So Clavain had been cleverer than her again. No, she corrected herself: not cleverer, but precisely as clever. Skade had made no mistakes yet, and though Clavain had parried all her attacks, he had yet to strike at her. The advantage was still hers, and she was certain that she had inconvenienced him with at least one of her attacks. At the very least she had forced him to burn fuel he would sooner have conserved. More probably she had made him divert his efforts into countering her attacks rather than preparing for the battle that lay ahead around Resurgam. In every military sense she had lost nothing except the ability ever to bluff convincingly again.
But she had never been counting on that anyway.
It was time to do what had to be done.
‘You lying fuck.’
Xavier looked up as Antoinette stormed into their quarters. He was lying on his back on the bunk, a compad balanced between his knees. Antoinette had a momentary glimpse of lines of source code scrolling down the ‘pad, the symbols and sinuous indentations of the programming language resembling the intricately formalised stanzas of some alien poetry. Xavier had a stylus gripped between his teeth. It dropped from his mouth as he opened it in shock. The compad tumbled to the floor.
‘Antoinette?’
‘I know.’
‘You know what?’
‘About the Mandelstam Ruling. About Lyle Merrick. About Storm Bird. About Beast. About you.’
Xavier slid around on the bunk, his feet touching the floor. He pushed a few fingers through the black mop of his hair, bashfully.
‘About what?’
‘Don’t lie to me, you fuck!’
Then she was on him in a blind, pummelling rage. There was no real violence behind her punches; under any other circumstances they would have been playful. But Xavier hid his face, absorbing her anger against his forearms. He was trying to say something to her. She was blanking him out in her fury, refusing to listen to his snivelling little justifications.
Finally the rage turned to tears. Xavier stopped her from hitting him, taking her wrists gently.
‘Antoinette,’ he said.
She hit him one last time, then started weeping in earnest. She hated him and loved him at the same time.
‘It’s not my fault,’ Xavier said. ‘I swear it’s not my fault.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He looked at her, she returning his gaze through the blur of her tears. ‘Why didn’t I tell you?’
‘That’s what I asked.’
‘Because your father made me promise not to.’
When Antoinette had calmed down, when she was ready to listen, Xavier told her something of what had happened.
Jim Bax had been a friend of Lyle Merrick’s for many years. The two of them had been freighter pilots, both working within and around the Rust Belt. Normally two pilots operating in the same trading sphere would have found it difficult to sustain a genuine friendship through the ups and downs of a systemwide economy; there would have been too many occasions where their interests overlapped. But because Jim and Lyle operated in radically different niches with very different client lists, rivalry had never threatened their relationship. Jim Bax hauled heavy loads on rapid high-burn trajectories, usually at short notice and usually, though not always, more or less within the bounds of legality. Certainly Jim did not court criminal clients, although it was not exactly true to say that he turned them away, either. Lyle, by contrast, worked almost exclusively with criminals. They recognised that his slow, frail, unreliable chemical-drive scow was about the least likely ship to attract the attention of the Convention’s customs and excise cutters. Lyle could not guarantee that his loads would arrive at their destinations quickly, or sometimes at all, but he could almost always guarantee that they would arrive uninspected, and that there would be no inconvenient lines of questioning extending back to his clients. So, in a more than modest fashion, Lyle Merrick prospered. He went to a great deal of trouble to hide his earnings from the authorities, maintaining a fastidious illusion of being constantly on the edge of insolvency. But behind the scenes, and by the standards of the day, he was a moderately wealthy man, far wealthier, in fact, than Jim Bax would ever be. Wealthy enough, indeed, to afford to have himself backed-up once a year at one of the alpha-level scanning facilities in Chasm City’s high canopy.
And for many years his act worked. Until the day a bored police cutter decided to pick on Lyle for no other reason than that he had never troubled them before, and so therefore had to be up to something. The cutter had no difficulty matching trajectories with Lyle’s scow. It requested that he initiate main-engine cut-off and prepare for boarding. But Lyle knew he could not possibly comply with the enforced main-engine cutoff. His entire reputation hinged on the fact that his hauls were never inspected. Had he allowed the proxy aboard, he would have been signing his own bankruptcy notice.
He had no choice but to run.
Fortunately — or not, as the case proved — he was already on final approach for Carousel New Copenhagen. He knew that there was a repair well on the rim just large enough to hold his ship. It would be tight, but if he could get inside the bay, he would at least be able to destroy the cargo before the proxies forced their way aboard. He would still be in a lot of trouble, but at least he would not have broken client confidentiality, and that, for Lyle, mattered a lot more than his own wellbeing.
Lyle, of course, never made it. He screwed up his last approach burn, harried by the cutters — there were now four of them swooping in to escort him, and they had already fired retarder grapples on to his hull — and collided with the outer face of the rim itself. Surprisingly, and no one was more surprised than Lyle, he survived the impact. The blunt life-support and habitat module of his freighter had pushed itself through the skin of the carousel like a baby bird’s beak ripping through eggshell. His velocity at impact had only been a few tens of metres per second, and although he had been bruised and battered, he suffered no serious injuries. His luck continued even when the main propulsion section — the swollen lungs of the chemical fuel tanks — went up. The blast rammed the nose module further into the carousel, but again Lyle survived.
But even as he realised his good fortune, he knew that he was in grave trouble. The impact had not occurred in the most densely inhabited portion of the carousel’s ring, but there were still many casualties. A vault of the rim interior had decompressed as his ship plunged through the rim, the air gushing through the wound in the carousel’s fabric. The chamber had been a recreational zone, a miniature glade and forest lit by suspended lamps.
On any other night, there might have been no more than a few dozen people and animals enjoying the synthetic scenery by moonlight. But on the night Lyle crashed there had been a midnight recital of one of Quirrenbach’s more populist efforts, and several hundred people had been there. Thankfully most had survived, though many had been seriously injured. But there had still been fatalities: forty-three dead at the final count, excluding Lyle himself. It was certainly possible that more had been killed.
Lyle made no attempt to escape. He knew that his fate was sealed. He would have been lucky to avoid the death penalty just for refusing to comply with the boarding order, but even if he had wriggled out of that — and there were ways and means — there was nothing that could be done for him now. Since the Melding Plague, when the once glorious Glitter Band had been reduced to the Rust Belt, acts of vandalism against habitats were considered the most heinous of crimes. The forty-three dead were almost a detail.