"Don't worry about it," Freitag advised him coolly. "Whoever or whatever is out there running the Cloud generator, we'll be ready for them."
Woe to those going down to Egypt for help, who put their trust in horses, who rely on the quantity of chariots, and on great strength of cavalrymen...
Quietly, I slipped out of the bridge, leaving Freitag and the others to their watch. And their confidence.
—
It didn't take the ten hours Eisenstadt had been prepared for. It was, in fact, just under an hour later when the Kharg's pseudogravity abruptly vanished.
We had arrived.
There were no warning sirens, no terse announcements of red alert or whatever as I left the command ready room and floated hurriedly across the small lounge to the bridge proper. Not that that was really surprising; Freitag would hardly have left matters to a last-second scramble for battle stations, any more than he had permitted me to stray farther from the bridge than the nearby ready room. Still, somehow, the silence was more unnerving than the sounds of even a pitched battle would have been. As if the bridge crew—perhaps even the entire ship—had been suddenly killed or disabled... Heart thudding in my ears, senses fully alert, I slid open the bridge door and pulled myself in.
And, naturally, instantly felt like a fool. Everyone was still alive and well, working quietly at their posts. The overall sense of the room was concentration, underpinned with tension and controlled nervousness, but there was nothing that seemed to indicate imminent danger.
I took a deep breath, privately embarrassed by my sudden wild imagination... and preoccupied with that, it took me another second to realize that that very lack of danger sense was in itself a signal that something here wasn't right.
Calandra was sitting quietly to one side, strapped into a ditto station chair where she could observe without being in the way. Giving the wall a push, I floated over to her. "What's wrong?" I murmured.
She shrugged fractionally, her sense uneasy. "There doesn't seem to be anything out there," she said.
I frowned, giving all the displays within eyeshot a quick scan. They meant little to my untrained eye. "Error?" I asked.
She flicked a glance at Eisenstadt and Zagorin, the latter working on getting into a meditative state—
I was looking at Zagorin, not any of the displays; but even so my peripheral vision was dazzled by the brilliant flicker of light that flashed across the room. "What—?"
I was drowned out by the warble of warning sirens. "Radiation attack," one of the crewers snapped. "Bow-starboard hull registering particle fluxes of—it's off the scale, sir." His voice sounded awed and more than a little shaken. "Heavy magnetic flux residue—focused particle beam weapon, almost certainly."
"Backtrack it, Kernyov," Freitag ordered another man. "Pinpoint the source. Costelic, how much got through?"
The first crewer opened his mouth to speak... paused. "Uh... virtually none, sir," he said slowly, frowning at his displays in disbelief. "The inner hull sensors are recording just barely above background."
"The hull is designed to block radiation, isn't it?" Eisenstadt asked.
"Not from particle weapons that go off the scale," Freitag said tartly. "You got a spectrum profile yet, Costelic?"
"It's coming in now, sir." Costelic paused, his puzzlement growing even deeper. "It... doesn't appear to have been a beam, sir. The distribution suggests an extremely hot thermal spectrum, almost like residue from a point source."
"Some kind of nova or star-collapse remnant, maybe?" Eisenstadt suggested doubtfully. "A wall of radiation sweeping past might give readings like that."
Freitag shook his head, studying Costelic's readings. "Too sharply defined for that. Kernyov!—where's that backtrack report?"
I looked at Kernyov in time to see him wave his hands helplessly. "It doesn't backtrack, sir," he said, voice rich with frustration. "I can pull a vector from the particle velocities—it's vague, but it's there—but there just isn't anything in that direction."
"What do you mean, isn't anything?" Freitag demanded. "That radiation came from somewhere."
"I know, sir, but there's nothing larger than a few microns in the indicated direction."
Freitag rubbed his fingertips together thoughtfully. "We're well within Solitaire system's cometary halo. Anything nearby large enough for a ship to be hiding behind?"
"I've already checked, sir," was the prompt answer. "There are eight good-sized comets visible on scope, but none of them is even remotely near the radiation vector. Also checked for neutrino emissions that might indicate fission or fusion going on; again, negative."
Freitag snorted and turned to Eisenstadt and Zagorin. "I want some answers, Doctor. When'll she be ready?"
"Thunderhead?" Eisenstadt asked, peering at Zagorin's impassive face. There was no response. "Thunderhead?" he repeated, throwing a questioning glance at Calandra and me.
"Doctor—" Freitag began.
"It's not Zagorin, Commodore," Calandra spoke up. "She's in the proper meditative state."
Freitag's eyes flicked to her, as if he was going to argue with her diagnosis. "Then why isn't it working?" he demanded instead.
I could see her brace herself. "I'd guess, sir, that the trouble is on the thunderhead side."
Freitag transferred his glare to Zagorin. "Is it, now. Sort of as if they led us out here and then deliberately pulled back?" He shifted the glare once more, this time to Eisenstadt. "I don't suppose, Doctor, that you'd care to speculate on why these friends of humanity would do something like that?"
It was the first time I'd heard the thunderheads referred to in that way; and from the way Eisenstadt winced, I gathered the phrase had been his own coinage. For the first time I realized just how hard he'd pushed to get this trip approved, and how much of his reputation and prestige he'd put on the line for it.
And now, with it threatening to crumble right in front of him, I saw his mind frost over in the face of Freitag's question. He glanced at me, an unspoken plea behind his eyes— "Perhaps," I spoke up, "they're simply unable to make contact."
"They can run a zombi over nine light-years farther from Spall than this," Freitag countered.
"But we've never had a ship come in from this direction," I pointed out, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. Now it was me on the hot spot, and I wasn't at all sure where I was even headed with this. "None of the colonies is anywhere near this path."
"And?" he challenged.
"Well..." I floundered a bit. "Perhaps the radiation here is a clue. Coming from seemingly nowhere, and all—"
"I hope you're not going to suggest the radiation is scaring them off."
I clenched my teeth. "I don't think the radiation per se is bothering them, no. But perhaps there's something else associated with the Cloud generator that is."
Freitag cocked an eyebrow. "Oh? What Cloud generator is that?" he asked, hand waving across the empty displays.
"There's nothing that says the Cloud generator has to be in normal space, is there?" I asked doggedly. Spur-of-the-moment idea or not, I had no intention of letting myself be bullied into just abandoning it. "The Cloud itself certainly doesn't seem to be. And if the Cloud was created to keep the thunderheads inside Solitaire system, maybe the generator itself was designed to keep them out."
Freitag's mouth opened... closed again. "Uh-huh," he said at last, thoughtfully. "Interesting, indeed. It's supposed to be impossible for something to be at rest in Mjollnir space, but let that pass for the moment. Costelic, have we got a solid fix on our position here?"