Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

nest and Deimos was secure—even the Demarchists had no immediate access to it. So Clavain’s call from the surface could be quietly ignored; spysat imagery doctored to make it appear as if he had never reached the dyke . . . had in fact been repelled by Conjoiner treachery. Inevitably the Demarchists would unravel the deception given time . . . but if Warren’s plan succeeded, they would all be embroiled in war long before then. That, thought Clavain, was all that Warren had ever wanted.
    Two brothers, Clavain thought. In many ways so alike. Both had embraced war once, but like a fickle lover Clavain had wearied of its glories. He had not even been injured as severely as Warren . . . but perhaps that was the point, too. Warren needed another war to avenge what one had stolen from him.
    Clavain despised and pitied him in equal measure.
    He searched for the safety clip on the gun. The rifle, now that he studied it more closely, was not all that different from those he had used during the war. The read-out said the ammo-cell was fully charged.
    He looked into the sky.
    The attack wave broke orbit hard and steep above the Wall: five hundred fireballs screeching towards the nest. The insertion scorched centimetres of ablative armour from most of the ships; fried a few others that came in just fractionally too hard. Clavain knew exactly what was happening: he had studied possible attack scenarios for years, the range of outcomes burned indelibly into his memory.
    The anti-assault guns were already working—locking on to the plasma trails as they flowered overhead, swinging down to find the tiny spark of heat at the head, computing refraction paths for laser pulses, spitting death into the sky. The unlucky ships flared a white that hurt the back of the eye and rained down in a billion dulling sparks. A dozen— then a dozen more. Maybe fifty in total before the guns could no longer acquire targets. It was nowhere near enough. Clavain’s memory of the simulations told him that at least four hundred units of the attack wave would survive both re-entry and the Conjoiner’s heavy defences.
    Nothing that Galiana could do would make any difference.
    And that had always been the paradox. Galiana was capable of running the same simulations. She must always have known that her provocations would bring down something she could never hope to defeat.
    Something that was always going to destroy her.
    The surviving members of the wave were levelling out now, commencing long, ground-hugging runs from all directions. Cocooned in their dropships, the soldiers would be suffering punishing gee-loads, but it was nothing they were not engineered to withstand: their cardiovascular systems had been augmented with the sort of non-neural implants the Coalition grudgingly tolerated.
    The first of the wave came arcing in at supersonic speeds. All around, worms struggled to snatch them out of the sky, but mostly they were too slow to catch the dropships. Galiana’s people manned their cannon positions and did their best to fend off as many as they could. Clavain clutched his gun, not firing yet. Best to save his ammo-cell power for a target he stood a chance of injuring.
    Above, the first dropships made hairpin turns, nosing suicidally down towards the nest. Then they fractured cleanly apart, revealing falling pilots clad in bulbous armour. Just before the moment of impact, each pilot’s armour exploded into a mass of black shock-absorbing balloons, looking something like a blackberry, bouncing across the nest before the balloons deflated just as swiftly to leave the pilot standing on the ground. By then the pilot—now properly a soldier—would have a comprehensive computer-generated map of the nest’s nooks and crannies; enemy positions graphed in real-time from the down-looking spysats.
    Clavain fell behind the curve of a dome before the nearest soldier got a lock on him. The firefight was beginning now. He had to hand it to Galiana’s