Redemption Ark

Well, Volyova admitted to herself, almost nothing. She had a vague curiosity concerning whatever it was that had allowed him to decelerate so savagely. Even if it was nothing as exotic as inertia-suppression technology… but no. It was nothing she needed desperately. That meant she could use all the force in her arsenal against him. She could wipe him out of existence, and her only loss would be something she was not even sure had ever existed.

But something still troubled her. Clavain, surely, could see all that for himself? Especially if she was dealing with the Clavain, the real Butcher of Tharsis. He had not lived through four hundred or more dangerous years of human history by making tragically simple errors.

What if Clavain knew something she didn’t?

She moved her fingers through the projection, nervously reconfiguring her pieces, wondering which of them she should use first, thinking also that, given Clavain’s limitations, it would be more interesting to let the battle escalate rather than taking his main ship out instantly.

‘Any news from Thorn?’ she asked.

‘He’s en route from Resurgam with another two thousand passengers.’

‘And does he know about our little difficulty with Clavain?’

‘I told him we were moving closer to Resurgam. I didn’t see any sense in giving him anything more to worry about.’

‘No,’ Volyova said, agreeing with her for once. ‘The people are at least as safe in space as they’d be on Resurgam. At least once they’re off the planet they’ve got a hope of survival. Not much of one, but…’

‘Are you certain you won’t use the cache weapons?’

‘I will use them Khouri, but not a moment sooner than I have to. Haven’t you ever heard of the expression «whites of their eyes»? Perhaps not; it’s the sort of thing only a soldier would be likely to know.’

‘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.