not!”
“Men of the Kuiper belt do not have the means nor the nature to overthrow men of the Blood!” Jed shouted at him.
Wolff let out a hollow laugh. “Oh, they have it in their nature, for sure, and someone has given them the means. If they see you I can’t say what they’d do. You must be an anathema to them, the highest of the high, and trapped in their midst! And Castellan Viprion orchestrated it, and he has brought down destruction on himself and on all of Satigenaria through his Blood avarice!”
Jed became fierce, drawing herself up to her full height. “I do not fear men of the Kuiper belt. They are as
vermin
.”
“I know what you do fear.” Wolff glowered down on her. “I ask you, Jed, does there exist the science to duplicate men?”
“Why do you ask these stupid questions? This is no time for them!”
“Answer it!”
“Yes, then. There has been for millennia, although it is wasteful of time and resources and has no use. What rubbish do you talk?”
“When I was down there, I saw something.”
“What did you see? You see nothing, Gerald Wolff!”
“I saw Taggart!”
Jed took a deep breath and realised her shoulders had become rigid. She forced them into a more relaxed posture. “You did not see Taggart. I saw to it thoroughly that he was dead. His jugular artery was severed and the body was cast into the void. No man could have survived it. What you saw was his identical twin, or a clone of him as you said, although I see no reason why a Bloodless low-caste imbecile such as he should be cloned. Or, most probably, you just saw someone of low caste, for you all look alike anyway, and your irrational imagination made you think it was Taggart.”
“Whatever I saw,” Wolff said savagely, “it is not a contingency I can ignore.”
Jed turned away from him, back toward the window. Of course Taggart was dead. There was no way it could be otherwise, and Wolff’s idea that someone would clone a low-caste man was beneath entertainment. But this information raised other possibilities. Kuiper belters were isolated populations, and as she’d said, they all looked similar. It would be reasonable to assume that, if Taggart had originated from this Kuiper belt, all its other inhabitants would look much the same as him. And if Taggart had come from here, he must have hijacked the
Shamrock
with the intention of it playing a part in his scheme, and that meant that he might well still want it.
“Then there is no alternative,” she finally said, and she took a cube of conurin from the pouch at her side. “We move to open water.”
Wolff remained silent, but Jed thought she saw an air of relief in him and the morran both.
She tried to keep the ship as low as she could, but the turbulence its motion generated in the water and the drifting debris interfered with the scanning equipment, and she lost track of the craft following the
Shamrock
. As they passed the building foundations, the water became clearer, and she knew she must breach now.
The
Shamrock
accelerated, rising to cut the waves with its dorsal wing and breaking into the air, ventral surface dripping. Behind, the pursuing ships came back into view. They fell back as her speed climbed and they manoeuvred to intercept. Jed checked the status of each. All were armed with weapons primed to maim the
Shamrock
. The question of why they seemed intent on the capture of her ship, as they had been on Carck-Westmathlon, worried her, but she spared it little attention, looking instead ahead and focusing. Capture or destruction were both the same to her.
Already the pursuers were gaining. Jed tried to turn upward, in order to force her ship on a vertical climb to the sky, but the manoeuvre was impossible without loss of lateral speed. Already they were upon her, blocking the only exit point. With the ships following from behind, the
Shamrock
was surrounded, a glittering dark plane of water below and the starry sky barred by the glowing tail lights of the attackers.
Wolff stepped forward beside her and looked at the monitor panels on the console, one of which showed the view directly above. “Faster,” he muttered.
The roar of air rushing over the hull surface became audible on the bridge as Jed pushed the engines as hard as they would go. The
Shamrock
was not designed to race in an atmosphere. Putting the main fusion engine online with a broken trap would cause the exhaust to ignite in the air, and the smaller craft had the acceleration advantage. The three forerunners were moving ahead to block her path.
“The only way I can go is down!” she cried.
“Ever shot at fish?”
Jed looked to Wolff and, with realisation of his meaning, cut the engines suddenly. The
Shamrock
plummeted as it went forward. The keel smashed into the surface with an outflinging of spray, the jolt sending all three of them forward against the console, and the ship skimmed the surface before sinking. The pursuers’ speed advantage was turned against them as they overshot and fought to turn. Jed vented carbon dioxide from the ballast thruster on the upper side of the tail, to rotate the prow upward toward the surface into a vertical takeoff position. The ship turned painfully slowly, the weight of the water gripping it. A column of bubbles trailed from the tail to the surface. Dawn was breaking over the ocean, and through the clear waters Jed could see the ships returning, and as they passed over they fired, not at the
Shamrock
itself, but at the optical illusion resulting from the change in refractive index between water and air, and blasts of energy flew past the ship, sending shockwaves of superheated vapour for the surface. Not one hit the hull. The water boiled. Vapour engulfed the pursuing craft.
As the tail swung down into position, Jed fired on all thrust, the frantic dash for safety hidden in the shroud of confusion. The water around the ship exploded in the wake, the blast stripping hydrogen from oxygen. The air deflagrated into a roaring hemisphere of fire, consuming the pursuers, before the ocean fell back upon the hole that had been blown in it.
The
Shamrock
rose on an actinic fountain amid a curtain of steam. Although Jed’s feet were firmly planted on what was technically now a vertical floor, she felt the nauseating tidal forces as the ship’s inertia dampers fought against gravity and acceleration. She did not look at the inferno below.
As the
Shamrock
passed the stratosphere, Jed adjusted the angle of the ship to move into slingshot. The sky grew darker, and the stretch of ocean and continents spread out beneath her gradually receded to a glowing arc of horizon. The
Shamrock
left a dirty grey trail above the white vortexes of weather systems. Far below lurked the massive hammerhead shape of the
Bellwether,
hanging suspended in its geostationary orbit above the bright ocean. The
Shamrock
was now upside-down with respect to the surface of the planet, and Wolff gasped when he recognised the enemy vessel.
“Our vector will carry the
Shamrock
away before it can possibly reach us,” Jed said, but she watched the ship nonetheless.
“What
is
that weapon?” said Wolff. “It obliterated an ion tram. I have never seen destructiveness of the like.”
“I have seen one only once afore. They are one of the greatest challenges of engineering, and they are scarcely seen and even scarcer deployed. It is a singularity ballista.”
Wolff's face tensed. “Singularity? A
black hole
?”
“An ignorant term of description for it, befitting only men of low caste.”
“I am ignorant and of low caste.” Wolff grinned in his idiotic way. “So it befits me.”
“Yes,” said Jed with a sigh of disgust. “It fires
black holes
at things.”
“Forgive my low-caste ignorance,” said Wolff, “but how in the name of the Pagan Atheist does a ship carry about ammunition of black holes with it, let alone load them onto a giant crossbow and shoot it?”
“The ship does not carry singularities with it.” Jed scowled. “That would be illogical. It compresses some matter down to a very small volume. It need only be a ton or so of refuse, to form a singularity, in position on the ballista, when required. Such a singularity would have an infinitesimal half life, so it must be contained within an inertia field to prevent it from evaporating or imploding the ballista apparatus. It is drawn by means of its own gravity to an unshielded part at the rear of the ballista. As soon as the protective field touches the attractor, an electrostatic charge is neutralised, causing the ballista to fire. As soon as the missile strikes the target, the protective inertia field fails, and the singularity evaporates…returns to mortal matter-and-energy state. Explodes.”
“Why do the inventions of men always turn to purposes of destruction?” Rh’Arrol said from behind.
“As opposed to the inventions of morrans, which do not exist and can therefore serve no purpose,” Jed retorted. The sun set behind the ship, the atmosphere blurring the terminator. Over the curve of the planet Jed detected twelve points of electromagnetic energy following her course.
“They follow! Abaft!”
She ran down the port corridor to the arsenal. Wolff followed her.
“I do not see them,” he said as she opened the rear loophole.
“Fool! If you could see them, we would be captured or dead by now!” Jed seized her bow and some arrows—not the kind she used for hunting, but a heavier sort filled with antimatter explosives. She bit down on conurin, chewed, felt concentration heighten again, and as soon as she nocked the arrow she was at Equilibrium.
The pursuers were nowhere near as difficult to hunt as chimaera. Jed released the first arrow, and it struck one of them.
“Did you hit it?” Wolff asked.
The only evidence of affirmation Jed gave was a quick dip of her head as she fitted the second arrow and singled out another ship, choosing a central one at strategic advantage. She checked and rechecked, but before she could release, synchrotron radiation lanced out from the closest follower, and struck the
Shamrock
low in the stern. The ship bucked with the impact, and Jed felt the tremor before Wolff pulled her back from the window and slapped his hand down on the loophole panel that sealed the hull. Sequestered from the battle in the gloom of the armoury, Wolff’s arm holding her firmly about the shoulders, Jed felt the deflection field fail momentarily, before coming back on line. That could have been lethal.
“Is it safe yet?”
“I think so.” Jed paused. “Your actions were expedient.”
Wolff let out a hollow laugh. “Is that Archer gratitude?” He relinquished his grasp of her, and she reopened the firing window, taking up position quickly and shooting, this time at the ship that had opened fire on hers.