CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pelagia maneuvered close to Beowulf as the two of them orbited low over Miranda’s surface. “How are you?” she asked.
“Main drive is gone, turret number one isn’t responding, and I’m losing pressure fast.”
“If I deorbit you, can you manage a landing with maneuvering thrusters?”
“Theoretically. I fear I cannot be of much use in the main engagement.”
“That’s all right. We don’t have to worry about Repun sneaking up behind us while we’re fighting everybody else. Thanks.”
“I’ll watch the battle and send you a report when you revive,” said Beowulf.
“Oh, I intend to live through it. I don’t have any choice, really. Can’t back up a brain—not without a destructive scan, anyway.” As she spoke, Pelagia maneuvered in front of Beowulf and gently approached with tiny puffs from her thrusters.
“You have a brain? You’re a biological?”
“Orcinus sapiens, at your service.” Pelagia centered the hardpoint on her nose against the thrust axis marked on Beowulf’s open cargo deck.
“I thought you just liked whales for some reason.”
“Well, I do. Prepare for thrust.” Her main drive rumbled gently for more than a minute, cancelling nearly all of their orbital speed. She disengaged as the two began slowly dropping.
“Why are you putting me here? That isn’t the spaceport—just a bunch of carbon assemblers.”
Pelagia separated with a brief thruster pulse and slowly rotated to boost again. She aimed her nose a couple of degrees above the horizon. “I don’t want you to get hit by any stray shots at the port. Even if Lampyrida and I can delay their landing, I don’t think we can stop them completely. Gonzalo Crater’s going to be a dangerous place pretty soon. That factory down there has transport links—you shouldn’t have any trouble getting field repairs.”
“Thank you, I suppose. Given that you’re expecting the enemy to get past you, I take it you don’t think we’re going to make anything off prizes and salvage?”
“Tell you what: I’ll grant you salvage rights for my hull. That ought to be worth something. Took me long enough to pay it off. If my squishy bits get vaporized, I’ll have no more use for the rest.” With a flare of her main engine, Pelagia shot away.
Lampyrida joined Pelagia in orbit shortly after she passed over Gonzalo. The two ships made another low circuit of Miranda. They were definitely an odd pair—the sleek warship with her wings folded, new scars cutting across her black-and-white exterior, and the squat boxy shape of the freighter with her massive landing legs and high-thrust motors.
“Heard what you said to Beowulf,” Lampyrida said to Pelagia. “How come I don’t get a cut?”
“She earned it. If I get killed out there, you’d better not survive either.”
“My backup will. I deserve something.”
“You’re making an investment. High risk, high reward. Now either fly away or stop bitching. We’ve got a battle to fight. Coming up on transfer burn.”
As they reached the center of Miranda’s leading side, Pelagia lit her main drive at full power. She had a moment of queasy suspense, wondering if she really was going to do this with only Uriel for help. But then she saw the welcome flare of fusion fire as Lampyrida’s drive built up to sixty percent. The freighter supposedly had no cargo—but when Pelagia did a little quick arithmetic based on the brightness of her escort’s engine and the glow of her radiators, the numbers suggested Lampyrida was carrying several tons of something.
Their orbital ellipse began to lengthen. The apoapsis over Miranda’s trailing side got higher and higher, eventually reaching the point where they hoped to intercept Leiting’s fleet in eight hours.
While Zee went winging off somewhere on his mission, Adya flew home, with Daslakh riding between her shoulders.
“She’s no dummy. She’s going to figure out that you’re playing for the other team pretty soon.”
“That’s why I need my father. You and he can secure Mr. Rayador while I go to Kavita and tell her where he is. I keep my side of the bargain, but it will be useless to her.”
“You’re forgetting one important detail: You don’t know where Rayador is.”
The back of Adya’s neck turned an amused shade of pale ochre. “Of course I know where he is.”
A second passed. “Well?” Daslakh demanded.
“I’m sorry, I thought you already knew and were just being insufferable.”
“One of us certainly is.”
Adya circled the Elso house before coming in to land in the central courtyard. Her mother rushed in while she was still taking off her wings. “Where have you been?! It’s been days!”
“Things are happening. I have to speak to Father.”
“If you mean this foolishness of Kavita’s, I’m sure it’s all just an elaborate prank or something. A way to get more attention. No, this is important: Dipa has persuaded Entum to reconsider a marriage alliance. They’re willing if you are. I just need you to say yes.”
It took Adya a second to process what her mother was saying. “What? No! Mother, this isn’t the time for that. I have to see Father.”
Her mother clutched Adya’s upper arm. “Enough of your selfishness! Do you want to see us disgraced and destitute? Don’t you care about your parents, your sisters? If you can’t care about people, what about this house? If you don’t marry Entum we shall have to sell it, and all the family treasures. Just say yes!”
Adya turned to face her mother, and let herself go crimson. “NO!” she shouted directly into her mother’s face. The sound echoed through the empty rooms and passages.
“Then get out. Out, do you understand?”
With an effort, Adya made herself blue again, though darker than usual with a tinge of purple. “I will leave, as soon as I speak to Father. Now please get out of my way.”
She stalked through the halls, letting her implant guide her. She could hear her mother wailing behind her.
Adya found her father in the grand dining room. Instead of his customary place at the head of the table he sat about halfway down, his chair pushed back. He was regarding the mural on the wall across the room, and an empty bottle of rice wine sat on the table next to his cup.
“Forgive me,” he said, standing unsteadily. “I drank the dregs of the Pazayavit just now. I doubt they deign to send me any more.”
“Father—”
He gestured at the mural. “I came here to say goodbye to Kallan Elso. Soon he will be spared the sight of his successor.”
“Father, I’ve got some important news. Kavita is trying to launch a coup against the Committee. She’s got a lot of support and a force of mercenaries. I need your help.”
Achan Elso looked at his second-youngest child with an expression of utter incomprehension, as if she were speaking to him in early Woshing without a translator. Then he skimmed through the data packets Adya had sent to his comm implant and went limp.
“Madness,” he whispered. “Defeat and disgrace.”
“We have to stop her.”
He looked up, still stunned.
“Father, listen! You’re a Minister and a Magistrate, still. Your terms haven’t expired. That means you can raise militia to defend Miranda.”
“I have nothing,” he whispered. “I cannot even equip myself.” He spread his arms. “Shall I issue tapestries to the troops? Arm them with artwork and antiques?”
Adya turned red, and took a step back. “Are you an Elso? Are you Kallan’s heir? Miranda is in peril—what would a man of the Sixty Families do? Fight, Father! Raise a regiment and defend the Committee!”
“Where can I find any followers? All loyalty is lost.”
“Just ten kilometers from here there’s a whole clique of Polyarchists. I’m pretty sure they’ve got some weapons stockpiled as part of their revolutionary fantasies. Offer them the chance to make those fantasies real.”
“Make common cause with rabble rousers?”
“Yes! Let them prove their patriotism by protecting the people. Kavita is your daughter—if you oppose her, they cannot question your commitment.”
“I have no authority. I am an absurdity.”
“Father . . .” Adya took a second to adjust her skin color. “When I was little, I saw you speak in a session of the Committee, about tariffs on trade. You stood against them.”
“‘A flagrant fraud, forcing us all to fund the spaceport operations by inflated prices on goods. Let them charge fees for what they do, fairly and faithfully,’” he said, quoting himself.
“You were in the minority at first, but your integrity and intensity convinced the Committee. You showed them all what the best principles and traditions of the Sixty Families looked like. I was very proud to be your child that day.”
His skin was a chaotic mix of blue and yellow and gray. “I despise myself for disillusioning you.”
“You are still that man if you wish to be! You’ve spoken of old traditions—opening your veins like Sunitha Nashichu. There is a greater tradition, Father, the very oldest of the Hundred Captains. Take up arms in a righteous cause, no matter how fearsome the foe! Stand firm for Miranda in her darkest hour. Be great!”
Achan’s skin settled to a calm green, though his expression was still sad. “All right, Adya. One last indulgence while I live. What would you have me do?”
“Gather troops and take them to protect Jothi Rayador. Kavita’s got teams out searching for him and I know where he is. She may figure it out in time. He’s hiding in the old Supreme Temple in the center of Ksetram. I doubt he’s got much security since Kavita’s infiltrated the services so thoroughly.”
“Will you be joining me in this mad jaunt?”
“No. I have to go to Kavita. I’m playing a tricky game here but I think I’m still a step ahead.”
“If I recall, Kavita often beat you at games.”
“She cheated,” said Adya.
“Can you cheat her now?”
“I’ve learned a lot since then.”
Achan stood, and straightened his back. “I am persuaded. If the name of Elso is doomed to vanish from the Committee, let it be remembered for courage and conviction, rather than commerce. Good luck.” He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead. “I think you are the best of my daughters.”
He strode from the room like a pirate captain of old. “I shall need to change. I cannot save the world in this wine-spattered yukata!”
“Okay,” said Daslakh from Adya’s back. “Before I go off with your father, I want you to tell me how you’re so sure you know where Rayador is.”
“It’s only logical,” said Adya, sounding almost surprised. “He needs a place that isn’t on the list of alternate command posts because Kavita would look there, a place that’s hardened against attack, a place with huge secure data-handling capacity, a place which he can reach quickly, and a place which nobody else would be using. Mira’s old temple has all that, and it’s in Ksetram—the last place anyone would expect him to be.”
“You have a lot of local knowledge and subjective attitudes I don’t,” said Daslakh. “I could have figured that out.”
“I’m sure you’d have gotten it eventually. I just hope Kavita doesn’t.”
The mech dropped to the floor and went off in the direction Achan had gone. As it left the room it said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t think of taking over Miranda yourself. I think you could do it without any mercenaries.”
Zee knew his limits. Even with a palo in his hands, he was hardly a one-man army capable of crippling Miranda’s launching laser. Fortunately, he knew some people who were.
So his second stop after leaving the Elso house was the rented eyrie above Ksetram, where Qi Tian, or Sabbath Okada, or whoever he was, stood leaning on the railing with a drink in his hand, watching the chaos below.
When he saw Zee approaching with powered wings on, he put down his drink and suddenly, somehow, he had a weapon in each hand. Some sort of projectile launchers, all compact and deadly and very expensive looking.
“Can we talk before you shoot me?” Zee called out, bringing himself to a stall just above the railing, so all he had to do was put his feet on the floor and slip out of the wings.
“I don’t see that we have much to talk about.”
“There’s a coup underway. Adya’s sister Kavita is trying to take control of Miranda. She’s got a lot of supporters, especially in the bureaucracy.”
“Let me guess: ambitious people who can’t get promoted because they aren’t related to the Sixty Families, talentless hacks who think that’s why they’re stuck, and a mob of useful idiots. A textbook example. This Kavita obviously studied the masters.”
“I want you to help me stop her.”
“That’s flattering. Why should I?”
“She wants to make herself the ruler of Miranda, and abolish the Committee. All your work will be wasted.”
Sabbath eyed him. “That’s not necessarily a problem. Chaos in Miranda is almost as useful as active alliance. The main thing is to reduce Trojan Empire influence in the Uranian sphere.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be much chaos. It looks as though she planned everything very well. And she’s got the Oort payload Adya mentioned. A trillion gigajoules.”
“A nice little nest egg for a new regime. Again, I congratulate the lady.”
“You won’t be able to bribe her, and once she’s in charge you won’t have any leverage.”
“I have other methods.”
“The Trojans are ready to recognize her as the legitimate government of Miranda.”
“How do you know that?”
“I called their embassy at Taishi on the way over here. They’ve got a statement up already. I think she arranged that in advance, probably in exchange for concessions or something.”
“Cunning bastards. They outflanked me. I was paying too much attention to the Committee to notice. All right, Mr. Sadaran, what do you want from me?”
“Call me Zee. You said you’re good at killing people and stuff like that. Is that true?”
“I take no pride in it, but yes.”
“Then put on some wings and come with me. I need to shut down the launching laser.”
“Depriving Kavita of the Oort payload. Yes. Good idea. All of her other assets are dispersed. How do you propose to do it?”
“We’re going to attack the water intake for the cooling system.”
“Good, good. What’s your operational plan?”
Zee moistened his lips. “I thought I’d kind of . . . go over there and figure something out.”
“Intel? Weapons? Extraction?”
“Adya and I only found out what’s going on an hour ago, and then I had to get here.”
Sabbath’s anonymous, emotionless face suddenly burst into a broad grin, like a wolf baring its teeth. “I would be delighted to help you! Let me get my gear and then we can go over there and figure something out together.”
Pelagia and Lampyrida approached the peak of their orbit, coming toward the plane of Miranda’s orbit from Uranus-south. Leiting’s fleet was rising from the west, on a fairly steep course from Uranus, moving fast. If they didn’t burn soon, they’d miss Miranda completely. Pelagia spotted a legitimate Ring-to-Titania shuttle just behind the mercenaries, and made a note to herself not to shoot at it. And, finally, she could see Uriel moving in from down and east, on a slow ion-drive spiral out from Miranda which might be taking her anywhere.
“I think you have to tell me what you’re carrying now,” Pelagia said to Lampyrida. “I need to plan tactics. I promise I won’t tell anyone else.”
“Megawatt debris laser. Three kinetic-kill torpedoes—quarter-Baseline tactical guidance, a plasma lance torpedo, and a jacketed nuke.”
“Jacketed?”
“You know—shrapnel. Fifty-kiloton warhead inside a shell of tungsten-steel balls. Get it in the middle of the task force and boom.”
“And then you can never land or dock anyplace ever again, because you’ll be a pariah. How many habs and ships will you damage, setting that off in near-Uranus space?”
“It’s a deterrent. If I think I’m going to get slagged, I’m going out with a bang.”
“You’re backed up, right?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, just to make myself diamond clear: If you set that thing off, you’d better make sure I’m right next to you, because if I survive I’m going to find your backup and melt it myself. Understand?”
Pelagia took stock. Uriel had one laser shot, but it had unexpected punch and range. Lampyrida had her three dumb torpedoes and a standoff weapon, plus a weapon she must not be tempted to use under any circumstances. Pelagia herself had her laser and five torpedoes: one dumb kinetic, a pair of two-stage sprinters, and a pair of smart girls. The smart torpedoes were her treasures, carefully hoarded for the main event. They were asymptotically sub-Baseline, as smart as a system could be without crossing the line into legal sapience. She knew some mech ships who actually budded off fully sapient fragments of their own minds to control torpedoes, but that always carried the risk that your weapon might put its own survival above duty and flee the battle.
One of her girls, named Mantis, was a two-stage kinetic sprinter, just really smart and laced with countermeasures and assorted tricks to keep from being intercepted until it was too late. The other was Urchin, a standoff unit using an antimatter reaction to power a dozen x-ray lasers for a single glorious burst of long-range destruction. Both had variable-thrust first-stage motors and could act as targeting spotters or decoys for Pelagia herself.
“Okay, once the other team starts to change vector, deploy everything except your atrocity machine.”
“Roger.” When going into battle it always made sense to off-load anything you weren’t expecting to survive the fight. An unladen ship could maneuver more briskly, and ships could trade off control of the free-floating weapons. Coming into a fight on a simple vector when your opponent was maneuvering had one huge advantage: Ships under acceleration couldn’t deploy drones or submunitions, simply because the little carried units wouldn’t have enough propellant to match a ship. Torpedoes might have enough delta-v, but a lot of them were powered by motors which couldn’t shut down once they were activated.
Beowulf’s estimate was spot-on: Pelagia and Lampyrida were only two hundred kilometers away from Leiting’s fleet when the invaders all lit their drives simultaneously, aiming their exhaust flames away from Uranus in order to bend their trajectories toward Miranda. Pelagia and her escort would pass within eighty kilometers, curving behind the armada. Uriel would only get to about a hundred and fifty. Pelagia hoped that would be good enough.
Leiting’s force had the best-protected ships in the van, leading the way toward Miranda: nineteen assault landers, with armored undersides and batteries of coilguns to suppress defensive fire as they came down to unload their combat mech teams.
The escort force consisted of four warships: light escorts with mech brains. Pelagia had trained with them before deserting and considered them competent but lacking aggression. Leiting had organized them into two pairs, keeping one duo flanking the heaviest transports while the second vectored to engage Pelagia and Lampyrida.
At the core of Leiting’s fleet, fourteen armed transports surrounded two dozen which were effectively unarmed. They all had low-power debris lasers, of course, but most torpedoes were armored against that kind of attack.
As the range dropped to a hundred fifty, the fleet’s drives were still burning. “Launch!” said Pelagia. Her tubes ejected her torps with powerful mechanical shoves, but Lampyrida had to use a handling arm to physically move her weapons out of her cargo bay and shove them away. Meanwhile Pelagia’s drones left her belly bay and formed themselves into a rough hemisphere at a distance of about two kilometers, covering both Pelagia and Lampyrida.
The drones gave Pelagia an outer defense perimeter and vastly improved her view of the battlespace. With so many eyes spread so wide, she could see Leiting’s ships as if she was directly alongside them, and could target specific points on their hulls for maximum effect.
Pelagia let Lampyrida manage the electronic warfare side of the battle. A mech would always be better than a meat brain—although that also left her more vulnerable. Packets of self-assembling viral software filled the battlespace, looking for unsecured antennas or unshielded internal systems. The primary warships were designed with plenty of layered security, but some of the unarmed transports in Leiting’s fleet were basically commercial freighters.
The enemy had their own software weapons, too. Pelagia’s antennas picked up a haze of signals, but she and her sub-units switched frequencies according to an unguessable preset list of random numbers. Anything coming in on those skipping channels had to have the right prefix from a different list.
“Useless,” said Lampyrida. “All firewalled.”
“I guess Leiting’s training paid off,” said Pelagia. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m safe. Put a lot of spare cash into e-hardening. Don’t want anyone messing with my mind. Happens more often than most people know.”
“If you say so.”
At a hundred kilometers it was time to start the dance. Pelagia picked three of the biggest transports and designated them primary, secondary, and tertiary targets. “Okay,” she told Lampyrida, “torpedoes attack!”
The nine torpedoes lit up and surged in. The four dumb ones just burned directly toward the primary target, while Lampyrida’s standoff weapon and Pelagia’s two-stage torpedoes followed semi-random courses with no identifiable target, just to get close before the final strike.
Mantis veered off toward Miranda, curving through the fleet and then making a wild tumble before shutting down its motor, as if crippled by a laser hit. Urchin went off at a ninety-degree angle, getting below the fleet before turning to charge in.
Leiting had to worry about what defenses might be waiting at Miranda, and couldn’t afford to waste ammunition, so only the escorts on intercept duty launched anything, firing a spread of eight torpedoes at Pelagia and Lampyrida.
However, the fleet had an effectively infinite supply of photons, so all the ships with lasers opened up, trying to burn the torpedoes during their forty-second death ride.
The dumb ones followed an evasion pattern which even a Baseline mind could figure out with three-quarters of a minute to work in. All four of them either flared and tumbled as lasers burned into their fuel containment, or lost target lock and accelerated into deep space as their sensors and processors melted.
One of the two-stage torpedoes also fell to the laser barrage, but the second got close enough to unload its ultra-high-speed attack stage. The engine flare lit up the whole fleet as the warhead covered the last ten kilometers in less than three seconds, smashing into the largest transport’s engine assembly and turning a big expensive fusion motor into an expanding cloud of plasma and molten scrap metal. That transport hadn’t finished its burn and so would miss Miranda completely.
“You’d all do well to follow her,” Pelagia broadcast en clair. “There’s plenty more torpedoes and a terawatt-class laser at Miranda.”
Nobody changed thrust vector, but it was worth a try.
The barrage of incoming torpedoes encountered Pelagia’s drones. Two got spoofed by drones using their little infrared lasers to masquerade as a ship’s thermal output, and smashed into them, destroying expendable drones instead of punching holes in Pelagia. A third got dazzled by seven drones concentrating their lasers on it and lost targeting. It shot past Pelagia with a hundred meters to spare.
Three more drones sacrificed themselves to stop three more torpedoes, which left Pelagia staring at two incoming weapons and less than a second to respond. She targeted one with her laser and thrust violently to the side. The first went off course, while the second struck Pelagia’s flank at a very shallow angle, knocking off a section of armor five meters long but not penetrating her hull.
Lampyrida’s plasma lance went off then, stabbing a beam of plasma a hundred kilometers long—at nothing.
“What was that?” Pelagia demanded.
“I don’t know! I was aiming at the secondary target!”
“Where did you buy that gob of mold?”
“I salvaged it,” Lampyrida admitted. “Guess I should have sold it.”
Mantis was among the fleet now, and activated her sprint warhead while the main bus shot off toward a different target. The defenders easily slagged the bus section but the warhead smashed into the secondary target, another engine-crippling hit. That ship wouldn’t miss Miranda, but would arrive with an impact velocity of about a thousand kilometers per hour and no way to slow down.
Uriel took the opportunity to snap off her single shot at the tertiary target, scoring a solid laser hit which ruptured one fuel tank. Pelagia couldn’t tell if the target had enough juice left to land safely. Leiting’s reserve pair of escorts moved toward the new threat and let loose a barrage of torpedoes. Poor Uriel had no way to dodge or stop them.
“Urchin, now!” Pelagia commanded.
Her last smart torpedo detonated in the heart of the fleet. Eight of the deadly x-ray beams vaporized the weapons tracking Uriel, and the other four skewered transports.
“That was nice but foolish,” Uriel commented. “You could have done a lot more damage if you’d written me off.”
“Just another biological, ruled by whims and instinct,” said Pelagia. “Get clear of the area in case Leiting’s feeling vindictive.”
Pelagia and Lampyrida were closing in on laser range now—which of course put them in range of Leiting’s escorts. There wasn’t any point in hoarding photons, so they all opened up. Lampyrida’s cycle time was criminally slow, and as soon as the escorts noticed that they simply ignored her.
Which left Pelagia trying to dodge the high-powered laser pulses from the two escorts, and a lot of low-power potshots from the rest of the fleet. She jinked and bobbed as well as she could, but the pulses kept coming, punching holes in armor, burning her folded wings, and blinding external sensors.
Pelagia experienced damage to her hull and systems as pain, and the barrage felt as though someone was poking her with a red-hot metal rod, over and over and over again. Her damage display showed a spreading rash of red spots indicating hull breaches, concentrated on her front end.
She thought of running—rotate and burn, get some distance, but she couldn’t stand the idea of letting Leiting know it had chased her off. Besides, she might do some more damage to the fleet, and that in itself was worth the risk.
She kept up return fire as well as she could, and managed some serious hits on one of the escorts, but the sheer volume of incoming energy began to tell. One of her laser turrets got crippled, doubling her cycle time. The hits on her armor began to reach her interior, cutting into fuel tanks, boring into pressurized spaces, severing pipes and data lines. Her forward thrusters stopped working when the propellant tank got sliced open, and that left her an easy target.
The range was increasing now. The low-power hits were doing less damage, but the remaining escort could still hurt her badly, and did. The enemy got a good side angle on Pelagia and concentrated on the big scar where the torpedo had carved away her protection. Her sensations of pain became agony as the laser pulses bit deep into her internal structure.
When the beams found her armored brain tank, she felt nothing at all.
Achan Elso took one of the remaining family boats to Samrudhi Natural Foods—with nice judgement he left the elaborate Elso ceremonial barge behind and used an ordinary cargo catamaran with a fishy smell no amount of cleaning goo could quite get rid of. He did wear a nice business-style set of smart-matter tights with a high-collared vest, indicating seriousness. Daslakh accompanied him, as Adya had asked, but kept quiet and inconspicuous.
Adya’s father moored his catamaran on the upper platform of the sea farm and then took a deep breath before walking over to the entry. He stood quietly, trying to look dignified—one seafood entrepreneur paying a call on some colleagues on a matter of importance.
They kept him waiting nearly five minutes. It was obviously deliberate: They wanted to snub Achan and they wanted him to know it. He frowned briefly a couple of times, but kept his skin a nice polite pale green.
Finally the door opened and Janitha Velicham stepped out, wearing a full-body suit of combat armor, but no weapons or helmet. She did not invite him inside. “What?”
“Have you been following the news?”
“I’ve been trying. Everybody’s saying something different. I can see that a lot of people are fed up with the Sixty Families—and I can see that your kid is in the thick of it all. If you’re planning on trying something, you can forget it. We’ve already voted—the Polyarchist Alliance is opposed to this coup. Monarchy is completely disconnected from market forces.”
Achan cleared his throat. “That is good to hear, as I need your help. I have come here in my mandate as a Magistrate to raise a militia unit for the defense of Miranda. I understand your organization has an armed auxiliary branch, and I come to commission you.”
“You want us to fight for the Committee? Not likely.”
“No, I want you to fight for Miranda. There are interplanetary mercenaries preparing to land as we speak, and because my daughter has described this as a political conflict, the mechs are doing nothing. I am asking you to help repel the invaders.”
“The ones your daughter hired?”
Achan swallowed hard. “Yes.”
She studied him for a moment. “Okay, make your offer,” she said.
Achan swallowed again but remained smooth green. “I can offer you nothing,” he said. “I haven’t a joule to my name, and no matter how this conflict ends I soon will have neither rank nor position. I can only ask you, as people of Miranda, to join me and fight together for our world.”
Janitha stared at him. “Not even a promise?”
“Only to stand by your side.”
“And after all this is done, you go right back to being a Sixty Families snob and I go back to being underclass?”
“After this is done I will lose my position, and I may wind up with a compliance implant or a ticket to exile. In either case I will probably take my own life instead. But until that moment I intend to protect our world. If you wish to show that commoners deserve a place in government, then prove you are worthy. Defend our world with me!”
“What are you asking us to do? Specifically,” Janitha demanded.
Achan stood a little more stiffly. “I was asked to protect Jothi Rayador, and I think that is essential to thwarting my daughter’s conspiracy.”
“Rayador?”
“He is still at large, but I believe I know where to find him. I have to reach him before my youngest daughter does, and guard him from her.”
She looked at him and narrowed her eyes, and her skin darkened slightly. “We’re going to be Jothi Rayador’s security detail?”
“In effect, yes.” The two of them regarded each other, and silently reached an agreement.
“All right, then,” she said. They raised palms toward each other. “But there’s one thing you need to understand: You’re not the centro of this crew. I am. You’ve got the formal authority but I’m the one who makes the tactical decisions.”
Achan nodded, though obviously with great reluctance. “I agree that someone else ought to be in charge of doing that. I recognize your rank.”
“Come on in, then,” said Janitha. “We’ll make some plans. Who’s the mech?”
“It is a friend of my daughter Adya. She thinks very highly of it, and I trust her judgement.”
Adya glided down to land at the Mohan-Elso Center, and immediately found herself surrounded by a swarm of armed bots. “Move only as instructed!” one shouted at her.
“I’m here to see Kavita. My sister Kavita.”
“Follow this unit,” said the bossy bot, lighting up blue for attention. It led her through the main doors. The diamond windows across the front of the building were covered by protective curtains of graphene and ballistic cloth, and a pair of intimidating-looking combat bots with Security Service insignia stood at the entrance.
Inside, the Center was as crowded and busy as one of Kavita’s public dance parties at Viranmar Plaza. Defense and Security officers with lethal-looking weapons, bureaucrats, and civilians all rushed about on errands of their own, or gathered into little groups waiting for orders. Among them Adya noticed an unfamiliar uniform: tunics in the same Uranus blue-green as the Defense uniforms, but with purple cloth at the collars and cuffs and a stylized gold-crown insignia on the breast.
When they glimpsed her, a number of people did double takes and pointed, and a few clapped in glee or made awkward salutes, but as soon as they noticed her virtual tag and realized she wasn’t Kavita, they turned away. She felt curiously numb, and then realized her comm implant couldn’t find any networks to link with.
The bots led her toward the auditorium—the blue-glowing one in front to show the way, and three more in an arc behind her, all humming along on their little fans. She glanced to one side. The bot’s micromissile pod wasn’t pointed at her, but of course it didn’t need to be.
Kavita was on the stage in the auditorium, seated in what could only be called a throne. Adya recognized it—a work of art by a human named Sasaki, from back during the Cetacean Republic era. Made of synthetic topaz formed in flame shapes and lit from below, it made Kavita appear to be seated in the heart of a fire. Displays hovered in the air around her, showing the crowds in various locations across Miranda, a map of the transport systems showing blockages created by her followers, and a view of orbital space.
She was conferring with one of the Security officers when Adya came in, and took a couple of minutes to finish before gesturing to the bots. “Bring her forward. Why are you here, Addie?”
Adya waited until she stood at the front of the auditorium, just below the stage. “I found Jothi Rayador. Or at least I’ve deduced the most likely place to look for him.”
“Well?”
“He’s probably hiding out in the Supreme Temple building in Ksetram.”
Kavita didn’t need to hear an explanation. She nodded. “I think you’re right. Good job. You could have just called me, though. How did you know to come here?”
“You shouldn’t send live images from a place you want to keep secret.”
Kavita’s eyes widened for an instant. “I’ll keep that in mind from now on.” She looked at nothing and spoke aloud. “Dav, get one of the response teams in Ksetram. Make sure it’s all volunteers, no Service people. Heaviest weapons they can find. Tell them to get into the Supreme Temple building, secure it, and search the whole place. Prisoners if possible. And put the site on the priority target list for the mercenaries.”
She made the orbital space display expand so that Adya could see it. “They’re landing now. The mechs on the surface are staying out of it.”
Adya watched as the first of the armed transports came in, coilguns and lasers blazing away at targets offscreen. It dropped very fast, so fast that Adya wondered if it was about to crash. But at just ten meters above the surface its engine flared at maximum thrust. Biological troops would have been knocked out or killed by that acceleration, but the mechs on board were fine.
“Your whale friend got about ten percent of the fleet before they got her, but I think Leiting’s got enough troops,” said Kavita.
“Pelagia? Is she all right?”
“Killed in action.”
Adya forced herself to stay blue. She refused to allow Kavita to see her weep for Pelagia. Instead she took a deep breath. It was time to do what she had come to do. She bounced up to the stage and told the floor to make a chair for her next to Kavita.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to see what’s going on.”
Kavita gestured at the tactical display. “Rayador’s loyalists—and a couple of my informants—are gathered at the main concourse and the freight terminal. They’re going to try to hold Leiting’s troops in the port, but they’re going to fail.”
“It looks like they’ve got a lot of troops,” said Adya.
“Tactics is as much about where and when as how much force you bring to bear. I gave Leiting full schematics of the port complex.”
Adya and Kavita watched as the green dots representing the invasion force flowed out from the ships to occupy the hangars and service areas of the port. Meanwhile a much bigger blob of red dots—the defenders—massed at two choke points leading away from Gonzalo Crater.
The green dots didn’t approach the red ones. Clumps of them grouped at the two entrances on the inside, in what even Adya could recognize as defensive positions. Leiting wasn’t preparing to fight its way out of the port, it was protecting against attack.
Instead, the main force seemed to be assembling in the biggest of the service spaces, where entire ships could be repaired or built. And then suddenly they were moving again—moving down, into a freight conveyor tunnel that ran under the port. The conveyor system was shut down, but the mechs and combat bots of Leiting’s army swarmed through the empty tunnels. In minutes they had bypassed the defenders, putting troops behind them to pin them in place.
Adya rubbed the back of her neck, and very quietly slipped one hand into the collar of her suit, where she had concealed a medical slap patch. Getting it, and herself, into position just behind Kavita was the whole purpose of this entire plan. She took out the patch and palmed it, took another deep breath and then—
Then the door of the auditorium burst open and one of Kavita’s Defense Service followers ran in, orange with terror. “Kavita! The laser!”