The antimatter production system itself was housed in a cluster of boxy silver-white industrial modules right in the centre
of the array. The mundane method of churning out antimatter was essentially unchanged since the late Twentieth Century; although
the levels of scale and efficiency had risen considerably since the first few experimental antipro-tons had been manufactured
in high-energy physics laboratories. Production requires individual protons to be accelerated until their energy becomes greater
than a giga-electron-volt, at which point each one has more energy in its motion than its mass. Once that state has been achieved,
they are collided with heavy nuclei, resulting in a spray of elementary particles that includes antiprotons, antielec-trons,
and antineutrons. These are then separated, collected, cooled, and merged into antihydrogen. But it is that initial proton
acceleration stage which absorbs the phenomenal amount of electricity produced by the solar array in its entirety.
The whole operation was overseen by a crew of twenty-five technicians, stationed in a large, heavily-shielded rotating carbotanium
wheel that floated deep inside the array’s umbra. They had now been joined by eight members of the
Organization to keep them in line. Taking over the station had been absurdly easy.
Because the black cartel took the elementary precaution of installing its own modified neural nanonics in everyone who knew
of the station’s location, there could only ever be two kinds of visitor: the Confederation Navy on a search and destroy mission,
or a legitimate buyer. The arrival of Capone’s lieutenants came as a severe shock to the crew. The few hand weapons available
were utterly useless against the possessed; their only other option was to kamikaze. Once the Organization’s terms and conditions
had been laid on the line, that was postponed indefinitely. The same kind of uneasy stand-off balance between need and fear
that had claimed New California settled across the station.
After supplying the first Organization convoy with every gram of antimatter held in storage, the station had been operating
a full production schedule ever since, attempting to cope with Capone’s desperate demands for more. Starships came from New
California every five or six days for new supplies.
______
Admiral Saldana’s squadron made no attempt at stealth or subtlety when it jumped into the system, emerging twenty-five million
kilometres from the star. Navy starships always had a tremendous advantage against the stations they hunted. Deep inside the
star’s gravity field, there could be no quick escape for the station’s crew. Defensive weapons were almost useless. Not even
antimatter propulsion and warheads could produce their usual overwhelming advantage; in such proximity to the star, combat
wasp sensors were almost blind.
Standard procedure for the Navy starships was to launch a volley of kinetic projectiles in a retrograde orbit. It was a tactic
that would quickly exhaust the station’s stock of drones, leaving them with beam weapons alone. Against a swarm of ten thousand
harpoons, their chances of vaporizing every one before it hit was effectively nil. That was assuming the station sensors were
even capable of locating the incoming missiles to begin with. In most cases the hellish solar environment completely masked
their approach. And the Navy vessels would never issue a warning, the station might never know of their presence until the
first missile struck.
All the attackers needed was a single strike against the production system. Any large explosion would inevitably set off a
chain reaction within the antimatter storage chambers. The resulting blast could at times be five or six times the size of
a planet-buster, depending on how much of the substance was in store.
This time it was going to have to be a little different. Meredith Saldana waited impatiently on the
Arikara
’s bridge while the voidhawks deployed around the star in small swallow manoeuvres. Each of them launched a pack of small
sensor satellites to scan the huge magnetosphere in which they were all immersed.
Locating the station was easy enough, though the sheer volume of space they were searching through made it a lengthy task.
The
Arikara
’s tactical situation computer started to receive datavises from the satellites, blending them into a harmonized picture of
the whole near-solar environment. When the information was complete, it showed the star as a dark sphere surrounded with graded
shells of pale gold translucence. The innermost seethed like a restless sea as the magnetic forces fluxed and coiled, above
that they smoothed out considerably.
A tiny knot of twisted copper light was sliding along a circular, five million kilometre orbit. The squadron’s comparative
position was fed in, and Meredith began issuing orders. Because of their vulnerability to the star’s heat and radiation, the
voidhawks maintained their orbits, enabling them to keep watch for any emerging starships. The Adamist starships flew inward.
Eight frigates were vectored into high inclination orbits, a location from which they could launch a kinetic assault on the
station. The remaining starships, including
Lady Macbeth
, aligned themselves on an interception course and accelerated along it at three gees.
When they were three million kilometres away, the
Arikara
pointed her main communication dish on the station, and boosted the signal to full strength.
“This communiquÉ is directed to the station commander,” Meredith datavised. “This is the Confederation Navy ship
Arikara
. Your illegal operation is now terminated. Ordinarily, you would be executed for your actions in producing antimatter, but
I have been authorized to offer you transport to a Confederation penal colony planet if you cooperate with us. This offer
is also applicable to any possessed who are resident at the station. I will require your answer within one hour. Failure to
respond will be taken as a refusal to cooperate, and you will be destroyed.” He datavised the flight computer to repeat the
message, and the squadron waited.
It took ten minutes for a static-heavy signal to emerge from the station. “This is Renko, I’m the guy Al left in charge around
here. And I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here before we smear your pansy asses across the sun. You got that clear,
pal?”
Meredith glanced across the bridge’s acceleration couches to where Lieutenant Grese was lying. The intelligence officer managed
to grin, despite the gee force.
“That’s a break,” he said. “We got Capone’s source, no matter what the outcome.”
“I believe the Navy is due a break,” Meredith said. “Especially our section of it.”
“He’ll have to stop those bloody infiltration flights now. His fleet will need all the antimatter they’ve got left to defend
New California.”
“Indeed.” Meredith was almost cheerful when he ordered the computer to datavise a reply to the station. “Consult your crew,
Renko. You’re in the losing position here. All we have to do is launch a single missile once an hour. You have to fire five
each time just to make sure it doesn’t get through. And we’re in no hurry, we can keep shooting at you for a couple of weeks
if we have to. There’s just no way you can win. Now are you going to accept my offer, or do you want to go back to the beyond?”
“Nice try, but you don’t mean it. Not for us, leastways. I know you guys, you’ll slam us into zero-tau the second we put our
hands up.”
“For what it’s worth, I am Rear Admiral Meredith Sal-dana, and you have my word that you will be given passage to an uninhabited
world capable of supporting human life. Consider your alternatives. If we attack the station, you go back to the beyond, if
I’m lying about transporting you to a planet you go back. But there is the very strong possibility that I’m not lying. Can
you really reject that hope?”
Along with the rest of the squadron, Joshua had to wait another twenty minutes for the answer. Eventually, Renko agreed to
surrender. “Looks like we’re on,” Joshua said. They were accelerating hard again, preventing him from smiling. But there was
no hiding the rise of excitement in his labouring voice.
“Christ, the other side of the nebula,” Liol marvelled. “What’s the furthest anyone’s ever been before?”
“A voidhawk scout group travelled six hundred and eighty light years from Earth in 2570,” Samuel replied. “Their course took
them directly galactic north, not in this direction.”
“I missed that,” Ashly complained. “Was there anything interesting out there?”
Samuel closed his eyes, questioning the voidhawks racing along their orbits millions of kilometres away. “Nothing unusual,
or dramatic. Stars with possible terracompatible planets, stars without. No sentient xenoc species.”
“The Meridian fleet went further,” Beaulieu said.
“Only according to legend,” Dahybi countered. “Nobody knows where they vanished to. In any case, that was centuries ago.”
“Logically then, they must have gone a long way if no one’s ever found them.”
“Found the wreckage, more like.”
“Such pessimism is bad for you.”
“Really? Hey, Monica.” Dahybi lifted one hand to make an appeal before the acceleration made him lower it fast again. “Do
your lot know where they went? It could be important if they’re waiting out there for us.”
Monica stared stubbornly at the compartment’s ceiling, a headache building behind her compressed eyeballs that no program
could rid her of. She really hated high gees. “No,” she datavised (her throat was suffering along with the rest of her), irritated
she couldn’t put any emphasis into her dig-italized speech. Not that snapping at the crew would endear her to them, but their
relentless discussions of utter trivia were starting to chafe. And she’d possibly got a month or more to go. “The ESA was
in its infancy back when the Meridian fleet was launched. Even today I doubt we’d bother planting assets in with a bunch of
paradise seeking fools.”
“I don’t want to know what’s there,” Joshua said. “The whole point of this mission is discovery. We’re real explorers going
out on a limb, first for at least a century.”
“Amen to that,” Ashly said.
“Where we are now is new for most people,” Liol said. “Just look at that station.”
“Standard industrial modules,” Dahybi said. “Hardly exotic or inspiring.” Liol sighed sadly.
“Okay, we’re getting close to injection point,” Joshua announced. “Systems review, please. How’s our fuselage holding out?”
The flight computer was datavising images from the localized sensors into his neural nanonics.
Lady Mac
’s thermo dump panels were fully extended, constantly rotating to present their narrow edges towards the raging star. Their
flat surfaces were glowing radiant pink as they expelled the ship’s accumulated heat. He’d programmed a permanent spin into
their vector, a fifteen minute cycle to ensure the immense thermal input was distributed evenly across the fuselage. Fine
manoeuvring was slow, given the additional reaction mass they were carrying, but the balance compensation programs were handling
it providing he kept tweaking them.
“No hot spots yet,” Sarha reported. “That extra layer of nulltherm foam is doing its job quite well. But it is picking up
a lot of particle radiation, far more than we’re used to. We’ll have to watch that.”
“Should lose it when we get behind the shield,” Liol said. “Won’t be long now.”
“See?” Beaulieu told Dahybi. “You are surrounded by optimists.”
The squadron’s interception ships were sliding into an orbital slot three thousand kilometres behind the antimatter station.
If Renko did decide to switch off the storage confinement chambers, the radiation impact from the blast would tax the shielding
on the starships to an uncomfortable degree. But they should be safe. So far, he appeared to be cooperating.
Commander Kroeber was handling the negotiation on how the hand over was to be accomplished. The civil star-ship already docked
at the station was to depart with everyone on board. It would rendezvous with one of the squadron’s marine cruisers. The possessed
would disembark and proceed directly to the brig under heavily armed guard where they would stay for the duration of the flight.
Any indication of them using their energistic power, for whatever reason, would result in a forty-thousand-volt current being
run through the brig. The cruiser, accompanied by two frigates, would fly directly to an uninhabited terra-compatible world
(currently in the middle of an ice age) where the possessed would be shot down to the tropical-zone surface in one-way descent
capsules, with a supply of survival equipment. There would be no further contact with that planet by the Confederation, apart
from delivering any further possessed with whom similar exceptional deals had been made.
Kroeber’s other offer, that they help the CNIS with its research into energistic power until such time as a solution was found
for possession, was summarily rejected.
Once the possessed were safely incarcerated, another marine cruiser would rendezvous with the starship and take off the station’s
regular crew ready to transport them to a penal planet. Complete control of the station systems was to be handed over to the
Navy technical crew, who would remote test their new domain. If total access was confirmed, a third marine cruiser would dock
with the station itself, and perform a boarding and securement manoeuvre.
After some haggling, mainly over the contents of the survival equipment they could take with them down to the icy planet,
Renko agreed to the arrangement.
Lady Macbeth
’s crew watched the proceedings through the sensors. The hand-over went remarkably smoothly, taking just less than a day.
A datavise from the first marine cruiser showed the possessed, dressed defiantly in double-breasted suits, laughing brashly
as they were led into the brig. The station crew looked frankly relieved that they’d escaped with exile. They datavised over
their access codes without a qualm.
“You may proceed to docking, Captain Calvert,” Admiral Saldana datavised. “Lieutenant Grese informs me we are now in full
command of the station. There is enough antimatter in storage for your requirements.”