“Now what?” Luseferous demanded.
“Damage control here, sir,” a voice said from the esuit. “Energy bolt straight through the whole ship, dead amidships. About two metres diameter. Plus… the bows have been shot off, back… to… about… the eighty-metre mark. Just gone. Same novel energy profile as the midships beam. Light speed; zero warning. Reactive defence systems still looking for a counter-measure against any subsequent usage… nothing coming up so far, sir.”
“Comms, sir,” another voice said, “Dwellers, demanding return of their people aboard. Apparently those were just warning shots.”
Tuhluer came striding up.
Luseferous looked at him. “Hand the Dwellers back,” he told the ADC. “Then get this thing away from here.” He strode towards the ship-to-ship.
“And the AM ships, sir?”
“Leave them where they are. Delay the ultimatum until the Luseferous VII is clear.”
“Sir.”
This time the Archimandrite made it all the way to the waiting flagship.
An hour later the Luseferous VII was still making its lumbering, injured way out of the planet’s gravity well. The Rapacious was already half a million klicks away and still accelerating. The Archimandrite — still shaking with rage even in his acceleration couch, the full awfulness and sheer insult of what had happened at last sinking in, his patience finally exhausted (those three facetious shithead Dwellers had even escaped, esuits reflecting or deflecting everything the Rapacious had thrown at them after they’d exited the Luseferous VII, disappearing, apparently unharmed, into the cloud tops) -ordered that the ultimatum be made to the Dwellers immediately, and that one of the ships carrying an AM warhead should drop its weapon into the planet’s atmosphere, just to show that they were serious.
The reply was almost instantaneous. The ship with the AM bomb — each one of the twenty ships with the AM bombs -vanished in a sudden pinpoint flare of light. All the warheads went off partially, reacting messily with the ordinary matter debris left after the destruction of the ships. Twenty ragged little suns guttered round Nasqueron like a tilted necklace, flaring, fading, flaring again and fading slowly once more.
Moments later, a hyper-velocity missile rose out of the turgid skies of the gas-giant and found the Luseferous VII despite all its desperate countermeasures within two minutes of clearing the cloud tops.
The radiation front tripped the Rapacious’s sensor buffers. That was how a proper antimatter warhead was supposed to work, seemed to be the implication.
The last signal from the great ship before it was ripped entirely apart and turned into radiation and high-speed shrapnel was from aide-de-camp Tuhluer, calmly informing Luseferous that the Archimandrite was a cunt.
Fassin Taak looked up at the stars of home. He felt tears in his eyes, even within the shock-gel. He rested on a windswept platform above a small cloud-top city low in the south polar region, just a couple of thousand kilometres from the torn, fluid boundary with Nasqueron’s southernmost atmospheric belt.
He tried to locate a friendly satellite, some signal that the little gascraft could recognise, but he couldn’t find anything. All broadcast signals were either terribly weak or scrambled, and he couldn’t locate any low-orbit devices to bounce a hail off. He tried to lock on to one of the weak broadcast wavelengths and use the gascraft’s biomind to decipher the signals, but the routines didn’t seem to be working. He gave up. For the moment, he was content just to sit here and look out at the few, familiar stars.
Despite Y’sul’s injuries, they’d still had to undergo an albeit slightly gentler form of the wild spiralling. Fassin had lain in the gascraft, feeling the series of nested corkscrewings and helixes build up like some coiling spring, thinking that this was them entering the wormhole, though in fact, as it turned out, they’d already been through it and this was the unwinding. Then, suddenly, they were here, back in Nasqueron, in the southern polar region, not the northern one they’d left from.
Sinking down just a few kilometres through the cloud tops, the ex-Voehn ship Protreptic had come to rest in a slightly too-big cradle in an enormous, echoing cavern of a hangar here in the lower regions of the nearly deserted polar city of Quaibrai. The City Administrator and a crowd of several hundred Dwellers had met them, hooting and throwing streamers and scent grenades.
A delegation comprising individuals from several different alien-ship enthusiast clubs had become particularly excited when they’d seen the Voehn craft and had bobbed up and down with impatience as Y’sul had been carefully offloaded and given into the care of a hospital squad. As soon as Y’sul, Fassin and the truetwin Quercer Janath had exited, the chirping, sizzling mass of enthusiasts rushed aboard, jostling for position as they’d tried to fit down the corridors and access ways. The truetwin had, thoughtfully, expanded the ship from its needle-ship portal-piercing formation to a fatter and hence more commodious configuration, but it still looked like a tight squeeze.
Y’sul, already looking half mended, though still shaking off the grogginess of his semi-coma, had twisted a fraction in his scoop-stretcher to look at Fassin as the hospital squad brought their ambulance skiff down to him. “See?” he’d croaked. “Got you back safely, didn’t I?”
Fassin had agreed that he had. He’d tried to pat Y’sul but used the wrong manipulator and instead just jerked in mid-gas. He’d swivelled and used the gascraft’s other arm, clutching the wounded Dweller’s hub-hand.
“You off home now?” Y’sul had asked.
“However much of it is left. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, if you do go, come back soon.” Y’sul had paused and shaken himself, as though trying to wake up more fully. “I should be ready to receive visitors again in a couple of dozen days or so and I anticipate a very full social calendar indeed thereafter. I fully intend to exploit my recent injuries and experiences without compunction and exaggerate outrageously my part in the taking of the Voehn ship, not to mention embellish my fight with the Voehn commander to the point of what will probably seem like complete unrecognisability, the first time you hear it. I’d appreciate your corroboration, providing you are able to enter into the spirit of the thing and not insist on being overly encumbered by the vulgar exigencies of objective truth, whatever version of it you may think you recall. What do you say?”
“My memory’s kind of hazy,” Fassin had told the Dweller. “I’ll probably back up anything you say.”
“Splendid!”
“If I can come back, I shall.”
Privately, he didn’t even know if he could get away in the first place. He didn’t know what sort of infrastructure remained to get him off the planet, get the gascraft repaired and return him — if whoever was in charge would let him return — nor whether the Dwellers would allow him to return.
During the last part of the six-hour journey from the worm-hole, when Quercer Janath had allowed him to see where they were and let him access the local data-carrying spectra, he’d tapped into the Nasqueron news services to see what had been going on during his absence.
The Dweller news was all about the war. The Formal War between Zone 2 and Belt C. Apparently it had become deeply exciting and enthralling and was already being talked of in respected critical circles as a classic of the genre, even though it was probably barely halfway through yet and still, with any luck at all, had a great deal to offer.