Federations

“They probably decided to attack us regardless of the outcome of their last attempt. Kinetics.”

“You sure there’s no defense?”

“Only good luck.” The ground lashed at us again, but Wendigo stayed standing. The roar that followed the first impact was subsiding, fading into a constant but bearable complaint of tortured ice. “The first probably only chipped us—maybe gouged a big crater, but I doubt that it ruptured any of the pressurized areas. Next time could be worse.”

And there would be a next time, no doubt about it. Kinetics were the only weapon capable of hitting us at such long range, and they did so by sheer force of numbers. Each kinetic was a speck of iron, accelerated to a hair’s breadth below the speed of light. Relativity bequeathed the speck a disproportionate amount of kinetic energy—enough that only a few impacts would rip the splinter to shreds. Of course, only one in a thousand of the kinetics they fired at us would hit—but that didn’t matter. They’d just fire ten thousand.

“Wendigo,’’ I said. “Can we get to your ship?”

“No,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “We can reach it, but it isn’t fixed yet.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll lift on auxiliaries. Once we’re clear of the splinter we’ll be safe.”

“No good, either. Hull’s breached—it’ll be at least an hour before even part of it can be pressurized.”

“And it’ll take us an hour or so just to get there, won’t it? So why are we waiting?”

“Sorry, Spirey, but—”

Her words were drowned by the arrival of the second kinetic. This one seemed to hit harder, the impact trailing away into aftergroans. The holographic frescos were all dark now. Then—ever so slowly—the ceiling ruptured, a huge mandible of ice probing into the chamber. We’d lost the false gravity; now all that remained was the splinter’s feeble pull, dragging us obliquely toward one wall.

“But what?” I shouted in Wendigo’s direction.

For a moment she had that absent look, which said she was more Queen than Wendigo. Then she nodded in reluctant acceptance. “All right, Spirey. We play it your way. Not because I think our chances are great. Just that I’d rather be doing something.”

“Amen to that.”

It was uncomfortably dim now, much of the illumination having come from the endlessly cycling frescos. But it wasn’t silent. Though the groan of the chamber’s off-kilter spin was gone now, what remained was almost as bad: the agonized shearing of the ice that lay beyond us. Helped by wasps, we made it to the train. I carried Yarrow’s corpse, but at the door Wendigo said: “Leave her.”

“No way.”

“She’s dead, Spirey. Everything of her that mattered, the Splinterqueen already saved. You have to accept that. It was enough that you brought her here, don’t you understand? Carrying her now would only lessen your chances—and that would really have pissed her off.”

Some alien part of me allowed the wasps to take the corpse. Then we were inside, helmeted up and breathing thick.

As the train picked up speed, I glanced out the window, intent on seeing the Queen one last time. It should have been too dark, but the chamber looked bright. For a moment I presumed the frescos had come to life again, but then something about the scene’s unreal intensity told me the Queen was weaving this image in my head. She hovered above the debris-strewn terrazzo—except that this was more than the Queen I had seen before. This was—what?

How she saw herself?

Ten of her twelve wasp composites were now back together, arranged in constantly shifting formation. They now seemed more living than machine, with diaphanous sunwings, chitin-black bodies, fur-sheened limbs and sensors, and eyes that were faceted crystalline globes, sparkling in the chamber’s false light. That wasn’t all. Before, I’d sensed the Queen as something implied by her composites. Now I didn’t need to imagine her. Like a ghost in which the composites hung, she loomed vast in the chamber, multiwinged and brooding—

And then we were gone.

We sped toward the surface for the next few minutes, waiting for the impact of the next kinetic. When it hit, the train’s cushioned ride smothered the concussion. For a moment I thought we’d made it, then the machine began to decelerate slowly to a dead halt. Wendigo convened with the Queen, and told me the line was blocked. We disembarked into vacuum.

Ahead, the tunnel ended in a wall of jumbled ice.

After a few minutes we found a way through the obstruction, Wendigo wrenching aside boulders larger than either of us. “We’re only half a klick from the surface,” she said, as we emerged into the unblocked tunnel beyond. She pointed ahead, to what might have been a scotoma of absolute blackness against the milky darkness of the tunnel. “After that, a klick overland to the wreck.” She paused. “Realize we can’t go home, Spirey. Now more than ever.”

“Not exactly spoiled for choice, are we.”