Would any group of Dwellers wish him ill, or somehow be under the command of somebody who did?
He called up the usually most reliable alien-watching service and accessed the global map. It was, for the first time since he’d been looking at it, completely clear. According to the display, there was not a single alien entity alive in Nasqueron. That appeared to include him, so his return hadn’t been documented yet, at least not by the enthusiasts who ran this service.
He was being called. Quercer Janath. He put the image-leaf back in its flank locker.
— Fassin. Anywhere we can take you?
— Locally, hasten to add.
— Ship at our disposal. Favour owed.
— That sort of thing.
· I don’t know, Fassin replied. — I’ve been thinking about that. Do you know any more about what’s happening with the invasion and the Starveling Cult forces?
· Getting reports coming in just now that there’s been some sort of breakdown at some conference.
— Firefight, bluntly.
— I’d like to find my friend Valseir, Fassin said. — I’ve sent a call, but no answer’s come back. I thought I might find him at a -
As he spoke, he thought suddenly of the RushWing Sheumerith, the Dwellers hanging trailed on long lines behind the great long flexible wing forever powering its way into the high skies of Nasqueron. The RushWing. That was the other place Valseir had said he might be found.
· Yes, he told the truetwin. — I do know where you could take me.
· Be in-atmosphere, you realise. Not that quick.
— Entirely used up our luck quotient bringing the ship into Nasq. unseen in the first place. Voehn ship, see. Nervous-making sort of thing for a lot of people. Apparently.
— That’s fine, Fassin told them.
They were scudding through the cloud stems under the topmost haze layer less than an hour later when the AM warheads went off. One was directly above them.
“Oh, wow!”
“Look at our shadow!”
A minute later, what they would later discover had been the destruction of the great ship Luseferous VII cast part of a giant halo of light all over the western sky. Quercer Janath freely confessed to being terribly impressed.
The Protreptic tore serenely on.
* * *
The first twelve ships of the Summed Fleet streaked across the inner system of Ulubis at just a per cent below light speed. Kilometre-long black minarets girdled by fast-spinning sections loosing missile clusters, pack munitions, scatter mines, stealth drones and suicide launchers, they lanced across the whole system in less than four hours, Nasqueron’s orbit in less than one and Sepekte’s in fifteen minutes.
Billions of kilometres behind them, on the same course and decelerating hard, lay the Mannlicher-Carcano and the main body of the Summed Fleet. Taince Yarabokin floated in her pod. In the VR command space of the battleship, there was something approaching total silence as the entire command crew lay quietly listening to the sparse exchanges beaming back from the twelve advance units darting across the system dead ahead.
Taince was amazed at how nervous she felt. She could feel her body trying to exhibit all the classic signs of the fight-or-flight response, and the pod’s bio systems doggedly countering each one. There was no doubt that this was an important mission. It would, arguably, be the most crucial one she’d ever been a part of. She was of sufficiently senior rank to have been briefed at the start on the strategic momentousness of what they were being sent to do, but even so she was surprised how similar she felt now to the way she’d felt on her first few combat missions. You never fully shook off the adrenalin rush no matter how many missions you undertook — the consensus was that the day you felt completely blase about a forthcoming engage-ment was either the day you were going to die or the day you should resign your commission forthwith — but the way she felt now was worryingly similar to how she’d felt before those early missions.
Somewhere, her nervousness would be being noted, too. Even if a live human medical officer wasn’t watching her life signs now, a program would be flagging her current state of anxiety as worth further investigation later. No privacy. Well, she’d known that when she joined up.
Taince took her mind away from these perplexing, almost embarrassing feelings and watched the data coming back from the lead ships.
What happened now, what these twelve craft discovered or didn’t discover as they crossed the system at accelerated particle speeds, would determine how the next part of her life was lived out.
There had been some odd energy and drive signatures from the system over the last few days, though nothing as bizarre as the sudden commotion around Nasqueron a few days ago. Twenty-plus antimatter explosions. All but one, it looked like, spread around the planet in a neat if wavy circle. They’d detonated too far out to do any great damage to the gas-giant itself or to its inhabitants, and the explosions had been very messy, almost as if they hadn’t been functioning warheads detonating efficiently but rather twenty — very big — ships losing M\AM containment at exactly the same time. Then, a minute or two later, an even bigger AM burst less than a light second out from Nasqueron, with the profile of something the size of the behemoth ship they’d identified earlier getting thoroughly blasted.
Then nothing, apart from the ambiguous maybe-leaving indications.
Because one plausible explanation that fitted most of the signs — no explanation anyone had come up with so far fitted all of them — was that the bad guys were pulling out. Nobody in fleet command really believed this was what could be happening -the Starveling Cult force had crossed decades of space to get to Ulubis: they wouldn’t turn tail and face the equally long trek back after just a few weeks, would they? — but it looked like one of the more likely explanations.
The data about to arrive would decide it one way or the other.
The battlecruiser 88, the advance squadron’s flagship, collating the real-time intelligence of the spearhead-shaped force and signalling it back to the main fleet, reported three heavy craft within detection though not attack range of the first, point destroyer. It signalled two of the following cruisers to adjust their trajectories and prepare remote munitions, guided and dumb. Little comms bleed. Possibly this was just good discipline or marginally better tech than they’d anticipated. Flank cruisers and destroyers reported a few missile platforms, firing at them, futilely, given their speed. A lot of mines, well spread. Evidence of AM material still floating free near the planet Nasqueron, in a debris profile that fitted exactly twenty ships having blown up at the same time eight days earlier. One big debris field, still heading outwards from the gas-giant, spreading, consistent with a very large ship having been destroyed.
A few other small enemy ships showing, the closest responding to their passing, firing beam weapons. No hits. The destroyer Bofors passed within a kilo-klick of a vessel of about the same size as it, identified it as a hostile before the other ship had even registered the craft hurtling past and hit and destroyed it with a high-X-ray laser from its phase-modulation collar turret before the hostile had time to react.
Halfway across the system now. Still just the three big targets. There should be hundreds.
The four craft at the trailing end of the advance squadron’s spear-point had time to spare while they nudge-deflected and picked off some of the targets that the point and mid-body ships had identified. They turned long-range sensors on the outer system and beyond, in the general direction of the E-5 Discon, getting a straight-down look along that track which the main fleet had only ever been able to view at a ninety-degree angle.