He accessed the navigation display to see just how practical any sort of return flight was. It didn’t look good. Maranta and Gramine had confined their search to the section of ring which was electrically charged, which meant one of them was always within three thousand kilometres of Lady Mac . The jump coordinate for Lalonde was a third of the way round the gas giant, over two hundred and seventy thousand kilometres from their present position. Out of the question. He started to hunt round for options.
“I think it’s a load of balls,” Warlow said when they were all assembled. “Possession! Kelly’s cracked.”
“You said it yourself,” Ashly said. “It’s a bad form of sequestration.”
“Do you believe in the dead coming back?”
The pilot grinned at the huge ochre cosmonik clinging to a corner of an acceleration couch. “It would make life interesting. Admit it.”
Warlow’s diaphragm issued a sonic boom snort.
“It doesn’t matter what name we choose to call the process,” Dahybi said. “The sequestration ability exists. We know that. What we have to decide is whether or not Kelly has been taken over by it.” He glanced at Joshua and offered a lame shrug.
“If she hasn’t then we’re all in a great deal of trouble,” Sarha said.
“If she hasn’t ?” Melvyn asked.
“Yes. That will mean there are twenty-nine children we have to get off that planet by this afternoon.”
“Oh, hell,” he mumbled.
“And if she has been sequestrated then she knew we were coming back anyway. So why try and get us to come back earlier? And why include all that crap about possession, when all it would do was make us more cautious?”
“Double bluff?” Melvyn said.
“Come on!”
“Sarha’s right,” Ashly said. “We always planned to go back; as far as Kelly knew, in a couple of days. There’s no logical reason to hurry us. And we know they try and hijack the spaceplanes which land. It’s not as if we wouldn’t have taken precautions. All this has done is make us even more cautious. My vote says she is in trouble, and they have found these stray children.”
“And me,” Dahybi said. “But it’s not our decision. Captain?”
It was the kind of oblique compliment about his status Joshua could really have done without. “Kelly would never call unless she really was desperate,” he said slowly. “If she has managed to avoid sequestration, or whatever, she would never have mentioned possession unless it was true. You all know what she’s like: facts no matter what it costs. And if she had been possessed, she wouldn’t tell us.” Oh, Jesus, be honest, I know she’s in deep shit. “They need to be picked up. Like she said: today.”
“Joshua, we can’t,” Melvyn said. He looked desperately torn. “I don’t want to abandon a whole bunch of kids down there any more than you. Even if we don’t know exactly what’s going on below those bloody cloudbands, we’ve seen and heard enough to know it ain’t good. But we’re never going to get past the Maranta and the Gramine . And I’ll give you good odds they’ve picked up Kelly’s message as well. They’ll be extra vigilant now. Face it, we’ve got to wait. They’ll spot us the second we turn our drive on.”
“Maybe,” Joshua said. “Maybe not. But first things first. Sarha, can our environmental systems cope with thirty kids and the mercenaries as well as the Edenists?”
“I dunno how big the kids are,” Sarha said, thinking out loud. “Kelly did say young. There’s probably room for four more in the zero-tau pods if we really cram them in. We can billet some in the spaceplane and the MSV, use their atmospheric filters. Carbon dioxide build-up is our main problem, the filters could never scrub the amount seventy people produce. We’d have to vent it and replace it from the cryogenic oxygen reserve.” Neural nanonics ran a best and worst case simulation. She didn’t like the margins on the worst case, not one bit. “I’ll give you a provisional yes. But thirty is the absolute limit, Joshua. If the mercenaries run into any other worthy cause refugees, they’re just going to have to stay down there.”
“OK. That leaves us with picking them up. Ashly?”
The pilot gave one of his engaging grins. “I told you, Joshua, I promised them I’d go down again.”
“Fine. That just leaves you, Gaura. You’ve been very quiet.”
“It’s your ship, Captain.”
“Yes, but your children are on board, and your friends and family. They’ll be exposed to a considerable risk if Lady Mac attempts to go back to Lalonde. That entitles you to a say.”
“Thank you, Joshua. We say this: if it was us stranded on Lalonde right now, we would want you to come and pick us up.”
“Very well. That’s settled then. We’ll try and rescue the mercenaries and the children.”
“One small point, Joshua,” Melvyn said loudly. “We’re stuck in the rings, with one combat wasp left, forty thousand kilometres from the edge of Murora’s gravity field. If we stick our heads up, they’ll be shot to buggery.”
“I was in a similar situation to this a year ago.”
“Joshua!” Sarha chided.
He ignored her. “It was the Ruin Ring, when Neeves and Sipika were coming after me. Look at where the Maranta and the Gramine are right now.”
They all accessed the navigational display, neon-sharp graphics unfurling in their minds. The two searching starships extruded curved yellow orbital trajectory plots paralleling the thick gauzy green slab of the ring which filled the bottom half of the projection. Lady Macbeth lurked below the ring surface like some outlandish slumbering marine creature.
“Maranta and Gramine are now six thousand kilometres apart,” Joshua said. “They’ve got a reasonable idea of the general area where we have to be hidden, and they’ve changed altitude twice in the last fifteen hours to cover different sections of the ring. If they stick to that pattern they’ll change again in another four hours.” He ordered the display to extrapolate their positions. “Gramine will be about three hundred kilometres from us, she actually passes over us in another ninety minutes; and Maranta is going to be right out at the extreme, about seven and a half thousand kilometres away. After that they’ll swap orbital tracks and begin a new sweep.
“So if we can break out when Maranta is seven and a half thousand klicks away, we’ll be far enough ahead of it to escape.”
“And Gramine ?” Melvyn asked. He didn’t like Joshua’s quiet tone, as if the young captain was afraid of what he was going to say.
“We know where it’s going to be, we can leave one of the megaton nukes from the combat wasp waiting for it. Mine the ring where it will pass overhead, attach the nuke to a large rock particle. Between them, the emp pulse, the plasma wave, and the rock fragments should disable it.”
“How do we get it there?” Melvyn asked.
“You know bloody well how we get it there,” Sarha said. “Someone’s got to carry it using a manoeuvring pack, right Joshua? That’s what you did in the Ruin Ring, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. They can’t detect one person fifteen kilometres deep in the ring, not using cold gas to manoeuvre.”
“Wait a minute,” Dahybi said. He had been running flight trajectory simulations in the navigation display. “Even if you did knock out the Gramine , and that’s a bloody long shot, we’re still no better off. Maranta will just launch her combat wasps straight at us. There’s no way we can out-run them, they’ll get us before we’re halfway to the edge of Murora’s gravity field, let alone Lalonde’s jump coordinate.”