The star wasn’t important enough to have a name. The Confederation Navy’s almanac office simply listed it as DRL0755-09-BG. It was an average K-type, with a gloomy emission in the lower end of the orange spectrum. The first scoutship to explore its planets, back in 2396, took less than a fortnight to complete a survey. There were only three unremarkable inner, solid planets for it to investigate, none of which were terracompatible. Of the two outer gas giants, the one furthest from the star had an equatorial diameter of fortythree thousand kilometres, its outer cloud layer a pale green with none of the usual blustery atmospheric conditions. As worthless as the solid planets. The innermost gas giant did raise the interest of the scoutship’s crew for a short while. Its equatorial diameter was a hundred and fifty-three thousand kilometres, making it larger than Jupiter, and coloured by a multitude of ferocious storm bands. Eighteen moons orbited around it, two of which had high-pressure atmospheres of nitrogen and methane. The complex interaction of their gravity fields prohibited any major ring system from forming, but all of the larger moons shepherded substantial quantities of asteroidal rubble.
The scoutship crew thought that such abundant resources of easily accessible minerals and ores would make it an ideal location for Edenist habitats. Their line company even managed to sell the survey’s preliminary results to Jupiter. But once again, DRL0755-09-BG’s mediocrity acted against it. The gas giant was a good location for habitats, but not exceptional; without a terracompatible planet the Edenists weren’t interested. DRL0755-09-BG was ignored for the next two hundred and fifteen years, apart from intermittent visits from Confederation Navy patrol ships to check that it wasn’t being used by an antimatter production station.
As the Lady Mac’s sensor clusters gave him a visual sweep of the penurious star system, Joshua wondered why the navy wasted its time.
He cancelled the image and looked around the bridge. Alkad Mzu was lying prone on one of the spare acceleration couches, her eyes tight shut as she absorbed the external panorama. Monica and Samuel were hovering in the background, as always. Joshua really didn’t want them on the bridge, but the agencies weren’t prepared to allow Mzu out of their sight now.
“Okay, Doc, now what?” he asked. He’d followed Mzu’s directions so that Lady Mac emerged half a million kilometres above the inner gas giant’s southern pole, near the undulating boundaries of the planet’s enormous magneto sphere. It gave them an excellent viewpoint across the entire moon system.
Alkad stirred on her couch, not opening her eyes. “Please configure the ship’s antenna to broadcast the strongest signal it can at the one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-kilometre equatorial orbital band. I will give you the code to transmit when you’re ready.”
“That was the Beezling’s parking orbit?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Sarha, get the dish ready for that, please. I think you’d better allow for a twenty-thousand-kilometre error when you designate the beam. No telling what state they were in when they got here. If they don’t respond, we’ll have to widen the sweep pattern out to the furthest moon.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“How many people left on this old warship of yours, Doc?” Joshua asked.
Alkad broke away from the image feeding into her neural nanonics. She didn’t want to. This was it, the star represented by that stupid little alphanumeric she had carried with her like a talisman for thirty years. Always expecting him to be waiting here for her; there had been a million first lines rehearsed in those decades, a million loving looks. But now she’d arrived, seen that pale amber star with her own eyes, doubt was gripping her like frostbite. Every other aspect of their desperate plan had fallen to dust thanks to fate and human fallibility. Would this part of it really be any different? A sublight voyage of two and a half light-years. What had the young captain called it? Impossible. “Nine,” she said faintly. “There should be nine of them. Is that a problem?”
“No. Lady Mac can take that many.”
“Good.”
“Have you thought what you’re going to tell them?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jesus, Doc; their home planet has been wiped out, you can’t use the Alchemist for revenge, the dead are busy conquering the universe, and they are going to have to spend the rest of their lives locked up in Tranquillity. You’ve had thirty years to get used to the genocide, and a couple of weeks to square up to the possessed. To them it’s still good old 2581, and they’re on a navy combat mission. You think they’re going to take all this calmly?”
“Oh, Mother Mary.” Another problem, before she even knew if they’d survived.
“The dish is ready,” Sarha said.
“Thanks,” Joshua said. “Right, Doc, datavise the code into the flight computer. Then start thinking what you’re going to say. And think good, because I’m not taking Lady Mac anywhere near a ship armed with antimatter that isn’t extremely pleased to see me.”
Mzu’s code was beamed out by the Lady Macbeth in a slim fan of microwave radiation. Sarha monitored the operation as it tracked slowly around the designated orbital path. There was no immediate response—she hadn’t been expecting one. She allowed the beam another two sweeps, then shifted the focus to cover a new circle just outside the first.
It took five hours to get a response. The tension and expectation which had so dominated the bridge for the first thirty minutes had expired long ago. Ashly, Monica, and Voi were all in the galley preparing food sachets when a small artificial green star appeared in the display which the flight computer was feeding Sarha’s neural nanonics. Analysis and discrimination programs came on-line, filtering out the gas giant’s constant radio screech to concentrate on the signal. Two ancillary booms slid up out of Lady Macbeth’s hull, unfolding wide broad-spectrum multi-element receiver meshes to complement the main communications dish.
“Somebody’s there, all right,” Sarha said. “Weak signal, but steady. Standard CAB transponder response code, but no ship registration number. They’re in an elliptical orbit, ninety-one thousand kilometres by one hundred and seventy thousand four-degree inclination. Right now they’re ninety-five thousand kilometres out from the upper atmosphere.” A strangely muffled gulp made her abandon the flight computer’s display to check the bridge.
Alkad Mzu was lying flat on her acceleration couch, with every muscle unnaturally stiff. Neural nanonics were busy censoring her body language with nerve overrides. But Sarha could see a film of liquid over her red-rimmed eyes which was growing progressively thicker. When she blinked, tiny droplets spun away across the compartment.
Joshua whistled. “Impressive, Doc. Your old crewmates have got balls, I’ll say that for them.”
“They’re alive,” Alkad cried. “Oh, Mother Mary, they’re really alive.”
“The Beezling made it here, Doc,” Joshua said, deliberately curt. “Let’s not jump to conclusions without facts. All we’ve got so far is a transponder beacon. What is supposed to happen next, does the captain come out of zero-tau?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Sarha, keep monitoring the Beezling. Beaulieu, Liol, let’s get back to flight status, please. Dahybi, charge up the nodes, I want to be ready to jump clear if things turn out bad.” He started plotting a vector which would take them over to the Beezling.
Lady Mac’s triple fusion drive came on, quickly building up to three gees. She followed a shallow arc above the gas giant, sinking towards the penumbra.
“Signal change,” Sarha announced. “Much stronger now, but it’s still an omnidirectional broadcast, they’re not focusing on us. Message coming in, AV only.”
“Okay, Doc,” Joshua said. “You’re on. Be convincing.”
They were still four hundred and fifty thousand kilometres away from the Beezling, which produced an awkward time delay. Pressed back into her couch, Alkad could only move her eyes to one side, glancing up at a holoscreen which angled out of the ceiling above her. A magenta haze slowly cleared to show her the Beezling’s bridge compartment. It looked as though some kind of salvage team had ransacked the place, consoles had been broken open to show electronic stacks with their circuit cards missing, wall panels had been removed exposing chunks of machinery which were half dismantled. To add to the disorder, every surface was dusted with grubby frost. Over the years, chunks of packaging, latch pins, small tools, items of clothing, and other shipboard debris had all stuck where they’d drifted to rest, giving the impression of inorganic chrysa lides frozen in the act of metamorphosis. Awkward, angular shadows overlapped right around the compartment, completing the image of gothic anarchy. There was only one source of illumination, a slender emergency light tube carried by someone in an SII spacesuit.
“This is Captain Kyle Prager here. The flight computer reports we’ve picked up our activation trigger code. Alkad, I want this to be you. Are you receiving this? I’ve got very little left in the way of working sensors. Hell, I’ve got little in the way of anything that works anymore.”
“I’m receiving you, Kyle,” Alkad said. “And it is me, it’s Alkad. I came back for you. I promised I would.”
“Mother Mary, is that really you, Alkad? I’m getting a poor image here, you look… different.”
“I’m old, Kyle. Very very old now.”
“Only thirty years, unless relativity is weirder than we thought.”
“Kyle, please, is Peter there? Did he make it?”
“He’s here, he’s fine.”
“Almighty Mary. You’re sure?”
“Yes. I just checked his zero-tau pod. Six of us made it.”
“Only six? What happened?”
“We lost Tane Ogilie a couple of years ago after he went outside to work on the drive tube. It had to be repaired before we could decelerate into this orbit; there was a lot of systems decay over twenty-eight years. Trouble is, the whole antimatter unit is badly radioactive now. Not even armour could save him from receiving a lethal dose.”
“Oh, Mother Mary, I’m sorry. What about the other two?”
“Like I said, we’ve had a lot of systems decay. Zero-tau can keep you in perfect stasis, but its own components wear out. They went sometime during the voyage, we only found out when we came out to start the deceleration. Both of them suicided.”
“I see,” she said shakily.
“What happened, Alkad? You’re not in any Garissan navy uniform I remember.”
“The Omutans did it, Kyle. Just like we thought they would. The bastards went ahead and did it.”
“How bad?”
“The worst. Six planet-busters.”
Joshua cancelled his link to the communications circuit, turning to the more mundane details of the flight. Some things he just didn’t want to hear: the reaction of a man being told his home planet has died.
Lady Mac’s sensors were slowly gathering more information on the Beezling, allowing the flight computer to refine the warship’s location beyond Sarha’s initial rough estimate. The gas giant’s violent magnetic and electromagnetic emissions were making it difficult. Even this far above the outer atmosphere space was a thick ionic soup, congested with severe energy currents which degraded sensor efficiency.
Joshua altered their flight vector several times as the new figures came in. Lady Mac was well over the nightside now, the swirl of particles around her forward fuselage glowing a faint pink as they were buffeted through the planetary magnetosphere. It played havoc with the support circuitry.
Beaulieu and Liol would datavise flurries of instructions to contain the dropouts, returning the systems to operational status. Joshua monitored Liol’s performance, unable to find fault. He’d make a good crewman. Maybe I could offer him Melvyn’s slot, except his ego would never allow him to accept. There has to be a way we can settle this.
He turned his attention back to the communications link. After the shocks he’d received, Kyle Prager was reacting badly to Mzu’s news of her deal with the agencies and Ione.
“You know I cannot hand it over to anybody else,” Prager said. “You should never have brought them here, no matter what you agreed with them.”
“What, and leave you to rot?” Alkad replied. “I couldn’t do that. Not with Peter here.”
“Why not? We planned for it. We would have destroyed the Alchemist and signalled the Confederation Navy for help. You know that. And as for this fable about the dead being alive …”
“Mother Mary. We can barely pick up your signal now, and I knew where to look. What sort of condition would you be in five years from now? Besides, there might not be any Confederation left in another five months, let alone five years.”
“Better that than risk others learning how to build an Alchemist.”
“Nobody is going to learn from me.”
“Of course not, but there are so many temptations for governments now the knowledge of its existence has leaked.”
“It leaked thirty years ago, and the technology is still safe. This rescue mission is designed to clear up the last loose end.”
“Alkad, you’re asking too much. I’m sorry my answer has to be no. If you try to rendezvous I will switch off the confinement chambers. We still have a quantity of antimatter left.”
“No!” Alkad yelled. “Peter’s on board.”
“Then stay away.”
“Captain Prager, this is Captain Calvert. I’d like to offer a simple solution.”
“Please do,” Prager answered.
“Shoot the Alchemist down into the gas giant. We’ll pick you up after it’s gone. Because I can assure you, I’m not going to come anywhere near the Beezling with that kind of threat hanging over me.”
“I’d like to, Captain, but it will take some time to check over the Alchemist’s carrier vehicle. Then the antimatter would have to be reloaded. And even if it still works, you might be able to intercept it.”
“That’s a very unhealthy case of paranoia you’ve got there, Captain.”
“One that has kept me alive for thirty years.”
“All right, try this. If we were possessed or simply wanted to acquire Alchemist technology we wouldn’t even have come here. We already have the doc. You’re military, you know there are a great many ways information can be extracted from unwilling donors. And we certainly wouldn’t have thrown in a crazy story like the possessed to confuse the issue. But we’re not possessed, or even hostile to you, so we told you the truth. So I’ll tell you what. If you’re still not convinced that we want to end the Alchemist threat, then go right ahead and kamikaze.”
“No!” Alkad yelled.
“Quiet, Doc. First though, Captain, you put this Peter Adul character in a spacesuit, boot him out the airlock, and let us pick him up. He cannot be allowed to die, not if he knows how to build an Alchemist. The possessed would have him then. Guarding against that technology leakage is part of your duty, too, now. Once we have him, I’ll blow you to shit myself if that’s what it takes.”
“You would, too, wouldn’t you?” Prager asked.
“Jesus, yes. After what I’ve been through chasing the doc, it’ll be a pleasure to finish this properly.”
“It may be just the lousy reception I’m getting, but you look very young, Captain Calvert.”
“Compared to most starship captains, I probably am. But I’m also the only option you have. You either die, or you come with me.”
“Kyle,” Alkad pleaded. “For Mary’s sake!”
“Very well. Captain Calvert, you can rendezvous with the Beezling and take my crew off. After that the Beezling will be scuttled with the Alchemist on board.”
Joshua heard someone on the bridge let out a heavy breath. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Christ, what an ungrateful bastard,” Liol complained. “Just make sure you invoice him a huge rescue bill, Josh.”
“Well that finally settles that question,” Ashly chuckled. “You’re definitely a Calvert, Liol.”
The Beezling was in a sorry state. That became increasingly apparent on Lady Mac’s final approach phase, when they were rising up behind it from a slightly lower orbit. Both ships were deep inside the penumbra now, although the gigantic orange and white crescent they were fleeing from still cast a glorious coronal glow across them. It was enough for Lady Mac’s visual sensors to provide a detailed image while they were still ten kilometres away.
Almost the entire lower quarter of the warship’s fuselage plates were missing, with only a simple silver petal pattern left surrounding the drive tubes. The hexagonal stress structure was clearly visible, fencing in black and tarnished chrome segments of machinery. Some units were obviously foreign, jutting up through the centre of the hexagons where they’d been hurriedly inserted to complement or enhance original components. From the midsection forward, the fuselage was relatively intact. There was very little protective foam remaining, just a few dabs of blackened cinderlike flakes. Long silvery scars etched across the dark mono bonded silicon told the story of multiple particle impacts. There were hundreds of small craters where the fuselage’s molecular-binding generators had suffered localized overloads. Punctures whose vapour and shrapnel had been absorbed by whatever module or tank was directly underneath. None of the delicate sensor clusters had survived. Only two thermo-dump panels were extended, and they were badly battered; one had a large chunk missing, as if something had taken a bite out of it.
“I’m registering a strong magnetic emission,” Beaulieu said as they closed the last kilometre. “But the ship’s thermal and electrical activity is minimal. Apart from an auxiliary fusion generator and three confinement chambers the Beezling is basically inert.”
“No thruster activity, either,” said Liol. “They’ve picked up a tumble. One rotation every eight minutes nineteen seconds.”
Joshua checked the radar return, computing a vector around the crippled old ship so he could reach its airlock. “I can dock and stabilize you,” he datavised to Captain Prager.
“Not much point,” Prager replied. “Our airlock chamber was breached by particle impact; and I doubt the latches will work anyway. If you just hold station we’ll transfer across in suits.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Captain,” Beaulieu said. “Two fusion drives. They’re on an approach vector.”
“Jesus!” He accessed the sensors. Half of the image was a ghostly apricot-coloured ocean illuminated by the planetary-sized aurora borealis storms which floated serenely above it. The nighttime sky which vaulted it was a perfect orrery dome of stars where the only movement came from tiny moons racing along their ordained pathways. Red icons were bracketing two of the brighter stars just outside the ecliptic. When Joshua keyed in the infrared they became brilliant. Purple vector lines sprouted out of them, projecting their trajectory in towards him.
“Approximately two hundred thousand kilometres away,” Beaulieu said, her synthesized voice sounding completely uncaring. “I think I can confirm the drive signatures; it appears to be our old friends the Urschel and the Raimo. Both plasma exhausts have very similar instabilities. If not them, then there are certainly possessed on board.”
“Who else?” Ashly grunted morosely.
Alkad looked around frantically, trying to make eye contact with the crew. They were all looking at Joshua as he lay on his couch, eyes closed, his flat brow producing neat parallel furrows as he frowned in concentration. “What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Take the survivors on board and run. Those ships are too far away to threaten us.”
Sarha waved her hand in annoyance. “They are now,” she said in a low voice. “They won’t be for long. And we’re too close to the gas giant to jump out. We need to be another hundred and thirty thousand kilometres away. In other words, up where they are. That means we can’t boost straight up; we’d fly straight into them.”
“So… what then?”
Sarha pointed a finger at Joshua. “He’ll tell us. If there’s a vector out of here, Joshua will find it.”
Alkad was surprised by the amount of respect in the normally volatile crew woman. But then all of the crew were regarding their captain with the kind of hushed expectancy that was usually the province of holy gurus. It made Alkad very uneasy.
Joshua’s eyes flipped open. “We have a problem,” he announced grimly. “Their altitude gives them too much tactical advantage. I can’t find us a vector.” A small regretful dip at the corner of his mouth. “There isn’t even a convenient Lagrange point this time. And I wouldn’t like to risk it anyway, not while we’re so close to a gas giant as big as this one.”
“Fly a slingshot,” Liol said. “Dive straight at the gas giant and go for a jump on the other side.”
“That’s over three hundred thousand kilometres away. Lady Mac can probably accelerate harder than the Organization ships, but they’ve got antimatter combat wasps, remember. Forty-five-gee acceleration; we’d never make it.”
“Christ.”
“Beaulieu, put a com beam on them,” Joshua said. “If they respond, ask them what they want. I’m sure we know, but if nothing else I’d like confirmation.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Doc, how do we go about firing the Alchemist at them?”
“You can’t,” she said simply.
“Jesus, Doc, this is no time for principles. Don’t you understand? We have no other way out. None. That weapon is the only advantage we’ve got left. If we don’t kill them, they’ll get you, and Peter.”
“This is not a question of principle, Captain. It’s not physically possible to deploy the Alchemist against starships.”
“Jesus.” He couldn’t believe it. But the doc looked frightened enough. Intuition convinced him she was telling the truth. The navigation program was still producing flight vectors. Dumb forcedcalculation, trying out every conceivable probability to find one which would let them escape. The plots flickered in and out of existence at a subliminal speed, miniature purple lightning bolts crackling around the inside of his head. Throw in wild card manoeuvres, lunar slingshots, Lagrange points. Pray! It didn’t make the slightest difference. The Organization frigates had thoroughly outmanoeuvred him. His one hope had been the Alchemist, a super-doomsday machine, a nuke to kill a couple of ants.
I have come so far I can actually see the ship it’s stored in. I can’t lose now, not with these stakes.
“Okay, Doc, I want to know exactly what your Alchemist does, and how it does it.” He clicked his fingers at Monica and Samuel. “You two, I’ll stay in Tranquillity if we survive this, but I have to know.”
“God, Calvert, I’ll stay there with you if that’s what it takes,” Monica told him. “Just get us out of this.”
“Joshua,” Sarha said. “You can’t.”
“Give me an alternative. It gets Liol’s vote. He’ll be captain then.”
“I’m crew, Josh. This is your ship.”
“Now he tells me. Datavise the file, Doc. Now, please.” Information leapt into his mind as the files came over. Theory, application, construction, deployment, operational parameters. All neatly indexed with helpful cross-referencing. The blueprints of how to slay a star; in fact, build enough and you could slay an entire galaxy; or even just… Joshua flicked instantaneously back to the operational aspects. Pumped a few figures of his own into Mzu’s coldly simple equations.
“Jesus, Doc, it wasn’t a rumour. You really are dangerous, aren’t you?”
“Can you do it?” Monica asked. She wanted to shout the question at him, jolt him out of that infuriating complacency.
Joshua winked at her. “Absolutely. Look, we came off badly down in that ironberg yard because that’s not my territory. This is. In space, we win.”
“Is he serious?” Monica appealed to the rest of the bridge.
“Oh, yes,” Sarha said. “If anyone gets hostile with Lady Mac, they just crash straight into his ego.”
• • •
High York posed a difficult problem of interpretation for Louise. The AV pillar in the Jamrana’s lounge shone its image down her optic nerve throughout the entire approach phase. There was no colour, space was so black she couldn’t even see the stars. The asteroid was different to Phobos’s chiselled cylinder, a grizzled irregular lump which the ship’s sensors seemed incapable of bringing into proper focus. Mechanical artefacts were shunting out of its puckered surface at all angles, though she wasn’t quite sure if she had the scale right. If she had, then they were bigger than the largest ship ever to ply Norfolk’s seas.
Fletcher was in the lounge with her. From the few comments he made he understood even less of the image than she did.
Genevieve, of course, was in her tiny cabin playing games on her processor block. She’d found a soul mate in one of Pieri’s younger cousins; the pair of them had taken to locking themselves away for hours at a time to tackle battalions of Trafalgar Greenjackets or skate through puzzles of five-dimensional topology. Louise wasn’t entirely happy with her sister’s new hobby, but on the other hand she was grateful she didn’t have the duty of keeping her amused during the flight.
High York’s disk-shaped spaceport traversed the AV image, eclipsing the asteroid itself. A high-pitched whine vibrated out of the lounge walls, and the Jamrana drifted forwards. And still there was no glimpse of Earth. Louise had really been looking forwards to that. Pieri would align a sensor on the planet for her if she asked, she was sure; but right now the whole Bushay family was involved in the docking procedure.
Louise asked her processor block for an update on their approach, and studied the display which appeared on its screen while it accessed the ship’s flight computer. “Four minutes until we dock,” she said. Assuming she was reading the tables of figures and coloured lines correctly.
She’d spent a large portion of the flight working through the block’s tutorial programs until she could manage the unit’s more basic display and operation modes. She didn’t need to ask anyone’s help to manage her medical nanonic packages, and she could monitor the baby’s health continually. It gave her a good feeling. So much of Confederation life was centred around the casual use of electronics.
“Why so nervous, my lady?” Fletcher asked. “Our voyage ends. With Our Lord’s mercy we have prevailed once more against the most inopportune circumstances. We have returned to the good Earth, the cradle of humanity. Though I fear that which has befallen me, I can do naught but rejoice at our homecoming.”
“I’m not nervous,” she protested unconvincingly.
“Come now, lady.”
“All right. Look, it’s not getting here; I’m really delighted we’ve made it. I suppose it’s silly of me, but something about being on Earth is very reassuring. It’s old and it’s very strong, and if people are going to be safe anywhere, then it’ll be here. That’s the problem. Something Endron said about it keeps bothering me.”
“You know that if I can assist you, I will.”
“No. It’s nothing you can help with. That’s the point. Endron told me we wouldn’t get through High York’s spaceport; that there would be inspections and examinations, awfully strict ones. It’ll be nothing like arriving at Phobos. And everything I’ve heard from Pieri just confirms that. I’m sorry, Fletcher, I don’t think we’re going to make it, I really don’t.”
“And yet we must,” he said softly. “That fiend Dexter cannot prevail. Should the necessity become apparent, I will surrender myself and warn Earth’s rulers.”
“Oh, no, Fletcher, you can’t do that. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“Yet still you doubt me, Lady Louise. I see your heart crying in pain. That is a source of grief for me.”
“I don’t doubt you, Fletcher. It’s just that… If we can’t get through, then Quinn Dexter won’t manage it either. That would mean your whole journey is for nothing. I hate that.”
“Dexter is stronger than I, lady. I hold that bitter memory quite plainly. He is also more cunning and ruthless. If there is but a single chink in the armour of Earth’s valiant harbourmasters he will find it.”
“Heavens, I hope not. Quinn Dexter loose on Earth is too horrible to think about.”
“Aye, my lady.” His fingers clasped hers to emphasise his determination. Something he rarely did, shying away from physical contact with people. It was almost as if he feared contamination.
“That is why you must swear faithfully to me that should I stumble in my task you must pick up the torch and carry on. The world must be warned of Quinn Dexter’s devilish intent. And if possible you must also seek out this Banneth of whom he spoke with such animosity. Alert her to his presence, emphasise the danger she will face.”
“I’ll try, Fletcher, really I will. I promise.” Fletcher was prepared to sacrifice his new life and eternal sanity to save others. Her own goal of reaching Joshua seemed so petty and selfish in comparison. “Be careful when we disembark,” she urged.
“I place my trust in God, my lady. And if they catch me—”
“They won’t!”
“Ah, now who has adopted a frail bravado? As I recall, ’twas you who warned me of what lies crouched beside the road ahead.”
“I know.”
“Forgive me, lady. I see that once again my tact is left wanting.”
“Don’t worry about me, Fletcher. I’m not the one they’ll put into zero-tau.”
“Aye, lady, I confess that prospect is one I shrink from. I know in my heart I will not last long in such black confinement.”
“I’ll get you out,” she vowed. “If they put you in zero-tau I’ll get it switched off, or something. There will be lawyers I can hire.” She patted her ship-suit’s breast pocket, feeling the outline of the Jovian Bank credit disk. “I have money.”
“Let us hope it proves sufficient, my lady.”
She gave him what she hoped was a bright smile, making out that everything was settled. So that’s that.
The Jamrana trembled, shaking loose small flocks of jumble. Clangs rumbled down the central ladder shaft as the spaceport docking latches engaged.
“That’s funny,” Louise said. The display on the block’s screen was undergoing a drastic change.
“Is something the matter, lady?”
“I don’t think so. It’s just odd, that’s all. If I’m reading this right, the captain has given the spaceport total access to the flight computer. They’re running some really comprehensive diagnostic programs, checking everything on board.”
“Is that bad?”
“I’m not sure.” Louise stiffened, glancing around self-consciously. She cleared her throat. “They’re also accessing the internal cameras. Watching us.”
“Ah.”
“Come along, Fletcher. We must get ready to leave.”
“Yes, ma’am, of course.”
He had dropped right back into the estate servant role without a blink. Louise hoped the cameras wouldn’t pick up her furtive smile as she pushed off from the deck.
Genevieve’s cabin was full of four inch light cubes, each of them a different colour. Little creatures were imprisoned inside them, as if they were cages made of tinted glass. The projection froze as Louise activated the door, an orchestral rock track faded away.
“Gen! You’re supposed to be packed. We’re here, you know, we’ve arrived.”
Her little sister peered at her through the transparent lattice, redeyed and frazzled. “I’ve just disarmed eight of the counter-program’s Trogolois warriors, you know. I’ve never got that far before.”
“Bully for you. Now get packed, you can play it again later. We’re leaving.”
Genevieve’s face darkened in petulant rebellion. “It’s not fair! We’re always having to leave places the moment we arrive.”
“Because we’re travelling, silly. We’ll get to Tranquillity in another couple of weeks, then you can put down roots and sprout leaves out of your ears for all I care.”
“Why can’t we just stay in the ship? The possessed can’t get inside if we’re flying about.”
“Because we can’t fly about forever.”
“I don’t see—”
“Gen, do as you’re told. Turn this off and get packed. Now!”
“You’re not Mother.”
Louise glared at her. Genevieve’s stubborn mask collapsed, and she started to sob.
“Oh, Gen.” Louise skimmed across the narrow space and caught hold of the small girl. She ordered the processor block off, and the glowing bricks flickered into dewy sparkles before vanishing altogether.
“I want to go home,” Genevieve blurted. “Home to Cricklade, not Tranquillity.”
“I’m sorry,” Louise cooed. “I haven’t being paying you much attention on this flight, have I?”
“You’ve got things to worry about.”
“When did you go to sleep last?”
“Last night.”
“Humm.” Louise put a finger under her sister’s chin and lifted her face, studying the dark lines under her eyes.
“I can’t sleep much in zero-gee,” Genevieve confessed. “I keep thinking I’m falling, and my throat all clogs up. It’s awful.”
“We’ll book into a High York hotel, one that’s on the biosphere’s ground level. Both of us can have a real sleep in a proper bed then. How does that sound?”
“All right, I suppose.”
“That’s the way. Just imagine, if Mrs Charlsworth could see us now. Two unmarried landowner girls, travelling without chaperones, and about to visit Earth with all its decadent arcologies.”
Genevieve attempted a grin. “She’d go loopy.”
“Certainly would.”
“Louise, how am I going to take this block back home? I really don’t want to give it up now.”
Louise turned the slim innocuous unit around in front of her. “We escaped the possessed, and we’ve flown halfway across the galaxy. You don’t really think smuggling this back to Cricklade is going to be a problem for the likes of us, do you?”
“No.” Genevieve perked up. “Everyone’s going to be dead jealous when we get back. I can’t wait to see Jane Walker’s face when I tell her we’ve been to Earth. She’s always going on about how exotic her family holidays on Melton island are.”
Louise kissed her sister’s forehead and gave her a warm hug. “Get packed. I’ll see you up at the airlock in five minutes.”
There was only one awkward moment left. All of the Bushay family had gathered by the airlock at the top of the life-support section to say goodbye. Pieri was torn between desperation and having to contain himself in front of his parents and his cluster of extended siblings. He managed a platonic peck on Louise’s cheek, pressing against her for longer than required. “Can I still show you around?” he mumbled.
“I hope so.” She smiled back. “Let’s see how long I’m there for, shall we?”
He nodded, blushing heavily.
Louise led the way along the airlock tube, her flight bag riding on her back like a haversack. A man was floating just beyond the hatch at the far end, dressed in a pale emerald tunic with white lettering on the top of the sleeve. He smiled politely.
“You must be the Kavanagh party?”
“Yes,” Louise said.
“Excellent. I’m Brent Roi, High York customs. There are a few formalities we have to go through, I’m afraid. We haven’t had any outsystem visitors since the quarantine started. That means my staff are all sitting around kicking their heels with nothing to do. A month ago you could have shot straight through here and we wouldn’t even have noticed you.” He grinned at Genevieve. “That’s a huge bag you’ve got there. You’re not smuggling anything in are you?”
“No!”
He winked at her. “Good show. This way please.” He started off down the corridor, flipping at the grab hoops to propel himself along.
Louise followed with Genevieve at her heels. She heard a whirring sound behind. The hatch back to the Jamrana was closing.
No way back now, she thought. Not that there ever had been.
At least the customs man appeared friendly. Perhaps she had been fretting too much about this.
The compartment Brent Roi led her into was just like a broader section of the corridor, cylindrical, ten metres long and eight wide. There were no fittings apart from five lines of grab hoops radiating out from the entrance.
Brent Roi bent his legs and kicked off hard as soon as he was through the hatch. When Louise went in he had already joined the others lining the walls. She looked around, her heart fluttering apprehensively. A dozen people were anchored to stikpads all around her, she couldn’t see their faces, they all wore helmets with silver visors. Each of them was holding some sort of boxy gun. The stub muzzles were pointed at Fletcher the instant he popped out of the hatchway.
“Is this customs?” she asked in a failing voice.
Genevieve’s small hand curled around her ankle. “Louise!” She clambered up her big sister’s body like mobile ivy. The two girls clung to each other fearfully.
“The ladies are not possessed,” Fletcher said calmly. “I ask you not to endanger them. I shall not resist.”
“Too fucking right you won’t, you son of a bitch,” Brent Roi snarled.
• • •
Ashly fired the MSV’s thrusters: too hard, too long. He cursed. The drift had been reversed, not halted. Pressure was wiring him close to overload. Mistakes like this could cost them a lot more than their lives. He datavised another set of directives into the craft’s computer, and the thrusters fired again, a shorter, milder burst this time.
The MSV came to rest three metres above the launch tube’s hatch. Like the rest of the Beezling’s fuselage it was badly scarred and mauled. But intact.
“No particle penetration,” he datavised. “It seems to be undamaged.”
“Good, get it open,” Joshua answered.
Ashly was already extending three of the MSV’s waldo arms. He shoved a clamp hand straight into the mounting hole left by a broken sensor cluster and expanded the segments, securing the MSV in place. A fission blade came on, burning a lambent saffron at the tip of the second arm. Ashly used it to slice into the fuselage at the rim of the hatch, then began to saw around.
Both the Beezling and the MSV trembled energetically. The computer datavised a series of clamp stress cautions, their grip on the mounting had shifted slightly. “Joshua, another one of those and you’re going to shake me loose.”
“Sorry. Won’t happen again, we’re docked now.”
Ashly accessed the MSV’s small sensor suite. The Lady Mac had attached herself to the rear of the Beezling, her aft hold-down latches engaging with the warship’s corresponding locks. A slim silver piston slid out of her ring of umbilical couplings, weaving around slowly as it sought out a socket on the Beezling to mate with.
Spacesuited figures wearing manoeuvring packs were flitting towards the bright circle of light which was Lady Macbeth’s open airlock. A third of the way around her fuselage one of her combat wasp launch tubes had opened. The front section of a combat wasp had risen up out of it, a dark tapering cylinder bristling with sensors and antennae. Beaulieu was working on it, her glossy body alive with reflected streaks of salmon-pink light that rippled fluidly with every movement. She had anchored her feet in the midsection grid which contained the drone’s tanks and generators. One of the submunitions chamber covers had already been removed; now she was busy extracting the cluster of electronic warfare pods from inside.
The MSV’s waldo arm finished cutting around the Beezling’s hatch. Ashly grabbed it with the heavy-load arm and pulled it free. A strew of dust motes and composite shavings popped out, quickly dwindling away. The MSV’s external lights swung around, and he was looking straight down into a smooth white cylinder which nested a sleek conical missile whose silver surface was polished brighter than any mirror.
“Is this the right one?” he asked, including his retinal image into the datavise.
“That is the Alchemist carrier, yes,” Mzu replied.
“There’s no response from any processors in there. Temperature is a hundred and twenty absolute.”
“It won’t have affected the Alchemist.”
Ashly said nothing, hoping her self-confidence was as justified as Joshua’s. He extended one of the MSV’s manipulator waldos into the launch tube and fastened it around the apex of the carrier vehicle’s nose cone. Triangular keys found the locking pins, and turned them. He retracted the arm carefully, bringing the nose cone with it. The base was studded with junctions for the thermal shunt circuits, which were reluctant to separate; after thirty years the vacuum and the cold had melded them together. Ashly increased the tension on the waldo, and they tore free with a judder which the arm’s inertia absorber could barely cope with.
“That’s it?” Ashly datavised when the nose cone was lifted clear. “That’s it,” Mzu confirmed.
The Alchemist was a single globe one and a half metres in diameter, its seamless surface a neutral grey colour. It was held in place by five carbotanium spider-leg struts which encased it neatly, their inner surfaces lined with adjustable pads to maintain a perfect grip.
“You should be able to detach the entire restraint mechanism,” Mzu datavised. “Sever the data and power cables if necessary; they’re not necessary anymore.”
“Okay.” He moved the manipulator waldo down the side of the Alchemist and used its small sensors to inspect the machinery he found below it. “This shouldn’t take long, the rivets are standard. I can cut them.”
“Fast, please, Ashly,” Joshua datavised. “The Organization ships are only twenty-four minutes away.”
“Gotcha. I’ll have this with Beaulieu in three minutes.” He moved the first of the manipulator’s tools forwards. “Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Why bother with a specialist carrier vehicle if it can be deployed in an ordinary combat wasp?”
“That carrier vehicle is designed to shoot the Alchemist into a star. Admittedly that’s a large target, but we can’t take starships very close to one. The carrier has to be fully insulated from the star’s heat and radiation, and it also has to be fast enough to avoid interception from combat wasps in the event we were detected. We built it to accelerate up to sixty-five gees.”
Ashly would have liked to have called her bluff. But given their current situation, ignorance and blind faith made life altogether less stressful.
Monica didn’t leave Alkad alone in the EVA preparation compartment, but she did permit her a discreet distance. Two other operatives were with her, ready to inspect the Beezling’s crew to make sure they brought nothing threatening with them into the Lady Macbeth.
Alkad didn’t really notice the agent’s presence, every aspect of her life had been under continual observation for so long now that intrusion meant nothing. Not even for this most precious occasion.
She anchored herself to a stikpad in front of the airlock hatch, waiting with outwards patience. When she sorted through her feelings she found the rightful edgy anticipation, but perhaps not so much of it as there should have been. Thirty years. Can you really stay in love with someone for that long? Or did I just keep the ideal of love alive? One small illusion of humanity in a personality which deliberately and methodically set about excluding any other form of emotional weakness.
Well enough, there were memories of the good times. Memories of shared ideals. And of course memories of affection, adoration, and intimacy. But shouldn’t real love require the continuing presence of the loved one in order to sustain itself and constantly renew? Has Peter really become nothing more than a concept suborned, just another excuse to retain my commitment?
The doubts tempted her to turn and flee from the moment. In any case, I’m over sixty and he’s still thirty-five. A hand started up towards her face, wanting to fork her hair back or tidy it. Silly. If she was so concerned about her appearance she should have done something about it long ago. Cosmetic packages, hormone gland implants, gene therapy. Except Peter would have hated her resorting to such untruthful indignities.
Alkad forced the delinquent hand down. The LEDs on the airlock’s control processor changed from red to green, and the circular hatch swung back.
Peter Adul was first out, the others had allowed him that civility. His SII suit’s silicon film had withdrawn from his head so she could see all the features she remembered so well. He stared back at her, a frightened smile on his lips. “White hair,” he said gently. “I never imagined that. Lots of things, but never that.”
“It’s not so bad. I imagined much worse happening to you.”
“But it didn’t. And we’re here. And you came to rescue us. After thirty years, you really came back here for us.”
“Of course I did,” she said, abruptly indignant.
Peter grinned wickedly. She laughed back, and launched herself into his arms.
Joshua was accessing the MSV’s external sensors to monitor Ashly’s and Beaulieu’s efforts to integrate the Alchemist with their combat wasp. Ashly was using a waldo arm to edge the device down into the submunitions chamber which the cosmonik had cleared. The Alchemist would fit, but the restraint arms folded around it were causing problems. Beaulieu had already sliced a couple of chunks off the carbotanium struts when they scraped against the chamber walls. This was one incredibly crude kludge-up from start to finish. But it didn’t need excessive sophistication to work, just a secure mounting.
Superimposed across the sensor image were the Lady Mac’s systems schematics, enabling him to keep a slightly more than cursory eye on their performance. Liol and Sarha were prepping the ship for high acceleration, shutting down all redundant ancillary equipment, cycling fluids back out of weight-vulnerable pipes and into their tanks, bringing the tokamaks up to full capacity so their power would be available for the molecular-binding force generators. Dahybi was running diagnostics through all the zero-tau facilities on board.
By rights the expectancy should have reduced his brain to a small knot of psychoses by now. Instead he had the oldest excuse of being too busy to worry. That and a wonderful burn of pure arrogance. It can work. After all, it was only marginally more crazy than the Lagrange point stunt.
Too bad I’ll never be able to brag about this one in Harkey’s Bar. Which was actually more of a concern than the manoeuvre itself. I can’t stay in Tranquillity for the rest of my life. I should never have mentioned it to the agents.
He saw Ashly extract the waldo from the combat wasp, leaving the Alchemist behind. Beaulieu reached forwards to hold a hose over the top of the submunitions chamber. A frayed jet of treacly topazcoloured foam shot out of the nozzle, surging all around the Alchemist. It was a duopoxy sealant, used by the astronautics industry for quick, temporary repairs. The cosmonik moved the nozzle in smooth assured motions, making sure the foam completely encapsulated the Alchemist, cementing it into the combat wasp.
“Ashly, take the MSV around to the main airlock and transfer over in your suit,” Joshua datavised.
“What about the MSV?”
“I’m dumping it here. It was never designed to withstand the kind of acceleration we’ll be undergoing. That makes it a hazard, especially with all the reaction thruster volatiles it has in its tanks.”
“You’re the captain. But what about the spaceplane?”
“I know. You just get back in; we’ve only got sixteen minutes left before the Organization ships get here.”
“Acknowledged, Captain.”
“Liol.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Jettison the spaceplane, please. Beaulieu, how’s it going?”
“Fine, Captain. I’ve got it covered. The sealant is bonding, should be set in another fifty seconds.”
“Excellent work. Get back inside.” Joshua datavised the flight computer for a secure channel to the combat wasp. The drone came on-line, and he started its launch sequence program. Once its internal processors were operative he loaded in the flight vector he’d formatted. “Doc, it’s time to find out how good you are.”
“I understand, Captain.”
She accessed the processor governing the combat wasp’s chamber which the Alchemist was riding in and used it to datavise a long activation code at the device. It datavised an acknowledgement back to her. The display in Joshua’s mind opened out rapidly to accommodate the new iconic representation: parallel sheets of dark information stacked as high as Heaven. They came alive with interlocking grids of purple and yellow that shone like channelled starfire. Perspective switch, and the sheets were concentric spherical shells, coming alight from the core outwards. Information and energy arranging themselves in a precise, and very specific, pattern.
“It’s working,” Alkad datavised.
“Jesus Christ.” The neurovirtual jewel glimmered at the centre of his brain, complex beyond human comprehension. It was an outrageous irony that something so deliciously intricate and beautiful should be the harbinger of so much destruction. “Okay, Doc, set it for neutronium. I’m launching in twenty seconds—mark.”
Lady Mac’s spaceplane had risen up out of her hangar as thermodump panels and sensor cluster booms shrank back the other way. Ashly caught one last glimpse of it as he swept down into the airlock. The circular docking ring clamped around its nose cone had just disengaged, allowing it to drift free, then Beaulieu’s shiny brass silhouette occluded the airlock hatch behind him, and that was the end of it.
Pity, he thought, it was a lovely little machine.
As soon as the airlock’s outer hatch closed the cylindrical chamber was fast-flooded with air. The flight computer’s datavised display revealed their status. Joshua was already firing the thrusters to align them on their new flight vector. Combat wasp launch tubes were opening.
Ashly and Beaulieu dived out of the airlock, racing for the bridge. There was nobody in any of the decks they passed through. Several open cabin doors showed them active zero-tau pods.
The combat wasp carrying the Alchemist completed its fusion drive ignition sequence and launched. A quick cheer from the bridge echoed through Lady Mac’s empty compartments. Then ten more combat wasps were firing out of their tubes and chasing after the first. The whole salvo headed down towards the gas giant at twenty-five gees.
Ashly flew through the bridge’s floor hatch just behind Beaulieu.
“Stations, please,” Joshua said. He triggered Lady Mac’s three fusion tubes, giving Ashly barely enough time to roll onto his acceleration couch before gravity pushed down. Restraint webbing closed over him.
“Signal from the Organization ships,” Sarha said. “They know who we are, they’re asking for you by name, Joshua.”
Joshua accessed the communications circuit. The image which his neural nanonics provided was shaky and stormed with static. It showed him a frigate’s bridge, with figures lying flat on acceleration couches. One of them was dressed in a double-breasted suit of chocolate-brown worsted with slim silver-grey pinstripes, a widebrimmed black fedora was resting on the console beside him. Joshua puzzled that one for a moment, the frigate was decelerating at seven gees. The fedora should have been squashed flat.
“Captain Calvert?”
“You got me.”
“I’m Oscar Kearn, and Al put me in charge around here.”
“Joshua,” Liol datavised. “The frigates are flipping over again. They’re starting to chase us.”
“Acknowledged.” He increased the Lady Mac’s acceleration, taking her up to seven gees.
Ashly groaned in chagrin before activating his acceleration couch’s zero-tau field. Black stasis closed around him, ending the punishing force. Alkad Mzu and Peter Adul joined him.
“Glad to meet you, Oscar,” Joshua had to datavise, his jaw was far too heavy to move.
“My people, they tell me you just fired something down at the big planet. I hope you ain’t been stupid, pal, I really do. Was it what I think it was?”
“Absolutely. No more Alchemist for anybody.”
“You dumb asshole. That’s a third of your options gone. Now you listen good, sonny boy, you switch off your ship’s engines and you hand over Mzu to me and there ain’t nobody gonna get hurt. That’s your second option.”
“No shit? Let me guess what the third is.”
“Don’t be a pumpkinhead, sonny. Remember, after we waste you and your rinky-dink ship, we’re only interested in giving the Mzu dame a new body. It’s the beyond for you, pal, for the rest of time. And take a tip from someone who’s been there, it ain’t worth it. Nothing is. So you just hand her over nice and smooth, and I don’t say nothing to the boss about you deep-sixing the Alchemist.”
“Mr Kearn, go screw yourself.”
“You call that Alchemist back, sonny. I know you got a radio control on the combat wasp. You call it back or I tell my crews to open fire.”
“If you blow up the Lady Mac you’ll definitely never get it, will you? Think about it, I’ll give you as much time as you need.” Joshua closed the communications link.
“How much more of this bloody acceleration?” Monica datavised.
“Seven gees?” Joshua replied. “None at all.” He increased the thrust up to a full ten gees.
Monica couldn’t even groan; her throat was sagging under its own weight. It was ridiculous, her lungs couldn’t inhale properly, her artificial tissue muscle implants were all in her limbs, not her chest. If she tried to hang on she’d end up asphyxiating. Keeping Mzu under observation was no longer an option. She would simply have to trust Calvert and the other crew members. “Good luck,” she datavised. “See you on the other side.”
The flight computer informed Joshua she’d activated her acceleration couch’s zero-tau field. That left him with only three people who hadn’t sought refuge in stasis: Beaulieu, Dahybi, and of course Liol.
“Status report, please,” he datavised to them.
Lady Mac’s systems and structure were both holding up well. But then Joshua knew she was capable of withstanding this acceleration, her real test was going to come later.
Seventy thousand kilometres behind her, the two Organization frigates were accelerating at eight gees, which was the limit of their afflicted drives. Their crews were hurriedly assembling situation outlines and summaries for Oscar Kearn, detailing how long it would be before the Lady Macbeth was outside the interception range of their combat wasps.
Ahead of all three ships, the salvo of eleven combat wasps were rushing towards the gas giant. There was no way any sensor could determine which was carrying the Alchemist, making any interdiction virtually impossible.
The status quo was held for over fifteen minutes before Oscar Kearn reluctantly admitted to himself that Calvert and Mzu weren’t going to hand over the device, nor surrender themselves. He ordered the Urschel and the Raimo to launch their combat wasps at Lady Macbeth.
“No good,” Joshua grunted savagely as Lady Mac’s sensors showed him the sudden upsurge in the frigates’ infrared emission signature. “You can’t dysfunction this chunk of reality, pal.”
The Alchemist was ninety seconds away from the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Its management programs began to orchestrate the complex energy patterns racing through its nodes into the sequence Mzu had selected. Once it was primed, activation occurred within two picoseconds. Visually it could hardly be less spectacular; the Alchemist’s surface turned infinitely black. The physics behind the change was somewhat more involved.
“What I did,” Alkad had datavised to Joshua when he asked her how it functioned, “was to work out how to combine a zero-tau field and the energy compression technique which a starship jump node utilizes. In this case, just as the energy density approaches infinite the effect is frozen. Instead of expelling the patterning node out of the universe, you get a massive and permanent space-time curvature forming around it.”
“Space-time curvature?”
“Gravity.”
Gravity at its strongest is capable of bending light itself, pulling at individual photons with the same tenacity as it once did Newton’s apple. In nature, the only mass dense enough to produce this kind of gravity is formed at the heart of a stellar implosion. A singularity whose gravity permits nothing to escape: no matter, no energy.
At its highest setting the Alchemist would become such a cosmological entity; its surface concealed by an event horizon into which everything can fall and nothing return. Once inside the event horizon, electromagnetic energy and atoms alike would be drawn to the core’s surface and compress to phenomenal densities. The effect is cumulative and exponential. The more mass which the black hole swallows, the heavier and stronger it becomes, increasing its surface area and allowing its consumption rate to rise accordingly.
If the Alchemist was fired into a star, every gram of matter would eventually plunge below the invincible barrier which gravity erected. That was Alkad Mzu’s humane solution. Omuta’s sun would not flare and rupture, would never endanger life on the planet with waves of heat and radiation. Instead the sun would shrink and collapse into a small black sphere, with every erg of its fusing nuclei lost to the universe for ever. Omuta would be left circling a non-radiative husk, its warmth slowly leaking away into the now permanent night. Ultimately, the air itself would become cold enough to condense and fall as snow.
But there was the second setting, the aggressive one. Paradoxically, it actually produced a weaker gravity field.
The Alchemist turned black as zero-tau claimed it. However, the gravity it generated wasn’t strong enough to produce a singularity with an event horizon. However, it was easily capable of overcoming the internal forces which designate an atom’s structure. The combat wasp immediately flashed into plasma and enfolded it. All electrons and protons within the envelope were crushed together, producing a massive pulse of gamma radiation. The emission faded rapidly, leaving the Alchemist cloaked in a uniform angstrom-deep ocean of superfluid neutrons.
When it struck the outer fringes of the atmosphere a searing white light flooded out to soak hundreds of square kilometres of the upper cloud bands. Seconds later the deeper cloud layers were fluorescing rosy pink while internal shadows surged through torn cyclones like mountain-sized fish. Then the light vanished altogether.
The Alchemist had reached the semisolid layers of the gas giant’s interior, and was punching through with almost no resistance. Matter under tremendous pressure was crushed against the device, which absorbed it greedily. Every impacting atom was squeezed directly into a cluster of neutrons that plated themselves around the core. The Alchemist was swiftly buried under a mantle of pure neutronium, which boasted a density that exceeded that of atomic nuclei.
As the particles were compressed by the device’s extraordinary gravity field, they liberated colossal quantities of energy, a reaction far more potent than mere fusion. The surrounding semisolid material was heated to temperatures which destroyed every atomic bond. A vast cavity of nuclear instability inflated around the Alchemist as it soared ever deeper into the gas giant. Ordinary convection currents were wholly inadequate to syphon off the heat at the same rate it was being produced, so the energy abscess simply had to keep on expanding. Something had to give.
Lady Mac’s sensors detected the first upwelling while the ship was still seven minutes from perigee. A smooth-domed tumour of cloud, three thousand kilometres in diameter, glowing like gaseous magma as it swelled up through the storm bands. Unlike the ordinary great spots infesting gas giants it didn’t spiral, its sole purpose was to elevate planetary masses of tortuously heated hydrogen up from the interior. Hurricanes and cyclones which had blasted their way through the upper atmosphere for centuries were thrust aside to allow the thermal monster its bid for freedom. Its apex distended over a thousand kilometres above the tropopause, casting a pernicious copper light over a third of the nightside.
Right at the centre, the glow had become unbearably bright. A spire of solid white light punctured the top of the cloud dome, streaking out into space.
“Holy Christ,” Liol datavised. “Was that it? Did it just detonate?”
“Nothing like,” Joshua replied. “This is only the start. Things are going to get a little nasty from now on.”
Lady Mac was already far ahead of the fountaining plasma stream, racing around the gas giant’s curvature for the dawn terminator. Even so, thermal circuits issued a grade three alarm as the plasma’s radiance washed over the hull. Emergency cryogenic exchangers vented hundreds of litres of inflamed fluid to shunt the heat out. Processors were failing at a worrying rate in the immense emp backlash of the wavering plasma stream; even the military-grade electronics were suffering. On top of that, electric currents started to eddy through the fuselage stress structure as the planetary flux lines trembled.
Dahybi had withdrawn into zero-tau, leaving Joshua and Liol to datavise instructions into the flight computer, bringing backups online, isolating leakages, stabilizing power surges. They worked perfectly together, keeping the flight systems on-line; each intuitively knowing what was required to support the other.
“Something very odd is happening to the planetary magnetosphere,” Beaulieu reported. “Sensors are registering extraordinary oscillations within the flux lines.”
“Irrelevant,” Joshua replied. “Concentrate on keeping our primary systems stable. Four minutes more, that’s all, we’ll be on the other side of the planet then.”
On board the Urschel, Ikela watched the lightstorm eruption on one of the bridge screens. “Holy Mary, it works,” he whispered. “It actually bloody works.” A perverse sense of pride mingled with fatalistic dismay. If only… But then, fruitless wishes were ever the province of the damned.
He ignored Oscar Kearn’s semi-hysterical (and totally impossible) orders to turn the ship around and get them the hell away from this badass planet. Twentieth-century man simply didn’t understand orbital mechanics. They had been accelerating along their present course for twenty-two minutes now, their trajectory effectively committed them to a slingshot flyby. Their best hope was to stay on track, and pray they got past perigee before another upwell exploded out of the atmosphere. That was what the Lady Macbeth was attempting. Good tactic, Ikela acknowledged grudgingly.
Somehow, he didn’t think the Urschel would make it. He didn’t know exactly how the Alchemist worked, but he doubted one eruption was the end of it.
With a sense of inevitability that curiously neutralized any regret or gloom, he settled back passively in his acceleration couch and watched the screens. The original spout of plasma was dying away, the cloud dome flattening out to dissipate into a thousand new hypervelocity storms. But underneath the frothing upper atmosphere a fresh stain of light was spreading, and it was an order of magnitude larger than the first.
He smiled contentedly at his god’s-eye view of what promised to be a truly dazzling Armageddon.
The Alchemist was slowing, it had passed through the semisolid layers into the true core of the planet. Now the density of surrounding matter was intense enough to affect its flight. That meant matter was being pressed against it in ever-greater quantities, and with it the rate of neutronium conversion was accelerating fast. The energy abscess which it generated stretched out back along its course through the planet’s interior like a comet’s tail. Sections of it were breaking apart; ten-thousand-kilometre lengths pinching into elongated bubbles which rose up through the disrupted tiers of the planet’s internal structure. Each one greater than the last.
The second upwelling rampaged out of the upper atmosphere; its tremendous scale making it appear absurdly ponderous. Vast fonts of ions cascaded from its edges as the centre broke open, twisting into scarlet arches which fell gracefully back towards the boiling cloudscape. A coronal fireball spat out of the central funnel, bigger than a moon, its surface slippery with webs of magnetic energy which condensed the plasma into deeper purple curlicues. Ghost gases flowered around it, translucent gold petal wings unfurling to beat with the harmonic of the planetary flux lines.
Lost somewhere among the rising glory of light were two tiny sparkles produced by antimatter detonating inside both Organization frigates.
Lady Mac swept triumphantly across the terminator and into daylight, surfing at a hundred and fifty kilometres per second over the hurricane rivers of phosphorescence which flowed through the troposphere. An arrogant saffron dawn waxed behind her, far outshining the natural one ahead.
“Time to leave,” Joshua datavised. “You ready?”
“All yours, Josh.”
Joshua datavised his order into the flight computer. Zero-tau claimed the last three acceleration couches on the bridge. Lady Mac’s antimatter drive ignited.
The starship accelerated away from the gas giant at forty-two gees.
Finally, the Alchemist had come to rest at the centre of the gas giant. Here was a universe of pressure unglimpsed except through speculative mathematical models. The heart of the gas giant was only slightly less dense than the neutronium itself. Yet the difference was there, permitting the inflow of matter to continue. The conversion reaction burned unabated. Pure alchemy.
Energy blazed outwards from the Alchemist, unable to escape. The abscess was spherical now, nature’s preferred geometry. A sphere at the heart of a sphere; dangerously tormented matter confined by the perfectly symmetrical pressure exerted by the mass of seventy-five thousand kilometres of hydrogen piled on top of it. This time there was no escape valve up through the weak, nonsymmetrical, semisolid layers. This time, all it could do was grow.
For six hundred seconds Lady Macbeth accelerated away from the mortally wounded gas giant. Behind her, the Alchemist’s trail of fragmented energy abscesses pumped up out of the darkside clouds, transient volcanoes of feculent gas rising higher than worlds. The planet began to develop its own billowing photosphere; a dark burgundy orb enclosed by a glowing azure halo. Its ebony moons sailed on indomitably through their new sea of lightning.
The starship’s multiple drive tubes cut out. Joshua’s zero-tau switched off, depositing him abruptly into free fall. Sensor images and flight data flashed straight into his brain. The planet’s death convulsions were as fascinating as they were deadly. It didn’t matter, they were over a hundred and eighty thousand kilometres from the disintegrating storm bands. Far enough to jump.
Deep beneath the benighted clouds, the central energy abscess had swollen to an intolerable size. The pressure it was exerting against the confining mass of the planet had almost reached equilibrium. Titanic fissures began to tear open.
An event horizon engulfed Lady Macbeth’s fuselage.
With a timing that was the ultimate tribute to the precision of Mzu’s decades-old equations, the gas giant went nova.
• • •
The singularity surged into existence five hundred and eighty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko’s pale jade blizzards of ammonia-sulphur cirrus. Its event horizon blinked off to reveal the Lady Macbeth’s dull silicon fuselage. Omnidirectional antennae were already broadcasting her CAB identification code. Given the reception they got on returning from Lalonde, Joshua wasn’t going to take any chances this time.
Sensor clusters telescoped outwards, passive elements scanning around, radars pulsing. The flight computer datavised a class three proximity alert.
“Charge the nodes,” Joshua ordered automatically. His mistake, he never expected to jump into trouble here. Now that might cost them badly.
The bridge lights dimmed fractionally as Dahybi initiated an emergency power up sequence. “Eight seconds,” he said.
The external sensor image flashed up in Joshua’s mind. At first he thought they were being targeted by electronic warfare pods. Space was flecked with small white motes. But the electronic sensors were the only ones not being taxed, the whole electromagnetic environment was eerily silent. The flight computer reported its radar track-while-scan function was approaching capacity overload as it designated multiple targets. Each of the white motes was being tagged by purple icons to indicate position and trajectory. Three were flashing red, approaching fast.
It wasn’t interference. Lady Mac had emerged just outside a massive particle storm unlike anything Joshua had ever seen before. The motes weren’t ice, nor rock.
“Jesus, what is this stuff?” He datavised a set of instructions into the flight computer. The standard sensor booms began to retreat, replaced by the smaller, tougher combat sensors. Discrimination and analysis programs went primary.
The debris was mostly metallic, melted and fused scraps no bigger than snowflakes. They were all radioactive.
“There’s been one brute of a fight here,” Sarha said. “This is all combat wasp wreckage. And there’s a lot of it. I think the swarm is about forty thousand kilometres in diameter. It’s dissipating, clearing from the centre.”
“No response to our identification signal,” Beaulieu said. “Tranquillity’s beacons are off air, I cannot locate a single artificial electromagnetic transmission. There isn’t even a ship’s beacon active.”
The centre of the debris storm had a coordinate Joshua didn’t even have to run a memory check on. Tranquillity’s orbital vector. Lady Mac’s sensor suite revealed it to be a large empty zone. “It’s gone,” he said numbly. “They blew it up. Oh, Jesus, no. Ione. My kid. My kid was in there!”
“No, Joshua,” Sarha said firmly. “It hasn’t been destroyed. There isn’t nearly enough mass in the swarm to account for that.”
“Then where is it? Where the hell did it go?”
“I don’t know. There’s no trace of it, none at all.”