‘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.’
‘We’re talking about anti-collision systems, Pilot, not military hardware. They’re programmed to recognise incoming foreign objects, not to extrapolate back from missile exhausts.’
There was a reticence in the pilot’s voice. ‘Prefect Dreyfus said we have to assume they’ve been uploaded with new software.’
Crissel coughed. ‘Rightly so, of course. Although the likelihood of that being the case… But are you sure we can’t just fire and take out all the weapons in one hit?’
‘Can’t guarantee it, sir. Best strategy is to hold fire until we have clear solutions on all the weapons, which’ll mean suspending our attack until just before we initiate the braking phase.’
‘Right. I just needed to be clear on that. And how far outside the avoidance volume will we be at that point?’
‘Thirty kilometres inside it,’ the pilot said.
Crissel nodded as if the matter were fully settled and need not be raised again. ‘Keep on this vector, Pilot. I’m going back to speak to the prefects.’
‘You’ll need to secure yourself in five minutes, sir. Things will get bumpy, especially if we have to dodge return fire.’
Crissel clambered out of the cool, clinical sanctuary of the flight deck back into the assembly area. The majority of the prefects had now donned their helmets, and of that number more than half had lowered and sealed their visors.
‘Pilot informs me that we shall commence braking phase in just over five minutes,’ Crissel said, holding himself in position by a padded handrail as he surveyed the massed black ranks. ‘Make no mistake, this isn’t just a lockdown or disciplinary action. There are more than eight hundred thousand people inside House Aubusson, and each and every one of them is counting on our help. There may be times when the agents of Panoply are feared and hated. There isn’t a field in the organisation who doesn’t know how
Satisfied with their response, conscious that to push them further might be to risk chastening humiliation, Crissel returned to the flight deck.
‘Status, please, Pilot.’
‘Braking in four minutes, Prefect. One hundred and twenty-two kilometres to outer edge of avoidance volume. You’d better secure yourself.’
‘About those anti-collision systems — you have a clearer view of them now, I take it?’
‘Refining all the time.’
‘And there’s been no change in the tactical situation? We still can’t guarantee a clean take-out at this range?’
‘Can’t promise it, sir.’
But he picked up a nuance in the pilot’s voice. ‘But the odds have improved in our favour?’
‘Slightly, sir.’
