"The least of our worries," the drone stated.
"Um." I grimaced. "Fleet?"
"Fleet ships are a long way off right now, but watch stations will still spot us, and Harald could get a hilldigger out to squash us before we arrived at Sudoria."
"That will depend upon how much he considers us a threat."
"We won't worry him at all, but he might think it handy to tell everyone he destroyed a Brumallian ship that was heading for Sudoria. That'd make him look like the good guy."
"And what is the plan should they send such a ship?"
"There is none—as yet."
It wasn't particularly comforting to know that the virus left inside me might not, in the end, be the cause of my death.
"You must have studied this ship carefully," I said. "How well would it stand up to a hilldigger?"
"There's an old expression…a snowball's chance in hell?"
"You seem decidedly unworried about it all."
"The emotional range of a tiger's facial expression isn't huge, but like yourself I find little to recommend mortality—even more so now I am…diminished."
"Does it hurt to have lost your other half?"
"I've lost my ability to travel through space, many tools, weapons and processing space, so my loss is like yours, one of strength. Didn't lose much memory and knowledge—just a few seconds." Those amber eyes fixed on me. "Given time and materials I could easily rebuild my other half, with all its previous advantages. I might have lost a lot, but I still do possess sufficient tools."
I realised, as Tigger spoke, that he was gently prodding me in some direction. I replayed our recent conversation in my mind and asked, "So how could this ship be saved in the event of Harald sending one of his hilldiggers against it?"
"With current Brumallian technology, not a chance."
Ah.
"And how well do you understand Brumallian technology?" I asked.
"Better than them."
Tigger halted, sat back on his haunches, raised a paw and, peering down at it, extended one claw at a time for inspection. I halted as well and rested my back against a pillar, feeling a muted vibration through the ship's bones. Guessing where this conversation was leading I took a leap ahead.
"Providing the Brumallians with any technology that would give them a definite military advantage would seriously piss off Geronamid, but obviously having that AI angry with us is substantially better than being dead."
"Oh, I agree." Tigger raised his head to meet my gaze.
"Were you waiting for permission from me?"
"Well," Tigger shrugged, "I'd then only be following orders."
Tigger, who could have been a major AI but chose to be a drone, was clearly not a great lover of responsibility. He wanted me to take the rap. I considered then who we should talk to, since this being a Brumallian ship, there was no Captain aboard.
"Tell Rhodane," I said. "She can put it to the Consensus." I wondered if that would be limited to a consensus of the present crew, for Fleet's blocking of signals prevented communication back to Brumal. I saw then how their system might not work so well in some situations.
Only later did I find out how they got round that one. They asked the ship.
Harald
With AC hum permeating the air and vibrating the catwalk below his feet, Harald folded his eye-screen to one side and peered over the rail down at the linear accelerator. Having finished the final checks, the gunnery crewmen were now moving into position on their monitoring platform above the aseptic gleam of the machinery surrounding the vacuum breech. The 800-foot-long accelerator—six feet wide, wrapped in heavily insulated coil sections and cooling jackets, and trailing massive power cables—slanted down through the body of the ship, its mouth opening directly below Ironfist's nose. A conveyor belt crammed with resin-encased iron projectiles snaked down to the breech machinery. Unlike the solid projectiles fired at the military infrastructure around Brumal throughout the war, Harald knew that inside their bullet-shaped cases these consisted of a block of irregularly shaped iron fragments bound together by the resin.
"It will be interesting to see how closely fact matches theory," he commented.
Standing next to him, with her hands folded behind her back, Jeon grimaced. "The ballistics formulae incorporate a degree of error, but on hitting an orbital target these projectiles should break apart like antipersonnel bullets to inflict maximum damage. Missing the target and entering atmosphere, they should quickly burn off their cases, then break apart and burn up before reaching the planet's surface."
"Should?" Harald repeated.
"We can't be entirely certain with a ton of iron travelling at such speeds. At the worst, one in ten will forge-weld into one single lump on atmospheric impact, and retain coherence long enough to strike the ground as a plasma column, but thereafter there's a less than point one per cent chance of hitting a major population centre."
Harald nodded slowly, then pushed his microphone across in front of his mouth. "Run test," he ordered.
After a moment the hum dropped to a lower note, which it held for a couple of seconds before rising back to its previous level. Through Harald's headset, his gunnery officer informed him, "Resonance in coils four and fifteen, but within operational parameters." Harald flipped his eye-screen back into position and read the data feeds from the other five hilldiggers chosen for this chore. Four of them were ready, but one had detected major faults in its linear accelerator. How surprising that one should be Davidson's Resilience. However, Harald had already factored in that at least one hilldigger would be unable to fire.
"Estimated damage such a forge-welded lump could cause?" he enquired of Jeon.
"About five hundred kilotons."
"Enough to take out a small city, then."
"Yes."
Harald stared down at his hands and observed how he was white-knuckling the rail. He deliberately relaxed his fingers. "Commence firing," he ordered over general com.
Down below, a snake of missiles advanced one segment down a conveyor, an arm slid one translucent yellow bullet—in which could be seen dark iron bones—into one of the two inner breech sections. With a hiss this section slid down into place in the vacuum breech. The hum dropped to a low note. Simultaneously the second inner breech section clonked across, and another projectile was fed into that too. The hum rose as the first section retracted, dropped again as the next fed in. So it continued for the first five shots—the motion similar to that of a simple pump. Then, after these second-stage test shots, the firing accelerated until the hum never rose again; the breech sections were in constant motion with projectiles being fired once every second.
Harald summoned up an exterior view of the fleet, but there was very little to see as the projectiles departed at near relativistic speeds other than the occasional spurt of a drive flame to keep the hilldiggers in position. The time until the projectiles reached their targets was one hour, but within only a few minutes Director Gneiss and the rest of the Oversight Committee would know Combine was being fired upon. Harald now keyed into feeds from Fleet stations all around Sudoria and flicked through multiple views, observing landing craft in the process of evacuation, as ordered previously. Accounting for the transmission delay, those craft should already be on their way down to the planet's surface. Quite probably the personnel aboard would be arrested once the wardens managed to reach them, but that was a problem to be resolved later. Those personnel would be safer in custody on the surface, for most certainly, knowing it was under attack, Combine would react fast to remove Fleet eyes from orbit. He waited, constantly checking the time display.