The Revelation Space Collection (245 page)

‘Then I don’t think you’re going to be a fuck of a lot of use, are you?’

Antoinette spoke softly again. ‘Xave ... how long do
you
think we’ve got before they’re on us?’

‘Assuming the usual approach pattern and deceleration tolerances ... thirty ... thirty-five minutes.’

‘So Clavain wasn’t far off.’

‘A lucky guess,’ Xavier said.

‘Actually, it wasn’t a lucky guess at all,’ Clavain said, folding down a flap from the wall and strapping himself to it. ‘I may not have dealt with banshees before, but I’ve certainly dealt with hostile approach-and-boarding scenarios.’ He decided they could stand not knowing that he had often been the one doing the hostile boarding.

‘Beast,’ Antoinette said, raising her voice, ‘you ready with those evasion patterns we ran through before?’

‘The relevant routines are uploaded and ready for immediate execution, Little Miss. There is, however, a not inconsiderable problem.’

Antoinette sighed. ‘Lay it on me, Beast.’

‘Our fuel-consumption margins are already slender, Little Miss. Evasive patterns eat heavily into our reserve supplies.’

‘Do we have enough left to throw another pattern and still make it back to the Belt before hell freezes over?’

‘Yes, Little Miss, but with very little ...’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Antoinette’s gauntleted hands were already on the controls, ready to execute the ferocious manoeuvres that would convince the banshees not to bother with this particular freighter.

‘Don’t do it,’ Clavain said.

Xavier looked at him with an expression of pure contempt. ‘What?’ ‘I said don’t do it. You can assume these are the same banshees as before. They’ve already seen your evasive patterns, so they know exactly what you’re capable of doing. It may have given them pause for thought once, but you can be certain they’ve already decided that the risk is worth it.’

‘Don’t listen ...’ Xavier said.

‘All you’ll do is burn fuel you might need later. It won’t make a blind bit of difference. Trust me. I’ve been here a thousand times, in about as many wars.’

Antoinette looked at him questioningly. ‘So what the fuck do you want me to do, Clavain? Just sit here and lap it up?’

He shook his head. ‘You mentioned additional deterrents earlier on. I had a feeling I knew what you meant.’

‘Oh no.’

‘You must have weapons, Antoinette. In these times you’d be foolish not to.’

NINETEEN

Clavain did not know whether to laugh or cry when he saw the weapons and realised how antiquated and ineffective they were compared with the oldest, lowest-lethality weapons of a Conjoiner corvette or Demarchist raider. They had obviously been cobbled together from several centuries’ worth of black market jumble sales, more on the basis of how sleek and nasty they looked than on how much damage they could really do. Apart from the handful of firearms stored inside the ship to be used to repel boarders, the bulk of the weapons were stowed in concealed hull hatches or packed into dorsal or ventral pods that Clavain had earlier assumed held communications equipment or sensor arrays. Not all of the weapons were even functional. About a third of them had either never worked or had broken down, or had run out of whatever ammunition or fuel-source they needed to work.

To access the weapons, Antoinette had pulled back a hidden panel in the floor. A thick metal column had risen slowly from the well, unfolding control arms and display devices as it ascended. A schematic of
Storm Bird
rotated in one sphere, with the active weapons pulsing red. They were linked back into the main avionics web by snaking red data pathways. Other spheres and read-outs on the main panel showed the immediate volume of space around the ship at various magnifications. At the lowest magnification, the banshee ships were visible as indistinct radar-echo smudges creeping closer to the freighter.

‘Fifteen thousand klicks,’ Antoinette said.

‘I still say we should pull the evasive pattern,’ Xavier murmured.

‘Burn that fuel when you need it,’ Clavain said. ‘Not until then. Antoinette, are all those weapons deployed?’

‘Everything we’ve got.’

‘Good. Do you mind if I ask why you were unwilling to deploy them earlier?’

She tapped controls, finessing the weapons’ deployment, reallocating data flows through less congested parts of the web.

‘Two reasons, Clavain. One: it’s a hanging offence to even think of installing weps on a civilian ship. Two: all those juicy guns might just be the final incentive the banshees need to come in and rob us.’

‘It won’t come to that. Not if you trust me.’

‘Trust you, Clavain?’

‘Let me sit there and operate those weapons.’

She looked at Xavier. ‘Not a hope in hell.’

Clavain leaned back and folded his arms. ‘You know where I am if you need me, in that case.’

‘Pull the evasive ...’ Xavier began.

‘No.’ Antoinette tapped something.

Clavain felt the entire ship rumble. ‘What was that?’

‘A warning shot,’ she said.

‘Good. I’d have done the same.’

The warning shot had probably been a slug, a cylinder of foam-phase hydrogen accelerated up to a few dozen klicks per second in a stubby railgun barrel. Clavain knew all about foam-phase hydrogen; it was one of the main weapons left in the Demarchist arsenal now that they could no longer manipulate antimatter in militarily useful quantities.

The Demarchists mined hydrogen from the oceanic hearts of gas giants. Under conditions of shocking pressure, hydrogen underwent a transition to a metallic state a little like mercury but thousands of times denser. Usually that metallic state was unstable: release the confining pressure and it would revert to a low-density gas. The foam phase, by contrast, was only quasi-unstable; with the right manipulation it could remain in the metallic state even when the external pressure dropped by many orders of magnitude. Packed into shells and slugs, foam-phase munitions were engineered to retain their stability until the moment of impact. Then they would explode catastrophically. Foam-phase weapons were either used as destructive devices in their own right, or as initiators for fission/fusion bombs.

Antoinette was right, Clavain thought. The foam-phase slug cannon might have been an antique in military terms, but just thinking of owning such a weapon was enough to send one to an irreversible neural death.

He saw the firefly smudge of the slug crawl across the distance to the closing pirate ships, missing them by mere tens of kilometres.

‘They’re not stopping,’ Xavier said, several minutes later.

‘How many more slugs do you have?’ Clavain asked.

‘One,’ Antoinette said.

‘Save it. You’re too far out now. They can get a radar lock on the slug and dodge it before it reaches them.’

He unstrapped himself from the folding flap, clambering down the length of the bridge until he was immediately behind Antoinette and Xavier. Now that he had the chance he took a better look at the weapons plinth, mentally assaying its functionality.

‘What else have you got?’

‘Two gigawatt excimers,’ Antoinette said. ‘One Breitenbach three-millimetre boser with a proton-electron precursor. Couple of solid-state close-action slug guns, megahertz firing rate. A cascade-pulse single-use graser, not sure of the yield.’

‘Probably mid-gigawatt. What’s that?’ Clavain pointed at the only active weapon she had not described.

‘That? That’s a bad joke. Gatling gun.’

Clavain nodded. ‘No, that’s good. Don’t knock Gatling guns; they have their uses.’

Xavier spoke. ‘Picking up reverse thrust plumes. Doppler says they’re slowing.’

‘Did we scare them off?’ Clavain asked.

‘Sorry, no; this looks exactly like a standard banshee approach,’ Xavier replied.

‘Fuck,’ Antoinette said.

‘Don’t do anything until they’re closer,’ Clavain said. ‘Much closer. They won’t attack you; they won’t want to risk damaging your cargo.’

‘I’ll remind you of that when we’re having our throats slit,’ Antoinette said.

Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what they do?’

‘Actually, that’s at the nice humane end of the spectrum.’

The next twelve minutes were amongst the most tense Clavain could remember. He understood how his hosts felt, sympathising with their instinct to shoot at the enemy. But it would have been suicidal. The beam weapons were too low-powered to guarantee a kill, and the projectile weapons were too slow to have any effectiveness except at very short range. At the very best they might succeed in taking out one banshee, but not two at once. At the same time Clavain wondered why the banshees had not taken the earlier warning. Antoinette had given them plenty of hints that stealing her imagined cargo would not be easy. Clavain would have thought that they would have decided to cut their losses and move on to a less nimble, less well-armed target. But according to Antoinette it was already unusual for banshees to foray this far into the zone.

When they were just under a hundred klicks out, the two ships slowed and split up, one of them arrowing around to the other hemisphere before resuming its approach. Clavain studied the magnified visual grab of the closest ship. The image was fuzzy -
Storm Bird’
s optics were not military quality - but it was enough to disperse any doubts they might have had about the ship’s identity. The view showed a wasp-waisted civilian vessel a little smaller than
Storm Bird
. But it was night-black and studded with grapples and welded-on weapons. Jagged neon markings on the hull suggested skulls and sharks’ teeth.

‘Where do they come from?’ Clavain asked.

‘No one knows,’ Xavier said. ‘Somewhere in the Rust Belt/Yellowstone environment, but beyond that . . . no one has a fucking clue.’

‘And the authorities just tolerate them?’

‘The authorities can’t do dick. Not the Demarchists, not the Ferrisville Convention. That’s why everyone’s so shit-scared of the banshees. ’ Xavier winked at Clavain. ‘I tell you, even if you guys do take over it isn’t going to be a picnic, not while the banshees are still around.’

‘Luckily it isn’t likely to be my problem,’ Clavain said.

The two ships crept closer, pinning
Storm Bird
from either side. The optical views sharpened, allowing Clavain to pick out points of weakness and strength, and to make a guess at the capability of the enemy ships’ weapons. Scenarios tumbled through his head by the dozen. At sixty kilometres he nodded and spoke quietly and calmly.

‘All right, listen carefully. At this range you have a chance of doing some damage, but only if you listen to me and do precisely what I say.’

‘I think we should ignore him,’ Xavier said.

Clavain licked his lips. ‘You can, but you’ll die. Antoinette: I want you to set up the following firing pattern in pre-programmed mode, without actually moving any of your weapons until I say. You can bet the banshees have us in their sights, and they’ll be watching to see what happens.’

She looked at him and nodded, her fingers poised over the controls of the weapons plinth. ‘Say it, Clavain.’

‘Hit the starboard ship with a two-second excimer pulse as close to amidships as you can get it. There’s a sensor cluster there; we want to take it out. At the same time use the rapid-fire slug gun to put a spread over the port ship, say a megahertz salvo with a hundred millisecond sustain. That won’t kill them, but it’ll sure as hell damage that rack launcher and probably buckle those grapple arms. In any case it’ll provoke a response, and that’s good.’

‘It is?’ She was already programming his firing pattern into the plinth.

‘Yes. See how she’s keeping her hull at that angle? At the moment she’s in a defensive posture. That’s because her main weapons are delicate; now that they’re deployed she won’t want to bring them into our field of fire until she can guarantee a kill. And she’ll think we’ve hit with our heaviest toys first.’

Antoinette brightened. ‘Which we won’t have.’

‘No. That’s when we hit them - both ships - with the Breitenbach.’

‘And the single-use graser?’

‘Hold it back. It’s our medium-range trump card, and we don’t want to play it until we’re in a lot more danger than this.’

‘And the Gatling gun?’

‘We’ll keep that back for dessert.’

‘I hope you’re not bullshitting us, Clavain,’ Antoinette warned.

He grinned. ‘I sincerely hope I’m not bullshitting you, too.’

The two ships continued their approach. Now they were visible through the cabin windows: black dots that occasionally pulsed out white or violet spikes of steering thrust. The dots enlarged, becoming slivers. The slivers took on hard mechanical form, until Clavain could quite clearly see the neon patterning of the pirate ships. The markings had only been turned on during their final approach; at that point, needing to trim speed with thruster bursts, there was no further prospect of remaining camouflaged against the darkness of space. The markings were there to inspire fear and panic, like the Jolly Roger of the old sailing ships.