met.’
‘What if they can’t keep the terms?’ Khouri said.
Volyova shrugged. ‘That’s their problem, not mine.’
She opened the link to Resurgam and said her piece — reiterating the demands she had made, and stating her deep disappointment that Sylveste had not been brought to light. She was wondering how convincing she sounded — whether the colonists truly believed her threats — when she was struck by an inspirational idea. She unclipped her bracelet, whispering the command which would instruct it to accept limited input from a third party, rather than injuring them.
She passed the bracelet to Khouri.
‘You want to salve your conscience, be my guest.’
Khouri examined the device as if it might suddenly extrude fangs, or spit venom into her face. Finally she raised it to her mouth, not actually slipping it around her wrist.
‘Go ahead,’ Volyova said. ‘I’m serious. Say whatever you want — assure you it won’t do a blind bit of good.’
‘Speak to the colonists?’
‘Certainly — if you think you can convince them better than I can.’
For a moment Khouri said nothing. Then — diffidently — she started speaking into the bracelet. ‘My name is Khouri,’ she said. ‘For whatever it’s worth, I want you to know I’m not with these people. I don’t agree with what they’re doing.’ Khouri’s large and frightened eyes scanned the bridge, as if she expected any moment to be punished for this. But the others showed only mild interest in what she had to say.
‘I was recruited,’ she said. ‘I didn’t understand what they were. They want Sylveste. They’re not lying. I’ve seen the weapons they’ve got in this ship, and I think they will use them.’
Volyova affected a look of bored indifference, as if all of this were exactly what she would have expected; tiresomely so.
‘I’m sorry none of you have brought Sylveste forward. I think Volyova’s serious when she says she’s going to punish you for that. All I want to say is, you’d better believe her. And maybe if some of you can bring him forward now it won’t be too—’
‘Enough.’
Volyova took back the bracelet. ‘I’m extending my deadline by one hour only.’
But the hour passed. Volyova barked cryptic commands into her bracelet, causing a target-designator to spring into place over the northerly latitudes of Resurgam. The red cross-hairs hunted with sullen, sharklike calm, until they latched onto a particular spot near the planet’s northern icecap. Then they pulsed a bloodier red, and status graphics informed Volyova that the ship’s orbital-suppression elements — almost the puniest weapons system it could deploy — were now activated, armed, targeted and ready.
Then she resumed her address to the colonists.
‘People of Resurgam,’ Volyova said. ‘Our weapons have just aligned themselves on the small settlement of Phoenix; fifty-four degrees north by twenty west of Cuvier. In fractionally less than thirty seconds Phoenix and its immediate environs will cease to exist.’
The woman dampened her lips with the tip of her tongue before continuing. ‘This will be our last announcement for twenty-four hours. You have until then to produce Sylveste, or we escalate to a larger target. Count yourselves lucky that we began with one as small as Phoenix.’
The general tenor of her pronouncements, Khouri realised, had been that of a schoolteacher patiently explaining why the punishment she was about to visit upon her pupils was both in their best interests and entirely brought about by their own actions. She avoided saying, ‘This will hurt me more than it hurts you,’ but if she had, Khouri would not have been at all surprised. In fact, she wondered if there was anything Volyova could now do which would surprise her in any way. It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species. And not just Volyova, but the entire crew. Khouri felt a pang of revulsion, shuddering to think how much a part of them she had recently dared imagine herself to be. It was as if they had all pulled masks from their faces, revealing snakes.
Volyova fired.
For a moment — a long, pregnant moment — there was nothing. Khouri began to entertain the idea that maybe the entire thing had been a bluff after all. But that hope lasted until the walls of the bridge shuddered, as if the entire ship were an ancient sea vessel scraping past an iceberg. Khouri felt none of the motion, since the articulated seat boom moved to smother the vibrations. But she had no doubts that she had seen it, and seconds later she heard what sounded like distant thunder.
The hull weapons had discharged.
On the projected image of Resurgam, the weapons readouts recast themselves, changing to illuminate the conditions of the armaments in the moments after they had been deployed. Hegazi consulted his seat readouts, his eyepiece clicking and whirring as it assimilated the news.
‘Suppression elements discharged,’ he said, voice clipped and devoid of emphasis. ‘Targeting systems confirm correct acquisition. ’ Then, with magisterial slowness, he elevated his gaze to the globe.
Khouri looked with him.
There was — where previously there had been nothing — a tiny red-hot smear near the edge of Resurgam’s northern polar cap, like a foul rat’s eye in the crust of the world. It was darkening now, like a hot needle just pulled from a brazier. But it was still hurtingly bright, darkening less through its own cooling than because it was being progressively shrouded by titanic veils of uplifted planetary debris. In windows which opened fleetingly in the curdling dark storm, Khouri observed dancing tendrils of lightning, their bright ignitions strobing the landscape for hundreds of kilometres around. A near-circular shockwave was racing from the site of the attack. Khouri observed its movement via a subtle change in the refractive index of the air, the way a ripple in shallow water caused the rocks below to acquire a momentary fluidity of their own.
‘Preliminary sit-rep coming in now,’ Hegazi said, still managing to sound like a bored acolyte reciting the dullest of scriptures. ‘Weps functionality: nominal. Ninety-nine point four per cent probability that target was completely neutralised. Seventy-nine per cent probability that no one within two hundred kilometres could have survived, unless they were behind a kilometre of armour.’
‘Good enough odds for me,’ Volyova said. She studied the wound in the surface of Resurgam for a moment longer, evidently satiating herself with the thought of planetary-scale destruction.
FIFTEEN
‘They bluffed,’ Sluka said, just as a sudden, false dawn shone over the north-easterly horizon, turning the intervening ridges and bluffs into serrated black cutouts. The glare was magnesium-bright, edged in purple. Briefly it overloaded whole strips of Sylveste’s vision, leaving numb voids where it had burned.
‘Care to take another guess?’ he asked.
For a moment Sluka seemed unable to answer. She only stared at the flare, mesmerised by its radiance and the message of atrocity it brought.
‘He told you they’d do it,’ Pascale said. ‘You should have listened to him. He knew these people. He knew they’d do exactly what they promised.’
‘I never thought they would,’ Sluka said, her voice so quiet that it seemed she was talking to herself. Despite the glare, it was still a totally silent evening, free even of the usual music of Resurgam’s winds. ‘I thought their threat was too monstrous to take seriously.’
‘Nothing’s too monstrous for them.’ Sylveste’s eyes were returning to normality now; enough that he could read the expressions of the women who were standing next to him on Mantell’s mesa. ‘From now on, you’d better take Volyova at her word. She means what she said. In twenty-four hours she’ll do it all again, unless you turn me over.’
It was as if Sluka had not heard him. ‘Perhaps we ought to get down,’ was all she said.
