“And a lot of—” somebody else started to say. Then the link hissed and clicked off.
Two of the line of ships disappeared in violent bursts of light: one at the far end, maybe one or two, and -
The next explosion filled her senses, seemingly right beside her. The wing commander’s ship. Hundreds of klicks away but filling the sky with light. Another flurry of silent explosions within and around the first one, spreading outwards like fierce blossoms of fiery white. One massive explosion, at the far, high-numbers end of the line of ships. Distant, tiny but intense eruptions of light all around them announced other wings suffering attrition too.
“We’re just getting wasted sitting here,” Dicogra said, trying to keep her voice level. She was really only talking to her own crew; the comms to the rest of the wing and beyond were wild with interference or jamming. “Nutche, anything on long range?” she asked. There was nothing she could see, but her displays were slightly more abstract and less raw than the data the jajue-jein would be looking at. There might be a hint of a target in there that she wasn’t seeing to pick up on.
“Nothing,” Nutche said. “Can’t see anything past this wall of collision light.”
Another ship gone, matter blasting into radiation half a thousand klicks away. She tried contacting any of the other ships, but failed.
“We’re starting engines,” she announced. “We might as well die charging at the bastards as sitting here like civilians.”
“Ma’am!” Mahil shouted. “We’re supposed to hold here!” The whule was the one she’d have expected to be shocked at disobeying orders.
“Ready your weapons, Mr Mahil. We’re going to find you something to shoot at.”
“Iprotest. However, weapons are ready.”
“Here we go.” Dicogra let the main drive rip, sending the ship darting forward, exhaust bright, throwing the craft at the wall of light ahead.
Grape-sized elements of a sensor group, tearing past with the rest of the hyper-velocity munitions, picked out the drive signature immediately and plipped to a following suicide launcher.
The one-shot destroyed itself blasting a fan of high-X-ray filaments at the target.
Drilled by just three finger-thin beams, run through for long enough for the summed velocities and vectors of the ship and brief-lived beams that penetrated it to cause the holes to elongate by a few radii, the NMS 3304 took an unlucky hit and erupted in a wild spray of radiation as its antimatter power core burst and blew out, flicking the torn and tumbling remains forward across the scintillating skies ahead and causing the bright hailstorm of collision light to bud briefly with a slow wave of debris hitting from behind.
Dicogra was barely able to think anything beyond experiencing a dawning feeling of horror.
Nutche, the jajuejein, had time to start the first syllable of the Song of Surrender Unto Death.
The whule Mahil was able to begin a scream of fear and rage directed at his captain, though the three predeceased the rest of those in their wing still alive at the time by only a matter of minutes.
* * *
Jaal Tonderon watched the war begin on one of the official news channels. She was with the rest of her immediate family, in a lodge in the Elcuathuyne Mountains in the far south of “glan-tine’s Trunk continent. The remainder of Sept Tonderon — those who weren’t more directly involved in the war itself — were scattered throughout and around the town of Oburine, a modest resort filling the alluvial floor of the steep-sided valley below the house.
“Everyone all right? Are you sure?” Jaal’s mother asked. A muttered chorus assured her that nobody needed anything else to eat or drink. They were down to a bare minimum of servants here. They were all having to do things for themselves and for others. The consensus was that this was good for them all in an unironic, camaraderie-heavy, mucking-in-together kind of way, but would swiftly become tedious.
“Mum, please sit down,” Jaal told her. Jaal’s mother, fashion-gaunt in the latest war-chic after decades of at the time equally fashionable Rubensism, sat down, squeezing easily between her husband and one of his sisters. All ten of them were crowded into a windowless basement room at the back of the lodge. This was reckoned to be the safest place in the house, just in case anything happened outside. If there was significant fighting in space around ’glantine, debris could fall anywhere.
Venn Hariage, the new Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon who had replaced the still-mourned Braam Ganscerel, had decreed that, especially as they represented the most senior Sept, and given the unfortunate fate of Sept Bantrabal, they could afford to lose no more of their people. They had broken the predictable sequence of processing round their seasonal Houses and left the usual stamping grounds of all the Septs far behind, retreating to the high hills bordering the Great Southern Plateau. In a war of the scale being threatened, there were no completely safe refuges, but here was significantly safer than most places. Only deep underground was much safer, and all those shelters were pretty much full of the military, the Omnocracy and the Administrata.
Some people and organisations had entrusted themselves to space, fleeing to small habitats and especially to little civilian ships, hoping to hide in the volumes of space throughout the inner system, though the official line was that to do so might be to get oneself mistaken for a military ship or munition and was therefore riskier than staying put on a planet. The disappearance of the industrialist Saluus Kehar in one of his own ships had been used as a warning in this regard, though there were bizarre rumours that he had either been sent on a failed peace mission to the invaders or — surely even more unlikely -that he had turned traitor and joined the enemy.
The holo-screen display was flat, just two-dimensional. Apparently this was to allow more signal space for the military’s transmissions. The uninvolving image, from a camera platform somewhere beyond the orbit of Nasqueron, showed space, on the outskirts of the outer planetary system. It was lit up with a speckled cloud of light, lots of little winking, twinkling glints, flaring up and dying down, each tiny spark instantly replaced by one or two others.
“So what are we seeing here, Jee?” said a disembodied, professional-sounding voice.
“Well, Fard,” more slow, competent tones replied, “this looks like a barrage of gunfire, being laid down by the defending forces, ahm, discouraging any incursion or infraction by the invaders.”
“…Right…”
Larger blotches of bright white explosions started to spit and spot across the screen. The camera jerked from one to another, then the view switched to another theatre of operations, still backed by the all-pervasive faraway stars.
Jaal bent to her younger brother, sitting cross-legged on the floor by her seat. “They’re never going to tell us the truth, are they?” she said quietly.
Leax, thin and angular after what was hoped would be his last surge of growth, looked uncomfortable. “You shouldn’t say that. We’re all on the same side, we’ve all got to support each other.”
“Yes, of course.” Jaal patted him, feeling the boy’s shoulder stiffen as she touched him. No more the days of wrestling and tickling. She guessed he’d pass through this stage of embarrassment and awkwardness soon enough. She wanted somehow to reassure him and nearly patted him again, but stopped herself.
The screen cut to another mini-feature on the splendid morale on board the battlecruiser Carronade.
“Feel so useless, don’t you?” Jaal’s uncle Ghevi said. He was only about forty but looked older, almost an accomplishment in an age when people with the right money could be eighty and look ten. “You really want to be out there, doing something.”