“Great,” Khouri said. “I was all ready to shoot the bastard—now what do I do?”
“You get a chance, you shoot,” Volyova said. “If you can focus the blast away from me, I’ll take my chances—this room’s better armoured than you’d think.” A moment’s silence, then: “Ah, good. Got you, you vicious piece of junk.”
She had the legs of the spider-room wrapped around the spike now. The weapon appeared to have given up all hope of dislodging her, and perhaps with good reason: it struck Khouri that Volyova had not achieved much, despite her valiant attempt. In all probability, the cache-weapon was not going to be greatly hindered by the arrival of the spider-room.
The struggle for control of the hull weapons had, meanwhile, resumed in earnest. Occasionally Khouri felt them budge slightly, the Mademoiselle’s systems momentarily losing the battle, but these tiny slippages were never enough to allow Khouri to target and deploy. And if Sun Stealer was assisting her, she did not feel it, although possibly that absence of presence was simply an artefact of his extreme cunning. Perhaps if Sun Stealer had not been there, she would have lost the battle completely, and—freed of this diversion—the Mademoiselle would already have unleashed whatever it was that the weapon held. Right now the distinction felt rather irrelevant. She had just noticed what it was that Volyova was doing. The spider-room’s thrusters were firing in concert now, resisting the thrust that the larger but clumsier weapon was applying.
Volyova was dragging the weapon downship, towards the spewing blue-white radiance that was the lighthugger’s nearest thrust-beam. She was going to kill the damned thing by taking it into the searing exhaust of the Conjoiner drive.
“Ilia,” Khouri said. “Are you sure this is… considered?”
“Considered?” This time there was no mistaking the woman’s clucking laughter, even though it sounded institutional. “It’s the most ill-considered thing I’ve ever done, Khouri. But right now I don’t see many alternatives. Not unless you get those guns online damn quickly.”
“I’m… working on it.”
“Well work on it some more and stop bothering me. In case it hadn’t occurred to you, I’ve got rather a lot on my mind right now.”
“Her whole life flashing before her eyes, I should imagine.”
“Oh, you again.” Khouri ignored the Mademoiselle, realising by now that her interjections served the sly purpose of distracting her; that by doing so she was indeed interfering in the course of the battle; not nearly so ineffective a bystander as she maintained.
Volyova had now less than five hundred metres to go before she dragged the cache-weapon into the flames. It was putting up a fight, thrusters going haywire, but its overall thrust capacity was less than that of the spider-room. Understandable, Khouri thought. When its designers had conceived the ancillary systems which would be required to move and position the device, the idea that it would also have to fend for itself in a wrestling match had probably not been uppermost in their minds.
“Khouri,” Volyova said, “in about thirty seconds I’m going to release the svinoi. Assuming my sums are right, no amount of corrective thrust will be able to stop it drifting into the beam.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Well, sort of. But I feel I ought to warn you…” Volyova’s voice faded in and out of clarity, reception compromised by the broiling energies of the propulsion beam, which she was now approaching at distances not usually considered wise for the organic. “It’s occurred to me that even if I succeed in destroying the cache-weapon… some part of the blast—something exotic, perhaps—might get sent back up the drive beam, into the propulsion core.” A pause that was definitely intentional. “If that happens, the results might not be… optimal.”
“Well, thanks,” Khouri said. “I appreciate the morale-building.”
“Damn,” Volyova said, quietly and calmly. “There’s a slight flaw in my plan. The weapon must have hit the spider-room with some kind of defensive EM-pulse; either that or the radiation from the drive is interfering with the hardware.” There was the sound—possibly—of someone making repeated attempts to throw antique metal switches on a console. “What I mean,” Volyova said, “is that I don’t seem to be able to break free. I’m stuck to the bastard.”
“Then shut off the damned drive—you can do that, can’t you?”
“Of course; how do you think I killed Nagorny?” But she didn’t sound optimistic. “Nyet—I’m locked out of the drive; must have blocked my intercession pathways when I ran Palsy…” She was practically gabbling now. “Khouri, this is getting a tiny bit desperate… if you have those weapons…”
The Mademoiselle spoke now, sounding appropriately smug. “She’s dead, Khouri. And at the angle you’d now have to fire, half those weapons would be disabled to prevent them inflicting damage on the ship. You’ll be lucky to scorch the cache-weapon’s hull with what remains.”
She was right—almost without Khouri noticing, whole blocks of potentially available armament had safed themselves, since she was now requesting them to point dangerously close to critical ship components. What remained were the lightest armaments, almost by definition incapable of doing any serious damage.
Perhaps sensing this, something relented.
The weapons were suddenly more under Khouri’s control than not, and—she realised—the fact that the remaining systems were limited in their firepower was actually to her advantage. Her plan had changed. What she needed now was surgical precision, not brute force.
In the hiatus, before the weapons were regained by the Mademoiselle, Khouri ditched the prior target pattern and issued re-aiming orders. Her instructions were specific in the extreme. Now, oozing into position as if immersed in toffee, the weapons aligned themselves on the impact points she had selected. Not the cache-weapon now, but something else entirely…
“Khouri,” the Mademoiselle began, “I really think you should consider this…”
But by then Khouri had already fired.
Gouts of plasma streamed out towards the cache-weapon connecting—not with the weapon itself, but with the spider-room, neatly severing all eight of its legs, and then all four of its grapple-lines. The room flung itself away from the lancing spear of the drive, its legs truncated abruptly at the knees.
The cache-weapon drifted into the beam, like a moth brushing into an incandescent lamp.
What happened thereafter took place in an inhumanly brief series of instants; almost too rapid for Khouri to comprehend until afterwards. The physical exterior of the cache-weapon evaporated in a millisecond, boiling away in a gasp of predominantly metallic vapour. It was impossible to tell whether it was the touching of the beam which led to what followed, or whether, at the instant of its destruction, the cache-weapon was already committed to the act of turning itself inside out.
Either way, things did not proceed quite as its builders had intended.
Simultaneously—or as near as mattered—what was left of the cache-weapon beneath its eviscerated hide emitted a prolonged gravitational eruction, a burp of shearing spacetime. Something very horrible was happening to the fabric of reality in the immediate vicinity of the weapon, but not in the way which had been planned. A rainbow of bent starlight flickered around the curdling mass of plasma-energy. For a millisecond the rainbow was approximately spherical and stable, but then it began to wobble, oscillating unevenly like a soap-bubble on the point of bursting. A fraction of a millisecond later, it collapsed inwards, and accelerating exponentially, vanished.
For another moment there was nothing left, not even debris, just the normal star-speckled backdrop of space.
Then a glint of light appeared, shading to ultraviolet. The glint magnified and swelled, bloating into an intense, malignant sphere. The wave of expanding plasma hit the ship, juddering it so violently that Khouri felt the impact even with the cushioning gimbals of the gunnery. Data rushed in, telling her—not that she was particularly keen on knowing—that the blast had not seriously compromised any hull-based systems, and that the brief spike of background radiation from the flash was within tolerable norms. Gravimetric scans had abruptly returned to normal.
Spacetime had been punctured, penetrated at the quantum level, releasing a minuscule glint of Planck energy. Minuscule, that is, compared with the normally seething energies present in the spacetime foam. But beyond normal confinement that negligible release had been like a nuke going off next door. Spacetime had instantly healed itself, knitting back together before any real damage was done, leaving only a few surplus monopoles, low-mass quantum black holes and other anomalous/exotic particles as evidence that anything untoward had happened.
The cache-weapon had malfunctioned, badly.
“Oh, very good,” the Mademoiselle said, sounding more disappointed than anything. “I hope you’re proud of what you’ve done.”
But what had Khouri’s attention now was the absence streaking towards her, rushing through gunspace. She tried to back out in time; tried to disengage the link—
But she was not quite fast enough.