Alastair Reynolds - Century Rain

“But you just said you can’t disable him.”

“Not in the hyperweb,” he said, raising a finger. “But if we can catch his ship in open space, between portals… then we might have a chance.”

Auger shook her head. “Too much risk of him getting away.”

“We’ll still have the missiles,” Tunguska said. “But the one thing they’re not is surgical.”

She imagined a school of swift, dolphinlike missiles skewering Niagara’s ship, blowing it apart in a soundless orgy of light. “I’m not going to shed any tears over that.”

“Or over your own death, which would doubtless ensue in the process? It would be suicide, Auger. His ship is carrying the Molotov device. That’s enough antimatter to crack open a moon, and it’s only two hundred kilometres away.”

Tunguska was right. It would have occurred to her sooner or later, but she was so fixated on killing Niagara that she had not really considered what his execution would actually entail.

“Even so,” she said, forcing out the words one by one, “we still have to do it.”

Tunguska’s expression was grave but approving. “I thought you’d say that. I just had to be sure.”

“What about Floyd?” she asked, her voice quavering as the realisation of what she had just decided slowly sunk in.

“Floyd and I have discussed the matter already,” Tunguska said. “For what it’s worth, we arrived at the same conclusion.”

She turned to Floyd. “Is that true?”

Floyd shrugged. “If that’s what it takes.”

Still looking into Floyd’s eyes, she said, “Then launch your missiles, Tunguska. And quickly, before any of us changes our minds.”

The faintest of shudders ran through the floor.

“It’s done,” Tunguska said. “They’re launched and running.”

Two hundred kilometres up the pipe, she thought. It was nothing in spatial terms. The missiles should have leapt across that distance in an eyeblink. But the hyperweb appeared to actively stifle attempts to pass through it more rapidly than the normal speed of a collapse wave. The missiles—according to Tunguska’s telemetry—were streaking ahead of his ship, following the expected acceleration curves for their mass and thrust, just as if they had been deployed in external space. For a little while it was even possible to bounce an electromagnetic pulse off them, or read the acoustic signal induced by their exhaust as it washed in a widening cone against the tunnel sides. But then something began to happen to them. They slowed, their acceleration curves levelling out, as if they had flown into spatial treacle. The faint, dwindling whisper of data from each missile reported no anomalies… but they were no longer travelling ahead with sufficient speed to intercept Niagara’s ship.

Tunguska stared at the spread of tactical displays—which were more for their benefit than his, Auger suspected—with obvious dissatisfaction. “This is what I feared,” he said. “There’s no telling whether any of them will reach Niagara in time.”

“Will we know when it happens?” she asked.

“Would you like to know?”

“I’d like to know that we’d succeeded, before…” Hervoice trailed off. There was no need for her to state the obvious.

“I’m afraid you probably won’t have that luxury. It’s anyone’s guess how the matter-antimatter fireball will travel back down the pipe, but it’s likely to be swift. There’ll be no time to reflect on victory. Equally, your deaths will be mercifully swift.”

Auger didn’t need reminding that she had effectively signed her own death warrant if one of the missiles got through. She was trying to push that knowledge to one side, but it kept squirming back to the forefront of her thoughts.

“Will you sense anything?” Floyd asked Tunguska.

“I’ll have an inkling,” he said. “When the fireball hits the skin of my ship, the information from the hull sensors should reach my skull an instant ahead of the destructive wave itself.”

“Giving you enough time to form a thought?” Auger asked, lacing her hand tightly with Floyd’s. “Enough time to extract a crumb of comfort that your sacrifice will have been worth it?”

“Perhaps.” Tunguska smiled at them. “It doesn’t have to be a very complicated thought, after all.”

“I’m not sure I envy you,” Auger said.

“And perhaps you’re right not to, but there it is. I could disable the connection between my neural machines and the hull sensors, but I don’t think I have the nerve.” He looked back at one of the wall images, studying it with suddenly alarmed eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Auger asked.

“Nothing that I didn’t expect, I suppose. The telemetry feeds from all the missiles are now silent.”

“Does that mean the missiles are dead?” Floyd asked.

“No—not necessarily, just that the data they’re trying to send back to us can’t find its way home. The missiles probably can’t hear our signals to them, either. They’ll have switched to autonomous flight mode.”

“Somehow I preferred it when we knew for certain that they were still out there,” Floyd said.

“Me, too,” Tunguska said. Then he reached out and placed his own hand over theirs, and the three of them sat in silence, waiting for something to happen, or for everything to stop happening.

Silence was the one thing Auger didn’t want. It left a vacuum in her head into which certain thoughts were too easily able to slip. She wanted the easy cadences of normal human conversation, the gossip and the small talk. She wanted to be able to think about anything other than that killing wall of furious light, the explosion that might even now be rushing towards them, faster than any advance information of its arrival could possibly travel. Faster than any possible news of success. How long had it been since the missiles had streaked away? She had lost all sense of time; it could have been minutes or hours. But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.

She looked at the other two—Floyd and the Slasher both—and knew that in their own way they were working through exactly the same thought process. As if in some silent acknowledgement of this, all three of them chose that moment to tighten their hands together.

Suddenly, a convulsive change occurred in the displays on the wall. Auger had an instant to register this, and another instant to let the implications unravel in her head. One of the missiles must have found its mark, and now the ship had detected the approaching hellfire…

But the voices in her head, quiet of late, told her no, that was not what was happening.

It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.

In another instant—another tick of the clockwork grind of consciousness—the ship began to execute some drastic evasive manoeuvre. Auger had just enough time to feel her weight shifting dangerously to one side when her gown stiffened into a protective cocoon and the furniture, floors and walls reshaped themselves into a protective matrix.

Then came the awful moment when the ship forced its breathing apparatus down her throat.

She experienced a momentary blissed-out sense that, in truth, being smothered into helplessness was actually quite pleasant…

Two or three missing frames of consciousness.

Information trickled into her skull, via Cassandra’s machines. They were talking to Tunguska and the rest of the ship.

One of their own missiles had just locked on to them. The peculiar spatial properties of the hyperweb tunnel had confused its navigation system, while the echoing babble of chaotic EM signals had caused it to disregard the message that Tunguska’s ship was friend, rather than foe. There was no time to aim and fire the beam weapons. The ship had flexed itself, bending its hull to let the missile slip by at the last instant, like a supple combatant avoiding a lethal stab. Once the missile had streaked past into the portion of the tunnel behind the ship, an emergency detonation command had gnawed into its tiny, murderous mind and made it self-trigger.