“Really, Mr Luseferous,” Feurish said, “this is no way to run a conference.”
“I have to say that I have to agree,” Chintsion said.
“Shut up,” Luseferous told them. “I also have numerous ships with multi-real-tonne antimatter warheads stationed right round this gas-giant. Planet-busters. If there’s still nothing happening after you’re all dead, I start detonating them in your precious fucking atmosphere. What passes for the authorities on your giant rotten fart of a planet will be informed of the above in due course.” The Archimandrite looked up at the guards poised on the gantries above. “Take them away. Get them out of those esuits. By cutting if necessary.”
A dozen giant black figures like suits of ancient armour encrusted with huge dark jewels sailed down, landing on the black diamond film on great talon-spread legs. Four surrounded each of the three esuited Dwellers.
“Well, gentlemen,” the Dweller called Peripule said ruefully to the other two, “I suppose it is not open to us to claim we went unwarned.”
An instant later, three violet circular curtains of light blazed out within the dark chamber, one encircling each Dweller. The exoskel guards were either rocked right back or physically blown over. Those unprotected people standing or sitting further away were picked up and thrown towards the walls. The shock wave hit Luseferous’s tall seat a fraction after the safety shield deployed, so that he watched the resulting chaos through a clinker of half-silvered diamond shutters.
The blast shook his seat, shook him and then reflected and echoed back off the distant walls. The three violet cylinders disappeared and left three huge neatly circular holes in the black diamond film beneath. The sickly light of Nasqueron’s yellow-brown cloud tops shone through. The air in the chamber was whirling and screaming out through the apertures. Blinks of white light flickered outside. Two of the exoskel guards were tumbled across the floor, scrabbling for grip, and were sucked out of the holes. Luseferous just stood staring. People, mostly unconscious and badly injured, started to slide in from the edges of the chamber where they’d been deposited by the triple blasts towards the three shining holes. A third exoskeleton-clad figure was being pulled, giant hands scraping and scrabbling frantically at the smooth diamond surface, towards the nearest hole and the whirling vortex forming above it. Then the ship’s systems finally woke up to what was happening and a dark shape flicked across the three puncture wounds in the vessel’s skin, sealing off the light and keeping what remained of the atmosphere within.
Relative calm returned. The thud, thud, thud noise continued. A rushing sound signalled replacement air being pumped back into the chamber. The exoskel guards got to their feet, looked around, then ran over to form a protective shield about the Archimandrite. More black shapes came plummeting from the gantries. Luseferous could hear people in the chamber moaning. He turned to look at Tuhluer, who was limping up to him through the phalanx of exoskel guards, his own emergency esuit and helmet deployed, the shiny bulge of faceplate reflecting the silvery diamond bubble that enclosed the Archimandrite and his chair.
“Kill the other Dwellers,” Luseferous told him. Tuhluer leaned in, hand to the side of his head, seemingly not hearing. “KILL THE OTHER DWELLERS!” Luseferous shouted. He clicked a stud on the arm of the seat and the diamond shuttering fell away. “Get us away from here,” he told the other man. “Warn the planet the AM warheads launch in three hours if they don’t start cooperating.” He looked at where the three Dweller representatives had made their sudden exit. “And make sure the Rapacious wasted those three comedians.”
“Sir!” Tuhluer said. “And what about the… chute supply?”
It took a moment before Luseferous realised that he meant the people being launched towards the planet. He waved one hand. “Oh, dump the lot.”
The Archimandrite Luseferous clicked the esuit’s communicator and told the Rapacious he was on his way. He marched through the moaning wounded towards the ship-to-ship and the waiting vessel beneath. The exoskel guards fell in around him, forming a giant hedge of armoured limbs and menacingly jagged torsos. He was almost at the ship-to-ship entrance when he was thrown off his feet. The exoskels staggered as the whole vast ship shook. One of the giant guards nearly fell on him, regaining his balance only at the last moment, servos whining.
“Now what?” Luseferous demanded.
“Damage control here, sir,” a voice said from the esuit. “Energy bolt straight through the whole ship, dead amidships. About two metres diameter. Plus… the bows have been shot off, back… to… about… the eighty-metre mark. Just gone. Same novel energy profile as the midships beam. Light speed; zero warning. Reactive defence systems still looking for a counter-measure against any subsequent usage… nothing coming up so far, sir.”
“Comms, sir,” another voice said, “Dwellers, demanding return of their people aboard. Apparently those were just warning shots.”
Tuhluer came striding up.
Luseferous looked at him. “Hand the Dwellers back,” he told the ADC. “Then get this thing away from here.” He strode towards the ship-to-ship.
“And the AM ships, sir?”
“Leave them where they are. Delay the ultimatum until the Luseferous VII is clear.”
“Sir.”
This time the Archimandrite made it all the way to the waiting flagship.
An hour later the Luseferous VII was still making its lumbering, injured way out of the planet’s gravity well. The Rapacious was already half a million klicks away and still accelerating. The Archimandrite — still shaking with rage even in his acceleration couch, the full awfulness and sheer insult of what had happened at last sinking in, his patience finally exhausted (those three facetious shithead Dwellers had even escaped, esuits reflecting or deflecting everything the Rapacious had thrown at them after they’d exited the Luseferous VII, disappearing, apparently unharmed, into the cloud tops) -ordered that the ultimatum be made to the Dwellers immediately, and that one of the ships carrying an AM warhead should drop its weapon into the planet’s atmosphere, just to show that they were serious.
The reply was almost instantaneous. The ship with the AM bomb — each one of the twenty ships with the AM bombs -vanished in a sudden pinpoint flare of light. All the warheads went off partially, reacting messily with the ordinary matter debris left after the destruction of the ships. Twenty ragged little suns guttered round Nasqueron like a tilted necklace, flaring, fading, flaring again and fading slowly once more.
Moments later, a hyper-velocity missile rose out of the turgid skies of the gas-giant and found the Luseferous VII despite all its desperate countermeasures within two minutes of clearing the cloud tops.
The radiation front tripped the Rapacious’s sensor buffers. That was how a proper antimatter warhead was supposed to work, seemed to be the implication.
The last signal from the great ship before it was ripped entirely apart and turned into radiation and high-speed shrapnel was from aide-de-camp Tuhluer, calmly informing Luseferous that the Archimandrite was a cunt.
Fassin Taak looked up at the stars of home. He felt tears in his eyes, even within the shock-gel. He rested on a windswept platform above a small cloud-top city low in the south polar region, just a couple of thousand kilometres from the torn, fluid boundary with Nasqueron’s southernmost atmospheric belt.
He tried to locate a friendly satellite, some signal that the little gascraft could recognise, but he couldn’t find anything. All broadcast signals were either terribly weak or scrambled, and he couldn’t locate any low-orbit devices to bounce a hail off. He tried to lock on to one of the weak broadcast wavelengths and use the gascraft’s biomind to decipher the signals, but the routines didn’t seem to be working. He gave up. For the moment, he was content just to sit here and look out at the few, familiar stars.