dismissed it. Zyvan and the tau both wanted me there, and if I pulled out, chances were the xenos would pick up their ball and go home, we’d all start shooting at each other again, and I’d get the blame for snatching defeat from the jaws of compromise. ‘That should keep everyone honest,’ I said instead, resolving to make sure I knew where the saviour pods were before anyone had a chance to open their mouths.
In the event I didn’t need to make sure of an escape route, as everyone was on their best behaviour; although that didn’t stop me from doing so anyway. By this stage in my career, finding the quickest way out of any new place I found myself in had become second nature, which rather accounted for the fact that I was still around to be paranoid.
Both warships assigned to what was euphemistically referred to as ‘diplomatic protection duty’ were stationed several kilometres from the orbital, due to the high concentration of debris still clustered around it. The cloud of detritus was so dense, in fact, that nothing much larger than an Aquila could approach the void station without being pounded to pieces; accordingly, as we approached the huge, and somewhat battered structure, our transport bobbed and weaved like an inebriate, as the pilot was forced to make constant course corrections to avoid a collision.
‘That’ll take some clearing up,’ Jurgen commented, peering through what seemed to me under the circumstances to be a pitifully thin sheet of armourglass at the spiralling chunks of jagged metal beyond. Many were rimed with frost, where some residual atmosphere had frozen around them, and I tried not to think too hard about the explosive decompression that had undoubtedly accompanied its deposition. Finding myself morbidly wondering how many of the motes of flotsam catching the light of the sun rising from beyond the edge of the world below were the cadavers of those too slow to have reached the closing bulkhead doors, I nodded, hoping a little conversation would distract me[21].
‘I imagine it will,’ I agreed. I’d been in two minds about bringing him, but was grateful by now that I had. His recovery was almost complete, and if the niggling little voice in the back of my head was right and the tau were up to something underhand, there was no one I’d rather have watching my back. Besides, he’d been grumpy enough about being left behind for my little chat with Zyvan and Donali; another perceived slight would have prolonged the sulk for weeks. ‘But at least it’ll make it hard for anything to sneak up on us.’
‘Anything big,’ Jurgen replied, after a moment’s reflection. ‘But it’d make it really easy to slip one of those drone things through without anyone noticing. Auspex’ll be well clogged.’
‘Quite so,’ I said, not best pleased to have been handed something else to fret about. Offhand, I couldn’t see any reason the tau would bother to do something like that, of course, but then I suppose that would have been the point. ‘Can you see the void station yet?’
Jurgen shook his head. ‘I thought it was on your side.’
‘Your side was my side a minute ago,’ I reminded him, just as the pilot tucked us into another roll, this time around a larger than usual piece of junk, which looked as though it had once been a pressure vessel from a fabricatory, or possibly a storage tank for liquids of some kind. Either way, it was longer than our Aquila, and eclipsed the sun for a moment. When the light returned it was from a new and unexpected angle, dazzling me. As I blinked my eyes clear, the orbital finally came into view.
I’d seen plenty of similar structures over the years, of course, although since our crippled starship had glanced off the anchorage above Nusquam Fundumentibus in its headlong plunge to the surface, the sight of one always brought with it a momentary surge of unease. I waited for the unwelcome sensation to pass off as it usually did, but the sense of disquiet refused to leave me, and after a while I realised it wasn’t going to. Not until I had a much better idea of what was going on, anyway.
‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ Jurgen said, unconscious as always of the irony; but on this occasion I had to concede that he had a point. The tau had attempted to board the orbital during the first wave of their initial