“I didn’t ask for a likelihood estimate,” Dreyfus said, nerves beginning to get the better of him.
It took another thirty minutes to bring the tumbling ship under control. The specialists rotated the hull so that its long axis was pointed at the Glitter Band, minimising its collision cross section should something go amiss with the nukes. There was no possibility of using the tugs to shove the lighthugger onto a safe trajectory; at best, all that could be done would be to aim her at one of the less densely populated orbits and hope that she slipped through the empty space between habitats. From this far out, the Glitter Band appeared to be a smooth, flat ring of tarnished silver: the individual glints from ten thousand habitats blurring into a solid bow of light.
Dreyfus kept reminding himself that it was still mostly empty space, but his eyes couldn’t accept it.
“How long?” he asked.
“You have just under an hour, sir,” Pell informed him.
“Give me an airlock as close to the front kilometre of the ship as you can manage. If anyone’s survived, that’s where they’ll be.”
Pell seemed reticent.
“Sir, I think you need to look at this first, before you go aboard that thing. We just picked up a burst of radio, stronger than anything we’ve heard since we began our approach.”
“What kind of burst?”
“Voice-only comms. It was faint, but we still managed to localise it pretty well. As it happens, it matched
one of the hotspots we’re already monitoring.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t see any hotspots because of all the thermal noise.”
“I was talking about hotspots inside the ship, sir. This one’s coming from outside.”
“Someone’s escaped?”
“Not exactly, sir. It’s as if they’re on the outside of the hull. We should have an image for you once we’re a bit closer.”
Pell started bringing the deep-system cruiser closer to the Accompaniment of Shadows. It was a fraught operation. Even though the lighthugger had been stabilised and was most likely completely drained of air, it was still giving off vapour at a prodigious rate as the ship’s water reserves boiled away into space. With the outgassing vapour came a steady eruption of debris, ranging from thumb-sized twinkling shards to chunks of warped metal the size of houses. The cruiser’s hull pinged and clanged with each nerve-jarring impact. Occasionally Dreyfus felt the subsonic burp as one of the Democratic Circus’s automatic guns intercepted one of the larger pieces of junk.
Forty-five minutes now remained.
“I’ve isolated the sound burst, sir,” Pell told Dreyfus.
“Do you want me to replay it?”
“Go ahead,” Dreyfus said, frowning.
But when the fragment burst over the cruiser’s intercom, he understood Pell’s unwillingness to transmit it without warning. It was just a momentary thing, like a squall of random sound picked up when scanning across radio frequencies.
But in that squall was something unspeakable, an implicit horror that pierced Dreyfus to the marrow. It was a voice calling out in pain or terror or both; a voice that encapsulated some primal state of human distress. There was a universe of misery in that fragment of sound; enough to open a door into a part of the mind that was usually kept locked and bolted.
It was not a sound Dreyfus ever wanted to hear again.
“Do you have that image ready for me?”
“Zeroing in now, sir. I’ll put it on the wall.”
Part of the transparent hull revealed an enlargement of the prow of the lighthugger. It zoomed in dizzyingly. For a moment Dreyfus was overwhelmed by the intricate, gothic detail of the ship’s spire-like hull. Then he made out the one thing that didn’t belong.
There was a figure on the hull. The spacesuited form was spread out, limbs splayed as if it had been nailed in place. Dreyfus knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was looking at Captain Dravidian.
And that Captain Dravidian was still alive.
The Ultras had done a thorough job with their victim. They’d nailed his extremities to the hull, with his head nearest to the prow. Some form of piton had been rammed or shot into his forearms and lower legs, puncturing suit armour and penetrating the hull’s fabric. Dreyfus judged that it was the same kind of piton that ships used to guy themselves to asteroids or comets: hyperdiamond-tipped, viciously barbed against accidental retraction. The entry wounds had been sealed over with rapid-setting caulk, preventing
pressure loss. Thus immobilised, Dravidian had been welded to the hull along the edges of his limbs and the midpoint of his torso. A thick silvery line of fillet-weld connected him to the plating of the ship, creating a seamless bond between the armour of his suit and the material of the hull. Dreyfus—standing weightless next to Dravidian, anchored to the hull by the soles of his boots—stared at the spectacle and realised that no expertise with cutters would suffice to free his witness in the time remaining.
He was going to ride his ship all the way to its doom, whether that meant a collision in the Glitter Band or an instant of nuclear annihilation. Through Dravidian’s faceplate, eyes tracked Dreyfus and Sparver. They were wide and alert, but utterly without hope.
Dravidian knew exactly how good his chances were.
Dreyfus used his left hand to unreel the froptic line from his right wrist. The design of Dravidian’s suit was unfamiliar to him: it was probably a jerry-built lash-up of home-made parts and ancient pieces, some of them dating back to the era of chemical rocketry. But almost all suits were engineered for a degree of intercompatibility. Air- and power-line jacks conformed to a handful of standard interfaces, and had done for centuries. It was the same for comms inputs.
Dreyfus found the corresponding jack in Dravidian’s sleeve and slid the froptic in. He felt the minute click as the contacts docked, followed an instant later by a hiss of foreign air-circulator noise in his helmet. He was hearing Dravidian’s life-support system.
“Captain Dravidian? I hope you can hear me. I’m Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, of Panoply.”
There was a pause longer than Dreyfus had been expecting. He was almost ready to give up on the attempt to talk when he heard Dravidian take in a laboured breath.
“I can hear you, Prefect Dreyfus. And yes, I’m Dravidian. It was very astute of you to guess.”
“I wish we could have reached you sooner. I heard your transmission. You sounded in pain.”
There came something like a chuckle.
“I was.”
“And now?”
“That at least has passed. Tell me: what have they done? I felt great pain in my extremities… but I couldn’t see. They were holding me down. Did they cut me into pieces?”
Dreyfus surveyed the welded form, as if he needed to reassure himself that all of Dravidian was there.
“No,” he said.
“They didn’t cut you into pieces.”
“That’s good. It means I go with some dignity.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“There is a scale of punishment amongst Ultras, when a crime is said to have been committed. As it is, my guilt has been deemed highly probable. But not certain. If they thought all possibility of innocence had been eliminated, then they would have cut me into pieces.”
“They’ve nailed you to the ship,” Dreyfus said.
“Nailed you and then welded you.”
“Yes, I saw the light.”
“I can’t get you out of that suit, or cut the suit away from the hull. I can’t cut away a section of the hull, either. Not in thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?”
“I’m afraid I have orders to destroy this ship. I am sorry that you have been made to suffer, Captain. I can promise you that my justice will be swift and clean, when it comes.”
“Nukes?”