Her hand gripped the walking stick like a talon. 'Fuel, Merlin. You told us we'd find helium three in the topsoil of our moon. Well, we didn't. Not enough to suit our needs, anyway.'
'Then you mustn't have been looking properly.'
'I assure you we looked, Merlin. You were mistaken. In fact almost everything you told us to expect on the moon turned out to be wrong. You really didn't pay much attention to it on your way in to Lecythus, did you?'
'It was a moon. I had a few other things on my mind.'
'Not only can't we mine it for helium three, but it isn't much good for anything else. The surface gravity's much less than you led us to expect, which complicates our operations tremendously. Things float away at the least provocation. Our experts say the density's so low we shouldn't expect to find anything useful under the crust. Certainly not the heavy ores and precious metals you promised us.'
'I don't know what to say.'
'That you were wrong?'
'I've seen a few moons, Minla. You get used to them. If this one's a lot less dense than I thought, then there's something weird about its chemistry. ' Merlin paused, feeling himself on the edge of something important, but whatever it was remained just out of reach.
'Well, it doesn't matter now. We'll just have to find fuel from an alternative source, and redesign our fusion drive accordingly. We'll need your help, if we aren't to fall hopelessly behind schedule.' Minla extended a withered hand towards the wheeling view. 'To have come so far, to have reached this point, and then failed . . . that would be worse than having never tried at all, don't you think?'
Chastened, Merlin scratched at his chin. 'I'll do what I can. Let me talk to the fusion engineers.'
'I've scheduled a meeting. They're very anxious to talk to you.' Minla paused. 'There's something you should know, though. They've seen you make a mistake. They'll still be interested in what you have to say, but don't expect blind acceptance of your every word. They know you're human now.'
'I never said I wasn't.'
'You didn't, no. I'll give you credit for that. But for a little while some of us allowed ourselves to believe it.'
Minla turned and walked away, the tap of her stick echoing into the distance.
As space wars went, it was brief and relatively tame, certainly by comparison with some of the more awesome battles delineated in the Cohort's pictorial history. The timeworn frescos on the swallowships commemorated engagements where entire solar systems were reduced to mere tactical details, hills or ditches in the terrain of a much larger strategic landscape, and where the participants - human and Husker both - were moving at significant fractions of the speed of light and employing relativistic weapons of world-shattering destructive potential. A single skirmish could eat up many centuries of planetary time, whole lifetimes from the point of view of a starship's crew. The war itself was a thing inseparably entwined with recorded history, a monstrous, choking structure with its roots reaching into the loam of deep time, and whose end must be assumed (by all except Merlin, at least) to lie in the unimaginably remote future.
Here, the theatre of conflict was considerably less than half a light-second in diameter, encompassing only the immediate space around Lecythus, with its girdle of half-finished Dormitories and Exodus Arks. The battle lasted barely a dozen hours, between first and last detonation. With the exception of Merlin's own late intervention, no weapons more potent than hydrogen bombs were deployed. Horrific, certainly, but possessed of a certain genteel precision compared to the weapons that had consumed Plenitude.
It began with a surprise strike from the surface, using a wave of commandeered atomic rockets. It seemed that the Regressives had gained control of one of the rocket assembly and launch complexes. The rockets had no warheads, but that didn't matter: kinetic energy, and the explosive force stored in their atomic engines, was still enough to inflict havoc on their targets. The weapons had been aimed with surprising accuracy. The first wave destroyed half of the unfinished Dormitories, inflicting catastrophic damage on many of the others. By the time the second wave was rising, orbital defences had sprung into action, but by then it was too late to intercept more than a handful of the missiles. Many of the atomic rockets were being piloted by suicide crews, steering their charges through Minla's hastily erected countermeasure screens. By the third hour, the Planetary Government was beginning to retaliate against Regressive elements using atmospheric-entry interceptors, but while they could pick away at enemy fortifications on the ground, they couldn't penetrate the anti-missile cordon around the launch complex itself. Rogue warheads chipped away at the edges of aerial land masses, sending mountain-sized boulders crashing to the surface. Even as the battle raged, brutal tidal waves ravaged the already-frail coastal communities. As the hours ticked by, Minla's analysts maintained a grim toll of the total numbers of surface and orbital casualties. In the fifth and sixth hours, more Dormitories fell to the assault. Stray fire accounted for even more losses. A temporary ceasefire in the seventh hour was only caused by the temporary occultation of the launch complex by a medium-sized aerial land mass. When the skies were clear again, the rockets rose up with renewed fury.
'They've hit all but one of the Exodus Arks,' Minla said, when the battle was in its ninth hour. 'We just had time to move the final ship out of range of the atomics. But if they find a way to increase their reach, by eliminating more payload mass . . .' She turned her face from his. 'It'll all have been for nothing, Merlin. They'll have won, and the last sixty years may as well not have happened.'
He felt preternaturally calm, knowing exactly what was coming. 'What do you want me to do?'
'Intervene,' Minla said. 'Use whatever force is merited.'
'I offered once. You said no.'
'You changed your mind once. Now I'm changing mine.'
Merlin went to Tyrant. He ordered the ship to deliver a concentrated charm-torp salvo against the compromised rocket facility, bringing more energy to bear on that one tiny area of land than had been deployed in all the years of the atomic wars. There was no need for him to accompany his ship; like a well-trained dog, Tyrant was perfectly capable of carrying out his orders without direct supervision.
They watched the spectacle from orbit. When the electric-white fire erupted on the horizon of Lecythus, brightening that entire limb of the planet in the manner of a stuttering cold sunrise, Merlin felt Minla's hand tighten around his own. For all her frailty, for all that the years had taken from her, astonishing steel remained in that grip.
'Thank you,' she said. 'You may just have saved us all.'
It had been ten years.
Lecythus and its sun now lay many light-weeks to stern. The one remaining Exodus Ark had reached five per cent of the speed of light. In sixty years - faster, if the engine could be improved - it would streak into another system, one that might offer the possibility of landfall. It flew alongside the gossamer line of the Waynet, using the tube as cover from Husker long-range sensors. The Exodus Ark carried only twelve hundred exiles, few of whom would live long enough to see another world.
The hospital was near the core of the ship, safely distant from the sleeting energies of interstellar radiation or the exotic emissions of the Waynet. Many of its patients were veterans of the Regressive War, victims of the viciously ingenious injuries wrought by the close conjunction of vacuum and heat, radiation and kinetic energy. Most of them would be dead by the time the fusion engine was silenced for cruise phase. For now they were being afforded the care appropriate to war heroes, even those who screamed bloodcurdling pleas for the painkilling mercy of euthanasia.