What with the extra defences and the patrols, the habitat was developing a siege mentality in the wake of Terrance Smith’s
departure.
But were her precautions enough?
“How is the alert hitting the Vasilkovsky Line?” Ione asked.
Dominique took a drink of juice. “Hard. We’ve got twenty-five ships idle in Tranquillity’s dock right now. No merchant is
going to risk sending cargo until they know for sure Laton isn’t at the destination. Three of our captains arrived yesterday,
all from different star systems. They all said the same thing. Planetary governments are virtually quarantining incoming starships,
asteroid governments too. Give it another week, and interstellar trade will have shut down altogether.”
“They’ll find the
Yaku
by then,” Clement said, tearing a corner off his toast. “Hell, they’ve probably found it already. The navy voidhawk said
it was a Confederationwide alert. No ship is ever more than ten days from a star system. I bet a navy squadron is blowing
it to smithereens right now.”
“That’s what gets me the most,” Ione said. “No knowing, having to wait for days for any news.”
Dominique leant forwards and squeezed her knee. “Don’t worry. The 7th Fleet squadron will stop him from becoming involved.
They’ll all be back here in a week with their tails between their legs complaining they didn’t get a chance to play soldier.”
Ione looked up into deep, surprisingly understanding eyes. “Yeah.”
“He’ll be all right. He’s the only man I know who could lie his way out of a supernova explosion. Some leftover megalomaniac
isn’t going to be a problem.”
“Thanks.”
“Who?” Clement asked around a full mouth, looking from one girl to another. Ione bit into a slice of her orange-coloured quantat.
It had the texture of a melon, but tasted like spicy grapefruit. Dominique was grinning roguishly at her over a coffee-cup.
“Girls’ talk,” Dominique said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Clement threw a quantat rind at her. “It’s Joshua. You’ve both got the hots for him.”
“He’s a friend,” Ione said. “And he’s in way over his silly little head, and we’re worried about him.”
“Don’t be,” Clement said briskly. “Joshua showed me round the
Lady Macbeth
. She’s got more combat potential than a front-line frigate, and Smith armed her with combat wasps before they left. Anyone
damn stupid enough to go up against that starship is dead meat.”
Ione gave him a kiss. “Thank you, too.”
“Any time.”
They ate the rest of their breakfast in companionable peace. Ione was debating what to do for the rest of the day when Tranquillity
called. That was the thing with being the absolute ruler of a bitek habitat, she reflected, you don’t really have to do anything,
thoughts were acted on instantly. But there was the human side to consider. The Chamber of Trade was nervous, the Financial
and Commerce Council more so, ordinary people didn’t know what was going on. Everybody wanted reassurance, and they expected
her to provide it. She had done two interviews with news companies yesterday, and there were three delegations who wanted
personal audiences.
Parker Higgens is requesting an immediate interview,
Tranquillity told her as she was finishing her coffee.
I recommend you grant it.
Oh, you do, do you? Well, I think there are more important things for me to attend to right now.
I believe this to be more important than the Laton crisis.
What?
It was the ambiguity which made her sit up straighter on the furry bed. Tranquillity was emitting a strong impression of
discomfort, as if it was unsure of a subject. Unusual enough to intrigue her.
There has been some remarkable progress with the Laymil sensorium recordings in the last seventy hours. I did not wish to
trouble you with the project while you were involved with upgrading my defence and soothing the residents. That may have been
my mistake. Last night some of the researchers made an extremely important find.
Which is?
she asked avidly.
They believe they have located the Laymil home planet.
The path leading from the tube station to the octagonal Electronics Division building was littered with ripe bronze berries
fallen from the tall chuantawa trees. They crunched softly as Ione’s shoes helped flatten them further into the stone slabs.
Project staff emerging from the stations gave her the faintly guilty glance of all workers arriving early and finding the
boss already in.
Oski Katsura greeted her at the entrance, dressed in her usual white lab smock, one of the few people in the habitat who never
seemed perturbed by Ione’s escort of serjeants. “We haven’t made an announcement yet,” she said as they went inside. “Some
of the implications are only just sinking in.”
The hall where the Laymil stack was kept had changed considerably since Ione’s first visit. Most of the experimental electronic
equipment had been cleared out. Processor blocks and AV projectors were lined up along the benches, forming individual research
stations, each with a rack of fleks. Workshop cubicles behind the glass wall had been converted into offices. The impression
was one of academic endeavour rather than out and out scientific pioneering.
“We use this mainly as a sorting centre now,” Oski Katsura said. “As soon as they have been decrypted, the sensorium memories
are individually reviewed by a panel of experts drawn from every discipline we have here at the project. They provide a rough
initial classification, cataloguing incidents and events depicted, and decide if there is anything which will interest their
profession. After that the relevant memory is datavised to an investigatory and assessment committee which each division has
formed. As you can imagine, most of it has been sent to the Cultural and Psychology divisions. But even seeing their electronics
used in the intended context of mundane day-to-day operation has been immensely useful to us here. And the same goes for most
of the physical disciplines—engineering, fusion, structures. There’s something in most memories for all of us. I’m afraid
a final and exhaustive analysis is going to take a couple of decades at least. All we are doing for now is providing a preliminary
interpretation.”
Ione nodded silent approval. Tranquillity’s background memories were revealing how hard the review teams were working.
There were only five other people in the hall, as well as Lieria. They had all been working through the night, and now they
were clustered round a tray from the canteen, drinking tea and eating croissants. Parker Higgens rose as soon as she came
in. His grey suit jacket was hanging off the back of one of the chairs, revealing a crumpled blue shirt. All-night sessions
were obviously something the old director was finding increasingly difficult to manage. But he proffered a tired smile as
he introduced her to the other four. Malandra Sarker and Qingyn Lin were Laymil spaceship experts, she a biotechnology systems
specialist, while his field was the mechanical and electrical units the xenocs employed in their craft. Ione shook hands while
Tranquillity silently supplied profile summaries of the two. Malandra Sarker struck her as being young for the job at twenty-eight,
but she had her doctorate from the capital university on Quang Tri, and references which were impeccable.
Ione knew Kempster Getchell, the Astronomy Division’s chief; they had met during the first round of briefings, and on several
formal social occasions since then. He was in his late sixties, and from a family which lacked any substantial geneering.
But despite entropy’s offensive, leaving him with greying, thinning hair, and a stoop to his shoulders, he projected a lively
puckish attitude, the complete opposite to Parker Higgens. Astronomy was one of the smallest divisions in the Laymil project,
concerned mainly with identifying stars which had Laymil-compatible spectra, and searching through radio astronomy records
to see if any abnormality had ever been found to indicate a civilization. Despite frequent requests, no Lord of Ruin had ever
agreed to fund the division’s own radio-telescope array. They had to make do with library records from universities across
the Confederation.
Kempster Getchell’s assistant was Renato Vella, a swarthy thirty-five-year-old from Valencia, on a four-year sabbatical from
one of its universities. He acted both excited and awed when Ione greeted him. She wasn’t quite sure if it was her presence
or their discovery which instigated his jitters.
“The Laymil home planet?” Ione asked Parker Higgens, permitting a note of scepticism to sound.
“Yes, ma’am,” the director said. The joy that should have been present at making the announcement was missing, he seemed more
apprehensive than triumphant.
“Where is it?” she asked.
Parker Higgens traded a pleading glance with Kempster Getchell, then sighed. “It used to be here, in this solar system.”
Ione counted to three. “Used to be?”
“Yes.”
Tranquillity? What is going on?
Although it is an extraordinary claim, the evidence does appear to be slanted in their favour. Allow them to complete their
explanation.
All right.
“Go on.”
“It was a recording that was translated two days ago,” Malandra Sarker said. “We found we had got the memory of a Laymil spaceship
crew-member. Naturally we were delighted, it would give us a definite blueprint for one of their ships, inside and out, as
well as the operating procedures. Up until now all we’ve had is fragments of what we thought were spaceship parts. Well we
found out what a Laymil ship looks like all right.” She datavised one of the nearby processor blocks; its AV pillar shone
an image into Ione’s eyes.
The Laymil ship had three distinct sections. At the front were four white-silver metal ovoids; the large central unit was
thirty metres long, with the three twenty-metre units clustered around it—obviously life-support cabins. The midsection was
drum shaped, its sides made up from interlaced stone-red pipes packed so tightly there was no chink between them, an almost
intestinal configuration. Five black heat-radiation tubes protruded at right angles from its base, spaced equally around the
rim. At the rear was a narrow sixty-metre-long tapering fusion tube, with slim silver rings running along its length at five-metre
intervals. Right at the tip, around the plasma exhaust nozzle, was a silver foil parasol.
“Is it organic?” Ione asked.
“We think about eighty per cent,” Qingyn Lin said. “It matches what we know of their use of biotechnology.”
Ione turned away from the projection.
“It is a passenger ship,” Malandra Sarker said. “From what we can make out, the Laymil didn’t have commercial cargo ships,
although there are some tankers and specialist industrial craft.”
“This would seem to be correct,” Lieria said, speaking through the small white vocalizer block held in one of her tractamorphic
arms. “The Laymil at this cultural stage did not have economic commerce. Technical templates and DNA were exchanged between
clan units, but no physical or biotechnology artefacts were traded for financial reward.”
“The thing is,” Malandra Sarker said, sinking down into a chair, “it was leaving a parking orbit around their home planet
to fly to Mirchusko’s spaceholms.”
“We always wondered why the ship fuel tanks we found were so large,” Qingyn Lin said. “There was far too much deuterium and
He3 stored for simple inter-habitat voyages, even if they made fifteen trips in a row without refuelling. Now we know. They
were interplanetary spaceships.”
Ione gave Kempster Getchell a questioning look. “A planet? Here?”
A wayward smile formed on his lips, he appeared indecently happy about the revelation. “It does look that way. We checked
the star and planet positions gathered from the spacecraft’s sensor array most thoroughly. The system we saw is definitely
this one. The Laymil home planet used to orbit approximately one hundred and thirty-five million kilometres from the star.
That does put it rather neatly between the orbits of Jyresol and Boherol.” He pouted sadly. “And here I’ve spent thirty years
of my life looking at stars with spectra similar to this one. All the time it was right under my nose. God, what a waste.
Still, I’m back on the cutting edge of astrophysics now, and no mistake. Trying to work out how you make a planet disappear…ho,
boy.”
“All right,” Ione said with forced calm. “So where is it now? Was it destroyed? There isn’t an asteroid belt between Jyresol
and Boherol. There isn’t even a dust belt as far as I know.”
“There is no record of any extensive survey being made of this system’s interplanetary medium,” Kempster said. “I checked
our library. But even assuming the planet had literally been reduced to dust, the solar wind would have blown the majority
of particles beyond the Oort cloud within a few centuries.”
“Would a survey now help?” she asked.
“It might be able to confirm the dust hypothesis, if the density is still higher than is usual. But it would depend on when
the planet was destroyed.”
“It was here two thousand six hundred years ago,” Renato Vella said. “We know that from analysing the position of the other
planets at the time the memory was recorded. But if we are to look for proof of the dust I believe we would be better off
taking surface samples from Boherol and the gas giant moons.”
“Good idea, well done, lad,” Kempster said, patting his younger assistant on the shoulder. “If this wave of dust was expelled
outwards then it should have left traces on all the airless bodies in the system. Similar to the way sediment layers in planetary
core samples show various geological epochs. If we could find it, we would get a good indication of when it actually happened
as well.”
“I don’t think it was reduced to dust,” Renato Vella said.
“Why not?” Ione asked.
“It was a valid idea,” he said readily. “There aren’t many other ways you can make something that mass disappear without trace.
But it’s a very theoretical solution. In practical terms the energy necessary to dismantle an entire planet to such an extent
is orders of magnitude above anything the Confederation could muster. You have to remember that even our outlawed antimatter
planetbuster bombs don’t harm or ablate the mass of a terracompatible-sized planet, they just wreck and pollute the biosphere.
In any case an explosion—multiple explosions even—wouldn’t do the trick, they would just reduce it to asteroidal fragments.
To turn it into dust or preferably vapour you would need some form of atomic disrupter weapon, probably powered by the star—I
can’t think what else would produce enough energy. That or a method of initiating a fission chain reaction in stable atoms.”