Redemption Ark

The hauler was unharmed, he knew. Once it was clear of Copenhagen another repair specialist would undoubtedly pick it up. In a few hours it would probably be back on its way to the House of Correction with its load of unfashionably mutated passengers.

Of course, there would still be hell to pay from a number of quarters: the passengers themselves, if they ever got wind; Swift-Augustine, the habitat that had sent them; the cartel that owned the hauler; maybe even the House of Correction itself, for endangering its clients.

They could all go fuck themselves. He had heard from Antoinette, and that was all that mattered.

CHAPTER 8

Clavain looked at the stars.

He was outside the Mother Nest, alone, perched head-up or head-down — he could not decide which — on the practically weightless surface of the hollowed-out comet. There was no other human being visible in any direction, no evidence, in fact, of any kind of human presence at all. A passing observer, spying Clavain, would have assumed that he had been cruelly marooned on the surface of the comet without ship, supplies or shelter. There was no evidence whatsoever of the vast clockwork which spun at the comet’s heart.

The comet spun slowly, periodically lifting the pale jewel of Epsilon Eridani above Clavain’s horizon. The star was brighter than all the others in the sky, but it still looked like a star rather than a sun. He felt the immense chill of the empty space between himself and the star. It was a mere 100 AU distant — not even a scratch compared with interstellar distances, but it still caused him to shiver. He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when, confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

Light caught his eye. It was an impossibly faint flicker somewhere in the plane of the ecliptic, a hand’s width from Eridani. There it was again: a sharp, sudden spark at the limit of detectability. He was not imagining it. Another flash followed, a tiny distance away from the first two. Clavain ordered his helmet visor to screen out the light of the sun, so that his eyes did not have to deal with such a large dynamic range in brightness. The visor obliged, occluding the star with a precise black mask, exactly as if he had stared at the sun for too long.

He knew what he was looking at. It was a space battle dozens of light-hours away. The ships involved were probably spread through a volume of space several light-minutes from side to side, firing at each other with heavy rela-tivistic weapons. Had he been in the Mother Nest he could have tapped into the general tactics database and retrieved information on the assets known to be patrolling that sector of the solar system. But it would have told him nothing he could not deduce for himself.

The flashes were mostly dying ships. Now and then one would be the triggering pulse of a Demarchist railgun — cumbersome, thousand-kilometre-long linear accelerator barrels. They had to be energised by detonating a string of cobalt-fusion bombs. The blast would rip the railgun to atoms, but not before it had accelerated a tank-sized slug of stabilised metallic hydrogen up to seventy per cent of light-speed, surfing just ahead of the annihilation wave.

The Conjoiners had weapons of similar effectiveness, but which drew their energising pulse from space-time itself. They could be fired more than once, and steered more quickly. They did not flash when they were fired.

Clavain knew that a spectroscopic analysis of the light in each of those flashes would have confirmed their origin. But he would not have been surprised to learn that most of them were caused by direct hits to Demarchist cruisers.

The enemy were dying out there. They were dying instantly, in explosions so bright and fast that there could be no pain, no realisation that death had come. But a painless death was only a small consolation. There would be many ships in that squadron; the survivors would be witnessing the destruction of their compatriots’ vessels and wondering who would be next. They would never know when a slug was on its way towards them, and they would never know when it arrived.

From where Clavain stood, it was like watching fireworks above a remote town. From the colours of Agincourt to the flames of Guernica, to the pure shining light of Nagasaki like a cleansing sword blade catching the sun, to the contrails etched above the skies of the Tharsis Bulge, to the distant flash of heavy relativistic weapons against a starscape of sable-black in the early years of the twenty-seventh century: Clavain did not need to be reminded that war was horrific, but from a distance it could also have a terrible searing beauty.

The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.