Reynolds, Alastair: Redemption Ark

“Fine. I’m sure you’ll improvise.”

But it was no simple thing to persuade a ship of vacuum to skim an atmosphere, even the upper atmospheric layer of a gas giant—even a ship as generously armoured and rounded as hers. At best, Storm Bird would come through this with some heavy hull damage that would still allow her to limp home to the Rust Belt. At worst, the ship would never see open space again.

And nor, in all likelihood, would Antoinette.

Well, she thought, at least there was one consolation: if she trashed the ship, she would never have to break the bad news to Xavier.

So much for small mercies.

There was a muted chime from the panel.

“Beast . . .” Antoinette said, “was that what I thought it was?”

“Very possibly, Little Miss. Radar contact, eighteen thousand klicks distant, three degrees off dead ahead; two degrees off ecliptic north.”

“Fuck. Are you certain it isn’t a beacon or weapons platform?”

“Too large to be either, Little Miss.”

She did not need to do any mental arithmetic to work out what that meant. There was another ship between them and the top of the gas giant; another ship close to the atmosphere.

“What can you tell me about it?”

“It’s moving slowly, Little Miss, on a direct course for the atmosphere. Looks rather as if it’s planning to execute a similar manoeuvre to the one you have in mind, although they’re moving several klicks per second faster and their approach angle is considerably steeper.”

“Sounds like a zombie—you don’t think it is, do you?” she said quickly, hoping to convince herself otherwise.

“No need to speculate, Little Miss. The ship has just locked a tight-beam on to us. The message protocol is indeed Demarchist.”

“Why the fuck are they bothering to tight-beam us?”

“One respectfully suggests you find out.”

A tight-beam was a needlessly finicky means of communication when two ships were so close. A simple radio broadcast would have worked just as well, removing the need for the zombie ship to point its message laser exactly at the moving target of Storm Bird .

“Acknowledge whoever it is,” she ordered. “Can we tight-beam them back?”

“Not without redeploying something one just went to rather a lot of trouble to retract, Little Miss.”

“Then do it, but don’t forget to haul it back in afterwards.”

She heard the machinery push one of the spines back into vacuum. There was a rapid chirp of message protocols between the two ships and then suddenly Antoinette was looking at the face of another woman. She looked, if such a thing were possible, more tired, drawn and edgy than Antoinette felt.

“Hello,” Antoinette said. “Can you see me as well?”

The woman’s nod was barely perceptible. Her tight-lipped face suggested vast reserves of pent-up fury, like water straining behind a dam. “Yes. I can see you.”

“I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone out here,” Antoinette offered. “I thought it might not be a bad idea to respond by tight-beam as well.”

“You may as well not have bothered.”

“Not have bothered?” Antoinette echoed.

“Not after your radar already illuminated us.” The woman’s shaven scalp gleamed blue as she looked down at something. She did not appear to be very much older than Antoinette, but with zombies you could never be sure.

“Um . . . and that’s a problem, is it?”

“It is when we’re trying to hide from something. I don’t know why you’re out here, and frankly I don’t much care. I suggest that you abort whatever you’re planning. The Jovian is a Contested Volume, which means that I’d be fully within my rights to blast you out of the sky right now.”

“I don’t have a problem with zom . . . with Demarchists,” Antoinette said.

“I’m delighted to hear it. Now turn around.”

Antoinette glanced down again at the piece of paper she had removed from her shirt pocket. The design on it showed a man wearing an antique spacesuit, the kind with accordioned joints, holding a bottle up to his gaze. The neck ring where his helmet should have been latched was a broken ellipse of gleaming silver. He was smiling as he looked at the bottle, which shone with gold fluid. No, Antoinette thought. It was time to be resolute.

“I’m not turning around,” she said. “But I promise I don’t want to steal anything from the planet. I’m not going anywhere near any of your refineries, or anything like that. I won’t even open my intakes. I’m just going in and out, and then I won’t bother you again.”

“Fine,” the woman said. “I’m very glad to hear that. The trouble is it’s not really me that you need to be worried about.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.” The woman smiled sympathetically. “It’s the ship behind you, the one I don’t think you’ve even noticed yet.”

“Behind me?”

The woman nodded. “You have spiders on your tail.”

That was when Antoinette knew she was in real trouble.

TWO

Skade was wedged between two curving black masses of machinery when the alert came in. One of her feelers had detected a change in the ship’s attack posture, an escalation in the state of battle readiness. It was not necessarily a crisis, but it certainly demanded her immediate attention.

Skade unplugged her compad from the machinery, the fibre-optic umbilical whisking back into the compad’s housing. She pressed the blank slate of the compad against her stomach, where it flexed and bonded with the padded black fabric of her vest. Almost immediately the compad began backing up its cache of data, feeding it into a secure partition in Skade’s long-term memory.

Skade crawled through the narrow space between the machine components, arching and corkscrewing through the tightest spaces. After twenty metres she reached the exit point and eased herself partway through a narrow circular aperture that had just opened in one wall. Then Skade froze, falling perfectly silent and still; even the colour waves in her crest subsided. The loom of implants in her head detected no other Conjoiners within fifty metres, and confirmed that all monitoring systems in this corridor were turning a blind eye to her emergence. But still she was cautious, and when she moved—looking up and down the corridor—she did so with exquisite calm and caution, like a cat venturing into unfamiliar territory.

There was no one in sight.

Skade pulled herself entirely free of the aperture, then issued a mental command that made it sphincter tight, forming an invisibly fine seal. Only Skade knew where these entry apertures were, and the apertures would only show themselves to her. Even if Clavain detected the presence of the hidden machinery, he would never find a way to reach it without using the brute force that would trigger the machinery to self-destruct.

The ship was in free fall, still, so Skade presumed, sidling closer to the enemy ship they had been chasing. Weightlessness suited Skade. She scampered along the corridor, springing from contact point to contact point on all fours. Her movements were so precise and economical that she sometimes seemed to travel within her own personal bubble of gravity.

[Report, Skade?]

She never knew precisely when the Night Council was going to pop into her head, but she had long since stopped being fazed by its sudden apparitions.

Nothing untoward. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what the machinery’s capable of doing, but so far everything’s working just the way we thought it would.

[Good. Of course, a more extensive test would be desirable . . . ]

Skade felt a flush of irritation. I already told you. At the moment it takes careful measurement to detect the influence of the machinery. That means we can perform clandestine tests under the cover of routine military operations.