In the Mouth of the Whale (31 page)

The voice screamed, a thin harrowing sound on one note, growing steadily in volume. I clapped my hands over my ears; Prem Singleton studied the front of the tank and waved her hand in front of one of the lights at its base and the scream cut out.

I said, ‘He didn’t try to blackmail your family. His great-grandchildren did. He was their prisoner.’

‘Are you always this sentimental, Isak, or do you sympathise with that thing’s plight because you went inside his head? I’m not punishing
him
; I’m punishing his family. I’m sure that he contains all kinds of information that his family want kept secret, and soon he’ll be in the hands of the Office of Public Safety. Talking of which, they’re beginning to notice the edges of our little action. We have to go.’

She stepped forwards and kissed me, then pushed me away and darted out of the chamber. I chased after her. I believed then that I had no other choice. I also believed that by withholding the exact location of the second back door, which had been lodged in that little packet addressed to Prem, I had a small but crucial advantage. I was wrong, of course.

12

The shifts of the Quick drone jockeys didn’t match Cthuga’s swift diurnal cycle. Sometimes Ori flew over the white plain of the cloud deck, beneath the cold bright spark of the sun and the vast and narrow shadow arch of the rings, which at this equatorial latitude cut the sky more or less in half. And sometimes she flew at night, the cloud deck faintly luminous under a black star-strewn sky.

Best of all were the dawn flights. As the bright point of the sun levered itself above the distant horizon, every insubstantial tower and ridge in the cloudscape threw immense shadows westward, rainbows conjured from feathery spindrifts of ammonium-ice crystals suddenly bridged neighbouring towers, and everything seemed to gain solidity in the hard pinkish light, until the sun rose further and the shadows shrank and the clouds became clouds again.

Ori and the others in her crew flew their drones a long way out from the pelagic station: a thousand kilometres wasn’t out of the ordinary. They flew a lot of practice runs, and did a lot of work in simulations, too. Their combat drones were much faster and less forgiving than the drones of the observation station, and the flying was trickier than in the searing black calm of the depths. Everything was travelling east in a river of frigid poisonous air at about three hundred kilometres per hour, but there were subtly clashing currents and vortices that dragged and plucked at Ori’s drone, sometimes flinging it hundreds of metres above its course, sometimes carving out pockets of lower pressure that dropped the drone a kilometre or more, into the streaming vapours of the cloud deck.

Predators flew even further. They were an ancient design, fast and quick, flying right on the edge of stability. If it wasn’t for the AIs that constantly trimmed and adjusted the angle of attack along the edges of their wings and micromanaged the profile properties of their skins, controlling the laminar flow over their entire surface, they would fall out of the sky at cruising speed even in clear air. They only came into their own in combat mode, during the brief powerful surges when they flew at multiples of the speed of sound.

So far, there’d been no contact with the enemy. Ori knew about combat only from simulations. The enemy dropped probes at random intervals in random places; no patterns had been deduced from the plethora of contacts. Their ships approached Cthuga at high relative velocities to minimise contact with the defensive pickets scattered ahead of and behind the gas giant as well as in orbit around it, and performed braking manoeuvres that cut through the outer edge of the atmosphere several times before they had shed enough delta vee to enter safely without burning up. Orbital drones attempted to intercept enemy ships as they skipped in and out of Cthuga’s atmosphere, the security net predicted likely entry points, and the closest of the pelagic stations dispatched their predators in hot pursuit while their drones simulated the electronic and radar signals of large structures to tempt enemy probes into traps.

Some of the enemy probes dropped straight down, deploying chutes to control their fall: these were the hardest to take out because the window for interception was usually less than an hour between the time the probe entered the atmosphere and the time it fell beyond the reach of the predators and their missiles and drones. Others flew extended missions, shedding secondary probes or attacking picket ships or aerostat stations. A few, not many, made sorties against the Whale, which had its own defences. Everyone knew that the enemy didn’t want to destroy the Whale because they wanted to use it. If the enemy ever overwhelmed the defensive network, the Whale would be destroyed in place, to deny the enemy its prize. And if that happened, Commander Tenkiller told her crew, everyone on every pelagic station would be stained indelibly with shame, and even dying in battle would be no redemption.

One day,
The Eye of the Righteous
began to alter its configuration. Its lower half flattened and spread out, turning the station from a fat, inverted teardrop to a stout and somewhat ungainly triangular wedge, and the four clusters of thrusters at its waist migrated towards the stern. Inside, clusters of hot-hydrogen ballonets and pods and hangars disconnected from each other and swung through ninety degrees and reeled inward, moving out of the way as structural spars lengthened or contracted like muscles. The blisters of the lifesystem migrated to the midsection of the dorsal side, which was now a blunt prow, and the drone and predator hangars shifted forward, coming to rest at either side of the central spine. By now, the station had lost headway and was drifting with the wind. It was beginning to rise, too. And it was no longer a station. It was a ship.

Inside the lifesystem, the alarming thumps, gratings, pops and twangs of the reconstruction ceased. The abrupt bouts of tilting and sliding stopped too; there was only a slow and steady rocking as the ship ascended. Ori and the other drone jockeys had been busy for most of the day, packing away everything loose in the living quarters and mopping up spills. Now the transformation was complete, they were able to take in the view.

The Eye of the Righteous
was rising high above the cloud deck. The sky was darkening to a hard indigo; the great ring-arch that divided it in two glistened like grapheme. The sharp white stars of two orbital forts were rising in the east, one above the other, and the southern border of the equatorial band, a stormy ribbon of vortices and fretted curves generated by friction with the neighbouring band, which rotated around the gas giant in the opposite direction, was coming into view dead ahead, a range of low dark plateaus and mesas floating out at the edge of the world.

Presently, the main engines ignited. The ship had reached cruising altitude and was beginning to move south.

Every crew member, True and Quick, was animated and electrified. The transformation could mean only one thing: action was coming. After evening prayers, Commander Tenkiller explained that a pod of enemy ships had been detected three hundred thousand kilometres out from the planet. They would arrive in ninety-eight hours and their most probable point of entry was somewhere in the boundary layers of the south equatorial band. This was a recent tactic, Commander Tenkiller said. Although most of the enemy probes were lost when they hit the permanent storms and vortices of the boundary layers between two counter-rotating bands, predators and drones couldn’t chase down the survivors until they reached calmer regions, and by that time they would be scattered all around the planet.

‘The enemy don’t care about their losses,’ she said. ‘They only care about ours. Remember that always.’

The Eye of the Righteous
reached a way point shortly after midnight. Ori woke to an alarming absence, realised that the motors had cut off and the ship was rocking, gently rocking. Drifting on the great current of air again. She couldn’t get back to sleep, and at last levered herself out of her niche and rode the elevator down and clambered along the companionway to the drone hangar, now more than twice as long as it had been before the ship had reconfigured itself.

She was checking her drone’s motor when one of the old hands, Lato, found her.

‘Fighting fever, we call it,’ Lato said. ‘People can’t sleep, thinking about what lies ahead. And because they haven’t slept, they can’t fight properly when the time comes to fight.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Ori said.

‘And you want to
do
right, because you’ve the taint of being different.’

Lato was slightly built for a Quick, which meant that she was a little taller than she was broad. Her shaven scalp was covered in glistening tattoos, interlocking patterns of geometric figures. She rarely smiled, but she did now.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come down here to spy on you or accuse you. I’m not worried about what people think. I only worry about how they do, and you do all right. No, I want to share something, and as you’re the only one in our shift awake . . .’

She threw a packet at Ori, and they were no longer in the hangar but hung somewhere above the ship. Looking up at a black sky full of stars, with the shadow of the ring-arch slung from east to west.

Ori was by now used to these abrupt transitions from reality to a battle scenario or, as here, a view patched from the ship’s external eyes. She lowered herself carefully to the hard rubber floor of the catwalk and asked what she should be looking for.

‘Follow the ring-arch up from the western horizon,’ Lato said. Her voice seemed to come out of nowhere, close to Ori’s left ear. ‘There’s a bright star about three-quarters of the way up. Sirius. See it?’

‘I see it.’

‘Do you see a faint line crossing the sky just below it, like a shadow or reflection of the ring-arch?’

‘Like a thin haze of cloud?’

‘That’s the belt. All the dust and other junk that orbits further out than Cthuga. Now, think about this: Cthuga and the belt both orbit the sun, and the rings orbit Cthuga’s equator, but why are the ring-arch and the belt in different places in the sky?’

‘It’s summer, in this hemisphere. So the axis of Cthuga is tipped at an angle to the sun.’

‘That’s part of it. What else?’

Ori tried to think of an answer, said at last that she didn’t know.

‘Most don’t. We aren’t told about it, and we aren’t curious, most of us. We aren’t bred to be. But this is important – maybe you can work out why when I tell you the answer,’ Lato said. ‘What it is, the belt and everything else apart from Cthuga orbits the sun in the same plane. But Cthuga’s orbit is tilted with respect to that plane. You follow?’

Ori was good at visualising spatial relationships. She imagined the globe of the world sunk to its waist in the flat disc of its rings, tilted at a slight angle towards the spark of the sun, so that it was also tilted with respect to the big disc of dust and debris of the belt behind it. Then she imagined that tilted world trundling in an arc that took it above the plane of the belt . . .

She said, ‘I think I see it.’

Lato said, ‘And do you see how it affects the way the enemy attacks us?’

‘The enemy live in the belt,’ Ori said. ‘At night we’re tipped one way against the belt. And by day we’re tipped in the opposite direction. So if the enemy comes straight at us along the plane of the ecliptic, where they hit will depend on the time of day.’

‘Basically,’ Lato said. ‘Although it’s more complicated than that, of course. Nothing travels in a straight line over long distances in any kind of gravity well . . . There. You see?’

It was a faint point of light, a new star suddenly flaring slightly above the faint band of the Belt, to the west of the star Sirius. It must have been moving fast, because it drew a streak across the darkness before it guttered out. Ori started to ask what it was, but then more stars appeared, streaking out in every direction from a central point, fading one by one even as more were born.

The display lasted for about ten minutes. A few of the stars were very bright, drawing streaks of pure white light across the sky that faded out to oranges and reds. Gradually, fewer and fewer stars appeared, stragglers flaring one by one at longer and longer intervals until at last the sky was quiet and dark again.

‘The enemy,’ Ori said.

‘Some of them.’

‘But they aren’t supposed to arrive for ninety hours.’

‘Nor will they. Those were outriders. Suicide probes discovering the limits of our defences. And those defences are a long way out, far beyond the orbits of Cthuga’s outermost moons. It always happens the same way,’ Lato said. ‘The enemy sends probes straight at our defences, and the defences destroy them. And then the second wave comes, trying to push through holes identified by the first wave. What we try to do is make deliberate holes in our defences, so that the enemy will punch through in places of our choosing. Places where we can be ready for them.’

‘They always do it the same way?’

‘So far. Maybe they’re not very smart. Or maybe they just don’t care about their losses, like the commander says. Maybe they figure that sooner or later they’ll overwhelm us.’

The night sky vanished. Ori pushed to her feet, thanked the veteran for showing her the battle.

‘That? It wasn’t anything,’ Lato said, and handed Ori a strip of patches. ‘Slap one on your arm, you’ll sleep nice and deep and wake up ready for anything. You’ll need it. They’ll be here soon.’