Then she resumed her address to the colonists.
“People of Resurgam,” Volyova said. “Our weapons have just aligned themselves on the small settlement of Phoenix; fifty-four degrees north by twenty west of Cuvier. In fractionally less than thirty seconds Phoenix and its immediate environs will cease to exist.”
The woman dampened her lips with the tip of her tongue before continuing. “This will be our last announcement for twenty-four hours. You have until then to produce Sylveste, or we escalate to a larger target. Count yourselves lucky that we began with one as small as Phoenix.”
The general tenor of her pronouncements, Khouri realised, had been that of a schoolteacher patiently explaining why the punishment she was about to visit upon her pupils was both in their best interests and entirely brought about by their own actions. She avoided saying, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you,” but if she had, Khouri would not have been at all surprised. In fact, she wondered if there was anything Volyova could now do which would surprise her in any way. It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species. And not just Volyova, but the entire crew. Khouri felt a pang of revulsion, shuddering to think how much a part of them she had recently dared imagine herself to be. It was as if they had all pulled masks from their faces, revealing snakes.
Volyova fired.
For a moment—a long, pregnant moment—there was nothing. Khouri began to entertain the idea that maybe the entire thing had been a bluff after all. But that hope lasted until the walls of the bridge shuddered, as if the entire ship were an ancient sea vessel scraping past an iceberg. Khouri felt none of the motion, since the articulated seat boom moved to smother the vibrations. But she had no doubts that she had seen it, and seconds later she heard what sounded like distant thunder.
The hull weapons had discharged.
On the projected image of Resurgam, the weapons readouts recast themselves, changing to illuminate the conditions of the armaments in the moments after they had been deployed. Hegazi consulted his seat readouts, his eyepiece clicking and whirring as it assimilated the news.
“Suppression elements discharged,” he said, voice clipped and devoid of emphasis. “Targeting systems confirm correct acquisition.” Then, with magisterial slowness, he elevated his gaze to the globe.
Khouri looked with him.
There was—where previously there had been nothing—a tiny red-hot smear near the edge of Resurgam’s northern polar cap, like a foul rat’s eye in the crust of the world. It was darkening now, like a hot needle just pulled from a brazier. But it was still hurtingly bright, darkening less through its own cooling than because it was being progressively shrouded by titanic veils of uplifted planetary debris. In windows which opened fleetingly in the curdling dark storm, Khouri observed dancing tendrils of lightning, their bright ignitions strobing the landscape for hundreds of kilometres around. A near-circular shockwave was racing from the site of the attack. Khouri observed its movement via a subtle change in the refractive index of the air, the way a ripple in shallow water caused the rocks below to acquire a momentary fluidity of their own.
“Preliminary sit-rep coming in now,” Hegazi said, still managing to sound like a bored acolyte reciting the dullest of scriptures. “Weps functionality: nominal. Ninety-nine point four per cent probability that target was completely neutralised. Seventy-nine per cent probability that no one within two hundred kilometres could have survived, unless they were behind a kilometre of armour.”
“Good enough odds for me,” Volyova said. She studied the wound in the surface of Resurgam for a moment longer, evidently satiating herself with the thought of planetary-scale destruction.
FIFTEEN
“They bluffed,” Sluka said, just as a sudden, false dawn shone over the north-easterly horizon, turning the intervening ridges and bluffs into serrated black cutouts. The glare was magnesium-bright, edged in purple. Briefly it overloaded whole strips of Sylveste’s vision, leaving numb voids where it had burned.
“Care to take another guess?” he asked.
For a moment Sluka seemed unable to answer. She only stared at the flare, mesmerised by its radiance and the message of atrocity it brought.
“He told you they’d do it,” Pascale said. “You should have listened to him. He knew these people. He knew they’d do exactly what they promised.”
“I never thought they would,” Sluka said, her voice so quiet that it seemed she was talking to herself. Despite the glare, it was still a totally silent evening, free even of the usual music of Resurgam’s winds. “I thought their threat was too monstrous to take seriously.”
“Nothing’s too monstrous for them.” Sylveste’s eyes were returning to normality now; enough that he could read the expressions of the women who were standing next to him on Mantell’s mesa. “From now on, you’d better take Volyova at her word. She means what she said. In twenty-four hours she’ll do it all again, unless you turn me over.”
It was as if Sluka had not heard him. “Perhaps we ought to get down,” was all she said.
Sylveste agreed, though before they headed back into the mesa they took time to crudely measure the direction from which the flash had come. “We know when it happened,” Sylveste said. “And we know the direction. When the pressure wave comes-through, we’ll know how far away it was. Settlements on Resurgam are still widely spread, so we should be able to pinpoint it.”
“She said the name of the place,” Pascale said.
Sylveste nodded.
“But while I’d believe any threat she made, I also know Volyova’s not to be trusted.”
“I don’t know anything about Phoenix,” Sluka said, as they descended via a cargo elevator. “I thought I knew most of the recent settlements. But then again I’ve not exactly been at the heart of government these last few years.”
“She would have started with something small,” Sylveste said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have room to escalate. We can assume Phoenix was a soft target; a scientific or geological outpost; something on which the rest of the colony wasn’t materially dependent. Just people, in other words.”
Sluka shook her head. “We’re talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It’s like their only reason for existing was so they could die.”
Sylveste felt physically sick; on the nauseous cusp of actually vomiting. It was, he thought, the only occasion in his life when this feeling had been engendered by an external event; something in which he was not directly participating. He had not even felt this way when Carine Lefevre had died. The mistake—the error—had not been his to commit. And while he had argued with Sluka that the crew would inflict what they threatened, some part of him had clung to the idea that, ultimately, they would not; that he was wrong and Sluka and the other humanitarians were correct. Perhaps, had he been in Sluka’s position, he too would have ignored the warning, irrespective of how sure he had felt before the attack. The cards always look different when it’s your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.
The pressure wave came three hours later. By then it was little more than a gust, but it was a gust completely out of place on such a still night. After it had passed, the air was turbulent, prone to sudden squalls, as if a full-blooded razorstorm was on the verge. Timing of the shock indicated that the site of the attack was somewhat less than three and a half thousand miles away (seismic data also confirmed this); almost due north-east, according to the visual evidence. Retiring under guard to Sluka’s stateroom, they pushed themselves beyond sleep with strong coffee, calling up global maps of the colony from Mantell’s archives.