“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 sun-scoop’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 wide-angle 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 voidhawk. 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.”