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THE ARM’S-LENGTH WAR VOLUME 3

Sequel to Part 2 & Moonstruck

by Tom Anderson

Chapter Twenty-One

INTERCEPTION

Gregory barely felt the mud grab at his feet as he leapt off the path, pursuing Warwick. As he had learned in the past, during drills on Royal Navy ships, he forced himself not to look at his watch – although now it was a fabric-thin chronometer built into the comm on his wrist. He knew that it would only make him feel even worse: what with explaining everything and the hurried journey back through the Citadel, they had already lost at least four minutes of their precious time…

They reached the shuttle. Warwick, with almost inhuman speed, hammered out the access code on the lock and the hatch opened up. Gregory heard his muddy feet squelch on the squeaky-clean (courtesy of nanotech, naturally) deck distantly, as though it were happening on a TV programme – and one which he wasn’t giving his full attention to, at that.

Behind him, he heard one of their Culvanai escorts say something short but incomprehensible. Nevertheless, he could guess what had been said. "Thanks, we’ll need it," he said uselessly, and then dropped abruptly into his seat as Warwick hit the big manual button that closed the door.

Warwick barely gave him time for his restraints to automatically flow into place before her hands were dashing through her holographic display, slamming everything into overdrive. He felt himself pressed back against his seat, the inertial compensators unable to quite make up for the acceleration (and in any case, like all Janvier-Graham technology, they were less effective within a planet’s gravity well). Casting a glance at a monitor showing a rear view, he saw that their over-enthusiastic exhaust had virtually left trails of solid clay in the mud – fortunately all of the Culvanai had sensibly pulled back in time. "Wow," he said, half to himself.

"Can’t afford to waste time," Warwick said through gritted teeth. "Get the fighters on, now!"

Gregory shook himself. "Aye, ma’am," he said. Over the past few weeks, due to their unusual situation, with he being the elder and having until recently been the captain of his own ship, they had worked out a strange arrangement: he said all the right things, but there was a nudge-wink relationship that neither took them too seriously. Now…now it was different. Now lives were at stake.

He quickly flipped through his own holographic display and brought up a couple of tiny, glittering columns which resolved themselves into the seated figures of the two pilots. "Esc One, Esc Two, this is Xiangtan," he said formally. "What is your status?"

"Roger, Xiangtan," said Esc One; what with the transmission muffling the voice and his helmet concealing his face, Gregory wasn’t sure which of the Ingram’s fighter pilots he was. "We are enroute to our respective missile groups and will be ready to intercept within 300 seconds. However we are requesting analysis for guidance on the best way to safely take out the missiles…"

"Acknowledged," Warwick said, not taking her eyes off the forward screen/window as she gunned the engines. With his peripheral vision, Gregory saw a vast trail of confused-looking dirigibles and planes with stubby wings and helicopter rotors – autogyros – being left in their engine wash.

"We’re just a pair of Hullabaloos," he muttered to himself, thinking guiltily of his childhood membership of the Arthur Ransome Society. That thought startled a laugh out of him: for all that it was ten thousand light-years away on an alien world, the landscape below them didn’t look all that different from the more winding bits of the Norfolk Broads.

"Sensors!" Warwick said, seemingly to herself. She hammered away at her own display for a moment, and then Gregory’s changed mode. "Get me a scan of those missiles!"

"Aye, ma’am," he said, scanning the…well…scans. He frowned as the blips of the incoming missiles appeared, and magnified them. "How can we get scans of them if they’re still over the horizon?" he asked.

"Bouncing the scan beams off the ionosphere," Warwick said peremptorily. "Now shut up and get me that scan!"

"Aye, ma’am," Gregory said, allowing a faint smile to spread across his face. Of course, he’d already been setting it up while he’d been talking: he knew the stakes here were too high to allow time for cabbageheading.

He frowned as he sorted through the different scan modes, as he had learned at the GSAT. Terahertz, infrared, ultraviolet, magnetic-resonance…

A three-dimensional holographic image of one of the missiles materialised above his display, rotating slowly. He almost laughed: it was exactly the sort of thing that would happen in a briefing before making a run on the Death Star or something. He just hoped their mission would be just as successful.

"It’s not a Fourther weapon," he said. That much was obvious. "It’s a contemporary job, got to be. Nuclear warhead, simple methane propulsion…"

"Thank God," Warwick said, with feeling. "So find out what it is."

Gregory studied the scan. There was nothing palpably alien about the missile’s design. He knew a little about nuclear weapons – practically all RN captains did – and this reminded him most of a Soviet missile from the 1960s. It exuded that air of unimaginative solidity and reliability. In some ways, though, it was more like an oversized V2: unless he was reading the scans wrongly, there seemed to be no guidance computer beyond a simple gyroscope system.

He said so. Warwick nodded, still devoting most of her attention to the forward view as she flew the Xiangtan as though her hair was on fire and the nearest extinguisher was on the Ickra island. "The Culvanai always made them like that even in the Fourth," she said. Right now her rapid, un-pausing Cancy mode of conversation seemed rather appropriate for the tense situation. "They went through a kind of arms race of electronic countermeasures throwing off advanced guidance systems. In the end they resorted to a simple system like this."

"But surely it can’t be that accurate," Gregory frowned as he shifted his attention to the warhead.

"The wind currents on Culvana are stronger than on Earth but also a lot more predictable," Warwick said. "That’s one reason why they use dirigibles instead of planes. The missiles can ride them to their destination…"

"I wondered at that," Gregory said slowly. "Because this is a cruise missile, not a ballistic one. Only those wind currents would let that work…" And now he came to look at it, the missile’s rear fins were rather wider than an Earth-built one’s would have been, almost more like wings.

"That’s right," said Warwick. "Which is a problem because if we set it off now it’s going to explode right above somebody’s island."

Gregory frowned. "Nuclear weapons don’t detonate if you shoot them down," he said.

"Culvanai ones do," Warwick said grimly. "They detonate via a pressure sensor on the nose cone. Always have."

"But that’s…" Gregory hesitated.

"Stupid?" Warwick said dryly. "Different priorities, different geopolitical situation. It’s to stop anyone getting funny ideas about sending a dirigible to intercept it in flight. They’ll only make it get another island instead – which will make that Cluster the enemy of the one it was originally aimed at. Either way the one who fired the missile gets the target in trouble."

Gregory shrugged. "Really mutually assured destruction," he murmured. "All right. So how do we intercept it?"

"There must be a way," Warwick said. "What are you getting from those readings?"

Gregory looked over them again. "How…accurate are those point-defence lasers of ours?" he asked in a strange voice.

"Very," Warwick said. "Why?"

He pointed at a part of the rotating hologram: it stopped rotating and zoomed in on that component. "The warhead, here…it’s a two-hemisphere job. A conventional explosive on either side, they go off simultaneously, slam the two hemispheres of plutonium together…boom."

"I know how nuclear weapons work," Warwick said dryly. "What’s your point?"

"I remember some Yank once telling me that if just one of the conventionals goes off, slams one hemisphere into the other at that slower speed, it isn’t enough to reach critical mass," Gregory explained. "It’s finely balanced not to permit that. And after that, it wouldn’t matter if the other went off…"

Warwick nodded slowly. "On a twenty-first century Usan missile," she said. "Will that still be true on a Culvanai one?"

Gregory risked a glance at his watch. "Eight minutes," he said. "Unless you can think of anything better…"

Warwick grunted in reluctant agreement. "All right," he said. "You getting this Escs?"

The display briefly returned to the holograms of the two pilots. "Acknowledged, Xiangtan," Esc One said. "Moving to intercept." The display switched back to the sensor view.

"And here we go," Warwick said.

Gregory nodded. There they were, ahead of them, coming up quickly. Four silvery dots, only vaguely visible against the misty background, heading towards them at around two thousand miles per hour (or ‘muff’ as the Fourthers rather embarrassingly pronounced it). They were easily picked out, though, by the jet trails spewing out from them, tracing a quartet of lines back over the horizon to the distant Ickra island. He noted that, a few miles back above a channel of water between two islands, the trails all neatly jerked in the same turn. It was true, then: even without a sophisticated guidance system, the predictable air currents meant the missiles would stay on course.

Or at least that was what their makers had intended. Gregory resolved to change that.

"Prepare for rapid turnaround," Warwick said cheerfully, about a nanosecond before her hands swept across her display.

Gregory felt the acid scratching at his epiglottis as the Xiangtan flipped end over end in midair, using its chemical jets to pull off a trick that would have impressed even a Harrier pilot. Again, the inertial compensators couldn’t, quite, and he only just restrained his gorge as Warwick neatly used a second set of jets to rotate them back upright. The jungle landscape returned to its proper place, beneath their feet, but now they were facing the other way – and flying backwards. Behind them, he saw their exhaust wash knock another three startled dirigibles out of position.

Before he had a chance to get his breath back, Warwick casually flipped all the engines back onto full. The gravity-weakened-shields managed – just – to bend the protesting air currents around an artificially aerodynamic invisible shape. But their glowed bright red with atmospheric friction, almost as though they were doing an orbital dive.

The Xiangtan slowed, attained a velocity of precisely zero for an instant that seemed like a century, and then began to accelerate forwards again. And it was at that moment that the missiles overtook them.

Gregory let his mouth fall open in surprise. Seeing the missiles on the main window/screen, they didn’t look much different from Human ones – except that the writing on the side was in Culvanai script, and for the enlarged fins that let them cruise through the air currents. But the shuttle was travelling at a similar speed, and within seconds had matched their velocity. Warwick pushed it slightly, so that the shuttle was flying along beside the missiles, and Gregory felt like he could reach out and touch them. He could have done, if not for the two-thousand-mile-an-hour air currents tearing his arm off.

"Time to try it," Warwick said. "Seven minutes."

Gregory blinked: time was stretching out, as it always did in stressful situations. That was just as well… "Aye, ma’am," he said. "What do I do?"

Warwick locked her controls on and leaned over. "You’ll have to use manual override to target the lasers," she said. "And controlled bursts…ah…there." A new targeting display came up. "Go wild."

Gregory gulped. He forced himself not to stare at the missiles themselves, but merely at the holograms on his targeting display. That way it felt, distant, detached, like a simulator or a computer game…

"And be careful with that," Warwick added. "Our shields aren’t strong enough here to protect us from four nuclear blasts at close range."

The Englishman shook his head. Just what he needed. Not only were thousands of lives riding on this – one of them was his own.

"No sense in wasting time," he muttered. Using the targeting display, which wasn’t too dissimilar to the one he’d used for training sessions with the more conventional weapons, he focused on the warhead of the nearest missile. Targeting crosshairs locked on the forward explosive pack. Now or never.

He hit the button.

He didn’t look up at the window/screen, but Warwick saw it, as she desperately scanned the mists ahead for any dirigibles that might run into their path.

A faint line of red light, visible only where it contracted the water vapour of the mists, lanced out from one of the shuttle’s eight point-defence lasers. It was only there for a fraction of a second, far from the sustained bursts that were usually used.

The flicker of light hit the missile’s side and cored a hole through it, as tiny as a full stop. A surgical strike indeed.

There was a brief burst of flame emitted from the tiny crack between two of the plates making up the missile’s shell. Warwick almost bit her tongue. But then the explosion died.

Gregory checked his display. The conventional explosive had gone off, detonated by the laser in lieu of its usual electric-charge detonator. It had slammed the forward hemisphere of plutonium into the rear one. And nothing more had happened. He let a slow grin spread over his face. "We did it!" he said.

"Good," Warwick said. "Now the others."

"No," Gregory said, and she shot him an angry, puzzled glance. "First I have to be sure it can’t go off…"

He re-targeted the laser on the missile’s nose cone and, before Warwick could say anything, fired.

The second beam hit the pressure sensor, lighting up all its circuits as well as though it had actually contacted a solid object. The signal was quickly sent back into the warhead, split into two and flowed into the two conventional explosive detonators. One of them fired and propelled its hemisphere forward. The second had nothing left to blow.

The hemispheres clashed together again, and nothing happened. Gregory smiled again. "It’s done!" he said. "We can shoot it down now…"

Warwick shook her head. "Too political," she said. "Let it come down on the Amra’s heads. But I’ll send a signal that they’re harmless…after you’ve done the others."

Gregory nodded. He targeted the same component on the next missile, fired…same result. The conventional explosive went off, the two halves of the plutonium ball were slammed together, not fast enough to reach a critical mass. Then the third missile…

He targeted the component carefully and passed his finger through the holographic firing button –

And the missiles all swerved to the left, as the Xiangtan’s starboard shields flared suddenly with greater air friction.

Gregory gaped as his laser lanced out, missed the missile’s still-armed warhead and detonator by a few feet, and fizzled out. "My God," he murmured.

Warwick slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. "Stupid," she muttered. "Bang on about the air currents and then forget to think of them myself…"

She quickly turned the shuttle back to the right trajectory, following the missiles, and gunned the fusion engines to get them back into position. Soon the two remaining missiles were there again. Shaking, Gregory targeted the component and fired again. This time it worked. The explosives went off, the plutonium collided, nothing happened.

And now the fourth missile. By now he was doing it almost automatically. Casually he flicked the crosshairs over where the component was and prepared to hit the button…

Then he yelled "STOP!" to himself.

"What?" Warwick said sharply, turning over.

"This missile – it’s a different design to the others," Gregory said grimly. "Look, it’s a whatchamacallit, a plutonium gun. Just a cone of plutonium that’s fired into a ball with that cone shape cut out of it…

"Which means," he concluded. "That there’s only one explosive pack. And if I set that off…" he shuddered.

Warwick blinked. "Then what do we do?" she said.

Gregory’s display cut back to the two pilots. "Xiangtan, this is Esc One," the leader said. "All targets destroyed by Ensign Gregory’s method." Gregory started; he’d forgotten that they’d been eavesdropping.

"None of them had an alternative warhead design?" Warwick asked.

"No, Lieutenant – all were the same," said Esc One.

"It’s an older design, at least on Earth," Gregory said. "Less efficient…"

"I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort for all those Culvanai who’ll be glowing and buzzing by nightfall," Warwick snapped. Gregory was taken aback that the same ridiculous image of nuclear fallout still persisted in the future, although perhaps it was a sarcastic idiom that had entered the language. In any case…

"What can we do?" he said. "How about using the ergblasters to vaporise it all in one go?"

"Won’t work," Warwick said, shaking her head. "The ergbeams would give the plutonium enough energy for each half to reach critical mass alone."

Gregory frowned. "How does that work?" he said. It was nothing like the nuclear physics he knew.

"No time for a lesson on the physics of ergweapons and how wrong Einstein was!" Warwick snapped. "Come on we have to think of something else!"

Gregory thought desperately. "Wait," he said. "You say they’re set off by an impact against the nose cone."

"That’s right – that one too," Warwick agreed, pointing at the hologram. "One minute by the way."

"How about an impact against the rear?"

Warwick frowned. "What are you thinking of?"

Gregory brought up a display and pointed to it. Warwick followed his gaze, gasped, and then grinned. "Helk Ensign that’s a crazy idea. Crazy enough to work. Okk. We’ll do it."

"But you’re not sure it’ll work?" Gregory said, as his fingers danced through the air, making the preparations.

"Of course not," she replied. "But I’ve got nothing else. And we’re running out of time."

"Aye, ma’am," he said with a faint grin. He gently adjusted the crosshairs. No sense in messing this up. Magnetic would be best… "Ready, ma’am."

"Go," Warwick said.

As Gregory’s hand drifted toward the control, as though in slow motion, preserved by the moment stretching off into infinity, he suddenly knew the words he had to say. In the abstract they sounded, absurd, archaic, jingoistic. But he also knew they were the right words to say.

"For England," he whispered, and hit the button.

The Xiangtan shuddered as, from the pod underneath the shuttle, its grappling hook lashed out on its carbon nanotube cable.

It might have hit hard enough to set off the pressure sensors anyway, nose cone or no, but Gregory had dialled down the power. As it was, it barely reached all the way there before the wind currents knocked it back again. But the tip of one claw scratched the wing of the missile, and that was enough. The magnetic clamps engaged, drawing the missile tight to the grappler, incidentally crumpling the thin metal of the fragile wing between the three claws.

Gregory let out a breath. "We’ve done it," he said.

"And now to do our duty," said Warwick. He gave her a sidelong glance, wondering if she was mocking his presumed last words. But all her attention was on the shuttle and its engines. She worked her controls, slowing the forward thrust, cutting in the retros. The cable began to stretch taut between the Xiangtan and the last missile.

Gregory gasped as, on the horizon before them, a familiar island appeared. The distinctive shape of its citadel was unmistakable. "There’s the Amra island!" he cried.

"Dammit," Warwick muttered. "They force our hand. Never mind." Her hands danced over the controls yet more rapidly. Gregory felt the shuttle slow yet further. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the island – he thought he could even see people standing on the battlements of the citadel, and more, far more, desperately fleeing the capital, carrying nothing but their young children and the clothes on their backs. He winced. If this didn’t work…

Well, at least I won’t be around to worry about it.

"Turnaround!" Warwick said. Once again, the chemical jets flared. Once again, the Xiangtan turned – though this time it was a lateral turn, not flipping end to end as that would tangle the cable attached to the ventral hull. Gregory clutched the armrests of his chair. But nothing happened, save for the fact that the missile was now being pulled back. As the grapple was only attached to one wing, the result was that the missile was yanked over to one side, and its engine trail traced bizarre loop-the-loops as the cable led it around. A Human-built missile, with its computer, might have tried to fight against the cable, get back to its preset course, or just detonate. But the simple Culvanai missile just kept flaring, its solid fuel motor not controllable in any case.

"And now we go to somewhere safe we can detonate it!" Warwick said.

Gregory blinked. "Where? You said there’s nowhere on Culvana that we could – oh." He abruptly realised.

"That’s right," Warwick said with a feral smile, and gunned the engines once more.

The Xiangtan rose upward, its nose tilting towards the twin suns. Gregory saw the shields burning again with air friction as they raced upwards. He glanced into the rear-facing monitor, worrying that the missile would be tossed about and thus detonated by their wake. But the grappler and thus its cargo were within the shield, Warwick having extended them around them. The missile still waggled furiously in its uneven grip, but showed no signs of going off.

As he looked in the rear viewer, he could see the three remaining missiles dropping down onto the Amra island. He saw several small Patriot-like countermissiles rising from the Citadel – either Warwick had neglected to send a signal saying the missiles were disarmed, or else the Amra were just panicky and wanted to be sure. Not that the countermissiles would have done that much good – most likely they would have just set off the warheads, meaning that all they could accomplish would be to make the detonation happen a couple of miles more distant.

As it happened, two of the three missiles were successfully brought down by countermissiles, the Amra weapons blowing them to shards of metal in midair. The third successfully evaded – not consciously, of course – all the weapons the Amra hurled at it, and descended into the one of the vast ‘courtyards’ that formed a quarter of the city. Nothing happened, beyond a brief spurt of debris thrown up by the impact. Gregory breathed a sigh of relief: aside from any unlucky person standing right under the missile as it came down, the Amra – and the rest of the Ingram party – had escaped harm.

"We’re getting there," Warwick said. Glancing up, Gregory nodded; the blue sky above was shading to black, and the stars were becoming visible. Behind him, he saw the missile’s rocket motor finally stutter and die. He half expected it to go off as a failsafe – which would have vaporised the shuttle, as the missile was held inside the shields – but nothing happened. He breathed yet another sigh of relief, and felt the adrenaline burning through his veins.

"Orbit," Warwick said presently, flicking some controls. And indeed the Xiangtan was there, the mottled surface of Culvana no longer a flat plain below them, but a palpable sphere. The stars were there, only slightly twinkling from the faint traces of atmosphere still above them.

"We’d better get even higher," Gregory warned. "Detonating it here could set off an EMP and wipe out electronics down there."

"Ah yes," Warwick said. "I keep forgetting the tech won’t be shielded against them. Shame we couldn’t just do that to Mu’rKlungs’ gang, eh?"

Gregory nodded. It was an attractive image. The biter bit, using their own weapon against them. But, while it might take out the twenty-first century era Culvanai technology, it wouldn’t touch the Fourther courier that was, after all, the key to the gang’s power.

"All right," Warwick said, finally slackening off the engine. "We’re coming up on one of the moons – there," she said. The moon, one of Culvana’s pair, was right ahead of them. It was perhaps half the size of Earth’s Moon (as Gregory could readily attest, from having lived there for months) but also much closer to Culvana. He was surprised the tides weren’t worse than they were, but his scanners told him that this moon had a relatively low density and thus a smaller gravitational field. He said so.

"And that’s another reason why it’s a good spot," Warwick said. She carefully adjusted the engines so that the Xiangtan, and its missile passenger, swung around one side of the moon and were now on the far side. The moon effectively eclipsed the planet, both from their sight and, more importantly, any trace of EMP. "Our shields will work well here; not much of a gravity well."

"Ah yes," Gregory said, mimicking her tones of a few moments ago. "So – now?"

"One moment," Warwick said. "First pull the shields in and then release the grappler – just in case –"

"Done," Gregory said. He’d been ready to do it now. The shields retreated from the missile and grappler, conforming to the sides of the cable. "Release the grappler?" Otherwise, if the missile went off, the explosion could conceivably vaporise the cable and rush in through the hole left in the shields.

"Yes, do it," Warwick said after a brief hesitation. "Plenty of spares on the Ingram."

Gregory nodded and hit the button. There was a distant clunk sound, and then the whole grappler pod was falling away from them, neatly jettisoned. The shields briefly bent around the pod as it passed through them, then closed up. "Now?" he asked.

"Retreat a little, and then," Warwick said. She manipulated the controls and the shuttle roared away until it was separated from the drifting, lost-looking missile by a couple of miles. "Now."

Gregory smiled, brought up the laser display again, targeted the nose cone, and fired.

The laser beam, hardly visible at all in the vacuum of space, flickered out, hit the nose cone.

And the missile detonated.

The nuclear explosion was rather anticlimactic in space, as there was no surrounding atmosphere for it to ignite and twist into an impressive mushroom cloud. Nevertheless, the detonation resembled a tiny sun for a brief moment, the window/screen darkening against the light. And then Gregory felt the energy washing over them. Not through them, though; the shields flared briefly as they repelled the gamma radiation and other EM with almost contemptuous ease.

And then the light faded, and there was nothing.

"It is finished," Warwick said, her voice sounding shaky.

Gregory could emphathise: the adrenaline, which had given him the ability to think and act fast enough to respond to the crisis, now demanded he repay it. He slumped in his chair, felt his hands quiver, hurriedly pulled them out of the holographic display lest he accidentally set off the self-destruct or fax his life savings to the government.

"We did it," he said finally.

Warwick nodded. "And now," she added slowly, "perhaps they’ll listen to us."

Chapter Twenty-Two

UNITED

For the third time in as many hours, Gregory’s feet were being sucked down by the tenacious muds of Culvana. Muttering obscenities to himself, and making a mental note to get hold of some of those flipper/snowshoes the Culvanai wore, he finally managed to drag himself back onto the concrete path.

Warwick was already there, but things were very different from before. Even this obscure, private path was packed with yellow-skinned aliens carrying young children and, occasionally, belongings. Half of them seemed to be trying to get out, and the other half were trying to get back in: the results of confused rumours going about. Gregory spotted one of the minor Amra Rulers up on the citadel’s battlements, yelling down at the crowd with a megaphone of some sort, but even that was lost in the chaos. Shaking his head, Gregory squared his shoulders and pushed his way through the crowd, Warwick assisting him. It helped that any Culvanai who angrily turned his way was momentarily stunned by his obviously alien appearance, and while they were standing there gaping, the two Humans had already moved on.

Eventually they made their way back into the Citadel proper, where the chaos was marginally more organised. Nevertheless, Gregory saw two groups of courtiers or civil servants – or both, possibly – apparently arguing over whether they were supposed to be taking the rare tapestries down or putting them up. Again, the Culvanai paused in their heated argument to stare at the bizarre pink-skinned, bristle-less beings as they passed, before performing the equivalents of shrugs and resuming it.

And then there was the big room. Gregory had begun to think of it as the War Room, and now that appellation looked even more apt. As well as the two big maps, one on the wall and one on the table, a host of smaller ones had been plastered anywhere they would fit, and pins and stickers and hurriedly written labels had been stuck all over them.

Around the table stood everyone they’d left there – including the Supreme Savant and the Supreme Defender, who’d returned – plus many more. Gregory spotted two younger-looking female Culvanai who bore an obvious family resemblance to Yu’lAmra; well, he reminded himself, all the Amra were members of one extended family, but here the resemblance was enough to suggest they were Yu’lAmra’s daughters.

Rebekah Meisenheimer looked up from one of the maps, which she’d been frowning at fiercely. "Good, you’re back," she said. From the way she relished the English words, Gregory guessed she’d been frustrated by Culvanaic conversations for the past hour or so. "What took you so long?"

Warwick explained what they had done, mentioning Gregory’s contributions in glowing terms; he looked aside, a little embarrassed. Furthermore, He’gAmmj decided to give a running translation into the lingua franca spoken by all the Culvanai here. Supreme Defender Lu’nAmra laughed, at first disbelievingly and then at the Others’ discomfiture, when they had assured her that Warwick wasn’t being hyperbolic. The Supreme Savant, whose name was Ri’lAmra, seemed even more impressed, and immediately began quizzing He’gAmmj about the Fourther laser technology, until Yu’lAmra, with what seemed to be an amused expression, gently told her that that could wait until later.

Ja’rIckra grunted. "So these were our own missiles," she said (via He’gAmmj and Je’tEnnck). "I suspected as much. They would have used their own weapons again before now if they had any left."

Warwick nodded. "Given how they must have pushed that courier to the limit on the way here I’m amazed they even had enough antimatter left for two missiles."

"And, of course, those couriers don’t carry more than two missiles for emergencies in any case," Je’tEnnck said thoughtfully. "I had hoped they’d be limited to that, but I was worried that they might have managed to build some more…"

"Not likely," Ja’rIckra said, once the words had been turned into the Mevlo Altongue for her. "All of my people are dead or fled. There are only twenty or so of the Others – less, now, for we managed to kill one or two of them." She took what pride she could in that minor victory. "They do not have anything like the industry to build anything more. They have only avoided starving so far by scaring the nearby islands into supplying them. Perhaps given more time and they will expand those demands, or else just try and take over one of those Clusters by force…"

"Those Clusters would not willingly serve them, any more than yours would, or did," said Yu’lAmra.

"I hope so," Ja’rIckra grunted, but it was obvious that she was sceptical of her neighbours.

"So these were ordinary atomic missiles," said Lu’nAmra. "Ickra design, I presume."

Warwick hesitated, then described them. By the time He’gAmmj had translated the words, Ja’rIckra – and Lu’nAmra – were nodding along, or the equivalent. "I thought so," Ja’rIckra said heavily. "No wonder they haven’t been active for a few weeks. They must have been busy breaking into our Cluster’s store of atomics." She scowled. "I had hoped those complex locking systems and booby traps were impregnable."

"They did have technology from the future," Ri’lAmra reminded her. "Which reminds me-"

Thankfully, someone cut the Savant off again. "How many missiles did you have?" Meisenheimer asked.

Ja’rIckra frowned at the translated words. "I would not wish to comment…oh, chasm, never mind. What harm can it do now?" Nevertheless, she mulled over her words for a few moments, before letting them out with a sigh: "We always had twelve ready to launch, and twenty-four more in storage. Most of them were plutonium gun warheads I inherited from my mother, but we were busy melting down some of the old plutonium to make bi-hemisphere or implosion sphere weapons instead. That was when the Others came."

Warwick glanced at Gregory. "They fired off twelve missiles," she said. "Eleven of them were bi-hemisphere jobs. The last one had a plutonium gun warhead. That was the one we had to drag into space to deal with."

Lu’nAmra laughed again at the story, at the sheer audacity of the method, as she had put it. The Culvanai had sent the odd probe or satellite into space, but the fact that the space programmes were the products of fragile and always-shifting alliances between Clusters meant that little tended to come of that. No single Cluster had the resources necessary to support a full-blown space programme: many struggled even to build nuclear weapons and missiles, although every Cluster needed them to avoid becoming irrelevant.

But Ja’rIckra slowly tapped the table before her as she thought. "Eleven new ones and one older," she said. "I think that means they’ve blown through our entire stock of the new warheads. As for the number of old ones left," she shrugged, "they’re still in storage and it will take time to get them out. Also some of them may still be halfway through the process of meltdown to make the new weapons, as it was when the Others came."

"So their remaining nuclear capabilities are limited," Meisenheimer said slowly.

"Does it matter?" Lu’nAmra argued. "You dealt with twelve of them easily enough."

Warwick shook her head, sending her blonde ponytail flicking from one shoulder to the other. "Any more missiles must have the plutonium-gun warheads. They may be less efficient but they will be much harder for us to deal with."

"It should not matter," Ja’rIckra said. "As I said, they are sorely lacking in womanpower. They won’t be able to prepare any more missiles for, oh, at least a week by my judgement."

Meisenheimer mulled that over, oncei t was translated. "And they still don’t know we’re here…?"

"Not according to our intercepts," said Ri’lAmra. "They have one of their gang, named Ul’iVrees," and Je’tEnnck groaned, "broadcasting propaganda. Nothing about you lot on the latest broadcast half an hour ago. They claimed to have fired missiles without warheads merely as a demonstration of power."

Lu’nAmra snorted. "They know nothing about this."

"Ul’iVrees," Je’tEnnck murmured to herself. "I might have known. Troublemakers, the lot of them." She laughed harshly. "Let’s send all our paleolithic, sexist, Human-hating morons to the Embassy on Luna, that way they won’t be able to avoid running into Humans, and their eyes will be opened by the experience." The words were a sarcastic singsong. "Avoiding the fact that that means you’ll be putting all your dangerous lunatics in one basket, where they can all swap their comm numbers…"

"There’s nothing we can do about it now, Ambassador," He’gAmmj said quietly.

Je’tEnnck ‘nodded’ slowly. "All right. So, what’s our plan of action to deal with them?"

Lu’nAmra glanced at Yu’lAmra, who nodded. "We’ve already moved a large part of our army down to the vicinity of the Ickra island, over the past few weeks," he said. "They’re being supported by the island of the Uref, a Cluster currently allied to our own." Gregory was amused at the ‘currently’: Culvanai alliances were like shifting sands. "In addition to that, I bet that at least the Onnv and the Rannt will support us, and their forces are also reasonably close by."

"But we haven’t dared attack yet," said Yu’lAmra. "Not while we thought they might have more of those chasm-weapons…"

"They do not," Je’tEnnck assured her. "And Matriarch Ja’rIckra seems able to confirm that they will not have access to any more atomics anytime soon, either…"

Yu’lAmra nodded. "Then we must strike now," she decided. "Hard, and fast."

"Hear, hear," Meisenheimer said loudly. "Perhaps a strike from orbit would be best. The Ingram could flux its way in and drop a missile on their heads before you can say Jack Robinson." Gregory pitied He’gAmmj, who struggled with the direct translation of that idiom.

Ja’rIckra frowned. "Would that not do even more damage to my island?" she asked.

"Well…" Meisenheimer shrugged; the Culvanai drew back in surprise at how her shoulders moved, a very alien way indeed to them. "Yes. But it would certainly take them out before they knew what they were doing."

"I don’t like it," Ja’rIckra said slowly.

"But if it means we don’t have to risk the lives of our soldiers…" Lu’nAmra pointed out.

"Your soldiers, you mean," Ja’rIckra shot back.

"Peace," Yu’lAmra said sharply. "You – Irthai male – you have something to say?"

Gregory lowered his hand. He’d been hoping that the Firster Culvanai couldn’t tell the difference between Human genders: a vain hope, evidently. "My name is Ken Gregory," he said. "There’s one thing: Ms Meisenheimer, were we not sent here partly to retrieve shielding technology appropriate for our new Unity spacecraft?"

Meisenheimer frowned. "Why, yes."

"Well – can the Culvanai of this period supply it themselves?"

He’gAmmj rattled off a few sentences at Lu’nAmra and Ri’lAmra, who replied, and then they went back and forth a few times. Gregory felt his heart sink: he could recognise someone trying to get across unfamiliar concepts. And if the concepts were unfamiliar…

Finally the Fourther Culvanai looked up. "They have particle shields, very early ones," he said in English. "Janvier-Graham? No. We are before the advent of Janvier-Graham technology on Culvana, just as we are on Earth."

Meisenheimer let out a sigh. "I had feared it might be so," she said. "Your histories are a little vague on this subject-"

"Because some of the Clusters discovered the effects before others and kept it secret for a long time," Je’tEnnck explained. "But I think now is too early, for any of them."

Meisenheimer raised an eyebrow. "And you didn’t feel the need to mention this back on Luna?" she said dangerously.

Je’tEnnck gave her an apologetic look. "I needed to use everything I had to get Mr. Garrows to sponsor this mission…"

Meisenheimer sighed. "All right," she said. "What was your point, Ensign Gregory?"

"Thank you. It is this," Gregory said. "Commander He’gAmmj, please ask Matriarch Ja’rIckra if the…the Others ever went around with datareaders – describe them to her – talking about how to build bits of future technology."

He’gAmmj went back and forth a few times with Ja’rIckra, who bit his head off once when (Gregory guessed) she felt she was being patronised by a mere male. But then He’gAmmj turned. "Yes," he said. "She says that some of her Savants wanted to start building future weapons and devices according to the plans given to them by the Others."

Gregory let out a breath. "Then, you see-"

"I see," Je’tEnnck said grimly. "They brought a copy of my embassy database with them when they fled, when they erased ours. So if we want those plans-"

"We have to take them intact," Warwick concluded. "Them, and the ship."

Meisenheimer looked up, as He’gAmmj filled in the Firster Culvanai. "All right," she said. "In that case, a new plan." She frowned. "We need to get people into that island secretly – commandoes – and bring it down that way. Not give them time to destroy that database or use it as a bargaining chip."

"Ah yes," Gregory said. "A Daring Commando Raid™." Inwardly, he wished they had a few SAS divisions on board. He knew they had a few, a very few, Astroforce SpecOps commandoes, but not many had been on Luna when the Shift happened…

"We’ll need to distract them," Je’tEnnck decided. "A frontal attack, while we send our women in the rear."

Yu’lAmra frowned at first, but Lu’nAmra enthusiastically talked her around to it. "It won’t be for long, and, as the Matriarch says, they don’t have much womanpower. They can hardly mobilise what’s left of the Ickra garage and hangar against us, if there are only twenty of them."

"Our women?" Ja’rIckra objected. "We should be in the first rank. I, and other Ickra. To retake our island." She spoke with as much confidence and dignity as though she were representing a force as united and powerful as that of the Amra: Gregory briefly had a mental image of Charles de Gaulle superimposed on the towering Culvanai, and restrained a chuckle.

"I suppose that can be arranged," Yu’lAmra said, sounding as though she rather hoped that the first rank got mown down by machinegun fire.

"And no NoMercies," Ja’rIckra added sharply.

Lu’nAmra’s bristles stood out straight in surprise. "But NoMercies are our best fighters," she objected. "I had planned to hire three brigades of them…"

"No," Ja’rIckra said firmly. "They will try and claim the island for themselves."

While the argument went on, Gregory asked Warwick: "What are NoMercies?"

Warwick laughed. "It’s just a translation of the Culvanaic term which is a contraction of ‘Nomadic Mercenary’. The other meaning in English is incidental – but accurate," she added with a wink. "They consist of those Culvanai left over when Clusters are wiped out or those exiled from their Cluster for an indiscretion. So they band together in nomadic brigades without a home island and travel around hiring themselves out. Some act as scientists or engineers for hire but most are warrior commandoes. They hope to raise enough money to improve their own weapons until that brigade can try and take an island from an established Cluster – or settle an empty one. That’s what Ja’rIckra is scared about."

Meanwhile, the argument had wound down. Yu’lAmra sighed. "Very well, no NoMercies," she said. "We shall supply the commandoes ourselves, and of course from you and your exiles…"

"And us," Meisenheimer chipped in once the words were translated. "And we will bring down more shuttles, so you can rapidly travel to your armies, and then we’ll use them to insert the commandoes."

Yu’lAmra’s bristles flickered. "Very well," she said. "They must be there in any case, just in case the Others manage to fire off another atomic missile."

Meisenheimer nodded and turned to Warwick. "Lieutenant, Ensign, please take the Xiangtan up to the Ingram. Get refuelled and request from Captain Stjepanovic that she detach all available shuttles to follow you back down. Ensure you stay over the horizon from the Ickra island and keep flux radio silence – that stands out a mile, or so they tell me."

"It’s true," Warwick agreed. "We should be able to get away with old-style Firster radio though if necessary."

She stood, beckoning Gregory with her. "Come Ensign. We must return."

Gregory nodded. "I’m beginning to get sick of the sight of that shuttle," he admitted.

*

Celoun admired the forward screen of the Deception. Not only was it a fine piece of engineering, far more advanced than the cathode ray screens that the Vároto normally had to put up with, but it displayed a most pleasing image as well. One side of the screen was occupied by the planet Vároton, its jungles and scrubland looking lovely on the single, rather contorted, enormous continental mass. The sea, a slightly purplish shade of blue – due to the presence of photosynthetic marine microbes – formed an aesthetically pleasing counterpart to it. Almost as fitting as blood on the soil of the battlefield, Celoun thought, or perhaps blood on the clinical whitewashed floor of the laboratory. After mulling it over for a while, he decided he preferred the latter image.

His favourite Vároto at the moment walked up to him and genuflected. It was a measure of how much this Vároto pleased Celoun that he had told him he could get away with such a cursory display of respect: others were forced into a full proskinethis, or worse. But not this one. His name was Wrais. Ehred Wrais. And he was the captain, the Killerlord, of the Deception, the ship that Celoun had chosen as his personal flagship.

"Killerlord Wrais," Celoun said. It amused him to address a member of one of the child-races, even though one he was pleased with, by a title containing the word lord. An uninformed fool might even think he was addressing Wrais as a superior…he laughed to himself at the joke.

Wrais was clever enough not to ask what the joke was. "Honoured Sahdavi Celoun," he said, and again, that relatively perfunctory title was enough from him. Celoun knew that the real respect lay beneath it, and unlike with some subordinates, he didn’t need to have them remind themselves of it all the time.

"Good," Celoun said, staring forward again. The right hand side of the screen showed the vastness of space, and in it were five more sleek black shapes, indeed visible only where they reflected the light from Vároton – which was in turn reflected from the suns. "The fleet is assembled. We are ready. And you have performed those checks I demanded?"

"Yes, my lord," said Wrais. "Lord Rosuntur’s subordinates were correct," he said reluctantly. "If we are careful, then we will be able to reach this planet Stentyrrea without stopping to set up refuelling stations. Just. Barely."

Celoun nodded. "Good enough. It will save time, and time is precious here. If our mission is a success, we will not require refuelling at any time."

Wrais frowned slightly. He did not know all the specifics of the mission, only that they were going to acquire some lost technology from the Noontide Age. In fact, Celoun’s words might have made him think that the god intended to abandon the Vároto there. But if so, then so what? He was content with it, for he knew that he had served his god well.

"Then that is all," Celoun said, half to himself. "Gilael and Xanthir shall press ahead with the construction projects," he laughed again, "not least because Gilael insists we shall need more ships to repel the Ol’Banedt invasion." Wrais shrank back at Celoun absently mentioning the hated name. "They can go for Svaalrog. We shall take the quicker path."

Celoun looked at the screen once more. In the centre of it, between the fleet and Vároton, were the shipyards. Six already, and more under construction. Two of them larger than the others, for new designs of ships. By the time they returned, a true battle force would be well under way.

"Open a channel to Rosuntur’s ship," he said in lordly tones. Rather than convey the order to one of his subordinates, Wrais pulled out the bulky remote control board that he carried with him at all times, enabling to override all the other bridge consoles. He selected the right mode and fiddled with the touch screen. "Done, my lord."

The screen shifted to show Rosuntur standing on the identical bridge of his chosen ship, the Truthful Lie. In fact, the bridges were so similar that Celoun suddenly had the thought that he was looking into a mirror – apart from the fact that Rosuntur’s Vároto killerlord was a female, and of course Rosuntur was (in Celoun’s entirely unbiased opinion) much uglier.

"Celoun," Rosuntur said without prologue. "We begin?"

"Presently," Celoun said. "Let us leave the gravity well and head for the edge of the cometary cloud."

"I concur," Rosuntur said. "This mission will succeed."

Celoun smiled. "We have no other choice, old friend," he said, for once without adding too much sarcasm to the phrase. "And once it has succeeded, then we shall be able to defeat our enemies once and for all."

Rosuntur nodded, but there was an odd twinkle in his eye. "I agree wholeheartedly, Celoun…"

Chapter Twenty-Three

THE CALL-UP

"You want to what?!" Captain Stjepanovic yelled.

Ambassador Je’tEnnck folded her arms, a deliberately learned Human gesture. "We want to wipe the traitor scum off the face of Culvana and try to repair the damage they have done," she said coldly. "I fail to see why you have any objection to that."

"You want to launch an assault using the shuttlecraft and personnel of this ship," Stjepanovic said. "In coordination with contemporary Culvanai forces down there…with the intention of restoring the Ickra to control of their island? That does not sit well with me."

Je’tEnnck paused, composing her thoughts. "I would have said the same thing, a few hours ago," she admitted. "But things down on the surface are not as we imagined them. The Ickra did not live up to my treacherous subordinates’ expectations. Now, what few of them are left oppose them, the ‘Others’ as they call them, with every…" she paused, dredging up the Human phrase from her memory, "fibre of their being."

"One of these survivors is Ja’rIckra," Stjepanovic pointed out. "The grandmother of Ky’lIckra herself! And you want to help them?"

"Considering the alternative, yes, Captain," Je’tEnnck said. "Ja’rIckra is not her granddaughter. She is conservative and rather abrasive, but far from the ogre that revisionist historians have made her out to be, those who blamed Ky’lIckra’s ravages on the fact that her mother and grandmother had so expanded their domain and its power…"

She paused. "Captain, we have to move now," she said. "The…Others have expended all their antimatter stores for weaponry, and have fired off all the contemporary atomic weapons they have ready access to."

"So you claim," Stjepanovic said, "based on Ja’rIckra’s information…"

Je’tEnnck sized up the fiery Serb. "Captain, we do not have any choice," she said baldly. "There are other weapons in the Ickra caches. Given time, the Others might be able to activate them and use them, perhaps even seize control of a Cluster more amenable to their demands…or less willing to stand up to them. I cannot allow that. We cannot allow that."

Stjepanovic frowned. "If the Others lack any significant weapons capability now, why not let the contemporaries make the attack themselves?"

"One, because the Amra or someone might try and take the island for themselves, destabilising the balance of power," Je’tEnnck said. That was normally forbidden, but the Amra could claim extraordinary circumstances…and with the Ka’Mevweck gone, there was no forum for anyone else to present a united front opposing such an action. "And, more importantly to you, we believe the Others have a copy of our database, the embassy database, with them. Including the plans for those shield technologies that Mr. Garrows is so interested in…"

Stjepanovic’s eyebrows came down suspiciously. "Why did you not mention this at the start?" she asked in dangerous tones.

"Because I wanted to see if you were willing to commit forces merely on the strength of saving Culvanai lives," Je’tEnnck said coldly. "The answer appears to be no, and I shall remember it. Furthermore, I have a direct request from your envoy Meisenheimer." She slid the datareader across the desk.

Stjepanovic read the words rapidly, then gave a sharp nod. "Very well," she muttered. "Some of our shuttlecraft cannot be spared from the work of the gasdiver," she said. "But I shall commit what I can. And those SpecOps people we have on board."

"And weapons," Je’tEnnck added pointedly.

Stjepanovic gave her an icy stare. "Yes," she said. "Under orders, I will hand over cases of ergrifles to a bunch of feuding primitives."

Je’tEnnck raised her (hairless) brow, another learned Human gesture. "You seem to have no problem with doing it on Earth."

And with that, she turned on her heel and left. Stjepanovic sighed, and went back to looking at the datareader.

"This had better be worth it, Meisenheimer," she said to the empty air.

Meanwhile, outside Stjepanovic’s office, Je’tEnnck met up with her pilots again. "We have permission, finally," the ambassador said.

Warwick nodded. "Not all the shuttles though?"

"No, just as you thought, Lieutenant," Je’tEnnck said. "The gasdiver. But enough." Her own personal datareader beeped and she lifted it to find that Stjepanovic had sent the authorisation through. She handed it over to Warwick, who scanned the numbers.

"Enough," the Cancy repeated eventually. "But not enough pilots…"

She turned to her protégé. "Which means, Ensign, that you’ll be flying the Xiangtan alone."

Gregory raised his eyebrows, but gave a quick nod. "Hey, we’ve already saved the planet," he said half-jokingly. "How hard can it be?"

*

Gregory soon found out. He didn’t know whether it was due to the fact that, given his actions with Warwick, the others now thought he could handle himself in the shuttle, but he had been given an…interesting complement for his shuttle.

They’d already landed on the Amra island – and he’d smiled at the obviously awestruck expressions of some of the Culvanai, who pointed at an entire fleet of the advanced craft – and loaded up even more on top of what they already had. The fleet consisted of five other bread-and-butter Raleighs like the Xiangtan, three Kohl heavy cargo shuttles and four Cordiale executive models now placed into service as transports. Thirteen in all: Gregory was glad he wasn’t superstitious. The Culvanai of course wouldn’t care. There were no fighters committed: they weren’t suited to the infiltration and would immediately give away the Fourther involvement if included in the distracting frontal strike. Stjepanovic would have been unlikely to part with them anyway. Esc One and Two, for their part – and Gregory wondered if he’d ever find out which of the pilots they had been – had returned to the ship.

He jerked his hands through the holographic controls, avoiding another startled-looking airship. "Close one," he muttered. "Still nothing on the Others’ radio to indicate they know we’re here?"

He’gAmmj was sitting in his passenger seat, acting as a translator. The other shuttles also had Fourther Culvanai in them for the same purpose, taken from the remaining Culvanai embassy staff on the Ingram. The Firster envoys, on the other hand, seemed to be watching the whole affair with an air of detached bemusement. None of them had insisted on observing the events, either trusting in Andrew Stillsby’s account or simply not caring.

He’gAmmj now answered his question. "No," he said. "I’m not surprised. The only place where they could have heard about us is on the contemporary radio."

"But surely all those airships must have reported us…"

"Encrypted military channels," He’gAmmj reminded him. "Oh, the Others could crack them with the courier’s computer. But why bother trying to catch all of them? Anyway, most of these are over the horizon from them." He frowned. "Maybe we should try and be a little more careful when we get closer to the Uref. The Others might be intercepting local transmissions to warn them of any attack."

"Seems sensible," Gregory agreed. He dodged an even larger airship, one which had a massive double gondola – almost like a catamaran – with what was obviously a flight deck spread between the pods. Two or three autogyros buzzed around the airship and he thought he could see the snouts of more protruding from the front of the flight deck. He frowned: he knew that airships had been poor bombers on Earth because even a small extra load could make it difficult for the gasbag to hold them up. How could this one manage the varying weight of autogyros on the flight deck, then? But he soon realised: the gasbag was only one means of holding the craft up. Poking out of the gondolas on either side were large nacelles bearing propellers, capable of rotating to point upwards and provide more downward thrust. By doing this with more and more of its nacelles, the airship could thus counter the increasing payload as autogyros landed – albeit at the expense of the forward drive that the propellers were otherwise engaged in.

"Interesting airship," he said, making conversation. "Autogyro carrier?"

"That’s right," said He’gAmmj. "I’m not an expert on the ones of this era…" his bristles drooped, he groaned, and he leaned over to ask a question of the other passenger in the front. Gregory was about to tell him that it wasn’t necessary, but He’gAmmj was already putting the question to Ja’rIckra. And who decided to put them together, and more to the point, with me? So far they had spent the trip in a frosty silence, avoiding each others’ gazes.

Ja’rIckra gave a few monosyllabic answers and then followed up with a flow of Culvanaic. He’gAmmj turned back to Gregory. From the way his bristles were twitching, Gregory – though he was hardly an expert on Culvanai body language – guessed that Ja’rIckra had managed to say something casually insulting again. But He’gAmmj spoke only of airships. "These large carrier dirigibles, Polh’ckelli we call them, are capable of carrying six autogyros. They are also equipped with secondary armaments, machine guns and rockets."

Gregory raised an eyebrow. Ja’rIckra, and even He’gAmmj, had sounded absurdly proud of such a small number of aircraft. Then he remembered that the powers putting forward these airships were not the vast nations of Earth, with their millions of people, but familial Clusters, perhaps fifty thousand people each, on tiny islands the size of the Isle of Wight or smaller. What was a miracle was that they were able to afford any serious firepower at all…

The shuttle passed near to another carrier airship and Gregory programmed a secondary console to give him a rotating holographic overview of one of the autogyros. He studied it: not unakin to the autogyros that (much like airships) everyone had claimed would catch on in the 1930s. Absurdly, he wondered if the Culvanai had ridiculous old movies claiming that in the future, the skies would be filled with planes and helicopters…

The autogyro had a short snout bearing a broad propeller: he’d learned that the Culvanai knew of the theory of the jet engine, but the composition of the atmosphere down here made them less efficient than a propeller, and besides, Culvanai vehicles rarely had to travel a long way so did not require such high speeds. The Amra had only managed to get their army a few hundred miles away by a complex webwork of deals and treaties. The shuttle convoy, of course, simply blasted through a half-dozen Cluster territories in a few minutes without bothering to ask permission. Why, when most of the Clusters couldn’t even be certain that they’d seen them?

There were two stubby wings extending out from the fuselage. They seemed to exist more to be a weapons platform than for any aerodynamic purpose. The wings had machine guns mounted on the tips, so ensuring that the bullet stream went around the broad propeller and not through it (Gregory wondered if they’d ever invented the interrupter gear, or just didn’t trust it), and a pair of rockets slung underneath. Like the nuclear missiles, the rockets were unguided. The Culvanai were too good at confusing their own guidance systems at this point in history, and besides, the rockets were built for shooting at big targets – such as airships. Hard to miss.

"Do you use autogyro bombers at all?" he asked He’gAmmj.

The Culvanai mulled it over. "Not to my knowledge," he said. "They’re not very efficient for bombing our cities, and…well, it’s not really our way in any case."

Gregory frowned. "What do you mean?"

He’gAmmj paused. "Have you read much about the Culvanai attitude to warfare?"

Gregory nodded hesitantly. "A little, in the encyclopaedias. I didn’t really understand it, though."

"Right. Well, we believe that the purest form of warfare is a single combat between two equal individuals, womano a womano," he said. "Everything else, you know, vehicles, aircraft, even armies, corrupts that pure scenario. So everyone tries to get the moral high ground." He paused. "Our aircraft are only built to destroy other aircraft. Our vehicles, only to destroy other vehicles. It’s hoped that this will cancel everything else out. Everything that’s, as you would say," he laughed, "ungentlemanly."

Gregory scratched his head. "Hard to see how such a system could survive. It died out on Earth in World War One, even if it was ever there. When it’s total war, with your very survival at stake, you begin to wonder whether keeping to the rules is worth it."

"Yet you do it yourself," He’gAmmj argued, as Gregory hastily swerved them around a whole convoy of airships crossing their course at ninety degrees. "In your Second World War, yes I know my Human history, both sides refrained from using poison gas. And don’t try and claim that wasn’t a total war."

Gregory opened his mouth, shut it again. The Culvanai had a point.

"Furthermore, I’ve seen it happens in your world today," He’gAmmj continued. "I’ve read your news broadcasts to get a feel for your world. The president of Usa has declared a ‘war on terrorism’, as though you could somehow expunge a certain underhanded form of warfare from your collective consciousness. And others, usually his political opponents," Gregory smiled, despite himself, "have said that they want to ban land mines and cluster bombs, because they carry on being a danger to civilians long after the original war has finished. By your argument, you never think about the afterwards while the war is on, and so you would use every weapon at your disposal just to ensure you did everything you could to survive and emerge victorious. But that doesn’t always happen."

"You make good points," Gregory said. "But what about your nukes? They’re an attack on a civilian target, and hardly a fair fight…"

"Quite the contrary. They are cannons at one pace, you might say. We all have them to ensure that nobody uses them. The Ka’Mevweck…" He’gAmmj winced, as did Ja’rIckra, though she was not following the English conversation, "…used to be able to authorise the collective use of atomics on any Cluster that made a serious breach of conventional law. But that was rarely needed…"

Gregory imagined a UN with teeth, a UN made up solely of tiny, tiny states, like a sort of global Holy Roman Empire, but all of them armed with nukes. To a Human, it seemed like a dystopian vision. To a Culvanai, it was normal…Gregory wondered how they would see – how they did see, in the case of the Fourthers, Earth, with its relatively few large nations, some larger and more powerful than others. He suspected that their enthusiasm was not overwhelming.

"Ah, we’re coming up to the horizon," said He’gAmmj. "I recommend we tread carefully now…"

Gregory nodded and hit his comm display. "All ships, this is Xiangtan…I recommend we try to avoid showing ourselves too much…the Others may be monitoring nearby transmissions…hug the terrain…" he laughed to himself as he signed off. He’d found himself slipping into the cool-calm American astronaut voice again.

"Good," He’gAmmj said. "We’ll land, organise everything, and then come up with the people for our…what did you call it?"

"Daring Commando Raid™," Gregory supplied.

Ja’rIckra must have recognised that term, for she spoke up. He’gAmmj paled at her words – Gregory reminded himself that to a Culvanai, that was the equivalent of a Human flushing. He’gAmmj immediately fired off a stream of Culvanaic back, and Ja’rIckra’s bristles…well, bristled.

Hoping to intervene (and incidentally avoiding even the sight of airships now), Gregory spoke up. "What is it, Commander He’gAmmj?"

As he’d hoped, the use of the title made He’gAmmj remember he was an Astroforce officer speaking before what was technically a subordinate. What with both their unusual circumstances, they’d mostly dispensed with decorum up to now, but…

"Matriarch Ja’rIckra," He’gAmmj said at length, "has decided that any pretensions I have of going on the raid should be dispensed with forthwith."

Gregory glanced over at Ja’rIckra, who looked defiant. "And what did you say?"

He’gAmmj hesitated. "Something about crawling back under a stone…"

"I thought so," Gregory said. "Well, tell her that I’m coming on this bloody raid, and so are a load of other Human males. See what she says to that."

Ja’rIckra ran on for a while, and He’gAmmj began a running translation. His voice turned with a tone of surprise at times, a surprise that was clearly not present in Ja’rIckra’s original speech. "Do not treat me like a fool. I know that you are an alien, and I have already surmised that in your biology and your society the positions of females and males are reversed relative to my own. That fact…surprises me, and yes, you might say, it disturbs me a little. But do not accuse me of being unable to deal with such facts or implying that they may cause me to change my worldview. Just as the males of your race are better suited for combat than your females, so the reverse is true of mine."

He’gAmmj, although still outraged, seemed surprised that Ja’rIckra had taken such a view. He’d obviously expected her to mindlessly condemn the Human males for fighting as well. For that matter, so had Gregory…

"Yet some females of my race fight," said Gregory, hastily adjusting his controls as he spotted a group of unknown autogyros peeping over the horizon. "Why not should then some of your males?"

Ja’rIckra seemed to laugh. He’gAmmj kept up his running translation. "I have seen males among my race who fight," she said. "Mostly NoMercies, I admit, and they cannot be classified as normal by any means, but…" she appeared to shrug. "Based on what I have seen, let me make a prediction about the females of your race who fight. I predict that a large number of them are rather, uhh, masculine in nature, and even those that are not, are extremely vicious, being ruled by their emotions rather than reason, and seem to hate all, uhh, men in the abstract, as though they were…" and Ja’rIckra moved her lips without speaking as she thought, "…all just interested in raping, uhh, women."

Gregory raised an eyebrow. "A bit of a stereotype, but I can’t claim that there’s not some truth in it," he admitted. "How did you surmise that?"

Ja’rIckra spoke again. "Because I have seen directly equivalent behaviour in those males of my race who have fought," she said. "Perhaps because they are at one and the same time, trying to fit in to a female-dominated system and yet also hating that very system. No wonder the contradiction seems to make them a little…unstable."

He’gAmmj still looked annoyed, but also thoughtful. Gregory said: "Perhaps. But while that may – may – be true of your world, and indeed of mine at the moment, Commander He’gAmmj is not of your world at this time. He belongs to a military which is not female-dominated or indeed solely Culvanai. To that end, will you not trust him on such a mission?"

To her credit, Ja’rIckra didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. Instead she spoke directly to He’gAmmj. "She asked me how much experience I have with…" He’gAmmj began to explain.

"Darin’ Ck’ummando Misshun tee-emm," Ja’rIckra added, copying Gregory’s words.

Gregory smiled. "And what do you have?"

He’gAmmj spoke in parallel, while Gregory checked the map and knew they were nearing the Uref island. "I have been on two such missions," he said. "One into the stronghold of a Xalbaynian pirate out in the Untamed Regions…uh, never mind," he said when both Gregory and Ja’rIckra looked askance at him, "and the other into a minor Rómidi outpost. I am not a commando primarily, true, but…"

Ja’rIckra spoke. "I went on many infiltrations in my youth," she said. "Though my mother was wary of it. She wanted me to get combat experience, of course, but not in a fashion associated with such high, unpredictable casualty rates…

"I did not believe her, of course. And I carried on not believing her right up until I lost this." She tapped her orphaned wrist and the mechanical claw that replaced her hand. "I was fortunate. Merely a botched detonator. If the whole bomb had gone up…" her bristles lay down flat for a moment. "They had to amptutate my hand in the ckelh-" (Autogyro, He’gAmmj told him) "on the way back to the island. After that my mother would not let me go on any more commando missions. And I forbade it to my own Vo’nIckra, before…" she trailed off, thuddingly reminded of her daughter’s death at the hands of Mu’rKlungs.

He’gAmmj, despite himself, seemed moved. But he spoke in Culvanaic, and then translated: "I hear you. But nevertheless…this is important. These are traitors to our kind, even more than they are to you. We must go down there. Je’tEnnck, the ambassador, must hunt down her treacherous subordinates…"

Ja’rIckra said: "That is true."

Gregory rolled his eyes. "Is this a ‘Crazy Culvanai Revenge Thing’?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Never mind – ah. Here we are. Hmm, nice army they’ve got down there…" Gregory reached for his comm.

eChapter Twenty-Four

UNDERHANDED TACTICS

In terms of size, the Amra army was about what Gregory had expected. Even such a relatively large and potent Cluster as the Amra could only field what would hardly be classified as a serious invasion force on Earth. Still, ottoh, they would scarcely be facing an Earth-standard-size defence force, either…

It was not the entire Amra army, for something had had to remain on the Amra island to defend against aggression from other Clusters. What with the webwork of alliances and treaties protecting them from war being fragile at the best of time, it would be entirely in character for one of their more ambitious neighbours to strike at them now, sensing weakness. Gregory scowled. Now should be a time for all Culvanai to unite against their common enemy. He’d feel even angrier if he hadn’t quietly known to expect exactly the same behaviour from Earth nations in the same situation.

So the force consisted of around two and a half thousand soldiers. Mostly females, including all the frontline troops of course, but some of the auxiliaries included males among their number. Gregory was amused to find that the male corps almost perfectly paralleled the female ones on Earth until recently: medical, logistics, aides. At least He’gAmmj wouldn’t have to fight against the system here, having got his way about being included on the Daring Commando Mission™.

Gregory nodded as Corollary Warwick stepped (sloshed?) up, accompanied by Andrew Stillsby. "Hello, ma’am," he said perfunctorily. "Is everything on schedule?"

Warwick inclined her head. "As well as can be expected," she said neutrally. "We’ve had the usual problems. Some of the Fourther Culvies who came down from the embassy staff are males and they intend to fight. Still they’ll probably all go with the Daring Commandoes so we should be okk."

"Along with Captain Gonzalez’s men?"

"That’s right." Pedro Gonzalez, the OIC of the small Astroforce SpecOps Corps who’d come along with the Charles Ingram, was a diminuitive movie-stereotype Spaniard with wiry strength and a sniper’s eye. His soldiers, who mostly towered over him, nevertheless had an almost religious adoration for his abilities. "Nearly all the Fourthers will be with the Daring Commandoes."

"Nearly?" Gregory asked.

Andrew Stillsby smiled. "I’m no Daring Commando," he said. "And the Firster Culvanai will want a few of us with them to help persuade their troops that they’re not being hung out to dry."

Gregory frowned. "Is that safe, Mr Stillsby?"

He laughed. "As safe as a war zone ever gets," he said seriously. "But I was a war correspondent in my youth and I know what it’s about. I won’t be putting myself into harm’s way if I can help it: I have a wife and son to think of, after all."

"I see. If you don’t mind me asking, which war?"

"First Gulf War," Stillsby replied promptly. "And Somalia in 1993. That meet with your exacting standards, Ensign?" he added amusedly.

"Quite," Gregory said hastily. "Don’t mind me, I just wanted to make sure…"

"That it wasn’t a set piece thing. Well, you have." Stillsby smiled to take the rancour from his words, and then gestured to the Amra forces before them, fanning out from the coast of the Uref island. "This seems altogether familiar, and yet interestingly different too."

Gregory nodded. The Amra forces were heavily mechanised, despite what He’gAmmj had told him about the Culvanai favouring infantry combat. He supposed that, in the morass of the sea-or-possibly-marsh, even experienced footsoldiers equipped with those snowshoe/flipper feet would rapidly be left behind.

Four or five types of vehicle were included in varying numbers, dispersed across the coastal marsh(?) in a carefully assembled formation. All of them were hovercraft. The two most common designs were a large, blocky troop carrier, apparently unarmed, and a slightly smaller light tank. The others seemed to be specialised vehicles built on the same two chasses, some mounting powerful anti-aircraft Gatling-type weapons, others converted to open-topped command cars. Culvanai support personnel swarmed over the whole lot, dragging smaller, non-propelled hovercraft behind them loaded with shells, machinegun belts and other supplies. The Amra army was getting ready to move.

"Those things don’t look very tough," Stillsby said, pointing at one of the light hovertanks. In the abstract, Gregory had to agree: due to the hovercraft propulsion, the armour couldn’t be too heavy or the tank wouldn’t move at a reasonable pace. The forward gun, which looked perhaps 90mm, was not mounted in a turret, but a sponson which gave it a more restricted arc of rotation – perhaps 120º, Gregory thought. It reminded him a little of the early American Lee tank design, and put serious limitations on the vehicle’s fighting ability – particularly since a hovercraft would probably be more cumbersome to turn around than a tracked vehicle.

"Well, I reckon it wouldn’t last long versus a Challenger II or an M1A1 Abrams," Gregory conceded, "or even one of those hoary old Soviet models the Iraqis used. But what’s the use of that, if any of those would just sink immediately afterwards?"

Stillsby laughed. "You’re right," he admitted. "I wonder why they have that sponson in the front instead of a turret?"

"So do I," Gregory confessed, who still hadn’t managed to work it out. "Maybe we can find out. Commander He’gAmmj?"

The commander glanced up from where he’d been poring over a large datareader. "What is it, Ensign?"

"Sorry to bother you, sir, but we were wondering if you could tell us why those tanks use sponsons instead of turrets?"

He’gAmmj moved his lips into an obviously practiced Human smile. "I could tell you," he said, "but it’s probably better if I show you."

He walked up to the nearest tank: Gregory saw that he’d got himself a pair of those snowshoe/flippers. He’gAmmj rapped on the metal hull, producing a hollow bong rather than a flat clunk which also told of the tank’s relatively thin armour. The top hatch of the tank slid back rather than hinging, and a young female Culvanai emerged from it. Her forehead tattoo was the orange of Warriors, of course, and showed a relatively simple version of the Amra symbol, indicating her lack of seniority. Her bristles flickered in surprise at He’gAmmj; she then released an almost Warwick-like continuous stream of words at He’gAmmj – in Culvanaic of course. He replied a few times, making descriptive hand gestures that were, oddly, perceptibly alien. Then the tank commander’s bristles lay down and she returned to her position, sliding the hatch shut behind her. He’gAmmj turned, gave Gregory and Stillsby a practiced ‘thumbs-up’ and slapped his way back to them over the marsh.

"She listened to you?" Gregory said, not bothering to hide his surprise.

"She was too thrilled to meet the Fighting Male From The Future that they’d all heard about to think of refusing me," He’gAmmj said, obviously amused. "The army grapevine, as usual: the stories have grown, so apparently now I hacked off Ja’rIckra’s other arm when she looked at me in a funny way."

Stillsby laughed. "But she’ll demonstrate?"

"That’s right – they were planning to do a few test firings anyway." He’gAmmj pointed at the tank with his middle finger. "Watch."

The commander rose from her hatch again, bearing a flag. Gregory had been surprised to discover that the Culvanai used flags on flagstaffs, but the designs of them were quite different to those on Earth, typically consisting of a small irregularly shaped piece of cloth at the hoist – usually evoking the shape of the Cluster’s tattoo symbol – and then with a variety of brightly coloured ribbon streamers of different lengths attached to that piece, streaming out from the flagstaff in the wind.

He recognised this one as the Amra flag he’d already seen. The tank commander waved it a few times to get the attention of the nearby soldiers, then flapped it in a complex semaphore-like pattern. Immediately the other vehicles moved away from the tank’s line of fire, and a few maintenance people used one of their drag-hovercrafts to pull a target into place: a chunk of debris, apparently salvaged from an old Uref vehicle.

The maintenance women retreated, leaving the tank a clear shot. "This is it," He’gAmmj said. Gregory, Stillsby and Warwick all put their fingers in their ears, then grinned embarrassedly at each other. He’gAmmj’s bristles all lay down: the percussive shockwave could be very disorienting to him if it hit them while they were extended.

The tank’s gun rotated slightly from side to side as the gunner picked her position. Then it fired.

In fact, the operation was in many ways not unlike that of an Earth tank. The shell, it was a discarding-sabot armour piercing job, exploded out of the barrel with a long tongue of flame, then almost instantaneously smashed into the target. The target was knocked backward a few tens of metres, spinning over and over in midair, before crashing down with a ten-inch burnt hole punched through the middle.

All of this was fairly unimportant, though, because the Humans’ eyes were not on the shell or the target. Instead they were watching the tank itself. Almost frictionless cushion of air + Newton’s First Law = Flying backward twenty feet at ridiculous speeds before the forward motors successfully brought them to a halt.

"Wow," Gregory said as the tank slowed. The commander leaned out of the hatch and waved to He’gAmmj, who returned it with a gesture of thanks. "That’s some recoil."

"I see," Stillsby said. "If it was a true turret, and you tried to fire at ninety degrees from forward, lengthwise across the hull instead of in line with it…"

"It’d probably flip over," Gregory concluded. "Which is, I believe, A Bad Thing."

"Now do you understand?" He’gAmmj asked. "It’s limiting, yes, and we’ve come up with some counters for it up in the Fourth, as you say. But it works well enough."

Gregory shrugged. "You know your business – or rather your Firster cousins do – Commander," he said. "I was just curious…"

"So was I," Stillsby continued. "I still am. Tell me, Commander, do you think your tank commander there would be willing to take on an embedded journalist?"

He’gAmmj laughed wheezily. "She’s young. If I show a bit of leg I think she’d give me one of the moons."

*

Supreme Defender Lu’nAmra frowned at the item she held in her hands. In many ways, it looked just like an ordinary glossy photograph. If she ignored the little holographic text boxes and helpful three-dimensional pop up arrows that hovered above it like yernee’lhe over the swamps. She tried to. "How did you take this?" she asked. "We tried with our satellites, of course, but the Others have got a jamming field that shuts down everything passing above the Ickra island…"

"We took it from our ship," Je’tEnnck explained.

"But you told me it was, what, thirty light-seconds away?" Lu’nAmra scowled. "I’m no sky-savant but that’s one chasm of a long way."

"It is," Je’tEnnck agreed. "But we have interferometers on board. You know interferometers?"

"Vaguely. That’s where you put two telescopes a few miles apart and, you know, it’s the equivalent of having one with a lens a few miles wide?"

"That’s about right. The amount of light you collect is very small, of course, but computer enhancing can fix that." Je’tEnnck’s bristles moved in a gentle, thoughtful rippling wave over her body. "The Ingram put out some self propelled camera probes a few hundred miles away from each other or the sensors on the Ingram…"

"I see," Lu’nAmra said. "Useful." She looked at the datareader again. "And this is what we’re attacking."

The photo showed a clear image of the Ickra island, or what was left of it after an almost ground-zero antimatter bomb let off by the Others themselves, and the few revenge-for-Ka’Mevweck atomics that had got through the laser shield. One of the deserted courtyards between the arms of the Citadel had been cleared of the debris that had once been homes and markets, and now housed a large, advanced-looking ship. A long, tapering cylindrical fuselage with two spherical objects at the back, the mysterious flux engines that the future people spoke of. They were currently lifted up in the air so they did not contact the ground: Je’tEnnck had told Lu’nAmra that they could be lowered to a different position once the ship was in space.

Not important. Lu’nAmra didn’t intend to let the Others escape. With the ship or otherwise.

"The Daring Commandoes will go in here," Je’tEnnck said, pointing at the wreckage-strewn courtyard opposite the one where the courier was landed. "Some will go through the courtyards and try and get into the courier to stop the…Others using it to escape, or deleting the database. The other DCs will go straight through the main part of the citadel, which seems to be inhabited, and make a distracting attack."

"I thought we were the distracting attack," Lu’nAmra said, amused.

"You’re the distraction for the distraction," Je’tEnnck told her. "Not that that’s not glorious," she added hastily.

"Of course."

"But it all comes down to the ship." Je’tEnnck sighed. "Without that ship they’re nothing. I wish they had never got hold of it in the first place."

"So do I," Lu’nAmra said. "Best we can do now is take it off their hands."

"Agreed."

*

Janet’s voice resounded in his head: This is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Stillsby…

Andrew grinned to himself and then scowled as he bashed his head on the ceiling. The female tank commander said something that might have been an apology: unfortunately, they couldn’t spare any translators to accompany him. He’d have to manage: at least with the datareader, he didn’t need a camera team. Everything was being recorded for posterity.

The light hovertank had a crew of three: the commander, who also handled radio communications, the gunner, and the loader. There was no coaxial machinegun or other anti-infantry weapons – Gregory had explained to him what He’gAmmj had told him about the Culvanai attitude towards warfare. He’d be interested to see if all their scruples really held up in fighting combat.

Andrew had previously been a similarly awkward passenger in other tanks and mechanised fighting vehicles, most prominently a British Challenger I on the sidelines in the Gulf War. At least the Culvanai vehicle had one advantage: its hovercraft air cushion meant that its motion was a smooth glide, far from the terrific vibrations common to human-built tanks travelling over uneven terrain.

Still, he couldn’t accomplish much tied up in here. As he had before, he pointed at the hatch above and gave the commander – her name was Yi’lAmra, he knew that much – a winsome smile. He didn’t know how much of his obviously Human body language would translate, but…

Yi’lAmra wasn’t exactly dripping with enthusiasm, but she pulled the hatch back and gestured. Nodding, Andrew pulled himself up from his awkward pose, sprawled over one of the high explosive shell racks, pushed his way past Yi’lAmra’s alien but nonetheless obviously female form with a muttered English apology, and managed to get his head and shoulders out of the tank.

He whistled as an autogyro hurtled overhead, making its characteristic buzzing sound. The Culvanai seemed to use their autogyros much as Humans used helicopter gunships, for taking out tanks with their rockets, but they also engaged in dogfights with other autogyros. It was irrelevant now, for of course the Others could not field any autogyros against them…

The autogyro – it was one of the few bearing pontoons instead of skis, allowing it to land like a seaplane on the more ocean-like parts of the Culvanai landscape – buzzed back up into the sky. Three powerful Amra airships loomed high in the sky, their sides painted with the Amra symbol in the orange of the warrior vocation caste. Any one of them would have been enough to make Count Zeppelin die of ecstasy, Andrew thought to himself. The carriers were larger even than the Hindenburg and seemed markedly less inclined to burst into flames.

Surrounding the three carriers were six or seven smaller airships, with single gondolas and clearly designed for more frontline fighting. Their gondolas mounted a large cannon, perhaps 150mm, which had a clever ball-and-socket mount so it could fire almost straight downward, in the plane of the airship’s own movement, or anywhere in between. It reminded Andrew of the cannon on the Apache helicopter gunship, only much larger. These smaller airships also had stubby wings with rockets mounted on them, and a series of bubble cockpits with Gatling guns protruding from them, evoking the Lancaster bomber in Andrew’s mind. Overall, they seemed to be the equivalent of the guided-missile destroyers and cruisers that escorted and defended the central carrier in a modern human naval carrier battle group.

"Seems almost pointless," he murmured to himself. "Damned impressive though." After all, all of this was only to provide a big flashy distraction for the Others while the Daring Commandoes used the shuttles to sneak into the Ickra island.

And there it was – on the horizon. Andrew was no expert but he could hardly miss it: it was by far the biggest island for miles around, larger even than the Amra’s. In fact, it was as large as Majorca. No wonder the Ickra were – had been – such a powerful Cluster.

"Here we go," he murmured. Instinctively, he tensed. Could the Others have something up their sleeve…?

Yi’lAmra suddenly let out a sharp yell and then began barking orders. Andrew ducked his head back inside the tank to look: her silver eyes were wide and her bristles quivering with foreboding. He followed her gaze to the large WW2ish radar-display in front of her, rather different from a human one – the phosphor was red instead of green, for one thing – but some thing were obvious. Such as the large cloud of blips moving towards the centre of the display, the tank, at rather high speed…

Andrew stuck his head back out again, just in time to see the first rocket slam into an airship.

It was one of the smaller, escort airships, and the dumb rocket, trailing a blue methane flame, struck its gasbag almost on the nose. There was a rather damp explosion and the front quarter of the gasbag deflated, the rest remaining intact due to its compartmentalisation. But that airship was immediately thrown out of balance, its nose drifting downwards, and it struggled with its rotating nacelles to correct its motion.

More rockets shot out of the mists and struck the airships. Some of them missed, going on to strike randomly in the Amra army or just thud into the mud. But several more compartments were deflated, in the large carriers as well as the small escorts. One of the escorts was unlucky: two rockets hit it in rapid succession and the resulting double explosion was enough to pierce the membranes between the compartments. The entire gasbag deflated and that escort slowly toppled out of the sky, ponderously drifting through the air. Most of the tanks and troop carriers below had time to float out of the way, but what with the panic and confusion at the sudden, unexpected attack, a few were caught underneath as the airship crashed. No, it was no Hindenburg: the explosion was muted, the result only of the airship’s weapons’ ammunition brewing up. That was no comfort to the Amra soldiers crushed beneath, though…

The Amra autogyros spun through the air in confusion, trying to find this new unseen threat. A few of the more reckless pilots unleashed their own unguided rockets into the mists as though they would hit anything.

And then they emerged, in a swarm…

Andrew blinked. Two dozen autogyros, more than the entire Amra force, and sleeker and more advanced-looking models. Even as he watched, two of them calmly and competently cornered one of the Amra autogyros and raked it with machinegun fire before the pilot could respond to the threat. That autogyro toppled out of the sky, its pilot dead and its engines trailing fire. Elsewhere, the situation was similar. Within seconds, the new autogyros had taken out five of the Amra ones with the loss of only one of their own number – and that to a collision with an airship. Not even that was wasted: that escort airship, already partly deflated by a rocket attack, was fully taken out by the crashing autogyro’s whirring blades. It began to fall through the air after its sister ship.

And then one of the new autogyros buzzed overhead, and Andrew caught sight of the symbol on its stubby wings, now bereft of rockets: all had been fired, wreaking havoc among the Amra airships. The symbol was not the usual complex Culvanai Cluster symbol, and nor was it warrior-orange. It was a simple, unassuming, sinister black disc. Andrew shivered, thinking of the Japanese fighters of WW2 and their ‘meatballs’. Furthermore, these newcomers had fought with a similar combination of skill and suicidal bravery.

A word, sounding like a curse. Yi’lAmra had poked her own head out of the wide hatch and was watching the autogyros. As he turned to her, she spoke another word. Andrew knew no Culvanaic, but he recognised this word, for he had heard it many times in one sentence, when Ja’rIckra had been arguing about her conditions for the attack…

"NoMercies."

Chapter Twenty-Five

THE DARING COMMANDO RAID™

Gregory flicked his thumb and adjusted his holographic display to show a better view of their target. There was the Ickra island, and there was the courier, hidden on the other side of the main citadel tower. Hopefully, they should only be using passive sensors – if that, for their power must be severely depleted – and so the bulk of the tower alone should hide the shuttles’ approach.

Hopefully.

"The Amra had better be a good distraction," he muttered.

"They’ll pull through," He’gAmmj reassured him. "In…the other history, they would have become one of the most militarily successful Clusters ever, in this age."

"Mm," Gregory said. "Well, in that case, might the Others panic and try to take off before we can get there?"

He’gAmmj laughed wheezily and repeated Gregory’s words, in the Mevlo Altongue, to the rest of the shuttle. There were a number of dutiful wheezes in response, and one scowl. From who else? "You worry too much, Irthai," Ja’rIckra said via He’gAmmj. The matriarch was beginning to pick up a few words of English on her own, as well.

Gregory shrugged. "Just want to do everything possible to minimise the chances of them seeing us."

He’gAmmj translated that, and then Ja’rIckra rattled off a reply. He’gAmmj’s bristles quivered in a manner that, Gregory was learning, was the equivalent of a frown. "The Matriarch says that they have a plan for just that."

Ja’rIckra gestured towards the rear of the shuttle. A single figure stood, quietly, and walked up to the cockpit, passing on either side a row of Culvanai and Human commandoes. Gregory glanced back at the figure, whom he was only perceiving with his peripheral vision as a purple blur, and his eyes bulged.

The figure was female. Very obviously and unmistakably female. Every other Culvanai woman that Gregory had seen so far, whether Firster or Fourther, had worn rather loose clothing that, once you looked beyond the slightly different design philosophies and aesthetic sense, was roughly comparable to what Human males usually wore: pragmatic, workmanlike, not particularly individualistic. Of course, many of the Culvanai he’d seen so far had been in the military, and so it was not surprising that their clothes were, well, uniform: even some of the males wore similar.

But this female was dressed – if such a term could be applied – in something more akin to what the archetypal TV sci-fi show alien bit of stuff wore. An extremely tight-fitting catsuit, apparently a single piece of (fabric?) all the way down to the soles of the (high-heeled?!) boots that blended directly into it. The material was violet in colour, and reflective, almost like PVC (and there’s an image Gregory could have done without). It covered her entire body except for her head and neck, her hands, and a collection of small holes dotted in a symmetrical but otherwise fairly random pattern over her body, revealing patches of the yellow skin beneath.

Despite himself, Gregory almost lost control of the shuttle. He hastily dragged his gaze back to the display, avoiding a collision with another of the Daring Commando shuttles. Not the sort of excuse that Warwick would be too happy with for snafuing the mission…

"Spellcaster Re’nIckra here will conceal us from the Others," Ja’rIckra said via He’gAmmj. He’gAmmj looked amused at Gregory’s discomfiture, while Ja’rIckra just seemed puzzled.

Spellcaster. Gregory nodded. Of course; purple was the colour of that Vocation cast, just as orange was for Warriors and blue for Rulers. He risked another glance back. Re’nIckra indeed also had the Ickra forehead tattoo in purple rather than the blue one that Ja’rIckra sported. Then, of course, his gaze was inevitably dragged down again…

He realised that the holes all over the bodysuit were there to allow the bristles in clumps across her flesh to protrude. And they were long, thin, delicate bristles, far more so than those of Ja’rIckra or He’gAmmj, waving softly from side to side. Her red hair was also rather longer, and its ends turned up in a wave, quite unlike the usual no-nonsense bobs of the female Culvanai. It made her look more like a Human female, Gregory thought unsteadily. The largest clump of the longest sensory bristles was situated between her breasts…

No. Gregory frowned, casting another glance back at his display to ensure he hadn’t overshot the Ickra island and was flying them all the way back to England. It had not been obvious on the majority of the Culvanai females, with their loose uniforms, but now it was unmistakable. The raised mass on Re’nIckra’s chest was not a Human female’s pair of breasts. In fact it was a single continuous lobe, almost like a fold-over of skin. He realised that it must be simply to support that single clump in the middle…

He remembered reading, and it seemed years ago, in the Ingram database articles on the Culvanai: The females are distinguished from the males by the presence of an additional clump of unusually long and sensitive sensory bristles, these being called the lack’ren or ‘hunters’. It is these which gave the females a superiority in hunting in Culvanai prehistory, then combat, and thus was ultimately responsible for their matriarchal society…

All fine and good, but the article had never said where the lack’ren was. Probably enjoy reporting all those faux pas, Gregory thought to himself.

He’gAmmj was speaking, in Culvanaic. He politely gave Gregory it in English: "The Matriarch asked me if the Others had any Spellcasters of their own, to possibly counter our efforts. I said I didn’t think so. In any case, the Matriarch says that Re’nIckra and her comrades should be skilled enough to ensure they won’t pick up her interference in itself, although in that case it won’t do any good."

Gregory thought about it. "All right," he said. "So you’ve got a Spellcaster in each shuttle?"

"That’s right. One wouldn’t be enough."

"Okay, er, okk – so they’ll stop the Others seeing us? But what about sensor displays?"

He’gAmmj produced a Human-style smile. "You misunderstand. Spellcasters do not make us invisible, either to the eye or to a sensor scope. They reach out to the brains of any watchers, and gently…push aside any impressions of our approach. Whether that be the sight of our trails in the sky, or a blip on a sensor display. Either way makes no difference. We will be safe unless we make a move that is so obvious it cannot easily be pushed aside."

"Such as if we went in with guns blazing," Gregory concluded, nodding. "Okk. So when do we begin?"

"Now seems as good a time as any," He’gAmmj said, glancing at his own display from the passenger seat. He gestured to Ja’rIckra, who in turn gestured to Re’nIckra. The Spellcaster – she seemed so young – gulped in a very Human fashion and then placed one hand on each of the two seat backs at the front of the cockpit. Gregory glanced down and saw a clump of ethereal bristles on the back of her hand, waving back and forth in a faintly disturbing manner. And then she closed her silvery eyes and began to mutter to herself, almost like a mantra…

Gregory hadn’t been sure what to expect. Perhaps some surge of a deep spiritual sense? In the event, it was just like being touched with a mild electrical shock. He started, as did the other Humans in the shuttle – the Culvanai seemed unaffected – and Re’nIckra’s hands gripped the seat backs ever tighter as she continued to chant.

Gregory glanced at his display. With the shock faded, he felt no different. "Is it working?" he whispered to He’gAmmj, not wanting to disturb Re’nIckra.

"I think so," He’gAmmj said. "We’ll know for sure if it isn’t when they shoot us out of the sky."

"Thanks," Gregory muttered. He blinked as a new series of blips appeared on his screen, rising from the Ickra island. He magnified them with a flick of his wrist within the hologram. "Whoa. See these? What are they?"

He’gAmmj frowned at them. Ja’rIckra took a closer look and muttered a few words. "They’re NoMercies," He’gAmmj said grimly. "The Matriarch says the symbol is that of the Korul Group – hah! Back in the Fourth, they’d become a Cluster years ago…they’re particularly known for their air forces."

"The Others have hired them," Gregory said. "Which means…"

"Which means that the Amra aren’t simply marching out to distract the Others," He’gAmmj concluded. "They’ve found someone to fight for them. Maybe even enough to crew some of those Ickra leftovers we all thought would be useless to them…"

"We’ve got to do something," Gregory said. "These shuttles – our missiles could get them even now –" for the cloud of autogyros was heading off in the opposite direction from them, towards the Amra.

"We can’t," He’gAmmj said grimly. "The Others would spot us for sure then. Not even the Spellcasters could guard against something as obvious as that."

Gregory bit his lip. He’d been in this situation before, about a year ago (it seemed much longer, now). An SAS team sent off from the Kent to cause an ‘accident’ in the nuclear ambitions of a certain unsavoury power, and then he’d learned that there were double the number of helicopters scanning the ground for any possible infiltrators. He could have blown them out of the sky with his ship’s long-range missiles, of course – but doing so would scrub the mission before it had started (and probably started World War III, of course). So he’d held his fire.

He tried not to think about how that mission had turned out…

"Well," he said, half to distract his own thoughts, "at least the Amra won’t win so quickly that the Others will take off…"

*

"Chasm!" Lu’nAmra swore as yet another of her precious autogyros fell to a coordinated attack from the NoMercies. The Amra had begun to recover from the surprise attack, to regain some of their own battle coordination, but the NoMercies weren’t going to let them get the upper hand if they could help it. So they attacked again and again, almost without regard for their own safety… The Others must be paying them one chasm of a lot.

An aide glanced up from the rear of the open-topped command vehicle, sensibly anonymous among the dozen or so scattered throughout the Amra army. "Supreme Defender, our Spellcasters report that their Ickra counterparts have hidden the Daring Commando shuttles. They are closing on the target."

"Oh, lovely," Lu’nAmra snapped. "Maybe our Spellcasters can pull their damned lack’rens out of their own arseholes and do the job they’re supposed to?!"

The aide flinched back and operated her radio again. "Supreme Defender, they say they’re doing the best they could, but the NoMercies have Spellcasters of their own. They’re attacking our pilots…"

Lu’nAmra cursed again. No wonder the Amra autogyros had failed to react effectively even to the surprise attack. "Well, tell our Spellcasters to focus on blocking the NoMercies’ efforts. Balance them." That was the common Culvanai command. Every weapon should balance its counterpart on the enemy side, until things were returned to their natural state of affairs, and it was just flesh against flesh, blood against blood, mind against mind.

Unfortunately, the NoMercies were often disinclined to hold to the laws. After all, they had all lost their own Clusters while fighting within those laws…

Even as she thought it, a NoMercy autogyro, one of the few to still have rockets left, fired one at one of the Amra tanks – or ‘armoured self propelled guns’ as the Culvanai word literally meant. The tank exploded, its thin armour unable to prevent the penetration. Lu’nAmra muttered to herself. "Bring forward our AA platforms," she said. "If our own autogyros can’t stop them…"

But, now that the Amra Spellcasters were balancing the NoMercy ones, the remaining autogyros had recovered. Using the NoMercies’ own tactics against them, three Amra autogyros closed on a single NoMercy one from three directions and ripped it apart with machinegun fire. The NoMercy craft blew up spectacularly, obviously the design having sacrified an armoured fuel tank for greater manoeuvrability. All fine and good, but there probably weren’t enough Amra autogyros left to tackle all the NoMercy ones…

The AA weapons came into play. No guided missiles, but some of them fired powerful dumb rockets equipped with shrapnel or flak warheads that basically removed an entire area of the sky from consideration: as the first cloud of flame and black smoke bloomed out with a muted thump, the NoMercy autogyros hastily adjusted their tactics. Only one NoMercy was caught in a flak burst before they instead closed with the carrier airships at point-blank range, taking damage from the airships’ point-defence Gatlings, but ensuring that the indiscriminate flak rockets didn’t dare fire at them. Lu’nAmra cursed again: these NoMercies were good. What was that symbol? The Korul? She’d heard good things about them – or, from this perspective, very bad indeed.

"Supreme Defender!" That was the aide again. "Supreme Defender, forward positions report vehicles approaching. Approximately twenty tanks and perhaps five troop carriers. All are Ickra designs with Korul signage."

Lu’nAmra’s bristles drooped. I might have known. "They’ll have something up their sleeves," she said. "They have at every other turn so far. All right: all positions, approach the enemy at maximum speed possible without breaking the formation. Let’s engage them as closely as we can, just as they have with our airships: then they won’t be able to pull off anything fancy without taking themselves out too."

Even as she said it, one of the huge carrier airships finally lost enough of its gasbag compartments. Lu’nAmra winced as it began to drift ponderously towards the ground. At least this descent was slow enough for the crew to dump the ammunition and the troops below to get out of the way…and it wasn’t as though there were enough autogyros left that the loss of the airship left some of them without a landing platform…

Lu’nAmra took out a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon ahead. Yes; there they were. A line of tanks, perceptively of Ickra design even from this distance, approaching them in a rather conventional formation. Suspiciously so, for NoMercies.

She smiled to herself, grimly. Payback time.

*

The face on the datareader was jounced around by the movement of her tank, but still clearly that of the NoMercy leader, Ya’vKorul. "They are approaching faster than we expected," she said. "You had better proceed soon or they will overwhelm us."

Ul’iVrees allowed herself a contemptuous sniff, on the inside. Even the NoMercies here in this barbarian age were constrained by absurd notions of honour. Surely Ya’vKorul was canny and had a mind for tricks? The history books said as much. But then the history books had said so much that had turned out to be a lie, a painful, painful lie…

"Do not worry," she told the datareader. "We will succeed." Yes. We will.

Ya’vKorul seemed to have some misgivings, but continued: "And we shall be restored to our rightful place?"

"Of course," Ul’iVrees lied. "It shall not be like that other history. This time you will become a Cluster, not face destruction."

Seemingly reassured, Ya’vKorul flexed her bristles politely and signed off. Ul’iVrees made sure the transmission was dead, then put her datareader down with a laugh and went over to one of the consoles. This, what had until recently been the Ickra command bunker, had survived the ruin visited upon the island when…it happened. Even now, she found it painful to think of, though she thought of herself as at least not possessing the delusions of Mu’rKlungs, who still maintained that the Ja’rIckra and Vo’nIckra of this place had been impostors somehow placed by the Humans.

Ul’iVrees glanced over the console. Nearly everything was shut down now. Evidently all the Ickra equipment had been as inferior as its makers: not one of those atomics they had fired off had apparently reached its target. She just had to hope that had been the rockets, and not the warheads…

She glanced at the radar display, which had been redirected from the primitive and now destroyed Ickra dishes, and now showed an uplink from the sensors on the courier. A few minutes ago, she had thought for a moment that she saw a blip or two on the other side of the island – the Korul assembling extra fighters elsewhere? That wouldn’t do… But when she had looked again, the blips had been gone.

Yes. Now was good enough. The Amra had indeed raced forward faster than they’d anticipated, but more fool them. And the Korul were also in place…Ul’iVrees smiled to herself and reached forward for the button.

"I don’t think so," said a voice from behind her in Culvanaic. A Fourther dialect of Culvanaic. Yet not one of the voices of their group, that she well recognised now from weeks of working together…

Ul’iVrees spun around, even as the puff of conductive gas hit her in the chest and the bolt of lightning lanced through it. Screaming, she collapsed to the floor, her bristles burning with sensation, her electrified nerves causing her muscles to spasm uncontrollably. She lay there, below the console, staring up at…

"No," she said thickly.

Ambassador Je’tEnnck stepped forward, lowering the Human-built gastaser she was holding. Glancing down contemptuously at Ul’iVrees, she casually placed her boot on the traitor’s neck.

"Ul’i," Je’tEnnck said conversationally. "No longer of the Cluster Vrees, for they have disowned you, you know? So have all the other Clusters your little band of shits hail from."

Ul’iVrees’ eyes widened. "Not…true…Culva…" she managed.

Je’tEnnck snorted. "If you are true Culvanai, then who would want to be one?" she said. "I could kill you now, you know. Crush your life out with one blow, you stinking coward." She put the pressure on harder, leaning into her foot. Ul’iVrees felt her larynx trying to slip down into her oesophagus, choking her. Je’tEnnck gestured at the console. "What’s this, hmm? Some minefield or something? Wipe out your allies and your enemies in one fell swoop? How like a true Culvanai," she sneered.

"…’tomic," Ul’iVrees gurgled.

"An atomic?" Je’tEnnck’s sneer was wiped off her face. She glanced at one of her subordinates – Ul’iVrees saw to her horror that there were males here, holding guns! And Irthai! "Can we inform the Amra?" Je’tEnnck asked.

The Human shook his head. "Not without alerting those Others still at the courier."

Je’tEnnck scowled. "All right. Well, at least I can do something about this." She opened the bottom of the console, casually disconnected it, and then fired her gastaser into the control panel. The circuits sparked, the solder melted, the radar display went dead.

"…nnot stop…us…" Ul’iVrees managed.

"You’ve already stopped yourself from achieving anything," Je’tEnnck said, almost sadly. "And now you’re not even worth me killing."

She pulled her boot off Ul’iVrees’ neck. "You," she said to a Culvanai subordinate, "get me some suitably twisty rope and tie her up. And leave her to wonder if Mu’r decided to mine this place as well."

Chapter Twenty-Six

CONFRONTATION

Andrew blinked as the first enemy tanks appeared on the horizon. Yi’lAmra cursed and impatiently dragged him back into the turret, then took his place. It exposed her to sniper fire – and the Culvanai had no qualms about coldbloodedly shooting down anyone in a vehicle, who had forfeited the personal combat rights of honour – but she could get a much better view of the battlefield from there.

Just when it’s getting interesting, Andrew complained to himself. Adimittedly, also interesting in the Chinese sense. But still… He blinked, staring at his datareader. Wait a minute…what was that thing that Ken showed me…?

Andrew played with the datareader’s controls, searching. He was pretty certain…this thing wasn’t just a PDA, but could also serve as a crude scanner…ah. There you go.

The screen reconfigured and now showed a view of the battlefield: even sensors that were a cheap bells-and-whistles feature to a Fourther were almost omniscient to a Firster. The datareader could easily see through the tank’s armour and give him a view of everything up to the horizon – and a little further, thanks to bouncing scanner beams off the ionosphere. As well as the flattish terrain and the vehicles on it, the datareader was capable of projecting rudimentary coloured holograms of airships and autogyros floating above it. Andrew winced as he saw two red NoMercy autogyros take out another green Amra one, but then an Amra carrier managed to see off the tormentors by raking them with Gatling fire. The Amra autogyros crashed and burned.

Andrew glanced back at the ground. Yes; there were the approaching tanks that Yi’lAmra was now examining with her Mark One Sensory Bristles. Only a couple of dozen or so, far fewer than the Amra force – a welcome change, when they were outnumbered in the air. And yet it made Andrew wonder to himself. He’d seen suicidal charges like this on Earth, but the NoMercies were supposed to be both subtle and extremely reluctant to spend more lives than they had to. This had to be a trap of some kind…

Yi’lAmra called out something. The loader quickly locked a shell into the breech. Andrew had noted that all the shells were of the same, armour-piercing type; high explosives against infantry formations was not the Culvanai way.

Yi’lAmra gave a continuous stream of instructions, the gunner minutely adjusting the sponson, and then a single word, snapped out: "TILAH!"

Andrew could guess what that meant, and had time to brace himself. The main gun fired, recoiling into the tank and spitting out the spent cartridge; the experienced loader quickly stepped out of its way. The tank itself lurched and went flying back twenty feet before Yi’lAmra got it under control. Yi’lAmra let out a yell, apparently of triumph: Andrew looked at his datareader and saw one of the red tanks vanish off the scope. He let a grin spread across his face, despite himself. Direct hit. And from outside what the datareader thought was maximum ac