New Kong successfully tested the ZTT drive in 2115, and the arkship concept was quickly and quietly discarded. Beautifully detailed plans and proposals drawn up by a multitude of starflight societies and associations were downloaded into university library memories to join the ranks of other never-made-it technologies like the nuclear powered bomber, the English Channel bridge, geostationary solar power stations, and continent birthing (the so-called Raising Atlantis project, where fusion bombs were proposed to modify tectonic activity). Then the Tyrathca world of Hesperi-LN was discovered in 2395, along with the news that it was actually a colony founded by an arkship. The old human plans were briefly revisited by history of engineering students, interested to see how they stood up to comparison with a proven arkship. That academic interest faded away inside of a decade.
Joshua, who fancied himself as something of a spaceflight buff, was fascinated by the dull blip of light which Lady Mac’s sensors were focused on. It was in a wildly elliptical orbit around Hesperi-LN, with a twelve thousand kilometre perigee and four hundred thousand kilometre apogee. Fortunately for their mission, it was just under three hundred thousand kilometres away from the Tyrathca planet, and climbing.
They’d emerged two million kilometres out from Hesperi-LN; a distance which put them safely beyond the planet’s known SD sensor coverage. The Tyrathca world was not a cradle for the kind of space activity found above industrialized human worlds. There were a few low-orbit docking stations, industrial module clusters, communication and sensor satellite networks, and twenty-five SD platforms supplied and operated by the Confederation Navy. Not that there was a lot of worry about pirate activity, the Tyrathca simply didn’t manufacture the kind of goods which could be sold on any human market let alone the underground one. The Confederation was far more concerned by the prospect of blackmail by a rogue starship captain armed with ground-assault weapons. Although they didn’t have consumer products, the Tyrathca did mine gold, platinum, and diamonds among other precious commodities for their indigenous industries. And the colony had been established in AD 1300; rumours of vast stockpiles accumulated over millennia persisted on every human world. Any bar or dinner party would have someone who knew somebody else who had been told of a first-hand witness who’d walked through the endless underground caverns filled with their glittering dragon hoards.
So the Navy maintained a small cost-ineffective outpost to guard against the possibility of any inter-species incident. It had been abandoned, along with all the other human-maintained systems, when the Tyrathca broke off contact. According to the briefing Monica and Samuel had given to the Lady Mac’s crew, the Tyrathca would find it difficult to keep the SD systems functional for very long.
“But we have to expect them to try,” Monica said. “Their ambassador was pretty damn insistent that we don’t intrude on them again.”
Joshua and Syrinx assumed the SD network was on-line and fully functional, and planned their tactics accordingly. The goal was to land an explorer team on Tanjuntic-RI, who would attempt to locate a reference to the Sleeping God in the arkship’s ancient electronics. Getting them inside unnoticed was the big problem.
Both craft were in full stealth mode when they emerged. Jumping into the system, Joshua had aligned Lady Mac so that her vector would carry her in a rough trajectory from the emergence coordinate towards the arkship. As long as he didn’t have to use either the fusion or antimatter drives, the starship would probably remain undetected. At this stage, they were back up; there to rush in and provide covering fire in case things got noisy and Oenone had to rescue their team. They were using passive sensors only, with just the chemical verniers firing occasionally to hold them stable; every nonessential system was in stand-by mode, reducing the power consumption and with it their thermal emission. Internal heat stores were soaking up the fusion generator output, although they could only last for a couple of days before the thermodump panels would have to be extended to dissipate the heat. Even that wasn’t too much of a problem, the radiation could be directed away from the SD network sensors. They’d have to be extremely unlucky to be discovered by anything that guarded Hesperi-LN.
“Picking up some radar pulses from the SD network,” Beaulieu reported. “But it’s very weak. They’re not scanning for us. Our hull coating can absorb this level easily.”
“Good,” Joshua said. “Liol, what about spacecraft activity?”
“Infrared’s showing twenty-three ships using their drives above the planet. The majority are travelling between low orbit and the SD platforms. Four seem to be heading up for high polar orbits. I’d say they’re complementing the platforms. But none of them are moving very fast, half a gee maximum. They are big ships, though.”
“That’s how the Tyrathca like them,” Ashly said. “Plenty of room to move round in the life support sections. It’s like being inside a bloody cathedral.”
“Offensive potential?”
“If they’re armed with human-made combat wasps, considerable,” Liol said.
“With that drive signature I’m assuming they’re Tyrathca inter-planetary ships; they have a dozen asteroid settlements to provide the planetary industries with several kinds of bulk microgee compounds. Which means their payload is considerably larger than ours. They’re like highly manoeuvrable weapons platforms.”
“Wonderful.” Joshua datavised the new bitek processor array they’d installed during the last refit. “Oenone, what’s your situation?”
“I remain on schedule, Joshua. We should be rendezvousing with Tanjuntic-RI in another forty-two minutes. The exploration team is suiting up now.”
Unlike the Lady Macbeth, Oenone had been able to accelerate and manoeuvre after emerging above the planet. By reducing its distortion field to a minimum, the voidhawk could accelerate at half a gee towards the arkship.
Given the distance involved, the network satellites were unable to pick up such a small ripple in space-time. The disadvantage was, with such a reduced field the voidhawk couldn’t perceive a fraction of the local environment it usually did. If for some unaccountable reason, the Tyrathca had surrounded Tanjuntic-RI with proximity mines, they wouldn’t know until they were very close indeed.
Syrinx always hated being dependent on just the sensor blisters and passive electronic arrays. The voidhawks’ ability to pervade a huge spherical volume of space around the hull was intrinsic to their flight.
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Tanjuntic-RI had been completely abandoned less than fifty years after it arrived in the Hesperi-LN star system. An unduly harsh treatment by human standards, but it had fulfilled every duty its long-dead builders had required of it, and the Tyrathca were not a sentimental species. Fifteen thousand years old, it had travelled one thousand six hundred light-years to ensure the Tyrathca race didn’t die along with their exploding home star. Five separate, successful colonies had been established along its route. Each time the arkship had stopped inside a star system to creat
e a new colony, the Tyrathca had virtually rebuilt it, refuelled it, then carried on with their crusade of racial survival. Even so, there are limits to the most sturdy machinery. After Hesperi-LN was founded, Tanjuntic-RI was left to circle ceaselessly above the planet.
Borrowing Oenone’s sensor blisters, Syrinx could see the details becoming clear as they glided in for a rendezvous. Tanjuntic-RI was a dark cylindrical rock six kilometres long, two and a half in diameter. Its surface was a gentle mottle of flattened craters, resembling a wind-sculpted ice field. Remnants of vast machines sketched out a random topology of tarnished metal lines along the floors of the meandering valleys. These appurtenances had succumbed to millennia of particle impacts and vacuum ablation. What had once been a surface bristling with elaborate towers and radiator panels the size of lakes was left with little more than their stubby mounting fixtures as a reminder of past grandeur. The forward end was the most heavily speckled, due mainly to the extensive remnants of a coppery hexagonal grid.
With Tanjuntic-RI capable of travelling at over fifteen per cent lightspeed, a collision with a single pebble at that speed could result in catastrophic damage. So in flight the arkship was protected by a plasma buffer, a cloud of electrically charged gas that broke up and absorbed any mass smaller than a boulder. It rode ahead of the arkship, a luminous mushroom-shape held in place by a magnetic field generated by the superconductor grid.
Right in the centre of the grid, aligned along the rotation axis, was the arkship’s spaceport. Although the concept was the same as the counter-rotating spaceports on Edenist habitats, the Tyrathca had fashioned an elaborate conical structure made up from tiers of disks. Its peak disappeared below the surface of the rock, as if it were a kind of giant arrow tip which had impaled itself in some forgotten era. The larger disks at the top end had broken off centuries ago, probably when the magnetic bearing seized up. Those that remained were vacuum ablating, their edges fraying like worn cloth, while their flat surfaces slowly dissolved, reducing their overall thickness. With the last maintenance crew departing thirteen centuries previously, the vast sheets of metal were down to a few centimetres thickness, and perforated by thousands of micrometeorite holes.
Oenone was also relaying the image of the arkship to the little exploration team suiting up in the crew toroid’s airlock prep chamber.
Given the clandestine nature of their mission, Monica Foulkes and Samuel were leading the team. There were only two technical staff coming with them; Renato Vella, who was Kempster Getchell’s chief assistant, and Oski Katsura, head of the Laymil project’s electronics division. Their job would be to reactivate Tanjuntic-RI’s electronic library and extract whatever files concerning the Sleeping God that they could locate.
Tactical support was supplied by four serjeants, loaded with Ione’s personality.
Kempster Getchell and Parker Higgens were also in the prep chamber; helping with the suits when they were asked, but mainly rehearsing mission goals with Renato and Oski. The formless black silicon of the SII suits had enveloped each of the team, now they were busy clipping their rigid exoskeleton suits on top. They were using standard issue Confederation Navy Marine armour, generator reinforced monobonded carbon with power augmentation. As sleek and featureless as the SII suits, they were designed for both asteroid and ship assault roles, capable of supporting and keeping the wearer active in high gee environments, and with built in manoeuvring packs.
The team started to run integration diagnostics. Arm joints bent and twisted, sensor inputs flicked through the spectrum. Monica, Samuel, and the serjeants ran their weapons interface programs, and stowed the various items of lethal hardware on their belts and racks once the suit processor confirmed the connection. Oski and Renato started picking up their blocks and equipment kits; there were too many to hang on their belts, so they were both using small chestpacks.
Kempster held Renato’s pack steady as it adhered to the armour suit. “I can’t feel the weight,” the young astronomer datavised. “I just have to balance right. And I’ve even got a program for that.”
“The wonders of science,” Kempster muttered. “Mind you, I ought to be flattered. Commando raids to acquire astronomical data. I suppose that’s a sign of how important my profession has become.”
“The Sleeping God isn’t an astronomical event,” Parker chided irritably.
“We’re sure of that now.”
Kempster smiled at the blank neutral-grey back of his assistant. Now he was ready, Renato datavised Oenone’s processor array for an update on their approach. Tanjuntic-RI’s dilapidated spaceport was a hundred and fifty kilometres away, and the voidhawk’s sensor blisters had it in perfect focus. The large disks were separated by a single central column that appeared to be made up from hundreds of braided pipes. They were spaced far enough apart, a hundred metres at least, to admit ships between them. Tyrathca craft had used them as hangar floors, anchoring themselves to docking pins and plugging into the utility sockets. Now, the disks were essentially flat sheets of decaying metal; their thin lattice of ancillary systems had evaporated away along with the rim.
“We’re not going to land on those, are we?” Renato Vella asked. “They don’t look very reliable.”
Samuel used his suit’s bitek processor to datavise a reply. “Oenone will take us in under the bottom disk. We’ll go EVA and try and find a way in along the spaceport’s support column.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” Monica datavised. “The archaeology team from the O’Neill Halo got in easily.”
“A hundred and thirty years ago,” Kempster said. “The decay rate Tanjuntic-RI is suffering from could well make things difficult for you. The original route may be blocked.”
“This isn’t an archaeology project, doc,” Monica datavised. “We’ll just cut our way in if we have to. Decay should help us there. The structure won’t put up much resistance.”
Kempster caught Parker’s eye, the two of them registering their disapproval in unison. Cut it open, indeed!
“At least we have a basic layout file of the internal chambers,” Oski datavised. “If we really did have to explore, I doubt we’d achieve anything.”
“Yeah,” Monica agreed. “How come the Tyrathca allowed that university team in?”
“Wrong question,” Parker said. “Why shouldn’t they? The Tyrathca couldn’t understand our interest in the arkship at all. You know they seal up and abandon a house once the breeders have died? Well Tanjuntic-RI is a similar case. Once something of theirs has ended its natural life, it becomes … invalid, is about the nearest definition we have. They just don’t use it, or visit it again. And it’s not due to the kind of respect we have for graves; they don’t consider their relics or burial houses to be sacred.”
“Weird species,” Monica datavised.
“That’s what they think of us, too,” Parker said. “The various Lords of Ruin have asked them on several occasions if they would join the Laymil research project, another viewpoint would always be valuable. It was the same answer each time. They’re simply not interested in examining obsolete artefacts.”
Oenone folded its distortion field to almost nothing as it crept across the last kilometre to Tanjuntic-RI. The arkship was rotating around its long axis once every four minutes, with only a small wobble picked up over the centuries. Which said a lot for how well they’d managed the internal mass distribution, Syrinx thought. As a result of the minute instability, the spaceport was pursuing a small loop which the voidhawk could match easily.
They slid in under the bottom disk, which was only seventy metres in diameter. The short length of the support column which emerged from the disk’s centre to burrow into the rock was twenty-five metres wide.
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Syrinx examined the twisted braid of pipes and girders that made up the spaceport’s support column. Following her silent urging, Oenone expanded its distortion field enough to pervade the dilapidated structure. A picture of entwined translucent tubes filled her mind. The number of black-crack flaws in the metal and composite was alarming, as was the thinness of individual tubes. <
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Oenone rotated gently, turning its crew toroid airlock towards the lead-grey shaft. Standing in the open hatch, Samuel’s suit sensors showed him the stars slip past until he was facing the wrinkled mesh of metal.
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