“Good,” Joshua said. “Liol, what about spacecraft activity?”

“Infrared’s showing twenty-three ships using their drives above the planet. The majority are travelling between low orbit and the SD platforms. Four seem to be heading up for high polar orbits. I’d say they’re complementing the platforms. But none of them are moving very fast, half a gee maximum. They are big ships, though.”

“That’s how the Tyrathca like them,” Ashly said. “Plenty of room to move round in the life support sections. It’s like being inside a bloody cathedral.”

“Offensive potential?”

“If they’re armed with human-made combat wasps, considerable,” Liol said. “With that drive signature I’m assuming they’re Tyrathca inter-planetary ships; they have a dozen asteroid settlements to provide the planetary industries with several kinds of bulk microgee compounds. Which means their payload is considerably larger than ours. They’re like highly manoeuvrable weapons platforms.”

“Wonderful.” Joshua datavised the new bitek processor array they’d installed during the last refit. “Oenone , what’s your situation?”

“I remain on schedule, Joshua. We should be rendezvousing with Tanjuntic-RI in another forty-two minutes. The exploration team is suiting up now.”

Unlike the Lady Macbeth, Oenone had been able to accelerate and manoeuvre after emerging above the planet. By reducing its distortion field to a minimum, the voidhawk could accelerate at half a gee towards the arkship. Given the distance involved, the network satellites were unable to pick up such a small ripple in space-time. The disadvantage was, with such a reduced field the voidhawk couldn’t perceive a fraction of the local environment it usually did. If for some unaccountable reason, the Tyrathca had surrounded Tanjuntic-RI with proximity mines, they wouldn’t know until they were very close indeed.

Syrinx always hated being dependent on just the sensor blisters and passive electronic arrays. The voidhawks’ ability to pervade a huge spherical volume of space around the hull was intrinsic to their flight.

We managed like this in our Navy days,Oenone said, unperturbed.

Syrinx grinned in the half-light of the bridge. The crew toroid’s internal power consumption was minimal as well. You mean back when we were young and foolish?

This is not a foolish venture,the voidhawk chided. Wing-Tsit Chong considers it of the utmost importance.

Me too. But this part just brings back memories.of Thetis, though she didn’t mention him. Lately she’d started to wonder if her brother had managed to elude the beyond as that ever-damned Laton had promised. Mild feelings of guilt had kept her away from his strange stunted existence within the Romulus multiplicity before they left. Really, what was the point in preserving him when his soul was free?

What is our best landing point, do you think?Oenone asked.

As always, the voidhawk knew when she needed distracting. I’m not sure. Show me what we can see.she accessed the all-too scant files on Tanjuntic-RI stored in the on-board processors, and attempted to match them up with the image the voidhawk was seeing.

Tanjuntic-RI had been completely abandoned less than fifty years after it arrived in the Hesperi-LN star system. An unduly harsh treatment by human standards, but it had fulfilled every duty its long-dead builders had required of it, and the Tyrathca were not a sentimental species. Fifteen thousand years old, it had travelled one thousand six hundred light-years to ensure the Tyrathca race didn’t die along with their exploding home star. Five separate, successful colonies had been established along its route. Each time the arkship had stopped inside a star system to create a new colony, the Tyrathca had virtually rebuilt it, refuelled it, then carried on with their crusade of racial survival. Even so, there are limits to the most sturdy machinery. After Hesperi-LN was founded, Tanjuntic-RI was left to circle ceaselessly above the planet.

Borrowing Oenone ’s sensor blisters, Syrinx could see the details becoming clear as they glided in for a rendezvous. Tanjuntic-RI was a dark cylindrical rock six kilometres long, two and a half in diameter. Its surface was a gentle mottle of flattened craters, resembling a wind-sculpted ice field. Remnants of vast machines sketched out a random topology of tarnished metal lines along the floors of the meandering valleys. These appurtenances had succumbed to millennia of particle impacts and vacuum ablation. What had once been a surface bristling with elaborate towers and radiator panels the size of lakes was left with little more than their stubby mounting fixtures as a reminder of past grandeur. The forward end was the most heavily speckled, due mainly to the extensive remnants of a coppery hexagonal grid.

With Tanjuntic-RI capable of travelling at over fifteen per cent lightspeed, a collision with a single pebble at that speed could result in catastrophic damage. So in flight the arkship was protected by a plasma buffer, a cloud of electrically charged gas that broke up and absorbed any mass smaller than a boulder. It rode ahead of the arkship, a luminous mushroom-shape held in place by a magnetic field generated by the superconductor grid.

Right in the centre of the grid, aligned along the rotation axis, was the arkship’s spaceport. Although the concept was the same as the counter-rotating spaceports on Edenist habitats, the Tyrathca had fashioned an elaborate conical structure made up from tiers of disks. Its peak disappeared below the surface of the rock, as if it were a kind of giant arrow tip which had impaled itself in some forgotten era. The larger disks at the top end had broken off centuries ago, probably when the magnetic bearing seized up. Those that remained were vacuum ablating, their edges fraying like worn cloth, while their flat surfaces slowly dissolved, reducing their overall thickness. With the last maintenance crew departing thirteen centuries previously, the vast sheets of metal were down to a few centimetres thickness, and perforated by thousands of micrometeorite holes.

Oenone was also relaying the image of the arkship to the little exploration team suiting up in the crew toroid’s airlock prep chamber. Given the clandestine nature of their mission, Monica Foulkes and Samuel were leading the team. There were only two technical staff coming with them; Renato Vella, who was Kempster Getchell’s chief assistant, and Oski Katsura, head of the Laymil project’s electronics division. Their job would be to reactivate Tanjuntic-RI’s electronic library and extract whatever files concerning the Sleeping God that they could locate. Tactical support was supplied by four serjeants, loaded with Ione’s personality.

Kempster Getchell and Parker Higgens were also in the prep chamber; helping with the suits when they were asked, but mainly rehearsing mission goals with Renato and Oski. The formless black silicon of the SII suits had enveloped each of the team, now they were busy clipping their rigid exoskeleton suits on top. They were using standard issue Confederation Navy Marine armour, generator reinforced monobonded carbon with power augmentation. As sleek and featureless as the SII suits, they were designed for both asteroid and ship assault roles, capable of supporting and keeping the wearer active in high gee environments, and with built in manoeuvring packs.

The team started to run integration diagnostics. Arm joints bent and twisted, sensor inputs flicked through the spectrum. Monica, Samuel, and the serjeants ran their weapons interface programs, and stowed the various items of lethal hardware on their belts and racks once the suit processor confirmed the connection. Oski and Renato started picking up their blocks and equipment kits; there were too many to hang on their belts, so they were both using small chestpacks.