Orla and Ravindra had their lenses on high magnification and were straining, looking for any sign of movement in the cave mouth. Conceivably the Veil could come into Jackson’s Hole through any of the tunnel networks that were large enough to fit their craft, but it seemed unlikely they would have time to find another cave mouth that they could be sure would get them where they wanted to go.
They were in the eye again. They could see the glare of the light from outside the cavern and beams of white light shining through the holes in the planetoid. Their systems went even more haywire. As the beam passed, the
Omerta
came in hard – all of its manoeuvring engines burning bright as it tried to check its momentum.
‘That was at least seven gees,’ Ravindra muttered. There would be a lot of pain on the other ship at the moment. If it hadn’t been for Jenny, this would have been the perfect moment to strike. Instead, Ravindra moved the
Song
further back into the nook in the wall.
The
Omerta
managed to halt just before it hit the rounded cave wall opposite the mouth of the enormous cavern. Ravindra was impressed despite herself. The Anaconda was a big ship, but the mil-spec upgrades to the weapons and shields had clearly extended to the engines as well and the pilot knew how to handle it. The
Omerta
’s manoeuvring engines burned again as she banked hard, avoiding the harsh light, into an area of ‘shade’ big enough to hold the Anaconda. Then lights stabbed out from the big ship. The beams of powerful searchlights. They started sweeping the area.
‘They’re using lidar as well, which will only be partially effective. I’m also receiving badly garbled comms.’
‘We’ll be able to communicate with them, right?’ Ravindra asked, though she knew the answer.
Orla laughed humourlessly. ‘Through close range tight beam, yes, though even that’s going to have background interference. I’ll be hitting them with a signal not far from the power of a pulse laser. You want to talk to them?’
‘No. I want to know where the corvette is.’ She still couldn’t see the smaller, faster ship, but refused to believe it had not come too.
As they came out of the glare of the eye the Anaconda moved away from its holding position and started moving around the giant cave. It was searching for the
Song
visually, its massive searchlights illuminating the darkness of the cavern. Ravindra checked all the weapons and flight systems again, and was sickened by their ongoing degradation.
The Anaconda didn’t so much remind her of its serpent namesake as an ocean-going predator searching for bottom feeders. Ravindra felt sweat run down her skin.
‘What happens if it finds us?’ Orla asked.
‘Hopefully we start negotiations. The problem is, we start negotiations without knowing where the corvette is, then it gets to blindside us.’
‘The bounty hunter?’
‘Perhaps she’s too smart to come here.’
‘There,’ Orla said, and pointed through the transparent hull towards the curving cavern wall nearly opposite them. The nose of the corvette was just about visible sticking out of the exit of one of the tunnel networks, protruding just enough to allow its optics and bridge crew to see into the cavern. This was not good. This meant that the corvette’s pilot had managed to find an external cave network in between pulses. They were
good
. Ravindra suspected another military slave pilot with Simpson Town genes.
‘Ready?’ Ravindra asked. Orla answered by unstrapping herself from the acceleration couch and pulling herself out of the bridge towards the closest airlock, where the cargo waited.
Ravindra slowly moved out of their hiding place and started moving across the cavern. The
Omerta
finally noticed the movement and turned two of its searchlights on the
Song.
The light was bright enough for the
Song
’s transparent hull to polarise.
‘Now that’s just obnoxious,’ Ravindra muttered as she moved the ship to the other side of Jackson’s Hole. She was now above the corvette and obscured from its view. The corvette moved out of its hiding place. The Anaconda started moving towards the
Song
, while the corvette rose within the cavern, attempting to find an overwatch position. Ravindra kept the
Song
moving, trying to deny the smaller ship a strong position over her cutter.
‘It’s done,’ Orla said. Even the internal comms were crackling with interference. ‘Three minutes.’
‘This is the
Song of Stone
, to the
Omerta
,’ Ravindra said over the tight beam link. ‘Drop Jenny and once we have her onboard and have ascertained that she’s okay, then we’ll drop the cargo.’
‘Let’s not waste each other’s time.’ Even through the static, Ravindra could tell that the voice belonged to the Veil. ‘In precisely thirty seconds you will drop my cargo and we will drop your engineer. You try to pick up your engineer faster than we pick up our cargo, and then we try to kill each other.’
Well, at least he isn’t pretending
, Ravindra conceded.
‘Understood,’ she told him. The
Song
’s targeting systems were slaved to her lenses. The crosshair would appear wherever she looked. She was looking between the Anaconda and the corvette right now. Windows were appearing in her vision as, with a word, she tasked the laser batteries to cover the two ships.
She continued to jockey for position in the cavern as Orla pulled herself back into the bridge and strapped herself into her couch.
‘Remember what I said about acceleration earlier, before you accelerated so hard that I passed out?’ Orla asked.
Ravindra glanced at the timer counting down from thirty, and then the other countdown for the Cave’s next intersection with the pulsar bursts. They were going to be close. Ironically, Jenny would be better shielded in a lifepod than they were on the
Song
. The countdown ran down to zero. Orla opened the airlock. The evacuating air forced the crate to tumble out into space. The
Song
’s optics picked up a plume of gas from one of the Anaconda’s airlocks. That wasn’t right … Orla magnified the image. They saw a small figure in a cheap space suit tumble away from the massive ship.
‘Bastards!’ Orla shouted. Jenny, assuming that she was in the spacesuit, had until the next sweep from the Lighthouse to live, if the existing radiation hadn’t already cooked her and her suit’s systems were still working. It also meant that although they could pick her up with the fuel scoop they wouldn’t be able to accelerate until she was safely secured, or they would break every bone in her body.
Ravindra was moving the ship, the manoeuvre engines burning brightly. She glanced at the third countdown. They passed close to the
Omerta.
Ravindra was worried that the huge ship would open fire. It didn’t, presumably equally worried that the
Song
would destroy the cargo crate in retaliation. What she did get was a close-in view of the Anaconda’s bristling weapons systems, close enough to see the ball-mounted beam and missile batteries track the
Song
. A window showing fuzzy imagery from one of the rear lenses allowed Ravindra to see the external hatches to the converted cargo bay opening. She could just about make out the fighter bays inside. She’d momentarily lost sight of the corvette.
‘Orla, where’s the corvette?’ Ravindra asked. Orla was looking all around.
‘I’ve lost it!’
The
Dragon Queen
winked into existence on the outskirts of Jackson’s Lighthouse and started micro-jumps towards the Cave. Ziva pulled up the Federation survey data for the system, not that there was much to look at. From the edge of the system there was nothing to see. There was gravity but no apparent star – at least, not unless you came at it from the right angle. Look at the right point in space and put on enough magnification and you’d see a tiny faint dot. Try looking at other parts of the spectrum and maybe you’d see a bit more clearly, although you’d start to wonder what sort of tiny star could be so bright in x-rays and gamma-rays and yet be so dim in the visible spectrum. Then maybe, as you started to come in closer, you’d notice something wasn’t quite right with the magnetic fields in the system. Maybe you’d start to realise how strong they were, but then again maybe not. Who the hell ever measured a system’s magnetic field when they’d just jumped into the Kuiper belt?
Or, if you got it wrong, you got hit by the pulsar beam, an unexpected deluge of X-rays and gamma-rays, and simply died. Jackson’s Lighthouse: a magnetar system, a spinning neutron star X-ray pulsar flinging out more hard radiation every second than anything short of a blue super-giant, and all of it tightly focused into two narrow spinning beams, one out from each magnetic pole. Add to that the magnetic field itself – about three orders of magnitude higher than any star ought to have – and you had a ship-killer of a star.
‘And the Hole is
how
close to that?’ muttered Ziva.
‘Its orbit is erratic. Currently less than a million kilometres.’
‘Marvellous.’
‘It could get worse,’ observed the Fer-de-Lance. ‘A few thousand miles from the surface of the magnetar and the gravitational tidal forces would rip us apart. The magnetic fields that close in are strong enough to support a whole new science of chemical molecular bonding.’
‘Let’s not get that close, then. Can you see the Cave yet?’
‘No.’
Ziva gritted her teeth. ‘Closer, then.’ The
Dragon Queen
’s more sensitive instruments were starting to play up in the magnetic fields, even muted as they were through the ship’s shields. ‘We’re here for a fight. What happens if we lose our shields out here?’
‘Uncertain. The Cave will act – to an extent – as a Faraday cage shield against the magnetic fields and a physical barrier to the magnetar X-ray beam. Inside it
may
be possible to survive. Outside, at that distance from the star, the beam will strip our shields and the magnetic field will disrupt most systems. Failures are likely to be widespread and catastrophic.’
Another micro-jump took them as close to the Cave’s orbit as the jump drive could manage. Still a few million klicks out. Still comfortable to loiter, provided she kept out of the pulsar beam, but the last dash for the shelter of the Cave was going to get interesting. Ziva dropped to silent running, as black and quiet as the Fer-de-Lance could get, and launched a reconnaissance drone. She watched for a few seconds as the sensor telemetry broke up. The drone reported a steadily worsening series of faults and then died.
‘That’s a bit fucking crap. Is that going to happen to all of them?’
‘A few hundred miles from the neutron star’s surface and the magnetic field will simply dismantle us on an atomic scale,’ observed the
Dragon Queen
.
‘And you’re telling me this because …?’ Ziva wasn’t sure whether the Fer-de-Lance was trying to cheer her up and take her mind off En and Aisha or whether it was trying to persuade her not to do this. It wasn’t really supposed to be able to do either.
Decision time. She didn’t have long out here in open space, not this close in to Jackson. The magnetic field was already fraying her shields. She needed the protection of the Cave or she needed to leave. Although if she went for the Cave, it was going to get a whole shit-storm worse before she reached it.
‘Found it.’ Right in the sweep of the pulsar beam. The
Dragon Queen
’s long-range optics started scanning the planetoid but from this far out there wasn’t much to see. Jackson himself, the one and only madman who’d been crazy enough to explore this place, had never made a map of it; or if he had, he’d kept it to himself. Either way, Khanguire knew the maze of tunnels in there better and going after her here was just plain stupid. The dark side of the Cave was going to be bad enough and Khanguire had set her rendezvous in the full sweeping glare of Jackson’s beam where it hit the planetoid smack in the face every twelve and a half seconds. Caught in that, the
Dragon Queen
would be as good as blind and would fry in less than a minute.
But I don’t actually have to go in
.
I can have a look. If I don’t like it, I can always leave, right? Simple as that. Just fly away.
Although she already didn’t like it and yet she was still here. Every thought of backing out threw up the sight of Aisha, lying on that bed, bleeding out.
The
Dragon Queen
presented a full systems diagnostic report. Ziva hadn’t asked for it but the ship had done it anyway. Even through the ship’s shields, she was getting mild interference on the magnetic containment in the reactor core and the fusion drives. Every sensor on the ship was registering some sort of disruption and they hadn’t even been hit by the pulsar beam.
Well played, Khanguire. Well played.
‘This supposed to be some sort of a hint, is it?’ Ziva muttered acidly.
She ought to bail out. Khanguire had chosen the terrain, had given herself the time to set up whatever ambush she liked; and when it came down to it, she had the stronger ship.
Again Ziva saw Aisha in that motel. Blood everywhere. The Veil.
‘Plot a course out of here,’ she said. ‘We're not here for Khanguire. If the Veil doesn't—’
She froze.
Another ship had entered the system. Maybe it had been there a while and she hadn’t seen it, but she saw it now because it was burning hydrogen hard, a mile-long streak of fusion light heading straight in for the Cave.
Khanguire?
But the plume was too big for the
Song of Stone
. ‘Mass estimate?’ she asked and the
Dragon Queen
came back with a number based on the plume size and apparent acceleration. Not the
Song.
But a heavily modified Anaconda – that would about do it …
The
Omerta.
So he
had
come.
She waited, watching the Anaconda flip on its tail and burn the other way, slowing down. A second fusion plume lit up a few seconds behind it. The corvette. She watched Jackson’s beam slice through the space between them, then waited until they both vanished into the glare of light that surrounded the Cave.