‘Actually They both looked at the console. ‘What, Ship?’ asked Antoinette. ‘Actually, that was one of mine. But your father liked it enough to steal it from me. I took that as a compliment.’ ‘So Lyle Merrick actually said…’ Xavier began. ‘Yes.’ ‘No shit?’ Antoinette said. ‘No shit, Little Miss.’ The last wave of slugs was still on its way when Clavain escalated to the next level of his attack against Volyova. Again, there was no element of surprise. But there almost never was in space war, where hiding places and opportunities for camouflage were so few and far between. One could plan, and strategise, and hope that the enemy missed the obvious or subtle traps buried in the placement of one’s forces, but in every other respect war in space was a game of total transparency. It was war between enemies who could safely each assume the other to be omniscient. Like a game of chess, the outcome could often be guessed after only a few moves had been made, especially if the opponents were unevenly matched. Volyova tracked the trajectories of the hyperfast missiles as they streaked across space from the launchers deployed by Zodiacal Light They accelerated at a hundred gees, sustaining that thrust for forty minutes before becoming purely ballistic. Then they were moving at slightly less than one per cent of the speed of light — formidable targets, but still within the capabilities of Nostalgia for Infinity’s autonomic hull defences. Any starship had to be able to track and destroy rapidly moving objects as a normal part of its collision-avoidance procedures, so Volyova had barely had to upgrade the existing safeguards to make full-scale weapons. It was a question of numbers. Each missile occupied a certain fraction of her available hull weapons, and there was always a small statistical chance that too many missiles would arrive at the same time for her — or the Captain, who was doing all the actual defending — to deal with. But it never happened. She ran an analysis on the missile spread and concluded that Clavain was not trying to hit her. It was within his capability to do so; he had some control over the missiles until the moment they stopped accelerating, enough to correct for any small changes in Infinity’s position. And a direct hit from a hyperfast, even one with a dummy warhead, would have taken out the entire ship in a flash. Yet the missiles were all on trajectories that stood only a small chance of actually hitting her ship. They slammed past with tens of kilometres to spare, while roughly one in twenty went on to detonate slightly closer to Resurgam. The blast signatures suggested small matter-antimatter explosions: either residual fuel, or pinhead-sized warheads. The other nineteen missiles were effectively dummies. A close blast would certainly damage Infinity , she thought. The five deployed cache weapons were robust enough not to worry her, but a close matter-antimatter blast could well incapacitate her hull armaments, leaving her wide open to a more concerted assault. Not that she was going to let it happen, but she would have to expend a good fraction of her resources in preventing it. And the annoying thing was that most of the missiles she had to destroy posed no actual threat; they were neither on intercept trajectories nor armed. She did not go so far as to congratulate Clavain. All he had done was adopt a textbook saturation-attack approach, tying up her defences with a low probability/high consequence threat. It was neither clever nor original, but it was, more or less, exactly what she would have done under the same circumstances. She would give him that, at least: he had certainly not disappointed her. Volyova decided to give him one last chance before ending his fun. ‘Clavain?’ she asked, broadcasting on the same frequency she had already used for her ultimatum. ‘Clavain, are you listening to me?’ Twenty seconds passed, and then she heard his voice. ‘I’m listening, Triumvir. I take it this isn’t an offer of surrender?’ ‘I’m offering you a chance, Clavain, before I end this. A chance for you to walk away and fight on another day, against a more enthusiastic adversary.’ She waited for his reply to crawl back to her. The delay could be artificial, but it almost certainly meant he was still aboard Zodiacal Light ‘Why would you want to cut me any slack, Triumvir?’ ‘You’re not a bad man, Clavain. Just… misguided. You think you need the weapons more than I do, but you’re wrong, mistaken. I won’t hold it against you. No serious harm has yet been done. Turn your forces around and we’ll call it a misunderstanding.’ ‘You speak as someone who thinks they hold the upper hand, Ilia. I wouldn’t be so certain, if I were you.’ ‘I have the weapons, Clavain.’ She found herself smiling and frowning at the same time. ‘That makes rather a lot of difference, don’t you think?’ ‘I’m sorry, Ilia, but I think one ultimatum is enough for anyone, don’t you?’ ‘You’re a fool, Clavain. The sad thing is that you’ll never know how much of a fool.’ He did not respond. ‘Well, Ilia?’ Khouri asked. ‘I gave the bastard his chance. Now it’s time to stop playing games.’ She raised her voice. ‘Captain? Can you hear me? I want you to give me full control of cache weapon seventeen. Are you willing to do that?’ There was no answer. The moment stretched. The back of her neck crawled with anticipation. If the Captain was not prepared to let her actually use the five deployed weapons, then all her plans crumbled to dust and Clavain would suddenly seem a lot less foolish than he had a minute earlier. Then she noticed the subtle change in the weapon’s icon status, signifying that she now had full military control of cache weapon seventeen. ‘Thank you, Captain,’ Volyova said sweetly. Then she addressed the weapon. ‘Hello, Seventeen. Nice to be doing business with you again.’ She pushed her hand into the projection, pinching the floating icon of the weapon between her fingers. Again the icon responded sluggishly, reflecting the dead weight of the weapon as it was brought out from the sensor shadow of Infinity’s hull. As it moved it was aligning itself, bringing its long killing axis to bear on the distant, but not really so distant, target of Zodiacal Light . At any time, Volyova’s knowledge of the position of Clavain’s ship was twenty seconds out of date, but that was only a minor annoyance. In the unlikely event that he suddenly moved, she was still guaranteed a kill. She would sweep his volume of possible occupancy with the weapon, knowing that she was sure to hit him at some point. She would know when she did; the detonation of his Conjoiner drives would light up the entire system. If anything was guaranteed to prick the interest of the Inhibitors, it would be that. Still, she had to do it. Yet Volyova trembled on the verge of execution. It felt wrong: too final; too abrupt; too — and this surprised her — unsporting. She felt she owed him a last chance
