“Some what?”
Fingers clicked again, more intolerant now. “Give me some fucking zero-nark. You’re pissing it neat you’ve taken so much.”
“Why?” Ollie asked sourly. “You running out of the good stuff?”
A final click, and he started to breathe harshly, felt the blood heat rising into his cheeks as the devil face switched on.
“Okay, okay,” Ollie said sullenly. “You seriously need to chill, fella.” He reached into a pocket and fished out a couple of caps. They weren’t what Tronde was expecting, too small, but what the hell…It was a sweet lift out of this godforsaken house.
He held them tight in his fist and slouched out. There was a peculiar blood-wet meat smell in the hallway, coming from the conservatory. He hung back a moment—but who in their right mind wanted to be responsible for the oxen-man that was Lars? So he looked up the stairs, where the bedroom and crazy Claudette waited. The thought of going back up there right now was just too much. Instead, he went into the kitchen to make some tea and check if the others had left him any food.
The Connexion Exoscience and Exploration starship assembly station was very different from Quoek asteroid and its small crew habitation toroid. This was a simple hundred-and-fifty-meter sphere in orbit around the gas giant, Librae b, without any comforting rotational gravity. Nobody lived in it; staff arrived through the portal to Sol at the start of their shift and left at the end, keeping their zero-gee exposure to a minimum so they weren’t spending hours each day on cardio and calcium maintenance regimes. Like every other far-flung corporate outpost, it was now operating with a skeleton team. All three of them—Denisha, Koel, and Jec-Coben—were waiting on the other side of the portal when Callum came through. Going directly from one gee to zero gee made him instantly queasy; his heart, convinced he was plummeting downward, sped up, producing a cold sweat across his skin. Calm yoga breathing did little to alleviate the nausea.
Annoyingly, it didn’t look like the gravity shift bothered Eldlund at all. Sie slid up through the portal and unhesitatingly grabbed the nearest handrail to steady hirself.
The inside of the station was a three-dimensional lattice of carbon girders laced with cables and hoses. Lights were attached to struts seemingly at random, pointing in every direction and casting bizarre shadows. Given that the interior of the sphere enclosed a large space, the dense tangle made Callum feel restricted.
“We’ve been told to provide you with total access,” said Jec-Coben, the team leader.
Callum remembered just in time not to try a handshake in zero gravity. “Thanks.”
“Do you mind me asking why you’re here?”
“Ask away. But I’m afraid we can’t tell you anything.”
The three technicians swapped anxious glances.
“We haven’t been back to Sol since the emergency was declared,” Jec-Coben said, “and the solnet channel has been patchy at best. How bad is it?”
“Bad, and about to get a whole lot worse when the Deliverance ships reach Earth.”
“Okay. How can we help?”
“Show me the starships.”
Jec-Coben started to haul himself along a handrail.
Callum watched him go, his throat coming uncomfortably close to a gag. For a moment he wondered if Eldlund carried anti-nausea narks, then pushed the thought aside.
The girders bent and twisted in geometric chaos, forming seven separate ovoid nests extending radially from the center of the station. Three were empty; the remaining four held starships under construction. Callum had never seen one outside of a virtual, and being so close caused an unexpected rush of emotion. This was exactly the kind of thing that had inspired a twenty-year-old Callum Hepburn: physical proof that the future held wonders beyond imagination. In his lifetime, the human race had reached the stars. How could you live in such times and not be besotted by the possibilities opening up, especially if you were an engineering freshman at university?
The nest Jec-Coben had brought them to contained the Euia, a starship that was halfway through its assembly. Callum stared at the familiar teardrop shape defined by a frame of curving spars. At the core was the long nozzle chamber, which utilized the same MHD technology as the solarwells. This time, though, the star’s plasma was nothing more than the most powerful rocket exhaust ever built. Ultramagnet coils kept it contained and directed, allowing the starship to accelerate at up to ten gees.
“In theory you could take it up to a hundred gees, no trouble,” Jec-Coben said. “There’s no limit to how much plasma you can push through, just the size of the portal you drop into a star.”
“So why don’t you?” Callum asked.
“There’s no need. Ten gees will get you up to point eight light speed in just over a month. And by keeping it at ten gees you don’t physically strain the internal components. They’re all solid state, but even so, everything is designed to function under twenty times its Earth weight.”
“Two hundred percent safety margin, huh?”
“Yep,” Jec-Coben said proudly.
Callum took a look at those gold and black systems clustered around Euia’s central rocket tube—the myriad components that were the most expensive, over-engineered, fail-safe machines ever built. They had to be. Starships couldn’t be allowed to fail. It wasn’t the cost—or at least not in wattdollars. It was the cost in time. Most would spend a couple of decades in flight to reach the next tranche of stars. To fail halfway there, or worse, on final approach, would mean launching another mission and enduring that time all over again.
Not every star was visited by the exploration starships, of course. Outside the station, five hundred kilometers away, massive observatory satellites were studying the neighboring stars with known exoplanets, producing superb resolution pictures and analyzing spectography, determining which of the lonely worlds was most suitable for terraforming—i.e., cheapest. Ainsley also allowed for pure scientific missions to stars that had interesting planets—those with weird chemistry that hinted at xenobiology, or any other major astronomical anomaly. Most stars within twenty light-years would be bypassed for the more promising targets beyond.
So a full flight had to be guaranteed. And if things did start to go wrong, the starship would open up its marsupial compartment and thread up, allowing a new starship to be launched through it to complete the flight.
Eldlund pointed. “Are those the hull plates?”
“Yes.”
Callum stared at the far end of the nest, feeling an unexpected glow of nostalgia. It had been a long time since he’d seen a portal pair waiting to establish entanglement. Back in the day, he’d sometimes gotten to use six-meter portals for exceptionally difficult jobs. But the ones he could see held ready in giant U-shaped pallets were easily thirty meters long. Big, curving triangles, a meter thick; if nature ever evolved a space lily, these would be its petals. He could see how they would fit together like a smooth-edge jigsaw to form the Euia’s hull, producing the iconic teardrop shape.
“Where do you put the portal doors twinned with the hull sections?” Callum asked. “Orbit them around a gas giant?”
“No,” Jec-Coben said. “Same as with the MHD chambers, we fix them to the surface of a large asteroid at least fifty AUs out from its primary star. That way if anything big does come through, there’s no damage to any part of the solar system.”
“What do you count as big?”
“Ordinary dust, mostly clumps of carbon atoms, you get a couple of strikes an hour of them. Sometimes you get a particle that’s grain-of-sand size intercepting the hull boundary. That’ll happen on average once every couple of days during flight.”
Callum pulled a face. “Come on here, man, I’m talking proper big. You know—dinosaur-killer size.”
“In a hundred and twenty-seven years of sending ships out to the stars, there have been eight recorded incid
ents of a pebble-sized object coming though the hull portal. Which we define as up to two centimeters across.”
“Interstellar space is really very empty,” Eldlund said. “In the twentieth century, people theorized that you could use a magnetic ramscoop to power a starship’s fusion rocket, but it turns out the hydrogen density between stars isn’t—” Sie trailed off under the look Callum was giving hir. “Sorry.”
“So you have no data concerning large-object intersection at relativistic speeds?”
“No,” Jec-Coben said. “But you see, everyone conflates encounter speed with an energy release, like a megaton bomb going off. But that’s flat-Earth-level science, complete garbage. And that’s the beauty of using this system. There can be no collision. Ever. Before quantum spatial entanglement, everyone thought you’d have to deploy a massive ion cloud to protect anything flying at even a couple of percent of light speed. That would be enough to ablate all the particle sleet that flooded across interstellar space. While today, what we’re actually doing when we turn the hull into a portal door is flying a hole through space. There is simply nothing to hit. If you take your hypothetical boulder of rock and plonk it right in front of our starship traveling at point eight light speed, all you’re doing is sweeping it up and sending it harmlessly out of the hull door’s twin. So the rock just drifts up away from the asteroid with the same relative velocity it had when it was wandering through interstellar space.”
Callum stared at the starship’s curving profile, exhilaration stirring his blood. “What about if the hull only hits half of the boulder?”
“Then—wham-bam—at that velocity it acts like Uriel’s sword, the ultimate irresistible force, and cuts clean through any rock. You get half a boulder with a very clean flat surface zipping up out of the hull’s twinned door.”
“That’s what I thought,” Callum said, smiling at Jec-Coben. “Now, how long will it take to finish assembling one of these starships?”
“The Euia is almost complete, so under normal circumstances, we’d be ready for preliminary flight trials in another six weeks.”
“And in very unusual circumstances, with any resource you need, how long to click all those remaining parts together?”
Jec-Coben gave Koel a questing look. “Physical integration…maybe twenty-four hours. But—”
“Thanks,” Callum said abruptly. “We need to get back now.” He gripped the handrail harder and slowly swung his body around a hundred eighty degrees until he was pointing back the way he’d come. Then he started pulling himself along, gliding between handrails. He couldn’t stop grinning.
“So?” Eldlund said.
Callum’s excitement overrode everything: freefall nausea, worry about the invasion—“It’s amazing! They don’t realize what they’ve got.”
“Uh…What have they got?”
“The perfect arkship-killer missile.”
It was the silence that was subtly wrong. Gwendoline woke up knowing something about the city was different. Even with the penthouse’s superb sound insulation, she could always detect the noise London generated at all hours of the day. But this morning there was nothing; even the birds were hushed.
She slipped out of bed, taking care not to wake Horatio. Crina was nowhere to be seen, although Gwendoline suspected the penthouse network had alerted the bodyguard that she’d risen. So she made sure that the anti-sniper sheet was raised before she stepped out onto the balcony. The city shield was diffusing an insipid predawn glimmer across the rooftops. As she watched, a tiny point of pure white light appeared for a couple of seconds. The Agreth MHD asteroid, Theano splashed; a missile got past its plasma jets.
Gwendoline lowered her gaze. At first glance Cheyne Walk was deserted. Then she saw it: a horse walking slowly along the road, its rider wearing a wide-brimmed Australian outbacker hat. They weren’t in any hurry, just ambling along at the center of their own version of normality.
She knew only too well where that attitude was coming from. The sheer enormity of what was happening was too huge to encompass, so reality was now held at arm’s length. For if she were to look upon it and accept all that was happening, she’d be running, naked and screaming, down the street alongside that horse. Instead, staying safe and aloof in the sanctuary of the penthouse, waiting placidly for the family to spirit her away to safety, was her shameful solution to Armageddon. That and Horatio being here.
If it works, don’t try to fix it.
So she watched with a mix of envy and bemusement as the horse and rider went past the building, then turned onto Battersea Bridge. Shaking her head at her own weakness, she went back inside.
The larger clothing printer in her dressing room was still working, so she loaded in a design for Horatio: a decent navy blue collarless shirt and dark green loose-fit trousers. She preferred slimline trousers on men, but that battle had been lost even before they got married. She still remembered the morning he lifted a ridiculous pair of baggies out of the printer—mustard yellow, too. He’d been so delighted her usual mockery had died before it was spoken. Smiling fondly at the memory, she watched the machine’s cluster of stainless steel nozzles clatter around like knitting needles as the clothes took shape. And, conveniently, Theano had Horatio’s size on file. She’d never quite got around to deleting that.
The shirt was finished, and the trousers half formed, when the printer’s nozzles started to joust with each other and the color of the fabric they were extruding changed again and again.
Theano splashed a pattern impaired icon, and the printer stopped abruptly. Gwendoline opened the glass top and lifted the blighted trousers from the machine. They were now half trousers, half garish kilt.
“Rebooting the printer,” Theano told her.
She watched the nozzles retract to their standby position.
“Reboot failed. Possible darkware contamination of the system. Deep clean required.”
“Okay,” she said. “How long will that take?”
“Unknown. Unable to establish verified connection to the manufacturer for the procedure update. Solnet bandwidth is low and fluctuating.”
“Keep trying. Oh, and get the home network to disconnect all the food printers from solnet. I don’t want them corrupted, too.” The idea made her shiver and pull her bathrobe tighter. That was when she realized the air-con wasn’t keeping the dressing room as cool as she liked it.
“The penthouse is in power saving mode,” Theano told her. “The main grid power failed in the night. Quantum batteries are supplying the electricity now.”
“How long will they last?”
“Several months, if they are used only to maintain the security boundary. Longer for ordinary day-to-day usage.”
“I think we’re past day-to-day now.”
At least the coffee machine was still working. While the croissant bricks were cooking in the panoforno, she ground some beans for Horatio, who liked his coffee black, and made herself a hot chocolate—and to hell with the sugar content.
“Thanks,” Horatio said when she carried it into the bedroom on a tray. They plumped the pillows up and sat cozily side by side, not needing to talk as they munched the croissants down. Good memories.
“What next, then?” Horatio asked as he finished his mug of coffee.
“The Olyix appear to be changing tactics,” Gwendoline said. “Alpha Defense has been tracking their movements. Over half of the Deliverance ships that were heading for habitats are changing course. It looks like they’re now heading out for the MHD asteroids.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Ultimately, no. We think their weapons will be able to reach through the plasma cascade. But on a positive note, it will take them a lot longer to eliminate all the MHD asteroids than the missiles would have taken.”
“Great. And the habitats will have more time to evacuate.”
She pulled a face. “Maybe not. The missiles are changing course, too. They’re heading back. Alpha Defense thinks they’re going to hit the habitats.”
“What? I thought the Olyix didn’t want to kill people.”
“They’re not. We managed to evacuate most of the habitats before the Deliverance ships reached them. There’ve been a couple of cases where an engineering crew was left trying to strip down industrial systems and send them to safety, but that’s all. The evacuation process has been a success. Most of the habitat populations are already gone.” She didn’t mention the political resistance that some of the terraformed worlds had put up to undesirables being dumped on them; Horatio would get too upset about that. “So Alpha Defense thinks this makes sense from the Olyix viewpoint. The missiles will simply wipe out the remaining habitats, denying us the chance to save the industrial systems we’ll need if the settled stars are going to fight back.”
“Is that what’s going to happen? Are we going to fight back?”
She shrugged. “Above my pay grade. But even if they don’t, we’ll need all the industrial capacity we can get to build exodus habitats. And that’s going to take a while.”
Horatio lifted up the last chunk of croissant. “I know the stuff in your fridges and freezers will feed the three of us for another week or more, but what if it’s longer than that?”
“The food printers are still working.”
“Okay. Then we need to see if we can stock up on basic printer ingredients. Maybe some dough bricks and the like, too.”
Gwendoline stared at him thoughtfully. “You don’t think we’re going to get to Nashua?”
“I don’t know. I know Loi will do his best, but I don’t want us to be any kind of burden on him. If it takes more than a week to organize, we shouldn’t be calling him for help.”
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