more nukes than precisely needed, but that balanced your botch of the amissile fields, eh?” He slapped Xin familiarly on the shoulder. Jau had the sudden realization that his single, frail treason had been detected.
“Yes, sir” was all he could think to say. Ahead, the curve of the planet glittered with a web of lights, the cities they had come to call Princeton, Valdemon, Mountroyal. Maybe the Spiders weren’t the people Rita imagined, maybe that was a fraud of translation. But whatever the truth, those cities were in the last seconds of their existence.
“Sir.” Bil Phuong’s voice came across bridge-wide comm. “I’ve got a high-level ack from Anne’s people. We’ll have full automation in a matter of seconds.”
“Ha. About time.” But there was a note of relief in Ritser Brughel’s voice.
Jau felt a thutter of vibration. Again. Again. Brughel’s head snapped up, and he gazed off at a virtual display. “That sounds like our battle lasers, but—”
Jau’s eyes flickered across the status listings. The weapons board was clean. Core power had jagged as if charging capacitors—but now that was level, too. And, “My pilots aren’t reporting any fire, sir.”
Thutter. Thutter. They had passed over the great cities, were coasting north into the arctic, over tiny lights scattered across an immensity of dark, frozen land. Nothing there, but behind them… Thutter.The sky lit with three pale beams, diverging, fading… the classic look of battle lasers in upper atmosphere.
“Phuong! What the fuck is going on down there!”
“Nothing, sir! I mean—” Sounds of Phuong moving among his zipheads. “Uh, the zips are working on valid target lists from L1.”
“Well, they’re totally out of synch withmy target list. Pull your head out, man!” Brughel cut the connection and turned back to his Pilot Manager. The Podmaster’s pale face was ruddy with building anger. “Shoot the bloody zips and get new ones!” He glared at Jau. “So what’s your problem?”
“I—maybe nothing, but we’re being illuminated from below.”
“Hunh.” Brughel, squinted at the electronic intelligence. “Yeah. Ground radars. But this happens several times on every rev… oh.”
Xin nodded. “This contact has lasted fifteen seconds. It’s like they’re tracking us.”
“That’s impossible. Weown the Spider nets.” Brughel bit his lip. “Unless Phuong has totally screwed up the L1 comm.”
The radar tag faded for a moment… and then it was back, brighter, focused. “That’s a targeting lock!”
Brughel jerked as if the image had turned into a striking snake. “Xin. Take control. Main torch if it will help. Get us out of here.”
“Yes, sir.” There weren’t many missile sites in the Spiders’ far north. But what there were would be nuke armed. Even a single hit could cripple theHand. Jau reached to enable his pilots—
—and the rumble of auxiliary thrusters filled the bridge.
“That wasn’t me, sir!”
Brughel had been looking right at him when the sound began. He nodded. “Get through to your pilots. Get control!” He bounced up from his place beside Xin and waved to his guards toward the aft hatch. “Phuong!”
Jau pounded frantically on his controls, shouted the command codes over and over. He saw scattered diagnostics, but no response from his pilots. The horizon had tilted slightly. The
“Main torch burn, sir! I can’t stop it—”
Brughel and his guards grabbed for hold-ons. The torch subsonics were unmistakable, vibrating out from bones and teeth. Slowly, slowly, the acceleration ramped up. Fifty milligees. One hundred. Loose junk floated faster and faster sternward, spinning and bouncing off obstacles. Three hundred milligees. A huge gentle fist pressed Jau back into his chair. One of the guards had been in open space, unable to reach a hold-down. He drifted past now, hefell past, crashing into the aft wall. Five hundred milligees, and still increasing. Jau twisted in his harness and looked back, up, at Brughel and the others. They were pinned aft, trapped by the acceleration that went on and on….
And then the torch sound faded, and Jau floated up in against his restraints. Brughel was shouting to his guards, gathering them together. Somewhere in the action he had lost his huds. “Status, Mr. Xin!”
Jau stared at his displays. The status board was still a random jumble. He looked out, forward along theHand’ s orbit. They had passed through a sunrise. Dim lit, the frozen ocean stretched to the horizon. But that wasn’t what mattered. The horizon itself looked subtly different.Not your classicalde-orbit burn, but it will do. Jau licked his lips. “Sir, we’ll be in the soup in one or two hundred seconds.”
For a moment, horror registered in Brughel’s face. “You get us back up, mister.”
“Yes, sir.” What else was there to say?
Brughel and his goons coasted across the bridge to the aft hatch.
Phuong: “Sir. I have a voice transmission from L1.”
“Well, put it on.”
It was a woman’s voice, Trixia Bonsol. “Greetings to the humans aboardInvisible Hand. This is Lieutenant Victory Lighthill, Accord Intelligence Service. I have taken control of your spacecraft. You will be on the ground shortly. It may be some time before our forces arrive on the scene. Do not, I repeat, do not resist those forces.”
Stark, gape-mouth surprise held everyone on the bridge… but Bonsol said nothing more. Brughel recovered first, but his voice wavered. “Phuong. Shut down the L1 link. All the protocol layers.”
“Sir. I-I can’t. Once up, the interconnect—”
“Yes you can. Get physical. Take a club to the equipment, but get yourselfoffline. “
“Sir. Even without the local zipheads… I think L1 has workarounds.”
“I’ll take care of that. We’re coming down.”
The guard by the hatch looked up at Brughel. “It won’t open, sir.”
“Phuong!”
There was no answer.
Brughel jumped to the wall beside the hatch, began pounding the direct opener. He might as well have been pounding a rock. The Podmaster turned, and Jau saw that the red was gone from his face. He was dead white and his eyes were wild. He had a wire gun in his hand now, and he looked around the bridge as if in search of a target. His gaze locked on Jau. The gun twitched up.
“Sir, I think I’ve gotten through to one of my pilots.” It was an absolute lie, but without his huds, Brughel couldn’t know.
“Ah?” The gun muzzle slipped a fraction. “Good. Keep at it, Xin. It’s your neck, too.”
Jau nodded, turned back to diddle fiercely with the dead controls.
Behind him, the search for the hatch’s manual override was frantic and obscene and incompetent… and finally terminated by the chatter of gunfire. Tumbling wires caromed around the bridge. “Bloody hell. That won’t do it,” Brughel said. There was the sound of a cabinet opening, but Jau kept his head down, doing his best to look desperately busy. “Here. Try this.” There was a pause, then a string of ear-numbing detonations.Lordy! Brughel kept that kind of ordnance on a starship’s bridge?
Triumphant shouts were faint behind the ringing in his ears. Then Brughel was shouting. “Go! Go! Go!”
Jau turned his head slightly, got a sidelong look at the bridge behind him. The hatch was still closed, but now there was a ragged hole punched in it. Twisted metal and less identifiable junk floated up from it.
And now Jau Xin was all alone on theHand’ s bridge. He took a deep breath and tried to make sense of his displays. Ritser Brughel was right about one thing. It was Jau’s neck on the line here.
The core power trace was still high. He looked out across the curving horizon. No question now. TheHand was down, consistent with the eighty-thousand-meter altitude on the status board. He heard the rumble of the aux thrusters.Did I get through? If he could orient properly and somehow fire the main torch… But no, they weren’t turning in the right direction! The great ship was aligning on their direction of flight, rear end first. To the left and right of the aft view, parts of the starship’s outer hull could be seen, angular spidery structures that were meant for the flows of interstellar plasma but never the atmosphere of a planet. Now their edges were glowing. Soft yellows and reds splashed out around them, cascading like glowing ocean spray. The sharpest edges glowed white and sloughed away. But the aux thrusters were still firing, a pattern of tiny bursts. On off. On off. Whoever was running
