Redemption Ark

if you listen to me and do precisely what I say.’

‘I think we should ignore him,’ Xavier said.

Clavain licked his lips. ‘You can, but you’ll die. Antoinette: I want you to set up the following firing pattern in pre-programmed mode, without actually moving any of your weapons until I say. You can bet the banshees have us in their sights, and they’ll be watching to see what happens.’

She looked at him and nodded, her fingers poised over the controls of the weapons plinth. ‘Say it, Clavain.’

‘Hit the starboard ship with a two-second excimer pulse as close to amidships as you can get it. There’s a sensor cluster there; we want to take it out. At the same time use the rapid-fire slug gun to put a spread over the port ship, say a megahertz salvo with a hundred millisecond sustain. That won’t kill them, but it’ll sure as hell damage that rack launcher and probably buckle those grapple arms. In any case it’ll provoke a response, and that’s good.’

‘It is?’ She was already programming his firing pattern into the plinth.

‘Yes. See how she’s keeping her hull at that angle? At the moment she’s in a defensive posture. That’s because her main weapons are delicate; now that they’re deployed she won’t want to bring them into our field of fire until she can guarantee a kill. And she’ll think we’ve hit with our heaviest toys first.’

Antoinette brightened. ‘Which we won’t have.’

‘No. That’s when we hit them — both ships — with the Breitenbach.’

‘And the single-use graser?’

‘Hold it back. It’s our medium-range trump card, and we don’t want to play it until we’re in a lot more danger than this.’

‘And the Gatling gun?’

‘We’ll keep that back for dessert.’

‘I hope you’re not bullshitting us, Clavain,’ Antoinette warned.

He grinned. I sincerely hope I’m not bullshitting you, too.‘

The two ships continued their approach. Now they were visible through the cabin windows: black dots that occasionally pulsed out white or violet spikes of steering thrust. The dots enlarged, becoming slivers. The slivers took on hard mechanical form, until Clavain could quite clearly see the neon patterning of the pirate ships. The markings had only been turned on during their final approach; at that point, needing to trim speed with thruster bursts, there was no further prospect of remaining camouflaged against the darkness of space. The markings were there to inspire fear and panic, like the Jolly Roger of the old sailing ships.

‘Clavain…’

‘In about forty-five seconds, Antoinette. But not a moment before. Got that?’

‘I’m worried, Clavain.’

‘It’s natural. It doesn’t mean you’re going to die.’

That was when he felt the ship shudder again. It was almost the same movement he had felt earlier, when the foam-phase slug had been fired as a warning shot. But this was more sustained.

‘What just happened?’ Clavain asked.

Antoinette frowned. ‘I didn’t…’

‘Xavier?’ Clavain snapped.

‘Not me, guy. Must have been the…’

‘Beast!’ Antoinette shouted.

‘Begging your pardon, Little Miss, but one…’

Clavain realised that the ship had taken it upon itself to fire the megahertz slug gun. It had been directed towards the port banshee, as he had specified, but much too soon.

Storm Bird shook again. The flight deck console lit up with blocks of flashing red. A klaxon began to shriek. Clavain felt a tug of air, and then immediately heard the rapid sequential slamming of bulkheads.

‘We’ve just taken a hit,’ Antoinette said. ‘Amidships.’

‘You’re in deep trouble,’ Clavain said.

Thanks. I gathered that.‘

‘Hit the starboard banshee with the ex—’

Storm Bird shuddered again, and this time half the lights on the console blacked out. Clavain guessed that one of the pirates had just hit them with a penetrating slug equipped with an EMP warhead. So much for Antoinette’s boast that all the critical systems were routed through opto-electronic pathways…

‘Clavain…’ she looked back at him with wild, frightened eyes. ‘I can’t get the excimers to work…’

‘Try a different routing.’

Her fingers worked the plinth controls, and Clavain watched the spider’s web of data connections shift as she assigned data to scurry along different paths. The ship shook again. Clavain leaned over and looked through the port window. The banshee was looming large now, arresting its approach with a continuous blast of reverse thrust. He could see grapples and claws unfolding, articulating away from the hull like the barbed and hooked limbs of some complicated black insect just emerging from a cocoon.

‘Hurry up,’ Xavier said, looking at what Antoinette was doing.

‘Antoinette.’ Clavain spoke as calmly as he could. ‘Let me take over. Please.’

‘What fucking good…’

‘Just let me take over.’

She breathed in and out for five or six seconds, just looking at him, and then unbuckled herself and eased out of the seat. Clavain nodded and squeezed past her, settling by the weapons plinth.

He had already familiarised himself with it. By the time his hands touched the controls, his implants had begun to accelerate his subjective consciousness rate. Things around him moved glacially, whether it was the expressions on the faces of his hosts or the pulsing of the warning messages on the control panel. Even his hands moved as if through treacle, and the delay between sending a nerve signal and watching his hands respond was quite noticeable. He was used to that, though. He had done this before, too many times, and he naturally made allowances for the sluggish response of his own body.

As his consciousness rate reached fifteen times faster than normal, so that every actual second felt like fifteen seconds to him, Clavain willed himself on to a plateau of detached calm. A second was a long time in war. Fifteen seconds was even longer. There was a lot you could do, a lot you could think, in fifteen seconds.

Now then. He began to set the optimum control pathways for the remaining weapons. The spider’s web shifted and reconfigured. Clavain explored a number of possible solutions, forcing himself not to accept second best. It might take two actual seconds to find the perfect arrangement of data flows, but that would be time well spent. He glanced at the short-range radar sphere, amused to see that its update cycle now looked like the slow beating of some immense heart.

There. He had regained control of the excimer cannons. All he needed now was a revised strategy to deal with the changed situation. That would take a few seconds — a few actual seconds — for his mind to process.

It would be tight.

But he thought he would make it.

Clavain’s efforts destroyed one banshee and left the other crippled. The damaged ship scuttled back into darkness, its neon patterning flickering spas-tically like a short-circuiting firefly. After fifty seconds they saw the glint of its fusion torch and watched it fall ahead of them, back towards the Rust Belt.

‘How to win friends and influence people,’ Antoinette said as she watched the ruined one tumble away. Half its hull was gone, revealing a skeletal confusion of innards belching grey spirals of vapour. ‘Good work, Clavain.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s two reasons for you to trust me. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have to faint.’

He fainted.

*

The rest of the journey passed without incident. Clavain was unconscious for eight or nine hours after the battle against the banshees, while his mind recovered from the ordeal of such a protracted spell of rapid