The air was cold and smelled of trees and dampness. Jaal shivered in her thin clothes and thought suddenly of Fassin. She’d been feeling guilty lately because sometimes now a whole day could go by when she didn’t think about him in the least, and that seemed disloyal. She wondered where he was, whether he was still alive, and if he ever thought of her.
She looked up above the town and the lines of lights studded across the hillsides opposite, gazing over the trees and the dusting of snow on the higher peaks against the darkening purple sky, and saw the steady stars, and lots of tiny, brief-lived flashing lights, sprinkled across the heavens like glittering confetti.
She looked away and went back in, suddenly terrified beyond telling that one of the little lights would swell and be a nuclear explosion or antimatter or one of those things, and blind her.
Afraid of the sky, afraid to look up, she thought as she went back down to rejoin the others.
* * *
Fleet Admiral Brimiaice had been able to watch his own death, that of his crew and the destruction of his once fine ship, coming at him in exquisite detail and slow motion.
Alarms and a sound like a high, strong wind filled the thin air. Smoke had hazed the view in front of the main forward screen for a while but it had cleared. Wreckage, some of it still creaking and groaning as it cooled, filled about a quarter of the command deck. Limbs and tatters of flesh of a variety of species-types lay strewn around the spherical space. He looked around as best he could. He had a serious puncture wound on his lower left flank, too large for his sap-blood to seal. The armoured esuit, which made him look so much like a little spaceship, had saved his life, or at least delayed his dying.
Hiss, went the air around him.
Just like the ship, he thought. Punctured, life leaking out of it, self-sealing overwhelmed. He tried to see somebody, anybody else left alive in the command deck, but all he could see were bodies.
They should have been podded up, of course, but there had been last-minute problems with the ship’s shock-gel pods -possibly the result of sabotage, possibly not — and so the command crew had had to resort to sitting or lying or floating within high-gee chairs. It would have been a fairly hopeless battle anyway, but the fact that they were more limited in their manoeuvring capabilities than they would have been otherwise had made it all the more forlorn.
The invader fleet was well within the inner system now, the most obvious sign of their presence a great splayed, curving collection of filaments shown on the Carronade’s main screen. The enemy ships themselves were still mostly unseen, conducting their commerce of destruction and death with the defending forces at removes of rarely less than ten kilo-klicks, and sometimes from mega-klicks off.
They’d knocked out most of the long-range sensors long before, or their Beyonder allies had. Now the defenders just had glorified telescopes. Faced with camouflaged ships and the tiny, fast-moving specks of the smaller stuff, they had little hope of seeing very much of who and what was attacking them. This seemed a terrible shame to the Fleet Admiral. Losing, and dying, was bad enough, but to be swept aside and not even properly to see what and who was doing it was somehow much worse.
Out of the dark skies had sailed or sliced missiles tipped with nuclear and AM warheads, one-shot hyper-velocity launchers and beam weapons, sleet clouds of near-light-speed micro-munitions, high-energy lasers and a dozen other types of ordnance, loosed from a variety of distant ships, nearer small craft and uncrewed platforms, fighter vehicles, weapon-carrying drones and clustered sub-munitions.
They had been a decent fleet, the Carronade and its screen of twelve destroyers. They had been charged with making an audacious attack on the heart of the enemy fleet, aiming straight for the great mega-ship which the tacticians said was at its core. They had left the inner system weeks before the invasion hit, departing the dockyard hub in Sepekte orbit in secrecy and climbing high up out of the plane of the system, taking much longer to complete this part of the journey than might have seemed necessary, to keep their drive signatures hidden from the invaders. Once under way, they hadn’t signalled at all, not even to each other, not until the lead destroyer had fixed the position of the enemy fleet’s core.
They had hoped to dive in, taking the Starveling invaders by surprise, but they’d been spotted hours out. A detachment of ships rose to meet them: eight or nine, each one more than a match for the Carronade, all with a handful of smaller craft in attendance. They had burst formation, spreading themselves so as not to create too compressed a target for high-velocity munitions, but it had made no difference. The destroyers were destroyed and the battlecruiser embattled, dying last only because it was slower, lumbering to its inevitable fate rather than racing for it.
Brimiaice had known it would end something like this. They all had. All this had been his idea and he had insisted on leading the mission just because he knew how unlikely it was to succeed. He’d have preferred the crews to have been all volunteer, but the need for secrecy had made that impossible. He’d anticipated a few problems but there had been no cowards. And if it had somehow, miraculously, worked, why, then they and he would have been numbered amongst the greatest heroes of the Mercatorial Age. That wasn’t why he had done it, or why any of them had, but it was true all the same. And even if this wild, doomed attempt at striking the heart of the invaders only gave them pause for a few seconds, it had been worth doing. At least they had displayed some audacity, some ferocity, shown they were not cowed or frozen into immobility or gutless surrender.
Another explosion shook the ship, and the seat he was contained within. The wreckage to his left shifted and some twisted bit of metal like a great curled leaf sailed past, just missing him. This explosion felt more powerful but sounded much quieter than all those that had gone before, maybe because the air was mostly gone from the control space now. More felt than heard.
Darkness. All lights out, screen fading away, image burned into the eyes but now no longer there in reality, the ghost of it jumping around in front of him as he looked about, trying to spot a light, a console or sub-screen or anything still functioning.
But nothing.
And with the darkness, silence, as the last of the air went, both from the control space and the esuit.
Brimiaice felt something give way inside him. He heard his insides bubbling out into the cavity between his body and the interior surface of the suit. He’d thought it would hurt, and it did.
He caught a glimpse of light off to one side, and looked up, realising, as the light flared all over one flank of the control space, that he was seeing the framework of the battlecruiser’s hull structure, silhouetted from outside by some astoundingly bright -
* * *
Lieutenant Inesiji of the Borquille palace guard lay outstretched in a little crater-like nest within the wreckage of one of the fallen atmospheric power columns, its fawn and red debris lying tubed, slabbed and powdered across the plaza leading to the Hierchon’s Palace. The klicks-high column had taken a direct hit at the plinth from something in the first attack earlier that morning, and tumbled base-first, collapsing with an astounding slowness along a course about half its height, finally creating from its circular summit — as it lowered mightily, thunderously, shaking the plaza, the palace, every nearby part of the city — a sudden great torus of dust and vapour, a huge coiling “O’ a hundred metres wide that floated up into the sky, rolling round and round under and over itself as the massive tower hammered into the lower-rise buildings surrounding the plaza.
Inesiji had watched it happen from near the top of the palace itself, crammed in behind the controls of a pulse gun hidden behind camo net hundreds of metres above where the great cloud of wreckage fell. His human and whule comrades lay around him, fallen around the three long, tensioned legs of the gun. The invaders had used neutron weapons, bombs and beams, killing almost all the other biologicals in the vicinity. Jajuejein were not so easy to kill. Not that quickly, anyway. Inesiji was suffering and seizing up, and would die within a few days no matter what, but he could still function.