There was a pause while the message scrolled along and off the screen, then:
~ Commander, I suspect this will be a formality, but I have to ask; do you wish to admit to what has happened here and turn your command over without a fight to the ROU Killing Time? This will probably be our last opportunity to avoid hostilities.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ the Commander said sourly.
~ I thought not. Very well. I shall vector away in the skein-shadow of the rock and try to loop round behind the ROU. Let it enter the defence system. Wait until it’s a week inside, no more, and then set everything you have upon it. I urge you again, Commander; turn over the tactical command apparatus to me.
‘No,’ the Commander said. ‘Leave and do whatever you think will best jeopardise the Culture vessel. I shall allow it to arrive at a point three weeks in and then attack.’
~ I am on my way. Do not let the ship come within a light week of the store itself, Commander. I know how it will think if it is attacked; this is not some genteel Orbital Mind or a nicely timorous General Contact Unit; this is a Culture warship showing every sign of being fully armed and ready to press matters.
‘What, creeping in as it is?’ the Commander sneered.
~ Commander, you would be amazed and appalled at how few bright sides there are concerning the appearance and behaviour of a warship like this. The fact it’s not charging in through the defence screen and metaphorically skidding to a stop is almost certainly a bad sign; it probably means it’s one of the wily ones. I repeat; do not wait until it is most of the way into the defence system before opening fire. Assaulted so far inside the defensive field it may well figure that it has no chance of escape and so might as well continue towards you and attack, and at that sort of range it would stand a decent chance of being able to obliterate the entire store and all the ships within it.
The Commander felt almost annoyed that the ship hadn’t appealed to his own personal sense of self-preservation. ‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘Half way in; two weeks.’
~ Commander, no! That is still too close. If we cannot destroy the ship in the first instant of the engagement it must be presented with a reasonable opportunity to escape, otherwise it may go for glory rather than attempt to extricate itself.
‘But if it escapes it can alert the Culture!’
~ If our attack is not immediately successful it will signal elsewhere anyway, assuming it has not already done so. We shall not be able to stop it. In that case, we shall have been discovered… though with any luck that will only put our plans out by a few days. Believe me, the craft’s physical escape will not bring the Culture here any quicker than a signal would. You will be putting this entire mission in jeopardy if you allow the vessel to come within more than three light weeks of the store.
‘All right!’ the Commander spat. He flicked a tentacle over the glowing board of the command desk. The communication link was cut. The Attitude Adjuster did not attempt to re-establish it.
‘Your suit, sir,’ said a voice from behind. The Commander whirled round to find the gelding midshipman – uniformed but not suited – with his space suit in his limbs.
‘Oh, at last! the Commander screamed; he flicked a tentacle at the creature’s eye stalks; the blow bounced them back off its casing. The gelding whimpered and fell back, gas sac deflating. The Commander grabbed his suit and pulled himself inside it. The midshipman staggered along the floor, half blinded.
The Commander ordered his lieutenant to reconfigure the command desk. From here they could personally control all the systems that had been entrusted by the Culture to the Mind which the traitor ship had killed. The command desk was like an ultimate instrument of destruction; a giant keyboard to play death tunes on. Some of the keys, admittedly, had to be left to trigger themselves once set, but these controls really did control.
The holo screen projected a sphere out towards the Commander. The globe displayed the volume of real space around Pittance, with tiny green, white and gold flecks representing major components of the defence system. A dull blue dot represented the approaching warship, coasting in towards them. Another dot, bright red, on the directly opposite side of the ship store from the blue dot and much closer – though drawing quickly away – was the traitor ship Attitude Adjuster.
Another screen alongside showed an abstracted hyperspatial view of the same situation, indicating the two ships on different surfaces of the skein. A third screen showed a transparent abstract of Pittance itself, detailing its ship-filled caverns and surface and internal defence systems.
The Commander finished getting into his space suit and powering it up. He settled back into position. He reviewed the situation. He knew better than to try to conduct matters at a tactical level, but he appreciated the strategic influence he could wield here. He was dreadfully tempted, all the same, to take personal control and fire all the defence systems personally, but he was aware of the enormous responsibility he had been given in this mission and was equally conscious that he had been carefully selected for this task. He had been chosen because he knew when not to – what had the traitor ship called it? Go for glory. He knew when not to go for glory. He knew when to back off, when to take advice, when to retreat and regroup.
He flicked open the communicator channel to the traitor ship. ‘Did the warship stop exactly a light month out?’ he asked.
~ Yes.
‘That’s thirty-two standard Culture days.’
~ Correct.
‘Thank you.’ He closed the channel.
He looked at the lieutenant at his side. ‘Set everything within range to open fire on the warship the instant it crosses the eight-point one days’ limit.’ He sat back as the lieutenant’s limbs flickered over the holo displays, putting his command into effect. Only just in time, the Commander noted. He’d been longer getting into his suit than he’d thought.
‘Forty seconds, sir,’ the lieutenant said.
‘… Give it just enough time to relax,’ the Commander said, more to himself than to anybody else. ‘If that is how these things work…’
Exactly eight and a tenth light days in from the position the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time had held while negotiating its permission to approach, space all around the blue dot on the screen scintillated abruptly as a thousand hidden devices of a dozen different types suddenly erupted into life in a precisely ordered sequence of destruction; in the real-space holo sphere it looked like a miniaturised stellar cluster suddenly bursting into existence all around the blue dot. The trace disappeared instantly inside a brilliant sphere of light. In the hyperspace holo sphere, the dot lasted a little longer; slowed down, it could be seen firing some munitions back for a microsecond or so, then it too disappeared in the wash of energies bursting out of the real-space skein and into hyperspace in twin bulging plumes.
The lights in the accommodation space flickered and dimmed as monumental amounts of power suddenly diverted to the rock’s own long-range weaponry.
The Commander left the comm channel to the traitor ship open. Its own course had altered the instant the defence weaponry had been unleashed; now its course was hooked, changing colour from red to blue and curving up and round and vectoring in hyperspace too, looping round to the point where the slowly fading and dissipating radiation shells marked the focus of the system’s annihilatory power.
A flat screen to the Commander’s left wavered, as if some still greater power surge had sucked energy even from its protected circuits. A message flashed up on it:
~ Missed, you fuckers! the legend read.
‘What?’ the Commander said.
The display flashed once and came clear again.
~ Commander; the Attitude Adjuster here again. As you may have gathered, we have failed.
‘What? But.. !’
~ Keep all defence and sensory systems at maximum readiness; ramp the sensor arrays up to significant degradation point in a week; we shall not need them beyond then.
‘But what happened? We got it!’
~ I shall move to plug the gap the attack left in our defences. Ready all the cleared ships for immediate awakening; I may have to rouse them within a day or two. Complete the tests on the Displacers; use a real ship if you have to. And run a total level-zero systems check of your own equipment; if the ship was able to insert a message into your command desk it may have been able to carry out more pertinent mischief therein.