House of Suns (66 page)

‘We kill him,’ Sorrel said. ‘No ifs, no buts. We don’t even let the bastard explain his actions. Just open fire.’

‘I’m first in line,’ Charlock said, still bruised from the loss of Steel
Breeze
. Galingale, as far as he was concerned, was just as much to blame for the demise of his ship as the robots. He wanted something to punch.

I understood how he felt. But I kept thinking how good it would feel to get Galingale’s throat between my hands and keep squeezing. I would make it nice and slow, ebbing the breath from his lungs across the same stretch of time it had taken Cyphel to fall from her room. She had known she was going to die; that no agency in the universe could prevent it. Let Galingale taste something of the same furnace-dry certainty. A long-range strike from a gamma-cannon was never going to give the same satisfaction.

But Betony said quietly, ‘We could use his ship. Maybe we can use Galingale, too, if he still has something useful to tell us. But we can definitely use the ship.’

‘It’s damaged,’ I said.

‘But fixable. Everything’s fixable, especially given the resources we still have aboard our own ships.
Midnight Queen
was always the fastest, out of all those that survived the ambush - excepting
Silver Wings,
of course.
Midnight’s
out of the race now, obviously-but that doesn’t mean her engine’s useless. If we can pull her in, fix her or recover the drive components, it may make a difference. None of our ships will be able to close the gap if
Silver Wings
pulls ahead again.
Midnight Queen
could still be able.’

I hated it, but I knew he was right. ‘Betony’s got a point.’

‘How about we spear him with a gamma-cannon and then pick through the remains?’ Agrimony asked, as if that was a reasonable proposal.

Betony acted as if he had not heard him. ‘I’ll intercept
Midnight Queen
with
Adonis Blue -
I’ll only need to make a small course correction to meet her. I’m the only one aboard my ship, so there’s no need to put anyone else’s life in danger.’

‘Adonis
Blue isn’t big enough to carry
Midnight Queen,’
I said. ‘Matter of fact,
Dalliance
is about the only remaining ship with a hold large enough.’

‘I have lampreys. They’ll match velocity with Galingale’s wreck and drag it back home. We’ll worry about the hold afterwards.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to, Campion. Let the risk be mine.’

‘No, I’m coming.’ Before he could raise another objection, I said, ‘Do you have an intercept course worked out already?’

‘Yes,’ he said, equivocally. ‘But I’m still not happy with your choice.’

‘Get over it. You know it makes more sense to take
Dalliance.
Frankly, I don’t even need you at all.’

‘Then I suppose this is stalemate.’ Betony held my gaze, daring me to blink, then shook his head in disgust or defeat or some weary combination of the two. ‘Follow me.
Shock Diamond, Snowstorm
and
Chromatic Aberration,
hold the pursuit course. We’ll rejoin you as soon as we have the wreck.’

Adonis Blue veered away sharply, not so much breaking acceleration safeguards as forgetting about them completely. The old
Dalliance
could never have kept up with her, but she was more agile since Ateshga’s upgrading. From my position in the bridge I watched the other three ships fall into the distance, timelag stretching until they were a third of a second away.
Adonis Blue
swerved again and then resumed her original course, except that she was now moving along a parallel vector. As near as could be judged, she was now on a precise collision course with the out-of-control
Midnight Queen.

‘Did you have your suspicions?’ Betony asked me as we waited for the wreck to tumble within intercept reach of the lampreys. ‘About Galingale, I mean.’ There was something comradely and confiding in his tone, as if I had finally absolved myself in his eyes.

‘Not an inkling,’ I told the imago.

‘Me neither. I can’t help but think of that as a failing, you know. I thought I had my finger on the pulse of the Line. I thought I knew all of us, even before the ambush. After it happened, and the Line was whittled down to so few of us, I felt I knew every surviving shatterling as well as I knew myself.’

‘We always suspected there was a snake. After Cyphel died, there wasn’t much doubt. But if it’s any consolation, I’d never have fingered Galingale as the culprit. Even after that business with Ugarit-Panth.’

‘I thought that was your mess, not his.’

‘Well, maybe I started it, but it gave Galingale the perfect excuse to push the ambassador over the edge. He showed him the entry for the Consentiency in the UA - established beyond all doubt that the ambassador’s civilisation was extinct.’

‘Could have been an innocent mistake...’ Betony started. ‘On second thoughts, probably not.’

‘Nothing innocent about it. Galingale wasn’t the first shatterling Ugarit-Panth spoke to, fishing for information after my indiscretion. But Galingale was the only one who came up with the idea of letting him see the UA, rather than the troves. The ambassador told me he’d been interested in seeing inside the UA before he went to Galingale, but I can’t help wondering if there wasn’t a degree of manipulation going on there.’

‘Galingale just happening to mention the UA, or making sure someone else mentioned it within earshot of the ambassador?’

‘It served his purpose. He was able to disclose the real facts about the ambassador’s home civilisation without implicating himself - at best, he would get away with it without anyone knowing he’d suggested it, at worst it would just look like another indiscretion. Ugarit-Panth came to me, Betony - told me what had happened. I could have acted then, but instead I agreed to protect Galingale. I felt sorry for the bastard - I kept seeing myself in his shoes. Whereas all along what he was hoping for - counting on - was the ambassador taking it so badly that he triggered the suicide mechanism inside his own body while still inside Ymir. That would have taken care of the rest of Gentian Line pretty effectively.’

‘And Galingale as well,’ Betony said.

‘Not necessarily - he could easily have contrived a reason to leave the planet in a hurry if he suspected the ambassador was going to blow. In fact, that’s exactly what he did do. The day after Cyphel’s funeral, Galingale very conveniently managed to get himself assigned to patrol duty. He must have been hoping the ambassador would kill most of us. Afterwards, he would have been able to pick off any survivors from space.’

‘But he didn’t know about Cadence and Cascade’s plans.’

‘No - they took us all by surprise. Of course, he would have been hoping they would die along with the rest of us. But at least he was already in space, in a fast ship and in a good position to embark on the chase.’

‘We should have seen all this.’

‘But we didn’t, so there’s no point burdening ourselves with recriminations. Maybe if I’d picked up on Cyphel’s clue sooner than I did—’

‘Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion - that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.’

‘You think anyone will be around to care?’

Betony opened his mouth to reply when something caught his attention. I heard the chime of an alert. ‘Here it comes, Campion. I’m releasing lampreys.’

I watched the bright sparks erupt from the fat green hull of
Adonis
Blue and streak away in hyphens of light, decelerating massively to reach the rest frame of Galingale’s wreck. I dropped twenty lampreys of my own and sent them to assist.
Dalliance
had had plenty of time to replace those lost in the passage through the reunion system, when I had been attacked by the ambushers.

The lampreys needed no direct supervision from us; they were fully capable of grasping the nature and specifics of their task, which was to fasten onto the wreck, stabilise her as well as they could and then haul her back into the accelerated frame of
Dalliance
and Adonis Blue. All Betony and I were required to do was watch the proceedings with nervous impatience, aware that we were falling slowly behind the rest of the pursuit squadron and would have to sacrifice even more of the already tattered safety margin to make up the distance.

‘We keep him at arm’s length,’ I said. ‘Until we know he’s dead, and hasn’t set his ship to self-destruct on us.’

‘I got the impression you’d have quite liked to get your hands on him.’

‘Was it that obvious?’

A few minutes later, a chime signalled that the lampreys had made contact with Midnight Queen, approached and locked on to her hull without encountering resistance. Betony and I surveyed the damaged ship, both of us doubting that Galingale could have survived the attack unless he was in abeyance. Acres of her hull had been peeled away, revealing knotted, vulnerable innards.

‘Maybe we should abandon her now,’ Betony said, as images of the mangled craft played before our eyes. ‘There can’t be much left to salvage from that.’

‘The drive kernel might be tiny and well shielded,’ I said, as if he did not know that already. ‘We’ve come this far—I’m not going back empty-handed.’ The lampreys began to haul the wreck towards our ships. I drummed my fingers, my heart in my throat. ‘We should send a probe aboard her.’

‘No time, dear boy. There are a million places Galingale might have hidden himself away - it would take us weeks to search every nook and cranny of his ship.’

He was right. I just did not want to be reminded of the alternative, if a physical search was out of the question.

‘This could be a ruse.’

‘Which is why it would have been a much better idea for you to remain with the other ships.’ But there was no rancour in his voice - if anything he appeared grateful for my company. ‘I’m going to bring
Adonis Blue
in close. I’ll be ready for an attack, but I won’t raise impasse until the last moment. That way at least we’ll know one way or the other.’

‘I don’t like this.’

‘No one’s asking you to like it. What matters is that you mustn’t stay around if things turn unpleasant. If I can’t handle myself, you aren’t going to make much difference. Race back to the other three ships and see what you can do en masse - maybe then you can help me. But one ship must survive to continue the pursuit. That’s imperative.’

‘We’re agreed on that. There’s been no word from Purslane since Galingale attacked
Silver Wings,
but—’

‘She’s alive. Don’t ever doubt that.’

Betony allowed the lampreys to drag their dead prize closer to
Adonis
Blue. I held
Dalliance’s
position, keeping a clear ten thousand kilometres between our two vessels. Betony’s toad-shaped ship was larger than
Midnight Queen,
but not by such a margin that he could have
swallowed
her inside his hold. He remained on pseudo-thrust and brought his weapons to attack readiness, but kept his impasse lowered. Ten more lampreys sprang from his hull to provide skein-thrust, should he need to raise the shield. There was a hundred kilometres between the two ships, then ten. At one kilometre, squashed together by my angle of view, they already appeared hopelessly fused, as if they had rammed together.

I saw it a moment before I saw Betony’s reaction. Either he was slow, or his impassor was not as effective as he had let us believe, taking valuable fractions of a second to reach operating strength. The ruined hull of
Midnight Queen,
the hull I had already observed to be peeling away in damaged plaques, exposing delicate insides, splintered apart in an explosion of curved and jagged shards. The instant it happened, I diagnosed it as a catastrophic, terminal failure of the ship’s integrity - Midnight Queen finally breaking up, stresses picking apart her ruined corpse. The next instant, I saw the truth. The vulnerable innards were merely another layer of camouflage that peeled away in the same eruption. There was another hull under all that deception - dark, sleek, intact. A dagger within a dagger.

I screamed a warning to Betony.

It was too late; the damage was already done. His impasse raised, but not swiftly enough to prevent chunks of that deceitful armour from raining onto
Adonis Blue,
gouging vicious wounds into her own hull. Then a long row of weapons emplacements sprang open along the vicious edge of Galingale’s dark new ship, turning it into a savagely barbed instrument, and at least a dozen gamma-cannon muzzles rammed forth and concentrated their fire on Betony’s vessel. The impasse deflected some of that energy, flickering like an electric-blue bubble as the photons downshifted into the optical, curdling with thick, squirming lightning as field asymmetries washed over its volume, but the attack was sustained and at devastatingly close range, and Adonis Blue had already been wounded by the hull shards. Despite all this, Betony’s lampreys started returning fire - whiplashing around the other ship, etching coils of light as their skein-drives gashed space to its fierce marrow, stabbing at the strobing impasse Galingale had raised around his own ship. Occasionally, when their discharges coincided with a lull in the strobing field, they found their mark. But the impacts did less damage to that dark hull than I would have anticipated, picking it away in dark scabs but never reaching through to anything vital.

Denied the ability to use pseudo-thrust at full efficiency, both ships began to fall out of my accelerated reference frame. Their impasses were merging, forming a dumb-bell shape as they tried to establish a minimum-surface-area solution.

I was reminded of ancient sailing ships engaged in close-quarters combat, their rigging tangling up, locking the two adversaries together unto the death.