Himation came through scratchily on a battle-communication frequency, tidal RF interference grinding behind his voice. 'We can knock the drive pods right off it, Pater,' he suggested.
'Quick then, Manteau — before they can get it back into the Dyne. On les aura!'
The Green Carnation and Atalanta in Calydon detached themselves from the opposed files of the ambush: they raced toward one another, met head-on in a suicidal flare of retrofire, executed a terrifying Siamese turn through ninety degrees of arc, and hurled themselves side by side at the transporter, white heat blazing at their sterns and a trail of stripped and violated particles streaming out behind them.
IWG woke up, staggered about, broke formation. 'They've sent us beginners!' cried Himation joyously. And as The Green Carnation ran on in through the broken globement, her rearward screens showed the rest of the fleet closing like a golden jaw. Dyne-torpedoes flipped end over end out of their tubes and began a misleading vibration — in and out of Reality they went, like shoals of pike seen through muddy water, and slipped among the battleships.
Pater himself took control of the flagship. He bore down on the haulage vessel like a madman, the command-bridge glare turning his buttonhole carnation black and his teeth the color of steel. 'Torpedoes are so unselective, Captain!' he shouted in Truck's ear: 'And I love those long reaction guns!' The caterpillar expanded until it filled the screens, huge registration numbers against its silver skin. And bigger yet: until Truck was digging his fingernails into his wet palms; until The Green Carnation howled with proximity alarms; until Pater threw her up into the vertical position and presented his ventral guns in a sweeping broadside skid -
Move for move in impeccable formation, the two cruisers shuddered and shook, their gunners grinning in the red ectoplasmic backwash of the cannon — and, abruptly, the hauler was a dead whale, its drive compartments separating and vaporizing in a wild yellow rose of light, its hold sheared neatly away beneath the wrecker's torch. Before the rose was blown, Atalanta in Calydon and The Green Carnation were up and out, mirror-images tumbling and braking through a loop that brought them back to their wallowing prize.
And before that maneuver was complete, the rest of the fleet was hanging at rest in the vacuum, practicing fire-control on bits of wreckage. IWG hadn't fired a shot: they were split open, they had spilled their flesh all over the show. One of them was still trying to withdraw, caught by some failure of its drive as it faded into the dyne fields — a gray, ghostly rubber ball, perished, gaping with pain, neither here nor there.
Little Tiny Skeffern had suffered the entire circus with his eyes shut and his hands clamped round the neck of his guitar. 'Truck, I'm not cut out for this stuff,' he said. He sat down on the floor, drew up his legs, and jerked a thumb at Pater. 'He's off his head, that bloke.' He raised a feeble smile. 'Next time I see you coming, remind me of this — even three weeks on Sad al Bari is beginning to look bearable.'
The exterior screens caught fire for a moment as some thin-lipped gunner blew an IWG Dynaflow to pieces. Truck stared out at the drifting wreckage.
'We've got it now, Tiny. If Pater keeps his word, we can take the thing somewhere quiet and chuck it out of an airlock. Sigma-End's a nice place: we could go there and get smashed for a year — go back to being losers,'
Tiny watched his fingers stalking up and down the fretboard. 'We don't have to go there to do that,' he observed astutely.
Pater relinquished the flagship to his pilot, who grinned ruefully, made an aerobatical gesture with one hand, and murmured, 'Nice time, Pater.' Pater bowed and laughed. 'Dock it now,' he suggested, 'and be careful with the artwork.' The command-bridge relaxed, its peculiar voices diminished. The severed hold section of the hauler crept back into view, toppling end over end on a heading for M41 in Orion, a target it was unlikely to reach in the near future.
'Prepare to board, Manteau,' said Pater over the ship-to-ship.
There was a long pause, full of the croaking whisper of the stars. Someone adjusted the gain of the receiver, shrugged.
'Manteau?'
Himation came on. 'Pater,' he reported thoughtfully, 'we aren't boarding anything just at this precise moment. Have a look out there. The bloody Fleet's arrived.'
'Oh Jesus,' whispered Tiny Skeffern, and closed his eyes again.
IWG came out of the dyne-fields in three waves, fifty at a time, each spherical dreadnought half a mile in diameter and mounting enough fire power to pulverize Jupiter. Their fire ports were already open, sowing torpedoes like showers of steel needles. Syringa and The Melancholia that Transcends All Wit vaporized in the first second of the engagement, trapped among the slagged embers of the ambushed convoy. The New English Art Club ran helplessly through the resulting plasma-front and came out limned with a fire of her own; looping and twisting, plowed into the last of the escort ships (which was still trying to vanish) and joined it half in and half out of dyne, ectoplasmic and doomed -
Aboard the flagship, Swinburne Sinclair-Pater rubbed his jaw and saw that it was impossible to disengage. The command-bridge howled and wept, the crew leaped and gyrated among their alien machinery like salmon in white water -
'I'm going to ram, bugger it,' reported the Liverpool Medici, driving sideways across Pater's bows at a group of three Fleet vessels, and was never heard from again. Down in her belly, gunners threw up disgustingly and cheered the moment of impact -
'Get out of the way and let the ferret see the rabbit!' screamed White Jonquil to the Gold Scab. She took a hit on the bridge and, her turrets spouting erratically, cartwheeled twenty thousand miles in a halo of tangled struts and hull-plates. 'Now look what you've done! — '
' — and there's a core-melt on Number Five,' whispered a faint, injured voice. 'Can anybody help — ' He died away without identifying himself, merged with the sea of interference -
It was murder.
They winked out one by one, The Forsaken Garden, Les Fleurs Du Mal, the Whistler, and the Fastidious. Running on to the guns, Imaginary Portraits embedded herself in her assailant: they spun together disconsolately, drifting toward far Centauri. Trilby and the Strange Great Sins collided, embraced, tore through IWG like an impromptu scythe.
A distant bubbling moan, as the ship with the core-melt came back on, pleading. Himation's voice cut across him as Atalanta in Calydon cut across the top of Pater's screen, trying to outrun a coven of shimmering torpedoes. 'We've been suckered, Pater. The jig's up. I count fifteen of us left, and I'm getting damage reports from my own crew.'
' — if someone could just get a party aboard. We've lost steerage — '
In half an hour, it was all up with them. Fifteen had dwindled to five after an attempt to break out of the IWG englobement: then to two. Tiny Skeffern shook his head and stared glumly at Truck as Pater and Himation skulked through the tragic debris, powered down and on communications silence to avoid detection. Corpses with frosty eyes knocked gently on the bull of The Green Carnation, and anarchist ships like filleted golden carp floated across her screens; while out beyond the eddy of wreckage IWG depended — a colony of fat spiders — from invisible threads.