It took ten minutes for a static-heavy signal to emerge from the station. “This is Renko, I’m the guy Al left in charge around here. And I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here before we smear your pansy asses across the sun. You got that clear, pal?”
Meredith glanced across the bridge’s acceleration couches to where Lieutenant Grese was lying. The intelligence officer managed to grin, despite the gee force. “That’s a break,” he said. “We got Capone’s source, no matter what the outcome.”
“I believe the Navy is due a break,” Meredith said. “Especially our section of it.”
“He’ll have to stop those bloody infiltration flights now. His fleet will need all the antimatter they’ve got left to defend New California.”
“Indeed.” Meredith was almost cheerful when he ordered the computer to datavise a reply to the station. “Consult your crew, Renko. You’re in the losing position here. All we have to do is launch a single missile once an hour. You have to fire five each time just to make sure it doesn’t get through. And we’re in no hurry, we can keep shooting at you for a couple of weeks if we have to. There’s just no way you can win. Now are you going to accept my offer, or do you want to go back to the beyond?”
“Nice try, but you don’t mean it. Not for us, leastways. I know you guys, you’ll slam us into zero-tau the second we put our hands up.”
“For what it’s worth, I am Rear Admiral Meredith Saldana, and you have my word that you will be given passage to an uninhabited world capable of supporting human life. Consider your alternatives. If we attack the station, you go back to the beyond, if I’m lying about transporting you to a planet you go back. But there is the very strong possibility that I’m not lying. Can you really reject that hope?”
Along with the rest of the squadron, Joshua had to wait another twenty minutes for the answer. Eventually, Renko agreed to surrender. “Looks like we’re on,” Joshua said. They were accelerating hard again, preventing him from smiling. But there was no hiding the rise of excitement in his labouring voice.
“Christ, the other side of the nebula,” Liol marvelled. “What’s the furthest anyone’s ever been before?”
“A voidhawk scout group travelled six hundred and eighty light years from Earth in 2570,” Samuel replied. “Their course took them directly galactic north, not in this direction.”
“I missed that,” Ashly complained. “Was there anything interesting out there?”
Samuel closed his eyes, questioning the voidhawks racing along their orbits millions of kilometres away. “Nothing unusual, or dramatic. Stars with possible terracompatible planets, stars without. No sentient xenoc species.”
“The Meridian fleet went further,” Beaulieu said.
“Only according to legend,” Dahybi countered. “Nobody knows where they vanished to. In any case, that was centuries ago.”
“Logically then, they must have gone a long way if no one’s ever found them.”
“Found the wreckage, more like.”
“Such pessimism is bad for you.”
“Really? Hey, Monica.” Dahybi lifted one hand to make an appeal before the acceleration made him lower it fast again. “Do your lot know where they went? It could be important if they’re waiting out there for us.”
Monica stared stubbornly at the compartment’s ceiling, a headache building behind her compressed eyeballs that no program could rid her of. She really hated high gees. “No,” she datavised (her throat was suffering along with the rest of her), irritated she couldn’t put any emphasis into her digitalized speech. Not that snapping at the crew would endear her to them, but their relentless discussions of utter trivia were starting to chafe. And she’d possibly got a month or more to go. “The ESA was in its infancy back when the Meridian fleet was launched. Even today I doubt we’d bother planting assets in with a bunch of paradise seeking fools.”
“I don’t want to know what’s there,” Joshua said. “The whole point of this mission is discovery. We’re real explorers going out on a limb, first for at least a century.”
“Amen to that,” Ashly said.
“Where we are now is new for most people,” Liol said. “Just look at that station.”
“Standard industrial modules,” Dahybi said. “Hardly exotic or inspiring.” Liol sighed sadly.
“Okay, we’re getting close to injection point,” Joshua announced. “Systems review, please. How’s our fuselage holding out?” The flight computer was datavising images from the localized sensors into his neural nanonics. Lady Mac ’s thermo dump panels were fully extended, constantly rotating to present their narrow edges towards the raging star. Their flat surfaces were glowing radiant pink as they expelled the ship’s accumulated heat. He’d programmed a permanent spin into their vector, a fifteen minute cycle to ensure the immense thermal input was distributed evenly across the fuselage. Fine manoeuvring was slow, given the additional reaction mass they were carrying, but the balance compensation programs were handling it providing he kept tweaking them.
“No hot spots yet,” Sarha reported. “That extra layer of nulltherm foam is doing its job quite well. But it is picking up a lot of particle radiation, far more than we’re used to. We’ll have to watch that.”
“Should lose it when we get behind the shield,” Liol said. “Won’t be long now.”
“See?” Beaulieu told Dahybi. “You are surrounded by optimists.”
The squadron’s interception ships were sliding into an orbital slot three thousand kilometres behind the antimatter station. If Renko did decide to switch off the storage confinement chambers, the radiation impact from the blast would tax the shielding on the starships to an uncomfortable degree. But they should be safe. So far, he appeared to be cooperating.
Commander Kroeber was handling the negotiation on how the hand over was to be accomplished. The civil starship already docked at the station was to depart with everyone on board. It would rendezvous with one of the squadron’s marine cruisers. The possessed would disembark and proceed directly to the brig under heavily armed guard where they would stay for the duration of the flight. Any indication of them using their energistic power, for whatever reason, would result in a forty-thousand-volt current being run through the brig. The cruiser, accompanied by two frigates, would fly directly to an uninhabited terracompatible world (currently in the middle of an ice age) where the possessed would be shot down to the tropical-zone surface in one-way descent capsules, with a supply of survival equipment. There would be no further contact with that planet by the Confederation, apart from delivering any further possessed with whom similar exceptional deals had been made.
Kroeber’s other offer, that they help the CNIS with its research into energistic power until such time as a solution was found for possession, was summarily rejected.
Once the possessed were safely incarcerated, another marine cruiser would rendezvous with the starship and take off the station’s regular crew ready to transport them to a penal planet. Complete control of the station systems was to be handed over to the Navy technical crew, who would remote test their new domain. If total access was confirmed, a third marine cruiser would dock with the station itself, and perform a boarding and securement manoeuvre.
After some haggling, mainly over the contents of the survival equipment they could take with them down to the icy planet, Renko agreed to the arrangement. Lady Macbeth ’s crew watched the proceedings through the sensors. The hand-over went remarkably smoothly, taking just less than a day. A datavise from the first marine cruiser showed the possessed, dressed defiantly in double-breasted suits, laughing brashly as they were led into the brig. The station crew looked frankly relieved that they’d escaped with exile. They datavised over their access codes without a qualm.