The Revelation Space Collection

approach, tying up her defences with a low probability/high consequence threat. It was neither clever nor original, but it was, more or less, exactly what she would have done under the same circumstances. She would give him that, at least: he had certainly not disappointed her.

Volyova decided to give him one last chance before ending his fun.

‘Clavain?’ she asked, broadcasting on the same frequency she had already used for her ultimatum. ‘Clavain, are you listening to me?’

Twenty seconds passed, and then she heard his voice. ‘I’m listening, Triumvir. I take it this isn’t an offer of surrender?’

‘I’m offering you a chance, Clavain, before I end this. A chance for you to walk away and fight on another day, against a more enthusiastic adversary.’

She waited for his reply to crawl back to her. The delay could be artificial, but it almost certainly meant he was still aboard Zodiacal Light.

‘Why would you want to cut me any slack, Triumvir?’

‘You’re not a bad man, Clavain. Just… misguided. You think you need the weapons more than I do, but you’re wrong, mistaken. I won’t hold it against you. No serious harm has yet been done. Turn your forces around and we’ll call it a misunderstanding.’

‘You speak as someone who thinks they hold the upper hand, Ilia. I wouldn’t be so certain, if I were you.’

‘I have the weapons, Clavain.’ She found herself smiling and frowning at the same time. ‘That makes rather a lot of difference, don’t you think?’

‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I think one ultimatum is enough for anyone, don’t you?’

‘You’re a fool, Clavain. The sad thing is that you’ll never know how much of a fool.’

He did not respond.

‘Well, Ilia?’ Khouri asked.

‘I gave the bastard his chance. Now it’s time to stop playing games.’ She raised her voice. ‘Captain? Can you hear me? I want you to give me full control of cache weapon seventeen. Are you willing to do that?’

There was no answer. The moment stretched. The back of her neck crawled with anticipation. If the Captain was not prepared to let her actually use the five deployed weapons, then all her plans crumbled to dust and Clavain would suddenly seem a lot less foolish than he had a minute earlier.

Then she noticed the subtle change in the weapon’s icon status, signifying that she now had full military control of cache weapon seventeen.

‘Thank you, Captain,’ Volyova said sweetly. Then she addressed the weapon. ‘Hello, Seventeen. Nice to be doing business with you again.’

She pushed her hand into the projection, pinching the floating icon of the weapon between her fingers. Again the icon responded sluggishly, reflecting the dead weight of the weapon as it was brought out from the sensor shadow of Infinity’s hull. As it moved it was aligning itself, bringing its long killing axis to bear on the distant, but not really so distant, target of Zodiacal Light. At any time, Volyova’s knowledge of the position of Clavain’s ship was twenty seconds out of date, but that was only a minor annoyance. In the unlikely event that he suddenly moved, she was still guaranteed a kill. She would sweep his volume of possible occupancy with the weapon, knowing that she was sure to hit him at some point. She would know when she did; the detonation of his Conjoiner drives would light up the entire system. If anything was guaranteed to prick the interest of the Inhibitors, it would be that.

Still, she had to do it.

Yet Volyova trembled on the verge of execution. It felt wrong: too final; too abrupt; too — and this surprised her — unsporting. She felt she owed him a last chance to back down; that some final, direly urgent warning should be given. He had come such a long way, after all. And he had clearly imagined himself to be in with a chance of gaining the weapons.

Clavain… Clavain… she thought to herself. It should not have been like this…

But it was, and that was that.

She tapped the icon, like a baby poking a bauble.

‘Goodbye,’ Volyova whispered.

The moment passed. The status indices and symbols next to the cache weapon’s icon changed, signifying a profound alteration in the weapon’s condition. She looked at the real-time image of Clavain’s ship, mentally counting down the twenty seconds it would take before the ship was torn apart by the beam from weapon seventeen. The beam would chew a canyon-sized wound in Clavain’s ship, assuming it did not trigger an immediate and fatal Conjoiner-drive detonation.

After ten seconds he had not moved. She knew then that her aim had been good, that the impact would be precise and devastating. Clavain would know nothing of his own death, nothing of the oblivion that was coming.

She waited out the remaining ten seconds, anticipating the bitter sense of triumph that would accompany the kill.

The time elapsed. Involuntarily, she flinched against the coming brightness, like a child waiting for the biggest and best firework.

Twenty seconds became twenty-one… twenty-one became twenty-five… thirty. Half a minute passed. Then a minute.

Clavain’s ship remained in view.

Nothing had happened.

THIRTY-SIX

She heard his voice again. It was calm, polite, almost apologetic.

‘I know what you just tried, Ilia. But don’t you think I’d already have considered the possibility of you turning the weapons against me?’

She stammered an answer. ‘What… did… you… do?’

Twenty seconds stretched to an eternity.

‘Nothing, really,’ Clavain said. ‘I just told the weapon not to fire. They’re our property, Ilia, not yours. Didn’t it occur to you for one moment that we might have a way to protect ourselves against them?’

‘You’re lying,’ she said.

Clavain sounded amused, as if he had secretly hoped she would demand more proof. ‘I can show it to you again, if you like.’

He told her to turn her attention to the other cache weapons, the ones that she had already thrown against the Inhibitors.

‘Now concentrate on the weapon closest to the remains of Roc, will you? You’re about to see it stop firing.’

It was a different kind of war after that. Within an hour the first waves of Clavain’s assault force were reaching the immediate volume of space around Nostalgia for Infinity. He watched it at the dead remove of ten light-seconds, feeling as distant from the battle he had initiated as some antiquated hill-top general gazing at his armies through field glasses, the din and fury of combat too far away to hear.

‘It was a good trick,’ Volyova told him.

‘It wasn’t any trick. Just a precaution you should never have assumed we wouldn’t have taken. Our own weapons, Ilia? Be serious.’

‘A signal, Clavain?’

‘A coded neutrino burst. You can’t block it or jam it, so don’t even think of trying. It won’t work.’

She came back with a question he had not been expecting, one that reminded him not to underestimate her for an instant.

‘Fair enough. But I would have thought, assuming you have the means to stop them from working, that you’d