The Algebraist (75 page)

‘Really, Mr Luseferous,’ Feurish said, ‘this is no way to run a conference.’

‘I have to say that I have to agree,’ Chintsion said.

‘Shut up,’ Luseferous told them. ‘I also have numerous ships with multi-real-tonne antimatter warheads stationed right round this gas-giant. Planet-busters. If there’s still nothing happening after you’re all dead, I start detonating them in your precious fucking atmosphere. What passes for the authorities on your giant rotten fart of a planet will be informed of the above in due course.’ The Archimandrite looked up at the guards poised on the gantries above. ‘Take them away. Get them out of those esuits. By cutting if necessary.’

A dozen giant black figures like suits of ancient armour encrusted with huge dark jewels sailed down, landing on the black diamond film on great talon-spread legs. Four surrounded each of the three esuited Dwellers.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ the Dweller called Peripule said ruefully to the other two, ‘I suppose it is not open to us to claim we went unwarned.’

An instant later, three violet circular curtains of light blazed out within the dark chamber, one encircling each Dweller. The exoskel guards were either rocked right back or physically blown over. Those unprotected people standing or sitting further away were picked up and thrown towards the walls. The shock wave hit Luseferous’s tall seat a fraction after the safety shield deployed, so that he watched the resulting chaos through a clinker of half-silvered diamond shutters.

The blast shook his seat, shook him and then reflected and echoed back off the distant walls. The three violet cylinders disappeared and left three huge neatly circular holes in the black diamond film beneath. The sickly light of Nasqueron’s yellow-brown cloud tops shone through. The air in the chamber was whirling and screaming out through the apertures. Blinks of white light flickered outside. Two of the exoskel guards were tumbled across the floor, scrabbling for grip, and were sucked out of the holes. Luseferous just stood staring. People, mostly unconscious and badly injured, started to slide in from the edges of the chamber where they’d been deposited by the triple blasts towards the three shining holes. A third exoskeleton-clad figure was being pulled, giant hands scraping and scrabbling frantically at the smooth diamond surface, towards the nearest hole and the whirling vortex forming above it. Then the ship’s systems finally woke up to what was happening and a dark shape flicked across the three puncture wounds in the vessel’s skin, sealing off the light and keeping what remained of the atmosphere within.

Relative calm returned. The thud, thud, thud noise continued. A rushing sound signalled replacement air being pumped back into the chamber. The exoskel guards got to their feet, looked around, then ran over to form a protective shield about the Archimandrite. More black shapes came plummeting from the gantries. Luseferous could hear people in the chamber moaning. He turned to look at Tuhluer, who was limping up to him through the phalanx of exoskel guards, his own emergency esuit and helmet deployed, the shiny bulge of faceplate reflecting the silvery diamond bubble that enclosed the Archimandrite and his chair.

‘Kill the other Dwellers,’ Luseferous told him. Tuhluer leaned in, hand to the side of his head, seemingly not hearing. ‘KILL THE OTHER DWELLERS!’ Luseferous shouted. He clicked a stud on the arm of the seat and the diamond shuttering fell away. ‘Get us away from here,’ he told the other man. ‘Warn the planet the AM warheads launch in three hours if they don’t start cooperating.’ He looked at where the three Dweller representatives had made their sudden exit. ‘And make sure the
Rapacious
wasted those three comedians.’

‘Sir!’ Tuhluer said. ‘And what about the… chute supply?’

It took a moment before Luseferous realised that he meant the people being launched towards the planet. He waved one hand. ‘Oh, dump the lot.’

The Archimandrite Luseferous clicked the esuit’s communicator and told the
Rapacious
he was on his way. He marched through the moaning wounded towards the ship-to-ship and the waiting vessel beneath. The exoskel guards fell in around him, forming a giant hedge of armoured limbs and menacingly jagged torsos. He was almost at the ship-to-ship entrance when he was thrown off his feet. The exoskels staggered as the whole vast ship shook. One of the giant guards nearly fell on him, regaining his balance only at the last moment, servos whining.

‘Now
what?’ Luseferous demanded.

‘Damage control here, sir,’ a voice said from the esuit. ‘Energy bolt straight through the whole ship, dead amidships. About two metres diameter. Plus… the bows have been shot off, back… to… about… the eighty-metre mark. Just gone. Same novel energy profile as the midships beam. Light speed; zero warning. Reactive defence systems still looking for a counter-measure against any subsequent usage… nothing coming up so far, sir.’

‘Comms, sir,’ another voice said, ‘Dwellers, demanding return of their people aboard. Apparently those were just warning shots.’

Tuhluer came striding up.

Luseferous looked at him. ‘Hand the Dwellers back,’ he told the ADC. ‘Then get this thing away from here.’ He strode towards the ship-to-ship.

‘And the AM ships, sir?’

‘Leave them where they are. Delay the ultimatum until the
Luseferous VII
is clear.’

‘Sir.’

This time the Archimandrite made it all the way to the waiting flagship.

An hour later the
Luseferous VII
was still making its lumbering, injured way out of the planet’s gravity well. The
Rapacious
was already half a million klicks away and still accelerating. The Archimandrite - still shaking with rage even in his acceleration couch, the full awfulness and sheer
insult
of what had happened at last sinking in, his patience finally exhausted (those three facetious shithead Dwellers had even
escaped,
esuits reflecting or deflecting everything the
Rapacious
had thrown at them after they’d exited the
Luseferous VII,
disappearing, apparently unharmed, into the cloud tops) - ordered that the ultimatum be made to the Dwellers immediately, and that one of the ships carrying an AM warhead should drop its weapon into the planet’s atmosphere, just to show that they were serious.

The reply was almost instantaneous. The ship with the AM bomb - each one of the twenty ships with the AM bombs - vanished in a sudden pinpoint flare of light. All the warheads went off partially, reacting messily with the ordinary matter debris left after the destruction of the ships. Twenty ragged little suns guttered round Nasqueron like a tilted necklace, flaring, fading, flaring again and fading slowly once more.

Moments later, a hyper-velocity missile rose out of the turgid skies of the gas-giant and found the
Luseferous VII
despite all its desperate countermeasures within two minutes of clearing the cloud tops.

The radiation front tripped the
Rapacious’s
sensor buffers.
That
was how a proper antimatter warhead was supposed to work, seemed to be the implication.

The last signal from the great ship before it was ripped entirely apart and turned into radiation and high-speed shrapnel was from aide-de-camp Tuhluer, calmly informing Luseferous that the Archimandrite was a cunt.

Fassin Taak looked up at the stars of home. He felt tears in his eyes, even within the shock-gel. He rested on a windswept platform above a small cloud-top city low in the south polar region, just a couple of thousand kilometres from the torn, fluid boundary with Nasqueron’s southernmost atmospheric belt.

He tried to locate a friendly satellite, some signal that the little gascraft could recognise, but he couldn’t find anything. All broadcast signals were either terribly weak or scrambled, and he couldn’t locate any low-orbit devices to bounce a hail off. He tried to lock on to one of the weak broadcast wavelengths and use the gascraft’s biomind to decipher the signals, but the routines didn’t seem to be working. He gave up. For the moment, he was content just to sit here and look out at the few, familiar stars.

Despite Y’sul’s injuries, they’d still had to undergo an albeit slightly gentler form of the wild spiralling. Fassin had lain in the gascraft, feeling the series of nested corkscrewings and helixes build up like some coiling spring, thinking that this was them entering the wormhole, though in fact, as it turned out, they’d already been through it and this was the unwinding. Then, suddenly, they were here, back in Nasqueron, in the southern polar region, not the northern one they’d left from.

Sinking down just a few kilometres through the cloud tops, the ex-Voehn ship
Protreptic
had come to rest in a slightly too-big cradle in an enormous, echoing cavern of a hangar here in the lower regions of the nearly deserted polar city of Quaibrai. The City Administrator and a crowd of several hundred Dwellers had met them, hooting and throwing streamers and scent grenades.

A delegation comprising individuals from several different alien-ship enthusiast clubs had become particularly excited when they’d seen the Voehn craft and had bobbed up and down with impatience as Y’sul had been carefully offloaded and given into the care of a hospital squad. As soon as Y’sul, Fassin and the truetwin Quercer & Janath had exited, the chirping, sizzling mass of enthusiasts rushed aboard, jostling for position as they’d tried to fit down the corridors and access ways. The truetwin had, thoughtfully, expanded the ship from its needle-ship portal-piercing formation to a fatter and hence more commodious configuration, but it still looked like a tight squeeze.

Y’sul, already looking half mended, though still shaking off the grogginess of his semi-coma, had twisted a fraction in his scoop-stretcher to look at Fassin as the hospital squad brought their ambulance skiff down to him. ‘See?’ he’d croaked. ‘Got you back safely, didn’t I?’

Fassin had agreed that he had. He’d tried to pat Y’sul but used the wrong manipulator and instead just jerked in mid-gas. He’d swivelled and used the gascraft’s other arm, clutching the wounded Dweller’s hub-hand.

‘You off home now?’ Y’sul had asked.

‘However much of it is left. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Well, if you do go, come back soon.’ Y’sul had paused and shaken himself, as though trying to wake up more fully. ‘I should be ready to receive visitors again in a couple of dozen days or so and I anticipate a very full social calendar indeed thereafter. I fully intend to exploit my recent injuries and experiences without compunction and exaggerate outrageously my part in the taking of the Voehn ship, not to mention embellish my fight with the Voehn commander to the point of what will probably seem like complete unrecognisability, the first time you hear it. I’d appreciate your corroboration, providing you are able to enter into the spirit of the thing and not insist on being overly encumbered by the vulgar exigencies of objective truth, whatever version of it you may think you recall. What do you say?’

‘My memory’s kind of hazy,’ Fassin had told the Dweller. ‘I’ll probably back up anything you say.’

‘Splendid!’

‘If I can come back, I shall.’

Privately, he didn’t even know if he could get away in the first place. He didn’t know what sort of infrastructure remained to get him off the planet, get the gascraft repaired and return him - if whoever was in charge would let him return - nor whether the Dwellers would allow him to return.

During the last part of the six-hour journey from the wormhole, when Quercer & Janath had allowed him to see where they were and let him access the local data-carrying spectra, he’d tapped into the Nasqueron news services to see what had been going on during his absence.

The Dweller news was all about the war. The Formal War between Zone 2 and Belt C. Apparently it had become deeply exciting and enthralling and was already being talked of in respected critical circles as a classic of the genre, even though it was probably barely halfway through yet and still, with any luck at all, had a great deal to offer.

Fassin had to search out a specialist alien-watcher service to find out that, starting about thirty-plus days earlier, the Ulubis system had been invaded and taken over by the Epiphany-5 Discon or Starveling Cult forces under the leadership of the Archimandrite Luseferous. The last significant, organised Ulubine Mercatorial resistance had ended just a dozen or so days ago following the formal surrender by the Hierchon Ormilla after the destruction of a city on Sepekte and a habitat in orbit around it. A counter-attack by several squadrons of the Summed Fleet was expected to commence within the next few dozen days or so. The latest was that a peace and cooperation conference was taking place about now in the Starveling ship
Luseferous VII,
in orbit about Nasqueron.

Fassin had sent a message which would at least attempt to find Valseir. He would wait a bit and see if that raised a reply. He’d thought of contacting Setstyin, but then he remembered, vaguely, that somebody had said something to him that had made him uneasy about the Dweller. No, wait, it had been the other way round, hadn’t it? Setstyin had always been a charming and helpful friend. Setstyin had warned him against the old Dweller who’d been in charge of the great spherical…
thing
that had risen out of the clouds and demolished the Mercatoria’s raiding force at the GasClipper regatta. Yes, that made more sense. He wondered why he couldn’t remember in more detail. It was strange. He’d always had a really good memory.