“Freeze invocation,” Dreyfus said, irritated that he’d been disturbed.
“Sparver, I thought I said that I wasn’t to be—”
“Had to reach you, Boss. This is urgent.”
“Then why didn’t you summon me on my bracelet?”
“Because you’d turned it off.”
“Oh.” Dreyfus glanced down at his sleeve.
“So I did.”
“Jane told me to pull you out of whatever you were doing, no matter how much you screamed and kicked. There’s been a development.” Dreyfus whispered a command to return Delphine to storage.
“This had better be good,” he told Sparver when the beta-level had vanished.
“I was close to getting a set of watertight testimonies tying the Accompaniment of Shadows to the Bubble. That’s all the ammunition I need to take back to Seraphim. He’d have no choice but to hand over the ship then.”
“I don’t think you need to persuade him to hand over the ship.” Dreyfus frowned momentarily, still irked.
“What?”
“It’s already on its way. It’s headed straight for us.”
CHAPTER 6
When Sparver prodded Dreyfus awake, they’d arrived within visual range of the Accompaniment of Shadows. Dreyfus untangled himself from the hammock webbing and followed his deputy into the spacious flight deck of the deep-system cruiser. Field prefects were authorised to fly cutters, but a ship as big and powerful as the Democratic Circus needed a dedicated team. There were three operatives on the flight deck, all wearing immersion glasses and elbow-length black control gloves. The chief pilot
was a man named Pell, a Panoply operative Dreyfus knew and respected. Dreyfus grunted acknowledgement, had Sparver conjure him a bulb of coffee, then asked his deputy to bring him up to date.
“Jane polled on the nukes,” the hyperpig said.
“We’re good to go.”
“What about the harbourmaster?”
“No further contact with Seraphim, or any other representative of the Ultras. But we do have a shipload of secondary headaches to worry about.”
“Just when I was starting to get used to the ones we already had.”
“Headquarters says there’s a storm brewing over Ruskin-Sartorious—the news is beginning to break. Not the full facts—no one else knows exactly which ship was involved—but there are a hundred million citizens out there capable of joining the dots.”
“Are people starting to work out that Ultras had to be involved?”
“Definite speculation along those lines. A handful of spectators have noticed the drifting ship and are beginning to think it must be tied to the atrocity.”
“Great.”
“In a perfect world, they’d see the ship as evidence that a crime has been committed and that the Ultras have acted with the necessary swiftness, punishing their own.”
Dreyfus scratched at stubble. He needed a shave.
“But if this was a perfect world, you and I’d be out of a job.”
“Jane says we have to consider the very real possibility that some parties may attempt unilateral punitive action if they conclude that Ultras were responsible.”
“In other words, we could be looking at war between the Glitter Band and the Ultras.”
“I’m hoping no one will be quite that stupid,” Sparver said.
“Then again, this is baseline humans we’re dealing with.”
“I’m a baseline human.”
“You’re weird.”
Captain Pell turned away from the console towards them and flipped up his goggles.
“Final approach now, sir. There’s a lot of debris and gas boiling off, so I suggest we hold at three thousand metres.”
Pell had turned most of the hull transparent, so that the Accompaniment of Shadows was visible alongside. Something was very wrong with it, Dreyfus observed. The engine spars ended in ragged, splayed stumps of tangled metal and hull plating, with no sign of the engines themselves. It was as if they had been ripped off; amputated. The vessel was crabbing, moving sideways instead of nose-first. The hull itself showed evidence of grave assault: great fissures and sucking wounds where armour had been plucked away to reveal hidden innards; machinery that was now glowing red-hot from some unspecified assault. Coils of blue-grey vapour bled into space, forming a widening spiral trail behind the slowly tumbling wreck.
The ship, Dreyfus realised, was burning from inside.
“I guess we’re seeing what passes for justice in Ultra circles,” Sparver said.
“They can call it what they like,” Dreyfus snapped back.
“I asked for witnesses, not a shipload of charred corpses.” He turned to Pell.
“How long until it hits the edge of the Glitter Band?”
“Four hours and twenty-eight minutes.”
“I told Jane we’d destroy it three hours before it reaches the outer habitat orbit. That gives us ninety minutes’ grace. How are the nukes coming along?”
“Dialled and ready to go. We’ve identified impact sites, but we’ll be happier if we stabilise the tumble before we blow. We’re looking at options for tug attachment now.”
“Quick as you can, please.”
The tug specialists were good at their job, and by the time Dreyfus had finished his coffee they had already anchored the three units in position at various stress-tolerant nodes along the wreck’s ruined hull.
“We’re applying corrective thrust now, sir,” one of the tug specialists informed him.
“Going to take a while, though. There’s a million tonnes of ship to stop tumbling, and we don’t want her snapping like a twig.”
“Any sign of movement or activity aboard?” Dreyfus asked.
“Fires are out,” Captain Pell said.
“All available air appears to have vented to space by now. Too much residual heat to start looking for thermal hotspots from survivors inside the thing, but we’re still sweeping her for electromagnetic signatures. Anyone human still alive in that thing has to be wearing a suit, and we may pick up some EM noise from life-support systems. It’s really not likely that we’ll find anyone, though.”
“I didn’t ask for a likelihood estimate,” Dreyfus said, nerves beginning to get the better of him.
It took another thirty minutes to bring the tumbling ship under control. The specialists rotated the hull so that its long axis was pointed at the Glitter Band, minimising its collision cross section should something go amiss with the nukes. There was no possibility of using the tugs to shove the lighthugger onto a safe trajectory; at best, all that could be done would be to aim her at one of the less densely populated orbits and hope that she slipped through the empty space between habitats. From this far out, the Glitter Band appeared to be a smooth, flat ring of tarnished silver: the individual glints from ten thousand habitats blurring into a solid bow of light.
Dreyfus kept reminding himself that it was still mostly empty space, but his eyes couldn’t accept it.
“How long?” he asked.
“You have just under an hour, sir,” Pell informed him.
“Give me an airlock as close to the front kilometre of the ship as you can manage. If anyone’s survived, that’s where they’ll be.”
Pell seemed reticent.
“Sir, I think you need to look at this first, before you go aboard that thing. We just picked up a burst of radio, stronger than anything we’ve heard since we began our approach.”
