The Night's Dawn Trilogy (499 page)

“I understand. I will play my part.”

“Good.”

“In the expectation of reward.”

“You will collect the drive. Humans keep their word.”

“A welcome assurance at this point.”

The other serjeant had gone to talk to Baulona-PWM. They stood in the middle of the plaza, with the dirty rain from the effigy
falling around them. The drops were less frequent, but larger, as the effigy continued its slow gyrations. “My ship tells
me that the Mosdva troops are invading the area around this cylinder,” Ione said. “Can your soldiers hold them off long enough
for you to retrieve the information?”

“How do you know this? We can detect no communication with your ship.”

“It is a method you are not familiar with. Now, can you hold them off?”

“We have no soldiers left outside Lalarin-MG. All is wrecked. Our food is grown in the tubes. There is no air, no fluid. Our
communication links are failing. Our fusion weapons are disabled. Does your ship have weapons which can help us?”

“Not weapons, but we can certainly help. I will need your agreement to act as the mediator between you and Quantook-LOU.”

“Why?”

“If you supply me with the information which makes the agreement between Tyrathca and Mosdva possible, I may be able to offer
all the Tyrathca of Lalarin-MG passage to one of the new Tyrathca worlds. It will not be today, but after we return to our
home we can send larger ships to collect you. They could be here in three to four weeks.”

“We will be dead within one hour. Mosdva will come to break open Lalarin-MG’s shell.”

“My ship can move Lalarin-MG away from Tojolt-HI. The Mosdva will no longer be able to reach it. This will give you time to
retrieve the information and mediate an agreement with Quantook-LOU.”

“You can move Lalarin-MG?”

“Yes.”

“Once we leave the shadow of Tojolt-HI, we will be unable to get rid of the sun’s heat. Our radiator bands are only sufficient
to rid us of the heat we produce inside.”

“Mediating the agreement won’t take that long. You will find and supply the astronomical information to me. When I am satisfied
it is correct, I will release the drive to Quantook-LOU and leave. All hostilities will then cease and the agreement will
become active. You can travel back to another enclave to wait for our ships to collect you.”

“I agree to this.”

______

Joshua varied
Lady Mac
’s acceleration at random as they flew back to the wrecked knot, making targeting difficult.

“Nobody’s shooting at us,” Liol said. It was almost a complaint. Heavy fire might have made Joshua rethink this whole idea.
Then again, part of him was looking forward to this with disgraceful childish glee. As he suspected his younger brother was,
as well. The rest of the crew treated the notion with an air of tolerant amusement. And Ione was doing a good job talking
rings around the xenocs.

He had to admit, everything was falling into place.

“That’s because we’re going the wrong way to be shot at,” Monica said. “We’re coming back to them. It’s leaving they object
to.”

“I wonder what they’ll make of this, then,” Joshua said.

Lady Mac
glided over the edge of the knot. Virtually all of the foil sheets had been torn away from its sunside slopes, letting the
red sunlight illuminate the snarl of dark tubes which made up the interior. Space around the knot was heavy with particles,
crystals and scraps of foil reflecting the sunlight in a blossom of crimson scintillations. The sunscoop’s plasma torch had
blown out a huge crater at the crest of the knot. Three hundred metres in diameter, its walls were a stipple of fractured
tubes with melted ends. They were still glowing coral red from the immense thermal barrage.

“I’m taking us in,” Joshua said. “Beaulieu, start saturating the knot.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The cosmonik switched the maser cannons to wideangle dispersal and began hosing the microwave energy around inside the crater.
It wasn’t powerful enough to damage the structure any further, but it would be lethal to any of the Mosdva creeping round
inside the knot.

Joshua rolled
Lady Mac
and started to edge her down into the crater. He used the forward lasers to slice through the tubes and wreckage at the bottom.
Sections began to drift free, vapour from their molten ends blowing them away gently. Chemical verniers fired around the starship’s
equator, moving it deeper into the crater.

______

Oenone
slipped out of its wormhole terminus thirty kilometres above the knot’s darkside. The Edenists in the life-support toroid
were all borrowing its sensor blisters, looking out in admiration at the monumental diskcity. Syrinx shared a smile with Ruben,
their minds cherishing the vista together. Little bursts of excitement wafted around the mental embrace which pervaded the
bridge as new facets of the xenoc construction were noticed and cherished. None of the ELINT coverage compared to actually
being here.

The tall pinnacles of thermal radiators glowed a steady orange in the voidhawk’s senses. It could feel the broad fans of heat
they gave off, slucing away through space towards the distant nebula. In the visual spectrum, Tojolt-HI was almost black.
The exception came from the area where the sunscoop had attacked. Foil sheets had either been torn free or disintegrated,
allowing sharp beams of intense red light to steal through the cluttered webs.

If Wing-Tsit Chong and the therapists could see me now,
Syrinx said contentedly.

They don’t need to,
Ruben said.
They know they did their job properly.

Yes, but it still galled when they said it. Just a timid tourist, indeed!

I am glad we came,
Oenone
said.
Everything here is fresh, but old at the same time. I feel Tojolt-HI has a dependability about it.

I know what you mean,
she told the enchanted void-hawk.
Anything that has such a long past must surely have an equally long future ahead of it.

It did have until we arrived,
Ruben said.

You’re wrong. The Mosdva can’t abandon it, nor any of the others. Ashly is right, ZTT won’t give them that option. But maybe
we’ll see change. Progress will begin again. I prefer to think of that as being our legacy. And who knows what they will achieve
with fresh resources and new technologies.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

You’re right.
The briefest glimmer of regret appeared amid her thoughts.

I’m picking up considerable radar activity above this side of the diskcity,
Edwin said.
I think our countermeasures are deflecting them.

Thank you,
Syrinx said.
Nothing we can do about visual acquisition, I’m afraid. And we’re silhouetted against the nebula for all Tojolt-HI to see.
Serina, have you acquired the trains?

Got them.

Cut the rails.

Five lasers stabbed out from the weapons pods clamped in
Oenone
’s lower hull groove. They slashed through the rail tracks meandering across the darkside’s huge thermal radiators. Serina
waited until the trains had halted, then used the lasers to chop the rail behind them.

Immobilised,
she said.
They can’t invade Lalarin-MG now.

They’d be pretty stupid to try,
Edwin said.
Our electronic sensors are picking up the
Lady Macbeth
’s microwave emissions from here. They’re powerful enough to leak through the knot.

Let’s go give him a hand,
Syrinx told
Oenone
.

The voidhawk darted in towards the diskcity. They came to rest directly over the knot.
Oenone
’s distortion field undulated through the damaged tubes and struts, allowing the Edenists to examine its anatomy. The remaining
scraps of asteroid rock in the knot’s central cavern were dark zones, their mass exerting a minuscule gravity field against
space time. Next to them, the cylinder rotated slowly, its thin shell nothing more than a murky shadow to the voidhawk’s perception.
Power circuits formed a grid of fuzzy violet lines permeating the whole edifice as the electron flows emitted their unique
signature. The greatest concentration of energy was swirling around the magnetic bearings at each hub. Small instabilities
flickered within the translucent folds, tarnishing the emissions. Barely fifty metres past the far end of the cylinder,
Lady Macbeth
appeared as a bright, dense twist in space-time.

“Got it, Joshua,” Syrinx said over the general communication link. “The cylinder masses approximately one-point-one-three
million tonnes.”

“Excellent. That’s no problem. With the antimatter drive,
Lady Mac
can hit forty gees, and we mass just over five thousand tonnes. That should give us nearly a fifth of a gee thrust.”

“All right, we’ll start cutting.”

Ruben, Oxley, and Serina all issued instructions to the bitek processors governing the weapons pods. Eighteen lasers fired
from the voidhawk’s lower fuselage, and under the crew’s directions began cutting through the tubes at the top of the knot.

______

Lady Mac
’s sensors could now focus on Lalarin-MG itself. Her lasers had scythed their way through the tangle of tubes and struts,
clearing a broad passage which Joshua had steered the starship along. Hot segments of tube twirled away into the main cavity,
bouncing against the metallic cylinder shell and the black lumps of rock. Light was filtering in for the first time in a hundred
centuries. Trickles of red sunlight slipped past
Lady Mac
’s fuselage, complemented by sizzling scarlet flashes of the lasers.

“How’s it going in there, Ione?” Joshua asked.

“We’re ready. Rotating airlocks are closed and sealed. I even got Baulona-PWM to find some padding for the Mosdva to lie on.”

“Okay, stand by.” The sensors were showing him the cylinder’s hub with its big circular bearing dead ahead. He cut the last
tube free, exposing the airlock chamber, and fired the ion thrusters to spin
Lady Mac
, matching her rotation to the cylinder. The starship’s forward fuselage section moved into the bearing, crushing the jagged
remnants of the tube. “Sarha?”

“I’ve got the molecular binding force generators on maximum.”

“Take the CAB safety limiters off line. Pump them higher. I want all the strength we’ve got in the stress structure.”

“You’ve got it.”

“We’ve cut this end free,” Syrinx said. “You’re clear.”

“Okay everyone, stand by.” Joshua fired the fusion drives, keeping their thrust to an easy one gee.
Lady Mac
pressed forward, compressing the remnants of the airlock chamber in towards the cylinder shell. The rim of the bearing pierced
the starship’s protective foam until it was touching the fuselage.

“We’re solid,” Liol declared.

Joshua increased the fusion drive thrust. Three strands of blue-white plasma stabbed back out through the crater, twining
together. Tubes and struts facing the ultraheated torrent of ions began to boil furiously, sending out twisters of gas.

“Stress structure’s holding,” Sarha said. The sound of the drive tubes was vibrating through the life support capsules, a
muffled drone. She’d never heard that before.

“It’s moving,” Beaulieu called out. “Accelerating at four per cent of a gee.”

“Okay, here we go,” Joshua said. He activated the antimatter drive.

Hydrogen and anti-hydrogen collided and obliterated each other within the engine’s complex focusing field. A shaft of pure
energy burst into existence behind the starship, as if a flaw in space-time had cracked open. Two hundred thousand tonnes
of thrust started to push Lalarin-MG out of its rapidly dissolving chrysalis.

______

“I think we might have something,” Etchells said.

Kiera looked up from the pizza slice she was munching through. A couple of the console displays were showing elongated stars
being lassoed by turquoise nets, columns of scarlet figures scrolling past too fast to be read. So far all the hellhawk had
found was some radar-type pulses coming from (presumably) stations orbiting the huge star. They gave nothing away, other than
the fact they weren’t Confederation. Kiera and Etchells both wanted to see if anything else existed before they started investigating.

“What have you seen?” she asked.

“Take a look for yourself.”

The gauzy iridescent clouds of the nebula slid across the bridge’s main port as the hellhawk swung round. Bright crimson light
shone in as it faced the red giant again.

Kiera dropped her pizza back into the therm box and squinted against the glare. Right in the middle of the port was a dazzling
white spark. As she watched, it grew longer and longer.

“What is that?”

“An antimatter drive.”

She smiled grimly “It must be the Confederation Navy ship.”

“Possibly. If it is, there’s something wrong. An antimatter drive should accelerate a ship at over thirty-five gees. Whatever’s
producing that drive flare is barely moving.”

“We’d better take a look then. How far away are they?”

“Roughly a hundred million kilometres.”

“But it’s so bright.”

“Nobody really appreciates how powerful antimatter actually is until they encounter it first hand. Ask the ex-residents of
Trafalgar.”

Kiera gave the apparition a respectful look, then went over to the weapons console. She started arming the combat wasps. “Let’s
go.”

______

Joshua switched all the starship’s drives off as soon as Lalarin-MG cleared the crest of the knot. The flight computer had
to tell him where that was. Tojolt-HI’s structure had simply melted away from the antimatter drive, leaving a hole over eight
kilometres wide where the knot had been. The fringes glowed cerise, extending bent tendrils of molten metal. Only the largest
lump of asteroid rock had survived intact, although it was down to a quarter of its original size. It tumbled in towards the
photosphere, its surface baked to a cauldron of bubbling tar, spewing out a guttering tail of petrochemical fog.