Conjoiners stormed onto the roof of the nest, taking up defensive positions around the domes and the dyke’s edge. Most of them carried the same guns they had used against the Ouroborus. Smaller numbers were setting up automatic cannon on tripods. One or two were manhandling large anti-assault weapons into position. Most of it was war surplus. Fifteen years ago the Conjoiners had avoided extinction by deploying weapons of awesome ferocity — but those ship-to-ship armaments were simply too destructive to use against a nearby foe. Now it would be more visceral, closer to the primal templates of combat, and none of what the Conjoiners were marshalling would be much use against the kind of assault Warren had prepared, Clavain knew. They could slow an attack, but not much more than that.
Galiana had given him another breather mask, made him don lightweight chameleoflage armour and then forced him to carry one of the smaller guns. The gun felt alien in his hands; something he had never expected to carry again. The only possible justification for carrying it was to use it against his brother’s forces — against his own side.
Could he do that?
It was clear that Warren had betrayed him; he had surely been aware of the worms around the nest. So his brother was capable not just of contempt, but of treacherous murder. For the first time, Clavain felt genuine hatred for Warren. He must have hoped that the worms would destroy the shuttle completely and kill Clavain and Voi in the process. It must have pained him to see Clavain make it to the dyke… pained him even more when Clavain called to talk about the tragedy. But Warren’s larger plan had not been affected. The diplomatic link between the nest and Deimos was secure — even the Demarchists had no immediate access to it. So Clavain’s call from the surface could be quietly ignored; spysat imagery doctored to make it appear as if he had never reached the dyke… had in fact been repelled by Conjoiner treachery. Inevitably, the Demarchists would unravel the deception, given time… but if Warren’s plan succeeded, they would all be embroiled in war long before then. That, thought Clavain, was all that Warren had ever wanted.
Two brothers, Clavain thought. In many ways so alike. Both had embraced war once, but, like a fickle lover, Clavain had wearied of its glories. He had not even been injured as severely as Warren… but perhaps that was the point, too. Warren needed another war to avenge what one had stolen from him.
Clavain despised and pitied him in equal measure.
He searched for the safety clip on the gun. The rifle, now that he studied it more closely, was not all that different from those he had used during the war. The read-out said the ammo-cell was fully charged.
He looked into the sky.
The attack wave broke orbit hard and steep above the Wall: five hundred fireballs screeching towards the nest. The insertion scorched centimetres of ablative armour from most of the ships; fried a few others that came in just fractionally too hard. Clavain knew exactly what was happening: he had studied possible attack scenarios for years, the range of outcomes burned indelibly into his memory.
The anti-assault guns were already working — locking on to the plasma trails as they flowered overhead, swinging down to find the tiny spark of heat at the head, computing refraction paths for laser pulses, spitting death into the sky. The unlucky ships flared a white that hurt the back of the eye and rained down in a billion dulling sparks. A dozen — then a dozen more. Maybe fifty in total before the guns could no longer acquire targets. It was nowhere near enough. Clavain’s memory of the simulations told him that at least four hundred units of the attack wave would survive both re-entry and the Conjoiner’s heavy defences.
Nothing that Galiana could do would make any difference.
And that had always been the paradox. Galiana was capable of running the same simulations. She must always have known that her provocations would bring down something she could never hope to defeat.
Something that was always going to destroy her.
The surviving members of the wave were levelling out now, commencing long, ground-hugging runs from all directions. Cocooned in their dropships, the soldiers would be suffering punishing gee-loads, but it was nothing they were not engineered to withstand: their cardiovascular systems had been augmented with the sort of non-neural implants the Coalition grudgingly tolerated.
The first of the wave came arcing in at supersonic speeds. All around, worms struggled to snatch them out of the sky, but mostly they were too slow to catch the dropships. Galiana’s people manned their cannon positions and did their best to fend off as many as they could. Clavain clutched his gun, not firing yet. Best to save his ammo-cell power for a target he stood a chance of injuring.
Above, the first dropships made hairpin turns, nosing suicidally down towards the nest. Then they fractured cleanly apart, revealing falling pilots clad in bulbous armour. Just before the moment of impact, each pilot’s armour exploded into a mass of black shock-absorbing balloons, looking something like a blackberry, bouncing across the nest before the balloons deflated just as swiftly to leave the pilot standing on the ground. By then the pilot — now properly a soldier — would have a comprehensive computer-generated map of the nest’s nooks and crannies; enemy positions graphed in real-time from the down-looking spysats.
Clavain fell behind the curve of a dome before the nearest soldier got a lock on him. The firefight was beginning now. He had to hand it to Galiana’s people — they were fighting like devils. And they were at least as well coordinated as the attackers. But their weapons and armour were simply inadequate. Chameleoflage was only truly effective against a solitary enemy, or a massed enemy moving in from a common direction. With Coalition forces surrounding him, Clavain’s suit was going crazy trying to match every background, like a chameleon in a house of mirrors.
The sky overhead looked strange now — darkening purple. And the purple was spreading in a mist across the nest. Galiana had deployed some kind of chemical smokescreen: infrared and optically opaque, he guessed. It would occlude the spysats and might be primed to adhere only to enemy chameleoflage. That had never been in Warren’s simulations. Galiana had just given herself the slightest of edges.
A soldier stepped out of the mist, the obscene darkness of a gun muzzle trained on Clavain. His chameleoflage armour was dappled with vivid purple patches, ruining its stealthiness. The man fired, but his discharge wasted itself against Clavain’s armour. Clavain returned the compliment, dropping his compatriot. What he had done, he thought, was not technically treason. Not yet. All he had done was act in self-preservation.
The man was wounded, but not yet dead. Clavain stepped through the purple haze and knelt down beside the soldier. He tried not to look at the man’s wound.
‘Can you hear me?’ he said. There was no answer from the man, but beneath his visor, Clavain thought he saw the man’s lips shape a word. The man was just a kid — hardly old enough to remember much of the last war. ‘There’s something you have to know,’ Clavain continued. ‘Do you realise who I am?’ He wondered how recognisable he was, under the breather mask. Then something made him relent. He could tell the man he was Nevil Clavain — but what would that achieve? The soldier would be dead in minutes; maybe sooner than that. Nothing would be served by the soldier knowing that the basis for his attack was a lie; that he would not in fact be laying down his life for a just cause. The universe could be spared a single callous act.
‘Forget it,’ Clavain said, turning away from his victim.
And then he moved deeper into the nest, to see who else he could kill before the odds took him.
But the odds never did.
‘You were always were lucky,’ Galiana said, leaning over him. They were somewhere underground again — deep in the nest. A medical area, by the look of things. He was on a bed, fully clothed apart from the outer layer of chameleoflage armour. The room was grey and kettle-shaped, ringed by a circular balcony.
‘What happened?’
‘You took a head wound, but you’ll survive.’
He groped for the right question. ‘What about Warren’s attack?’
‘We endured three waves. We took casualties, of course.’
Around the circumference of the balcony were thirty or so grey couches, slightly recessed into archways studded with grey medical equipment. They were all occupied. There were more Conjoiners in this room than he had seen so far in one place. Some of them looked very close to death.
Clavain reached up and examined his head, gingerly. There was some dried blood on the scalp, matted with his hair, some numbness, but it could have been a lot worse. He felt normal — no memory drop-outs or aphasia. When he pushed himself up to sitting and tried to stand, his body obeyed his will with only a tinge of dizziness.
