“I quite agree,” Western Europe said.

“Only because you can’t risk another vote.”

“There’s no need to get personal. We remain on top of the situation.”

“Really? Where’s Dexter, then?”

“When the time comes, I will eliminate him.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

The K5 star had a catalogue number, but that was all. Only three planets were in orbit around it, two of them smaller than Mars, and a gas giant fifty-thousand kilometres in diameter. Undistinguished in astronomical terms, it lay forty-one light-years outside the loose boundary of space claimed by the Confederation. There had been a single scoutship visit in 2530, which quickly established its worthlessness. As far as official records were concerned, that was the first and last time humans had visited the barren system. Certainly the Navy never bothered with it; their patrols were stretched thinly enough as it was searching for illegal activity within the Confederation and through the stars fringing the boundary. Although the surrounding wreath of stars was an obvious location for illegal operations (and several highly dubious independent colony ventures), forty-one light-years was just too far away to justify the expense of regular inspection flights.

Such a safeguard made it ideal for the black cartel. Their antimatter station orbited five million kilometres from the star’s surface, a closeness which stretched human materials science to its limit. The radiation, heat, particle, and magnetic forces it encountered were appalling. An approaching ship would see it as a simple black disk sailing across the incandescent solar glare. Sixty kilometres in diameter, it cast a significant cone-shaped umbra behind it; a zone insulated from the star’s heat, the one place where hell’s proverbial snowflake might just have survived. The surface facing the star was a radial concertina array of solid state cells absorbing the incredible blast of heat and converting it directly into electricity. At the back they glowed a gentle pink, utilizing their own shade to radiate the immense thermal load away into space. In total, the array was capable of generating over one and a half terawatts of electricity.

The antimatter production system itself was housed in a cluster of boxy silver-white industrial modules right in the centre of the array. The mundane method of churning out antimatter was essentially unchanged since the late Twentieth Century; although the levels of scale and efficiency had risen considerably since the first few experimental antiprotons had been manufactured in high-energy physics laboratories. Production requires individual protons to be accelerated until their energy becomes greater than a giga-electron-volt, at which point each one has more energy in its motion than its mass. Once that state has been achieved, they are collided with heavy nuclei, resulting in a spray of elementary particles that includes antiprotons, antielectrons, and antineutrons. These are then separated, collected, cooled, and merged into antihydrogen. But it is that initial proton acceleration stage which absorbs the phenomenal amount of electricity produced by the solar array in its entirety.

The whole operation was overseen by a crew of twenty-five technicians, stationed in a large, heavily-shielded rotating carbotanium wheel that floated deep inside the array’s umbra. They had now been joined by eight members of the Organization to keep them in line. Taking over the station had been absurdly easy.

Because the black cartel took the elementary precaution of installing its own modified neural nanonics in everyone who knew of the station’s location, there could only ever be two kinds of visitor: the Confederation Navy on a search and destroy mission, or a legitimate buyer. The arrival of Capone’s lieutenants came as a severe shock to the crew. The few hand weapons available were utterly useless against the possessed; their only other option was to kamikaze. Once the Organization’s terms and conditions had been laid on the line, that was postponed indefinitely. The same kind of uneasy stand-off balance between need and fear that had claimed New California settled across the station.

After supplying the first Organization convoy with every gram of antimatter held in storage, the station had been operating a full production schedule ever since, attempting to cope with Capone’s desperate demands for more. Starships came from New California every five or six days for new supplies.

Admiral Saldana’s squadron made no attempt at stealth or subtlety when it jumped into the system, emerging twenty-five million kilometres from the star. Navy starships always had a tremendous advantage against the stations they hunted. Deep inside the star’s gravity field, there could be no quick escape for the station’s crew. Defensive weapons were almost useless. Not even antimatter propulsion and warheads could produce their usual overwhelming advantage; in such proximity to the star, combat wasp sensors were almost blind.

Standard procedure for the Navy starships was to launch a volley of kinetic projectiles in a retrograde orbit. It was a tactic that would quickly exhaust the station’s stock of drones, leaving them with beam weapons alone. Against a swarm of ten thousand harpoons, their chances of vaporizing every one before it hit was effectively nil. That was assuming the station sensors were even capable of locating the incoming missiles to begin with. In most cases the hellish solar environment completely masked their approach. And the Navy vessels would never issue a warning, the station might never know of their presence until the first missile struck.

All the attackers needed was a single strike against the production system. Any large explosion would inevitably set off a chain reaction within the antimatter storage chambers. The resulting blast could at times be five or six times the size of a planet-buster, depending on how much of the substance was in store.

This time it was going to have to be a little different. Meredith Saldana waited impatiently on the Arikara ’s bridge while the voidhawks deployed around the star in small swallow manoeuvres. Each of them launched a pack of small sensor satellites to scan the huge magnetosphere in which they were all immersed.

Locating the station was easy enough, though the sheer volume of space they were searching through made it a lengthy task. The Arikara ’s tactical situation computer started to receive datavises from the satellites, blending them into a harmonized picture of the whole near-solar environment. When the information was complete, it showed the star as a dark sphere surrounded with graded shells of pale gold translucence. The innermost seethed like a restless sea as the magnetic forces fluxed and coiled, above that they smoothed out considerably.

A tiny knot of twisted copper light was sliding along a circular, five million kilometre orbit. The squadron’s comparative position was fed in, and Meredith began issuing orders. Because of their vulnerability to the star’s heat and radiation, the voidhawks maintained their orbits, enabling them to keep watch for any emerging starships. The Adamist starships flew inward. Eight frigates were vectored into high inclination orbits, a location from which they could launch a kinetic assault on the station. The remaining starships, including Lady Macbeth , aligned themselves on an interception course and accelerated along it at three gees.

When they were three million kilometres away, the Arikara pointed her main communication dish on the station, and boosted the signal to full strength.

“This communiquй is directed to the station commander,” Meredith datavised. “This is the Confederation Navy ship Arikara. Your illegal operation is now terminated. Ordinarily, you would be executed for your actions in producing antimatter, but I have been authorized to offer you transport to a Confederation penal colony planet if you cooperate with us. This offer is also applicable to any possessed who are resident at the station. I will require your answer within one hour. Failure to respond will be taken as a refusal to cooperate, and you will be destroyed.” He datavised the flight computer to repeat the message, and the squadron waited.