The tall pinnacles of thermal radiators glowed a steady orange in the voidhawk’s senses. It could feel the broad fans of heat they gave off, slucing away through space towards the distant nebula. In the visual spectrum, Tojolt-HI was almost black. The exception came from the area where the sunscoop had attacked. Foil sheets had either been torn free or disintegrated, allowing sharp beams of intense red light to steal through the cluttered webs.
If Wing-Tsit Chong and the therapists could see me now,syrinx said contentedly.
They don’t need to,ruben said. They know they did their job properly.
Yes, but it still galled when they said it. Just a timid tourist, indeed!
I am glad we came, Oenone said. Everything here is fresh, but old at the same time. I feel Tojolt-HI has a dependability about it.
I know what you mean,she told the enchanted voidhawk. Anything that has such a long past must surely have an equally long future ahead of it.
It did have until we arrived,ruben said.
You’re wrong. The Mosdva can’t abandon it, nor any of the others. Ashly is right, ZTT won’t give them that option. But maybe we’ll see change. Progress will begin again. I prefer to think of that as being our legacy. And who knows what they will achieve with fresh resources and new technologies.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
You’re right.the briefest glimmer of regret appeared amid her thoughts.
I’m picking up considerable radar activity above this side of the diskcity,edwin said. I think our countermeasures are deflecting them.
Thank you,syrinx said. Nothing we can do about visual acquisition, I’m afraid. And we’re silhouetted against the nebula for all Tojolt-HI to see. Serina, have you acquired the trains?
Got them.
Cut the rails.
Five lasers stabbed out from the weapons pods clamped in Oenone ’s lower hull groove. They slashed through the rail tracks meandering across the darkside’s huge thermal radiators. Serina waited until the trains had halted, then used the lasers to chop the rail behind them.
Immobilised,she said. They can’t invade Lalarin-MG now.
They’d be pretty stupid to try,edwin said. Our electronic sensors are picking up the Lady Macbeth ’s microwave emissions from here. They’re powerful enough to leak through the knot.
Let’s go give him a hand,syrinx told Oenone .
The voidhawk darted in towards the diskcity. They came to rest directly over the knot. Oenone ’s distortion field undulated through the damaged tubes and struts, allowing the Edenists to examine its anatomy. The remaining scraps of asteroid rock in the knot’s central cavern were dark zones, their mass exerting a minuscule gravity field against space time. Next to them, the cylinder rotated slowly, its thin shell nothing more than a murky shadow to the voidhawk’s perception. Power circuits formed a grid of fuzzy violet lines permeating the whole edifice as the electron flows emitted their unique signature. The greatest concentration of energy was swirling around the magnetic bearings at each hub. Small instabilities flickered within the translucent folds, tarnishing the emissions. Barely fifty metres past the far end of the cylinder, Lady Macbeth appeared as a bright, dense twist in space-time.
“Got it, Joshua,” Syrinx said over the general communication link. “The cylinder masses approximately one-point-one-three million tonnes.”
“Excellent. That’s no problem. With the antimatter drive, Lady Mac can hit forty gees, and we mass just over five thousand tonnes. That should give us nearly a fifth of a gee thrust.”
“All right, we’ll start cutting.”
Ruben, Oxley, and Serina all issued instructions to the bitek processors governing the weapons pods. Eighteen lasers fired from the voidhawk’s lower fuselage, and under the crew’s directions began cutting through the tubes at the top of the knot.
Lady Mac ’s sensors could now focus on Lalarin-MG itself. Her lasers had scythed their way through the tangle of tubes and struts, clearing a broad passage which Joshua had steered the starship along. Hot segments of tube twirled away into the main cavity, bouncing against the metallic cylinder shell and the black lumps of rock. Light was filtering in for the first time in a hundred centuries. Trickles of red sunlight slipped past Lady Mac ’s fuselage, complemented by sizzling scarlet flashes of the lasers.
“How’s it going in there, Ione?” Joshua asked.
“We’re ready. Rotating airlocks are closed and sealed. I even got Baulona-PWM to find some padding for the Mosdva to lie on.”
“Okay, stand by.” The sensors were showing him the cylinder’s hub with its big circular bearing dead ahead. He cut the last tube free, exposing the airlock chamber, and fired the ion thrusters to spin Lady Mac , matching her rotation to the cylinder. The starship’s forward fuselage section moved into the bearing, crushing the jagged remnants of the tube. “Sarha?”
“I’ve got the molecular binding force generators on maximum.”
“Take the CAB safety limiters off line. Pump them higher. I want all the strength we’ve got in the stress structure.”
“You’ve got it.”
“We’ve cut this end free,” Syrinx said. “You’re clear.”
“Okay everyone, stand by.” Joshua fired the fusion drives, keeping their thrust to an easy one gee. Lady Mac pressed forward, compressing the remnants of the airlock chamber in towards the cylinder shell. The rim of the bearing pierced the starship’s protective foam until it was touching the fuselage.
“We’re solid,” Liol declared.
Joshua increased the fusion drive thrust. Three strands of blue-white plasma stabbed back out through the crater, twining together. Tubes and struts facing the ultraheated torrent of ions began to boil furiously, sending out twisters of gas.
“Stress structure’s holding,” Sarha said. The sound of the drive tubes was vibrating through the life support capsules, a muffled drone. She’d never heard that before.
“It’s moving,” Beaulieu called out. “Accelerating at four per cent of a gee.”
“Okay, here we go,” Joshua said. He activated the antimatter drive.
Hydrogen and anti-hydrogen collided and obliterated each other within the engine’s complex focusing field. A shaft of pure energy burst into existence behind the starship, as if a flaw in space-time had cracked open. Two hundred thousand tonnes of thrust started to push Lalarin-MG out of its rapidly dissolving chrysalis.
“I think we might have something,” Etchells said.
Kiera looked up from the pizza slice she was munching through. A couple of the console displays were showing elongated stars being lassoed by turquoise nets, columns of scarlet figures scrolling past too fast to be read. So far all the hellhawk had found was some radar-type pulses coming from (presumably) stations orbiting the huge star. They gave nothing away, other than the fact they weren’t Confederation. Kiera and Etchells both wanted to see if anything else existed before they started investigating.
“What have you seen?” she asked.
“Take a look for yourself.”
The gauzy iridescent clouds of the nebula slid across the bridge’s main port as the hellhawk swung round. Bright crimson light shone in as it faced the red giant again.
Kiera dropped her pizza back into the therm box and squinted against the glare. Right in the middle of the port was a dazzling white spark. As she watched, it grew longer and longer.
“What is that?”
“An antimatter drive.”
She smiled grimly “It must be the Confederation Navy ship.”
“Possibly. If it is, there’s something wrong. An antimatter drive should accelerate a ship at over thirty-five gees. Whatever’s producing that drive flare is barely moving.”
“We’d better take a look then. How far away are they?”
“Roughly a hundred million kilometres.”
“But it’s so bright.”
“Nobody really appreciates how powerful antimatter actually is until they encounter it first hand. Ask the ex-res
idents of Trafalgar.”
Kiera gave the apparition a respectful look, then went over to the weapons console. She started arming the combat wasps. “Let’s go.”
Joshua switched all the starship’s drives off as soon as Lalarin-MG cleared the crest of the knot. The flight computer had to tell him where that was. Tojolt-HI’s structure had simply melted away from the antimatter drive, leaving a hole over eight kilometres wide where the knot had been. The fringes glowed cerise, extending bent tendrils of molten metal. Only the largest lump of asteroid rock had survived intact, although it was down to a quarter of its original size. It tumbled in towards the photosphere, its surface baked to a cauldron of bubbling tar, spewing out a guttering tail of petrochemical fog.
The red giant shone through the huge circular rent in the diskcity, illuminating the end of the cylinder and a tapering slice of the shell as if a flame was playing up the side. Lady Mac ’s ion thrusters fired, backing her out of the crushed bearing ring. The hub had bowed inward under the enormous force she’d exerted, but the rib spars had held. Now they were retreating from the diskcity at a leisurely thirty metres per second.
“And they’re still not shooting at us,” Liol said.
“I should hope not,” Dahybi retorted. “After that little display of power they’ll think twice about antagonising us again.”
“Look how much damage we’ve done,” Ashly said. “I’m sorry, but this is one accomplishment which doesn’t make me very proud.”
“This section of Tojolt-HI was mostly dead,” Liol said. “And the sunscoop had already destroyed the tubes which still had viable life support functions.”
“Ashly’s right,” Joshua said. “All we’ve done is react to events. We’re in control of very little.”
“I thought that’s what life was,” Liol said. “The honour of witnessing events. You need to be a God to control them.”
“That drops us into a neat little paradox, then,” Sarha said. “We have to control events if we want to find a God. But if we can control them, then ipso facto we’re already gods.”
“I think you’ll find it’s a question of scale,” Joshua said. “Gods determine the outcome of large events.”
“What happened here was pretty big.”
“Not compared to the destiny of an entire species.”
“You’re taking this very seriously,” Liol said.
Joshua didn’t even smile. “Somebody has to. Think of the consequences.”
“I’m not a total asshole, Josh. I do appreciate just how bad it’s going to get if no one can find an answer to all of this.”
“I was thinking what happens if we succeed, actually.”
Liol’s laugh was more a bark of surprise. “How can that be bad?”
“Everything changes. People don’t like that. There’s going to have to be sacrifices, and I don’t mean just physical or financial. It’s inevitable. Surely you can see that coming?”
“Maybe,” Liol said gruffly.
Joshua looked over to his brother and put on his wickedest grin. “In the meantime, you’ve got to admit, it’s a wild ride.”
One of the serjeants stayed with Baulona-PWM and Quantook-LOU to act as an arbitrator as they tried to sort out the parameters of a new agreement. A triumph of optimism, she thought: that both of them believed the ZTT drive would bring about a new era among the diskcities orbiting Mastrit-PJ. It was clear that they were both conceding the remaining Tyrathca population would be evacuated to the flightship colony worlds. Their enclaves among the diskcities would not be expanded. Such a premise made it even more important that the two species didn’t clash over who had claim on new star systems. Retrieving the flightship information really had become essential to the agreement. An intriguing irony. Now all she had to worry about was Quantook-LOU’s sincerity. It made her suggest several safeguards to Baulona-PWM, such as ensuring communications were opened up to all the remaining enclaves. Not that either of them knew how many there were scattered among the diskcities. Quantook-LOU admitted even he didn’t know how many diskcities there were.
The other serjeant accompanied a team of six breeders that Baulona-PWM had designated to reactivate their electronics. They escorted her to the band of fat towers around the end of the cylinder. It was Lalarin-MG’s utilities district, with the towers housing water treatment plants, air filtration, fusion generators (appallingly crude, she thought), and the heat exchangers. Fortunately each service was provided by parallel stations, giving it a failsoft capability. A third of the systems were inoperable, the machinery inert and tarnished, testifying as to how long it had been since Lalarin-MG had a full population.
She was taken to a tower which the breeders said was an electrical and communications station. The ground floor was occupied by three tokamaks, only one of which was working. A ramp spiralled up to the first floor. There were no windows, and the ceiling lights didn’t work. Her infrared sensors showed her the silent ranks of electronic consoles, very reminiscent of those in Tanjuntic-RI. The Tyrathca had brought portable lights with them, which they set up revealing the true state of the consoles. Humidity had succoured a fur of algae over the rosette keyboards and display screens. Access panel catches had to be drilled through to release them, exposing rubbery fungal growths over the circuitry inside. The breeders had to run cables down to the generator below to power up the consoles.
One console actually burst into flames when they switched it on. Oski’s curses echoed through the general communication link.
“Ask them if we can integrate our processor blocks with their network,” she told Ione. “If I’ve got access, I’ll be able to load some questors in. That should speed the process up. And while we’re about it, let’s see if they’ll accept a little advice on reactivation procedures.”
The wormhole terminus opened six hundred kilometres above Tojolt-HI’s darkside, deep in the umbra. The Stryla flew out; Etchells was in his harpy form, red eyes blazing as he looked round in surprise. From his position the huge disk eclipsed most of the sun’s surface, with a tide of crimson light appearing to sweep up over the rim, as if it was sinking into an ooze of photons.
His distortion field billowed out, probing the xenoc structure. It also clashed with another distortion field.
What are you doing here? Oenone asked.
Same thing as you.he found the voidhawk, three thousand kilometres away. It was next to a large hollow cylinder, a habitation station of some kind. There was another Confederation ship close by. When he focused his optical senses in their direction he saw a small glimmer of sunlight erupting through the disk directly behind them.
He quickly altered his distortion field, opening another wormhole interstice. This time he came out a hundred kilometres from the voidhawk. Red sunlight washed over his leathery scale-like feathers, and he looked down curiously at the tear in the disk. Its melted edges were radiating strongly in the infrared. The mountainous heat exchangers surrounding it were operating at their upper limit, trying to radiate away the immense thermal load imposed by overheated tubes.
“I’d say the Adamist ship used its antimatter drive to push the cylinder clear of the disk,” he told Kiera. “Nothing else could cause that kind of damage.”
“Which means they consider it important,” she said.
“I don’t see why. It’s inhabited, and very fragile. It can’t be a weapon.” His distortion field caught flocks of small chemically fuelled missiles flitting among the sharp, hot cones bristling out of the darkside. Lasers shot at them, blowing them apart in mid-flight. Over thirty radar beams from all sections of the disk were sweeping across him. One of the missiles plunged down among the heat exchange mountains, exploding. Atmospheric gas puffed out into space from the tube it shattered. “And there’s some kind of war being fought down there. Widespread by the look of it.”
“They flew all the way round the Orion Nebula, and when they get here they rip that cylinder out of a war zone,” Kiera said.
“All right, it�
��s important.”
“Which means it’s bad for us. Minimize your energistic effect, please.”
The hellhawk’s shape rippled back to its natural profile.
Kiera’s fingers typed quickly over the weapons console. Targeting sensors locked on to the cylinder.
Disengage your weapons, now, Oenone ordered.
Etchells let Kiera hear the affinity voice, routing it through one of the AV pillars on the bridge.
“Why?” she asked. “What’s in there?”
Several thousand unarmed Tyrathca. You would be committing butchery.
“What do you care? In fact, why are you here?”
To help.
“Very noble. And total bollocks.”
Do not fire, Oenone appealed to Etchells. We will defend the cylinder.
That cylinder contains the means to destroy me,etchells replied. I’m quite sure of that.
We are not barbarians. Physical destruction solves nothing.
Kiera fired four combat wasps at the cylinder.
The response from Oenone and Lady Macbeth was instant. Fifteen combat wasps launched on interception trajectories, scattering submunitions. Lady Macbeth ’s defence masers speared the incoming drones as their submunitions ejected. Two hundred and fifty fusion bombs detonated in the space of three seconds. Some pumped gamma lasers, but most were missile warheads.
Joshua absorbed the burst of sensor data disgorged by the tactical program, desperate for an overview. Visual sensors were useless against the blaze of destruction, but none of the attacking combat wasps electronic warfare submunitions had targeted Lady Mac —strangely negligent programming. The starship’s sensors stared into the heart of the mayhem, filtering out the atomic and electromagnetic interference. Three small kinetic impacts registered against the cylinder, along with several beam strikes. But the structure remained intact.
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