It was Emmet Mordden, again, who was on duty in the operations centre when the Organization fleet started to emerge above New California. The hellhawks were first, their wormholes opening more or less in the official emergence zone, a hundred thousand kilometres above Monterey. That gave them some warning that the Adamist craft were en route. Emmet quickly called in five more operatives to monitor their rag-tag arrival. They certainly aimed for the emergence zone, but with possessed officers on board aiming and hitting were increasingly separate concepts. Event horizons started to inflate across a vast section of space around the planet; the only thing regular about them was the timing. One every twenty seconds.
The big flight trajectory holoscreens ringing the centre had to change perspective several times, clicking down through their magnification to encompass space right out to Requa, New California’s fourth moonlet. Black icons started to erupt across the screen as if it was being struck by dirty rain.
The AI began to absorb the swarm of information datavised in from the SD sensor platforms, and started plotting the starships’ erratic trajectories. Multiple vector lines sprang up on every console display. The operators studied them urgently, opening communication circuits to verify the ships were still under Organization control. Emmet got so carried along by the pandemonium of the first few minutes it took a while before he began to realize something was badly wrong with the whole episode. Firstly, they were too early, Admiral Kolhammer’s task force couldn’t possibly have arrived at Tranquillity yet. Secondly, there were too many ships. Even if the ambush had been a massive success, some ships would have been lost. Of all Capone’s lieutenants, he had the most pragmatic view of just how effective the fleet ships were.
Those two ugly facts were just beginning to register, when he sensed the dismay bubbling up among Jull von Holger’s thoughts, as the hellhawk liaison man communicated with his colleagues.
“What the hell is it?” Emmet demanded. “Why are they back here? Did they lose, chicken out, or what?”
Jull von Holger shook his head in bewilderment, most reluctant to be the messenger of bad news. “No. No, they didn’t lose. Their target . . . Tranquillity jumped away.”
Emmet frowned at him.
“Look, just call Luigi, okay. I don’t understand it myself.”
Emmet gave him a long dissatisfied look, then turned to his own console. He ordered it to find the Salvatore ’s transponder, and open a channel to the flagship. “What’s going on?” he asked when a fuzzy picture of Luigi Balsamo appeared in the corner of his display.
“She tricked us,” Luigi shouted angrily. “That Saldana bitch ran away. Christ knows how she managed it, but the whole thing vanished down a wormhole. Nobody told us a habitat could do that. You never warned us, did you? You’re supposed to be the Organization’s technical whiz kid. Why the fuck didn’t you say something?”
“About what? What do you mean it went down a wormhole? What went down a wormhole?”
“Why don’t you listen , shitbrain? The habitat! The habitat vanished in front of us!”
Emmet stared at the image, refusing to believe what he’d heard. “I’m calling Al,” he said eventually.
It was the first time Luigi had ever been intimidated by the big double doors of the Nixon suite. There were a couple of soldiers on duty outside, wearing their standard fawn-brown double-breasted suits, big square-jawed guys with a dark rasp of stubble, glossy Thompson machine guns held prominently. He could sense several people milling about inside, their familiar thoughts dull and unhappy as they waited for him. He thought of all the punishments and reprimands he’d attended in his own capacity as one of the Organization’s elite lieutenants. The omens weren’t good.
One of the soldiers opened the doors, a superior in-the-know grin on his face. He didn’t say anything, just made a mocking gesture of welcome. Luigi resisted the urge to smash his face to pulp, and walked in.
“What the fuck happened?” Al bellowed.
Luigi glanced round at the semicircle of erstwhile friends as the doors closed behind him. Patricia was there, as was Silvano, Jezzibella, Emmet, Mickey, and that little bitch Kiera. All of them going with the tide that was sweeping him away to drown.
“We were given some very bad information.” He looked pointedly at Patricia. “Perez sold us a dummy. And you bought it.”
“He didn’t,” she snapped. “He possessed one of the First Admiral’s top aids in Trafalgar. Kolhammer was heading straight for Tranquillity.”
“And we would have got him, too. If somebody had just warned me. I mean, Jesus H Christ, an entire goddamn habitat flitting off. Do you have any idea how big that thing was?”
“Who cares?” Al said. “The habitat wasn’t your main target. You were there to blow up Kolhammer’s ships.”
“The only way we could do that was if we’d captured the habitat first,” Luigi said angrily. “Don’t try blaming all this on me. I did everything you asked.”
“Who the fuck else am I going to blame?” Al asked. “You were there, it was your responsibility.”
“Nobody has ever heard of a habitat that can do that before,” Luigi ground out. “Nobody.” He shoved an accusatory finger at Jezzibella. “Right?”
For whatever reason, Jezzibella had assumed her impish adolescent girl persona, red ribbons tying her hair into ponytails, a white blouse and grey pleated skirt not really covering her body. She pouted, a gesture which was almost obscenely provocative. It was an act which various judges had been asked to ban when she performed it live on tour. “Right. But I’m hardly an expert on energy patterning systems, now am I?”
“Christ almighty. Emmet?” It was almost a plea.
“It is unprecedented,” Emmet said with some sympathy.
“And you.” Luigi glared at Kiera. “You lived in a habitat. You knew all about how they work, why didn’t you tell us?” The attack didn’t quite kick up the response he expected. A flash of icy anger twisted Kiera’s thoughts, while Al simply sneered scornfully.
“Valisk was not capable of performing a swallow manoeuvre,” she said. “As far as we know, only Tranquillity has that ability. Certainly none of the Edenist habitats can. I don’t know about the other three independent habitats.”
“Didn’t stop Valisk from vanishing, though, did it,” Al muttered snidely.
Silvano gave an over-loud laugh, while Jezzibella smiled demurely at Kiera’s discomfort. Luigi looked from one to the other in puzzlement. “Okay, so are we agreed? It was a shitty situation, sure. But there was nothing I could do about it. That Saldana girl took everyone by surprise.”
“You were the fleet’s commander,” Al said. “I gave you that job because I thought you were smart, man, that you had some flare and imagination. A guy with a few qualities, know what I mean? If all I want is some putz who expects a slap on the back every time he does what he’s told I would have given the job to Bernhard Alsop. I expected more from you, Luigi, a lot more.”
“Like what? I mean, come on here, tell me, Al, just what the hell would you have done?
“Stopped it from flying out. Don’t you get it, Luigi? You were my man on the ground. I was goddamn depending on you to bring the Organization through this okay. Instead, I’m left with shit all over my face. Once you saw what was happening you should have zeroed the place.”
“Christ, why won’t any of you listen ? I was fucking trying to zero it, Al. That’s what spooked Saldana; that’s what made her scoot the hell out of there. I’d got nearly five thousand of those war rockets chasing after her faster than a coyote with a hornet up its ass, and she got clean away. There was nothing we could do. We were damn lucky to cut free ourselves. The explosions from all those war rockets did some damage, too, we were . . .”