I’ve seen nothing I couldn’t explain.
[Then you haven’t been looking hard enough. Here, Remontoire: examine our data, if you doubt us. See if that changes your opinion. See if that makes it any clearer to you.]
The data nugget was scripted into his head. An instinct told him to delete it still compressed, still unread. But he decided to leave it there for the time being.
You’re suggesting a partnership?
[Disunited, we’ll never beat them. Together, we could make a difference.]
Perhaps. But it’s not me you really want, is it?
[Of course not, Remontoire.]
He smiled: Skade’s Conjoiners might have been leaderless, might even have been driven towards him by some instinctive imperative to fill that void, but mainly it was the hypometric weapon. It was the one technology they hadn’t managed to steal or reverse-engineer, despite Skade’s theft of Aura. All that they needed was one prototype; it didn’t even have to be intact, so long as they could reconstruct its working configuration.
Thanks for the offer, but I’m actually a tiny bit preoccupied at the moment. Why don’t we chat about this later? Say, in a few months?
[Remontoire… don’t make us do this.]
He applied lateral thrust, veering rudely away from the other ship. He mapped areas of brain function dropping in and out as the blood sloshed through his skull. A moment later the corvette shadowed him, mimicking his vicious moves with a finesse verging on the sarcastic.
[We need that weapon, Remontoire.]
So I guessed. Why didn’t you just come out and say it at the beginning?
[We wanted to give you the chance to see things our way.]
I suppose I should be grateful, in that case.
He felt his ship judder. His head lit up with damage reports, bright and geometric as a migraine. They had hit him with multiple hull-penetrating slugs targeted for ship-critical functions. It was very surgicaclass="underline" they wanted to leave him drifting, ripe for theft, rather than to blow his ship apart. Whether they cared about his survival was another matter entirely.
[Surrender the weapon now, Rem, and we’ll leave you with enough flight-capability to escape that wolf aggregate closing in on us.]
Sorry, but that’s not really in my plans for today.
His vessel rattled again: more vital functions faltered or dropped out of service. The ship was already trying to find work-arounds, doing its best to keep flying, but there was a limit to the damage it could soak up. He considered retaliating, but he was keen to save his conventional ordnance for the aggregates. That left the hypometric weapon itself, barely tested since its laborious calibration.
He issued the mental command that caused it to spin up to activation energy, compensating for the drift in the ship’s vector as angular momentum transferred to the shining innards of the weapon. Externally, there was no evidence of any change in the device at all. He wondered what kind of sensors the corvette had trained on him, and whether they were good enough to pick up the subtle signatures of activation.
It was a small weapon with a correspondingly limited precision and radial volume of effect (conventional terminology—things like “range” and “accuracy‘—were only vaguely applicable to hypometric weapons). But it also spun up very quickly. He tuned its scale of effect, found the solution in the complex topography of weapon parameters that corresponded to a specific point in the three-dimensional volume of surrounding space.
He re-established a communications channel to the corvette. Pull back.
[Again, don’t make us do this, Remontoire.]
The weapon discharged. In the microwave-frequency map of the corvette’s cold spots, a wound had suddenly appeared: a perfectly hemispherical bite in the side of the hull. The cryogenic temperature gradients flowed like water around a sinkhole, gyring and wheeling as they tried to find a new equilibrium. Pairs of cooling nodes locked into unstable oscillation modes.
The weapon spun up again. He put another hole in the corvette’s hull, deeper this time, so that the wound was concave.
The corvette responded. Reluctantly, he parried the ship-to-ship munitions with a spread of countermeasures while still holding some back for the Inhibitor machines.
The weapon spun up a third time. He concentrated, forcing himself to examine the solution from every angle. An error now could be fatal for all involved.
Discharge. His third attack was not visible at all. If he had done his sums correctly he had just put a spherical hole inside the ship without touching the hull. It would not have touched any vital internal systems. And—his coup de grace—the centre of the final hole would be exactly in line with the centres of the last two, to micron accuracy.
He waited a moment for the precision—and essential restraint—of his attack to sink in before contacting them again. The next one takes out your life-system. Got the message?
The corvette hesitated. Seconds oozed by, time for Skade’s acolytes to examine thousands of possible response scenarios, toying with them the way children toyed with building blocks, constructing huge, wobbling edifices of event and counter-event. Almost certainly they had not expected him to turn the weapon against them. Their best intelligence would never have suggested he had that degree of control over the weapon’s effects. Even if it had—and even if they had considered the possibility of an attack—they must have assumed he would strike at their ship’s drive core, taking it out in an instant of blinding light.
Instead, he had let them off with a warning. This wasn’t, Remontoire had thought to himself, a time to be making new enemies.
There was no further transmission. He watched, fascinated, as the cryo-arithmetic engines smoothed out the temperature gradients around the two exterior wounds, doing their best to camouflage the damage. Then the corvette flipped over, pushed its thrust to the limit and made itself scarce.
Remontoire allowed himself a miserly instant of self-congratulation. He had played that one well. His ship was still spaceworthy despite the damage it had sustained. And all he had to worry about now was the approaching aggregate of Inhibitor machines. The machines would arrive in three minutes.
Two thousand kilometres, then a thousand, then five hundred. Closer, his sensors struggled to deal with the clump of Inhibitor machines as a single entity, throwing back wildly conflicting estimates for distance, scale and geometric disposition. The best he could do was to focus his efforts on the larger nodes, refining his hull-camouflaging to provide a better line-of-sight match with the cosmic background. He adjusted his thrust vectoring, losing some acceleration but steering his ship’s exhaust beams away from the shifting concentrations of enemy machines. The exhausts were invisible, all but undetectable via the methods available to Remontoire. He hoped the same disadvantage applied to the aliens, but it paid not to take chances.
The clumps reorganised, shifting nearer. They were still too far away and too vaguely dispersed to make an effective target for the hypometric weapon. He was also wary of using it against them except as a tool of last resort. There was always the danger that he’d show it to them too many times, giving them enough data to conjure up a response. It had already happened with other weapons: time and again the Inhibitors had evolved effective defences against human technologies, including some of those already bequeathed by Aura. It was possible that the alien machines were not evolving them at all, but simply retrieving countermeasures from some ancient, jumbled racial memory. This conjecture alarmed Remontoire more than the idea that they might have developed their adaptations and responses through intelligent thinking. There was always the hope that one kind of intelligence could be beaten by the application of another kind, or that intelligence—self-regarding, prone to doubt—might even conspire in its own downfall. But what if there was no intelligence in the Inhibitor activities, just a process of archival retrieval, an utterly mindless bureaucracy of systematised extinction? The galaxy was a very old place and it had seen many clever ideas. More than likely, the Inhibitors already possessed ancient data on the humans’ new weapons and technologies. If they had not yet developed effective responses, it was only because that retrieval system was slow, the archive itself vastly distributed. What that meant was that there was nothing the humans could do, in the long run. No way to outgun the Inhibitors, except on a very local scale. Think galac-tically, think beyond the immediate handful of solar systems, and it was already over.