The thick shadows slithering over the storage globes merged together into funereal blemishes until the light was completely extinguished. They shattered in unison, belching out thick wobbling rivers of hydrocarbon fluid. It began to evaporate under the red giant’s unrelenting radiance, producing a surge of oily fog. A huge patch of shade crept over the sunside, defacing its usual gleaming hue to a dusky claret.
“Christ,” Liol gasped. “Did we do that?”
“No,” Dahybi said. “But they’ll blame us anyway.”
“Ione?” Joshua asked. “Are you all right?” He concentrated on the general communication link. The view through the serjeants’ sensors was shaking badly. The effect of the sunscoop’s plasma strike against Lalarin-MG was the same as an earthquake. Tyrathca breeders were scattered across the plaza, struggling to regain their footing. The soldiers had closed in on the three Mosdva, prodding them with their big maser rifles.
“We’re okay,” she said. The serjeants began to scan round. “No sign of structural breakdown. The cylinder is still intact and rotating.”
“That’s something.”
Above the serjeants, the Sleeping God’s effigy was moving in a circular bouncing motion, completely out of phase with the cylinder’s rotation.
The axial gantry securing it bent and stretched with frighteningly loud stress creaks.
Baulona-PWM walked unsteadily over to Quantook-LOU. The distributor of resources was suffering in the aftermath of the attack, unable to lift himself up from the juddering plaza.
“Mosdva break their separation agreement,” Baulona-PWM said. “You damage Lalarin-MG. You kill our vassal castes. We will fire our weapons at Tojolt-HI. You will be exterminated.”
“Wait,” Ione said. “You cannot exterminate Quantook-LOU. He is the only Mosdva willing to deal with you. Without him there will be war. Billions of Tyrathca will die because you exterminated him. Their deaths will be your fault.”
“They will not die if you leave Mastrit-PJ. Do not give the Mosdva your faster-than-light drive. The Tyrathca here will survive. The Sleeping God will come to aid us.”
“The Mosdva will be given our drive. That is why we have come, to bring balance to the galaxy. The Tyrathca from Tanjuntic-RI were given the drive.”
“Tyrathca have faster-than-light drive?” Baulona-PWM demanded.
“Some of your worlds have it, yes. The technology is spreading slowly. Outside Mastrit-PJ your race is becoming powerful. Humans and our xenoc allies will not permit that to happen. There must be balance and harmony between races, only then can there be peace.”
Quantook-LOU heaved down a breath, but still made no effort to rise.
“Humans are stupid,” he said. “Why did you give Tyrathca the drive? Can you not see what they are?”
“We know what both of you are. That is why we are here. Now you must choose. Will you mediate a new agreement? Will you pursue peace?”
“What will you do if we do not mediate an agreement?” Quantook-LOU asked.
“The balance will be enforced by us,” Ione said. “We will not tolerate war.”
“The Mosdva will mediate an agreement for peace,” Quantook-LOU said. “If the Tyrathca of Lalarin-MG do not wish to mediate with me, I will find an enclave that will.”
“Baulona-PWM, what is your answer?” Ione asked.
“I will mediate,” the breeder said. “But the Mosdva still attack Lalarin-MG. They must stop. There can be no agreement if we are dead.”
“Quantook-LOU, can you get the other dominions to withdraw?”
“I cannot. I must have the drive first, and the Lady Macbeth must leave. Only then will they be forced to ally with me.”
“You can’t have the drive until we have the Tyrathca information,” Ione said. “Baulona-PWM, how long will it take you to recover the information necessary for the agreement?”
“I am uncertain where it is stored. Our old memory centres are no longer enabled. We would have to reactivate them.”
“Wonderful,” Joshua exclaimed. “Not even total catastrophe can loosen these bollockheads up. Beaulieu, what’s happened to the trains?”
“Three of them are still en route, Captain. And the surviving Mosdva in spacesuits are still infiltrating the knot on the darkside.”
“Jesus, we have to buy Ione some time.”
“We could go back to the knot and use our firepower to defend Lalarin-MG from the Mosdva troops,” Liol suggested.
“No.” Joshua rejected it automatically. It would be messy, he knew. Lady Mac might be the most powerful ship in the system, but she wasn’t invincible. They needed some way of isolating Lalarin-MG while the Tyrathca breeders found the almanac. And maybe Quantook-LOU really could negotiate some kind of peace settlement. Nice bonus.
He let the factors stream through his mind. With that arrogant Calvert certainty that they had to act on Lalarin-MG, it was just a matter of running through options. Thinking what he had available to work with.
Joshua started chuckling wickedly.
Ashly closed his eyes in prayer. “Oh shit.”
“Syrinx,” Joshua called. “I need Oenone down here.”
One of the serjeants bent down beside Quantook-LOU. The distributor of resources had rolled partially on his side, which was why he couldn’t right himself. His bodyweight was trapping his midlimb. Ione pushed his flank as hard as she dared; too much pressure would snap his bones.
“I thank you,” Quantook-LOU said as his midlimb wriggled free. “You would make an excellent Mosdva. Even I am adrift among your mediating strategies.”
“A compliment indeed. My prime requirement, however, remains unchanged.”
“I understand. I will play my part.”
“Good.”
“In the expectation of reward.”
“You will collect the drive. Humans keep their word.”
“A welcome assurance at this point.”
The other serjeant had gone to talk to Baulona-PWM. They stood in the middle of the plaza, with the dirty rain from the effigy falling around them. The drops were less frequent, but larger, as the effigy continued its slow gyrations. “My ship tells me that the Mosdva troops are invading the area around this cylinder,” Ione said. “Can your soldiers hold them off long enough for you to retrieve the information?”
“How do you know this? We can detect no communication with your ship.”
“It is a method you are not familiar with. Now, can you hold them off?”
“We have no soldiers left outside Lalarin-MG. All is wrecked. Our food is grown in the tubes. There is no air, no fluid. Our communication links are failing. Our fusion weapons are disabled. Does your ship have weapons which can help us?”
“Not weapons, but we can certainly help. I will need your agreement to act as the mediator between you and Quantook-LOU.”
“Why?”
“If you supply me with the information which makes the agreement between Tyrathca and Mosdva possible, I may be able to offer all the Tyrathca of Lalarin-MG passage to one of the new Tyrathca worlds. It will not be today, but after we return to our home we can send larger ships to collect you. They could be here in three to four weeks.”
“We will be dead within one hour. Mosdva will come to break open Lalarin-MG’s shell.”
“My ship can move Lalarin-MG away from Tojolt-HI. The Mosdva will no longer be able to reach it. This will give you time to retrieve the information and mediate an agreement with Quantook-LOU.”
“You can move Lalarin-MG?”
“Yes.”
“Once we leave the shadow of Tojolt-HI, we will be unable to get rid of the sun’s heat. Our radiator bands are only sufficient to rid us of the heat we produce inside.”
“Mediating the agreement won’t take that long. You will find and supply the astronomical information to me. When I am satisfied it is correct, I will release the drive to Quantook-LOU and leave. All hostilities will then cease and the agreement will become active. You can travel back to a
nother enclave to wait for our ships to collect you.”
“I agree to this.”
Joshua varied Lady Mac’s acceleration at random as they flew back to the wrecked knot, making targeting difficult.
“Nobody’s shooting at us,” Liol said. It was almost a complaint. Heavy fire might have made Joshua rethink this whole idea. Then again, part of him was looking forward to this with disgraceful childish glee. As he suspected his younger brother was, as well. The rest of the crew treated the notion with an air of tolerant amusement. And Ione was doing a good job talking rings around the xenocs.
He had to admit, everything was falling into place.
“That’s because we’re going the wrong way to be shot at,” Monica said.
“We’re coming back to them. It’s leaving they object to.”
“I wonder what they’ll make of this, then,” Joshua said.
Lady Mac glided over the edge of the knot. Virtually all of the foil sheets had been torn away from its sunside slopes, letting the red sunlight illuminate the snarl of dark tubes which made up the interior.
Space around the knot was heavy with particles, crystals and scraps of foil reflecting the sunlight in a blossom of crimson scintillations. The sun-scoop’s plasma torch had blown out a huge crater at the crest of the knot. Three hundred metres in diameter, its walls were a stipple of fractured tubes with melted ends. They were still glowing coral red from the immense thermal barrage.
“I’m taking us in,” Joshua said. “Beaulieu, start saturating the knot.”
“Aye, Captain.”
The cosmonik switched the maser cannons to wide-angle dispersal and began hosing the microwave energy around inside the crater. It wasn’t powerful enough to damage the structure any further, but it would be lethal to any of the Mosdva creeping round inside the knot.
Joshua rolled Lady Mac and started to edge her down into the crater. He used the forward lasers to slice through the tubes and wreckage at the bottom. Sections began to drift free, vapour from their molten ends blowing them away gently. Chemical verniers fired around the starship’s equator, moving it deeper into the crater.
Oenone slipped out of its wormhole terminus thirty kilometres above the knot’s darkside. The Edenists in the life-support toroid were all borrowing its sensor blisters, looking out in admiration at the monumental diskcity. Syrinx shared a smile with Ruben, their minds cherishing the vista together. Little bursts of excitement wafted around the mental embrace which pervaded the bridge as new facets of the xenoc construction were noticed and cherished. None of the ELINT coverage compared to actually being here.
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, sluicing 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.
<
<
<
<> Oenone said. <
<> she told the enchanted voidhawk. <
<
<
<
<
<
<
<
<
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.
<
<
<
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.
The Naked God Page 133
