“Which is a real shame,” Sunderam went on. “Because I really would have liked to have helped.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she grumbled, but then an idea occurred to her. “Commander, would it be true to say that I helped your cause during the recent upheavals?”

  Sunderam puffed out his cheeks, unsure where she was going with this.

  “Er, I suppose you did. You treated that gunshot wound of mine. That must count for something: saving the life of the group commander.”

  “I hardly saved your life,” she said churlishly. “What I did was ensure that the wound didn’t get infected. A simple corpsman could have done that.”

  “Yet they didn’t. Come on, what’s your point?”

  “Would my actions be enough to have furthered your cause, would you say?”

  “Yes,” Sunderam pondered this. “That was definitely the case.”

  “Good. Well, in that case, I’d like to request your permission to marry.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  She felt the deck quiver twice as she was leaving the operating theatre. She was starting to have second thoughts about what it was that Sands had got her involved with. As she thought about Faulkner’s body being mangled by the auto-doc, certain macabre scenarios started running through her mind.

  The process by which they believed Faulkner had been brought out of hibernation was routinely linked with a vast range of worrying after-effects from debilitating nerve damage to a condition known as revival amnesia. Not only would Faulkner be facing a future filled with severe muscle atrophy and debilitating neurological pain but there was the worry that he’d be left so weakened by the procedure that he wouldn’t have the strength to get out of bed. In Sands’ experience, very few patients ever regained their full health long term and for many, it resulted in full scale paralysis.

  Sands had given her two basic options for Faulkner’s continued care. The first one, the basic package as he’d called it, involved as few invasive methods as possible. It required a protracted recovery period supported by intensive physiotherapy aligned with pain killing injections as and when necessary. The second involved extensive gene therapy and a new procedure which made use of nanotechnology rebuilding bone tissue at a molecular level. If things went well, Sands promised, the bones in his legs and sections of his spine which had been damaged during his extended incarceration could be physically reconfigured. While a little short of a miracle cure, it provided Faulkner with his best chance of making a full recovery.

  But there were risks. In some cases, the receptors in the bones themselves sometimes failed to shut off the growth hormones triggered during the re-building process. These could lead to growth deformities of their own and was a particular risk around the area of the spine.

  The risk of the procedure going wrong was considerable, which was why she’d asked that Faulkner be brought back to full consciousness before they embarked on it. She’d intended to put the case to him, for and against surgery. But, in the end, he’d been in no condition to even grasp what it was that was being proposed, let alone understand the possible implications and so, in the end, it had been left to her to make the final decision.

  Normally, it would be up to either the patient or a close family member to sign off on something so potentially life changing but Sands had been happy to let her invoke her emergency powers as governor. After all, if anyone was going to appeal this decision it would invariably end up on her desk anyway.

  She was considering this as she rode the elevator back to the bridge. There were two other crew members traveling with her and they watched in silence as the screen re-played the images of the attack on Laxx’s point defence systems.

  Only this time there was extra footage which she hadn’t seen before. This time the defences were over-whelmed as a second flight of missiles methodically destroyed each of the platforms, one after the other.

  As she watched, she was aware that her heart was starting to race. This whole thing was suddenly starting to feel more real. So far, everything had felt like some kind of virtual reality exercise. It all looked very plausible but it had no bearing on the real world. Once it was over, everything would return to the way it had been at the start. There was no real threat. But now, things had moved on apace and, while no one had actually died, it was starting to look as though that was becoming more of a distinct possibility. And now, as the Renheim drew closer to the planet, the idea that she might be in very real danger was starting to hit home.

  So she was slightly better prepared than the other two when the elevator doors finally opened and they saw the bridge in utter turmoil. Crew members were running all over, shouting directions to one another.

  As she stepped inside, a young ensign almost ran into her and she had to use both hands to stop him. Even then he tried to push past her, his eyes fixed and staring.

  “Ensign, just stop a second. What on earth’s going on?”

  “It’s the Loki. She’s just launched a fresh salvo.”

  She tried to get him to look at her. “I know. They took out the point defence platforms. I just saw it.”

  “No, ma’am. You don’t understand. That was before. She’s just launched her main missiles. They’re directly targeting the station.”

  She looked at him again, trying to make sense of what it was he was saying.

  “But that can’t be right, can it?” she stared at him in bewilderment. “They can’t fire on the station. I mean, what would they hope to achieve?”

  “I have to go,” he said and disappeared into the elevator.

  The main screen still showed The Galaxian docked against the orbital. In the top right-hand corner, Captain Selig was still talking but he’d been muted. Not that you had to hear what he was saying to understand his predicament: his eyes said it all.

  Ardent felt suddenly useless. She didn’t know what to do or even where to stand. Even Lieutenant Commander Schwartz looked to be out of her depth. But one thing Ardent did know: she had to do something. She had to make sense of what was happening and she had to do it quickly.

  The crew might know what they were doing but one look at Meyer was enough to realise that he was completely at a loss as to what to do next. He stood rooted to his lectern, his eyes darting about as if unsure what it was he was actually witnessing.

  Farnese, similarly, was at his console, furiously swiping through information as if hoping for a solution simply to present itself. None appeared to be forthcoming.

  There was a big diagnostic diagram over in one corner of the room, just standing unattended. There’d been a similar one back on Blackthorn. They’d used it largely for docking purposes and she’d grown quite adept at using it. How different could this one be?

  Not very different at all, as it turned out. Although this was a military grade programme, it used the same operating software and she was quickly up to speed, dragging in information from the local server in order to help her make sense of all that she was seeing. She started by calling up all the available backgrounds on the various ships and crew involved as well as information on the orbital, its maintenance records and recent component failures. Then she began bringing up information on the Da’al ship although beyond some very basic operating parameters there wasn’t too much to look at.

  Only then did she turn to the Renheim’s in-flight missile library, an area which she had no previous experience of and which she found instantly baffling. Lots of groups of numbers, none of which made any sense to her and most of which she could only guess as to the purpose of.

  It was only when she started to bring all this together that it started to present itself as elements of various engagement scenarios. But, how this all fitted together, she had no idea.

  Only something didn’t look right.

  “Sixteen?”

  She ran a series of searches and calculations but they all came back to the same conclusion: she’d been right the first time.

  There were sixteen separate warheads incoming. At least.

  Then she opened a sub-category and the display changed, transforming all the warheads into tangibly coloured carets. Eight smaller blue ones, six orange ones and two green. All creeping along, seeming to crawl towards their intended target. It was only when she realised how many thousands of kilometres each centimetre of the display represented that the speed of these things became apparent.

  With a sudden surge of excitement, all of the disparate parts of what she’d been looking at suddenly coalesced into a sprawling whole and she was forced to step back in order to absorb the full effect. Slowly but systematically a conclusion began to present itself. The level of intricacy involved with all these variables was staggering but the conclusions seemed clear enough.

  She checked the trajectories again, adjusting them here and there in the hope of coming to a different conclusion. What if these missiles were suddenly to accelerate, or if their trajectories were to flatten? What if their fuel load was different? What then?

  Ardent felt sweat break out over all her body. Only one outcome made any sense. She had to tell someone about it.

  But who would listen? She wasn’t even a formal member of the crew.

  Farnese was still at his console and, even though he was the last person she wanted to speak to, she realised that she had no other option.

  “I’m very busy right now,” he said without even looking up.

  “I can see that. But this is urgent.”

  He cocked his head at her. “Really? And this isn’t?”

  She went over to look at his calculations.

  “You’re calculating evasion strategies for The Galaxian?”

  He rolled his eyes. “What if I am?”

  “You’re wasting your time – here!” she moved back towards her own display, beckoning for him to follow.

  Farnese hesitated for a moment but then, after checking that Meyer was otherwise engaged, he started to come over.

  She replayed the scenario she’d been working on.

  Then played it again.

  Both times they watched as the blue missiles pierced the delicate skin of the orbital, prompting fingers of fire to erupt along one side. The orbital continued to turn as the six vivid orange carets punched home, setting off oscillating waves which threatened to buckle the station. The arrival of the last two missiles was timed to perfection and as they struck home, vast blooms of destruction rippled through the station’s interior causing it to burst at the seams.

  “Alright,” Farnese said, nodding. “That’s not good.”

  “Not good at all.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense. Why would they want to destroy a material asset?”

  “I know, but…”

  “I can understand them wanting to destroy The Galaxian, but this! Strategically, it makes no sense.”

  “It doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not – this is what they’re trying to do.”

  *

  Fred Dekker’s crew had yet to report for duty. They were still down on Laxx, enjoying their last hours of freedom before they began their long haul back to Lincoln Station. Bar, casino, whorehouse: they’d no doubt done it all. His people were nothing if not predictable in their planet activities. It didn’t matter to them if there was an alien starship heading their way, so long as they had money in their pocket, they’d be looking for ways of spending it.

  There were only three of them left up on the Praader-Lorenz: Dekker in his role as captain, Yanik Utgoff the ship’s steward and Stella Robbins down in engineering. They’d been experiencing some technical difficulties of late and Dekker had requested an extended lay-over in order to deal with them.

  But the owners hadn’t been happy with that. They wanted their own technicians to look at it when they were back at Lincoln and had instructed Dekker to patch things together as best he could until their return. Which was why he’d spent the last three days working with Robbins trying to get the ship to a point where she was capable of setting sail again. As a result, neither he nor Robbins had managed to score any down time.

  But it wasn’t that which had angered him. He was used to this kind of laissez-faire attitude from his employers concerning the safety of their crews. After a while, you just got used to the idea that they didn’t care about the welfare of the people they employed. All they cared about was sticking to the deadline and ensuring that they didn’t incur any transport penalties.

  No, what galled him was the way that he’d had to pretend that it was all business as normal as one of the biggest humanitarian disasters he’d ever seen, played out around him. And the idea was that he just ignored it and got on with the job. Over the last three days he’d had to turn a deaf ear to the pleas from his fellow hauliers who were asking for his help. Normally, he didn’t like to get involved in politics so it was easy just to apply himself to the task at hand. But this was different. There were families out there who needed his help and yet he was supposed to ignore their plight and just get on with his work. Only, the longer he’d spent docked at the orbital, the more conflicted he began to feel.

  Luckily, his two sons and their families were safely back at Lincoln but he couldn’t help but wonder how he’d feel if they were the ones in danger and his fellow hauliers failed to help them. He wouldn’t be at all happy with that situation and yet that was exactly what he was planning on doing.

  Didn’t seem right.

  He’d spent the last couple of hours stripping down his control desk, part of the problem was that he’d been trying to run too many systems through it but he’d pared that down now and thought that he might have sorted it. He was just re-attaching the front panel when he saw the light flashing on one of the side consoles.

  Engineering.

  “Hi, Stella, what can I do for you?”

  It was rare for them to speak like this. Stella wasn’t great with people, as a rule, and normally preferred to message him.

  “Hi Fred. Just wondering if you’ve been watching the local news.”

  “What is it? One of the boys? What’ve they been up to this time?”

  The way things were going, he didn’t have time to go fishing someone out of the local jail.

  “No. It’s not that,” Stella assured him. “It’s that alien ship – she’s started taking down the station’s defences. One at a time.”

  “Really?” this was an unwelcome escalation of events. “But, what about all those people on the station?”

  “That’s just what I was thinking.”

  Dekker scanned the frequencies, trying to get a picture and failing.

  “Okay, Stella, here’s what we’re going to do: let me take a look at this and then I’ll get back to you. Alright?”

  “Yes. Fine. I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”

  No, thought Dekker. And neither do I.

  ​ *

  Elsbeth Morton never did get the wedding procession she’d secretly been hoping for.

  While Sunderam had given the necessary permissions for her to get married – on the paperwork, Hermendal told her, she was listed as Sunderam’s private surgeon – he wasn’t comfortable being actively involved in the actual arrangements and had despatched one of his more senior officers to oversee things.

  The man overseeing the ceremony was called Yeoh and he made no secret of the fact that he thought that this whole thing was beneath him but he did speak English and that cleared things up a lot. Also, he seemed eager to get everything over and done with.

  This was a huge relief to Morton. There was a febrile atmosphere all over the ship – she felt that it had a lot to do with the spate of executions which Sunderam had instigated – and there was a sense of a society balancing on the edge. She felt very strongly that if there was to be a challenge to Sunderam’s authority that it would likely happen in the next twenty-four hours, in which case all of her work of the last few hours would have been for nothing. But the important thing would be that she had made a commitment to Bayas to try and get him released and she felt that considering the extreme circumstances, she had been every bit as good as her word.

  It had been Yeoh who had vetoed the idea of a procession, not that she’d wanted much. She’d envisaged a very small procession involving just a few people but even that had proven too much. She suspected that they didn’t want to draw attention to a female officer, technically an enemy of the Empire, marrying one of their own. Things were volatile enough, they didn’t need to add any more sparks to the fire.

  All the paperwork was done in advance in Sunderam’s office with a clerk taking her through all the paperwork while Yeoh translated. It was all very involved with a medical orderly coming in at one point to take mouth swabs, she assumed for a DNA test although that was never confirmed.

  After about an hour of this, she was taken to a side room where a female tailor was waiting with a rack of near identical dresses. The dresses were of slightly different sizes and the tailor helped her pick out two which seemed most appropriate.

  The bodices were plain white but around the hem and the sleeves was the same black, green and red detailing she seen on the bride earlier in the day. The woman encouraged to try both dresses on. The first was too narrow in the hips and she struggled to pull it down, feeling rather foolish for some reason. The second was a better fit if a little too long in the body.

  The woman seemed pleased with this though, produced a small sewing kit and began to take in the shoulder straps while Morton was still wearing it. Miraculously, this appeared to work, the dress fitting snugly apart from under her arms.

  The tailor ushered her through a side door into what Morton assumed would be a changing room with mirrors so she was surprised to find Yeoh waiting for her. He looked her over from a number of angles before going to stand directly behind her. Satisfied that she looked the part, he led her out into the corridor where a cart was waiting. She sat on one side with Yeoh on the other but even so, it was difficult not to bump into one another.

  There were a large number of people milling around and the sight of her dress caused many of them to stop and applaud as she sped past. It was a disconcerting experience though not an unpleasant one.