Oenone
and
Graeae
had spent four years of patrolling uninhabited star systems, providing occasional random escorts for merchant ships in the
hope of engaging pirates, exercised with the Fleet on full-system defence attacks, taken part in a marine assault on an industrial
station suspected of building antimatter combat wasps, and making innumerable goodwill calls at ports throughout the 4th Fleet’s
sector. For the last eight months the Admiralty had assigned them to an independent interception duty, under the command of
the Confederation Naval Intelligence Service. This was the third chase flight the CNIS had sent them on: the first ship had
been empty when they reached it; the second, a blackhawk, managed to elude them with its longer swallow range, much to Syrinx’s
extreme chagrin. But the
Dymasio
was undeniably guilty; the CNIS had suspected it of carrying antimatter for some time, and this flight proved it. Now the
ship was preparing to enter an inhabited system to make contact with an asteroid separatist group. This time they would make
their arrest. This time!
Oenone
’s cabin atmosphere seemed compressed by the prospect.
Even Eileen Carouch, the CNIS lieutenant who was liaising with them, had picked up on the Edenists’ expectancy. She was strapped
into the couch next to Syrinx, a middle-aged woman with a bland, unmemorable face, the kind Syrinx supposed was ideal for
an active agent. But the personality behind it was resolute and resourceful; discovering the
Dymasio
’s hoarded cache was proof of that.
Right now she had her eyes tight closed, accessing the datavised information
Oenone
was providing through bitek processors interfaced with their hardware equivalents, allowing all the Adamists to see what
was going on.
“
Dymasio
’s ready to jump,” Syrinx said.
“Thank heavens for that. My nerves can’t stand much more of this.”
Syrinx felt a grin on her lips. She always found a slight edge of tension in her dealings with Adamists on an individual basis;
them and their emotions locked inside impenetrable bone, you never knew quite what they felt, which was difficult for the
empathic Edenists to handle. But Eileen had turned out to be amazingly blunt with her opinions. Syrinx quite enjoyed her company.
The
Dymasio
vanished. Syrinx felt the sharp kink in space as the ship’s patterning nodes warped the fabric of reality around her hull;
to
Oenone
the distortion was like a flare. One that was totally quantifiable. The voidhawk instinctively knew the emergence-point coordinate.
Let’s go!
Syrinx broadcast loudly.
Power flooded through the voidhawk’s patterning cells. An interstice was torn open. They plunged into the expanding wormhole.
Syrinx could feel
Graeae
generating its own wormhole away to one side, then the interstice closed behind them, sealing them in timeless oblivion.
Imagination, twinned with genuine voidhawk sensorium input, provided a giddy rushing sensation for the couple of heartbeats
it took to traverse the wormhole. A terminus opened at some indeterminable distance, a different texture of negation, seemingly
curving round them. Starlight began to pour in, bending into a filigree of slender blue-white lines around the hull.
Oenone
shot out into space. Stars became hard diamond points again.
The event horizon had evaporated from the
Dymasio
’s hull, depositing the starship five light-days out from Ho-neck’s sun. Its sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels emerged
from the hull with the timidity of a hibernating creature venturing out into a spring day. As with all Adamist starships,
it took time to check its location, and scan local space for stray comets or rock fragments. That crucial time lapse allowed
the tremendous spacial flaws accompanying the opening of the voidhawks’ terminuses to remain undetected.
Ignorant of his invisible followers, the
Dymasio
’s captain activated the starship’s main fusion drive, heading towards the next jump coordinate.
“It’s moving again,” Syrinx said. “Preparing to go insys-tem. Do you want to interdict?” The thought of antimatter being carried
into an inhabited system disturbed her.
“What’s the new destination?” Eileen Carouch asked.
Syrinx consulted the system’s almanac stored in
Oenone
’s memory cells. “It looks like Kirchol, the outer gas giant.”
“Any settlements in orbit?” She hadn’t quite grasped how to pull information from
Oenone
the way she could from hardware memory cores.
“None listed.”
“It has to be heading for a rendezvous, then. Don’t interdict it, follow it in.”
“Let it into an inhabited system?”
“Sure. Look, if it was just the antimatter we wanted, we could have boarded any time in the last three months. That’s how
long we’ve known the stuff was on board.
Dymasio
has visited seven inhabited star systems since we started monitoring it, without threatening any of them. Now my agent confirms
the captain has found a buyer with these separatist hotheads, and I want them. This way we can wrap up both supplier and destination.
We could even come out of it with the location of the antimatter-production station. Commendations all round, so just be patient.”
“OK.”
Did you catch all that?
Syrinx asked Thetis.
Certainly did. And she’s quite right.
I know, but…
She broadcast a complex emotional harmonic of eagerness and frustration.
Bear with it, little sister.
Mental laughter. Thetis always knew how to tweak her.
Graeae
had been born before
Oenone
, but there was a marked comparison in size; with a hull diameter of a hundred and fifteen metres
Oenone
was the largest of all
Iasius
’s children. And it wasn’t until puberty’s growth hormones came into effect that Thetis outmatched her in physical tussles.
But they had always been the closest, always competing against each other.
I’ve never met anyone more unsuitable for a captaincy,
Ruben chided.
No composure, all teenage recklessness, that’s your fault, young lady. I’m jumping ship when this is over, bugger what the
contract says.
She laughed out loud, quickly turning it into a cough for Eileen’s benefit. Even though she was used to the degree of honesty
which affinity fostered, Ruben always astounded her with his intimate knowledge of her emotional composition.
You don’t complain about my other teenage attributes,
she shot back, complete with a very graphic image.
Oh, lady, you just wait till we’re off duty.
I’ll hold you to that.
The prospect almost made the tense waiting worthwhile.
Because of the need for a more precise trajectory when jumping towards a planet than for an interstellar jump,
Dy-masio
spent a good fifty minutes re-aligning its course with considerable accuracy. Once its new orbital vector intersected Kirchol,
the starship reconfigured itself for a jump.
Weapons status check, please,
Syrinx demanded when the light from
Dymasio
’s dive flame began to fade.
Combat wasps and proximity defence systems online,
Chi replied.
OK, everybody, alert status one. We don’t know how many hostiles there are going to be around Kirchol, so we’ll proceed with
extreme caution. The admiral wants this ship interdicted, not destroyed, but if we’re outnumbered we let loose the combat
wasps and retreat. Let’s just hope this is the nest.
She caught an indistinct mental grumble:
It can’t possibly be another decoy jump. Please.
From the tiredness of the tone she guessed it was Oxley, who was actually older than Ruben, a hundred and fifty. Sinon had
recommended him when she was assembling her first crew. He had stayed on mostly out of loyalty to her when she signed on with
the navy. More cause for guilt.
Dymasio
jumped.
Kirchol was a muddy brown globe three hundred and seventy thousand kilometres below
Oenone
’s hull, attendant moons glimmering dimly in the exhausted sunlight. The gas giant had nothing like the majesty of Saturn,
it was too drab, too listless. Even the stormbands lacked ferocity.
Dymasio
and the two voidhawks had emerged above the south pole; insignificant on such a scale, one dull speck, and two coal-black
motes, falling with imperceptible slowness as the gravity field tugged at them.
Syrinx opened her mind to Chi, combining
Oenone
’s perceptual awareness with the weapons officer’s knowledge of their combat wasps’ performance capabilities. Her nerves stretching
over a huge volume of space, making a far-off body tremble in reaction.
The
Dymasio
started to transmit a simple radio code, beaming it down towards the gas giant. Given their position, there would be no overspill
falling on the populated inner system, Syrinx realized, no chance of being detected even in a few hours when the radio waves
finally bridged the gulf.
An answering pulse flashed out from something in orbit around Kirchol, well outside
Oenone
’s mass-detection range. The source point began to move, vaulting out of its orbit at five gees.
Oenone
couldn’t detect any infrared trace, and there was no reaction-drive exhaust. The radio signal cut out.
A blackhawk.
The thought leapt between the Edenists on both voidhawks, a shared frisson of glee.
It’s mine,
Syrinx told Thetis on singular-engagement mode. She hadn’t forgotten how the last blackhawk had given them the slip. It rankled
still.
Oh, come on,
he protested.
Mine,
she repeated coolly.
You get all the glory nabbing that actual antimatter. What more do you want?
The next blackhawk we come across is mine.
Of course,
she cooed.
Thetis retreated, his subconscious grousing away. But he knew better than try and argue with his sister when she was in that
mood.
We’re going after it?
Oenone
demanded.
We certainly are,
she reassured it.
Good, I didn’t like losing that last one. I could have matched its swallow.
No, you couldn’t. That was nineteen light-years. You’d damage your patterning cells trying to emulate that. Fifteen light-years
is our limit.
Oenone
didn’t answer, but she could sense the resentment in its mind. She had almost been tempted to try the larger than usual swallow,
but fear of injuring the voidhawk held her back. That and the prospect of stranding the rest of the crew in deep space.
I would never harm you or the crew,
Oenone
said gently.
I know. But it was annoying, wasn’t it? Very!
The blackhawk rose up out of the ecliptic plane in a long, graceful curve. Even when it slowed to rendezvous with the
Dymasio
the two waiting voidhawks couldn’t discern its shape or size. They were thirty thousand kilometres away, too far for optical
resolution, and the slightest use of the distortion effect to probe it would have given them away.
Both target craft used their radios when they were five thousand kilometres apart, a steady stream of encrypted data. It made
tracking absurdly easy,
Oenone
’s passive electronic sensor array triangulating them to half a metre. Syrinx waited until they were only two thousand kilometres
apart, then issued the order to interdict.
HOLD YOUR LOCATION,
Oenone
bellowed across the affinity band. It detected a mental flinch from the black-hawk.
CANCEL YOUR ACCELERATION, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO INITIATE A SWALLOW. STAND BY FOR RENDEZVOUS AND BOARDING.
Gravity surged back into the crew toroid, building with uncomfortable speed.
Oenone
and
Graeae
streaked in towards their prey at eight gees.
Oenone
was capable of generating a counter-acceleration force of three gees around the crew toroid, which still left Syrinx subject
to a harsh five gees. Her toughened internal membranes could just about take the strain, but she worried that the blackhawk
would try to run. Their crews nearly always used nanonic supplements, enabling them to withstand much higher acceleration.
If it developed into a straight chase,
Oenone
’s crew were going to suffer, especially Ruben and Oxley.
She needn’t have worried. After
Oenone
’s affinity shout, the blackhawk folded in its distortion field. But she was keenly aware of the sullen anger colouring its
thoughts, presumably echoing those of its captain. There was a name, too, or rather an insistence of identity:
Vermuden
.
Graeae
was broadcasting a radio message at the
Dymasio
, the same demand to maintain position. In the Adamist star-ship’s case, enforcement was a more practical option. The voidhawk
reached out with its distortion field, disrupting the quantum state of space around the
Dymasio
’s hull; if it tried to jump away now, the interference would produce instabilities in its patterning nodes, with spectacularly
lethal results as the desynchronized energy loci imploded.
Oenone
and
Graeae
drew apart as they closed on their respective targets. The
Vermuden
was a sharp profile in Syrinx’s mind now, a flattish onion shape one hundred and five metres in diameter, its central spire
tapering to a needle-sharp point sixty metres above the hull rim. There was no crew toroid, instead three silvery mechanical
capsules were fixed equidistantly around the upper hull; one was a life-support cabin large enough for about five or six people,
another was a hangar for a small spaceplane, the third was its cargo hold. Energy currents simmered below its hull, spectral
iridescent whirls that suggested extreme agitation.