Such arrogance, he cursed inside the confines of his own skull, such stupid blind faith in our technological prowess.
Right now there were fourteen adults and five children crammed inside. There hadn’t been time for them to reach another lifeboat. With a hubris which hindsight revealed to be quite monstrous, the disasters which the designers anticipated had all been natural. Even a meteorite strike would leave most of the wheel intact, and evacuation would be a calm rational process.
What had never been even a theoretical contingency was insane Adamist starships slicing the station apart with lasers.
It had all happened so fast. Now little Gatje and Haykal hugged Tiya, their mother, faces distraught as she kept them anchored. The air was too hot, it stank of vomit. Aethra couldn’t hide its torment over the kinetic missile attack that bit deep into its shell from the young impressionable minds. Candre’s death convulsions as she went through explosive decompression was still causing wintry shivers along Gaura’s spine. The combined psychological stresses of the last fifteen minutes was going to leave a trauma scar that would take a long time to heal even for the well-balanced psyche of an Edenist.
And it was all his fault. As station chief he should have taken precautions. He had known about the civil strife on Lalonde. Yet he had done nothing.
It is not your fault,aethra said softly into his mind. Who could have anticipated this?
I should have.
From the information you had, this was not predictable.
I had enough data from Ilex. It was chaos on the planet when they left.
These starships did not come from Lalonde. They are mercenaries, recruited elsewhere.
I could still have done something. Put people into apartments closer to the lifeboats. Something! How are Candre and the others?
I have them. But now is not a good time to begin raising my consciousness to multiplicity status.
No. And you? How are you?
I was angry, frightened. Now I feel sorrow. It is a sad universe where such wanton acts can take place.
I’m sorry we brought you into existence. You have done nothing to deserve this.
I am glad I live. And I may yet continue to live. None of the craters is more than twenty metres deep. I have lost a lot of nutrient fluid though, and my mineral-digestion organs have been damaged from the shockwaves.
Gaura’s hand squeezed the grab hoop he was holding. Fury and helplessness were alien to him, but he felt them now with a daunting strength. The physical damage can be repaired. It will be repaired, never doubt that. Not as long as one Edenist remains alive.
Thank you, Gaura. You are a fine supervisor. I am privileged to have you and your staff attend the dawn of my intellect. And one day Gatje and Haykal shall run around in my park. I will enjoy their laughter.
A solid beam of intolerable white light stabbed into the lifeboat through its one small, heavily shielded port. Space was being devastated by another hail of fusion explosions. The children started crying again.
Through Aethra’s much-degraded perception he saw the long white fusion exhaust of the third Adamist starship decelerating towards them. With its tremendous velocity it had to be a warship, but there had been no contact apart from the curt woman telling them to switch off the beacon. Who were they? Who were the other two? Why had they attacked Aethra?
Not knowing was difficult for an Edenist.
You will soon be safe,aethra said. it widened its broadcast to include the Edenists on both lifeboats. All of you will be safe.
Gaura met his wife’s frightened stubborn eyes. I love you,he said for her alone.
The blast light was fading. He looked out of the port, his mind welcoming inquisitive contacts, showing the children their solidly real rescuer approaching.
Whoever the pilot was, he was coming very close. And moving far too fast.
Space directly outside the lifeboat was filled with the brilliant fusion exhaust. Gaura flinched, jerking back from the port. It’s going to hit!
There were screams behind him. Then the exhaust vanished, and a huge spherical starship was a hundred metres away, small sensor clusters sticking out of its dark silicon hull like metallized insect antenna. Its equatorial ion thrusters exhaled fountains of sparkling blue ions, halting its minute drift.
Bloody hell!it was a collective sentiment from the adults.
The starship rolled towards the lifeboat as though there was a solid surface below it. And its extended airlock tube was suddenly coming round to clang against the hatch.
Gaura took a moment to recover his poise. A voidhawk would be very hard put to match that display of precision manoeuvring.
The lifeboat’s bitek processors reported the short-range inter-ship channel was picking up a transmission.
“You people in the lifeboat, as soon as the hatch opens we want you through the tube and into the lounge,” commanded the female voice they’d heard earlier. “Make it fast! We’re running out of combat wasps and we’ve got to pick your friends up as well.”
The hatch seal popped and it swung back. Little Gatje squealed in alarm as one of the biggest cosmoniks Gaura had ever seen floated in the airlock tube.
It’s all right,he told his dismayed daughter. He’s a . . . friend. Really.
Gatje clutched at the fabric of her mother’s suit. Promise, Daddy?
“Shift your bastard arses through here now!” Warlow bellowed.
The children gulped into fearful silence.
Gaura couldn’t help it, after all the horror they’d been through to be greeted by such utter normality, he started to laugh. I promise.
“Oh, Jesus, they’ve cracked it,” Joshua told the three crew-members left on the bridge when Lady Mac rendezvoused with the second lifeboat. Another combat wasp was curving round over Aethra’s bulk, accelerating sharply. “I knew they’d work out the numbers game eventually.” He fired a salvo of three drones in defence. It was a terrible ratio. One which the Lady Mac could only ever lose. Three defenders was an absolute minimum to guarantee an attacker didn’t get through. If he could just have flown evasive manoeuvres, or attacked, or been able to run, the numbers would have shifted back towards something near favourable.
“Jesus!” The fourth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. He had to launch another three from Lady Mac ’s diminishing reserves.
“Fifteen left,” Sarha said with morbid cheerfulness. The starship’s maser cannons fired at a kinetic missile that was sixty kilometres away. Five nuclear-tipped submunitions exploded perilously close to Aethra, reducing the latest attacking combat wasp to its subatomic constituents.
“Did you have to tell us that?” Melvyn said laboriously.
“You mean you didn’t know?”
“Yes. But I could always hope I was wrong.”
Joshua accessed a camera on the airlock deck. Warlow had anchored himself to a stikpad beside the airlock tube. He was grabbing people as they came out and slinging them into the chamber. Ashly and one of the Edenist men were on a stikpad below the ceiling hatch, catching then shoving the human projectiles up into the lounge above.
“How many more to come, Warlow?” Joshua datavised.
“Six. That makes forty-one in total.”
“Wonderful. Stand by for combat acceleration the second the airlock seals.” He sounded the audio warning so the Edenists would know. The flight computer showed his plot of an open-ended vector heading away from Murora. At eight gees they could outrun the other starships easily, and jump outsystem. That kind of prolonged acceleration would be tough on the Edenists (no sinecure for the crew, either), but it was one hell of a lot better than staying here.
“Joshua, Gaura has asked me to say some of the children are very young, they can’t possibly survive high gees,” Warlow datavised. “Their bones aren’t strong enough.”
“Jesus shit! Kids? How old? How many gees?”
“One girl was about three. There were a couple of five-year-olds as well.”
�
��Fuck it!”
“What is it?” Sarha asked, real concern darkening her sea-green eyes for the first time since they’d entered the Lalonde system.
“We’re not going to make it.”
The fifth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. Seven of the Lady Mac ’s submunition drones detonated their nuclear explosives in immediate response. Joshua launched two more.
“Even if we jump without an alignment trajectory, from here, it’ll take us fifteen seconds to retract the sensors and prime the nodes,” he said. “We’ll be blind for ten seconds. It’s not long enough.”
“So run,” Sarha said. “Fire every last combat wasp at them and go. Lady Mac can make eight gees even with tube one down. Maranta can’t make more than four gees. We can get clear.”
“That vector’s already loaded. But we’ve got kids on board. Shit! Shit! Shit!” He saw the last Edenist being yanked out of the airlock tube by Warlow. The flight computer was shutting the hatch before his feet were fully clear.
Do something, and do it now, Joshua Calvert, he told himself. Because you’re going to be dead in twenty seconds if you don’t.
His mind ordered the flight computer to start the fusion tube ignition sequence.
Another whole two seconds to think in.
There was nothing in the tactics programs, even Dad had never dug himself a hole this deep in the shit.
Can’t run, can’t fight, can’t jump out, can’t hide . . .
“Oh yes I can!” he whooped.
The fusion drives came on, and the Lady Mac accelerated down the vector plot that sprang from Joshua’s mind even as the idea unrolled. Three gees, heading straight in towards the gas giant.
“Joshua!” Dahybi complained. “We can’t jump if you take us inward.”
“Shut up.”
Dahybi settled back and started into a recital of a scripture he remembered from his youth. “Yes, Captain.”
“Warlow, activate the three zero-tau pods we’ve got in capsule C, and cram the children in. You’ve got four minutes maximum before we start accelerating properly.”
“Right, Joshua.”
The sensors reported that four combat wasps were pursuing them. Joshua fired an answering salvo of five. He could hear Dahybi muttering something that sounded like a prayer, it had the right dirge-like resonance.
“They’re coming after us,” Melvyn said a minute later.
Maranta and its cohort were accelerating away from Aethra.
“That’s the Gramine ,” Sarha said after studying the image. “Look at the angle its drive is deflected through. There isn’t another starship that can do that. Wissler was always boasting about their combat agility.”
“Just wonderful, Sarha, thanks,” Joshua proclaimed. “You got any other morale boosters for us?”
Warlow climbed the ladder into the lounge deck, boosted muscles lifting him easily against the heavy gravity. Carbon composite rungs creaked in dismay under his tripled weight. There were Edenists packed solid across the lounge floor, none of the acceleration couches had been activated—not that there were enough anyway. They didn’t have neural nanonics, the cosmonik realized. And because of it their children whimpered and snivelled in wretched distress without any cushioning below them.
He walked over to the smallest girl, who was lying wide-eyed and terribly pale beside her mother. “I’m putting her into zero-tau,” he announced shortly, and bent down. He had plugged a pair of cargo-handling arms into his elbow sockets before coming up the ladder, they had wide metal manipulator forks which would act as a good cradle. The girl started crying again. “There will be none of this acceleration in the pod. Explain to her. She must not squirm when I pick her up. Her spine will break.”
Be brave,tiya told her daughter. He will take you to a safe place where you won’t hurt so.
He’s horrible,gatje replied as the metal prongs slid underneath her.
You will be all right,gaura said, reinforcing the pacific mental subliminal Tiya was radiating.
Warlow took care to keep Gatje’s spine level, supporting her head with one set of forks while the other three arms were positioned under her torso and legs. He lifted gingerly.
“Can I help?” Gaura asked, levering himself onto his elbows. His neck felt as though it was being slowly compressed in a hydraulic vice.
“No. You are too weak.” Warlow clumped out of the lounge, an outlandish faerie-legend figure walking amongst the prone hurting bodies with a grace completely at variance with his cumbersome appearance.
There were seven children under ten years old. It took him nearly five minutes to shift them from the lounge to the zero-tau pods. His neural nanonics monitored their flight on a secondary level. The attacking starships were matching Lady Mac ’s three-gee acceleration. Combat-wasp submunitions produced a continual astral fire of plasma between them.
Lady Mac swept over the fringes of the ring, two thousand kilometres above the ecliptic as Warlow lowered the last child into the zero-tau pod.
“Thank Christ for that,” Joshua said when the pod was enveloped by the black field. “OK, people, stand by for high acceleration.”
Lady Mac ’s thrust increased to seven gees, tormenting the Edenists in the lounge still further. For all the stamina of their geneered bodies they had never been supplemented to withstand the onerous burden of combat spaceflight.
Maranta and Gramine began to fall behind. Sensors showed three more combat wasps eating up the distance.
“Jesus, how many of the fucking things have they got left?” Joshua asked as he launched four of the Lady Mac ’s remaining six drones in response.
“I estimate ten,” Melvyn datavised. “Possibly more.”
“Wonderful.” Joshua angled the Lady Mac down sharply towards the rings.
The slow moving pack of dusty ice chunks reflected an unaccustomed radiance as the three starships streaked past. After millennia of stasis, stirred only by the slow heartbeat of the gas giant’s magnetosphere, the ring’s micrometre dust was becoming aroused by the backwash of electromagnetic pulses from the fusion bombs exploding above it. Dark snowflake-crystal patterns rippled elegantly over its surface. The temperature rose by several fractions of a degree, breaking up the unique and fantastically delicate valency bonds between disparate atoms which free fall and frigidity had established. Behind the starships, the rings quivered like a choppy sea before the storm was unleashed.
Those on board the Lady Macbeth able to receive the sensor images watched with numbed fascination as the ring particles grew larger, changing from a grainy mist to a solid plain of drifting mud-yellow boulders. It took up half of the image; they were close enough now to make it seem like the floor of the universe.
The penultimate combat wasp darted out of the Lady Macbeth ’s launch-tubes. Submunitions ejected almost at once, scattering like a shoal of startled fish. A hundred kilometres behind her, twenty-seven fusion bombs arrayed in an ammonite maculation detonated simultaneously, throwing up a temporary visual and electronic barrier. She turned, unseen by her pursuers, triple drive exhausts scoring vast arcs across the stars. Then the three barbs of superenergized helium were searing into the ice and rock of the ring. No physical structure was capable of withstanding that starcore temperature. The agitated surface cratered and geysered as though a depth charge had been set off far below.
Lady Macbeth dived straight into the rings, decelerating at eleven gees.
Chapter 10
The watchers were there when Alkad Mzu arrived at the shoreline of Tranquillity’s circumfluous salt-water sea. As always they remained several hundred metres behind, innocuous fellow hikers enjoying the balmy evening, even a couple on horses trekking along the wilder paths of the habitat. She counted eight of them as she walked along the top of the steep rocky escarpment to the path which led down to the beach. This cove was one of the remoter stretches of the northern shoreline; a broad curve of silver-white sand two kilometres long, with jutting headlands of polyp-rock cliffs.
Several small islands were included within the bay’s sweeping embrace, tenanted by willowy trees and a fur of colourful wild flowers. A river emptied over the escarpment two hundred metres from the path where she stood, producing a foaming waterfall which fell into a rock pool before draining away over the sands. Overhead, the giant habitat’s light-tube had languished to an apricot ember strung between its endcap hubs. Vitric water caught the final rays to produce a soft-focus copper shimmer across the wavelets.
Alkad picked her way carefully along the shingle-strewn path. An accident now would be the ultimate irony, she thought. There was the familiar nagging ache in her left leg, exacerbated by the rough incline.
Her retinal implants located a pair of adolescent lovers in the dunes at the far end of the beach. Craving solitude amid the deepening shadows, their dark entwined bodies were oblivious to the world, and nearly invisible. The girl’s baby-blonde hair provided a rich contrast to her ebony skin, while the boy reminded Alkad of Peter as he stroked and caressed his willing partner. An omen, though Alkad Mzu no longer really believed in deities.
She reached the warm, dry sands and adjusted the straps of her lightweight backpack. It was the one she had brought with her to the habitat twenty-six years ago; it contained the cagoule and flask and first aid kit which she carried unfailingly on every ramble through the interior. By now the routine of her hike was scribed in stone. If she hadn’t worn it, the Intelligence agencies would have been suspicious.
Alkad cut across the dunes at an angle, aiming for the middle of the beach, her feet leaving light imprints in the powdery sand. Three watchers made their way down the path behind her, the rest carried on walking along the top of the escarpment. And—a recent development, this—a couple of Tranquillity serjeants stood impassively at the foot of the escarpment beside the waterfall. She only saw them against the craggy polyp because of their infrared emission. They must have been positioned there in anticipation of her route.
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