Nilssen laughed. ‘Surrender? To you? Why would we do that? I could never take anything you say seriously, Benzamir Mahmood. We’ve decided that you’ll stay with us for as long as we decide to keep you. Just hope you don’t outlive your usefulness.’ He paused. ‘What did you say?’

Now Benzamir was calm, back in control. Nilssen’s moment of hesitation was all it took. ‘We can’t carry on this conversation indefinitely. In two minutes Ariadne will launch kinetic weapons against all your structures. If you’re outside, unarmed, and under my protection, she’ll hold fire and you’ll live. If you’re not, you can take your chances with hypervelocity sabots. Either way, your dreams of world domination are over.’

‘You’re lying. She wouldn’t dare do that to us while you’re here.’

‘It’s all been arranged. Feel free to call her bluff.’

‘No.’ Nilssen looked up. ‘No! How could you do this? Tell her to stop.’

‘You’ll have to turn your glittershields off for that. I expect that’s something you don’t want to do, shipkiller.’

‘It was Peri. She did it! She’s the one who destroyed the brain. Not me.’ He tried one last time. ‘Benzamir, you were the most passionate of all of us. You wanted this!’

Benzamir balled his fists and stepped forward. The ground thundered as soil and stones sprayed out. ‘I didn’t want this! This disaster, this travesty, this heap of shit that you’ve made for yourselves. This isn’t what I argued for at all, and now I’ve taken away all your choices. Evacuate. Take no weapons. You’ve got just over a minute.’

Faces started to appear at the balcony windows. They could hear every word, and they were afraid.

‘No one is going anywhere,’ boomed a voice.

Benzamir looked up at a first-floor hab and saw Peri Renzo looking down at him. Once, he would have responded by grinning like an idiot.

‘You don’t have the balls carry this charade off any longer, Benzamir!’ she shouted. ‘You were always such a disappointment.’

‘The one thing you could never comprehend, Peri: that a man might give up his own life for what he thought was right.’

‘As you wish. Peter? Take him.’

CHAPTER 43

NILSSEN SCREAMED AND leaped. Weapon-pods spun and spat. His remotes darted and flashed. Benzamir was not there. He had launched himself backwards, as far and as fast as he could.

The remotes exchanged fire with each other; some fell out of the sky, molten one moment, frozen twisted ruins the next. Benzamir had more; when the opening salvo had finished, they turned on Nilssen. He staggered backwards, glowing gouges like fiery claw marks criss-crossing him.

Benzamir jumped forward, kicked a huge foot out, followed it up with half-turn and hand-spike slash that skittered shrieking across the surface of Nilssen’s abdomen. Still reeling, his opponent found it difficult to strike back. But blows that would have caved in a man’s ribs bounced off the shielded armour. Strikes had to be precise, timed, and meant.

Nilssen’s arm came over Benzamir’s shoulder, a shove gone wrong. Benzamir stepped inside, slamming his back against him and then throwing him. The battlesuit flew, banged down hard in the soft ground.

‘Warning,’ said Benzamir’s suit. ‘Overload.’

He unfurled his wing-like radiator array and ran at Nilssen again. He was down to half a dozen remotes, but Nilssen, who had none left, found that as fast as he used missiles and pop-up cannon, lasers would destroy the launchers themselves. Benzamir’s suit was heating up, but the radiators should shed the excess. He’d taken little damage, but Nilssen’s front armour was badly compromised.

Nilssen was on his feet, but his left arm, the one Benzamir had used as a lever, was hanging useless. They fought and kicked, stabbing at each other in lightning-fast moves, remotes circling and boiling off composite when they had the chance. Nilssen fell back under the onslaught, Benzamir concentrating on the weakened breastplate for his most penetrating attacks.

The moment Nilssen deployed his own radiators, the remotes changed tactics, pouring as much heat as they could into the black wings. Instead of keeping the suit cool, they were cooking it inside out.

Nilssen dropped to his knees. Benzamir swung his fist at his head, once, twice, three times. It ripped off with a shriek and bounced away.

‘Go on, then. Finish it,’ Nilssen grunted.

‘We could have all lived,’ said Benzamir. ‘Instead, we all have to die.’

The ground vibrated as if it was the surface of a drum. The air shocked hard. Plastic shattered, stone broke, metal bent, anything not tied down flew.

Benzamir was jerked off his feet. He landed curled up. The sky flashed into incandescence. He waited for a bar of molten light to vaporize the hab and everything inside.

There was a second concussion, a third, as hypervelocity sabots turned domes into craters. The power flickered as the generator vanished in a mushroom cloud; the secondary kicked in.

Still he waited. The noise and the shaking died down. He could faintly hear the lightning crack of Ariadne’s laser as she picked off unshielded targets. Nothing else.

Slowly it dawned on him that she’d had no intention of destroying the living hab, despite it being the plan they’d both agreed on. She loved him too much, and she’d lied to him.

He got back up. Nilssen had fallen flat on his chest: he could no longer see what was going on, and Benzamir was in no rush to tell him. The curved front of the living block was ragged, the windows gone, the structure warped by the colossal impacts so close by. The people inside would be deaf and bleeding from the overpressure transferred through the dome, which had flexed and bent, but not broken. His remotes lay inert on the ground, stirring feebly.

The triple doors were beckoning him. He reached them unsteadily – all his sight lines were out of true – and transmitted what he hoped was still the access code.

Before he could be proved wrong, his vision blinked red. Without hesitating, Benzamir threw himself aside, turned his shoulder under his body and jumped up again. His radiators closed and opened, hissing and crackling with effort, just as the first salvo of rockets screamed by. His pop-ups took care of the second volley, but right behind the missiles were two undamaged battlesuits still streaming with pond water.

Benzamir had spent himself on defeating Nilssen. He had nothing in reserve because he hadn’t thought to keep anything back.

‘Ari! Can you hear me?’

The two battlesuits were on Benzamir, going for his legs, trying to bring him down.

‘Warning. Overload.’

He blocked and dodged, while he tried to come up with an idea that might save himself.

‘Warning. Overload.’

He was in heat shock. He couldn’t think. His instincts traded blows with the battlesuits, dodged their lunging attacks, fired off the last of his guns and rockets in an attempt to reduce them to smoking debris, and still he had two enemies to fight.

This was what they wanted, what they’d planned from the start. They had known he couldn’t resist Peter Nilssen’s challenge. They’d goaded him into losing his temper and he’d ended up losing everything.

‘Warning. Critical overload.’

He had to disengage. Run. But they were hitting him as hard as he had hit Nilssen. He kept on pulling back, letting them get the advantage, taking damage, until his back was against the first set of pressure doors.

He heard a bang. A few moments later and a little closer, another.

Then he put everything into one jump. He arced through the air, hands and feet splayed. If he was wrong, they’d be on him in a moment, and there’d be no recovery. They’d just stamp on his chest until it broke.