> it said formally.
> Tranquillity replied.
The voidhawk accelerated in towards the habitat, building up to three gees almost immediately.
> Tranquillity said. >
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The tube carriage slid to a halt and Captain Khanna stepped out onto the small station’s platform. He was thirty-eight years old, with crew-cut sandy red hair, pale skin given to freckles if he was caught by the sun, regular features, and dark brown eyes. His body was kept in trim by a stiff forty-minute navy-approved workout each morning without fail. Out of his academy class of one hundred and fifteen officer cadets he had finished third; it would have been first but the computer psychological assessment said his flexibility wasn’t all that it could be, he was “doctrine orientated”.
He had been on the First Admiral’s executive staff for eighteen months, and in that time hadn’t made a single mistake. This was his first independent assignment, and he was frankly terrified. Tactics and command decisions he could handle, even Admiralty office politics; but a semi-reclusive universally revered black sheep Saldana teenage girl affinity-bonded to a non-Edenist bitek habitat was another matter. How the hell did you prepare motivation-analysis profiles on such a creature?
“You’ll do all right,” Admiral Aleksandrovich had said in his final briefing. “Young enough not to alienate her, smart enough not to insult her intelligence. And all the girls love a uniform.” The old man had winked and given him a companionable pat on the back.
Maynard Khanna pulled the jacket of his immaculate deep-blue dress uniform straight, placed his peaked cap firmly on his head, squared his shoulders, and marched up the stairs out of the station. He came out onto a courtyard of flagstones, lined with troughs full of colourful begonias and fuchsias. Paths led off from all sides into the surrounding sub-tropical parkland. He could see some sort of building a hundred metres away; but it was given only a fleeting glance as he stared round in astonishment. After coming through the airlock from the docking-ledge he had climbed straight into the waiting tube carriage, he hadn’t seen anything of the interior until now. The sheer size of Tranquillity was awesome, big enough to put a couple of standard Edenist habitats inside and shake them around like dice in a cup. A blinding light-tube glared hotly overhead, white candyfloss clouds trailed slowly through the air. A panorama of forests and meadows flecked with silver lakes and long water-courses rose up on either side of him like the walls of God’s own valley. And there was a sea about eight kilometres away—it couldn’t be called anything else with its sparkling wavelets and picturesque islands.
He followed the arch of it rising up and up, his neck tilting back until his cap threatened to fall off. Millions of tonnes of water were poised above him ready to crash down in a flood which would have defeated Noah.
He brought his head down hurriedly, trying to remember how he had got rid of the giddiness when he visited the Edenist habitats orbiting Jupiter.
“Don’t look outside the horizontal, and always remember the poor sod above you thinks you’re going to fall on him,” his crusty old guide had said.
Knowing he had been defeated before he even started, Maynard Khanna walked along the yellow-brown stone path towards the building that resembled a Hellenic temple. It was a long basilica which had one end opening out into a circular area with a domed roof of some jet-black material supported by white pillars, the gaps between them filled by sheets of blue-mirror glass.
The path took him to the opposite end of the basilica, where a pair of serjeants stood guard duty like nightmare goblin statues on either side of the entrance arch.
“Captain Khanna?” one asked. The voice was mild and friendly, completely at odds with its appearance.
“Yes.”
“The Lord of Ruin is expecting you, please follow my servitor.” The serjeant turned and led him into the building. They walked down a central nave with large gilt-framed pictures hanging on the brown and white marble walls.
Maynard Khanna assumed they were holograms at first, then he realized they were two-dimensional, and a more detailed look revealed that they were oil paintings. There were a lot of countryside scenes where people wore elaborate, if baroque, costumes, riding on horses or gathered in ostentatious groups. Scenes from old Earth, pre-industrial age. And a Saldana would never make do with copies. They must be genuine. His mind balked at how much they must be worth; you could buy a battle cruiser with the money just one of them would fetch.
At the far end of the nave a Vostok capsule was resting on a cradle under a protective glass dome. Maynard stopped and looked at the battered old sphere with a mixture of trepidation and admiration. It was so small, so crude, yet for a few brief years it had represented the pinnacle of human technology. What ever would the cosmonaut who rode it into space think of Tranquillity?
“Which one is it?” he asked the serjeant in a hushed tone.
“Vostok 6, it carried Valentina Tereshkova into orbit in 1963. She was the first woman in space.”
Ione Saldana was waiting for him in the large circular audience chamber at the end of the nave. She sat behind a crescent-shaped wooden desk positioned in the centre; thick planes of light streamed in through the giant sheets of glass set between the pillars, turning the air into a platinum haze.
The white polyp floor was etched with a giant crowned phoenix emblem in scarlet and blue. It took an eternity for him to cover the distance from the door to the desk; the sound of his boot heels clicking against the polished surface echoed drily in the huge empty space.
Intended to intimidate, he thought. You know how alone you are when you confront her.
He snapped a perfect salute when he reached the desk. She was a head of state, after all; the Admiral’s protocol office had been most insistent about that, and how he should treat her.
Ione was wearing a simple sea-green summer dress with long sleeves. The intense lighting made her short gold-blonde hair glimmer softly.
She was just as lovely as all the AV recordings he’d studied.
“Do take a seat, Captain Khanna,” she said, smiling. “You look most uncomfortable standing up like that.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” There were two high-backed chairs on his side of the desk; he sat in one, still keeping his pose rigid.
“I understand you’ve come all the way from the First Fleet headquarters at Avon just to see me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“In a voidhawk?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Owing to the somewhat unusual nature of this worldlet, we don’t have a diplomatic corps, nor a civil service,” she said airily. A delicate hand waved around at the audience chamber. “The habitat personality handles all the administrative functions quite effectively. But the Lords of Ruin employ a legal firm on Avon to represent Tranquillity’s interests in the Confederation
Assembly chamber. If there’s a matter of urgency arising, you only have to consult them. I have met the senior partners, and I have a lot of confidence in them.”
“Yes, ma’am—”
“Maynard, please. Stop calling me ma’am. This is a private meeting, and you’re making me sound like a day-club governess for junior aristocrats.”
“Yes, Ione.”
She smiled brightly. The effect was devastating. Her eyes were an enchanting shade of blue, he noticed.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now what have you come to talk about?”
“Dr Alkad Mzu.”
“Ah.”
“Are you familiar with the name?”
“The name and most of the circumstances.”
“Admiral Aleksandrovich felt this was not a matter to take to your legal representatives on Avon. It is his opinion that the fewer people who are aware of the situation, the better.”
Her smile turned speculative. “Fewer people? Maynard, there are eight different Intelligence agencies who have set up shop in Tranquillity; and all of them run surveillance operations on poor Dr Mzu. There are times when their pursuit becomes dangerously close to a slapstick routine. Even the Kulu ESA have posted a team here. I imagine that must be a real thorn in my cousin Alastair’s regal pride.”
“I think what the Admiral meant was: fewer people outside high government office.”
“Yes, of course, the people most able to deal with the situation.”
The irony in her tone made Maynard Khanna give an inward flinch. “In view of the fact that Dr Mzu is now contacting a number of starship captains, and the Omutan sanctions are about to expire, the Admiral would be extremely grateful if we could be told of your policy regarding Dr Mzu,” he said formally.
“Are you recording this for the Admiral?”
“Yes, a full sensevise.”
Ione stared straight into his eyes, speaking in a clear precise diction.
“My father promised Admiral Aleksandrovich’s predecessor that Dr Alkad Mzu would never be allowed to leave Tranquillity, and I repeat that promise to the Admiral. She will not be permitted to leave, nor will I countenance any attempt to sell or hand over the information she presumably holds to anybody, including the Confederation Navy. Upon her death, she will be cremated in order to destroy her neural nanonics. And I hope to God that sees the end of the threat.”
“Thank you,” Maynard Khanna said.
Ione relaxed a little. “I hadn’t even been gestated when she arrived here twenty-six years ago, so tell me, I’m curious. Has Fleet Intelligence discovered yet how she survived Garissa’s destruction?”
“No. She can’t have been on the planet. The Confederation Navy was in charge of the evacuation, and we have no record of carrying her on any of our ships. Nor was she listed as being in any of the asteroid settlements. The only logical conclusion is that she was outsystem on some kind of clandestine military mission when Omuta bombed Garissa.”
“Deploying the Alchemist?”
“Who knows? The device certainly wasn’t used; so either it didn’t work or they were intercepted. The general staff favours the interception scenario.”
“And if she survived, so did the Alchemist,” Ione concluded.
“If it was ever built.”
She raised an eyebrow. “After all this time, I thought that was taken for granted.”
“The thinking goes that after all this time, we should have heard something other than rumours. If it does exist, why haven’t the Garissan survivors tried to use it against Omuta?”
“When it comes to Doomsday machines, rumours are all I want to hear.”
“Yes.”
“You know, I’ve watched her sometimes while she’s been working over in the Laymil project’s physics centre. She’s a good physicist, her colleagues respect her. But she’s nothing exceptional, not mentally.”
“One idea in a lifetime is all it takes.”
“You’re right. Clever of her to come here, really. The one place where her security is guaranteed, and at the same time the one mini-nation which everybody knows is no military threat to other Confederation members.”
“So may I say you have no objection to our maintaining our observation team?”
“You can, providing you don’t flaunt the privilege. But please reassure yourselves. I don’t think she’s received much geneering, if any. She can’t last more than another thirty years, forty at the outside. Then it will all be over.”
“Excellent.” He leant forward a few millimetres, lips moving upwards into a slight awkward smile. “There was one other matter.”
Ione’s eyes widened with innocent anticipation. “Yes?”
“An independent trader captain called Joshua Calvert mentioned your name in connection with one of our agents.”
She squinted up at the ceiling as if lost in a particularly difficult feat of recall. “Oh, yes, Joshua. I remember him, he caused quite a stir at the start of the year. Found a big chunk of Laymil electronics in the Ruin Ring. I met him at a party once. A nice young man.”
“Yes,” Maynard Khanna said gingerly. “So you didn’t warn him about Erick Thakrar being one of our deep-cover operatives?”
“Erick Thakrar’s name never passed my lips. Actually, Thakrar has just been accepted by Captain André Duchamp for a berth on the Villeneuve’s Revenge, that’s an Adamist ship with an antimatter drive fitted. I’m sure Commander Olsen Neale will confirm that for you. Erick Thakrar’s cover is completely intact, I can assure you that André Duchamp doesn’t suspect a thing.”
“Well, that’s a great relief, the Admiral will be pleased.”
“I’m glad to hear it. And please don’t concern yourself over Joshua Calvert, I’m sure he’d never do anything illegal, he’s really an exemplary citizen.”
> Oenone warned the crew. They were two light-weeks from Puerto de Santa Maria’s star, which cast a barely perceptible shadow on the voidhawk’s foam-encased hull. The Nephele was drifting eight hundred kilometres over the upper hull, yet Oenone’s optical sensors were unable to see it.
Twenty-eight thousand kilometres further in towards the faint star, the Lady Macbeth’s sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels were folding with the neatness of an alighting eagle.
If only everything about the Adamist starship’s flight was that neat, Syrinx wished. This Captain Calvert was a born incompetent. It had taken them six days to get here from New California, a distance of fifty-three light-years. The manoeuvres which Lady Macbeth performed every time she reached a jump coordinate were appallingly sloppy, they went on for hours at a time. Time was money in the cargo business. And if this was the way Calvert navigated on every voyage it was no wonder he needed the money so desperately.
“Stand by,” Syrinx told Larry Kouritz. “He’s lined up on the Ciudad asteroid.”
“Roger,” the marine captain acknowledged.
“The Ciudad,” Eileen Carouch muttered as she accessed the Puerto de Santa Maria file in her neural nanonics. “There are several insurrectionist cells based there, according to the planetary government’s Intelligence agency. They are pushing hard for independence.”
> Syrinx broadcast,
Nephele, you keep a sharp watch for approaching ships. If these insurrectionists are desperate enough to try and obtain antimatter-confinement technology they may be dumb enough to try and assist their courier.>>
> Targard, the Nephele’s captain, replied.
Syrinx returned her attention to Oenone’s sensor inputs. The Lady Macbeth had reverted to a perfect sphere. Blue ion flames shrank away to nothing.
There was a sharp twist in space’s uniformity.
> she comma
nded.
Oenone erupted out of the wormhole terminus seventeen hundred kilometres distant from the Lady Macbeth. A blizzard of foam flakes swirled away as electronic sensors and thermo-dump panels were uncovered around the crew toroid. Fusion generators in the lower hull combat systems toroid powered up. X-ray lasers deployed. Gravity returned to the crew toroid. The distortion field swelled outwards, accelerating the voidhawk up to seven gees. It chased a sharp curve round to align on the Lady Macbeth. Two hundred kilometres away the Nephele was shaking off its stealth cloak.
Ciudad was a distant lacklustre speck, with a small constellation of industrial stations wrapped around it. Strategic defence sensor radiation raked across the Oenone.
Syrinx was aware of a curious secondary oscillation in the distortion field. Foam was streaming away from all across the hull.
> Oenone sighed almost subliminally.
Syrinx didn’t have time to form a rebuke. A transmitter dish unfolded from the lower hull toroid, swinging round to focus on the Lady Macbeth.
“Starship Lady Macbeth,” she relayed through the transmitter’s bitek processors. “This is Confederation Navy ship Oenone. You are ordered to hold your position. Do not activate your reaction drive, do not attempt to jump away. Stand by for rendezvous and boarding.”
Oenone’s distortion field reached out to engulf the Adamist starship.
Syrinx could hear Tula communicating with Ciudad’s defence control centre, informing them of the interception.
“Hi there, Oenone,” Joshua Calvert’s voice came cheerfully out of the bridge’s AV pillars. “Are you in some kind of trouble? How can we assist?”
Lying prone on her couch, her teeth gritted against the four-gee acceleration, Syrinx could only glance at the offending pillar in disconcerted amazement.
Oenone covered the last five kilometres cautiously, every sensor and weapon trained on the Lady Macbeth, alert for the slightest hint of treachery. At a hundred and fifty metres’ distance, the voidhawk rotated slowly, presenting its upper hull towards the Adamist starship. The two extended airlock tubes, then touched and sealed. Larry Kouritz led his squad into the Lady Macbeth’s life-support capsules, executing the penetration and securement procedures with textbook precision.