The Naked God - Flight nd-5

by Peter F. Hamilton

  With Tanjuntic-RI capable of travelling at over fifteen per cent lightspeed, a collision with a single pebble at that speed could result in catastrophic damage. So in flight the arkship was protected by a plasma buffer, a cloud of electrically charged gas that broke up and absorbed any mass smaller than a boulder. It rode ahead of the arkship, a luminous mushroom-shape held in place by a magnetic field generated by the superconductor grid.

  Right in the centre of the grid, aligned along the rotation axis, was the arkship’s spaceport. Although the concept was the same as the counter-rotating spaceports on Edenist habitats, the Tyrathca had fashioned an elaborate conical structure made up from tiers of disks. Its peak disappeared below the surface of the rock, as if it were a kind of giant arrow tip which had impaled itself in some forgotten era. The larger disks at the top end had broken off centuries ago, probably when the magnetic bearing seized up. Those that remained were vacuum ablating, their edges fraying like worn cloth, while their flat surfaces slowly dissolved, reducing their overall thickness. With the last maintenance crew departing thirteen centuries previously, the vast sheets of metal were down to a few centimetres thickness, and perforated by thousands of micrometeorite holes.

  Oenone was also relaying the image of the arkship to the little exploration team suiting up in the crew toroid’s airlock prep chamber. Given the clandestine nature of their mission, Monica Foulkes and Samuel were leading the team. There were only two technical staff coming with them; Renato Vella, who was Kempster Getchell’s chief assistant, and Oski Katsura, head of the Laymil project’s electronics division. Their job would be to reactivate Tanjuntic-RI’s electronic library and extract whatever files concerning the Sleeping God that they could locate. Tactical support was supplied by four serjeants, loaded with Ione’s personality.

  Kempster Getchell and Parker Higgens were also in the prep chamber; helping with the suits when they were asked, but mainly rehearsing mission goals with Renato and Oski. The formless black silicon of the SII suits had enveloped each of the team, now they were busy clipping their rigid exoskeleton suits on top. They were using standard issue Confederation Navy Marine armour, generator reinforced monobonded carbon with power augmentation. As sleek and featureless as the SII suits, they were designed for both asteroid and ship assault roles, capable of supporting and keeping the wearer active in high gee environments, and with built in manoeuvring packs.

  The team started to run integration diagnostics. Arm joints bent and twisted, sensor inputs flicked through the spectrum. Monica, Samuel, and the serjeants ran their weapons interface programs, and stowed the various items of lethal hardware on their belts and racks once the suit processor confirmed the connection. Oski and Renato started picking up their blocks and equipment kits; there were too many to hang on their belts, so they were both using small chestpacks.

  Kempster held Renato’s pack steady as it adhered to the armour suit. “I can’t feel the weight,” the young astronomer datavised. “I just have to balance right. And I’ve even got a program for that.”

  “The wonders of science,” Kempster muttered. “Mind you, I ought to be flattered. Commando raids to acquire astronomical data. I suppose that’s a sign of how important my profession has become.”

  “The Sleeping God isn’t an astronomical event,” Parker chided irritably. “We’re sure of that now.”

  Kempster smiled at the blank neutral-grey back of his assistant. Now he was ready, Renato datavised Oenone ’s processor array for an update on their approach. Tanjuntic-RI’s dilapidated spaceport was a hundred and fifty kilometres away, and the voidhawk’s sensor blisters had it in perfect focus. The large disks were separated by a single central column that appeared to be made up from hundreds of braided pipes. They were spaced far enough apart, a hundred metres at least, to admit ships between them. Tyrathca craft had used them as hangar floors, anchoring themselves to docking pins and plugging into the utility sockets. Now, the disks were essentially flat sheets of decaying metal; their thin lattice of ancillary systems had evaporated away along with the rim.

  “We’re not going to land on those, are we?” Renato Vella asked. “They don’t look very reliable.”

  Samuel used his suit’s bitek processor to datavise a reply. “Oenone will take us in under the bottom disk. We’ll go EVA and try and find a way in along the spaceport’s support column.”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem,” Monica datavised. “The archaeology team from the O’Neill Halo got in easily.”

  “A hundred and thirty years ago,” Kempster said. “The decay rate Tanjuntic-RI is suffering from could well make things difficult for you. The original route may be blocked.”

  “This isn’t an archaeology project, doc,” Monica datavised. “We’ll just cut our way in if we have to. Decay should help us there. The structure won’t put up much resistance.”

  Kempster caught Parker’s eye, the two of them registering their disapproval in unison. Cut it open, indeed!

  “At least we have a basic layout file of the internal chambers,” Oski datavised. “If we really did have to explore, I doubt we’d achieve anything.”

  “Yeah,” Monica agreed. “How come the Tyrathca allowed that university team in?”

  “Wrong question,” Parker said. “Why shouldn’t they? The Tyrathca couldn’t understand our interest in the arkship at all. You know they seal up and abandon a house once the breeders have died? Well Tanjuntic-RI is a similar case. Once something of theirs has ended its natural life, it becomes . . . invalid , is about the nearest definition we have. They just don’t use it, or visit it again. And it’s not due to the kind of respect we have for graves; they don’t consider their relics or burial houses to be sacred.”

  “Weird species,” Monica datavised.

  “That’s what they think of us, too,” Parker said. “The various Lords of Ruin have asked them on several occasions if they would join the Laymil research project, another viewpoint would always be valuable. It was the same answer each time. They’re simply not interested in examining obsolete artefacts.”

  Oenone folded its distortion field to almost nothing as it crept across the last kilometre to Tanjuntic-RI. The arkship was rotating around its long axis once every four minutes, with only a small wobble picked up over the centuries. Which said a lot for how well they’d managed the internal mass distribution, Syrinx thought. As a result of the minute instability, the spaceport was pursuing a small loop which the voidhawk could match easily.

  They slid in under the bottom disk, which was only seventy metres in diameter. The short length of the support column which emerged from the disk’s centre to burrow into the rock was twenty-five metres wide.

  That lower disk must have been used to dock the Tyrathca analogue of our MSV’s,syrinx suggested. With the big inter-planetary ships on the top deck.

  That would be logical, Oenone agreed. I wonder what they looked like?

  Very similar to those the Tyrathca use today,ruben said. They don’t innovate much. Once a system is finalized they never change it.

  That doesn’t make a lot of sense,serina said. How can you know when something is as good as possible unless you keep analyzing and tinkering with the design? A bicycle is a good, efficient method of getting from one place to another, but the car came along because we weren’t satisfied with it.

  I hadn’t really thought about it,ruben admitted. Now you mention it, thirteen hundred years is a long time to stick with one design, an awful lot more if you add their voyage time to that. We’re still improving our fusion drives, and we’ve only had them six hundred years.

  And they’re a lot better than Tyrathca fusion drives,oxley said. We’ve been selling them improvements ever since we made contact.

  You’re applying human psychology to them,ruben said. It’s a mistake. They don’t have our intuition or imagination. If it works, they really don’t try to fix it.

  They must have some imagination,cacus protested. You can hardly design an arkship without it.


  Ask Parker Higgens,ruben said. a slight tinge of defensiveness was leaking into his affinity voice. Maybe he can explain it. I guess being slow and methodical gets you there in the end.

  Syrinx examined the twisted braid of pipes and girders that made up the spaceport’s support column. Following her silent urging, Oenone expanded its distortion field enough to pervade the dilapidated structure. A picture of entwined translucent tubes filled her mind. The number of black-crack flaws in the metal and composite was alarming, as was the thinness of individual tubes. That really is very fragile,she declared. Samuel, please be careful when you egress. It won’t take much to snap the spaceport clean off.

  Thanks for the warning.

  Oenone rotated gently, turning its crew toroid airlock towards the lead-grey shaft. Standing in the open hatch, Samuel’s suit sensors showed him the stars slip past until he was facing the wrinkled mesh of metal. Even though it was basically just a frayed mechanical structure, it had a quality that told him it wasn’t human. Neatness, he decided, it lacked neatness, the kind of confident elegance that was the signature of human astroengineering. Where humans would use failsofts and multiple redundancy, the Tyrathca built tough simple devices in tandem. If one was taken out of service for repair or maintenance they trusted the second to remain functional. And it was obviously a philosophy which worked. Tanjuntic-RI’s existence and triumph was evidence of that. It was just . . . reality at one degree from human sensibilities.

  The voidhawk’s movement halted. Shadows plagued the hull, turning the marbled polyp a dingy walnut. Gravity in the airlock faded away as the distortion field flowed away from it.

  This is as close as we can get,syrinx said. The archaeology team went in just above the bearing ring.

  The spaceport support column appeared to be holding steady just past the lip of the hull. Stars waved about behind it. Samuel triggered the cold gas jets in his armour, and drifted out from the airlock. Gaps in the column were easy enough to find. The original close weave of pipes and structural girders had been loosened when the bearings seized up, opening a multitude of chinks, though it was impossible to guess which one had been used by the archaeology team all those years ago. He selected one ten metres above the huge bearing ring set in the rock.

  Nitrogen puffed out from tiny nozzles around his slimline manoeuvring backpack, edging him closer to the gap. It was lined with a buckled pipe on one side, and a tattered conduit casing on the other. He reached out with his left gauntlet, and made a tentative grab for one of the flaky cables inside the conduit. Dust squirted out around his fingers, and tactile receptors in his palm told him the cable had compressed slightly in his grip. But it held. His main worry had been that everything they touched along the column would disintegrate like so much brittle porcelain.

  “Okay, there’s a degree of integrity left in the material,” he datavised back to the rest of the team. “You can come over. I’m going in.”

  Helmet and wrist lights came on, and he shone the beams into the black cavity ahead. When the column bearings seized up, the torque stress exerted by the spaceport’s inertia had splintered hundreds of structural girders, ripping apart the multitude of pipes and cables they carried. The result was to fill the inside of the column with a forbidding tangle of wreckage. Samuel activated his inertial guidance block. Bright green directional graphics flicked up over the monochrome sensor image, and he eased himself forward. According to his suit sensors, the spaces between the interlocking struts contained a thin molecular haze from the slowly ablating metal.

  The chinks were becoming smaller, with fragments scraping against his armour as he hauled himself in the direction the graphics indicated. He pulled a ten centimetre fission knife from his belt. The blade’s yellow light shone brightly, shimmering off the strands of ash-grey metal. It cut through without the slightest resistance.

  I feel like some kind of Victorian soldier aristocrat hacking through a jungle,he confided to the Oenone ’s crew.

  Scraps of crumbling metal were whirling round him, bouncing and twirling off the corners and angles of the shambolic maze. The second armour-suited figure had reached the gap: Renato Vella, who was quickly wriggling along after him. One of the serjeants was next, followed by Monica, another serjeant, then Oski Katsura. Syrinx and the crew used the sensor blisters to watch them vanish inside one after the other.

  Looking good,she said, sharing a quiet confidence with her crew.

  Parker Higgens and Kempster Getchell walked into the bridge, and took the chairs Syrinx indicated. “They’re making progress,” Edwin told the two elderly science advisors. “At this rate, Samuel will have reached the main airlock chamber in another ten minutes. They could be at their target level in a couple of hours.”

  “I hope so,” Tyla said. “The quicker we’re away from here, the better. This place gives me the creeps. Do you suppose the Tyrathca souls are watching us?”

  “An interesting point,” Parker said. “We’ve not had any reports of our returning souls encountering a xenoc soul in the beyond.”

  “So where do they go?” Oxley asked.

  “We’ll put that on the list of questions for the Sleeping God,” Kempster said jovially. “I’m sure that’s quite trivial compared to—” he broke off as all the Edenists froze, closing their eyes in unison. “What?”

  “A starship,” Syrinx hissed. “Oenone can sense its distortion field. Which means the Tyrathca detectors will pick it up, too. Oh . . . bloody hell.”

  I see you,the Stryla gloated.

  Etchells hadn’t realized that there was a voidhawk accompanying the rogue Adamist starship. Not until he swallowed in above Hesperi-LN, and started scanning round for the ship he’d pursued from the antimatter station. There was plenty of activity above the xenoc planet, big sedate ships powering their way into high inclination orbits, complementing the protective sphere thrown up by the SD platforms. The twin moons were sending out constant gravitational perturbations as they orbited round each other, half a million kilometres above Hesperi-LN itself. A network of sensor satellites. An unusually thick band of dust slithering above the upper Van-Allen belt. He had to move around cislunar space in small swallows so that his distortion field could complete a clean sweep above the planet. The Adamist starship was easy to locate, a tight curve in the uniformity of space-time. He focused on it, prying and probing at its composition by creating a multitude of tiny ripples within his distortion field, seeing how they reacted to the encounter, the diffraction pattern created as they washed across the hull and internal machinery. One thing was clear, it wasn’t a Navy ship. The layout was all wrong for that. And Navy ships didn’t have an antimatter drive. Its main fusion generators were shut down, leaving just a couple of ancillary tokamaks to power the life support capsules; and the biggest give-away of all: its thermo-dump panels were retracted. It was in stealth mode.

  A Confederation Navy sanctioned starship on a clandestine mission in the Tyrathca system. It would have to be a very important mission to risk an inter-species clash at this delicate time. Etchells knew damn well it had to be connected to the issue of possession somehow. Nothing else would warrant approval. When he extrapolated its trajectory, he saw it was going to fly past a moonlet. He ran through a batch of his stolen almanac memories, discovering that the moonlet was actually an arkship, abandoned over a thousand years ago after a flight from an exploding star. His knowledge of Tyrathca history was almost zero, although the fundamentals were there. But he certainly couldn’t imagine any connection with their ancient ship and the possession crisis.

  A quick swallow manoeuvre put him a thousand kilometres from Tanjuntic-RI, hours ahead of the Adamist starship, and he began to examine it. That was when he found the stealthed voidhawk lurking so close to the surface it was almost touching.

  His flush of achievement was tempered by continuing worry. What the hell were they doing here? It had to be important. Critical, even. Which meant it was a threat to him. Among all his possible options
, one thing was very clear. They had to be prevented from achieving their goal, whatever it was.

  This is captain Syrinx of the voidhawk Oenone. Who am I addressing?

  The name’s Etchells, and I’m one of Capone’s hellhawks.

  Leave this star system immediately. We will not hesitate to use force to make you comply.

  Tough bitch, huh? Well, give me a reason to leave. In fact, I’d like you to tell me what you two are doing here.

  Our task is not your concern. Leave, now.

  Wrong. I think it has a lot to do with me.etchells launched a combat wasp at the arkship, then immediately swallowed away. The wormhole terminus opened a hundred kilometres from the Adamist starship. He loaded a hunter program into another combat wasp, and launched it as he emerged into real space.

  As soon as Syrinx warned him a hellhawk had arrived, Joshua initiated combat status. He knew damn well their cover either had been, or was about to be, blown. Lady Mac ’s main fusion generators powered up, the full suite of combat sensors rose out of their recesses, combat wasp launch tubes opened. Alkad Mzu and Peter Adul hurriedly secured themselves on the large, zero-tau capable acceleration couches in the lounge. Up in the bridge, webbing tightened around the crew.

  “Wormhole terminus opening,” Beaulieu warned. “One hundred kilometres.”

  Joshua triggered the Lady Mac ’s triple fusion drives. That close wasn’t an accident, the hellhawk had their exact coordinate. “Liol, maser the bastard.”

  “On it, Josh.” A targeting program went primary in his neural nanonics. Three of the starship’s eight maser cannons aligned themselves on the terminus and fired. The beams caught the hellhawk as it slid out, and tracked it perfectly. At a hundred kilometres, the inverse square law meant they couldn’t kill the hellhawk immediately. Joshua didn’t care about that. He just wanted to force it away. Lady Mac could take a lot more radiation punishment than any bitek construct if the hellhawk wanted an energy beam duel.