‘I’ve forgotten more about soldiering than you’ll ever know, Ilia.’ ‘Just trust me. Is it so much to ask?’ Twenty-two minutes later the battle began. Clavain’s opening salvo was almost insultingly inadequate. She had detected the signatures of railgun launchers, ripples of electromagnetic energy designed to slam a small dense slug up to one or two thousand kilometres per second. The slugs took an hour to reach her from their launch points near Zodiacal Light . At the very limit of her resolution she could make out the skeletal cruciform shapes of the launchers themselves, and then watch the pulse of sequenced matter-antimatter explosions that drove the slugs up to their terminal velocities, gobbling up the railguns in the process. Clavain did not have enough railguns to saturate the immediate volume of space around her ship, so she could avoid being hit simply by making sure she — or rather the Captain — kept Nostalgia for Infinity in a constant random-walk pattern, never entering the volume of space where it had been an hour earlier, which was where any arriving railgun slug would have been aimed. At first, that was exactly what happened. She did not even have to ask it of the Captain. He was privy to the same tactical information as Volyova, and appeared capable of arriving at the same conclusions. She felt the faint yawing and pitching, as if her bed was adrift on a raft on a mildly choppy sea, as Nostalgia for Infinity moved, shifting with short, thunderous bursts of the many station-keeping thrusters which dotted the hull. But she could do better than that. With the long-range grabs of the railguns and the electromagnetic launch signatures, she could determine the precise direction in which a particular slug had been aimed. There was a margin of error, but it was not large, and it amused Volyova to remain exactly where she was until the last possible moment, only then moving her ship. She ran simulations in the tactical display, showing the Captain the projected impact point of each new slug launch, and was gratified when the Captain revised his strategy. She liked it better this way. It was far more elegant and fuel-efficient, and she hoped that the lesson was not lost on Clavain. She wanted him to become cleverer, so that she could become cleverer still. Clavain watched as the last of his railguns fired and launched, destroying itself in a cascade of quick, bright explosions. It was an hour since he had begun the attack, and he had never seriously expected that it would do more than occupy the Triumvir’s time, diverting her attention away from the other elements of the attack. If one of the slugs had hit her ship it would have delivered about a kilotonne of kinetic energy on impact; enough to cripple the lighthugger, perhaps even to rip it open, but not enough to destroy it entirely. There remained a chance of success — four slugs were still on their way — but the Triumvir had already shown every indication that she could deal with this particular threat. Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle. He suspected that the Triumvir felt likewise. Felka and Remontoire were floating next to him in the observation cupola, which was decoupled from the spinning part of the ship. Now that Zodiacal Light had slowed to a halt on the edge of the battle volume they no longer had need of their exoskeletons, and Clavain felt oddly vulnerable without his. ‘Disappointed, Clavain?’ asked Remontoire. ‘No. As a matter of fact I’m reassured. If anything feels too easy, I start looking for a trap.’ Remontoire nodded. ‘She’s no fool, that’s for certain, no matter what she’s done to her ship. You still don’t believe that story about an evacuation attempt, I take it?’ ‘There’s more reason to believe it now than there was before,’ Felka said. ‘Isn’t that right, Clavain? We’ve seen shuttles moving between surface and orbit.’ ‘That’s all we’ve seen,’ Clavain said. ‘And a larger ship moving between orbit and the lighthugger,’ she continued. ‘What more evidence do we need that she’s sincere?’ ‘It doesn’t necessarily indicate an evacuation programme,’ Clavain said through gritted teeth. ‘It could be many things.’ ‘So give her the benefit of the doubt,’ Felka said. Clavain turned to her, brimming with sudden fury but hoping that it did not show. ‘It’s her choice. She has the weapons. They’re all I want.’ ‘The weapons won’t make any difference in the long run.’ Now he made no attempt to hide his anger. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ ‘Exactly what I said. I know, Clavain. I know that everything that is happening here, everything that means so much to you, to us, means precisely nothing in the long run.’ ‘And this pearl of wisdom came from the Wolf, did it?’ ‘You know I brought a part of it back from Skade’s ship.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And that means I have all the more reason to disregard anything you say, Felka.’ She hauled herself to one side of the cupola and disappeared through the exit hole, back into the main body of the ship. Clavain opened his mouth to call after her, to say something in apology. Nothing came. ‘Clavain?’ He looked at Remontoire. ‘What, Rem?’ ‘The first hyperfast missiles will be arriving in a minute.’ Antoinette saw the first wave of hyperfast missiles streak past, overtaking Storm Bird with a velocity differential of nearly a thousand kilometres per second. There had been four missiles in the spread, and although they passed around her ship on all four sides, they converged ahead an instant later, the flares of their exhausts meeting like the lines in a perspective sketch. Two minutes later another wave passed to starboard, and then a third slipped by to port, much further out, three minutes after that. ‘Holy shit,’ she whispered. ‘We’re not just playing war, are we?’ ‘Scared?’ Xavier asked, pressed into the seat beside hers. ‘More than scared.’ She had already been back into the body of Storm Bird , inspecting the ferociously armoured assault squad she carried in her ship’s cargo bay. ‘But that’s good. Dad always said…’ ‘Be scared if you aren’t scared. Yeah.’ Xavier nodded. ‘That was one of his.’
