eye?”
She shrugged. “Something like four hundred years.”
“Point made. At least in
“Managed without it until now. And there’s another thing: don’t know much about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three.”
“It’s conjectural,” I said. “And in any case it almost happened; they almost went to the brink.”
“Almost?”
“It’s set in a different timeline.”
She grinned, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, you kill me.”
“She made a move yet?” I asked.
“What?”
“The defector.”
“Oh, we’re back in reality now?” Yarrow laughed. “Sorry, this is going to be slightly less exciting than
“Inconsiderate,” I said. “Think the bitch would give us a run for our money.” And as I spoke the weapons readout began to pulse faster and faster, like the cardiogram of a fluttering heart. “How long now?”
“One minute, give or take a few seconds.”
“Want a little bet?”
Yarrow grinned, sallow in the red alert lighting. “As if I’d say no, Spirey.”
So we hammered out a wager; Yarrow betting fifty tiger-tokens the rat would attempt some last-minute evasion. “Won’t do her a blind bit of good,” she said. “But that won’t stop her. It’s human nature.”
Me, I suspected our target was either dead or asleep.
“Bit of an empty ritual, isn’t it.”
“What?”
“I mean, the attack happened the best part of five minutes ago, realtime. The rat’s already dead, and nothing we can do can influence that outcome.”
Yarrow bit on a nicotine stick. “Don’t get all philosophical on me, Spirey.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. How long?”
“Five seconds. Four . . . ”
She was somewhere between three and four when it happened. I remember thinking that there was something disdainful about the rat’s actions: she had deliberately waited until the last possible moment, and had dispensed with our threat with the least effort possible.
That was how it felt, anyway.
Nine of the quackheads detonated prematurely, far short of kill-range. For a moment the tenth remained, zeroing in on the defector—but instead it failed to detonate, until it was just beyond range.
For long moments there was silence while we absorbed what had happened. Yarrow broke it, eventually.
“Guess I just made myself some money,” she said.
Colonel Wendigo’s hologram delegate appeared, momentarily frozen before shivering to life. With her too-clear, too-young eyes she fixed first Yarrow and then me.
“Intelligence was mistaken,” she said. “Seems the defector doctored records to conceal the theft of those countermeasures. But you harmed her anyway?”
“Just,” said Yarrow. “Her quackdrive’s spewing out exotics like Spirey after a bad binge. No hull damage, but . . . ”
“Assessment?”
“Making a run for the splinter.”
Wendigo nodded. “And then?”
“She’ll set down and make repairs.” Yarrow paused, added: “Radar says there’s metal on the surface. Must’ve been a wasp battle there, before the splinter got lobbed out of the Swirl.”
The delegate nodded in my direction. “Concur, Spirey?”
“Yes sir,” I said, trying to suppress the nervousness I always felt around Wendigo, even though almost all my dealings with her had been via simulations like this. Yarrow was happy to edit the conversation afterward, inserting the correct honorifics before transmitting the result back to Tiger’s Eye—but I could never free myself of the suspicion that Wendigo would somehow unravel the unedited version, with all its implicit insubordination. Not that any of us didn’t inwardly accord Wendigo all the respect she was due. She’d nearly died in the Royalist strike against Tiger’s Eye fifteen years ago—the one in which my mother was killed. Actual attacks against our two mutually opposed comet bases were rare, not happening much more than every other generation—more gestures of spite than anything else. But this had been an especially bloody one, killing an eighth of our number and opening city-sized portions of our base to vacuum. Wendigo was caught in the thick of the kinetic attack.
Now she was chimeric, lashed together by cybernetics. Not much of this showed externally—except that the healed parts of her were too flawless, more porcelain than flesh. Wendigo had not allowed the surgeons to regrow her arms. Story was she lost them trying to pull one of the injured through an open airlock, back into the pressurized zone. She’d almost made it, fighting against the gale of escaping air. Then some no-brainer hit the emergency door control, and when the lock shut it took Wendigo’s arms off at the shoulder, along with the head of the person she was saving. She wore prosthetics now, gauntleted in chrome.
“She’ll get there a day ahead of us,” I said. “Even if we pull twenty gees.”
“And probably gone to ground by the time you get there, too.”
“Should we try a live capture?”
Yarrow backed me up with a nod. “It’s not exactly been possible before.”
The delegate bided her time before answering. “Admire your dedication,” she said, after a suitably convincing pause. “But you’d only be postponing a death sentence. Kinder to kill her now, don’t you think?”
“Doesn’t look like the kind of touchdown you walk away from,” Yarrow said.
“Think they ejected?”
“No way.” Yarrow sketched a finger through a holographic enlargement of the ship, roughly cone-shaped, vaguely streamlined just like our own thickship, to punch through the Swirl’s thickest gas belts. “Clock those dorsal hatches. Evac pods still in place.”
She was right. The pods could have flung them clear before the crash, but evidently they hadn’t had time to bail out. The ensuing impact—even cushioned by the ship’s manifold of thick—probably hadn’t been survivable.
But there was no point taking chances.
Quackheads would have finished the job, but we’d used up our stock.
That at least was the idea.
It all happened very quickly, not in the dreamy slow-motion of a neurodisney. One instant the molemines were descending toward the splinter, and then the next instant they weren’t there. Spacing the two instants had been an almost subliminally brief flash.
“Starting to get sick of this,” Yarrow said.