It had been bad enough knowing that a small part of that thing had come back with the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds. But that at least had been contained; it had been within the Mademoiselle’s powers to hold him at bay. Now Khouri had to accept that a more substantial fragment of Sun Stealer had reached her. And the Mademoiselle had been curiously absent ever since—until this voiceless half-glimpse, which might have been nothing at all; less than a figment of her imagination; something which any sane person would have dismissed as a trick of the light at the edge of vision.
If it had been her… what did it mean, after all this time?
Eventually the initial phase of exercises finished, and some of the suit functionality was reinstated. Not everything, but enough to let the three of them know that a certain slate had been wiped clean, and that from now the rules would be different.
“All right,” Volyova said. “I’ve seen worse.”
“I’d take that as a compliment,” Khouri said, hoping to elicit some vague camaraderie from her compatriots. “But the trouble with Ilia is she means it literally.”
“At least one of you gets it,” Volyova said. “But don’t let it go to your head, Khouri. Especially as it’s about to get serious.”
At the far end of the chamber another clamshell door was easing open. Because of the constantly shifting light, Khouri saw what happened more as a series of frozen, glare-saturated images than actual motion. Things were spilling out: an expanding mass of ellipsoidal objects, each perhaps half a metre long, metallic-white in colour, with various protrusions, gun-nozzles, manipulators and apertures interrupting its surface.
Sentry drones. She knew them—or something similar—from the Edge. They had called them wolfhounds, because of the ferocity of their attack, and the fact they always moved in packs. Although their main military use was as an instrument of demoralisation, Khouri knew what they could do, and she knew that wearing a suit was no guarantee of safety. Wolfhounds were built for viciousness, not intelligence. They carried relatively light weapons—but they did so in large numbers, and, more to the point, they acted in unison. A pack of wolfhounds could collectively target their fire against a single individual, if their pooled-processors deemed that the action was strategically useful. It was that singlemindedness which made them terrifying.
But there was more. Embedded in the mass of erupting drones were several larger objects, also metallic-white in colour, but lacking the spherical symmetry of the wolfhounds. It was difficult to make them out clearly in the intermittent bursts of illumination, but Khouri thought she knew what they were. They were other suits, and they were very unlikely to be friendly.
The wolfhounds and the enemy suits were dropping away from the central axis now, vectoring towards the three waiting trainees. Perhaps two seconds had elapsed since the other door had opened, but it had seemed much longer as Khouri’s mind easily switched to the mode of rapid consciousness which combat demanded. Many of the suit’s higher autonomous functions were disabled, but its target-acquisition routines were still operable, so she ordered the suit to lock onto the wolfhounds, not actually firing, but keeping a bead on each one. She knew that her suit would confer with its two partners; between them devising a moment-by-moment strategy and allocating targets to each other, but that process was largely invisible to the wearer.
Where the hell was Volyova?
Was it possible she could have moved from one end of the chamber to the other, in time to appear in the pack? Yes, probably—motion in a suit, at least on a scale this compressed, could be so rapid that a person might seem to disappear from one point and appear hundreds of metres further away an eyeblink later. But the enemy suits Khouri had seen had definitely come through the other door, which would have necessitated Volyova leaving the chamber and making her way to the other end through normal ship corridors and accessways. Even in a suit, even with the route keyed in beforehand, Khouri doubted that anyone could do that so quickly; not without becoming liquid en route. But maybe Volyova had a short-cut; a clear shaft through which she could move much more rapidly…
Shit.
Khouri was being shot at.
The wolfhounds were firing, lancing her with small-grade laser fire, emerging in twin beams from malignant, closely spaced eyes in the upper hemisphere of their ellipsoid shells. By now their chameleoflage had adapted to the floor metal, turning them into purple lozenges which seemed to dance in and out of clarity. Her suit skin had silvered to an optically perfect mirror, deflecting most of the energy, but some of the initial blasts had done real damage to the suit integrity. She would lose points for that—she had been too busy cogitating on Volyova’s vanishing act to pay attention to the attack. That diversion, of course, had almost certainly been Volyova’s intention. She looked around, confirming what the suit readouts were telling her, which was that her compatriots had all survived. Flanking her, Sudjic and Kjarval resembled androform blobs of mercury, but they were not hurt and were returning fire.
Khouri set her escalation protocols to stay one offensive step ahead of the enemy, but not to obliterate them. Her suit sprouted low-yield lasers, popping up on both shoulders, pivoting on turrets. She watched the beams converge ahead of her, knifing forwards, each burst leaving a lilac contrail of ionised air. When hit, the shining, flying purple wolfhounds tended to crash out of the sky, bouncing to the ground or just exploding in hot blossoms. It would have been unwise in the extreme to be out in the chamber without a suit.
“You were slow,” Sudjic said, on the general-suit, even as the attack continued. “This was real, we’d be hosing you off the walls.”
“How many times you seen close-quarters action, Sudjic?”
Kjarval—who until then had said next to nothing—cut in on them. “We’ve all seen action, Khouri.”
“Yeah? And did you ever get close enough to the enemy to hear them scream for mercy?”
“What I mean is… fuck.” Kjarval had just taken a hit. Her suit spasmed momentarily, flicking through a series of incorrect chameleoflage modes: space-black; snow-white and then florid, tropical foliage, making it look as if Kjarval were a door leading out of the chamber into the heart of some remote planetary jungle.
Her suit stammered, and then regained its reflective sheen.
“I’m worried about those other suits.”
“That’s what they’re for. To make you worry, and louse up.”
“We need help to louse up? That’s a new one.”
“Shut it, Khouri. Just concentrate on the damned war.”
She did. That part was easy.
Roughly a third of the attacking wolfhounds had been shot down, and no new forces were emerging through the chamber’s still-open end door. But the other suits—there were three of them, Khouri saw—had done nothing so far except loiter near the hole, and were now slowly moving towards the floor, correcting their descent with bursts of needle-thin thrust from their heels. As they did so they too assumed a colour and texture which matched the shot-up floor. It was impossible to tell which—if any—were occupied.