"So are they building a cycler there?" she asked, nervously twining her hands together.
"Actually, I don't think so. At any rate, I don't think they could launch a cycler using beam power. The total number of power tethers they've got in orbit around the Twins will produce trillions of watts of power, but that's not enough. It's kind of a puzzle, actually," he said happily. "The tethers produce far more power than they'd need to construct a starship or run a sizeable colony, but not enough to launch much more than a cycler cargo. There's no colony. If there's a starship, it's hidden inside that cylinder. So what are they doing with all that power? I don't know."
"What about the Banshee? Are you sure Crisler didn't detect our arrival?"
He nodded. "It's got a very low-level radar ping going. They're not expecting visitors— why should they? These ships," he nodded at a window showing their interceptors, "are not supposed to exist."
"The R.E. discounts the halo as a threat," said Sola, who'd come to hover nearby. "We're seen as bumpkins. It's our biggest advantage."
Rue nodded, contemplating the interceptors. Michael had come to examine the windows as well; secretly she was glad he was putting his anger aside, if only for the moment.
The interceptors certainly looked exotic, and Rue'd had the engineers emboss their diamond hulls with ruby lettering: Lasa script. They had copied fragments of writing found on a wrecked Lasa ship. Nobody knew what the words said; the point was not to fool the Lasa, but to convince Crisler that these interceptors were native to this place— part of the machinery.
Sola, the tactician, pointed to a top-down map of the Twins' system. "We can send teams A and B around the dwarfs, so that they ride in to the construction site in the pellet streams from the scavengers. Two ships at first, so as not to alarm Crisler. They'll dock opposite the Banshee at the construction site and we'll disembark as quickly as we can. If we can employ countermeasures to their inscape or sensors, we'll do that. The two squads will look for any control center, as well as looking for your crew, Captain." He shook his head. "That will be the tricky part."
"You don't have to remind me," she said coldly. "Then what?"
He shrugged. "Then the other interceptors approach. We'll see how close we can get to the Banshee before we have to open fire. But all we have to do is take out a critical system, like her engines and she'll have to surrender. If she's caught unprepared, it should be easy. Immobile, she has no options, because we can slide in behind the 'construction shack' to avoid her weaponry. We'll board her and secure your people."
Rue nodded. "Sounds good. Prepare everyone. It'll take a couple of days to orbit the dwarfs, so we'll head out right away. Communication is to be by laser only. We'll leave this outpost and one interceptor to act as observers."
"So who's on the in-teams?" asked Mike, his expression neutral.
She hesitated. Rue didn't want to send Mike into the fray, but if she left him here as an observer, he would be furious with her. "I'm going," she said. "With one squad, to bring my people out. Dr. Herat will go in the other ship, and… and since you control that autotroph thing, you'll go with him. We need to know what's valuable and what isn't, here. Do we need to secure the whole system to be safe? Or just the new cycler? Only you and Herat can make that assessment."
He nodded, his expression neutral.
The Klaxons sounded and everyone began to suit up to return to their ships. Rue watched Mike as he talked to Dr. Herat. His eyes often drifted back to her; he knew she was watching. But they were separated by meters and an impossible gulf of duty, for now. She tried to fix his features in her mind, in case she never saw him alive again.
* * *
HERAT WAS NOT one to let fear get in the way of his enthusiasms; so Michael was surprised at how subdued the professor seemed as they began their run around the back side of Apophis.
As soon as they were coasting on the aerobraking trajectory the pilot had chosen, Herat ordered the telescopes out and began silently studying the face of Apophis. Michael checked on his autotroph companion, and when he was certain the swarm's systems were all working, opened a connection to the ship's telescopes for it.
As he worked he brooded over what Rue had said. Was it true that he knew no other way to relate to those he cared for, other than service? — to place someone else's needs above his own, and ensure that those needs were met? Wasn't that what love was?
Or was it possible that love was sharing your own goals with someone else? In which case… just what were his goals? He didn't know anymore.
"Something's happening," muttered Herat. "I was right."
Michael climbed through the maze of pipes and struts that was the cabin of the interceptor and settled beside Herat. His shoulder brushed the hot carapace of the autotroph's capsule.
"What are you talking about?"
"It's been bothering me since we arrived. Why didn't the Lasa notice us? Acknowledge our presence?"
Michael shrugged. "Maybe they weren't looking. Or maybe we didn't send the right signal to wake them up. Or they haven't noticed us either, which is quite likely."
"Maybe they weren't looking. If they weren't, that would suggest that this installation is running on autopilot. Maybe it and its ancestors haven't encountered a sentient species in a billion years. It could have evolved away from its original purpose and then Jentry's Envy would be an accidental mutation— a throwback.
"But if it was expecting us to know how to signal it? That would imply that this place was not meant for us. But I believe Jentry's Envy and, by extension, this place, was a gift. Meant for anyone who wanted to take it."
Michael saw his point. "The lack of a greeting is ominous."
"I was hoping that the system had signaled Crisler when he first arrived. Now I don't think it did. Look." He gestured to a long-range infrared view across the horizon of Apophis. Michael could see the faint thread shapes of the orbiting tethers and a vague pink glow that the window legend said was a retreating cloud of small packets bound for the construction shack.
Herat read Michael's look of incomprehension and scowled. "Look at the packets, man! The closest ones are days away from their origin. The whole stream stretches from a million kilometers above Apophis all the way to the shack. It's a long continuous flow of building material— but it's been cut off."
He was right. The last packet of building material sent from the Twins had gone out days ago. Michael saw where Herat was going with this: "The system started to shut down as soon as Crisler arrived!"
"Yes." Herat scowled at the display. "The question is, why?"
"But that's great, Professor. It's a major clue. We'd better laser this back to the fleet."
Herat glanced up, shrugging. "I suppose."
This wasn't like the professor at all. "What's wrong?" Michael asked.
For a moment Herat looked exasperated. Then his shoulders slumped and he said, "I know that it was right for me to join the halo. The Compact, I mean. The R.E.'s rotting from within. My career was winding down anyway; the Panspermia Institute's a farce, always has been… I just miss my children. I don't know if I'll ever see them again, Bequith."
"After this," Michael nodded to the Twins, "you can still go home. You're not a wanted man in the R.E., Professor. Crisler thinks you're safely dead."
"It's not that. I… sometimes I just feel my age, Bequith… Michael. After this…" Herat gazed sadly at the displays. "What will there be after this? This place is a treasure world, for sure. And it's the climax of my career. The end of a long search. It's funny. After all these years, I'm sorry to see the search end, maybe because I'm old enough to know that it's all downhill from here."
He laughed. "Never mind. Look, maybe the Lasa machinery is supposed to run on its own until someone intervenes. Then it hands control over to the newcomer. It's an instinct of the machine, it's designed that way. So maybe the shutdown means this place is functioning the way it was originally designed to: It won't eat up the resources of new colonists. It w
ill only turn back on when they allow it, which would be when they are not competing with it for resources.
"Or I could be wrong. Anyway, send our observations to the fleet."
Later, when they turned the lights red for a sleep period— their orbit of Apophis would take several days— Michael found his mind whirling on about Rue, about himself, and about Laurent Herat. The last time Herat had acted like this was on the shores of Kadesh. Hard to believe that was over a year ago. At that time, the professor had come face-to-face with his own version of the kami of Dis. His lifelong enthusiastic chase after the alien had turned up worse than nothing. It seemed he had pursued ultimate answers for himself in that search and those answers weren't there. For a while, Jentry's Envy had convinced him it could be otherwise, but he was now coming again to face the same reality.
Thinking this made Michael sad and yes, he heard that whisper of the kami, saying it doesn't matter, nothing matters. To hold an artifact millions of years old in your hands and realize that every being for whom it had held significance was long extinct— that would rattle anyone who thought about it too long. And Herat had thought about such things his whole life.
This whole place could be a vast machine running senselessly on after the deaths of its creators. The Lasa must be extinct and if Rue Cassels had not stumbled upon Jentry's Envy, perhaps no one would ever have found this place. It would have gone on about its ceaseless activity, a kind of guardian of the underworld, of the tomb of interstellar space.
Time swept all away and it would sweep Laurent Herat away soon enough. Also Michael Bequith and all his cares and loves. These thoughts jumbled together in his mind, bringing him a confused, unpleasant melancholy, as he drifted off to sleep.
So they traveled on in their circuit of the giant failed star. All around, as they passed, the Lasa machinery that surrounded Apophis was changing. Over the next days Michael spent hours staring at the cloudscapes of the brown dwarf. Ancient and incredibly cold, they flowed like oil, a spectrum of icy blues visible only under extreme light amplification.
Apophis had been stillborn. It had never attained enough mass to burn hydrogen and so like all brown dwarfs it had glowed in its brief glory by gravity and magnetic forces alone. After billions of years, it had almost exhausted the heat of its birth. Only very rarely did the dwarf's magnetic field pull a twist of energy up through the atmosphere; then, wan arches of light would shimmer above the cloudscapes, only to flicker and collapse, exhausted, after a few minutes.
Nonetheless, bright things moved down in that realm, where flat, viscous thunderheads moved like charging armies across dark plains of dense cloud. Fusion-powered aircraft wove in and out among the starlit thunderheads, like birds at play. And in some places, great dark balloon cities drifted, tethers unreeling for hundreds of kilometers below them to tap the cloud decks. In the telescope, these balloons looked more like ancient battleships than craft of the air; to withstand eighteen gees of gravity, they were buttressed with squat girders and plated with titanium.
Were there windows in those floating fortresses? And did some entity, part of the mechanical ecology of Apophis, pause sometimes to gaze out at the stars?
Every now and then, sun-bright engines would kick into life atop one of those balloon cities. Stark nuclear light brought the gunmetal-blue cloudscapes into sharp relief, somehow making Apophis seem even colder and more alien. The tanker carrying lithium, beryllium and other hard-won treasures would climb laboriously for hours until it rendezvoused with a passing orbital tether.
The orbiting tethers grazed on whatever rose from the depths. They passed cargo packets up and past their orbital centers and flung them off their outermost arms. Each became a little world on its own, negotiating its position with the Twins through the music of gravity. After flying a million kilometers, each and every packet of cargo would arrive at a spot a few meters on a side, there to be caught by another tether in a higher orbit. This one would fling the cargo on its ultimate course, to meet with the invisibly distant construction shack that was the ultimate reason for all this activity.
Now, though, these intricate systems were falling silent. The jets cruised aimlessly. The floating cities withdrew their arms and hung silent. A few last cargo rockets clambered to the top of the atmosphere, but as they fell again they disintegrated in seconds. Stillness spread slowly, but unstoppably across the dark continents of air.
Michael's interceptor brushed the upper atmosphere of Apophis, briefly becoming a meteor before bouncing back into space. They shot silently through a province of motionless tethers and after another day lined up right behind the final cloud of packets heading for the shack. The cloud would act like chaff to the Banshee's radar; they would be invisible until they were almost to the shack.
There was really no preparing for what they might find there. They could only contemplate the world they had come to and, when they slept, let its dark kami whisper in their dreams.
* * *
RUE WAS EXERCISING to counteract free-fall weakness when the call came. The message, encrypted and sent by laser, was from the remains of their fleet, which was now spiraling toward the construction shack as unobtrusively as possible.
"Captain, we've got new reconnaissance pictures of the Banshee," said the young woman in the inscape window. "We think you should look at them, stat."
Images popped up, familiar at first: the twin balloons of the Banshee were now in full bolo configuration, swinging at opposite ends of a long tether. They appeared as twin glowing beads standing out from the long dark cylindrical body of the construction shack. Other photos showed close-ups of the habitats, which had been rounded can-shapes when Rue had ridden in the ship. One was still shaped that way; the other was smaller, spherical now, with a number of gathered bunches of fabric knotted at one end.
They had a catastrophic hull breach, Rue realized as she flipped through the rest of the images. Finally she came to one that showed the ramjet section of the starship. It was lit by six arc-welding torches. The tiny stars shone on long black scars and hairlike bunches of fullerene jutting out of the hull.
The scars were in lines, such as lasers would make. But where between here and the Envy could Crisler have gotten into a battle? It didn't make sense— unless Rue's crew had done something?
For a moment her heart leapt at the thought— but she knew the resources they'd had to work with. Unless they attacked the gunnery stations and took over the Banshee's own lasers…
Anxiously, she forwarded the images to the other vanguard interceptor. This ship, which contained Mike and Laurent Herat, was now almost directly behind the construction shack relative to her. They were approaching from opposite sides, according to plan and so far the Banshee didn't seem to have noticed. Indeed, the Banshee wasn't really scanning, which implied that they felt there was no threat here.
It took several seconds for round-trip messages and she didn't want to risk an open laser link, lest the beam overlap one of the Banshee's sensors. So Rue waited for long minutes while, she presumed, the others pored over the images. Finally Dr. Herat's face popped up in a little window.
"It looks like laser fire. The ship's badly damaged— I don't know if she'd be able to start the ramjet with the condition it's in. If Crisler's not expecting reinforcements, I'd say he's in pretty dire straits at this point. We may not need to fire a shot to take the Banshee."
This news should have cheered her, but Rue didn't like not knowing who had crippled Crisler's ship.
Her answer came six hours later, as she was eating. They had just completed a braking maneuver and were lining up for the final deceleration to rendezvous with the construction shack. Rue had an inscape window open over her plate, the shack, now floodlit from the Banshee, visible in it.
Suddenly the window went gray and the words SIGNAL LOSS appeared in it. Rue blinked at it in puzzlement for a second. Then she heard a sound like snakes hissing and the interceptor seemed to shudder under her.
The pilot sho
t past her, cursing loudly. He yanked himself into his seat and now Sola was yelling orders like there'd been a hull breach.
Hull breach! She dove for her own g-bed, waiting for the confirming spike of pain in her ears as pressure dropped. It didn't come, but she felt the ship turning under her. She reached over and punched the tactician's arm. "What's happening?"
"We lost forward sensors. We're flipping over to use the aft set."
"Did we hit something?"
"Don't know… no, it wasn't like that." Sola looked a bit gray. "I think it was a laser. The Banshee must have spotted us."
"I'm setting up a dusty plasma shield," said the pilot. Rue's window came back on-line, showing a turning starfield. A glowing orange haze appeared and slowly thickened until the stars vanished.
"How am I supposed to see through this?" said Rue.
"Telescope's off-line," muttered the pilot. "Hull registered a two thousand degree temperature spike. Definitely a laser."
"What's the Banshee doing?"
Sola had a bunch of windows open. "…Nothing," he said, puzzled. "It hasn't varied its radar ping. No movement, no heat signature from weapons fire."
"Incoming transmission," said the pilot. "It's from IR 21." That was Mike's ship.
Doctor Herat appeared again, this time looking flustered. "Rue, we've been fired on! It's not coming from the Banshee. It might be an automated system, probably an asteroid defense. It's pretty persistent, we've taken three strong hits already."
She tapped the window to reply. "Find out why! Are we too big or something? I thought we were supposed to register as one of those cargo packets 'cause we're part of the cloud. Why didn't that work?"
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