“It may be a difficult question. You may be uncomfortable about answering it truthfully.”
“Go on anyway.”
“Is something happening? Something I don’t know about?”
“What kind of something?”
“I’ve been hearing sounds. I’ve been in this room for eleven years, Tom, so I’ve become quite astonishingly attuned to my surroundings. I’ve almost never heard any noises from elsewhere in Panoply, except for today.”
“What kinds of noises?”
“The kinds of noises people make when they’re trying very hard to do something without making any sound. Something that involves heavy machinery and tools.” She faced him directly.
“Is something going on?” He’d never lied to her, in all the years they’d known each other. Never lied, or bent the truth, even when that would have been the kinder thing to do.
Today he chose to lie.
“It’s the mouth bay,” he said.
“The launching rack was damaged when one of the cruisers came in too hard. They’ve been working around the clock to get it back into shape.”
“The mouth bay is hundreds of metres away, Tom.”
“They’re using heavy equipment.”
“Look at me and say that.” He met her gaze steadily.
“It’s the bay. Why? What else do you think it might be?”
“You know exactly what I think.” She glanced away. He couldn’t tell whether he’d passed or failed the test of her scrutiny.
“I’ve been trying to get Demikhov to talk to me. He’s using every excuse in the book not to return my calls.”
“Demikhov’s been busy. That business with Gaffney—”.
“All right, so he’s been busy. But if you knew something was happening… if you knew they were planning something… you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely,” Dreyfus said.
Except now.
“It’s time,” she said, returning her attention to the display.
“Weevil contact in three… two… one. Impact is confirmed. They’ve made groundfall.” She raised her arm and spoke into her bracelet.
“This is Aumonier. Detach the Bellatrix and instruct her to proceed at full-burn. Repeat, detach the Bellatrix.”
They still had cam feeds from the docking hub of the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle. Hundreds of people were still crammed into the boarding tubes, being ushered aboard the waiting liner. Dozens of constables, marked by their armbands, were assisting in the boarding process. Dreyfus already knew that many constables had elected to remain inside the Spindle rather than leave on earlier evacuation flights. A few hours earlier they’d just been ordinary citizens, going about their daily lives.
“Bellatrix is secured for space,” Aumonier said, reading a text summary on her bracelet.
“She’s moving, Tom. She’s undocking.”
The feed had locked on to a single boarding corridor. The viewpoint was from inside a transparent-walled tube filled with civilians, constables and servitors, floating in an unruly multicoloured jumble. The vast, white, porthole-sprinkled side of the Bellatrix loomed beyond the glass, huge and steep as a cliff. And the cliff was starting to move: pushing away from the tube with a dreamlike slowness. At the far end of the tube, hundreds of metres from the cam, Dreyfus made out a sudden puff of silvery white vapour escaping to vacuum. He presumed that the airlock doors had closed, but a small amount of air had been sacrificed into space.
The Bellatrix kept receding. He focused on the golden glow of her airlock. Formless debris spilled out. Something was wrong there, he realised. The liner’s outer doors should have closed by now.
“Jane…” he began.
“They can’t close the doors,” she said numbly.
“The locks on the Bellatrix are jammed. Too many people are trying to squeeze through.”
“It’s not just the liner,” Dreyfus said.
Air was still rocketing into space from the end of the docking tube. But now it was carrying people with it, sucked out by the force of decompression. It started at the far end and then raced up the tube, towards the cam. Dreyfus watched in horror as the people nearest the cam realised what was coming. He saw them scream and reach for something to hold on to. Then it hit them and they were just gone, as if they’d been rammed down a syringe by an invisible plunger.
He watched them spill into space by the hundreds: civilians, constables, machines, clothes, possessions and toys. He watched the people-shaped things thrash and die.
The cam greyed out.
Another feed showed the Bellatrix turning, giving a view along its white flanks. The outrush from the open airlock had ceased. Interior doors must have closed.
“She’s on drive,” Dreyfus said. The liner’s quadruple engines cranked wide, spitting tongues of pink fire. The enormous vessel hardly appeared to move at first. Gradually, though, the slow but sure acceleration became apparent. The Bellatrix began to put distance between itself and the habitat. Departing from the Spindle’s forward docking hub, the liner would have the entire bulk of the habitat between it and the fusion explosion when the missiles hit home.
Aumonier lifted her bracelet again.
“Connect me to the Democratic Circus,” she said, barely breathing before speaking again.
“Captain Pell: allow the Bellatrix to achieve ten kilometres. Then you may open fire on the habitat’s aft assembly.”
Since the Bellatrix was maintaining a steady half-gee of thrust, it took only sixty seconds for the liner to reach the designated safe distance. By then, all surrounding habitats—those that hadn’t already been taken by Aurora— were on a state of high defensive alertness, anticipating not just the electromagnetic pulse of each nuclear strike, but also the likely risk of impact debris. For Dreyfus the seconds slowed and then appeared to stall altogether. He knew that Aumonier would have preferred to give the liner more space, but she was mindful of the weevils escaping and doing more harm if they waited. The evacuees aboard the Bellatrix would just have to hope that the shielding between them and the engines would serve to protect them from the worst effects of the blast.
A voice, rendered small and reedy in transmission, spoke through her bracelet.
“Pell, Supreme Prefect. Bellatrix has cleared safe-distance margin.”
“You already have my authorisation to fire, Captain.”
“I just wanted to be certain that nothing’d changed, Ma’am.”
“Nothing’s changed. Do your job, Captain Pell.”
“Missiles launched and running, Ma’am.”
The cam feed switched to a long-range view of the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle. With distance foreshortened by the cam angle, the Bellatrix almost appeared to be still docked.
The missiles surged in, etching two bright streaks of exhaust fire, as if they’d gashed open space to reveal something luminous and clean behind it.
They detonated.
The nuclear explosion—the double bursts occurred too close in time to separate—whited out the cam view. There’d been no sense of the fireball expanding; it was just there, consuming everything in a single annihilating flash.
It happened in deathly silence.
All the displays in Jane’s room flickered momentarily as the electromagnetic pulse raced across the Glitter Band.
Then the whited-out view dulled through darkening reds until the background blackness was again visible, and something mangled and molten was drifting there, something that had once been a habitat, but which now resembled more the blackened, tattered remains of a spent firework. The nukes had destroyed the manufactory, but in doing so they’d blasted away at least a third of the habitat’s length, leaving the rest of the structure cracked
