“TrÈs bon
. He is a beautiful
enfant
. I always said so.”
“He can certainly be restored,” the surgeon said. “There is the question of what kind of procedure you would like me to perform.
We can use artificial tissue implants to return him to full viability within a few days, these we have in store. Following
that we can begin the cloning operation and start to replace the AT units as his organs mature. Or alternatively we can simply
take the appropriate genetic samples, and keep him in zero-tau until the new organs are ready to be implanted.”
“Of course.” AndrÉ cleared his throat, not quite looking at his other two crew. “Exactly how much would these different procedures
cost?”
The surgeon gave a modest shrug. “The cheapest option would just be to give him the artificial tissue and not bother with
cloned replacements. AT is the technology which people use in order to boost themselves; the individual units will live longer
than him, and they are highly resistant to disease.”
“Magnifique.”
AndrÉ gave a wide, contented smile.
“But we’re not going to use that option, are we, Captain?” Madeleine said forcibly. “Because, as you said when Erick saved
both your ship and your arse, you would buy him an entire new clone body if that’s what it took. Didn’t you? So how fortunate
that you don’t have to clone a new body, and all the expense that entails. Now all you are going to have to pay for is some
artificial tissue and a few clones. Because you certainly don’t want Erick walking around in anything less than a perfectly
restored and natural condition. Do you, Captain?”
AndrÉ’s answering grin was a simple facial ritual.
“Non,”
he said. “How right you are, my dear Madeleine. As ever.” He gave the surgeon a nod. “Very well, a full clone repair, if
you please.”
“Certainly, sir.” The surgeon produced a Jovian Bank credit disk. “I must ask for a deposit of two hundred thousand fuseodollars.”
“Two hundred thousand! I thought you were going to rebuild him, not rejuvenate him.”
“Sadly, there is a lot of work to be done. Surely your insurance premium will cover it?”
“I’ll have to check,” AndrÉ said heavily.
Madeleine laughed.
“Will Erick be able to fly after the artificial tissue has been implanted?” AndrÉ asked. “Oh, yes,” the surgeon said. “I won’t
need him back here for the clone implants for several months.”
“Good.”
“Why? Where are we going?” Madeleine asked suspiciously.
AndrÉ produced his own Jovian Bank disk, and proffered it towards the surgeon. “Anywhere we can get a charter for. Who knows,
we might even avoid bankruptcy until we return. I’m sure that will make Erick very happy knowing what his recklessness has
reduced me to.”
• • •
Idria asteroid was on full Strategic Defence alert, and had been for three days. For the first forty-eight hours all the asteroid
council knew was that
something
had taken over the New California SD network, and coincidentally knocked out (or captured) half of the planetary navy at
the same time. Details were hazy. It was almost too much to believe that some kind of coup could be successful on a modern
planet, but the few garbled reports which did get beamed out before the transmitters fell ominously silent confirmed that
the SD platforms were firing at groundside targets.
Then a day ago the voidhawk messenger from the Confederation Assembly arrived in the system, and people understood what had
happened. With understanding came terror.
Every settled asteroid in the Lyll belt was on the same maximum alert status. The Edenist habitats orbiting Yosemite had announced
a two-million-kilometre emergence exclusion zone around the gas giant, enforced by armed voidhawks. Such New California navy
ships as had escaped the planetary catastrophe were dispersed across several settled asteroids, while the surviving admirals
gathered at the Trojan asteroid cluster trailing Yosemite to debate what to do. So far all they’d done was fall back on the
oldest military maxim and send out scouts to fill in the yawning information gap.
Commander Nicolai Penovich was duty officer in Idria’s SD command centre when the Adamist starships emerged three thousand
kilometres away—five medium-sized craft, nowhere near the designated emergence zone. Sensors showed their infrared signature
leap upwards within seconds of their appearance. Tactical programs confirmed a massive combat wasp launch. Targets verified
as the asteroid’s SD platforms, and supplementary sensor satellites.
Nicolai datavised the fire command computer to retaliate. Electron and laser beams stabbed out. The hastily assembled home
defence force fleet—basically every ship capable of launching a combat wasp—was vectored onto the intruders. By the time most
of them had got under way the attackers had jumped away.
Another four starships jumped in, released their combat wasps, and jumped out.
The assault was right out of the tactics flek, and there was nothing Nicolai could do about it. His sensor coverage had already
degraded by forty per cent, and still more was dropping out as combat wasp submunitions stormed local space with electronic
warfare pulses. Nuclear explosions were surrounding the asteroid with a scintillating veil of irradiated particles, almost
completely wiping out the satellites’ long-range scanner returns.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to direct the platforms’ fire on incoming drones. He didn’t even know how many surviving
salvos there were anymore.
Two of the defending ships were struck by kinetic missiles, disintegrating into spectacular, short-lived streaks of stellar
flame.
Nicolai and his small staff recalled the remainder of the fleet, trying to form them into an inner defensive globe. But his
communications were as bad as the sensor coverage. At least three didn’t respond. Two SD platforms dropped out of his command
network. Victims of combat wasps, or electronic warfare? He didn’t know, and the tactics program couldn’t offer a prediction.
The platforms were never really intended to ward off a fullscale assault like this, he thought despairingly. Idria’s real
protection came from the system’s naval alliance.
A couple of close-orbit detector satellites warned him of four starships emerging barely fifty kilometres from the asteroid.
Frigates popped out, spraying combat wasps in all directions. Eight were aimed at Idria’s spaceport, scattering shoals of
submunitions as they closed at thirty-five gees. Nicolai didn’t have anything left to stop them. Small explosions erupted
right across the two-kilometre grid of metal and composite. Precisely targeted, they struck communications relays and sensor
clusters.
Every input into the SD command centre went dead.
“Oh, shit almighty,” Lieutenant Fleur Mironov yelled. “We’re gonna die.”
“No,” Nicolai said. “They’re softening us up for an assault.” He called up internal structural blueprints, studying the horribly
few options remaining. “I want whatever combat personnel we have positioned in the axial spindle tubes, they’re to enforce
a total blockade. And close down the transit tubes linking the caverns with the spaceport. Now. Who-ever’s left out there
will just have to take their chances.”
“Against the possessed?” Fleur exclaimed. “Why not just fling them out of an airlock?”
“Enough, Lieutenant! Now find me some kind of external sensor that’s still functioning. I must know what’s happening outside.”
“Sir.”
“We have to protect the majority of the population. Yreka and Orland will respond as soon as they see what’s happened. And
Orland had two navy frigates assigned to it. We only have to hold out for a couple of hours. The troops can manage that, surely.
The possessed aren’t that good.”
“If Yreka and Orland haven’t been attacked as well,” Fleur said dubiously. “We only saw about a dozen ships. There were hundreds
in the asteroids and low-orbit station docks when the possessed took over New California.”
“Jesus, will you stop with the pessimism, already? Now where’s my external sensor?”
“Coming up, sir. I got us a couple of thermo dump panel inspection mechanoids on microwave circuits. Guess the possessed didn’t
bother targeting those relays.”
“Okay, let’s have it.”
The quality of the image which came foaming into his brain was dreadful: silver-grey smears drifting entirely at random against
an intense black background, crinkled bluebrown rock across the bottom quarter of the picture. Fleur manipulated the mechanoids
so that their sensors swung around to focus on the battered spaceport disk at the end of its spindle. The spaceport was venting
heavily in a dozen places, girders had been mashed, trailing banners of tattered debris. Eight lifeboats were flying clear
of the damaged sections. Nicolai Penovich didn’t like to imagine how many people were crammed inside, nor how they could be
rescued. Vivid white explosions shimmered into existence against the bent constellation of Pisces. Someone was still fighting
out there.
A large starship slid smoothly into view, riding a lance of violet fusion fire. Definitely a navy craft of some kind, it was
still in its combat configuration; short-range sensor clusters extended, thermo dump panels retracted. Steamy puffs of coolant
gas squirted from small nozzles ringing its midsection. Hexagonal ports were open all around its front hull, too big for combat
wasp launch tubes.
Scale was hard to judge, but Nicolai estimated it at a good ninety metres in diameter. “I think that’s a marine assault ship,”
he said.
The main drive shut off, and blue ion thrusters fired, locking it in to position five hundred metres away from the spindle
which connected the non-rotating spaceport with the asteroid.
“I’ve placed a couple of squads in the spindle,” Fleur said. “They’re not much, some port police and a dozen boosted mercenaries
who volunteered.”
“Horatio had it easy compared to them,” Nicolai murmured. “But they should be able to hold. The possessed can’t possibly mount
a standard beachhead operation. Their bodies screw up electronics, they’d never be able to wear an SII suit, let alone combat
armour. They’re going to have to dock and try and fight their way along the transit tubes, that’s going to cost them.” He
checked the external situation again, seeking confirmation of his assessment. The big ship was holding steady, with just intermittent
orange fireballs spluttering out of the equatorial vernier thruster nozzles to maintain attitude.
“Get me access to sensor coverage of the spaceport, and check on our internal communications,” Nicolai ordered. “We may be
able to coordinate a running battle from here.”
“Aye, sir.” Fleur started to datavise instructions into the command centre’s computer, interfacing their communications circuits
with the civil data channels which wove through the spaceport.
Shadows began to flicker inside the ship’s open hatches. “What the hell have they got in there?” Nicolai asked.
The inspection mechanoids turned up their camera resolution. He saw figures emerging from the ship, hornets darting out of
their nest. Dark outlines, hard to see with the mushy interference and low light level. But they were definitely humanoid
in shape, riding manoeuvring packs that had enlarged nozzles for higher thrust. “Who are they?” he whispered.
“Traitors,” Fleur hissed. “Those NC navy bastards must have switched sides. They never did support independent asteroid settlements.
Now they’re helping the possessed!”
“They wouldn’t. Nobody would do that.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
He shook his head helplessly. Outside the spindle, the fast, black hornets were burning their way in through the carbotanium
structure. One by one, they flew into the ragged holes.
• • •
Louise was actually glad to return to the quiet luxury of Balfern House. It had been an extraordinary day, and a wearyingly
long one, too.
In the morning she’d visited Mr Litchfield, the family’s lawyer in the capital, to arrange for money from the Cricklade account
to be made available to her. The transfer had taken hours; neither the lawyer nor the bank was accustomed to young girls insisting
on being issued with Jovian Bank credit disks. She stuck to her guns despite all the obstacles; Joshua had told her they were
acceptable everywhere in the Confederation. She doubted Norfolk’s pounds were.
That part of the day had proved to be simplicity itself compared to finding a way off Norfolk. There were only three civil-registered
starships left in orbit, and they were all chartered by the Confederation Navy to act as support ships for the squadron.
Louise, Fletcher, and Genevieve had taken their coach out to Bennett Field, Norwich’s main aerodrome, to talk to a spaceplane
pilot from the
Far Realm
, who was currently groundside. His name was Furay, and through him she had gradually persuaded the captain to sell them a
berth. She suspected it was her money rather than her silver tongue which had eventually won them a cabin. Their fee was forty
thousand fuseodollars apiece.
Her original hope of buying passage directly to Tranquillity had gone straight out of the window barely a minute after starting
to talk to Furay. The
Far Realm
was contracted to stay with the squadron during its Norfolk assignment; when the ship did leave, it would accompany the navy
frigates. No one knew when that would be anymore, the captain explained. Louise didn’t care, she just wanted to get off the
planet. Even floating around in low orbit would be safer than staying in Norwich. She would worry about reaching Tranquillity
when the
Far Realm
arrived at its next port.
So the captain appeared to give in gracefully and negotiate terms. They were due to fly up tomorrow, where they would wait
in the ship until the squadron’s business was complete.
More delay. More uncertainty. But she’d actually started to accomplish her goal. Fancy, arranging to fly on a starship, all
by herself. Fly away to meet Joshua.
And leave everyone else in the stew.