Erick’s brow crinkled in surprise.
Olsen Neale gave a modest smile. “Yes, a blackhawk. They’re fast, they’re good. And Laton will ultimately have them too if
we don’t stop him. Their captains are just as unnerved by him as we are.”
“All right.” Erick gave up. “I’ll go.”
“Anything. Any piece of data. What he’s done out in the Lalonde hinterlands. Where the
Yaku
went. Just anything.”
“I’ll get whatever I can.”
“You could try asking this journalist, Graeme Nicholson.” He shrugged at Erick’s expression. “The man’s smart, resourceful.
If anyone on that planet had the pres-
ence of mind to track the
Yaku
’s jump coordinate, it’ll be him.”
Erick rose to his feet. “OK.”
“Erick… take care.”
The heavy curtains in Kelly Tirrel’s bedroom were drawn across the two oval windows. Ornate wall-mounted glass globes emitted
a faint turquoise light. It made the white bed-sheets shimmer as if they were the surface of a moonlit lake; human skin was
dark and tantalizing.
Kelly let Joshua run his hands over her, parting her legs so he could probe the damp cleft hidden below her tangle of pubic
hair.
“Nice,” she purred, squirming over the rumpled sheets.
His teeth shone as he parted his lips. “Good.”
“If you take me with you, there will be five days of this. Nonstop; and in free fall, too.”
“A powerful argument.”
“Money as well. Collins will pay triple rate for my passage.”
“I’m already rich.”
“So get richer.”
“Jesus, you’re a pushy bitch.”
“Is that a complaint? Did you want to be with someone else tonight?”
“Er, no.”
“Good.” Her hand slid round his balls. “This is the one for me, Joshua. This is my make or break chance. I blew the Ione story
because of someone not a million kilometres from here.” Her fingers tightened slightly. “Opportunities like this don’t come
to a place like Tranquillity three times in a life. If I pull it off I’ll be made; top of the seniority table, good assignments,
a decent bureau posting, a real salary. You owe me this, Joshua. You owe me very big.”
“Suppose the mercenaries don’t want you with them?”
“You leave them to me. The way I’ll pitch it at them, they’ll eat up the offer. Heroes up against frightening odds
helping to flatten Laton, rogues with a heart of gold, sen-sevised into every home in the Confederation. Come on!”
“Jesus.” There was still an uncomfortable pressure round his balls, long red nails touching his scrotum, a little too sharply
to be described as tickling. She wouldn’t. Would she? Her smart, expensive grey-blue Crusto suit was folded neatly over a
chair by the dresser. It had been taken off with military regimentation as she
prepared
for sex.
She probably would. Jesus.
“Of course I’ll take you.”
Thumb and forefinger nipped one ball impishly.
“Yow!” His eyes watered. “You don’t think you’re getting carried away with this idea, do you? I mean, there are career moves
and career moves. Landing on a hostile planet behind enemy lines is pushing company loyalty to extremes.”
“Crap.” Kelly rolled onto one elbow and glared at him. “Did you see who Time Universe had introducing their studio segments?
Matthias bastard Rems, that’s who. Just because he was in the right place at the right time. That lucky little shit. He’s
younger than me, barely out of his nursery pen. And they gave him three days prime scheduling time. And market research says
he’s popular because he’s
boyish
. Some women like that, it turns out. Eighty-year-old virgins, I should think. The reason Time Universe won’t let him record
sensevises is because then we’d all know for sure he hasn’t got any balls.”
“Not a problem in your case, is it?”
It came out before he could think. Kelly spent a hot violent twenty minutes making him wish it hadn’t.
The nineteen starships under Terrance Smith’s command assembled a thousand kilometres beyond Tranquillity’s spaceport: the
Gemal
with five thousand general troops, three cargo clippers carrying their equipment and supplies, and fifteen combat-capable
ships, six of which were black-hawks.
Tranquillity watched their drives come on, and the flotilla moved in towards Mirchusko at one gee. The Adamist starships employed
a single-file formation (with
Gemal
leading) which the blackhawks encircled insolently. Strategic-defence sensor-platforms detected a vast amount of encrypted
data traffic being exchanged between the ships as communication channels were tested and combat tactics exchanged.
They curved around the gas giant, heading towards its penumbra. Their drive exhausts shortened and vanished while they were
still a hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometres above the unruly cloudscape, coasting towards the jump co-ordinate. Tranquillity
saw the faint blue flickers of ion jets perfecting their orbital tracks; then the thermo-dump panels and sensor clusters began
to withdraw. The blackhawks rushed away from the main convoy, freed of the constraints imposed by their Adamist partners,
expanding in a perfectly spaced rosette. Then the bitek starships performed their swallow manoeuvre, jumping on ahead to scout
for any possible trouble. Space reverberated with the gravity-wave backwash of their wormhole interstices snapping shut behind
them, impinging on the habitat’s sensitive mass-detection organs.
Gemal
jumped. Tranquillity noted its spacial location and velocity vector. The trajectory was aligned exactly on Lalonde. One by
one the remaining starships fell into the same jump coordinate and triggered their energy patterning nodes, squeezing themselves
out of space-time.
Since the advent of its independence in 2238, Avon’s government had contracted civil astroengineering teams to knock fifteen
large (twenty- to twenty-five-kilometre diameter) stony iron asteroids into high orbit above the planet using precisely placed
and timed nuclear explosions. Fourteen of them followed the standard formula of industrialization adopted throughout the Confederation.
After their orbits were stabilized with a perigee no less than a hundred thousand kilometres, their ores had been mined out
and the refined metal sent down to the planet below in the form of giant lifting bodies which coasted through the atmosphere
to a splash-glide landing in the ocean. The resulting caverns were expanded, regularized into cylindrical shapes, the surface
sculpted into a landscape, sealed, then turned into habitable biospheres. At the same time the original ore refineries would
gradually be replaced by more sophisticated industrial stations, allowing the asteroid’s economy to shift its emphasis from
the bulk production of metals and minerals to finished micro-gee engineered products. The refineries moved on to a fresh asteroid
in order to satisfy the demand of the planetary furnaces and steel mills, keeping the worst aspects of raw-material exploitation
offplanet where the ecological pollution on the aboriginal biota was zero.
Anyone arriving at a terracompatible planet in the Confederation could tell almost at a glance how long it had been industrialized
by the number of settled asteroids in orbit around it.
Avon had been opened for colonization to ethnic Canadians in 2151 during the Great Dispersal, and conformed to the usual evolutionary
route out of an agrarian economy into industrialization in slightly less than a century. A satisfactory achievement, but nothing
remarkable. It remained a pedestrian world until 2271 when it played host to the head of state conference called to discuss
the worrying upsurge in the use of antimatter as a weapon of mass destruction. From that conference was born the Confederation,
and Avon seized its chance to leapfrog an entire developmental stage by offering itself as a permanent host for the Assembly.
Without any increase in exports, foreign currency poured in as governments set up diplomatic missions; and the lawyers, interstellar
companies, finance institutions, influence peddlers, media conglomerates, and lobbyists followed, each with their own prestige
offices and staff and dependents.
There was also the Confederation Navy, which was to police the fragile new-found unity between the inhabited stars. Avon contributed
to that as well, by donating to the Assembly an orbiting asteroid named Trafalgar which was in the last phase of mining.
Trafalgar was unique within the Confederation in that it had no industrial stations after the miners moved out. It was first,
foremost, and only, a naval base, developing from a basic supply and maintenance depot for the entire Confederation Navy (such
as it was in the early days) up to the primary military headquarters for the eight hundred and sixty-two inhabited star systems
which made up the Confederation in 2611. When First Admiral Samual Alek-sandrovich took up his appointment in 2605 it was
the home port for the 1st Fleet and headquarters and training centre for the Marine Corps. It housed the career Officer Academy,
the Engineering School, the Navy Technical Evaluation Office, the First Admiral’s Strategy Office, the Navy Budget Office,
the principal research laboratories for supralight communications, and (more quietly) the headquarters of the Fleet Intelligence
Arm. A black and grey peanut shape, twenty-one kilometres long, seven wide, rotating about its long axis; it contained three
cylindrical biosphere caverns which housed a mixed civilian and military population of approximately three hundred thousand.
There were non-rotational spaceports at each end: spheres two kilometres in diameter, the usual gridwork of girders and tanks
and pipes, threaded with pressurized tubes carrying commuter cars, and docking-bays ringed by control cabins. Their surface
area was just able to cope with the vast quantity of spaceship movements. The spindles were both fixed to Trafalgar’s axis
at the centre of deep artificial craters two kilometres wide which the voidhawks used as docking-ledges.
As well as its responsibility for defence and anti-pirate duties across the Confederation it coordinated Avon’s defence in
conjunction with the local navy. The strategic-defence platforms protecting the planet were some of the most powerful ever
built. Given the huge numbers of government diplomatic ships, as well as the above average number of commercial flights using
the low-orbit docking stations, security was a paramount requirement. There hadn’t been an act of piracy in the system for
over two and a half centuries, but the possibility of a suicide attack against Trafalgar was uppermost in the minds of navy
tacticians. Strategic sensor coverage was absolute out to a distance of two million kilometres from the planetary surface.
Reaction time by the patrolling voidhawks was near instantaneous. Starships emerging outside designated areas took a formidable
risk in doing so.
Ilex
was calling for help even before the wormhole terminus closed behind it. Auster had ordered the voidhawk to fly straight
to Avon, over four hundred light-years from Lalonde. Even for a voidhawk, the distance was excessive.
Ilex
needed to recharge its energy patterning cells after ten swallows, which involved a prolonged interval of ordinary flight
to allow its distortion field to concentrate the meagre wisps of radiation which flittered through the interstellar medium.
The voyage had taken three and a half days. There were sixty people on board, and the bitek life-support organs were rapidly
approaching their critical limit. The air smelt bad, membrane filters couldn’t cope with the body gases, CO2 was building
up, oxygen reserves were almost exhausted.
Trafalgar was five thousand kilometres away when the wormhole terminus sealed. Legally, it should have been a hundred thousand.
But a long sublight flight to a docking-ledge would have pushed
Ilex
’s life-support situation from critical to catastrophic.
The asteroid immediately went to defence condition C2, allowing the duty officer to engage all targets at will. Nuclear-pumped
gamma-ray lasers locked onto the void-hawk’s hull within three-quarters of a second of the wormhole opening.
Every Edenist officer in Trafalgar’s strategic-defence command-centre heard
Ilex
’s call. They managed to load a five-second delay order into the defence platforms. Auster gave a fast resume of the voidhawk’s
situation. The delay was extended for another fifteen seconds while the duty officer made her evaluation. A squadron of patrol
voidhawks closed on
Ilex
at ten gees.
“Stand down,” the duty officer told the centre, and datavised a lockdown order into the fire-command computer. She looked
across at the nearest Edenist. “And tell that idiot captain from me I’ll fry his arse off next time he pulls a stunt like
this.”
Ilex
swooped in towards Trafalgar at five gees as traffic control cleared a priority approach path ahead of it. Six patrol voidhawks
spiralled round it like over-protective avian parents, all seven bitek starships exchanging fast affinity messages of anxiety,
interest, and mild rebuke. The northern axial crater was a scene of frantic activity while
Ilex
chased the asteroid’s rotation, looping around the globular non-rotating spaceport to fly in parallel to the spindle. It
settled on a titanium pedestal with eight balloon-tyre maintenance vehicles and crew buses racing towards it, bouncing about
in the low gravity.
Lalonde’s navy office personnel disembarked first, hurrying along the airlock tube to the waiting bus, all of them taking
deep gulps of clean, cool air. A medic team carried Niels Regehr off in a stretcher, while two paediatric nurses soothed and
patted a blubbering Shafi Banaji. Environment-maintenance vehicles plugged hoses and cables into the crew toroid’s umbilical
sockets, sending gales of fresh air gusting through the cabins and central corridor. Resenda,
Ilex
’s life-support officer, simply vented the fouled atmosphere they’d been breathing throughout the voyage, and grey plumes
jetted up out of the toroid, seeded with minute water crystals that sparkled in the powerful lights mounted on the spindle
to illuminate the crater.