Redemption Ark

Clavain offered her one end of a data feed from the ship’s sensor net. Skade accepted the feed, instructing her implants to map it into her sensorium with her usual filters and preferences.

She experienced a pleasing instant of dislocation. Her body, the bodies of her companions, the room in which they floated, the great sleek carbon-black needle of Nightshade — all these things shifted to insubstantiality.

The Jovian was a massive presence ahead, wrapped in an ever-moving geometrically complex cloud of interdicted zones and safe passages. An angry swarm of platforms and sentries whipped around the world in tight precessional orbits. Closer, but not much closer, was the Demarchist ship that Nightshade had been chasing. It was already touching the top of Tangerine Dream’s atmosphere, beginning to glow hotter. The shipmaster was taking a risk with the atmospheric dive, hoping to gain concealment beneath a few hundred kilometres of overlying cloud.

It was, Skade reflected, a move born of desperation.

Transatmospheric insertions were risky, even for ships built to make skimming passes into the upper layers of Jovians. The shipmaster would have had to slow down before attempting the plunge, and would be moving slowly again upon return to space. Aside from the camouflaging effect of the overlying air — the benefits of which depended on the armoury of sensors that the pursuing ship carried, and on what could be detected by low-orbit satellites or floating drones — the only advantage in making a skim was to replenish fuel reserves.

In the early years of the war, both sides had used antimatter as their main energy source. The Conjoiners, with their camouflaged manufactories on the edge of the system, were still able to produce and store antimatter in militarily useful quantities. Even if they could not, it was common knowledge that they had access to even more prodigious energy sources. But handling antimatter was something that the Demarchists had not been able to do for more than a decade. They had fallen back on fusion power, for which they needed hydrogen, ideally dredged from the oceans within gas giants where it was already compressed into its metallic state. The shipmaster would open the ship’s fuel scoops, sucking in and compressing atmospheric hydrogen, or might even attempt a plunge into the ‘merely’ liquid hydrogen sea overlaying the metallic-state hydrogen wrapped around the Jovian’s rocky nugget of a core. But that would be a hazardous thing to attempt in a ship that had already sustained battle damage. Very probably the shipmaster would be hoping that the scoops would not be necessary; that it might instead manage to rendezvous with one of the whale-brained tankers circling endlessly through the atmosphere, singing sad, mournful songs of turbulence and hydrocarbon chemistry. The tanker would inject slugs of pre-processed metallic hydrogen into the ship, some to use as fuel and some to use as warheads.

Atmospheric insertion was a gamble, and a desperate one, but one that had paid off enough times to be slightly preferable to a suicidal scuttling operation.

Skade composed a thought and popped it into her companions’ heads. I admire the shipmaster’s determination. But it won’t help him.

Clavain’s response was immediate. [It’s a she, Skade. We picked up her signal when she tight-beamed the other ship; they were passing through the edge of a debris ring, so there was enough ambient dust to scatter a small fraction of the laser light in our direction.]

And the interloper?

Remontoire answered her. [We always suspected it was a freighter from the moment we had a clean lock on its exhaust signature. That turns out to be the case, and we know a little more now.]

Remontoire offered her a feed, which she accepted.

A fuzzy image of the freighter sharpened in her mind’s eye, accreting detail like a sketch being worked to completion. The freighter was half the size of Nightshade, a typical in-system hauler built one or two centuries ago; definitely pre-plague. The hull was vaguely rounded; the ship might once have been designed to land on Yellowstone or one of the other atmosphere-bound bodies in the system, but it had gained so many bulges and spines since then that it made Skade think of a fish afflicted with some rare recessive mutation. Cryptic machine-readable symbols flickered on its skin, some of which were interrupted by blank acres of repaired hull cladding.