Silence was the one thing Auger didn’t want. It left a vacuum in her head into which certain thoughts were too easily able to slip. She wanted the easy cadences of normal human conversation, the gossip and the small talk. She wanted to be able to think about anything other than that killing wall of furious light, the explosion that might even now be rushing towards them, faster than any advance information of its arrival could possibly travel. Faster than any possible news of success. How long had it been since the missiles had streaked away? She had lost all sense of time; it could have been minutes or hours. But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.
She looked at the other two—Floyd and the Slasher both—and knew that in their own way they were working through exactly the same thought process. As if in some silent acknowledgement of this, all three of them chose that moment to tighten their hands together.
Suddenly, a convulsive change occurred in the displays on the wall. Auger had an instant to register this, and another instant to let the implications unravel in her head. One of the missiles must have found its mark, and now the ship had detected the approaching hellfire…
But the voices in her head, quiet of late, told her no, that was not what was happening.
It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.
In another instant—another tick of the clockwork grind of consciousness—the ship began to execute some drastic evasive manoeuvre. Auger had just enough time to feel her weight shifting dangerously to one side when her gown stiffened into a protective cocoon and the furniture, floors and walls reshaped themselves into a protective matrix.
Then came the awful moment when the ship forced its breathing apparatus down her throat.
She experienced a momentary blissed-out sense that, in truth, being smothered into helplessness was actually quite pleasant…
Two or three missing frames of consciousness.
Information trickled into her skull, via Cassandra’s machines. They were talking to Tunguska and the rest of the ship.
One of their own missiles had just locked on to them. The peculiar spatial properties of the hyperweb tunnel had confused its navigation system, while the echoing babble of chaotic EM signals had caused it to disregard the message that Tunguska’s ship was friend, rather than foe. There was no time to aim and fire the beam weapons. The ship had flexed itself, bending its hull to let the missile slip by at the last instant, like a supple combatant avoiding a lethal stab. Once the missile had streaked past into the portion of the tunnel behind the ship, an emergency detonation command had gnawed into its tiny, murderous mind and made it self-trigger.
The explosion had caused a local alteration in the geometry of the tunnel cladding, sending propagation shocks haring away in all directions; meanwhile, re-radiated energies bounced around in a storm of short-wavelength photons, chewing through the protective armour of Tunguska’s ship and into the soft living tissues of the passengers within.
Sensing further danger, the ship kept its occupants locked within the gee-load cushioning while it strained ahead with every sensor that could claw some scrap of information about the forward state of the tunnel. The reverberations from the missile blast had blinded the acoustics, for now at least. Frantically, the ship switched to backup systems it would never have relied upon during normal flight. Neutrino lasers and wide-spectrum EM pulses peered into the bright, swallowing mouth.
Another two missiles were haring back towards them, groping for a target.
Premature-detonation signals were transmitted at maximum signal strength. Beam weapons, deployed and ready now, locked on and prepared to fire if the missiles did not self-destruct.
One of the pair ripped apart in a controlled explosion, dampeners limiting the blast radius. The other missile shrugged off the kill order and increased its acceleration rate, sprinting for final interception. The ship swerved and contorted itself, pushing its structural limits beyond all conceivable safety margins. Shrill reports of irreparable damage hit Auger’s brain. The ship could still tolerate more damage—but not much more.
The beam weapons swung hard and locked on to the third stray missile. They fired, impacting at a range of only two kilometres up the tunnel from the ship. With its dampening systems not engaged, this missile’s explosion was the most violent of the three.
They raced into the fireball. The ship screamed, writhing in cybernetic agony.
Then it was through.
Faster than language, a thought made its way into Auger’s head.
“We deployed six missiles,” Tunguska told her. “Three have come back. Three more must still be out there.”
At lightning speed, the cloud of machines in her head wove a response. Had Auger answered, or was it Cassandra framing the question? She didn’t know. “How many more close hits can we take?”
“None,” Tunguska said.
Over the next five minutes, two more missiles came back. The first was limping, damaged by glancing encounters with the tunnel lining. The beam weapons engaged and killed it with swift efficiency, destroying it at a range of sixty-five kilometres, the very limit of detection.
The other missile surrendered itself to the kill-order, puffing apart in a damped blast that inflicted only minor damage.
“One’s still out there,” Tunguska said.
“Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all, was it?” Auger observed wryly.
“It was the only one we had,” Tunguska replied phlegmatically.
During the next ten agonising minutes, a sixth missile did arrive, coasting on a high-speed intercept trajectory. It showed no inclination to obey the destruct commands, even when it was very close. Tunguska’s beam weapons gored it open, but the warhead refused to detonate. The missile veered in a hairpin turn, then speared itself at a right angle into the tunnel cladding. Half-blind as they were, the acoustic sensors could still track its progress as it bored through the stressed laminate of artificial space-time. Somewhere deep inside the cladding it finally blew up, and the entire wall bulged outward.
“That was number six,” Auger said. “All six are down. We’re home and dry.”
“No,” Tunguska said. “At least, we can’t be sure. That last one… it wasn’t one of ours.”
“But you sent six—”
“And five returned. That last one was a gift from Niagara. It means he knows we’re here.”
By the time Tunguska’s ship emerged from the portal, automatic damage repair had taken care of the worst of the wounds the ship had sustained in the tunnel. There were some things that could not be put right without specialist attention, but they would have to wait until the vessel returned to Polity space. For now, it was still capable of continuing the chase, albeit at reduced effectiveness, while the bleed-drive was nursed back to full health.
“If only we could be sure of the route Niagara took,” Tunguska said.
Auger leaned forward, resting her elbows on the soft padding of the extruded table. The ship had released its grip on its occupants. They had all been dosed with UR, the tiny machines now swimming through their bodies on a mad errand to correct the genetic damage caused by the radiation from the undamped missile blasts. “I thought you were hoping to catch him between portals.”
“I was,” the Slasher said. “And there was always a chance of that. Unfortunately, Niagara was just a little too fast. He may have cut some safety margins now that he knows we’re chasing him.”