The mole took three and a half hours to blast its way down to the critical point, boring deep into the mantle. Forward scans took readings of the rock in the nanosecond before the lasers destroyed it, and on-board sensors analysed the geochemistry of the vapour as it streamed through filters, too. Martins did not look up from screens for one moment of that three and a half hours. He didn’t speak, either, other than for an occasional pleased murmur. He had the projected, theoretical model of the planet’s interior along with that actually being found by the mole. Every now and again, when a key point was reached, he would give it a neat little tick.
Finally, when the mole reported back the composition of deep mantle rock, Martins raised his head.
‘We have hit hot toffee,’ he announced, ‘and it is ferropericlase.’
Thunderous applause and cheering, and Alex shook hands with him, giving him a grin and ‘Well done.’ The mole would last another sixty seven minutes before it finally gave out, and all of that data would be collected, too, but that was the moment that gave them the go for the Ignite test.
They did that next day, after final preparations of the missile were complete. The most important and most dangerous part of that was charging it with superlight fuel. They came to alert stations for that, as the Fleet required for any procedure involving uncontained fuel, and there was a certain tension as the customary ask came for silence on deck during the procedure.
Morry Morelle, though, made it look easy, handling the fizzing incandescent fuel pod into the missile as calmly as if he was putting a charged cell into a toy rocket.
Now, though, the ultimate test had arrived.
Pride was at stake, here, big time, not least because they knew very well that quite a few people at Devast considered them at least partly to blame for the failure of the first test. People with no understanding of how intolerable Candra Patello’s behaviour had become had said that the Fourth should have kept her on the ship as a vital member of the team. They had sucked teeth and shaken heads over the Fourth allowing a mere crewman to get hands on with their missile, too. Even the team here on the ship had been insultingly dubious about their abilities. If this test failed, the Fourth would be humiliated.
They left the target system shortly after ten in the morning. The Stepeasy swung into formation with them for a while, but peeled away again as they approached the point where the Heron would be releasing the missile. They were nowhere in sight as the frigate prepared for the launch.
‘At your discretion, Mr Sartin,’ said Alex, once all the checklists had been done.
Jonas tried not to swallow nervously, though his mouth felt very dry. He reminded himself that there was no more pressure on him, really, than on all of them. All he had to do was say one word.
Time stretched out like the deliberate tantalising of low-grade game shows. The whole ship seemed to be poised in a breath-held state of anticipation that went on interminably.
‘Fire,’ said Jonas, and was surprised at how calm and matter of fact he sounded.
The Ignite fired. It wasn’t a spectacular launch – it was designed for soft release, gliding out of the missile tube only fractionally faster than the ship was travelling. It didn’t accelerate, either – this was a stealth missile, after all, and high speed had been sacrificed for low visibility.
So, they followed it back to the target system, which took another two hours. There was nothing to do but keep an eye on the tiny fuzzy pixellated blob at the very edge of their long range scopes, so that was what they did. Lunch was being served as normal, but soppo and dogs were brought to the command deck for those who couldn’t tear themselves away.
Micky Efalto accepted a mug of soup, but waved away the traditional hot beef roll.
‘I’ll eat later,’ he said. He had been invited to the command deck to watch the test. That wasn’t somewhere the leading star felt at home, particularly not sitting at the big table with the officers. He was well aware of what responsibility lay on him, here, too, everything resting on whether he had correctly identified the reason for the misfire, and whether his solution worked. He was attempting a lordly nonchalance, but could not have even attempted to swallow solid food at this point.
Alex did, eating soppo and a dog with unaffected appetite. He resisted the temptation to have a game of triplink with Buzz as the ship cruised after the missile, though. That was something he would have done, before, both to distract himself at a time when there was nothing else he could be doing, and to convey to the crew a sense of relaxed confidence. Now, though, he’d accepted that could be confusing to the crew, not knowing when he was working and when he wasn’t. He had also come to understand that it would not look good to Devast, when they got this footage as part of the report. Civilians had been trained by the movies to expect eagle-eyed tension in command at such times, along with clipped orders and at least one close up of a sweating subordinate. Devast wouldn’t get that. What they would get instead was footage of the skipper enjoying a hot beef roll and mug of soup, keeping a contemplative eye on screens.
The Ignite missile slipped through the comet cloud exactly on schedule. It detonated less than four hundredths of a second later.
As before, there was a flare that was no more in the scale of the solar system than a camera flash in a major stadium.
This time, though, there was no catastrophic shattering of the target planet, no hurtling mass of debris. It was just as if the planet had been edited out in stop motion animation – one second there, the next, abruptly, not. There was no visible debris, though sensors on the frigate could see the tremendous surge of energy as the planet was blasted into sub atomic particles. It looked amazing on superlight scopes, an expanding sphere of tachyons that rapidly engulfed the entire system and spread out beyond. Visually, though, there was just nothing to see. One planet, totally destroyed in less time than the human eye could blink.
There was a second or two aboard the Heron for people to believe what they were seeing, then uproar.
Alex grinned at the yelling cheers and thunderous hammering on tables and pipes that made the whole ship feel as if it was vibrating.
‘Excellent work, Mr Efalto,’ he said, and reached out a hand.
Micky Efalto leaned forward to shake hands with him, his face flushed with pleasure and relief.
‘I never doubted it would work,’ he declared, ‘not for one minute.’
‘Me neither,’ said Alex. The two of them looked into one another’s eyes for a moment, with perfect understanding, and grinned again as they sat back.
They had to shake hands again, very soon, this time with the Devast team. They’d been in the lab, monitoring the data as it came in, but came running to the command deck as soon as the ship was stood down from alert. They were practically gabbling with delight, all shaking hands with Alex, Micky and everyone else around. Micky got apologies for having doubted him, too, along with excited congratulations and exclamations. Alex allowed them to express their amazement and delight for several minutes, then suggested they might benefit from going to calm down with a cup of tea.
‘Time to relax, now,’ he advised.
‘Are you kidding?’ Mack was wild eyed with joy, having seen six years of work come to fruition. ‘We’ll be up all night with the data!’ he declared, and as if that had triggered a need in all of them to get back to the lab, they shook hands again with as many hands as they could grab before rushing off.
‘All right,’ Alex said, with a glance around at the triumphant officers and crew on the command deck, ‘let’s try not to be too unbearably smug, shall we?’
Fourteen
Two days later, the Heron and the Stepeasy parted company.
Before they did, though, the Heron’s crew enjoyed an unexpected treat – five hour shipleave passes, issued in waves so that everyone got the opportunity to visit the superyacht. They were royally entertained, with haute cuisine catering and all the ship’s luxurious facilities available to them, including the hair salon w
ith intersystem-class stylists, the on-board spa and leisure facilities.
Top of the to-do list, however, and the most popular by far, was the opportunity to have a tour of Davie North’s private quarters. And not just a tour – by Davie’s own orders, visitors were allowed to bounce on the bed, walk through his wardrobe and try on any clothes they liked, use his bathroom and play with the state of the art environmental controls. It was the lounge that most people came back raving about – it was full surround holographic, with VR systems so sophisticated you really did feel that you might actually be in one of the tens of thousands of locations programmed in. Davie usually had it set to one of its many astrodome options, giving a real-time view of the space around the ship. That was how it had been when Alex von Strada first met him there, a disconcerting experience to walk out across what seemed like a glass floor, surrounded by infinite space, to the white fur-covered sofas.
There were only two people on the ship who didn’t take that leave. Even Jermane Taerling accepted, commenting as so many others had that it wasn’t every day you got the chance to see how the super-rich lived. Davie had not seemed surprised, though, or offended, that Alex had declined the invitation. And he was, himself, the other person who had declined it; there was nothing on the yacht that he wanted, after all.
During that two days, they were also busy transferring a good many supplies and equipment from the Second’s lab into quarters being set up for them on the Stepeasy.
Not all of them were going. Sam Maylard had made a case for being allowed to stay, in order to monitor, operate and develop the food vats which had become his particular baby. Misha Tregennis, too, had made her case for the assistance she could provide in analysing Samartian technology, should that opportunity arise.
The others were all leaving. Some of them were a little shamefaced as they did so – Alex had turned down an application to stay from Misha’s post-grad assistant, seeing that he was shaking with fear even as he tried to tell the captain how much he wanted to stay. The Devast team, too, had felt obliged to offer to come along in case they could be of any help in providing information about the Ignite. They had been rather obviously relieved, though, when Alex had pointed out that there was no need for that as the Fourth knew all about it themselves. It was true, too, that it was important for them to stay behind in case the Heron didn’t return. They would need to take the test-fire data back to Devast, convince their board that the problem had been solved, and bring the Ignite into production as quickly as possible.
So Mack McLaver and the others departed, cheered off the ship by the crew and still calling out thanks and good wishes as the airlock closed behind them. Just minutes after that, the superyacht signalled a salute to the frigate as the Heron turned away. Quite a few people watched the yacht fall behind with a pang of regret. It had been good to have their company during the last nine weeks’ dark running. Now they really would be isolated, entirely out on their own.
There were many, too, thinking of their families. All of them had left mail with the Stepeasy, all of them conscious that if they did not return, that would be the last messages their families would ever get from them. Buzz had advised that people shouldn’t make those messages over-emotional. If the worst happened and they didn’t make it home, they would want their families to see that they had been strong, happy, embarking on a great adventure. And if that wasn’t true, as Buzz observed, they were on the wrong ship.
All the same, there were some tearful moments on the ship as people recorded holo-messages for partners, parents and children left behind. It was hard not to get emotional, when you had to say things like ‘if I don’t make it home, I want you to know that I love you very much’. People were watching footage they’d brought with them from Therik, too, messages recorded for them by their loved ones and holos from shoreleave. There was an atmosphere on the ship, not of homesickness exactly but of sentimentality.
At the same time, though, there was a thrill of expectation. Whatever regret there may have been over leaving the Stepeasy behind was overcome as the yacht vanished from scopes in a couple of minutes. People turned away, returning their attention to what was happening aboard the ship.
At first sight, that looked like nothing very much – business as usual, the skipper on the command deck and Buzz doing rounds. This was an official procedure carried out every day by the Exec, doing a visual inspection and using spot-check scanners to confirm that the ship was in a clean and tidy condition. Teabreak Li, the Housekeeping Sub, was following. The Sub knew very well that the ship had been thoroughly cleaned that morning and that the worst possible thing that could happen was that Buzz might pick up and mention, very pleasantly, something that had happened since Teabreak’s own fanatically careful inspection. That did not stop him being tense as a coiled spring, though. Some of the crew found it amusing to wind him up by putting fingerprints on walls or mug-rings on tables.
And there, sure enough, was a dirty great greasy handprint on the grab-rail of a zero-gee ladderway. It was visible with the naked eye, obvious from metres away. It could only have been put there seconds before the Exec and Housekeeping Sub came into that section of the ship. Already, the autobot that kept that ladderway clean was homing in on it; a busy, purposeful little beetle.
Buzz looked at the handprint, glanced around at the handful of crew working in the section and homed in on the one who had a hand oh so casually in his pocket. Teabreak, beside him, was almost quivering with indignation.
Buzz smiled at the suspect, one Leading Star Jonno Trevaga. Trevaga grinned back, trying to look as much like an angel as his bullish features would allow. Buzz’s own smile was indulgent. They had been quite worried about Trevaga for a while. He’d been so devastated by the consequences of his mischief at Karadon that he’d vowed he’d never mess around again. And he had, too, maintained an alarmingly high standard of saintly behaviour, far too saintly to be either good for him or sustainable, long term. It was good to see him relaxed and having a harmless laugh again. Or at least, Buzz thought so. Teabreak’s brooding look was not nearly so appreciative.
‘Satisfactory response to recent contamination,’ Buzz stated, for the inspection record.
He moved on with no more comment than that, leaving the crew grinning. Even while they were having rounds and winding Teabreak up, though, they were keeping half an eye on an astrogation screen. It had a countdown in one corner, signalling how long it would be until they crossed the League border.
As that ticked down to under twenty minutes, speculative buzz intensified. The crew had been expecting an announcement from the skipper any time these last few days, telling them that they would not be able to indulge in the traditional fun and games of border crossing. This was not at all the same kind of situation as when they’d left League space to go to X-base Amali, after all. That had involved rising out of the irregular pancake of League territory, the border just a technicality.
This, though, was very different. This was an active border. The moment they crossed the border here they would technically be within Marfikian-controlled space, behind enemy lines. It hardly seemed the time to be indulging in horseplay.
On the other hand, any rational analysis would conclude that they would be at no greater risk that side of that border than they were this. This region might be non-charted but it was rated low hazard for ordinary navigation. They would not reach the area hatched out as non-navigable for another seven days, yet. The chances of encountering Marfikians out here were so remote as to be not worth considering, too.
Even so, there was a question hanging over it right till the moment when the astrogation chart showed that they had crossed the notional plane that defined League territory. Buzz was back on the command deck by then, sitting next to Alex with an air of amused expectation.
Then Hali Burdon went onto the command deck, along with Able Star Jenni Asforth, currently the youngest member of the crew.
‘All right, hop it,’ Jenni said, with a disres
pect that would have got her on a charge at any other time than this. ‘We’re outside League borders, Fleet rules don’t hold any more and we’re taking the ship.’
Alex surrendered to this mutiny with a grin, leading his officers off to the wardroom where they were to be nominally ‘detained’ for the next hour. Hali took the conn, herself, as she was perfectly qualified to do, and waited for the few seconds to be sure that all other essential posts were being held by petty officers, too. Then she grinned, nodding to Jenni who was to be ‘skipper’ for the next hour. Jenni grinned hugely, drew breath, and gave the wildest order in the Fleet’s lexicon.
‘Let the rumpus begin!’
As the crew ran wild around the ship, playing ball games, having food fights and enjoying all the usual rumpus fun, Alex and the officers enjoyed the equally traditional tea party in the wardroom. There was something wonderfully absurd about sitting there sipping tea and nibbling little sandwiches while the crew was running riot. Several of the passengers joined them there, too, having been given the option of taking sanctuary in the wardroom if they liked.
‘I suppose this is what the media got hold of,’ Jermane observed, a little uneasily, as a thunderous ball game hurtled past the wardroom door, ‘when they were reporting that you’d had a riot aboard, that time at Karadon.’
He was speaking to Martine Fishe, who smiled confirmation.
‘Impossible for us to explain what was really going on, of course,’ she commented. ‘Since to do so we’d have had to admit to having left League space. Though they knew the score there, of course – the more clued up journos, at least. It was just that protest thing they do, broadcasting the story they know isn’t true in protest against not being allowed to report what they know is. That didn’t bother us nearly so much as spacers, obviously, recognising immediately that the kind of riot being reported could only be a border-crossing rumpus. One of the Fleet’s oldest customs, this, you know.’
Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Page 30