Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780575090705
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2020-01-29T18:30:00+00:00

21

Adrana did not expect to be squawked by Fura – that would risk giving away what little uncertainty might remain of her position – but when at last the console did buzz, signalling an incoming transmission, she could not quite negate the hope that it might be her sister, and that the news might not be so terrible as she feared.

But there could be no good news. She had monitored the further unfolding of that engagement. The attack against Revenger had entered a cruel and slow secondary phase. The five ships of the squadron were no longer shooting quite so actively, but from the pattern of their muzzle flashes it was clear that they were now closing in on their quarry with a methodical and deliberate patience. She imagined a field of carnage, after some disproportionate slaughter. Now the triumphant party was moving slowly and calmly through the bloodied and mangled bodies of the fallen, occasionally stopping to jab a sword into some whimpering enemy who hadn’t had the decency to die quickly. The battle was technically still in progress – it would not be formally decided until the last moaning form had been pricked into silence – but all that remained was a sort of ghastly, clerical formality.

So it was with the attack on Revenger. The squadron ships were still too far off to send in launches (if that was their intended endgame) but there could no longer be any doubt that they would prevail. If Revenger was a cornered rat, she was now tormented by five stalking cats. Every ten or twenty minutes they were content to shoot a slug or two at her, scanning for sail or hull-flash and refining their aim accordingly.

And still there had been no counterblast from Fura.

Adrana did not even have the luxury of being the only witness to this travesty. News of it was all over the general squawk, and they were even beginning to see it on the short-range flickerbox transmissions beaming out from Trevenza Reach. There were a hundred different viewpoints, a hundred different commentaries, a hundred different theories and opinions. No one had direct proof that it was the Ness sisters’ ship being shot at, and there was no official line from anywhere in the Congregation concerning the actions of the sub-squadron. But there were plenty of observers who had guessed the essential truth of what was happening. It did not take vast powers of deduction: tying up five ships in a lengthy engagement was always going to be expensive.

Who was worth that sort of cost, besides the Ness sisters?

The only crumb of encouragement Adrana could take from any of this was that no one, to the best of her knowledge, had yet speculated that the Ness sisters might be operating different ships, and that one of them might be coming in from the Empty on a different course to the other . . .

‘It might,’ Lasling said, when the console had been buzzing for about ten seconds, ‘be worth answering that.

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