"It is all prepared," Harald replied.
Carnasus turned. "So why a five-megaton warhead?"
"Because, though Parliament will accept our necessary excision of BC32, it would not be prepared to accept the damage a larger warhead or a gravity disruptor might cause to BC31, which is indirectly linked by tunnels to our target."
"But you think they will accept the destruction of Vertical Vienna itself?"
Harald paused for a moment. He had expected Carnasus to be more lucid than usual now, since the exigency of the situation could produce no less than that effect, but the old man seemed worryingly sharp. Here then was a hint of the Carnasus who had commanded this ship during the last five years of the War. A man to be admired, and not just… Harald could feel the sweat slick on his hands. He closed his eyes for a moment and felt something shift inside his head. Yes, what happened now was inevitable, and regret was merely wasted energy. He opened his eyes, dried his palms against his foamite suit—and knew they would now remain dry.
"They will have to accept it," he confirmed.
"Yes, they would have…" Carnasus blinked, looked momentarily confused, then hardened again. "Return to the Bridge, Harald, and cancel the strike."
"Why do you—?"
"Are you questioning my orders, Tacom?"
"Yes, I am. I am questioning the orders of a man who is obviously no longer fit to be Admiral. We cannot let the Brumallians get away with this."
Carnasus glared at him, then slowly his expression softened. Harald noted Alun stand up and begin moving over. Like Harald he appeared unarmed—having left his side arm down below.
"Harald," said the Admiral, "I have always wanted to see Fleet remain pre-eminent in the Sudorian system, and I have always felt that we should have exterminated all the Brumallians. But I would rather see our hilldiggers scrapped in the sun than stand by and watch you start a civil war."
Harald could not believe that he now wanted to cry. Angrily he clamped down on the feeling. "Then you are a fool."
Carnasus just looked tired as he raised his arm and spoke into a wrist communicator. "Guards, get up here now." Lowering his arm he stepped closer to Harald. "The loss of the Consul Assessor is no particular loss to me, and I could even accept that you used a Fleet Special Operations team to accomplish it. But Combine, Harald? A civil war between Fleet and Orbital Combine?"
"I'm so sorry," said Harald, something catching in his throat—and he truly was. Hearing the sound of boots on the stair leading up, he stepped sideways, spun, the edge of his hand cracking hard against Alun's temple. The man dropped instantly, without a sound.
"So sorry," Harald repeated, reaching inside a belt pocket to withdraw the small Combine-manufacture pistol he had obtained many months before. Two shots spun the old man off his feet. Harald stepped over, glancing back as the two guards entered. He stood over Carnasus and shot him twice more, through the head, then turned as his guts suddenly twisted up. After a second he staggered to one side, abruptly crouched and vomited on the floor. This physical reaction had been unexpected. He gave himself a moment to recover, then stood up again and wiped his mouth. One of the guards, he saw, was staring up at the recording heads mounted in the ceiling. "Don't worry about them. They'll show exactly what I want them to show." Walking over, he dropped the pistol down beside Alun. "Just as the recordings of this one's interrogation will."
One of the men stooped to turn the unconscious officer over and cuff him.
"Now," said Harald, "I have some terrible news to deliver about the assassination of our Admiral by Orbital Combine. And I have a missile to launch."
Tigger
Right, stop Fleet from destroying Vertical Vienna, thought Tigger.
Preventing the first missile reaching the planet's surface was no problem, but what about the next one? He could introduce some massive fault into Ironfist's systems to prevent further firings, but then there were still five other such ships within a day's travel of Brumal, so what about them? If Fleet proved utterly relentless in its purpose, Tigger's continued actions would eventually reveal his presence, then the problems would really start.
Accelerating up through atmosphere, Tigger separated into his two parts—his tiger aspect dropping back down towards the planet's surface. Of course, even without McCrooger's instructions, Tigger would have intervened to prevent such wanton death and destruction, for he had seen the bitter results, close up, when he retrieved that disk for Orduval. Descending from the sky his tiger half landed on an icy canal path leading towards the ground-level cap of Vertical Vienna. His sensorium divided—since his consciousness also occupied his sphere half—he also left atmosphere and distantly observed the hilldigger Ironfist. Listening in to com channels he realised the launch of a missile was imminent.
On the surface, the cat half of Tigger scanned down inside the hive city and realised, with some relief, that the Brumallians were rapidly evacuating it. He estimated that within two hours not a living soul would still occupy the tunnels. This made his task somewhat easier, since he only needed to delay things that long and then Fleet would be destroying an empty city. Of course, there was nothing to prevent them then firing on other Brumallian cities. If that proved to be the case, Tigger decided he must come out into the open and yell for help from Geronamid. The AI, though against taking overt action, would not countenance blatant genocide here.
Still listening to com channels, Tigger then heard about the assassination of Admiral Carnasus. Apparently a Fleet officer had gunned him down in his Admiral's Haven. When Tigger learnt that Harald Strone had assumed command until Captain Dravenik could be recalled, he felt a deep disquiet. He needed to find out more, but that would have to wait, since he could now see the tops of two missile silos opening on the body of the hilldigger Ironfist.
Scanning, Tigger learned just enough to ascertain which missile was the main one and which the back-up. He focused on the main missile but found shielding and hardened systems defeating his probing. A lot of that shielding lay within the silo itself, so best to wait until after the missile was launched. Cruising 1,000 miles down, and to one side of the hilldigger, the drone decided his best option would be to introduce a fault into the guidance system, then return to the ship and tamper with those systems that loaded guidance to the missile. This way Fleet's inability to destroy Vertical Vienna right now would be seen as just one random fault, and thus be less likely to arouse suspicion.
The missile launched and Tigger began vectoring in on it. Scanning again he realised the missile itself was hardened against informational attack. It therefore looked like he would have to physically intercept it to introduce the fault. He sighed and accelerated. He would have to drill through the casing and inject micro-manipulator tentacles to tamper with its hardware. Merely pushing it off course would not work, since the guidance system would automatically correct. As he closed, he wondered at the degree of paranoia within Fleet—at them using a missile as difficult to interfere with as this. Did they think the Brumallians still possessed the ability, or the will, to maintain electronic warfare devices? If so, it showed that those in command of Fleet did not understand their old enemy at all.
Eight hundred miles from Ironfist the missile's drive shut down. Tigger closed in on it, extending four cell-form metal grabs to close around the armoured cyclindrical body. A rosy glow bloomed from the missile's nose cone as it entered thin atmosphere, and streaks of orange fire spat past the clinging drone. He extruded a chainglass drill and began cutting through metal. Then a sudden horrible and aberrant thought occurred to him and he put together some wildly disparate facts. There was that certain recent research undertaken on Corisanthe Main, which Fleet had access to despite its hostility towards Combine. And Harald, like his three siblings, was never to be underestimated.