The Night's Dawn Trilogy (407 page)

“Yes. He said so.”

“And Banneth definitely lives on Earth? Interesting. Whatever happened between the two of them sounds very ugly, which implies
they were involved in some kind of criminal activity. I think that should provide my investigation with an adequate starting
point.”

“Oh.” Louise didn’t quite look at him. It was so obvious, laid out like that. She should have sent a questor into criminal
archives.

“I am a professional, Louise,” he said kindly. “You do know the possessed have reached Earth, don’t you?”

“Yes. I accessed the news from New York. The mayor said they’d been eliminated, though.”

“He would. But Govcentral still hasn’t opened the vac-train lines to New York. That should tell you something. And now we’ve
had the Eiffel Tower blown up for no reason other than to demoralize and anger people. That probably means they’re in Paris
as well. A feat like that is beyond the ability of some stimbrained street gang. What I’m trying to say, Louise, in my dear
bumbling way, is that if Quinn Dexter is here, then he’ll be heading for Banneth as well. Now do you really want to bump into
him again?”

“No!” Genevieve squeaked.

“Then bear in mind that’s where your current path is taking you.”

“All I need is Banneth’s eddress,” Louise said. “Nothing else.”

“Then I will do my best to ensure you receive it. I’ll be in touch.”

Ivanov waited until the sisters were circling down the spiral stair before asking:
Do you want me to give her Banneth’s eddress?

I’m afraid it’s a bit pointless right now,
Western Europe answered.
Edmonton has been sealed up, with Quinn inside. I can’t get her in to meet him; so she’ll just have to sit this out on the
substitute’s bench for a while.

The prospect of interstellar flight had been real to certain sections of the human race for a long time before
Sputnik One
thundered into orbit. A notion which began with visionaries like Tsiolkovskii, Goddard, and somewhat more whimsical science
fiction writers of that age, was quickly taken up and promoted by obsessive space activists when the first microgee factories
came on line, proving that orbital manufacturing was a profitable venture. With the development of the O’Neill Halo and the
Jupiter mining operation in the Twenty-first Century the concept finally began to seem practical. Asteroids were already being
hollowed out and made habitable. Now it was only an engineering and finance problem to propel them out of Earth orbit and
across the gulf to Proxima Centauri. There were no theoretical show stoppers; fusion or antimatter engines could be built
to accelerate the giant rocks up to speeds of anything between five and twenty per cent of lightspeed, depending on which
physicist you asked. Generations of crew would live, tend their machinery, and die within the rock as they crawled across
the emptiness, with the anticipation that their descendants would inherit a fresh world.

Sadly, human nature being what it is, century-duration flights were just too long, the ideal of colonization too abstract
to motivate the governments and large institutions of the time into building these proposed space arks. The real clincher,
inevitably, was cost. There could never be any return on the investment. So it seemed as though the fresh start idealists
would just have to go on dreaming.

One such thwarted dreamer was Julian Wan, who, more resourceful than his colleagues, persuaded the board of the New Kong corporation
to research faster than light travel. His pitch was that it would be a small, cheap project testing the more dubious equations
of Quantum Unification Theory, essentially a few wild theoretical physicists with plenty of computer time. But if it could
be made to work, the commercial opportunities would be phenomenal. Noble concern for human destiny and the search for pure
knowledge never got a look in.

New Kong successfully tested the ZTT drive in 2115, and the arkship concept was quickly and quietly discarded. Beautifully
detailed plans and proposals drawn up by a multitude of starflight societies and associations were downloaded into university
library memories to join the ranks of other never-made-it technologies like the nuclear powered bomber, the English Channel
bridge, geostationary solar power stations, and continent birthing (the so-called Raising Atlantis project, where fusion bombs
were proposed to modify tectonic activity). Then the Tyrathca world of Hesperi-LN was discovered in 2395, along with the news
that it was actually a colony founded by an arkship. The old human plans were briefly revisited by history of engineering
students, interested to see how they stood up to comparison with a proven arkship. That academic interest faded away inside
of a decade.

Joshua, who fancied himself as something of a spaceflight buff, was fascinated by the dull blip of light which
Lady Mac
’s sensors were focused on. It was in a wildly elliptical orbit around Hesperi-LN, with a twelve thousand kilometre perigee
and four hundred thousand kilometre apogee. Fortunately for their mission, it was just under three hundred thousand kilometres
away from the Tyrathca planet, and climbing.

They’d emerged two million kilometres out from Hesperi-LN; a distance which put them safely beyond the planet’s known SD sensor
coverage. The Tyrathca world was not a cradle for the kind of space activity found above industrialized human worlds. There
were a few low-orbit docking stations, industrial module clusters, communication and sensor satellite networks, and twenty-five
SD platforms supplied and operated by the Confederation Navy. Not that there was a lot of worry about pirate activity, the
Tyrathca simply didn’t manufacture the kind of goods which could be sold on any human market let alone the underground one.
The Confederation was far more concerned by the prospect of blackmail by a rogue starship captain armed with ground-assault
weapons. Although they didn’t have consumer products, the Tyrathca did mine gold, platinum, and diamonds among other precious
commodities for their indigenous industries. And the colony had been established in AD 1300; rumours of vast stockpiles accumulated
over millennia persisted on every human world. Any bar or dinner party would have someone who knew somebody else who had been
told of a first-hand witness who’d walked through the endless underground caverns filled with their glittering dragon hoards.

So the Navy maintained a small cost-ineffective outpost to guard against the possibility of any inter-species
incident
. It had been abandoned, along with all the other human-maintained systems, when the Tyrathca broke off contact. According
to the briefing Monica and Samuel had given to the
Lady Mac
’s crew, the Tyrathca would find it difficult to keep the SD systems functional for very long.

“But we have to expect them to try,” Monica said. “Their ambassador was pretty damn insistent that we don’t intrude on them
again.”

Joshua and Syrinx assumed the SD network was on-line and fully functional, and planned their tactics accordingly. The goal
was to land an explorer team on Tanjuntic-RI, who would attempt to locate a reference to the Sleeping God in the arkship’s
ancient electronics. Getting them inside unnoticed was the big problem.

Both craft were in full stealth mode when they emerged. Jumping into the system, Joshua had aligned
Lady Mac
so that her vector would carry her in a rough trajectory from the emergence coordinate towards the arkship. As long as he
didn’t have to use either the fusion or antimatter drives, the starship would probably remain undetected. At this stage, they
were back up; there to rush in and provide covering fire in case things got noisy and
Oenone
had to rescue their team. They were using passive sensors only, with just the chemical verniers firing occasionally to hold
them stable; every non-essential system was in stand-by mode, reducing the power consumption and with it their thermal emission.
Internal heat stores were soaking up the fusion generator output, although they could only last for a couple of days before
the thermo-dump panels would have to be extended to dissipate the heat. Even that wasn’t too much of a problem, the radiation
could be directed away from the SD network sensors. They’d have to be extremely unlucky to be discovered by anything that
guarded Hesperi-LN.

“Picking up some radar pulses from the SD network,” Beaulieu reported. “But it’s very weak. They’re not scanning for us. Our
hull coating can absorb this level easily.”

“Good,” Joshua said. “Liol, what about spacecraft activity?”

“Infrared’s showing twenty-three ships using their drives above the planet. The majority are travelling between low orbit
and the SD platforms. Four seem to be heading up for high polar orbits. I’d say they’re complementing the platforms. But none
of them are moving very fast, half a gee maximum. They are big ships, though.”

“That’s how the Tyrathca like them,” Ashly said. “Plenty of room to move round in the life support sections. It’s like being
inside a bloody cathedral.”

“Offensive potential?”

“If they’re armed with human-made combat wasps, considerable,” Liol said. “With that drive signature I’m assuming they’re
Tyrathca inter-planetary ships; they have a dozen asteroid settlements to provide the planetary industries with several kinds
of bulk microgee compounds. Which means their payload is considerably larger than ours. They’re like highly manoeuvrable weapons
platforms.”

“Wonderful.” Joshua datavised the new bitek processor array they’d installed during the last refit. “
Oenone
, what’s your situation?”

“I remain on schedule, Joshua. We should be rendezvousing with Tanjuntic-RI in another forty-two minutes. The exploration
team is suiting up now.”

Unlike the
Lady Macbeth
,
Oenone
had been able to accelerate and manoeuvre after emerging above the planet. By reducing its distortion field to a minimum,
the voidhawk could accelerate at half a gee towards the arkship. Given the distance involved, the network satellites were
unable to pick up such a small ripple in space-time. The disadvantage was, with such a reduced field the voidhawk couldn’t
perceive a fraction of the local environment it usually did. If for some unaccountable reason, the Tyrathca had surrounded
Tanjuntic-RI with proximity mines, they wouldn’t know until they were very close indeed.

Syrinx always hated being dependent on just the sensor blisters and passive electronic arrays. The voidhawks’ ability to pervade
a huge spherical volume of space around the hull was intrinsic to their flight.

We managed like this in our Navy days,
Oenone
said, unperturbed.

Syrinx grinned in the half-light of the bridge. The crew toroid’s internal power consumption was minimal as well.

You mean back when we were young and foolish?

This is not a foolish venture,
the voidhawk chided.
Wing-Tsit Chong considers it of the utmost importance.

Me too. But this part just brings back memories.
Of Thetis, though she didn’t mention him. Lately she’d started to wonder if her brother had managed to elude the beyond as
that ever-damned Laton had promised. Mild feelings of guilt had kept her away from his strange stunted existence within the
Romulus multiplicity before they left. Really, what was the point in preserving him when his soul was free?

What is our best landing point, do you think?
Oenone
asked.

As always, the voidhawk knew when she needed distracting.
I’m not sure. Show me what we can see.
She accessed the all-too scant files on Tanjuntic-RI stored in the on-board processors, and attempted to match them up with
the image the voidhawk was seeing.

Tanjuntic-RI had been completely abandoned less than fifty years after it arrived in the Hesperi-LN star system. An unduly
harsh treatment by human standards, but it had fulfilled every duty its long-dead builders had required of it, and the Tyrathca
were not a sentimental species. Fifteen thousand years old, it had travelled one thousand six hundred light-years to ensure
the Tyrathca race didn’t die along with their exploding home star. Five separate, successful colonies had been established
along its route. Each time the arkship had stopped inside a star system to create a new colony, the Tyrathca had virtually
rebuilt it, refuelled it, then carried on with their crusade of racial survival. Even so, there are limits to the most sturdy
machinery. After Hesperi-LN was founded, Tanjuntic-RI was left to circle ceaselessly above the planet.

Borrowing
Oenone
’s sensor blisters, Syrinx could see the details becoming clear as they glided in for a rendezvous. Tanjuntic-RI was a dark
cylindrical rock six kilometres long, two and a half in diameter. Its surface was a gentle mottle of flattened craters, resembling
a wind-sculpted ice field. Remnants of vast machines sketched out a random topology of tarnished metal lines along the floors
of the meandering valleys. These appurtenances had succumbed to millennia of particle impacts and vacuum ablation. What had
once been a surface bristling with elaborate towers and radiator panels the size of lakes was left with little more than their
stubby mounting fixtures as a reminder of past grandeur. The forward end was the most heavily speckled, due mainly to the
extensive remnants of a coppery hexagonal grid.

With Tanjuntic-RI capable of travelling at over fifteen per cent lightspeed, a collision with a single pebble at that speed
could result in catastrophic damage. So in flight the arkship was protected by a plasma buffer, a cloud of electrically charged
gas that broke up and absorbed any mass smaller than a boulder. It rode ahead of the arkship, a luminous mushroom-shape held
in place by a magnetic field generated by the superconductor grid.

Right in the centre of the grid, aligned along the rotation axis, was the arkship’s spaceport. Although the concept was the
same as the counter-rotating spaceports on Edenist habitats, the Tyrathca had fashioned an elaborate conical structure made
up from tiers of disks. Its peak disappeared below the surface of the rock, as if it were a kind of giant arrow tip which
had impaled itself in some forgotten era. The larger disks at the top end had broken off centuries ago, probably when the
magnetic bearing seized up. Those that remained were vacuum ablating, their edges fraying like worn cloth, while their flat
surfaces slowly dissolved, reducing their overall thickness. With the last maintenance crew departing thirteen centuries previously,
the vast sheets of metal were down to a few centimetres thickness, and perforated by thousands of micrometeorite holes.