Alastair Reynolds - Spirey And The Queen

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Spirey and the Queen

a novelette by Alastair Reynolds

Space war is godawful slow. Mouser's long-range sensors had sniffed the

bogey two days ago, but it had taken all that time just to creep within

kill-range. I figured it had to be another dud. With ordnance, fuel and

morale all low, we were ready to slink back to Tiger's Eye anyway; let one

of the other thickships pick up the sweep in this sector.

So - still groggy after frogsleep - I wasn't exactly wetting myself with

excitement; not even when Mouser started spiking the thick with

combat-readiness psychogens. Even when we went to Attack-Con-One, all I

did was pause the neurodisney I was tripping (Hellcats of Solar War Three,

since you asked), slough my hammock and swim languidly up to the bridge.

"Junk", I said, looking over Yarrow's shoulder at the readout. "War debris

or another of those piss-poor chondrites. Betcha."

"Sorry kid. Everything checks out."

"Hostiles?"

"Nope. Positive on the exhaust; dead ringer for the stolen ship." She

traced a webbed hand across the swathe of decorations which already curled

around her neck. "Want your stripes now or when we get back?"

"You actually think this'll net us a pair of tigers?"

"Damn right it will."

I nodded, and thought: she isn't necessarily wrong. No defector, no stolen

military secrets reaching the Royalists. Ought to be worth a medal, maybe

even a promotion.

So why did I feel something wasn't right?

"Alright," I said, hoping to drown qualms in routine. "How soon?"

"Missiles are already away, but she's five light-minutes from us, so the

quacks won't reach her for six hours. Longer if she makes a run for

cover."

"Run for cover? That's a joke."

"Yeah, hilarious." Yarrow swelled one of the holographic displays until it

hovered between us.

It was a map of the Swirl, tinted to show zones controlled by us or the

Royalists. An enormous slowly rotating disk of primordial material,

eight-hundred AU edge to edge; wide enough that light took more than four

days to traverse it.

Most of the action was near the middle, in the light-hour of space around

the central star Fomalhaut. Immediately around the sun was a material-free

void which we called the Inner Clearing Zone, but beyond that began the

Swirl proper; metal-rich lanes of dust condensing slowly into rocky

planets. Both sides wanted absolute control of those planet-forming

Feeding Zones - prime real estate for the day when one side beat the other

and could recommence mining operations - so that was where our vast armies

of wasps mainly slugged things out. We humans - Royalist and Standardist

both - kept much further out, where the Swirl thinned to metal-depleted

icy rubble. Even hunting the defector hadn't taken us within ten light

hours of the Feeding Zones, and we'd gotten used to having a lot of empty

space to ourselves. Apart from the defector, there shouldn't have been

anything else out here to offer cover.

But there was. Big too, not much more than a half light-minute from the

rat.

"Practically pissing distance," Yarrow observed.

"Too close for coincidence. What is it?"

"Splinter. Icy planetesimal, you want to get technical."

"Not this early in the day."

But I remembered how one of our tutors back at the academy put it:

Splinters are icy slag, spat out of the Swirl. In a few hundred thousand

years there'll be a baby solar system around Fomalhaut, but there'll also

be shitloads of junk surrounding it, leftovers on million-year orbits.

"Worthless to us," Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair

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which ran all the way from her brow to fluke. "But evidently not to

ratty."

"What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming

to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl." Yarrow gave me

her best withering look. "Yeah, okay," I said. "Not my smartest ever

suggestion." Yarrow nodded sagely. "Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours

is to fire and forget."

Six hours after the quackheads had hared away from Mouser, Yarrow floated

in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath. She resembled an inverted

question mark, and if I'd been superstitious I'd have said that wasn't

necessarily the best of omens.

"You kill me," she said.

An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren - first to

swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made

sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee

thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us

to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin which let us tolerate

cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the

billions of molecule-sized demons which coursed through our bodies, or the

combat-specific psychomodifications. But swapping your legs for a tail

touched off too many queazy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve,

though.

"What?" I said.

"That neurodisney shit. Isn't a real space war good enough for you?"

"Yeah, except I don't think this is it. When was the last time one of us

actually looked a Royalist in the eye?"

She shrugged. "Something like four hundred years."

"Point made. At least in Solar War Three you get some blood. See, it's all

set on planetary surfaces - Titan; Europa; all those moons they've got

back in Sol system. Trench warfare; hand to hand stuff. You know what

adrenalin is, Yarrow?"

"Managed without it until now. And there's another thing: Don't know much

about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three."

"It's conjectural," I said. "And in any case it almost happened; they

almost went to the brink."

"Almost?"

"It's set in a different timeline."

She grinned, shaking her head. "I'm telling you, you kill me."

"She made a move yet?" I asked.

"What?"

"The defector."

"Oh, we're back in reality now?" Yarrow laughed. "Sorry, this is going to

be slightly less exciting than Solar War Three."

"Inconsiderate," I said. "Think the bitch would give us a run for our

money." And as I spoke the weapons readout began to pulse faster and

faster, like the cardiogram of a fluttering heart. "How long now?"

"One minute, give or take a few seconds."

"Want a little bet?"

Yarrow grinned, sallow in the red alert lighting. "As if I'd say no,

Spirey."

So we hammered out a wager; Yarrow betting fifty tiger-tokens the rat

would attempt some last-minute evasion. "Won't do her a blind bit of

good," she said. "But that won't stop her. It's human nature."

Me, I suspected our target was either dead or asleep.

"Bit of an empty ritual, isn't it."

"What?"

"I mean, the attack happened the best part of five minutes ago, realtime.

The rat's already dead, and nothing we can do can influence that outcome."

Yarrow bit on a nicotine stick. "Don't get all philosophical on me,

Spirey."

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