“OK. That leaves us with picking them up. Ashly?”
The pilot gave one of his engaging grins. “I told you, Joshua, I promised them I’d go down again.”
“Fine. That just leaves you, Gaura. You’ve been very quiet.”
“It’s your ship, Captain.”
“Yes, but your children are on board, and your friends and family. They’ll be exposed to a considerable risk if
Lady Mac
attempts to go back to Lalonde. That entitles you to a say.”
“Thank you, Joshua. We say this: if it was us stranded on Lalonde right now, we would want you to come and pick us up.”
“Very well. That’s settled then. We’ll try and rescue the mercenaries and the children.”
“One small point, Joshua,” Melvyn said loudly. “We’re stuck in the rings, with one combat wasp left, forty thousand kilometres
from the edge of Murora’s gravity field. If we stick our heads up, they’ll be shot to buggery.”
“I was in a similar situation to this a year ago.”
“Joshua!” Sarha chided.
He ignored her. “It was the Ruin Ring, when Neeves and Sipika were coming after me. Look at where the
Maranta
and the
Gramine
are right now.”
They all accessed the navigational display, neon-sharp graphics unfurling in their minds. The two searching starships extruded
curved yellow orbital trajectory plots paralleling the thick gauzy green slab of the ring which filled the bottom half of
the projection.
Lady Macbeth
lurked below the ring surface like some outlandish slumbering marine creature.
“
Maranta
and
Gramine
are now six thousand kilometres apart,” Joshua said. “They’ve got a reasonable idea of the general area where we have to
be hidden, and they’ve changed altitude twice in the last fifteen hours to cover different sections of the ring. If they stick
to that pattern they’ll change again in another four hours.” He ordered the display to extrapolate their positions. “
Gramine
will be about three hundred kilometres from us, she actually passes over us in another ninety minutes; and
Maranta
is going to be right out at the extreme, about seven and a half thousand kilometres away. After that they’ll swap orbital
tracks and begin a new sweep.
“So if we can break out when
Maranta
is seven and a half thousand klicks away, we’ll be far enough ahead of it to escape.”
“And
Gramine
?” Melvyn asked. He didn’t like Joshua’s quiet tone, as if the young captain was afraid of what he was going to say.
“We know where it’s going to be, we can leave one of the megaton nukes from the combat wasp waiting for it. Mine the ring
where it will pass overhead, attach the nuke to a large rock particle. Between them, the emp pulse, the plasma wave, and the
rock fragments should disable it.”
“How do we get it there?” Melvyn asked.
“You know bloody well how we get it there,” Sarha said. “Someone’s got to carry it using a manoeuvring pack, right Joshua?
That’s what you did in the Ruin Ring, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. They can’t detect one person fifteen kilometres deep in the ring, not using cold gas to manoeuvre.”
“Wait a minute,” Dahybi said. He had been running flight trajectory simulations in the navigation display. “Even if you did
knock out the
Gramine
, and that’s a bloody long shot, we’re still no better off.
Maranta
will just launch her combat wasps straight at us. There’s no way we can out-run them, they’ll get us before we’re halfway
to the edge of Murora’s gravity field, let alone Lalonde’s jump coordinate.”
“If we accelerate at eight gees, we’ll have seven minutes fifteen seconds before the
Maranta
’s combat wasps will catch us,” Joshua said. “Distance-wise that works out at about sixteen thousand kilometres.”
“That still won’t get us outside Murora’s gravity field. We couldn’t even jump blind.”
“No, but there is one place we can jump from. It’s only fifteen thousand kilometres away; we would have a twenty-second safety
margin.”
“Where?” Melvyn demanded.
Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer. The navigational display drew a violet trajectory line from the
Lady Mac
towards the edge of the ring, sliding round in a retrograde curve to end at one of the four tiny ring-shepherd moonlets.
“Murora VII,” Joshua said.
A terrible realization came to Dahybi; his balls retracted as though he’d dived into an icy lake. “Oh, Christ,
no
, Joshua. You can’t be serious, not at that velocity.”
“So give me an alternative.”
“An alternative to what?” Sarha asked petulantly.
Still looking at Joshua, Dahybi said: “The Lagrange point. Every two-body system has them. It’s where the moonlet’s gravity
is balanced by Murora’s, which means you can activate a starship’s nodes inside it without worrying about gravitonic stress
desynchronization. Technically, they’re points, but in practice they work out as a relatively spherical zone. A
small
zone.”
“For Murora VII, about two and a half kilometres in diameter,” Joshua said. “Unfortunately, we’ll be travelling at about twenty-seven
kilometres per second when we reach it. That gives us a tenth of a second to trigger the nodes.”
“Oh, shit,” Ashly grunted.
“It won’t be a problem for the flight computer,” Joshua said blandly.
“But where will the jump take us?” Melvyn asked.
“I can give us a rough alignment on Achillea, the third gas giant. It’s on the other side of the system now, about seven billion
kilometres away. We’ll jump a billion kilometres, align
Lady Mac
properly on one of its outer moons, then jump again. No way will
Maranta
be able to follow us through those kind of manoeuvres. When we get to Achillea we slingshot round the moon onto a Lalonde
trajectory and jump in. Total elapsed time eighty minutes maximum.”
“Oh, God… well, I suppose you know what you’re talking about.”
“Him?” Sarha exclaimed. “You must be joking.”
“It has a certain degree of style,” Dahybi said. He nodded approvingly. “OK, Joshua, I’ll have the nodes primed. But you’re
going to have to be staggeringly accurate when we hit that Lagrange point.”
“My middle name.”
Sarha studied the bridge decking. “I know another one,” she muttered under her breath.
“So who’s the lucky one that gets to EVA in the rings and blow up the
Gramine
?” Melvyn asked.
“Volunteers can draw lots,” Joshua said. “Put my name in.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Sarha said. “We all know you’re going to have to fly the
Lady Mac
, no one else could hit that moonlet, let alone its Lagrange point. And Ashly has to take the spaceplane down, I expect that
flight’s going to need a professional. So the rest of us will draw for it.”
“Kindly include twenty of us,” Gaura said. “We are all qualified in EVA work, and we have the added advantage of being able
to communicate with Aethra in case the star-ship should alter course.”
“Nobody is volunteering, nobody is drawing lots,” Warlow said, using excessive volume to obliterate any dissent. “This is
my job. It’s what I’m designed for. And I’m the oldest here. So I qualify on all counts.”
“Don’t be so bloody morbid,” Joshua said, annoyance covering his real concern. “You just plant the nuke on a rock particle
and come straight back.”
Warlow laughed, making them all wince. “Of course, so easy.”
Now, finally, under the slowly spinning inferno and looking up into a glaring formless void. Journey’s end. Chas Paske had
to turn down his optical sensors’ receptivity, the light was so bright. At first he had thought some kind of miniature sun
lurked up there at the centre of the flaming vortex of cloud, but now the boat had carried him faithfully under the baleful
cone he could see the apex had burst open like a malignant tumour. The rent was growing larger. The cyclone was growing larger,
deeper and wider.
He knew its purpose at last, that knowledge was inescapable where he was, pressed down in the bottom of the flat boat under
the sheer pressure of the light. It was a mouth, jaws opening wide. One day—soon—it would devour the whole world.
He gave a wild little giggle at the notion.
That heavy, heavy light was migrating from whatever (wherever?) lay on the other side. Weighty extrinsic photons sinking slowly
downwards like snow to smother the land and river in their own special frost. Whatever they touched, gleamed, as though lit
from within. Even his body, shoddy, worthless thing it was now, had acquired a dignified lustre.
Above the gashed cloud was a sheer plane of white light, a mathematical absolute. The ocean into which his white silk dream
river emptied. A universal ocean into which Lalonde was destined to fall like a pearl droplet, and lose itself for evermore.
He felt himself wanting to rise up towards it, to defy gravity and soar. Into the perpetual light and warmth which would cleanse
him and banish sorrow. It would ripple once as he penetrated the meniscus, throwing out a polished wave crown, a single ephemeral
spire rising at the centre. After that there would be no trace. To pass through was to transcend.
His remoulded face was incapable of smiling. So he lay there gladly on the boat, mind virtually divorced from his body, looking
up at his future, awaiting his moment of ascension. His physical purpose long since abandoned.
Even though the red cloud’s thunder had retreated to a muffled rumbling he never heard the starting gun being fired, so the
first cannonball shattered his serenity with shocking abruptness.
They had known he was there, the possessed, they had been aware of him all along. From the moment he’d passed under the aegis
of the red cloud he had registered in their consciousness, as an orbiting gnat might impinge upon a man’s peripheral vision.
His hapless journey down the river was of no consequence to them; in his miserable degenerative state he was simply not worth
their attention nor a moment’s effort. The river was bringing him surely to their bosom, they were content to let him come
in his own time.
Now he was here, and they had assembled down by the docks to provide a maliciously frolicsome reception. It was a black-hearted
jamboree suitable to celebrate the last possession before Lalonde escaped the universe for good.
The iron ball whistled low over Chas’s boat with a backlash crack that set the insecure craft rocking, then splattered into
the snowlily mush thirty metres away. Purple smoke and ten-metre magnesium flames squirted joyously into the air like a jumbo
Roman candle.
Chas shunted round on his elbows, looking in disbelief at the chromatic blaze. The snowlilies started to melt away around
his boat, lowering it into sparkling clear blue water. Whoops and catcalls wafted over the river from the shore. He twisted
round.
Durringham with all of its white towers and onion-dome spires and lofty castles and lush hanging gardens formed a magnificent
backdrop to the armada racing to collect him. There were Polynesian war canoes with flower-garlanded warriors digging their
paddles into the clear water; rowing eights with lean young men sweating under the cox’s bellowed orders; triremes, their
massed oars flashing in immaculate unison; Viking marauders sporting resplendent scarlet and gold sun-god sails; dhows whose
lateens strained ahead of the fresh breeze; junks, sampans, ketches, sloops… and riding fast and proud out in front was a
big three-masted buccaneer, its crew in striped shirts scrambling over the rigging. A quarter of the city’s population crowded
the circular harbours (now ancient solid stone) cheering on their chosen team in a boisterous rollicking carnival atmosphere.
Chas gagged at the sight of it all; the nightmare dormant in every human brain
the entire world is out to get me
. The whole city was chasing him, wanted him, hated him. He was their new toy, the day’s amusement.
His body spasmed in massive quakes, implants faltering. Intolerable waves of pain from his leg crashed past the crumbling
analgesic blocks. “Bastards!” he roared. “You shit-eating bastards. You don’t play with me. I am your enemy. I am not a joke.
Fear me. Fear me, God damn you!”
A dainty ring of smoke puffed out of the buccaneer’s forward gun. Chas screamed, fury and terror in one incoherent blast of
sound.
The cannon-ball hit the water ten metres away, sending up a sheet of steaming white water. Wavelets rushed out, slapping his
boat.
“Bastards.” It wasn’t even a whisper. Adrenalin and nerves could do nothing more for him, he was devoid of strength. “I’ll
show you. Freaks. Zoo people. I am not a joke.” Somewhere far away a soprano chorus was singing black canticles.
Chas datavised the activation code into the kiloton bomb strapped in its harness at his side. Good old faithful bomb. Stuck
to him the whole time. That’ll wipe the smile off their faces.
Nothing happened, his neural nanonics had shut down. Pain was burning through him, leaving only numbness in its wake. Fingers
scrabbled feebly at the bomb’s small manual control panel, prising open the cover. His head flopped to one side to follow
the movement. He eventually managed to focus an optical sensor. The panel keyboard was dark, inert. It had failed. He had
failed.
Almost forgotten natural tear glands squeezed out their very last drops as he slowly knocked a fist on the wooden planking
in utter futility.
A couple of the triremes were gaining on the buccaneer. It was developing into a three-boat race, though one of the war canoes
refused to give up, warriors pounding the water with their paddles, skin gleaming as though they were sweating oil. Back on
the harbours the elated cheering mixed with songs and chants from across five millennia.
The buccaneer crew fired another cannon to terrorize their crushed victim.
“You won’t have me!” Chas cried in defiance. He put a hand on each gunwale and started to rock the boat as the cannon-ball’s
wavelets broke against the hull. “Never. Never. I won’t be a part of it, not of you.”