“We’ll come back.”
“Not in this ship, not in a week. If we dock at a port, it’ll take a month to refit. That’s without any hassle from the navy. They won’t be alive in two days, not down there.”
“The navy said they’d pick up any survivors.”
“You mean that same navy which right now is shooting at our former colleagues?”
“Jesus!”
“There isn’t going to be a combat wasp left in thirty minutes,” the pilot said reasonably. “Not at the rate they’re expending them. All we have to do is sit tight for a couple of hours out here.”
Instinct pushed Joshua, repelled him from Lalonde and the red cloud bands. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ashly, but no. This is too big for us.” The coordinate display flipped up in his mind.
Ashly looked desperately round the bridge for an ally. His eyes found Sarha’s guilty expression.
She let out an exasperated sigh. “Joshua?”
“Now what!”
“We should jump to Murora.”
“Where?” His almanac file produced the answer, Murora was the largest gas giant in the Lalonde system. “Oh.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “There’s even an Edenist station in orbit to supervise their new habitat’s growth. We can dock there and replace the failed nodes with our spares. Then we can jump back here in a day or so and do a fast fly-by. If we get an answer from the mercs, and the navy doesn’t shoot us on sight, Ashly can go down to pick them up. If not, we just head straight back to Tranquillity.”
“Dahybi, what do you think?” Joshua asked curtly. Most of his anger was directed at himself; he should have thought of Murora as an alternative destination.
“Gets my vote,” the node specialist said. “I really don’t want to try an interstellar jump unless we absolutely have to.”
“Anybody else object? No? OK, nice idea, Sarha.” For the third time, the jump coordinate display appeared in his mind. He computed a vector to align the Lady Mac on the gas giant, eight hundred and fifty-seven million kilometres distant.
Ashly blew Sarha a kiss across the bridge. She grinned back.
Lady Macbeth’s two remaining fusion drives powered down. Ion thrusters matched her course to the Murora jump coordinate with tiny nudges. Joshua fired a last coded message at the geostationary communications satellites, then the dish antenna and various sensor clusters started to sink down into their jump recesses.
“Dahybi?” Joshua asked.
“I’ve programmed in the new patterns. Look at it this way, if they don’t work, we’ll never know.”
“Fucking wonderful.” He ordered the flight computer to initiate the jump.
Two kinetic missiles hammered into the frigate Neanthe, almost severing it in half. When the venting deuterium and glowing debris cleared, Arikara’s sensors observed Neanthe’s four life-support capsules spinning rapidly. Still intact. Kinetic missiles found two of them while a one-shot pulser discharged eighty kilometres away, stabbing another with a beam of coherent gamma radiation.
Admiral Saldana clenched his teeth in helpless fury. The battle had rapidly escalated out of all control, or even sanity. All the mercenary ships had fired salvos of combat wasps, there was simply no way of telling which were programmed to attack ships (or which ships) and which were for defence.
The tactical situation computer estimated over six hundred had now been launched. But communications were poor even with the dedicated satellites, and sensor data was degraded by the vast amount of electronic warfare signals emitted by everybody’s combat wasps. One of the bridge ratings had said they’d be better off with a periscope.
When it came, the explosion was intense enough to outshine the combined photonic output of the six hundred-plus fusion drives whirling round above Lalonde. An unblemished radiation nimbus expanded outwards at a quarter of the speed of light, engulfing starships, combat wasps, submunitions, and observation satellites with complete dispassion; hiding their own detonation behind a shell of scintillating molecules. When it was five hundred kilometres in diameter it began to thin, swirling with secondary colours like a solar soap bubble. It was three thousand kilometres ahead of the Arikara, yet it was potent enough to burn out every one of the sensors which the flagship had orientated on that sector of space.
“What the hell was that?” Meredith asked. The fear was there again, as always. Antimatter.
Seven gees slammed him down in his couch as the starship accelerated away from the planet and the dwindling explosion.
Clark Lowie and Rhys Hinnels reviewed the patchy tactical situation data leading up to the explosion. “It was one of their starships which imploded, sir,” Clarke Lowie said after a minute’s consultation. “The patterning nodes were activated.”
“But it was only three thousand kilometres above Lalonde.”
“Yes, sir. They must have known that. But they took out the Shukyo and the Bellah. I’d say it was deliberate.”
“Suicide?”
“Looks that way, sir.”
Five ships. He had lost five ships, and God knows how much damage inflicted on the rest of them. Mission elapsed time was twenty-three minutes, and most of that had been spent flying into orbit from the emergence point.
“Commander Kroeber, withdraw all squadron ships from orbit immediately. Tell them to rendezvous at the jump coordinate for Cadiz.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
A direct repudiation of the First Admiral’s orders, but there was no mission left, not any more. And he could save some crews by retreating now. He had that satisfaction, for himself.
The gravity plane shifted slightly as the Arikara came round onto its new vector, then reduced to five gees. Another salvo of combat wasps was fired as enemy drones curved round to intercept them.
Madness. Utter madness.
The river was one of the multitude of smaller unnamed tributaries that covered the south-western region of the colossal Juliffe basin. Its roots were the streams wandering round the long knolls which made up the land away to the south of Durringham, merging and splitting a dozen times until finally becoming a single steadfast river two hundred kilometres from the Juliffe itself.
At the time the spaceplanes brought down the mercenary scout teams there was still a respectable current running through it, the deflected rains hadn’t yet begun to affect the flow of water. In any case, the lakes and swamps which accounted for a third of its length formed a considerable reservoir, capable of sustaining the level for months.
The snowlilies, too, were relatively unaffected. The only difference the red cloud made was to extend the period it took for the aquatic leaves to ripen and break free of their stems. But where it ran through the thickest jungle that made up the majority of the Juliffe basin, the snowlilies seemed almost as numerous as always. Certainly they managed to cover the river’s thirty-metre width, even if they weren’t layered two or three deep as they had been in previous seasons.
Where the tributary ran through a quiet section of deepest jungle, one of the snowlilies five metres from the bank bulged up near the centre, then tore. A fist with grey water-resistant artificial skin punched through and began to widen the tear. Chas Paske broke the surface, and looked round.
The banks on either side of him were steep walls made from the knotted roots of cherry oak trees. Tall trunks straddled the summit, their white bark stained magenta from the light filtering through the tenebrous canopy far overhead. As far as the combat-boosted mercenary could see there was nobody around. He struck out for the shore.
His left thigh had been badly damaged by the white fire flung by the women who’d ambushed them. It was one reason for diving into the river as his team fled from the spaceplane’s landing zone. Nothing else seemed to extinguish the vile stuff.
Their shrill, delighted laughter had reverberated through the trees as the mercenaries crashed through the undergrowth. If he had just been granted another minute to unload their gear, establish a perimeter defence form
ation, the outcome would have been so very different. They had enjoyed it, those vixen women, that was the terrifying part of it, calling happily to each other as the mercenaries ran in panic. It was a game to them, exhilarating sport.
They weren’t people as he understood. Chase Paske was neither a superstitious nor religious man. But he knew that whatever evil had befallen Lalonde had nothing to do with Laton, nor was it going to be solved by Terrance Smith and his rag-tag forces.
He reached the bank and started to climb. The roots were atrociously slippery, his left leg dangled uselessly, and his arms and back were badly burnt, debilitating the boosted muscles. It was a slow process, but by jamming his elbows and right knee into crannies he could lever and pull himself upwards.
The women, it appeared, hadn’t understood the feats a boosted metabolism was capable of. He could survive for an easy four hours underwater without taking a breath. A useful trait when chemical and biological agents were being used.
Chas scrambled up the last couple of metres to the top of the woody bank, and rolled into the lee of a crooked trunk. Only then did he start to review the bad news his neural nanonics medical program was supplying.
The shallow flesh burns he could ignore for now—although they would need treating eventually. Almost half of his outer thigh had been burnt away, and the dull glint of his silicolithium femur was visible through the minced and charred muscle tissue. Nothing short of a total rebuild was going to get his leg functioning again. He started picking long white worm-analogues from the lairs they were burrowing into the naked wound.
He didn’t even have his pack with him when the women attacked. There was only his personal equipment belt. Which was better than nothing, he thought phlegmatically. It contained two small neural nanonic packages, which he wrapped round the top of his thigh like an old-fashioned bandage. They didn’t cover half the length of the wound, but they would stop poisoned blood and aboriginal bacteria from getting into the rest of his circulatory system. The remainder of it was going to fester, he realized grimly.
Taking stock, he had a first aid kit, a laser pistol with two spare power magazines, a small fission-blade knife, a hydrocarbon analyser to tell him which vegetation contained toxins his metabolism couldn’t filter, a palm-sized thermal inducer, and five EE grenades. He also had his guido block, a biological/chemical agent detector block, and an electronic warfare detector block. No communications block, though, which was a blow; he couldn’t check in with Terrance Smith to request evacuation, or even find out if any other members of his team had survived.
Finally there was the kiloton fusion nuke strapped to his side in its harness. A black carbotanium sphere twenty centimetres in diameter, thoroughly innocuous looking.
Chas did nothing for five minutes while he thought about his situation; then he began to cut strips of wood from the cherry oaks to form a splint and a crutch.
Hidden behind its event horizon, the singularity came into being two hundred and twenty thousand kilometres above Murora, its intense mass density bending the course of nearby photons and elementary particles in tight curves. It took six milliseconds to expand from its initial subatomic size out to fifty-seven metres in diameter. As it reached its full physical dimensions the internal stresses creating the event horizon ceased to exist.
Lady Macbeth fell in towards the gas giant, ion thrusters squirting out long spokes of cold blue fire to halt the slight spin caused by venting coolant gases. Thermo-dump panels stretched wide to glow a smoky cardinal red as they disposed of the excess thermal energy acquired during the starship’s frantic flight through Lalonde’s polar atmosphere. Sensor clusters swept the local environment for hazards while star trackers fixed their exact position.
Joshua exhaled loudly, allowing his relief to show. “Well done, Dahybi. That was good work under pressure.”
“I’ve been in worse situations.”
He refused to rise to the bait. “Sarha, have you locked down those malfunctioning systems yet?”
“We’re getting there,” she said blandly. “Give me another five minutes.”
“Sure.” After the harsh acceleration of Lalonde orbit, free fall was superbly relaxing. Now, if she’d just give him a massage ...
“That was one hell of a scrap back there,” Melvyn said.
“We’re well out of it,” Warlow rumbled.
“Feel sorry for the scout teams, trapped on a planet full of people who behave like that.” Melvyn stopped and winced, then gave Joshua a cautious glance.
“She knew what she was going down to,” Joshua said. “And I meant what I said about going back to check.”
“Reza Malin knew what he was about,” Ashly said. “She’ll be safe enough with him.”
“Right.” The flight computer datavised an alarm into Joshua’s neural nanonics. He accessed the sensor array.
Murora’s storm bands were smears of green and blue, mottled with the usual white ammonia cyclones. A thick whorl of ochre and bronze rings extended from the cloud tops out to a hundred and eighty thousand kilometres, broken by two major divisions. The gas giant boasted thirty-seven natural satellites, from a quartet of hundred-kilometre ring-shepherds up to five moons over two thousand kilometres in diameter; the largest, M-XI, named Keddie, had a thick nitrogen methane atmosphere.
Aethra had been germinated in a two hundred thousand kilometre orbit, far enough outside the fringes of the ring to mitigate any danger of collision from stray particles. The seed had been brought to the system in 2602 and attached to a suitable mineral-rich asteroid; it would take thirty years to mature into a structure capable of supporting a human population, and another twenty years to reach its full forty-five-kilometre length. After nine years of untroubled development it was already three and a half kilometres long.
In the same orbit, but trailing five hundred kilometres behind the young habitat, was the supervisory station, occupied by fifty staff (it had accommodation for a thousand). The Edenists didn’t use bitek for such a small habitational environment; it was a carbotanium wheel seven hundred and fifty metres in diameter, eighty metres wide, containing three long gardens separated by blocks of richly appointed apartments. Its hub was linked to a large non-rotating cylindrical port, grossly under-used, but built in anticipation of the traffic which would start to arrive once the habitat reached its median size and He3 cloud-scoop mining began in Murora’s atmosphere. During the interim there were just two inter-orbit vessels docked, which the station staff used to commute to Aethra on their inspection tours.
Lady Macbeth had emerged forty thousand kilometres away from the solitary Edenist outpost, a jump accuracy Joshua was entirely satisfied with considering the conditions. Her sensors focused on the station in time to see it break apart. The rim had been sliced open in several places, allowing the atmosphere to jet out. Small thrusters were still firing in a useless attempt to halt the ominous wobble which had developed. Optical sensors revealed trees, bushes, and oscillating slicks of water rushing out of the long gashes.
“Like the Ruin Ring,” Joshua whispered painfully.
Small circular spots on the carbotanium shell glowed crimson. The tough metal was visibly undulating as the structure’s seesaw fluctuations increased. Then one of the cryogenic fuel-storage tanks in the non-rotating port exploded, which triggered another two or three tanks.
It was hard to tell the exact number, the entire station was obscured by the white vapour billowing out.
As the cloud dispersed large sections of the wheel tumbled out of the darkening centre.
A hundred kilometres away, two fusion drives burnt hotly against the icy starscape, heading for the immature habitat. One of the ships was emitting a steady beat of microwaves from its transponder.
“They’re here already,” Melvyn said. “Bloody hell. They must have jumped before we did.”
“That is the Maranta’s transponder code,” Warlow said without any notable inflection. “Why would Wolfgang leave it transmitting?”
&nbs
p; “Because he’s not the captain any more,” Ashly said. “Look at the vectors. Neither of them is maintaining a steady thrust. Their drives are unstable.”
“They’re going to kill the habitat, aren’t they?” Sarha said. “Just like Laton did all those years ago. Those bastards! It can’t hurt them, it can’t hurt anybody. What kind of sequestration is this?”
“A bad one,” Warlow grumbled at an almost subliminal volume. “Very bad.”
“I’m picking up lifeboat beacons,” Melvyn said with a rush of excitement.
“Two of them. Somebody escaped.”
Joshua, who had felt eager triumph at their successful jump to Murora and anger at the station’s violation, was left empty, leaving his mind in an almost emotion-free state. His crew was looking at him. Waiting. Dad never mentioned this part of captaining a ship.
“Melvyn, Sarha; recalibrate the injection ionizers for the number one fusion tube. Whatever thrust we can get, please. I’m going to need it. Ashly, Warlow, get down to the airlock deck. We won’t have much time to bring them on board, make sure they come through as fast as possible.”
Warlow’s couch webbing peeled back immediately. The cosmonik and the pilot went through the floor hatch as though they were in a race.
“Dahybi, recharge the nodes. I’ll jump outsystem as soon as we have them on board.” If we get them on board.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Stand by for combat gees. Again!”
On the other side of hugely complex schematic diagrams, Sarha smiled knowingly at the hard-used martyred tone.
Lady Macbeth’s fusion drives ignited, driving the ship towards the twirling wreckage of the station. Thermo-dump panels hurried back into their recesses as the gee force climbed. The starship’s sensors tracked the two fusion drives forty thousand kilometres ahead. Joshua was wondering how long it would take for them to spot the rescue attempt. If they use the sensors the way they do the fusion drives they may never see us. Maranta was only accelerating at half a gee.