Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

The gas detonation fractured several of the factory ship’s outer plates and ruptured the insulation of a main power cable, so that when the water rushed in through the gaps in the ship’s hull it shorted out the electricity supply for several dozen ships near the heart of the Log-Jam. That part of the city sank into darkness.

The Module sensed the electrical fields immediately around fade and die, leaving only the magnetic signatures of the fabric of the ships themselves.

Emergency lights burned on the ships for a few seconds until their stand-by generators took up the strain, so that, one by one, the vessels flickered into brightness again. The Log-Jam’s power supply centre-tapping the reactors of dozens of old submarines and four of the eight nuclear-powered carriers which made up Carrier Field-instituted checks to determine where the power line had shorted, before it started to re-route electricity to the affected area.

The power supply in the Devastator took a little longer to re-establish while its alarms were checked. When the old battle-ship’s systems did fire up again, much of the emergency wiring-replaced only a few months earlier as part of the vessel’s rolling refit programme by an electrical company very distantly owned by Miz Gattse Kuma-promptly melted, starting numerous but small fires throughout the old ship. The system was shut down again. Duty engineers on the Devastator -who, after the guards, made up the bulk of the old battleship’s fifty or so night staff-worked to reroute the generator supply while battery-powered fire control systems tackled the fires; most were put out within a few minutes.

The Module half-ploughed, half-floated gently on, approach-ing the dark space under the silent battleship, whose wide, flat bottom hung suspended just a handful of metres above the floor of soft, black mud.

Lebmellin fought the desire to look at his timepiece or ask an aide the hour. He watched the Chief Invigilator as the older man fell under the spell of the golden-haired Franck woman. The aristocrat was quite outshone in her company. Zefla Franck glowed; she filled the space about her with life and beauty and an attraction you could almost taste.

The Sharrow woman had a sort of quiet, dark beauty, under- stated despite the strength of her features and forbidding, even if one had not known she was from a major house; she was like a dark, cloud-covered planet clothed in quiet, cold mystery.

But the Franck woman was like Thrial; like the sun; a radiance Lebmellin could feel on his face as she joshed and joked with his immediate superior. And the old fool was lapping it up, falling for it, falling for her.

Mine , thought Lebmellin, watching her as she talked and laughed, savouring the way she put her head back and the exquisite shape it gave that long, inviting neck. Mine , he told himself, fastening his gaze on her hand when it went out to touch the ornately embroidered material on the arm of the Chief Invigilator’s robe.

You’ll be mine , Lebmellin told her piled mass of shining golden hair and her wise-child laughing eyes and her perfect, agile, ever minutely swivelling and shifting figure and her luxurious, enveloping, softly welcoming voice and mouth. Mine, when this is over, and I can have whatever I want. Mine.

The Chief Invigilator offered to show the Francks the Log-Jam from his yacht. She accepted; her brother declined gracefully, to the obvious relief of the Chief Invigilator. He swept off with her on his arm, taking only his two bodyguards, private secretary, butler, chef and physician with him and leaving the rest of his entourage behind to look briefly discomfited, then relax and enjoy themselves.

The mains power was reconnected by a different route before the Devastator ’s generator could be hooked into the circuit. When the battleship’s circuits came alive again, many of the alarms went off. There were still dozens of small fires burning aboard, and though they too were extinguished shortly after the power returned, there was smoke in many of the ship’s spaces, only gradually being pulled out of the vessel as its ventilation system rumbled back to life.

The alarms continued to sound, refusing to be reset without triggering again. The engineers and guard techs scratched their heads and ran various checks.

It was a few minutes before they realised that they weren’t dealing with a set of persistent and interlinked false alarms, and that something really was wrong.

By that time the Module had used a thermal lance to cut its way through the battleship’s mine-armour just a little to port of the vessel’s keel, directly under the Addendum Vault. It trundled back a little to let the three-metre disc of white-heat-edged metal thump onto the mud and disappear, then powered through the thick plume of disturbed mud until it was just underneath the hole. It reconfigured its tracks and motor chassis for minimum-cross-sectional shape and vertical large-bore pipe-working, then floated up into the flooded bilgespace.

The Crownstar Addendum lay in what had been the Devastator’s B-turret magazine. The magazine and the turret above had been designed to rotate as a unit to train the-three forty-centimetre guns on their targets; it had been heavily armoured to start with, and on its conversion from magazine to vault had been reinforced with extra titanium armour, as well as having all its entrances but one sealed up, so that once it had been swivelled away from the matching aperture in the magazine cylinder’s sleeve, the only way in was through at least a metre of armour plate.

The Module placed a shaped charge rather larger than any projectile the Devastator had ever fired under the base of the magazine vault, then crawled to one side of the flooded compartment, withdrew all its surface sensors into its armoured carapace and switched its listening devices off entirely.

The detonation shuddered through every single one of the Devastator ’s sixty thousand tonnes. It raised eyebrows and clinked ice cubes in glasses on adjoining ships. Two senior technicians in the battleship’s security control room looked slowly at each other and then reached for the Maximum Alert panic button. Every alarm on the ship that hadn’t gone off already proceeded to.

Lebmellin got the call about a third after midnight; he was waiting for it, so sensed his communications aide’s stillness as she listened to something more important than the chatter of world news and jam systems reports which usually spoke to her wired eardrum. She closed one eye, checking her lid-screen.

The Chief Invigilator’s comm man was already talking into a brooch phone.

Lebmellin’s aide tapped his elbow once, and spoke the code he was expecting. “Sir; a Court representative has arrived unexpectedly. He’s aboard the Caltasp Princess .”

“Oh dear,” Lebmellin said. He turned back to the industrialist he’d been talking to, to make his apologies.

“It’s on F deck!” the security chief said, slamming the console and looking round the smoke-misted atmosphere of the control room, where lights flashed from most surfaces and every seat was occupied with people punching buttons, talking quickly into phones and thumbing through manuals. “Oh, sorry, Vice Invigilator,” he said, standing quickly.

Lebmellin left his aides in the corridor and strode into the centre of the room, his gaze sweeping round the boards and walls of flashing lights. “Well now,” he said in his best calm-but-determined voice. “What is going on, eh, chief?”

“Something’s broken into the vault, sir. Straight up and in after a power cut; it’s only two bulkheads-fairly thin bulkheads-away from the central chamber now. The last-ditch stuff ought to activate, but as nothing else has stopped it…” He shrugged. “It’s jammed the vault sir, but it can’t get away; we have two microsubs under the hole and four-soon six-crawler units standing by at the side of the hull, plus the duty submarine on its way to the nearest practicable space with divers ready, and all deck surfaces within two hundred metres under guard. We’ve informed the City Marines and they have aircraft and more men standing by. The Chief Invigilator is-”