The navigator was opening his mouth to reply when, without warning, the Kharg lurched and gravity abruptly returned.
"Hold it—!" Freitag snapped, his flash of anger turning to equally sharp embarrassment as he suddenly remembered he was yelling an order to a dead man. "Kernyov!—get his hands away from that thing."
"No!" Eisenstadt barked as Kernyov reached for the Deadman Switch board. "We could lose our path!"
Freitag threw him a stabbing glare. "We may already have lost it—"
And, mid-sentence, the circuit breakers cracked and gravity again vanished. Freitag swore under his breath, and for a long second seemed to be trying to regain his mental balance; then the gears meshed and he was back in control again. "All right, let's sort this out. Costelic, where are we now?"
The navigator peered at his displays. "Not too far from where we started, Commodore. Looks like we basically did a short loop, back around to a point about five million kilometers closer in to Solitaire. I can give you an exact location in a minute."
Freitag eyed me. "You want to try and explain this one, Benedar?" he suggested. "You've got a choice: two separate Mjollnir-space generators or one extremely large one. Take your pick."
I took a deep breath, trying desperately to come up with an answer that wouldn't sound overly stupid—and as abruptly as the last time, the displays again flashed with light.
Eisenstadt yelped something, the words drowned out by the warbling of the radiation alarm. "What in chern-fire—?"
"Shut up," Freitag snapped. "Costelic?"
"Same as before, Commodore," the other reported. "Hot radiation, but without any of the penetrating power of a beam weapon."
For a moment longer the activity continued on the bridge, with crewers reporting generally the same findings as before. But I was watching Freitag... and because I was, I saw the moment when his irritated puzzlement turned suddenly to something cold. "Commodore?" I asked tentatively.
He ignored me. "Costelic... did we get anything on the aft-starboard instruments?"
"The flash came from the bow-starboard side again—"
"I know where it came from," Freitag said tightly. "I'm asking about aft-starboard. Specifically, ninety degrees from the flash."
"Ah—yes, sir." Costelic's fingers skittered across the keys. "There's not really much of anything there, sir. Solitaire system is that direction, of course; a couple of comets in the distance... just a moment."
"What is it?" Eisenstadt asked.
"We'll know in a minute," Freitag told him.
I watched as Costelic's sense took on a tinge of awe... and when he lifted his gaze from his displays his eyes were haunted. "Aft-starboard instruments show a tube-shaped region of high particle density, Commodore," he said, the words coming out with some difficulty. "Expanding rapidly into an even larger tube of... extremely hard vacuum. A large fraction of the high density material reads as superexcited helium."
The muscles in Freitag's back visibly tightened. "And the optical scanners?"
Costelic braced himself. "It's there, all right, sir. Computer's doing a cleanup and compensation now—be just a few more seconds."
"It who?" Eisenstadt asked. "What did you pick up, one of the thunderheads?"
"Hardly, Doctor," Freitag said darkly. "That splash of light and particle radiation... was the backwash of a spacecraft."
Eisenstadt blinked. "A space—?"
And all at once his sense turned to quiet horror. "You mean... traveling space-nomal?"
Freitag nodded grimly. "And over nine light-years in from the edge of the Cloud, too. Even at—looks like they're doing something over ten percent lightspeed—even at that rate they must have been doing this for one smert of a long time. Costelic?—where's that adjusted data?"
"Coming through now, Commodore... oh, bozhe moi."
The last word was an abrupt whisper. For a long moment Freitag gazed at his displays... and I watched his sense go from disbelief to something akin to horror.
Slowly, he looked up, turning to face Eisenstadt. "My error, Doctor," he said, his voice icy calm. "It's not, in fact, one spacecraft heading inwards toward Solitaire. It's something close to two hundred of them."
Eisenstadt stared at him. "A war party?"
"I don't see what else it could be," Freitag nodded.
I suddenly noticed my hands were clenched tightly at my sides. "Couldn't they simply be colony ships?" I asked, moved by something I only vaguely understood to give the strangers the benefit of the doubt.
Freitag looked at me. "Does it matter?" he asked bluntly. "Whether they want territory or a fight, the end result is still the same.
"Solitaire is under attack."
Chapter 28
"...The ships, fortunately, are only about half the size we'd originally estimated," Freitag said, splitting his display to show both an actual photo as well as a computer-scrubbed rendition. "Nearly forty percent of the size and mass is taken up by this umbrella-like thing, apparently a scoop-and-shield arrangement that magnetically grabs interstellar hydrogen and funnels it into the drive—those four nozzles on the underside—while simultaneously protecting the passengers from any atoms and micrometeors that the fields missed. The main body of the ship is back here—" he indicated it—"hanging about a kilometer beneath the drive section."
"Held there by what?" Governor Rybakov asked coolly. All things considered, I thought, she was taking this with considerable composure.
"A cable, we assume," Freitag told her. "Unfortunately, the Kharg's cameras weren't good enough to resolve it. That gives us a lower limit for its strength, though, and it's considerable."
"How considerable?" Rybakov demanded. "Beyond Patri capabilities?"
Eisenstadt shook his head. "I've done some checking and we could duplicate it. Tricky and expensive, but possible."
The tension in the governor's sense eased a bit. "At least they've got similar technology," she murmured. "I suppose we should be grateful for small favors."
Freitag and Eisenstadt exchanged glances. "Perhaps, Governor," Freitag said cautiously. "But don't forget that these ships have been running, probably constantly, for something like eighty-five years—and without putting in at a port for maintenance, I might add. That implies a tremendous technological consistency; and for them to be willing to ride the things in the first place implies an equally impressive confidence in that technology."
"Although we don't really know the ships are manned, do we?" Rybakov countered. "They could just as easily be robots. And as far as your assumed consistency is concerned, remember that we also don't know how many ships they had when they first started out. These one hundred ninety-two could conceivably be just the tail end of a fleet that originally numbered in the thousands."
"Unlikely," Freitag grunted. "Easy enough to check, thougli—all we have to do is search their backtrack for derelicts or debris."
"Provided the thunderheads will cooperate in such a search," Rybakov said, turning her gaze on me for the first time. "Which is why I wanted Benedar to be in on this conference today."
I gazed back at her... and it was only then, faced with the contrast in attitudes, that I suddenly realized just how much Eisenstadt's original antagonism toward me had diminished over the past few weeks. "I'll help in any way I can," I said evenly.
She almost grimaced, her sense a mixture of distaste and determination reminiscent of when she'd come to Randon to retrieve her illegally issued customs IDs. "I understand you've been keeping an eye on these Halloas Dr. Eisenstadt is using to talk to the thunderheads," she said.