“Two hundred thousand! I thought you were going to rebuild him, not rejuvenate him.”

“Sadly, there is a lot of work to be done. Surely your insurance premium will cover it?”

“I’ll have to check,” André said heavily.

Madeleine laughed.

“Will Erick be able to fly after the artificial tissue has been implanted?” André asked.

“Oh, yes,” the surgeon said. “I won’t need him back here for the clone implants for several months.”

“Good.”

“Why? Where are we going?” Madeleine asked suspiciously.

André produced his own Jovian Bank disk, and proffered it towards the surgeon. “Anywhere we can get a charter for. Who knows, we might even avoid bankruptcy until we return. I’m sure that will make Erick very happy knowing what his recklessness has reduced me to.”

•   •   •

Idria asteroid was on full Strategic Defence alert, and had been for three days. For the first forty-eight hours all the asteroid council knew was that something had taken over the New California SD network, and coincidentally knocked out (or captured) half of the planetary navy at the same time. Details were hazy. It was almost too much to believe that some kind of coup could be successful on a modern planet, but the few garbled reports which did get beamed out before the transmitters fell ominously silent confirmed that the SD platforms were firing at groundside targets.

Then a day ago the voidhawk messenger from the Confederation Assembly arrived in the system, and people understood what had happened. With understanding came terror.

Every settled asteroid in the Lyll belt was on the same maximum alert status. The Edenist habitats orbiting Yosemite had announced a two-million-kilometre emergence exclusion zone around the gas giant, enforced by armed voidhawks. Such New California navy ships as had escaped the planetary catastrophe were dispersed across several settled asteroids, while the surviving admirals gathered at the Trojan asteroid cluster trailing Yosemite to debate what to do. So far all they’d done was fall back on the oldest military maxim and send out scouts to fill in the yawning information gap.

Commander Nicolai Penovich was duty officer in Idria’s SD command centre when the Adamist starships emerged three thousand kilometres away—five medium-sized craft, nowhere near the designated emergence zone. Sensors showed their infrared signature leap upwards within seconds of their appearance. Tactical programs confirmed a massive combat wasp launch. Targets verified as the asteroid’s SD platforms, and supplementary sensor satellites.

Nicolai datavised the fire command computer to retaliate. Electron and laser beams stabbed out. The hastily assembled home defence force fleet—basically every ship capable of launching a combat wasp—was vectored onto the intruders. By the time most of them had got under way the attackers had jumped away.

Another four starships jumped in, released their combat wasps, and jumped out.

The assault was right out of the tactics flek, and there was nothing Nicolai could do about it. His sensor coverage had already degraded by forty per cent, and still more was dropping out as combat wasp submunitions stormed local space with electronic warfare pulses. Nuclear explosions were surrounding the asteroid with a scintillating veil of irradiated particles, almost completely wiping out the satellites’ long-range scanner returns.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to direct the platforms’ fire on incoming drones. He didn’t even know how many surviving salvos there were anymore.

Two of the defending ships were struck by kinetic missiles, disintegrating into spectacular, short-lived streaks of stellar flame.

Nicolai and his small staff recalled the remainder of the fleet, trying to form them into an inner defensive globe. But his communications were as bad as the sensor coverage. At least three didn’t respond. Two SD platforms dropped out of his command network. Victims of combat wasps, or electronic warfare? He didn’t know, and the tactics program couldn’t offer a prediction.

The platforms were never really intended to ward off a full-scale assault like this, he thought despairingly. Idria’s real protection came from the system’s naval alliance.

A couple of close-orbit detector satellites warned him of four starships emerging barely fifty kilometres from the asteroid. Frigates popped out, spraying combat wasps in all directions. Eight were aimed at Idria’s spaceport, scattering shoals of submunitions as they closed at thirty-five gees. Nicolai didn’t have anything left to stop them. Small explosions erupted right across the two-kilometre grid of metal and composite. Precisely targeted, they struck communications relays and sensor clusters.

Every input into the SD command centre went dead.

“Oh, shit almighty,” Lieutenant Fleur Mironov yelled. “We’re gonna die.”

“No,” Nicolai said. “They’re softening us up for an assault.” He called up internal structural blueprints, studying the horribly few options remaining. “I want whatever combat personnel we have positioned in the axial spindle tubes, they’re to enforce a total blockade. And close down the transit tubes linking the caverns with the spaceport. Now. Whoever’s left out there will just have to take their chances.”

“Against the possessed?” Fleur exclaimed. “Why not just fling them out of an airlock?”

“Enough, Lieutenant! Now find me some kind of external sensor that’s still functioning. I must know what’s happening outside.”

“Sir.”

“We have to protect the majority of the population. Yreka and Orland will respond as soon as they see what’s happened. And Orland had two navy frigates assigned to it. We only have to hold out for a couple of hours. The troops can manage that, surely. The possessed aren’t that good.”

“If Yreka and Orland haven’t been attacked as well,” Fleur said dubiously. “We only saw about a dozen ships. There were hundreds in the asteroids and low-orbit station docks when the possessed took over New California.”

“Jesus, will you stop with the pessimism, already? Now where’s my external sensor?”

“Coming up, sir. I got us a couple of thermo dump panel inspection mechanoids on microwave circuits. Guess the possessed didn’t bother targeting those relays.”

“Okay, let’s have it.”

The quality of the image which came foaming into his brain was dreadful: silver-grey smears drifting entirely at random against an intense black background, crinkled blue-brown rock across the bottom quarter of the picture. Fleur manipulated the mechanoids so that their sensors swung around to focus on the battered spaceport disk at the end of its spindle. The spaceport was venting heavily in a dozen places, girders had been mashed, trailing banners of tattered debris. Eight lifeboats were flying clear of the damaged sections. Nicolai Penovich didn’t like to imagine how many people were crammed inside, nor how they could be rescued. Vivid white explosions shimmered into existence against the bent constellation of Pisces. Someone was still fighting out there.

A large starship slid smoothly into view, riding a lance of violet fusion fire. Definitely a navy craft of some kind, it was still in its combat configuration; short-range sensor clusters extended, thermo dump panels retracted. Steamy puffs of coolant gas squirted from small nozzles ringing its midsection. Hexagonal ports were open all around its front hull, too big for combat wasp launch tubes.

Scale was hard to judge, but Nicolai estimated it at a good ninety metres in diameter. “I think that’s a marine assault ship,” he said.

The main drive shut off, and blue ion thrusters fired, locking it in to position five hundred metres away from the spindle which connected the non-rotating spaceport with the asteroid.