Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

people—they were fighting like devils. And they were at least as well coordinated as the attackers. But their weapons and armour were simply inadequate. Chameleoflage was only truly effective against a solitary enemy, or a massed enemy moving in from a common direction. With Coalition forces surrounding him, Clavain’s suit was going crazy trying to match every background, like a chameleon in a house of mirrors.
    The sky overhead looked strange now—darkening purple. And the purple was spreading in a mist across the nest. Galiana had deployed some kind of chemical smoke-screen: infrared and optically opaque, he guessed. It would occlude the spysats and might be primed to adhere only to enemy chameleoflage. That had never been in Warren’s simulations. Galiana had just given herself the slightest of edges.
    A soldier stepped out of the mist, the obscene darkness of a gun muzzle trained on Clavain. His chameleoflage armour was dappled with vivid purple patches, ruining its stealthiness. The man fired, but his discharge wasted itself against Clavain’s armour. Clavain returned the compliment, dropping his compatriot. What he had done, he thought, was not technically treason. Not yet. All he had done was act in self-preservation.
    The man was wounded, but not yet dead. Clavain stepped through the purple haze and knelt down beside the soldier. He tried not to look at the man’s wound.
    “Can you hear me?” he said. There was no answer from the man, but beneath his visor, Clavain thought he saw the man’s lips shape a word. The man was just a kid—hardly old enough to remember much of the last war. “There’s something you have to know,” Clavain continued. “Do you realise who I am?” He wondered how recognisable he was, under the breather mask. Then something made him relent. He could tell the man he was Nevil Clavain—but what would that achieve? The soldier would be dead in minutes; maybe sooner than that. Nothing would be served by the soldier knowing that the basis for his attack was a lie; that he would not in fact be laying down his life for a just cause. The universe could be spared a single callous act.
    “Forget it,” Clavain said, turning away from his victim.
    And then he moved deeper into the nest, to see who else he could kill before the odds took him.
    But the odds never did.
    “You were always were lucky,” Galiana said, leaning over him. They were somewhere underground again— deep in the nest. A medical area, by the look of things. He was on a bed, fully clothed apart from the outer layer of chameleoflage armour. The room was grey and kettle-shaped, ringed by a circular balcony.
    “What happened?”
    “You took a head wound, but you’ll survive.”
    He groped for the right question. “What about Warren’s attack?”
    “We endured three waves. We took casualties, of course.”
    Around the circumference of the balcony were thirty or so grey couches, slightly recessed into archways studded with grey medical equipment. They were all occupied. There were more Conjoiners in this room than he had seen so far in one place. Some of them looked very close to death.
    Clavain reached up and examined his head, gingerly. There was some dried blood on the scalp, matted with his hair, some numbness, but it could have been a lot worse. He felt normal—no memory drop-outs or aphasia. When he pushed himself up to sitting and tried to stand, his body obeyed his will with only a tinge of dizziness.
    “Warren won’t stop at just three waves, Galiana.”
    “I know.” She paused. “We know there’ll be more.”
    He walked to the railing on the inner side of the balcony and looked over the edge. He had expected to see something—some chunk of incomprehensible surgical equipment, perhaps—but the middle of the room was only an empty, smooth-walled, grey pit. He shivered. The air was colder than in any part of the nest he had visited so far, with a medicinal tang that reminded him of the convalescence