“You signed me up for my multi-tasking.”
“All right,” Joshua said. She was right, it was hard for him to talk about this. “It’s Louise.”
“Ah! The Norfolk babe. The very young one.”
“She’s not . . .” he began automatically. Sarha’s lack of expression stopped him. “Well, she is a bit young. I think I sort of took advantage.”
“Oh wow. I never thought the day would come when I heard you say that. Exactly why is it bothering you this time? You use your status like a stun gun.”
“I do not!”
“Please. When was the last time you went planetside or even into port without your little captain’s star bright on your shoulder?” She gave him a sympathetic smile. “You really fell for her, didn’t you?”
“No more than usual. It’s just that none of my other girlfriends wound up being possessed. Jesus, I had a hint of what that was like. I can’t stop thinking what it must have been like for her, how fucking ugly. She was so sweet, she didn’t belong in a world where those kind of things happen to people.”
“Do any of us?”
“You know what I mean. You’ve done stims you shouldn’t have, you’ve accessed real news sensevises. We know this is a badass universe. It helps, a bit. As much as anything can. But Louise—damn, her brat sister, too. We flew off and left them, just like we always do.”
“They spare children, you know. That Stephanie Ash woman on Ombey brought a whole bunch of kids out. I accessed the report.”
“Louise wasn’t a child. It happened to her.”
“You don’t know that for certain. If she was smart enough, she might have eluded them.”
“I doubt it. She doesn’t have that sort of ability.”
“She must have had some pretty amazing features to have this effect on you.”
He thought back to the carriage journey to Cricklade after they’d just met, her observations on Norfolk and its nature. He’d agreed with just about everything she’d said. “She wasn’t street-smart. And that’s the kind of dirty selfishness you need to elude the possessed.”
“You really don’t believe she made it, do you?”
“No.”
“Do you think you’re responsible for her?”
“Not responsible, exactly. But I think she was sort of looking at me as the person who was going to take her away from Cricklade Manor.”
“Dear me, whatever could have given her that impression, I wonder?”
Joshua didn’t hear. “I let her down, just by being me. It’s not a nice feeling, Sarha. She really was a lovely girl, even though she’d been brought up on Norfolk. If she’d been born anywhere else, I’d probably . . .” He fell silent, shifting his sweatshirt round, not meeting Sarha’s astonished stare.
“Say it,” she said.
“Say what?”
“Probably marry her.”
“I would not marry her. All I’m saying is that if she’d been given a proper childhood instead of growing up in that ridiculous medieval pageant there might’ve been a chance that we could have had something slightly longer-term than usual.”
“Well that’s a relief,” Sarha drawled.
“Now what have I done?” he exclaimed.
“You’ve been Joshua. For a moment there I thought you were actually evolving. Didn’t you hear yourself? She hasn’t had the education to become a crew member on Lady Mac , therefore it can’t possibly work between you. There was never a thought that you might give up your life to join her.”
“I can’t!”
“Because Lady Mac is far more important than Cricklade estate, which is her life. Right? So do you love her, Joshua? Or do you just feel guilty because one of the girls you shagged and dumped happened to get captured and possessed?”
“Jesus! What are you trying to do to me?”
“I’m trying to understand you, Joshua. And help if I can. This matters to you. It’s important. You have to know why.”
“I don’t know why. I just know I’m worried about her. Maybe I’m guilty. Maybe I’m angry at the way the universe has crapped all over us.”
“Fair enough. All of us are feeling that way right now. At least we’re doing something about it. You can’t fly Lady Mac to Norfolk and rescue her; not any more. As far as anyone knows, this is the next best thing.”
He gave her a sad grin. “Yeah. I guess that’s me being selfish, too. I have to be doing something. Me.”
“It’s the kind of selfishness the Confederation needs right now.”
“That still doesn’t make it fair what happened to her. She’s suffering through no fault of her own. If this Sleeping God is as powerful as the Tyrathca believe, then it’s got some explaining to do.”
“We’ve been saying that about our deities ever since we dreamt them up. It’s a fallacy to assume it shares our morals and ethics. In fact it’s quite obvious it doesn’t. If it did, none of this would have happened. We’d all be living in paradise.”
“You mean the argument against divine intervention is forever unbreakable?”
“Yep, free will means we have to make our own choices. Without that, life is meaningless; we’d be insects grubbing along the way our instincts tell us. Sentience has to count for something.”
Joshua leant over and placed a grateful kiss on her forehead. “Getting us into trouble, usually. I mean, Jesus, look at me. I’m a wreck. Sentience hurts.”
They went out into the bridge together. Liol and Dahybi were lying on their acceleration couches, looking bored. Samuel was emerging from the hatchway.
“That was a long handover,” Liol remarked waspishly.
“Can’t you manage those yourself?” Joshua asked.
“You might have a Calvert body, but don’t forget which of us has more experience.”
“Not in all the relevant fields, you don’t.”
“I’m off watch,” Dahybi announced loudly. His couch webbing peeled back, allowing him to swing his feet down onto the decking. “Sarha, you coming?”
Joshua and Liol grinned at each other. Joshua made a polite gesture towards the floor hatch, which Liol acknowledged with a gracious bow. “Thank you, Captain.”
“While you’re in the galley I could do with some breakfast,” Joshua shouted after them. There was no reply. He and Samuel settled down on their acceleration couches. The Edenist was becoming a proficient systems officer, helping the crew with their shifts, as had the other science team specialists travelling on board. Even Monica was chipping in.
Joshua accessed the flight computer. Trajectory graphics and status schematics overlaid the external sensor images. Space had become awesome.
Three light-years ahead, Mastrit-PJ poured a strong crimson light across the dull foam which coated the starship’s fuselage. The Orion nebula veiled half of the starscape to galactic north of Lady Mac , a glorious three-dimensional tapestry of luminescent gas with a furiously turbulent surface composed from scarlet, green, and turquoise clouds clashing as rival oceans, their million-year antagonism throwing out energetic, chaotic spumes in all directions. Inside, it was knotted with proplyds, the glowing protoplanetary disks condensing out of the maelstrom. At the heart lay the Trapezium, the four hottest, massive stars, whose phenomenal ultraviolet output illuminated and energized the whole colossal expanse of interstellar gas.
Joshua had come to adore the infinitely varied topology of the nebula as they’d slowly flown out of Confederation space to soar around it. It was alive in a way no physical biology could match, its currents and molecular shoals a trillion times as complex as anything found in a hydrocarbon-based cell. The young, frantic stars which cluttered the interior were venting tremendous storms of ultra-hot gas, propagating shockwaves that travelled over a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres an hour. They would take the form of loops which curled and twisted sinuously, their frayed ends shimmering brightly as they fanned away the wild energy surging along their length.
For the crews in both Lady Mac and Oenone ,
watching the nebula had replaced all forms of recorded entertainment. Its majesty had lightened their mood considerably; theirs was now a true flight into history, no matter what the outcome.
Joshua and Syrinx had decided on flying around the galactic south of the nebula, an approximation of Tanjuntic-RI’s flightpath. During the first stages they’d utilized observations from Confederation observatories to navigate around the quirky folds of cloud and glimmering prominences visible from human space, even though the images were over 1,500 years out of date. But after the first few days they were traversing space never glimpsed by human telescopes. Their speed slowed as they had to start scanning ahead for stars and dust clouds and parsec-wide cyclones of iridescent gas.
Long before Mastrit-PJ itself was visible, its light coloured the cooler outer strands of the nebula. The ships flew onwards with its thick red glow deepening around them. As soon as the star rose into full view 700 light-years ahead, parallax measurements enabled Oenone to calculate its position, enabling them to plot an accurate trajectory straight for it.
Now Joshua was piloting Lady Mac to her penultimate jump coordinate. Radar showed him Oenone 1,000 kilometres away, matching their half-gee acceleration. The burn was stronger than Adamist ships usually employed, but they hadn’t been altering their delta-V much during the flight round the nebula, choosing to wait until they got a fix on Mastrit-PJ before matching velocity with the red giant.
“Burn rate is holding constant,” Samuel said, after they’d run their diagnostic programs. “You have some quality drive tubes here, Joshua. We should have just under sixty per cent of our fusion fuel left when we jump in.”
“Good enough for me. Let’s hope we don’t soak up too much delta-V searching for the redoubt. I want to hold all the antimatter in reserve for the Sleeping God.”
“You are positive about the outcome, then?”
Joshua thought about the answer for a moment, mildly surprised by his own confidence. It was a pleasant contrast to the disquiet he felt over Louise. Intuition, a tonic against conscience. “Yeah. Guess I am. That part of it, anyway.”
The orange vector plot which the flight computer was datavising into his neural nanonics showed him the jump coordinate was approaching. He started reducing their acceleration, datavising a warning to the crew. Samuel began retracting the sensor booms and thermo-dump panels.
Lady Mac jumped first, covering two and a half light years. Oenone shot out of its wormhole terminus six seconds later, a healthy hundred and fifty kilometres away. Mastrit-PJ wasn’t quite a disk, though its brilliant glare would make it hard for the naked eye to tell. From a mere half light-year distance its red light was sufficient to wash out the nebula and most of the stars.
“I’ve been hit by lasers with less power,” Joshua muttered as the sensor filters cut in to deflect the rush of photons.
“It’s only recently ended its expansion phase,” Samuel said. “In astrological terms, this has only just happened.”
“Stellar explosions are fast events. This happened fifteen thousand years ago, at least.”
“Once the initial expansion occurs, there is a long period of adjustment within the photosphere as it stabilises. Either way, the overall energy output is most impressive. As far as this side of the galaxy is concerned, it outshines the nebula.”
Joshua checked the neuroiconic displays. “No heat, and precious little radiation. Particle density is up on the norm, but then it’s been fluctuating the whole time we’ve chased round the nebula.” He datavised the flight computer to establish a communication link with Oenone . “How are we doing with the final coordinate?”
“I was pleasingly correct with my earlier estimates,” the voidhawk replied. “I should have the final figure ready for you in another five minutes.”
“Fine.” After their first sighting of Mastrit-PJ, Joshua had checked the figures which Oenone had supplied a couple of times, out of interest rather than distrust. Each time they’d been better than any reading Lady Mac ’s technological sensors could provide. He didn’t bother after that.
“We should be able to measure the photosphere boundary to within a thousand kilometres,” Syrinx datavised. “Defining exactly where it ends and space begins is problematical. Theory has an effervescence zone measuring up to anything between five hundred to half a million kilometres thick.”
“We’ll stick to plan-A, then,” Joshua datavised back.
“I think so. Everything’s checked out as we expected so far. Kempster has activated every sensor we’re carrying, recording it like flek memories are infinite. I expect he’ll let us know if he and Renato spot any anomalies.”
“Okay. In the meantime I’ll plot an initial vector to leave Lady Mac with a neutral relative velocity. I can refine it when you’ve finished working out the coordinate.” He suspected Oenone could supply him with the appropriate vector within milliseconds. But damn it, he had some pride.
Lady Mac ’s star trackers locked on to the new constellations they’d mapped. He brought his navigation programs into primary mode and began feeding in the raw data.
Joshua and Syrinx had decided on an interval of several hours before making the final jump to Mastrit-PJ. Partly it was due to their lack of knowledge on its real position and size. Once that was determined, they intended to emerge in the ecliptic plane, a safe distance above the top of the photosphere, with their velocity matched perfectly to the star’s. It meant the only force acting on them would be the star’s gravity, a tiny tide-like pull inwards. From that vantage point they would be able to scan space for a considerable distance. Logically, the remnants of the Tyrathca’s redoubt civilization should be orbiting the star’s equator. Possibly on a Pluto-type planet that had survived the explosion, or a large Oort-ring asteroid. Although the volume of space was admittedly huge, by jumping in steady increments round Mastrit-PJ’s equator they should eventually be able to find it.
Oenone would also spend the time to completely recharge its energy patterning cells from cosmic radiation, saving its fusion fuel. Not only would that prepare the voidhawk to carry out the search, it would then have the ability to withdraw across a considerable distance, matching Lady Mac ’s sequential jump facility should they unwittingly enter a hostile armed xenoc environment. That was an imaginative worst-case scenario dreamt up by Joshua, Ashly, Monica, Samuel, and (surprisingly) Ruben; which everyone else cheerfully told them verged on outright paranoia. As it turned out, they’d done quite a good job.
A star is a perpetual battleground of primal forces, principally those of heat and gravity which manifest themselves as expansion and contraction. At its core, a main-sequence star is a giant hydrogen fusion reaction, heating the rest of the mass sufficiently to counter gravitational contraction. However, fusion is only as finite as its fuel supply, while gravity is eternal.
After billions of years of steady luminescence, Mastrit-PJ exhausted the hydrogen atoms of its core, burning them into inert helium. Fusion energy production continued within a small shell of hydrogen wrapped around the central region. Temperature, pressure, and density all began to change as the envelope took over from the core as the principal source of heat. As the transformation of its internal structure progressed, so Mastrit-PJ left its original stable luminous sequence behind at an ever increasing rate. Its outer layers began to expand, heated by convection currents surging up from the growing fusion envelope. While on the inside of the envelope, the core continued its gravitational contraction as a snow of helium atoms drifted downwards adding to its mass.
Mastrit-PJ divided into two distinct and very different entities: the centre burning with renewed vigour as it continued its contraction, and the outer layers bloating out and cooling through the spectrum from white through yellow and into red. That was the epoch of stellar evolution from which the Tyrathca had fled. The expanding star inflated out to over four hundred times its original radius, eventually settling down with a diameter of one thousand six hundred and seventy million kilometres. It
swept across the three inner planets, including the Tyrathca homeworld, and quickly devoured the two outer gas-giants. There was no exact line to show where the star ended and space began, instead the inflamed hydrogen thinned out into a thick solar wind which blew steadily out into the galaxy. However, for catalogue and navigational purposes, Oenone had defined Mastrit-PJ’s periphery at seven hundred and eighty million kilometres from its invisible core.
Lady Macbeth was the first to emerge, a respectable fifty million kilometres above the wispy radiant sea of dissolving particles. Normal space had ceased to exist, leaving the starship coasting between two parallel universes of light. On one side, the spectral eddies of the nebula jewelled with young stars; on the other, a flat, featureless desert of golden-hot photons.
Oenone emerged twenty kilometres from the dark Adamist ship.
“Contact locked,” Joshua datavised in confirmation to Syrinx as their dish acquired Oenone ’s short-range beacon. Lady Mac ’s full complement of survey sensors were rising out of their fuselage recesses, along with the new systems which Kempster had requested. He could actually see a similar suite deploying from the pods riding in the voidhawk’s lower fuselage cargo cradles.
“I see you,” she replied. “Confirming no rocks or dust clouds in our immediate vicinity. We’re starting the sensor sweep.”
“Us too.”
“How’s your thermal profile?”
“Holding fine,” Sarha replied when he consulted her. “It’s hot out there, but not as bad as the approach to the antimatter station. Our dump panels can radiate it away faster than we’re absorbing it. Wouldn’t want you to fly us too much closer, though. And if you can give us a slow continuing roll manoeuvre, I’d be happy. It’ll avoid any hot-spots building on the fuselage.”
“Do my best,” he told her. “Syrinx, we can cope. How about you?”
“Not a problem at this distance. The foam insulation is intact.”
“Okay.” He fired the starship’s equatorial ion thrusters, initiating the slow barbecue-mode roll Sarha wanted.
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