Аластер Рейнольдс - The Iron Tactician

Teal relayed the statement. Struxer barked back his answer, which was monosyllabic enough to require no translation.

‘He says if we want it, we should try taking it,’ Teal said.

Merlin nodded – he had been expecting as much, but it had seemed worth his while to make one last concession at a negotiated settlement. ‘Ship, give me manual fire control on the torp racks. We’re a little further out than I’d like, but it’ll give me time to issue a warning. I’m taking out those kinetic batteries.’

‘You have control, Merlin,’ Tyrant said.

Baskin asked: ‘Are you sure it isn’t too soon?’

Merlin gave his reply by means of issuing the firing command. Tyrant pushed out its ventral weapons racks and the charm-torps sped away with barely a twitch of recoil. Only a pattern of moving nodes on the targeting display gave any real hint that the weapons had been deployed.

‘Torps armed and running,’ Tyrant said.

‘Teal, tell them they have a strike on its way. They’ve got a few minutes to move their people deeper into the asteroid, if they aren’t already there. My intention is to disable their defences, not to take lives. Make sure Struxer understands that.’

Teal was in the middle of delivering her message when Tyrant jolted violently and without warning. It was a sideways impulse, harsh enough to bruise bones, and for a moment Merlin could only stare at the displays, as shocked as he had been when Teal had slapped him across the face.

Then there was another jolt, in the opposite direction, and he understood.

‘Evasive response in progress,’ Tyrant said. ‘Normal safety thresholds suspended. Manual override available, but not recommended.’

‘What?’ Baskin grimaced.

‘We’re being shot at,’ Merlin said.

Tyrant was taking sharp evasive manoeuvres, corkscrewing hard even as it was still engaged in a breakneck deceleration.

‘Impossible. We’re still too far out.’

‘There’s nothing coming at us from Mundar. It’s something else. Some perimeter defence screen we didn’t even know about.’ He directed a reproachful look at Baskin. ‘I mean, that you didn’t know about.’

‘Single-use kinetics, perhaps,’ Baskin said. ‘Free-floating sentries.’

‘I should be seeing the activation pulses. Electromagnetic and optical burst signatures. I’m not. All I’m seeing are the slugs, just before they hit us.’

They were, as far as Tyrant could tell, simply inert slugs of dense matter, lacking guidance or warheads. They were falling into detection range just in time to compute and execute an evasion, but the margins were awfully fine.

‘There are such things as dark kinetics,’ Baskin said. ‘They’re a prototype weapon system: mirrored and cloaked to conceal the launch pulse. But Struxer’s brigands have nothing in their arsenal like that. Even if they had a local manufacturing capability, they wouldn’t have the skills to make their own versions…’

‘Would the Tactician know about those weapons?’ Teal asked.

‘In its catalogue of military assets… yes. But there’s a world of difference between knowing of something and being able to direct the duplication and manufacture of that technology.’

‘Tell that to your toy,’ Merlin murmured. He hoped it was his imagination, but the violent counter-manoeuvres seemed to be coming more rapidly, as if Tyrant was having an increasingly difficult time steering between the projectiles. ‘Ship, recall six of the charm-torps. Bring them back as quickly as you can.’

‘What good will that do?’ Baskin snapped. ‘You should be hitting them with everything you’ve got, not pulling your punch at the last minute.’

‘We need the torps to give us an escort screen,’ Merlin said. ‘The other six can still deal with all the batteries on the visible face.’

It had been rash to commit all twelve in one go, he now knew, born of an arrogant assumption as to his own capabilities. But he had realised his mistake in time.

‘Struxer again,’ Teal said. ‘He says it’s only going to get worse, and we should call off the other missiles and give up on our attack. Says if he sees a clear indication of our exhaust, he’ll stand down the defence screen.’

‘Carry on,’ Baskin said.

‘Charm-torps on return profile,’ Tyrant said. ‘Shall I deploy racks for recovery?’

‘No. Group the torps in a protective cordon around us, close enough that you can interdict any slugs that you can’t steer us past. And put in a reminder to me to upgrade our attack countermeasures.’

‘Complying. The remaining six torps are now being reassigned to the six visible targets. Impact in… twenty seconds.’

‘Struxer,’ Merlin said, not feeling that his words needed any translation. ‘Get your people out of those batteries!’

A sudden blue brightness pushed through Tyrant ’s windows, just before they shuttered tight in response.

‘Slug interdicted,’ the ship said calmly. ‘One torp depleted from defence cordon. Five remaining.’

‘Spare me the countdown,’ Merlin said. ‘Just get us through this mess and out the other side.’

The six remaining charm-torps of the attack formation closed in on Mundar in the same instant, clawing like a six-taloned fist, gouging six star-hot wounds into the asteroid’s crust, six swelling spheres of heat and destruction that grew and dimmed until they merged at their boundaries. Merlin, studying the readouts, could only swallow in horror and awe, reminded again of the potency of even modest Cohort weaponry. Megatonnes of rock and dust were boiling off the asteroid even as he watched, like a skull bleeding out from six eye-sockets.

Three of the cordon torps were lost before Tyrant began to break free into relatively safe space, but by then Merlin’s luck was stretching perilously thin. The torps could interdict the slugs for almost any range of approach vectors, but not always safely. If the impact happened close enough to Tyrant , that was not much better than a direct hit.

They were through, then, but not without cost. The hull had taken a battering from two of the nearer detonations, and while none of the damage would ordinarily been of concern, Merlin had been counting on having a ship in optimum condition. Limping away to effect repairs was scarcely an option now.

The consolation, if he needed one, was that Mundar had taken a much worse battering.

‘Is Struxer still sending?’ Merlin asked.

‘He’s trying,’ Teal said.

Struxer’s face appeared, but speckled by interference. He looked strained, glancing either side of him as he made his statement. Teal listened carefully.

‘He says they’ve still got weapons, if we dare to come any nearer. His position hasn’t changed.’

‘Mine has,’ Merlin said. ‘Ship, send in the remaining torps, dialled to maximum yield. Strike at the existing impact sites: see if we can’t open some fracture plains, or punch our way deep inside.’ Then he enlarged the asteroid’s schematic and began tapping his finger against some of the secondary installations on the surface – what the intelligence dossiers said were weapons, sensor pods, airlocks. ‘Ready nova-mines for dispersal. Spread pattern three. We’ll pick off any moving targets with the gamma-cannon.’

Teal said: ‘If you hit Struxer’s antenna you’ll take away our means of communicating.’

‘I’m past the point of negotiation, Teal. My ship’s wounded and I take that personally. If you want to send a last message to Struxer, tell him he had his chance to play nicely.’

Baskin leaned forward in his seat restraints. ‘Don’t do anything too rash, Merlin. We came to force his hand, not to annihilate the entire asteroid.’