Redemption Ark

Through the flight deck windows the lighthugger still loomed enormously large, extending in either direction like a great dark cliff, chiselled here and there with strangely mechanistic outcrops, defiles and prominences. The docking bay Storm Bird had just cleared was a diminishing rectangle of gold light in the nearest part of the cliff, the huge toothed doors already sliding towards each other. Yet even though the doors were sealing, there was still adequate room for smaller vessels to make their departures. She saw them with her own eyes and on the various tactical displays and radar spheres that packed the flight deck. As the armoured jaws slid towards closure, small skeletal attack ships, little more than armoured trikes, were able to slip between the teeth. They zipped out, riding agile high-bum antimatter-catalysed fusion rockets. They made Antoinette think of the mouth-cleaning parasites of some enormous underwater monster. By comparison, Storm Bird was a sizeable fish in its own right.

The departure had been the most technically difficult she had ever known. Clavain’s surprise attack demanded that Zodiacal Light sustain a deceleration of three gees until its arrival within ten light-seconds of Nostalgia for Infinity, All the attack ships in the current wave had been forced to make their departures under the same three gees of thrust. Exiting any spacecraft bay was a technically demanding operation, most especially when the departing ships were armed and fuel-heavy. But doing it under sustained thrust was an order of magnitude more difficult again. Antoinette would have considered it a white-knuckle job if Clavain had demanded that they exit at a half-gee, the way rim pilots arrived and departed from Carousel New Copenhagen. But three gees? That was just being sadistic.

But she had made it. Now she had clear space for hundreds of metres in any direction, and a lot more than that in most.

‘Cut in tokamak on my mark, Ship. Five… four… three… two… and mark.’ Through years of conditioning she tensed, anticipating the tiny thump in the seat of her pants that always signified the switch from nuclear rockets to pure fusion.

It never came.

‘Fusion burn sustained and steady. Green across the board. Three gees, Antoinette.’

She raised an eyebrow and nodded. ‘Damn, but that was smooth.’

‘You can thank Xavier for that, and perhaps Clavain. They found a glitch in one of the oldest drive-management subroutines. It was responsible for a slight mismatch in thrust during the switch between thrust modes.’

She switched to a lower-magnification view of the lighthugger, one that showed the entire length of the hull. Streams of makeshift attack craft — mostly trike-sized, but up to small shuttles — were emerging from five different bays along the hull. Many of the craft were decoys, and not all of the decoys had enough fuel to get within a light-second of Nostalgia for Infinity. But even knowing that it still looked impressive. The huge ship appeared to be bleeding streams of light.

‘And you had nothing to do with it?’

‘One always tries one best.’

‘I never thought otherwise, Ship.’

‘I’m sorry about what happened, Antoinette…’

‘I’m over it, Ship.’

She couldn’t call it Beast any more. And she certainly couldn’t bring herself to call it Lyle Merrick. Ship would have to do.

She switched to an even lower magnification, calling up an overlay that boxed the numerous attack craft, tagging them with numeric codes according to type, range, crew and armament, and plotted their vectors. Some idea of the scale of the assault now became apparent. There were around a hundred ships in total. Sixty or so of the hundred were trikes, and about thirty of the trikes actually carried assault-squad members — usually one heavily armoured pig, although there were one or two tandem trikes for specialist operations. All of the crewed trikes carried some form of armament, ranging from single-use grasers to gigawatt-yield Breitenbach bosers. The crew all wore servo armour; most carried firearms, or would be able to disengage and carry their trike’s weapon when they reached the enemy ship.