Redemption Ark

On the edge of the combat swarm, though still within range of potentially damaging weapons, Antoinette disengaged the evasive pattern she had been running and throttled Storm Bird down to one gee. Through Storm Bird’s windows she could see the elongated shape of the Triumvir’s lighthugger, visible at a distance of two thousand kilometres as a tiny scratch of light. Most of the time it was dark enough that she did not see the ship at all, but two or three times a minute a major explosion — some detonating mine, warhead, drive-unit or weapons-trigger — threw light against the hull, momentarily picking it out the way a lighthouse might glance against a jagged pinnacle rising from the depths of a storm-racked ocean. But there was never any doubt about where the ship was. Sparks of flame were swarming around it, so bright that they smeared across her retina, etching dying pink arcs and helices against the stellar backdrop, the trails reminding her of the fiery sticks children had played with during fireworks shows in the old carousel. Pinpricks of light within the swarm signified smaller armaments detonating, and very occasionally Antoinette saw the hard red or green line of a laser precursor beam, caught in outgassing air or propellant from one or other of the ships. Absently, cursing her mind’s ability to focus on the most trivial of things at the wrong time, she realised that this was a detail that they always got wrong in the space opera holo-dramas, where laser beams were invisible, the sinister element of invisibility adding to the drama. But a real close-range space battle was a far messier affair, with gas clouds and chaff shards erupting all over the place, ready to reflect and disperse any beam weapon.

The swarm was tighter towards the middle, thinning out through dozens of kilometres. Though she was on the edge of it, she was aware of how tempting a target Storm Bird must present. The Triumvir’s defences were preoccupied with the closer attack elements, but Antoinette knew that she could not afford to count on that continuing.

Xavier’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Antoinette? Scorpio’s ready for departure. Says you can open the bay door any time you like.’

‘We’re not close enough,’ she said.

Scorpio’s voice cut over the intercom. She no longer had any difficulty distinguishing his voice from those of the other pigs. ‘Antoinette? This is close enough. We have the fuel to cross from here. There’s no need for you to risk Storm Bird by taking us any closer.’

‘But the closer I take you, the more fuel you’ll have in reserve. Isn’t that true?’

‘I can’t argue with that. Take us five hundred kilometres closer, then. And Antoinette? That really will be close enough.’

She magnified the battle view, tapping into the telemetry stream from the many cameras that now whipped around the Triumvir’s ship. The image data had been seamlessly merged and then processed to remove the motion, and while there were occasional snags and dropouts as the view was refreshed, the impression was as if she were hovering in space only two or three kilometres beyond the ship itself. The silence was one thing that the holo-dramas got right, she realised, but she had never realised how terribly, profoundly wrong that silence would be when accompanying an actual battle. It was an abject void into which her imagination projected endless screams. What did not help was the way that the Triumvir’s ship loomed out of darkness in random, fitful flashes of light, never lingering long enough for her to comprehend the form of the ship in its entirety. What she saw of the ship’s perverted architecture was nonetheless adequately disturbing.

Now she saw something that she had not seen before: a rectangle of light, like a golden door, opened somewhere along the wrinkled complexity of Nostalgia for Infinity’s hull. It was open for only a moment, but that was long enough for something to slip through. The glare from the engine of the shuttle that had emerged caught the stepped spinal edge of a flying buttress, and as the ship gyred, orientating itself with strobing flashes of thrust, the black shadow of the buttress crawled across an acre of hull material that had the scaled texture of lizardskin.

What about the wolves, Felka?

[Everything, Clavain. At least, everything that I learned. Everything that the Wolf was prepared to let me know.]

It may not be all of the picture, Felka. It may not even be part of it.

[I know. But I still think I should tell you.]