We are sorry if some of you will go home to nightmares tonight. We can’t help that. In fact, if truth be told, we’re not sorry at all. Nightmares are what we’re all about. It’s the nightmare of us that will stop this planet falling back into war.
If you have trouble sleeping tonight, spare us a thought.
GALACTIC NORTH
The two of them crouched in a tunnel of filthy ice, bulky in spacesuits. Fifty metres down the tunnel, the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal legs, transmitting a thermal image onto their visors. Irravel jumped whenever the noise shifted into something human, cradling her gun nervously.
‘Damn this thing,’ she said. ‘Hardly get my finger around the trigger.’
‘It can’t read your blood, Captain.’ Markarian, next to her, managed not to sound as if he was stating the obvious. ‘You have to set the override to female.’
Of course. Belatedly remembering the training session on Fand where they’d been shown how to use the weapons — months of subjective time ago; years of worldtime — Irravel told the gun to reshape itself. The memory-plastic casing squirmed in her gloves to something more manageable. It still felt wrong.
‘How are we doing?’ she asked.
‘Last team’s in position. That’s all the tunnels covered. They’ll have to fight their way in.’
‘I think that might well be on the agenda.’
‘Maybe so.’ Markarian sighted along his weapon like a sniper. ‘But they’ll get a surprise when they reach the cargo.’
True: the ship had sealed the sleeper chambers the instant the pirates had arrived near the comet. Counter- intrusion weaponry would seriously inconvenience anyone trying to break in, unless they had the right authorisation. And there, Irravel knew, was the problem; the thing she would rather not have had to deal with.
‘Markarian,’ Irravel said, ‘if we’re taken prisoner, there’s a chance they’ll try to make us give up the codes.’
‘Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind already.’ Markarian rechecked some aspect of his gun. ‘I won’t let you down, Irravel.’
‘It’s not a question of letting me down,’ she said, carefully. ‘It’s whether or not we betray the cargo.’
‘I know.’ For a moment they studied each other’s faces through their visors, acknowledging what had once been more than professional friendship; the shared knowledge that they would kill each other rather than place the cargo in harm’s way.
Their ship was the ramliner
Luyten 726-8 had been no one’s idea of a welcoming destination. No human colonies had flourished there. All that remained were droves of scavenging machines sent out by various superpowers. The ship had locked into a scavenger’s homing signal, eventually coming within visual range of the inert comet the machine had made its home, and which ought to have been chequered with resupply materials. Irravel had been revived from reefersleep just in time to see that none of the goods were there — just acres of barren comet.
‘Dear God,’ she’d said. ‘Do we deserve this?’
After a few days, despair became steely resolve. The ship couldn’t safely travel anywhere else, so they would have to process the supplies themselves, doing the work of the malfunctioning surveyor. It would mean stripping the ship just to make the machines to mine and shape the cometary ice — years of work by any estimate. That hardly mattered. The detour had already added years to the mission.
Irravel ordered the rest of her crew — all ninety of them — to be warmed, and then delegated tasks, mostly programming. Servitors were not particularly intelligent outside of their designated functions. She considered activating the other machines she carried as cargo — the greenfly terraformers — but that cut against all her instincts. Greenfly machines were von Neumann breeders, unlike the sterile servitors. They were a hundred times cleverer. She would only consider using them if the cargo was placed in immediate danger.
‘If you won’t unleash the greenflies,’ Markarian said, ‘at least think about waking the Conjoiners. There may only be four of them, but we could use their expertise.’
‘I don’t trust them. I never liked the idea of carrying them in the first place. They unsettle me.’
‘I don’t like them either, but I’m willing to bury my prejudices if it means fixing the ship faster.’
‘Well, that’s where we differ. I’m not, so don’t raise the subject again.’
‘Yes,’ Markarian said, and only when its omission was insolently clear added: ‘Captain.’
Eventually the Conjoiners ceased to be an issue, when the work was clearly under way and proceeding normally. Most of the crew were able to return to reefersleep. Irravel and Markarian stayed awake a little longer, and even after they’d gone under, they woke every seven months to review the status of the works. It began to look as if they would succeed without assistance.
Until the day they were woken out of schedule, and a dark, grapple-shaped ship was almost upon the comet. Not an interstellar ship, it must have come from somewhere nearby — probably within the same halo of comets around Luyten 726-8. Its silence was not encouraging.
‘I think they’re pirates,’ Irravel said. ‘I’ve heard of one or two other ships going missing near here, but it was always put down to accident.’
‘Why did they wait so long to attack us?’
‘They had no choice. There are billions of comets out here, but they’re never less than light-hours apart. That’s a long way if you only have in-system engines. They must have a base somewhere else to keep watch, maybe light-weeks from here, like a spider with a very wide web.’
‘What do we do now?’
Irravel gritted her teeth. ‘Do what anything does when it’s stuck in the middle of a web: fight back.’
But the Hirondelle’s minimal defences had only scratched the enemy ship.
Oblivious, it fired penetrators and winched closer. Dozens of crab-shaped machines swarmed out and dropped below the comet’s horizon, impacting with seismic thuds. After a few minutes, sensors in the furthest tunnels registered intruders. Only a handful of crew had been woken. They broke guns out of the armoury — small arms designed for pacification in the unlikely event of a shipboard riot — and then established defensive positions in all the cometary tunnels.
Nervously now, Irravel and Markarian advanced around a bend in the tunnel, cleated shoes whispering through ice barely more substantial than smoke. They had to keep their suit exhausts from touching the walls if they didn’t want to get blown back by superheated steam. Irravel jumped again at the pattern of photons on her visor and then forced calm, telling herself it was another mirage.
Except this time it stayed.
Markarian opened fire, squeezing rounds past the servitor. It lurched aside, a gaping hole in its carapace. Black crabs came around the bend, encrusted with sensors and guns. The first reached the ruined servitor and dismembered it with ease. If only there’d been time to activate and program the greenfly machines. They’d have ripped through the pirates like a host of furies, treating them as terraformable matter…
And maybe us, too, Irravel thought.
Something flashed through the clouds of steam: an electromagnetic pulse that turned Irravel’s suit sluggish, as if every joint had corroded. The whine of the circulator died to silence, leaving only her frenzied breathing. Something pressed against her backpack. She turned slowly around, wary of falling against the walls. There were
