“Yes.”
“Okay. Sarha, get the dish ready for that, please. I think you’d better allow for a twenty-thousand-kilometre error when you designate the beam. No telling what state they were in when they got here. If they don’t respond, we’ll have to widen the sweep pattern out to the furthest moon.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“How many people left on this old warship of yours, Doc?” Joshua asked.
Alkad broke away from the image feeding into her neural nanonics. She didn’t want to. This was it, the star represented by that stupid little alphanumeric she had carried with her like a talisman for thirty years. Always expecting him to be waiting here for her; there had been a million first lines rehearsed in those decades, a million loving looks. But now she’d arrived, seen that pale amber star with her own eyes, doubt was gripping her like frostbite. Every other aspect of their desperate plan had fallen to dust thanks to fate and human fallibility. Would this part of it really be any different? A sublight voyage of two and a half light-years. What had the young captain called it? Impossible. “Nine,” she said faintly. “There should be nine of them. Is that a problem?”
“No. Lady Mac can take that many.”
“Good.”
“Have you thought what you’re going to tell them?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jesus, Doc; their home planet has been wiped out, you can’t use the Alchemist for revenge, the dead are busy conquering the universe, and they are going to have to spend the rest of their lives locked up in Tranquillity. You’ve had thirty years to get used to the genocide, and a couple of weeks to square up to the possessed. To them it’s still good old 2581, and they’re on a navy combat mission. You think they’re going to take all this calmly?”
“Oh, Mother Mary.” Another problem, before she even knew if they’d survived.
“The dish is ready,” Sarha said.
“Thanks,” Joshua said. “Right, Doc, datavise the code into the flight computer. Then start thinking what you’re going to say. And think good, because I’m not taking Lady Mac anywhere near a ship armed with antimatter that isn’t extremely pleased to see me.”
Mzu’s code was beamed out by the Lady Macbeth in a slim fan of microwave radiation. Sarha monitored the operation as it tracked slowly around the designated orbital path. There was no immediate response—she hadn’t been expecting one. She allowed the beam another two sweeps, then shifted the focus to cover a new circle just outside the first.
It took five hours to get a response. The tension and expectation which had so dominated the bridge for the first thirty minutes had expired long ago. Ashly, Monica, and Voi were all in the galley preparing food sachets when a small artificial green star appeared in the display which the flight computer was feeding Sarha’s neural nanonics. Analysis and discrimination programs came on-line, filtering out the gas giant’s constant radio screech to concentrate on the signal. Two ancillary booms slid up out of Lady Macbeth ’s hull, unfolding wide broad-spectrum multi-element receiver meshes to complement the main communications dish.
“Somebody’s there, all right,” Sarha said. “Weak signal, but steady. Standard CAB transponder response code, but no ship registration number. They’re in an elliptical orbit, ninety-one thousand kilometres by one hundred and seventy thousand four-degree inclination. Right now they’re ninety-five thousand kilometres out from the upper atmosphere.” A strangely muffled gulp made her abandon the flight computer’s display to check the bridge.
Alkad Mzu was lying flat on her acceleration couch, with every muscle unnaturally stiff. Neural nanonics were busy censoring her body language with nerve overrides. But Sarha could see a film of liquid over her red-rimmed eyes which was growing progressively thicker. When she blinked, tiny droplets spun away across the compartment.
Joshua whistled. “Impressive, Doc. Your old crewmates have got balls, I’ll say that for them.”
“They’re alive,” Alkad cried. “Oh, Mother Mary, they’re really alive.”
“The Beezling made it here, Doc,” Joshua said, deliberately curt. “Let’s not jump to conclusions without facts. All we’ve got so far is a transponder beacon. What is supposed to happen next, does the captain come out of zero-tau?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Sarha, keep monitoring the Beezling . Beaulieu, Liol, let’s get back to flight status, please. Dahybi, charge up the nodes, I want to be ready to jump clear if things turn out bad.” He started plotting a vector which would take them over to the Beezling .
Lady Mac ’s triple fusion drive came on, quickly building up to three gees. She followed a shallow arc above the gas giant, sinking towards the penumbra.
“Signal change,” Sarha announced. “Much stronger now, but it’s still an omnidirectional broadcast, they’re not focusing on us. Message coming in, AV only.”
“Okay, Doc,” Joshua said. “You’re on. Be convincing.” They were still four hundred and fifty thousand kilometres away from the Beezling , which produced an awkward time delay. Pressed back into her couch, Alkad could only move her eyes to one side, glancing up at a holoscreen which angled out of the ceiling above her. A magenta haze slowly cleared to show her the Beezling ’s bridge compartment. It looked as though some kind of salvage team had ransacked the place, consoles had been broken open to show electronic stacks with their circuit cards missing, wall panels had been removed exposing chunks of machinery which were half dismantled. To add to the disorder, every surface was dusted with grubby frost. Over the years, chunks of packaging, latch pins, small tools, items of clothing, and other shipboard debris had all stuck where they’d drifted to rest, giving the impression of inorganic chrysalides frozen in the act of metamorphosis. Awkward, angular shadows overlapped right around the compartment, completing the image of gothic anarchy. There was only one source of illumination, a slender emergency light tube carried by someone in an SII spacesuit.
“This is Captain Kyle Prager here. The flight computer reports we’ve picked up our activation trigger code. Alkad, I want this to be you. Are you receiving this? I’ve got very little left in the way of working sensors. Hell, I’ve got little in the way of anything that works anymore.”
“I’m receiving you, Kyle,” Alkad said. “And it is me, it’s Alkad. I came back for you. I promised I would.”
“Mother Mary, is that really you, Alkad? I’m getting a poor image here, you look . . . different.”
“I’m old, Kyle. Very very old now.”
“Only thirty years, unless relativity is weirder than we thought.”
“Kyle, please, is Peter there? Did he make it?”
“He’s here, he’s fine.”
“Almighty Mary. You’re sure?”
“Yes. I just checked his zero-tau pod. Six of us made it.”
“Only six? What happened?”
“We lost Tane Ogilie a couple of years ago after he went outside to work on the drive tube. It had to be repaired before we could decelerate into this orbit; there was a lot of systems decay over twenty-eight years. Trouble is, the whole antimatter unit is badly radioactive now. Not even armour could save him from receiving a lethal dose.”
“Oh, Mother Mary, I’m sorry. What about the other two?”
“Like I said, we’ve had a lot of systems decay. Zero-tau can keep you in perfect stasis, but its own components wear out. They went sometime during the voyage, we only found out when we came out to start the deceleration. Both of them suicided.”
“I see,” she said shakily.
“What happened, Alkad? You’re not in any Garissan navy uniform I remember.”
“The Omutans did it, Kyle. Just like we thought they would. The bastards went ahead and did it.”
“How bad?”
“The worst. Six planet-busters.”
Joshua cancelled his link to the communications circuit, turning to the more mundane details of the flight. Some things he just didn’t want to hear: the reaction of a man being told his home planet has died.
Lady Mac ’s sensors were slowly gathering more information on the Beezling , allowing the flight computer to refine the warship’s location beyond Sarha’s initial rough estimate. The gas giant’s violent magnetic and electromagnetic emissions were making it difficult. Even this far above the outer atmosphere space was a thick ionic soup, congested with severe energy currents which degraded sensor efficiency.
Joshua altered their flight vector several times as the new figures came in. Lady Mac was well over the nightside now, the swirl of particles around her forward fuselage glowing a faint pink as they were buffeted through the planetary magnetosphere. It played havoc with the support circuitry.
Beaulieu and Liol would datavise flurries of instructions to contain the dropouts, returning the systems to operational status. Joshua monitored Liol’s performance, unable to find fault. He’d make a good crewman. Maybe I could offer him Melvyn’s slot, except his ego would never allow him to accept. There has to be a way we can settle this.
He turned his attention back to the communications link. After the shocks he’d received, Kyle Prager was reacting badly to Mzu’s news of her deal with the agencies and Ione.
“You know I cannot hand it over to anybody else,” Prager said. “You should never have brought them here, no matter what you agreed with them.”