The fields watched him as he propelled himself along the gangway, hand over hand in the weightless fall of the Universal Suffrage’s cruise phase. None of them had yet snapped down their visors. He could see their faces, feel their eyes tracking him as he passed. He didn’t recognise any of them. Even their names, stencilled onto the inert-matter armour of their suits, triggered only glimmers of recognition.
The pressure of their attention demanded a response from him, some rousing, rallying speech. His mouth was raw, filled with the aftertaste of his retching session. Dreyfus would surely have said something, Crissel thought. It didn’t need to be much. Just a word or two of encouragement. He brought himself to a halt and turned around slowly, nodding at the young men and women filling those black lobster-like suits.
‘None of us are under the illusion that this is going to be easy,’ Crissel said, instantly dismayed at how quavery and ineffectual his own voice sounded. ‘They’ll have the hub airlocks well guarded and we’ll more than likely be meeting opposition as soon as we reach the interior. It’s quite probable that we’ll be outnumbered. But we do have the advantage of training and equipment. Remember, you are Panoply operatives. You have right on your side.’
The reaction was not what he had been expecting, or hoping for. The prefects just looked bewildered and fearful, as if his words had robbed them of the exact measure of morale he had hoped to bolster. ‘When I say it won’t be easy,’ he continued, ‘I don’t mean we won’t succeed. Of course not. I just mean—’
A girl with almond-coloured eyes and a heart-shaped face asked, ‘How will we distinguish hostiles from locals, sir?’
He tapped the crown of his own helmet. ‘Tactical drop-down will overlay all citizens known to the polling apparatus. Anyone you see who isn’t recognised by the overlay must be assumed a non-indigent hostile.’ He flashed her an overconfident smile. ‘Naturally, you have authorisation to euthanise.’
‘Pardon me, sir,’ said a young man with a day’s growth of chin stubble, ‘but we were informed that we’d probably be operating in an environment without local abstraction.’
‘That’s correct,’ Crissel said, nodding. If Aubusson had dropped off the external abstraction, there was every reason to believe its internal systems had gone into blackout as well.
‘Then how will the tactical overlays know who is who?’ the girl asked, with the tone of someone who genuinely expected a reasonable answer.
Crissel opened his mouth to respond, then felt ominous mental trap doors opening. He’d made a mistake. There could be no guarantee that the overlays would work at all.
‘The hostiles will be the ones… being hostile,’ he said.
The prefects just stared at him. If they’d mocked him, or even fired back another question, it would have been preferable to that dumb, expectant staring, as if what he had told them made perfect operational sense.
Something stirred in the dry embers of his gut again. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, preparing to turn and make his way back to the cubicle. But just as he spoke, the pilot emerged from the flight deck into the assembly area, holding headphones against his skull. ‘Visual on Aubusson, sir. Thought you’d like to see it.’
‘Thank you,’ Crissel said.
He entered the cruiser’s spacious flight deck with a shaming sense of relief. House Aubusson looked frighteningly close on the allocated display panes, but that was deceptive; they were still thousands of kilometres away, and the habitat’s anti-collision systems would not yet have picked out the approaching cruiser from the confusion of general Glitter Band traffic moving on similar vectors.
‘Looks normal enough,’ Crissel commented as the end-on view zoomed to reveal the small-scale details of the docking hub, where a handful of spacecraft were still attached. ‘I take it there hasn’t been any significant change since we left Panoply?’
‘Nothing that will affect our approach,’ the pilot said. ‘But there’s something you should know about.’ He opened windows over the main view, illustrating side-on views of the habitat captured by some other distant vehicle or camera platform. ‘Visible light,’ he said. ‘Six hours apart. The view on the right is the most recent.’
‘They look the same.’
The pilot nodded, confirming Crissel’s judgement. ‘Now look at the same snapshots in infrared. Anything jump out at you?’
One end of the habitat was a smear of thermal emissions, where it had been cool before. The overlay shaded structures in a gradation of colours, ranging from brick red to fiery orange.
‘Judging by those cooling foils, she’s putting out a lot of heat all of a sudden.’
The pilot made an affirmative noise. ‘Started up in the last four hours, as far as we can tell.’
Crissel risked a silly question. ‘Which end is that?’
‘Not the one we’re intending to dock at. The docking hub’s still as cool as it ever was, apart from some small hotspots around the weapons, dumping the waste heat after they fired.’
Weapons, Crissel thought. How easy it was to switch from thinking of the anti-collision systems as instruments for the preservation of life to machines designed to terminate it.
‘So what’s happening? Why is she getting hotter at that end?’
‘Guesswork so far, but one explanation could be that the manufactories have started up.’
‘I didn’t know Aubusson had manufacturing capability.’
‘Years back she was a bigger player, apparently,’ the pilot said, tapping a finger against a text summary on his fold-up armrest pane. ‘Never as large as any of the heavy manufactories, but still putting out a few hundred thousand tonnes a year. High-value, low-bulk products. Construction servitors, mainly, for use in setting up the new industrial centres on the Eye. Good business for a while, but once the lunar manufacturies were up to speed, places like Aubusson lost their business.’
Old history, Crissel thought. Marco’s Eye had been the main industrial supplier in the system for more than a century. ‘So what happened to the manufactory?’
‘They kept the infrastructure. Must have been betting against a time when they’d be able to compete against the Eye, for one reason or another. Judging by that thermal output, they’ve got the factory wheels spinning again.’
‘But they’ve only had control of Aubusson for half a day. They can’t have started up the manufactory so quickly. It isn’t humanly possible.’
‘Like I said,’ the pilot said defensively, ‘just guesswork.’
‘This doesn’t affect our mission,’ Crissel said shakily. ‘If anything it makes it more urgent that we get in there and secure the place for Panoply.’
‘Just thought you ought to know, sir.’
‘You were right to bring it to my attention.’ After an uncomfortable pause, during which he was uncertain as to whether his presence on the flight deck was appropriate or not, Crissel said: ‘How soon now?’
‘We’ll be entering the habitat’s collision-avoidance volume in six minutes. The cargo drones were intercepted when they were two hundred kilometres into that volume, or about one hundred kilometres from the hub.’ The pilot drew his attention to another read-out, crammed with tactical summary data. ‘But we’ll be ready to target the anti-collision weapons with our guns long before then. We already have positive firing solutions for half of them.’
The back of Crissel’s neck bristled. ‘Then why don’t we fire? If it isn’t a stupid question.’
‘They’d see us then. We’re presenting a highly stealthed cross section now, but as soon as we launch missiles, the enemy aiming systems’ll be able to backtrack from our missiles’ exhaust vectors.’