Liol, Monica, Alkad, and Dahybi were already in the small galley when he air-swam through the hatch. They gave him varying sympathetic looks which he acknowledged ruefully.
“We’ve been talking to Syrinx and Cacus,” Monica said. She shrugged at Joshua; he’d paused in the act of filling his tea sachet from the water nozzle to raise an eyebrow. “Not just us that’s restless. Anyway, they’ve located another seven diskcities.”
Joshua datavised the flight computer for a general communication link and said good morning to the Oenone ’s crew.
“The Mosdva empire appears to be quite extensive,” Syrinx told him. “Judging by the distribution of diskcities we’ve seen so far, that early estimate needs to be revised upwards. Fair enough if we believe there were seven thousand asteroid habitats to begin with. Kempster and Renato have also been scanning further out from the photosphere. So far they haven’t located a single lump of rock within twenty degrees of the ecliptic. Quantook-LOU was telling the truth when he said there was a desperate struggle for mass after the stellar expansion. Every spare gram must have been incorporated into the diskcities.”
“Quantook-LOU didn’t say struggle,” Joshua said. “He said wars, plural.”
“Which he blamed squarely on the Tyrathca,” Alkad said.
Joshua gave the physicist a bleak look. She didn’t say much, but her comments were normally pretty valid. “You think the Mosdva took control earlier than that?”
“We can never know exactly what this star system’s history is, but I would think it likely that the Mosdva started their revolt right after the star’s expansion phase. That would be when the Tyrathca were most dependant on them. Everything else we’ve been told does tend to paint them in an unusually generous light. An oppressed people struggle to regain their long-lost freedom. Please. History is always written by the good guys.”
“I did gloss over some of our less endearing traits,” Joshua said. “That’s human nature.”
“You should have stung Quantook-LOU’s office space with some nanonic bugs,” Liol said. “I’d love to hear what’s being said in there right now.”
“Too big a risk,” Monica said. “If they found them, at worst they could interpret it as a hostile act; and even if they were diplomatic about it, we would have handed them a whole new technology.”
“I don’t think that leaves us much to worry about,” Liol said. “The Confederation isn’t about to be invaded by Mosdva, it’s the Tyrathca we have to worry about.”
“Enough,” Joshua said. He shifted round to make room for a sleepy unshaven Ashly who was drifting into the galley. “Look, we’ve just about got everyone up now anyway, we’d best convene and thrash out what we’re going to do next.”
There was one more discovery before the meeting started. Joshua was finishing his breakfast when Beaulieu datavised a curt message requesting him to access Lady Mac ’s sensor suite. “I’ve located a Mosdva ship,” the cosmonik said.
“At last,” Liol said eagerly. He closed his eyes and accessed the image.
Beaulieu hadn’t activated any visual enhancement programs to counter the redness. All Joshua could make out was a big brilliant-white shape gliding up towards a rendezvous with Tojolt-HI—the same configuration as the ship already docked to the rim: five huge globes clumped round a drive unit and scoop. Except these globes were glowing a vivid purple-white, brighter than the photosphere.
“It surfaced twenty minutes ago,” Beaulieu datavised.
The cosmonik replayed the recording. Lady Mac ’s sensors had detected a magnetic anomaly within the photosphere, hundreds of kilometres wide, the flux lines twisting into a dense wood-knot pattern. But it was moving faster than orbital velocity, and growing larger. Visual sensors started tracking it, showing the endless scarlet haze. At first it was as unruffled as a sea mist at dawn, then the impossible happened and long streaks of shadow rippled across the picture. They were actually folds in the gas. Something underneath was stirring the igneous hydrogen atoms, creating swirling currents in the calm envelope. A bright patch of white light started to shine up through the red plasma. The ship rose up smooth and clean through the outer layers of the photosphere, scoop first, pushing a vast bow wave of glowing ions ahead of it. Each of its five globes was shining as bright as a white dwarf star, radiating away enormous quantities of electromagnetic and thermal energy. Thick scarlet coronas avalanched from the lip of the scoop, purling gently all the way back down into the body of the red giant. The remainder of the nimbus was sucked down into the ship’s funnel, growing steadily brighter as it progressed, until it was consumed by a dazzling white flame burning brightly at the throat.
“The globes have been dimming since it surfaced,” Beaulieu said. “Their external temperature is dropping in concert.”
“Looks like you were right about it being a ramscoop, Josh,” Liol said cheerfully. “It’s got to be where they get their mass from now the asteroids have been consumed. Fancy that, mining the sun.”
“That thermal dump technology is damn impressive,” Sarha said. “It’s got to be superior to anything we have. Shedding heat while you’re inside a star. God!”
“Simply compressing and condensing photosphere hydrogen into a stable gaseous state wouldn’t generate that much heat,” Alkad said. “They must be fusing it, burning it down into helium, perhaps even all the way to carbon.”
“Christ, they must be desperate for mass.”
“The iron limit,” Joshua mused. “You can’t fuse atoms past iron without having to input energy. Every other reaction until that element generates energy.”
“Is that relevant?” Liol asked.
“Not sure. But it makes iron their gold equivalent. It can’t hurt knowing what they value most. It’s the trans-iron elements that they’ll be running out of.”
“The fact that they’ve resorted to this extraordinary method gives us some considerable leverage,” Samuel said. “We’ve seen little evidence of molecular engineering compounds in the diskcity structure. Our materials science will allow them to exploit mass far more efficiently than they do currently. Every innovation we bring has the potential for inflicting vast change upon them.”
“This is what we have to decide,” Syrinx said. “Liol, have the ELINT satellites revealed anything that might help us?”
“Not really. They’re holding station a thousand kilometres above the darkside now, which gives us excellent coverage. It’s pretty much what we observed as we flew in: trains moving about and very little else. Oh, we picked up a couple of nasty-looking atmospheric vents. The tubes must have ruptured. There were bodies in the gas stream.”
“They must fight a constant maintenance battle against structural fatigue,” Oxley said. “That’s a lot of surface area to cover.”
“Everything’s relative,” Sarha said. “There’s a lot of Mosdva to cover it.”
“I wonder how inter-dependant the dominions are,” Parker said. “For all Quantook-LOU says about driving a hard bargain on the cargo and mass which Anthi-CL sends to the inner dominions, they have to ensure supplies are preserved. Without fresh material, the tubes would decay. The inner dominions would react strongly to such a threat, I imagine.”
“We’ve confirmed eighty dead areas across Tojolt-HI,” Beaulieu said. “They amount to just under thirteen per cent of the total.”
“So much? That would tend to indicate a society in decline, possibly even a decadent one.”
“Individual dominions might fall,” Ruben said. “But overall their society remains intact. Face it, the Confederation has inhabited worlds that don’t exactly thrive, yet some of our cultures are positively vibrant. And I find it significant that none of the rim sections are dead.”
“The other major source of external activity is based around those dead sections,” Liol said. “It looks like major repair and reconstruction work. Those dominions certainly aren’t decadent, they’re busy expanding into their old neighbours’ territory.”
“I
can accept they’re socially comparable to us,” Syrinx said. “So based on that assumption, do we offer them ZTT technology?”
“In exchange for a ten-thousand-year-old almanac?” Joshua said. “You’ve got to be kidding. Quantook-LOU is smart, he’ll know there’s something very wrong about that. I’d suggest we build in an exchange of astronometrical data and records along with whatever commercial trade deal we can put together. After all, they’ve never seen what lies on the other side of the nebula. If we offer them the ability to break free of Tyrathca-dominated space they’ll need to know what’s out there.”
“I’ve told you,” Ashly said. “ZTT isn’t a way out.”
“Not for the proles,” Liol said. “But the leadership might take it for their families, or clans, or members of whatever cause they rally round. And it’s the leadership we have to deal with.”
“Is that the kind of legacy we really want to leave behind us?” Peter Adul asked quietly. “The opportunity for interstellar conflict and internal strife?”
“Don’t get all moral on me,” Liol said. “Not you. We can’t afford those kind of ethics. It’s our goddamn species on the brink here. I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”
“If, as intended, we’re going to ask a God for its help, perhaps you should consider how worthy we’re going to appear before it should you follow that course.”
“What if it considers obliterating your foes to be a worthy act? You’re assigning it very human traits. The Tyrathca never did that.”
“That’s a point,” Dahybi said. “Now we know why the Tyrathca managed to get where they are with zero imagination, how does that reflect on our analysis of the Sleeping God?”
“Very little, I’m afraid,” Kempster said. “From what we’ve learned about them, I’d say that unless the Sleeping God explained itself to the Tyrathca of Swantic-LI, they simply wouldn’t know what the hell it was. By calling it a God, they were being as truthful as only they can be. The simplest translation equates to our own: something so powerful we do not comprehend it.”
“Just how much will ZTT change the diskcity society?” Syrinx asked.
“Considerably,” Parker said. “As Samuel points out, just by being here we have changed it. We have shown Tojolt-HI that it is possible to circumvent Tyrathca space. As this is a species with an intellect not dissimilar to our own, we must assume they will ultimately pursue that method. In effect, that gives us control over the timing, nothing more. And allowing them access to ZTT now may generate a portion of goodwill among at least one faction of a very long lived and versatile race. I say we should pursue every effort to make the Mosdva our friends. After all, we now know that ZTT or the voidhawk distortion field ability are hardly the last word in interstellar travel, the Kiint teleport ability has taught us that lesson.”
“Any other options?” Syrinx asked.
“As I see it, we have four in total,” Samuel said. “We can try and get the almanac through a trade exchange. We can use force.” He paused to smile apologetically as his fellow Edenists registered their disapproval. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we have that ability, therefore it should be examined. Our weaponry is likely to be superior, and our electronic and software capability would definitely be able to extract information from their memory cores.”
“That’s an absolute last resort,” Syrinx said.
“Totally,” Joshua agreed firmly. “This is a culture which wages war over any spare mass on a scale we’ve never seen before. They might not have sophisticated weapons compared to ours, but they’ll have one hell of a lot of them; and Lady Mac is in the front line. What are the other two?”
“If Quantook-LOU proves uncooperative, we simply find a dominion which will help us. We’re not exactly short of choice. The last option is a variant of that: we leave straight away and find a Tyrathca colony.”
“We’ve established a reasonable level of contact with Quantook-LOU and the Anthi-CL dominion,” Sarha said. “I think we should build on that. Don’t forget time is a factor as well, and we came here so we wouldn’t have to deal with the Tyrathca.”
“Very well,” Syrinx said. “We’ll follow Joshua’s tactic for now. Set up a major commercial trade, and tack on the almanac data as a subsidiary deal.”
Joshua kept the same team with him when he returned to the diskcity. This time they were shown directly to Quantook-LOU’s private glass bubble.
“Have you found trade items within your ship, Captain Joshua Calvert?” the Mosdva asked.
“I believe so,” Joshua said. He glanced round the translucent chamber with its barnacles of alien machinery, vaguely disquieted. Something had changed. His neural nanonics ran a comparison check with his visual memory file. “I’m not sure if it’s relevant,” he told his crew through the affinity link, “But several chunks of hardware bolted onto the piping are different now.”
“We see them, Josh,” Liol answered.
“Anybody got any ideas what they could be?”
“I’m not picking up any sensor emissions,” Oski said. “But they’ve got strong magnetic fields, definitely active electronics inside.”
“Beam weapons?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t see anything that equates to a nozzle on any of them, and the magnetic field doesn’t correspond to a power cell. My best guess is that they’ve rebuilt this whole chamber as a magnetic resonance scanner: if they’ve got quantum interface detectors sensitive enough they probably think it will allow them to look inside our armour.”
“Will it?”
“No. Our suit shielding will block that. Nice try though.”
“Did you examine the processor I gave you?” Joshua asked Quantook-LOU.
“It has been tested. Your design is a radical one. We believe we can duplicate it.”
“I can offer more advanced processors than that. As well, we have power storage cells that operate at very high density levels. We offer the formula for superstrength molecular chains; which should be very useful to you, given your shortage of mass.”
“Interesting. And what would you like in return?”
“We saw your ship returning from the sun. Your thermal dissipation technology would be extremely useful to us.”
The negotiation took off well, Joshua and Quantook-LOU reeling out lists of technology and fabrication methods. The trick was in trying to balance them: was optical memory crystal worth more or less than a membrane layer that could guard metal surfaces against vacuum ablation? Did a low-energy carbon filtration process have parity with ultrastrong magnets?
As they talked, Oski kept monitoring the new hardware modules. The magnetic fields they put out were constantly changing, sweeping across the translucent bubble in waves. None of them were able to penetrate their suits. In return, her own sensors could pick up the resonance patterns they generated inside the Mosdva. She slowly built up a three-dimensional image of their internal structure, the triangular plates of bone and mysterious organs. It was an enjoyable irony, she felt. After forty minutes, the magnetic fields were abruptly switched off.
Liol was paying scant attention to the negotiations. He and Beaulieu were occupied reviewing the data coming in from their ELINT satellites. Now they had the observation subroutines customized properly, there was a lot of activity to see on the darkside. Trains moved everywhere, following a simple generalized pattern. Large full tankers made their way inwards from the rim, offloading cargo at the industrial modules, then once they were empty, they turned and went directly back to the rim. Goods trains, those loaded with items produced inside industrial modules, ran in every direction. Liol and Beaulieu were beginning to think they might even be independent trading caravans, forever touring round the dominions. Something Joshua hadn’t asked was if the Mosdva had currency, or if everything was bartered.
“Another vent,” Beaulieu commented. “It’s only seventy kilometres from the captain’s location.”
“Christ, that’s the third this morning.” Liol ordered the closest sa
tellite to focus on the plume. Bobbles of liquid were oscillating amid the gas squirting out towards the nebula. Ebony shapes, radiating brightly in the infrared, thrashed around inside it, their motions grinding down the further away they got from the darkside. “You’d think they’d have better structural integrity after all this time. Everything else they do seems to work pretty well. I know I wouldn’t like to live with that kind of threat looming over me, it’s worse than building a house on the side of a volcano.” His subconscious wouldn’t leave the notion alone; there was something wrong about the frequency of the tube breeches. He ran a quick projection through his neural nanonics. “Uh, guys, if they suffer structural failure at this rate, the whole diskcity will fail inside of seven years. And I’ve included some pretty generous rebuilding allowances in that.”
“Then you must have got it wrong,” Kempster said.
“Either that, or this isn’t a normal event we’re witnessing.”
“Venting again,” Beaulieu called out. “Same web as the last, barely a hundred metres apart.”
In the Oenone ’s bridge, Syrinx gave Ruben an alarmed look. “Access all the visual records from the ELINT satellites,” she said. “See what kind of activity there is in the vent areas prior to the actual event.”
Ruben, Oxley, and Serina nodded in unison. Their minds merged with the bitek memory processors governing the satellites.
“Do we tell Joshua?” Ashly asked.
“Not yet,” Syrinx said. “I don’t want him alarmed. Let’s see if we can confirm the cause first.”
An hour after they began negotiating, Joshua and Quantook-LOU had finalized a list of twenty items to exchange. It was to be mainly information, formatted to the digital standard used by the Mosdva, with one physical sample of each item to prove the concept wasn’t merely a boastful lie.
“I’d like to move on to pure data now,” Joshua said. “We’re interested in as much of your history as you’re prepared to release; astronomical observations, particularly those dealing with the sun’s expansion; any significant cultural works; mathematics; the biochemical structure of your plant life. More if you’re willing.”
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