'So?'
'It'll take the ship days to claw that energy back out of the vacuum, and until then she won't be able to carry out any superluminal jumps. We'll be at the swarm's mercy, if it decides to turn on us.'
'We're at a dead end here, anyway,' Dakota insisted. 'We have to act now.'
'It's a mistake,' the ghost warned her.
'No. It's a risk, but one we're still going to have to take.'
Chapter Two
Nathan Driscoll looked up and noted that one of the suns had gone out.
He stepped back, his hands greasy with gore and his nostrils full of the scent of burned flesh, and watched as an evac team carried away the injured soldier he had been tending, and then loaded him into a waiting air-ambulance. The medbox units that had once been an integral part of the ambulance's interior had long since been stripped out, so the soldier's stretcher was instead slotted into one of several brackets, the rest of them already occupied by other injured men and women.
Nathan studied the pattern of dim red balls that clung to the coreship's curving ceiling, a dozen kilometres above the city of Ascension, his breath frosting the air. He couldn't work out precisely which of the thousands of fusion globes had just failed, but he had sensed the sudden, marginal drop in ambient light; the world had just become a little bit darker than it already was. He pulled his scarf tighter around his neck in a futile attempt to counter the biting cold.
He brought his gaze back down, and in that moment saw her.
A group of refugees – perhaps a dozen men, women and children in all – was making its way past the ruined facade of a mall about half a block away. Probably they'd been forced to abandon their homes as the fighting between the Consortium and Peralta's terroristas spread along the banks of First Canal. Despite the half-light, Nathan had spotted a woman with long brown hair gathered up in a band, her terrified features smeared with dirt.
It was only the briefest of glimpses, but his heart leapt nonetheless.
Ilsa.
Almost as soon as he'd spotted her, a cadence of ground-rattling thumps heralded the return of a four-legged rover-unit from the battle, troopers clinging to its sides while the most seriously injured were lifted on to pallets mounted on top of the rover itself. Nathan rushed forward with the other two volunteer medics, and helped to load the wounded into another air-ambulance that had dropped to the fractured tarmac almost as soon as the previous one had lifted off.
Nathan began to doubt himself, even as he worked. It had been the merest, most fleeting glimpse: only part of her face had been visible. She had been wrapped up in layers of clothing, a rag pulled tight around her neck to ward off the plummeting temperatures; because, ever since the Shoal had abandoned them, the temperature had dropped even as the light failed. It didn't take a genius to realize the coreship was dying.
Nathan pulled himself up inside the second air-ambulance, along with Kellogg and the other new volunteer whose name he'd already forgotten. The ambulance's jets began to whine, preparing for takeoff, but his mind was on other things.
He was almost certainly mistaken, of course, as he imagined he saw Ilsa everywhere he looked: in the faces of the troopers and volunteer aid workers, or among the refugees who vastly out-numbered them all; or the corpses that had come to fill the streets and canals as the fighting intensified.
But then again, this might have been her. It might have been Ilsa. If he could find her… if she was still alive…
Nathan hopped back down from the open rear of the ambulance. He could see no sign of the refugees, but he guessed they were heading for the shores of the canal. His fluorescent plastic waistcoat – meant to identify him clearly as a non-combatant – flapped around his waist in the backwash from the jets.
'Nathan!' Kellogg bellowed down at him. 'What the fuck do you think you're doing?'
Nathan looked up, shook his head. 'I saw someone I know,' he yelled over the noise.
More than likely the refugees intended to wade across the canal under cover of darkness, since the bridges were frequently targeted. If they could get to the other side, they had a chance at escaping the worst of the fighting.
'Nathan, get the fuck back in!' Kellogg yelled again. 'Once this thing goes, it goes!'
'I'll find my own way back,' Nathan replied, and started to jog away, heading towards the canal. Kellogg yelled something else, but the words were lost as the ambulance's VTOL jets lifted it high above the ground. It tipped its nose in the direction of Third Canal and northwest, and began to accelerate.
The streetlights had been down ever since Peralta had targeted the city's primary fusion reactor systems. Nathan stripped off his waistcoat and shoved it deep inside a pile of rubble.
He jogged on past the ruined mall and kept going, squinting into the deep shadows as he went. He alternated between running and walking until he finally arrived exhausted at the banks of First Canal several minutes later. His bones ached, and more than ever he felt the slow onslaught of late middle age.
Nathan crossed the street and peered down the embankment at the black waters. The dark shapes of bodies drifted by, carried along by the artificial tide. Ice had formed on either side of the canal, and he squinted up and down its length until he sighted a huddle of dark shapes moving along the path at the foot of the slope, maybe fifty metres away.
Nathan slipped and skidded down the steep stone facing of the embankment until he reached the path they were on. Some of the refugees were already braving the ice and the freezing cold to wade across the slow-moving waters.
'Hey!' he yelled, waving as he came towards them.
Several turned and shouted out in fear, assuming, in the dim light, that he must be one of Peralta's soldiers. A few more threw themselves further into the water and started swimming frantically.
Nathan slowed down and raised his hands. Their faces, even in the faint light, were clouded with terror and suspicion. 'I'm not with Peralta or anyone else,' he yelled. 'I'm just looking for somebody. I thought she might be…'
Then he moved a step closer and saw her: an angular woman with brown hair, her eyes dulled by fatigue. It wasn't Ilsa, though. Now he could see her more clearly, he could only wonder how he might have made such a mistake.
'What the hell are you doing, running straight at us like that?' one of them demanded, his face looking bruised and ugly in the dim light, fists bunched in readiness at his sides. Like the rest, he wore several layers of extra clothing to try and keep the cold out, the topmost layers already ragged and worn.
'I'm sorry, I-'
Bright light suddenly flared down on them. Nathan crouched instinctively, and squinted up the embankment towards several figures that had suddenly appeared there, silhouetted by arc lights mounted on top of a rover. He heard one of the refugees mutter the word terrorista, but Nathan knew these new arrivals were Consortium troopers.
Some of the troopers quickly made their way down a series of steps leading to the waterside path, their weapons held up in readiness against their shoulders. The rover came closer to the rim of the embankment, its blunt, instrument-shrouded head swinging slowly from side to side, scanning the environment constantly for threats. Its brilliant light shone down on the filthy waters, illuminating the bloated shapes of the dead.
One of the troopers came up close, pushing her visor up to reveal a small round face, a lick of dirty blonde hair pushing out from under her heavy black helmet. Karen, he realized with a shock. Sergeant Karen Salk, his sometime lover.