House of Suns (20 page)

Hesperus did not respond at first. I do not think he was shocked by my suggestion, but more that he wished to accord it a respectful silence. Given the evidence, I had little doubt that he had drawn a similar conclusion himself.

The ambush could not have happened without Gentian collaboration.

The console chimed to inform me that Mezereon was signalling me again. Her message was brief, simply a string of coordinates.
Dalliance
adjusted her course minutely and gave me an ETA for the rendezvous. Allowing for deceleration, we would be on Mezereon’s position in twelve minutes.

‘Campion,’ Hesperus said, after a while, ‘I do not wish to alarm you, but I am seeing something beyond Mezereon. It was not there a few moments ago. Whatever it is is large, and it is moving towards us.’

Dalliance
pushed her faculties to the limit, lowering her detection thresholds now that I had independent evidence that something else was lurking in the cloud. In a few moments, something appeared in the displayer - a hazy blob, framed in a box and accompanied by the exceedingly sparse data my ship had managed to extract. The object was well camouflaged but large - five or six kilometres wide - and Hesperus had been right about it coming nearer.

‘It could be a big ship, or a big ship carrying a Homunculus weapon, or just one of the weapons on its own,’ I said.

‘I see smaller signals grouped around it - other ships, perhaps.’

At that moment Mezereon returned. We were close enough now that she was able to send an imago without risk of interception. The figure appeared before me, to the right of Hesperus. She was trying to be firm, but there was a crack in her voice that she could not quite conceal.

‘You have to turn back now, Campion. They’re moving one of the H-guns onto you. If you turn tail and go to maximum power, you may stay out of range. They’ll still chase you, but maybe you can keep ahead of them.’

This time Mezereon’s message protocol permitted me to answer her.

‘They must have been counting on killing me with the Spitting Cobra, but I damaged it.’

‘Good for you,’ she said, a gleam of admiration in her eyes. ‘It won’t stop them, but at least you showed them there’s still fire in the Line.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Turn around now. You’ve done your best, Campion, but there’s no sense in dying to make a point. I’ve told you what I can. I wish I could have given you the prisoners, but—’

‘I’m still coming in,’ I said.

‘If you are committed to this rescue,’ Hesperus said, ‘then I will do what I can to draw the fire of the Homunculus weapon. I will pass Mezereon’s position at speed and increase my visibility.’

‘Are you certain about doing this?’

‘Already committed. I will make my closest approach to Mezereon’s position in three minutes. Then I will adjust my impasse emissions and engine signature to lure the Homunculus weapon. Even if it can still see you, I doubt that it will be able to resist a closer target.’

‘Whatever happens, Hesperus ... I’m grateful.’

‘I am going silent now. I shall see you in interstellar space, when we have put this unfortunate place behind us.’

His imago rippled and vanished, leaving me alone with Mezereon.

‘You were just talking to a Machine Person, weren’t you? How in God’s name did you pull that off?’

‘I’m full of surprises.’

The next three minutes passed like an age as I watched Hesperus streak forward and then slam past Mezereon’s position, missing her by barely half a million kilometres. By then, my view of the approaching object and its escort of ships had improved substantially. That it was a Homunculus weapon was beyond argument: I was seeing it from a foreshortened perspective, but
Dalliance
was able to extrapolate its true form, and the delicate, slender-stalked flower-like shape, its maw a coronet of diaphanous petals, veined like dragonfly wings, was an uncanny match against data in the trove. It must have arrived hidden in the belly of one of our ships, but there was no need to conceal it now; the slender form might have looked vulnerable, but that fragility was deceptive. The field-reinforced, field-armoured weapon was being propelled by tugs much like my own lampreys: they were clamped onto the stem like thorns and had sharp skein-drive signatures.

Once he had passed Mezereon, Hesperus began to tune his hull to make himself more conspicuous. He fired his own weapons against the Homunculus device and its escort vehicles, not with any obvious expectation of doing harm, but in the hope of goading it into a response. His drive emissions became noisier: Hesperus could have been tracked from across the system by now. Purslane would have been aware of his actions even if she did not grasp their full significance.

A minute later, I began my own slowdown.
Dalliance
forwent all her usual safeguards. The engine screamed in my ears, the dampeners warning that they could not guarantee to neutralise the thousands of gee-forces trying to keep me moving in a straight line.

I grimaced and sank deeper into my seat, hands clasping at the armrests, as if that would make the slightest difference if the dampeners failed.

As the distance between
Dalliance
and Mezereon’s ship dwindled to thousands of kilometres, and then hundreds, I got my first clear look at the vessel I had come to rescue. Mezereon had done everything she could to camouflage herself, but she had not been able to work miracles. Her ship was a wreck, damaged beyond obvious repair. It was a lozenge-shaped hull just less than a kilometre from end to end, and about a fifth of kilometre across the beam. Where her engine had been was a perfectly spherical hole, as if a giant had taken a crunching bite out of the ship. At the forward end of the ship, the nose was split open like a ruptured seed pod. Evidence of smaller weapon or collision impacts peppered the hull with silvery craters, stark chrome flowers against the midnight black of the intact parts.

But Mezereon had been inventive. She still had a working impassor, and she had gathered several million tonnes of rubble inside the bubble with her ship, dressing it around the wreck to form a gauzy screen that would offer some concealment if the bubble failed. Beyond the bubble, several larger chunks of rock had been arranged to provide secondary camouflage. Seen in close-up, it looked unnatural - big boulders apparently coalescing into a baby asteroid, with a glassy marble at the heart of that swarm of rubble - but she must have been counting on never coming under direct scrutiny.

‘I’m very near you now,’ I said. ‘Cargo bay’s already open - there’s enough room for you inside. But you’ll have to drop the bubble and lose your camouflaging screen.’

‘I’m scared. They’re close enough now that if I do drop my bubble, they’ll have no trouble finding me again.’

‘You told me your bubble was about to give up the ghost anyway. You’ve nothing to lose.’

As I completed the final phase of my approach, my deceleration dropping down to mere gees of slowdown, my attention flicked back to Hesperus. He had begun to steer, while still maintaining a steady assault against the Homunculus weapon. He must have had some effect, for two of the escort vehicles had begun to peel off to close in on him. But the weapon itself was showing no inclination to follow his bait. The two escort craft were accelerating hard as they made their turn, nearly as hard as Hesperus himself.

Dalliance
came to a halt just beyond Mezereon’s last layer of camouflaging boulders. Her bubble flicked off and her ship began to inch forward on impellors, nosing clear of the rubble that had been trapped within the bubble. The boulders carved silvery gouges in her hull as they knocked against her, splintering and pulverising in the process. The impellors began to glow a vivid pink, signifying some worrying ailment deep inside their mechanisms. Never mind: all they had to do was get her another few hundred metres, and then they could be scrapped.

I assigned two of the lampreys to rearrange the rubble into a makeshift screen between us and the Homunculus weapon. With enough intelligence not to need direct supervision, they set to work in a blur of furious motion, zipping back and forth too quickly for the eye to track.

While the lampreys were busy, I spun
Dalliance
around to bring the bay into alignment and dropped my own field. The lampreys buzzed around me like busy fireflies, doing their best to shepherd away the larger rocks that had been disturbed by Mezereon’s emergence. All of a sudden, even the wreck of her ship looked too big to fit, as if I had misjudged the capacity of my cargo bay.

‘Disengage your impellors,’ I told Mezereon. ‘You have enough momentum now. I’ll take care of the rest.’

At that moment it was as if half the sky had been clawed back to reveal a blinding whiteness beyond it, as if the black of night was just an eggshell-thin layer masking an unimaginably cruel brightness. On the console hovering above me,
Dalliance
recorded a litany of complaint: moderate damage sustained across a large acreage of the hull, one of the fireflies out of action.

Mezereon’s imago flickered and reformed.

‘They just used it.’

I nodded: I had guessed as much for myself. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I think the rubble took the brunt of it. We’re still outside its effective kill-range. Did you take a hit?’

‘Nothing that can’t be fixed, and nothing that’ll stop us getting away.’

I did not care to think about what would happen when that weapon came closer. Technically, it had not even touched us. My hands trembling, I watched as Mezereon’s ruined ship began to drift into my cargo bay, with what appeared to be no more than angstroms of clearance in any direction.
Dalliance
clanged as something knocked against her. But the slow drift continued. Switching to an internal view, I saw the wreck force its way into the bay as if some obscene creature was striving to raid the snug burrow of another animal. Bits of Mezereon’s ship, especially around the existing damage spots, were ripping away.

The sky beyond the sky whitened again, brighter this time, turning the bay and the ship into pink-edged silhouettes, and
Dalliance
let me know that she had sustained more damage. One of the boulders tumbled away from the screen that the lampreys had erected, and it was glowing red on the side that had been facing the weapon.

Then Mezereon was clear of the doors.

Grapples moved in to lock her ship into position. I reinstated my bubble and gave the command to move. With fewer lampreys to push her along,
Dalliance
could not sustain her former rate of acceleration. I decided I would risk stuttering the bubble, allowing the engine to contribute to the effort. At a thousand gees, the wall of boulders dropped away behind me with disarming swiftness. It was tempting to think that I had already put sufficient safe distance between myself and the Homunculus weapon, but that was not the case.

When I relocated
Vespertine,
I saw Hesperus was taking her towards the weapon, having executed a hairpin turn that would have crushed most ships, let alone their human occupants.

‘Hesperus,’ I whispered, ‘don’t do this. We’re getting away all right.’

As if he could have heard me, or would have listened even if he could.

The weapon fired again. This time there was a jagged and asymmetric quality to the wash of light as it branched across the sky. When it abated, something brachiform and luminous remained. The weapon had made a lesion: they must have been pushing it to its limit in their determination to kill me.

There was nothing more I could do to improve my chances.
Dalliance
was giving her all to get away as quickly as possible, and my fretting would make no difference whatsoever.

Yet I could not turn away until I had seen what would become of Hesperus.

‘Did you see him die?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Campion said.

‘I’m sorry. For you and for him.’

We were aboard
Dalliance,
lying together. We had cleared the cloud and were now in interstellar space, returning to cruise speed. I had whisked over as soon as Campion’s ship was in range of mine. We had embraced, holding each other so tightly that it was as if our coming back together was only provisional, a state of affairs that might be rescinded at any moment if the universe changed its mind.

We had kissed, and then our kissing had become an exercise in frenzied exploration, as if the hours that we had been apart had been long enough to dull our memories of each other. We lost our clothes and made love, dozing into half-sleep before starting anew, until we both fell into blissful unconsciousness, weary but glad to have survived. Now we were awake again, holding on to each other like two exhausted swimmers, each using the other for support.

‘I should introduce you to the new guests,’ Campion said, after a long silence during which I had almost fallen back into dream.

‘Are they all right?’

‘I checked on them, obviously. Only Aconite and Mezereon are awake at the moment. But I thought I’d save the big welcome until you could share in it. I suggested they wait in the gardens until you were ready.’

‘What about the prisoner - or prisoners? Did you find out anything more?’

‘Nothing beyond what Mezereon already told me - that this was all somehow caused by me.’

‘For all we know Mezereon got the wrong end of the stick, or the prisoner was feeding her a lie.’

‘A lie that just happened to include me as a detail?’

I had no answer for that.

We washed, clothed ourselves, then whisked through-ship to
Dalliance’s
gardens. I did my best to hide my concerns from him, but all the while my mind was spinning through the possibilities. How could the ambush have had anything to do with Campion, if he had been so conspicuously late for the reunion?

It made no sense unless the ‘cause’ of it was something that had happened during the last reunion. Something in Campion’s thread, in other words. But if that was the case then we were dealing with an agency that thought nothing of plotting our demise across a timescale of an entire circuit, longer than the lifespan of some planetary civilisations.