The forty attacking lampreys broke into sub-squadrons and began concentrating their fire on the areas of vulnerability we had already identified. Occasionally one managed to punch through the strobing field, but I knew that it was more by luck than judgement, and even when the gamma-rays touched naked hull, they did no more than scuff against that armour. But perhaps it could work, given time - the death of a thousand cuts, rather than a single, decisive wound. I allowed myself a flicker of encouragement from the fact that
Silver Wings
had yet to respond in kind. Perhaps the robots really were struggling to control all her systems.
Six minutes after the transmission of the new battle orders, Orache and Agrimony’s ships -
Mystery Wind
and
Yellow Jester
- moved into attack range, strobing their fields and coordinating the use of their shipboard gamma-cannons with
Steel Breeze.
The lampreys continued their needling assault.
The new ships dropped impasse long enough to release lampreys of their own.
Cannons loosed.
‘Impact!’ shouted Agrimony. ‘Ablation and ionisation, kilotonnes of hull plating! We’re getting through!’
‘Impassor instability,’ Henbane said, catching some of Agrimony’s excitement. ‘By God, she’s hurting. Field dropped to zero for two point eight milliseconds! Four lampreys now inside
Silver Wings’
impasse. Field drop again - make that nine lampreys. Moving to firing positions. We’re inside the moat.’
‘Main cannons cycling,’ Charlock said. ‘One clean hit is all we need. I’m starting to think we can actually do this—’
Then he stopped talking. The blunt arrow that was the icon for
Steel Breeze
was flashing on and off, signalling something catastrophic. The banner of numbers and symbols next to the pulsing icon updated rapidly.
Our attention flicked to the realtime image of his ship, captured from the other two vehicles. They were looking through the battle volume, hazed by savage energies, the intervening space roiled by impassor and drive distortion, awash with gas and debris. But even an imperfect view was enough to tell us that something was very wrong with
Steel Breeze.
Charlock’s ship was pulsing with miniature explosions, ripping along the raked edge of her flanks like a spectacularly choreographed fireworks display. The arrowhead craft began to tumble, the sequenced pink stutter of real-thrust engines signifying desperate attempts to regain lateral control. It was to no avail. Somewhere inside, the inertia-compensating machinery lost its hold on the ship. As several hundred brute gravities sank their teeth into the fabric of her hull, she tore open like a carcass. An instant later came the fierce light of her dying engine, a growing white sphere dulling to purple and then black along its perfect boundary. The sphere swelled to the size of the impasse quicker than the eye could track. For a delirious moment the impasse held it in check, even though the impassor that had woven that field was now no more than a cloud of fundamental particles at the heart of the explosion. The sphere turned a more furious kind of white, a white that burned into the eye like a hot lance, dappled with the negative specks of the lampreys still gathered around it, and then broke through that final, failing barricade, into open space.
Steel Breeze
was gone.
‘What just happened?’ Charlock said, looking around like a man who needed someone to shake him out of a bad dream. ‘Someone tell me what just happened. We were winning. We were getting through. Why did she start fighting back now?’
‘She was biding her time,’ Tansy said. ‘Waiting until all three ships were close. Must have punched through her own impasse with a sync-locked gamma-cannon.’
‘Pull
Mystery Wind
and
Yellow Jester
out of attack range,’ Betony said, clutching onto his calm façade as if it was the last firm thing in the universe. ‘And then hope and pray that they work it out for themselves, because I don’t think
Silver Wings
is going to sit and wait for us to make the next move.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I reached out a hand to steady myself, the other grasping the fixed handhold of the energy-pistol with renewed strength. The weapon wavered and re-centred itself on Cadence. There was another vibration, harder and sharper this time. Chimes began to sound from the white control core, emergency messages scrolling in cryptic red text across its surfaces.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
‘Work it out for yourself.’
‘It sounds to me as if we’re under attack. Maybe Cascade is trying to break into the ark, but I don’t think that’s it - if he was going to use force against us, he’d have done it already.’
Cadence regarded me levelly, but said nothing.
‘The whole ship must be under attack -
Silver Wings
herself. Those were either weapon impacts being soaked up by the impasse, or her own weapons discharging. Or both.’
Cadence tilted her head minutely. ‘An attack is in progress,’ she informed me, her tone neutral.
‘How many ships?’
‘Three of your pursuit craft - I give you this information freely, since it is valueless.’
I raised myself from my haunches, still keeping the energy-pistol aimed at her, and made my way to the command console. Recalling the sequence of commands Hesperus had already shown me, I activated the ark’s transmitter.
‘This is Purslane. I’m still here. Would someone like to tell me what’s going on?’
I waited the requisite five or six minutes, but no reply was forthcoming.
‘They cannot hear you now,’ Cadence said. ‘With the impasse raised to battle-strength, only
Silver Wings
herself could get a coherent signal through. This ark does not have the power to reach your friends, nor the sensitivity to detect their return transmissions.’
‘You can’t run at battle-strength for ever, though. You’re losing headway all the time you aren’t on drive. That means you consider these ships at least a plausible threat.’
‘They have weapons. They could destroy us if we do not take precautions. This is hardly a startling admission.’
There was another vibration, lasting thirty or forty seconds. Despite the many layers of field-damping between the ark and the outer boundary of
Silver Wings’
impasse, it still felt like a small earthquake. I felt a stomach-churning surge as the engine snatched and grabbed, trying to maintain headway in the instants when the impasse was recycling.
‘You’re doing an awfully good job of keeping me alive,’ I said. ‘If I was a couple of robots running a ship, I wouldn’t bother going to all that trouble to neutralise acceleration, especially in a battle situation. I’d just be thinking about my immediate survival.’
‘You are our hostage. If your continued existence enables us to negotiate with our pursuers, then you are of use to us.’
‘Then they
are
a concern. Or you’ve got another reason for keeping me alive.’
‘They inconvenience us. They irritate us. No more than that.’
Trusting nothing Cadence said to me, I considered it worthwhile trying to signal Campion again. Again there was no sign that my message had got through. My attention wavered for a few moments, fixated on the unfamiliar technology. When I snapped back onto her, Cadence had begun to push a glistening chrome tendril from one of her leg-sockets.
I shot it. ‘Naughty.’
The energy discharge had singed the remaining part of her leg back from the stump, turning it from chrome to charred black. Cadence appeared oblivious to the damage I had just inflicted. ‘You must understand that I will do what needs to be done,’ she said, as ruthlessly calm as ever.
‘That makes two of us, then.’
‘Cascade informs me that two of the three ships have now been disposed of. The third is damaged and yet still attempting another assault. It may be that their aim is poor, or that they have simply abandoned any hope of saving you.’ Cadence’s tone became patronising. ‘Of course you feel betrayed. You have every right. How else are you expected to feel, having been deemed expendable?’
I said nothing. Arguing with that implacable silver face was beginning to bore me.
The vibrations increased in ferocity over the next ten or twelve minutes, reached a peak and then ended without warning. I waited, expecting them to return, but as the minutes wore on it began to seem as if the attack was over.
‘That’s the last ship gone,’ Cadence said. ‘Three of your fellow shatterlings dead, and to no avail. I believe the ships in question were
Steel Breeze, Yellow jester
and
Mystery Wind.
Doubtless you can tell me who was aboard them.’
‘Our ships don’t need us aboard.’
‘Yes, cling to that possibility.’ After a moment she added, ‘What I said to you earlier, before we were interrupted - the offer still stands, Purslane. Negotiate with your friends. Tell them to give up their pursuit and we will still let you leave.’
‘And Hesperus?’
‘Take him if you wish. No matter what he told you, he is damaged beyond effective repair.’
‘You’re not looking too good yourself. Aren’t you upset that Cascade hasn’t come down to try and rescue you?’
‘He knows I pose no risk to the success of this mission. I cannot be coerced or manipulated. I cannot be tortured or deceived. If I imagined there was the slightest danger of you learning something of tactical value, I would destroy myself. If Cascade felt the same way, he could reach into me and kill me himself.’
‘Where are we headed?’
‘You’ll find out when we get there.’
‘Hesperus already looked inside you, when he was damaged and you were trying to see what he knew. Isn’t that a concern?’
‘He saw very little. He is even weaker now, and we have modified our protocols to block the one channel he was able to penetrate. It was an oversight, an unacceptable one, but no great damage was done. We still have the ship, which was always our objective.’
‘My ship.’
‘You’ve done well with her. She is very fast.’
‘Is that all it is, Cadence? Is that all this is about?’
She cocked her head. ‘What else could it be? Speed is of the essence. Your ship is unquestionably fast.’
‘End of story.’
‘Yes.’
‘It seems to me that you came a long, long way just to find a very fast ship. Hesperus and I don’t think you learned very much when you were on Neume.’ I shifted to a more comfortable position, resigned to the fact that this was going to be a long wait. There had been no change in Hesperus since his lights had gone out; nothing to indicate he was ever coming back to life. ‘Did you kill Cyphel?’ I asked. ‘You can tell me now. It’s not going to make a difference to our relationship.’
‘Then why ask?’
‘Old-fashioned curiosity.’
‘Then yes, we killed Cyphel.’
‘By throwing her off a balcony? Sorry, but that doesn’t strike me as quite your style. I’ve seen how quickly you can move, how you can change form and colour when you need to. I can’t help thinking you’d have preferred to kill her some other, less clumsy way.’
‘It would have been a mistake to assassinate her in a way that identified us as the culprits.’
‘No; you didn’t do Cyphel. That was someone else. Her death might have suited you; it might have put us off the immediate trail of solving the mystery of the ambush, but it wasn’t you. And you didn’t want me to know that, did you?’
Something quickened behind her eyes: alarm or interest, I could not say for certain.
‘What you know, what you do not know, is of no concern to me.’
‘I know why we were ambushed. It was to prevent the emergence of information damaging to the Commonality. If a handful of us hadn’t been late, it would have been all over for Gentian Line. The secret that we were about to reveal to the wider galaxy would have stayed a secret. But no one allowed for
you.’
‘Then the ambushers were acting in the interests of humans,’ Cadence said, with an amused tone. ‘From your standpoint, they were doing the right and proper thing. Far from hating them, far from seeking to bring them to justice, you should applaud their efforts. If you care about your species, you should do all in your power to complete the work the ambushers began. Tell your friends to turn their ships around, return to Neume and concentrate their weapons on any remaining Gentian shatterlings. Then turn that fire on themselves, until none are left. As a final grace note, you could be the last to commit suicide; the last to take that secret to her grave. Would that not be a reasonable course of action, Purslane? Would that not be the
decent
thing to do?’
‘It might, if you didn’t already know about the ambush and the reasons for it.’
‘Well, there is that.’
I tipped the Synchromesh into my eyes, one cold, clear drop into each. ‘You didn’t come to suppress the emergence of that knowledge. Something else brought you to Neume, and I don’t think it was my ship, either.’
‘Why else?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what I’m going to find out, one way or another.’
‘And then?’
‘I’ll stop you. There are a million ways to do it.’
‘Almost all of which happen to involve your death.’
‘But like you say - that would be the decent thing to do. I’m not above a grand gesture if I think it’ll serve a higher good. It just may not be
your
higher good we’re talking about.’
I lifted my sleeve and adjusted the dial on my chronometer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Charlock might have lost his prized
Steel Breeze,
but he still had enough grip on events to remember the search he had been running before the failed attack. There was only a slight waver in his voice as his imago spoke, addressing us all.
‘The battle didn’t change a damned thing.
Silver Wings
varied her course during the initial assault, but as soon as it was over - as soon as we lost
Mystery Wind
and
Yellow jester-
she fell back on exactly the same vector she was following before. The course projections I showed you earlier are still valid. She’ll still skirt the Harmonious Concordance in seven thousand years, passing within fifteen years of the present boundary. I think we agreed that that isn’t likely to be the destination.’