“And that includes nuking them, does it?” Meredith asked. He’d been subject to anti-Saldana bigotry for so long now the insults never even registered. “They’re sequestrated, you cretin, they don’t even know they’re your people any more. This invasion isn’t going to be beaten by brute force. Now, you will broadcast that message, make the mercenary teams turn back.”

The tactical display sounded an alarm. A broad fan of curving purple vector lines were rising high over Wyman, Lalonde’s small arctic continent. Someone behind the planet had launched a salvo of fifty-five combat wasps.

“My God,” Meredith muttered. “Lowie, what are they aimed at?”

“Unclear, Admiral. There is no single target, it’s a rogue salvo. But from the vectors I’d say they were seeking to engage anything in the thousand-kilometre orbit . . . Bloody hell.”

A second salvo, of equal size, was curving round the south pole.

“Jesus, that’s a neat pincer movement,” Joshua said. At some ridiculous private level he was delighted he didn’t need any intervention from his neural nanonics to remain calm. He felt his mind function with that same cool reserve which had manifested itself back in the Ruin Ring when Neeves and Sipika appeared.

This is me, what I am: a starship captain.

The Lady Mac ’s three fusion drives came on almost without conscious thought. “Stand by for combat gees,” he warned.

“How many?” Sarha asked nervously.

“How high is up?”

Other starships were getting under way, retracting their thermo-dump panels. Three of them launched combat wasps in a defensive cluster formation.

“Remain in orbit,” Smith ordered over the command net. “The navy squadron will provide us with protective cover from the salvo.”

“Like bollocks they will,” Joshua said. The squadron was still four minutes from orbital injection. A sensor scan revealed blackhawks and voidhawks alike racing up for a higher altitude; the slower Adamist starships were following, with three exceptions, Gemal one of them.

The gee force in Lady Mac ’s bridge passed five gees. Ashly groaned in dismay. “My bones can’t take this.”

“You’re younger than me,” Warlow countered.

“I’m more human, too.”

“Wimp.”

“Castrated mechanoid.”

Sarha suddenly noticed the trajectory Joshua had loaded into the flight computer. “Joshua! Where the hell are you taking us?”

Lady Mac was rising above the equatorial plane at seven gees, decreasing altitude at the same time.

“We’re going under them.”

“This trajectory is going to graze the atmosphere!”

He watched more of the mercenary starships launching combat wasps. “I know.” It had been an instinctive manoeuvre, opposing every tactic program in the flight computer’s memory core; they all said altitude was the key in orbital combat situations, giving you more room to manoeuvre, more flexibility. Everyone else in the little mercenary fleet was clinging to that doctrine, escaping from Lalonde with fusion drives operating way out on the limit. “Dad was always telling me about this one,” he said in what he hoped was a confident manner. “He always used it in a scrape. Lady Mac ’s still about, isn’t she?”

“Your bloody father isn’t!” Sarha had to datavise, she couldn’t expel enough air from her lungs to talk. The acceleration had reached nine gees. She hadn’t known even Lady Mac could produce that kind of drive level. Every internal membrane supplement had turned rock hard. An arterial implant at the base of her neck was injecting oxygen into her bloodstream, making sure her brain didn’t starve. She couldn’t ever remember having to use it before. Joshua Calvert, we are not a bloody combat wasp!

“Look, it’s very simple,” he explained, trying to sort out the logic in his own mind. As usual, rationality was trailing well behind impetuosity. “Combat wasps are designed for deep-space operations. They can’t operate in the atmosphere.”

“We are designed for deep-space operations!”

“Yes, but we’re spherical.”

Sarha couldn’t snarl, she would have dislocated her jaw bone; but she managed to grate her teeth together.

Lady Macbeth flew over the Sarell continent in forty-five seconds, arching down sharply towards the brown and yellow volcanic deserts. She was three hundred kilometres in altitude when she passed over the northern coastline; the north pole was two and a half thousand kilometres ahead. Seven hundred kilometres above, and four thousand kilometres ahead, the combat wasp salvo spotted her. Six of them abruptly altered course and dived down.

“Here they come,” Joshua said. He fired eight of Lady Mac ’s combat wasps, programming them for a tight defence-shield formation. The drones leapt upwards at twenty gees, scattering submunitions almost immediately.

Aft sensors showed the starships in orbit behind and above were releasing more and more combat wasps. Even the Gemal was breaking out of its thousand-kilometre orbit, the old colonist-carrier could only make one and a half gees. And there was no escort, Joshua saw sadly. Far away to the east, barely above the horizon, there was a volley of explosions followed by the unmistakable larger smeared detonation of a starship. Wonder who that was? It didn’t seem to matter much, only that it wasn’t him.

“Melvyn, keep monitoring the grav-detector satellite data. I want to know if any ships start jumping outsystem, and if possible where to.”

“I’m on it, Joshua.”

“Dahybi, I can’t believe the voidhawks can keep jamming our nodes with all this going on, the second they slip I want to know.”

“Yes, Captain.”

The sensors showed Joshua the attacking combat wasps releasing their submunitions. Particle beams lanced out from both swarms. “OK, everybody, here we go.” He shot an order directly into the drive deflector coils, and Lady Mac lurched downwards.

Meredith Saldana caught the crazy flight vector developing and datavised a request into the tactical situation computer for confirmation. The vector was recomputed and verified. Half of the squadron’s frigates would be unable to produce a nine-gee thrust. “Who’s that idiot?” he asked in reflex.

“Lady Macbeth , sir,” Lieutenant Franz Grese said. “None of the others have triple-fusion drives.”

“Well, if they all suicide on us I shall be a very happy man.”

It wasn’t looking good. He had already changed the squadron’s operational orbit from one thousand kilometres to two thousand three hundred, which would give them a superior look-down shoot-down position—but only if the mercenary ships stayed put. Injection was in ninety seconds. Combat wasps were being launched at a prodigious rate from the mercenary fleet. Intelligence and tactics programs couldn’t say which were defensive and who was attacking whom. Each of his squadron’s ships had launched a defence cluster salvo.

One of the voidhawks exploded with appalling savagery, and the victorious blackhawk skirted its roiling debris plume to vanish into a wormhole interstice.

“Who?” he asked Rhoecus.

“Ericra , but they saw the combat-wasp barrage approaching. Ilex has their memory patterns safe.”

Even now, after all the truths he had seen in his cosmopolitan life, Meredith felt the old twang of prejudice. Upon death, souls departed this life for ever. It was the Christian way. They were not to be ensnared in a mockery of God’s living creatures.

You can leave the Kingdom, he acknowledged jadedly, but it never leaves you.

Go in peace , he prayed silently for the dead Edenists. Wherever you roam.

On a more pertinent level he was down to six voidhawks.

“Combat wasps have locked on to the Gemal , sir,” Clarke Lowie reported.

The gee force on the bridge was reducing rapidly as the Arikara slid into orbit.