“Captain!” Shane pointed. The hatch in the decking was sliding shut. Orange strobes started to flash with near-blinding pulses in time to a piercing whistle.
“Mon dieu, non!”
SD sensors relayed a perfectly clear image of the Villeneuve’s Revenge to the CNIS duty officer. The ship was well into its deceleration phase when the emergency started. It was less than two hundred kilometres away from Trafalgar’s counter-rotating spaceport, which was grave cause for concern. The crew’s apparent dismay could just be one massive diversion. If a salvo of combat wasps were fired at the asteroid from this distance it would be almost impossible to intercept all of them.
Had it just been Duchamp and his crew on board, she would have vaporised the starship there and then. But Pryor’s actions and enigmatic statement just before his cabin sensor had gone off line stayed her hand. She was sure he was doing this; and the one routine which the starship had left open to Trafalgar’s scrutiny was fire control to the combat wasps. Pryor must be trying to reassure SD Command. None of the lethal drones had been armed.
“Keep tracking it with a full weapons lock,” she datavised to her fellow officers in the SD Command centre. “Tell the voidhawk escort to stand by.”
Long jets of snowy vapour were squirting out from the Villeneuve’s Revenge as the emergency vent emptied every tank on board. Hydrogen, helium, oxygen, coolant fluid, water, reaction mass; they all emerged under high pressure to shake the ship about as if a dozen thrusters were firing in conflicting directions. None of them were powerful enough to affect its orbital trajectory. With its deceleration burn interrupted, it continued to fly towards Trafalgar at nearly two kilometres per second.
“They’re not going to have any fuel even if they do regain control of the propulsion systems,” the SD guidance officer said. “The ship will impact in another two minutes.”
“If it gets within ten kilometres of Trafalgar, destroy it,” the CNIS duty officer ordered.
The multiple vent continued unabated for another fifteen seconds, giving the ship a highly erratic tumble. Explosive bolts detonated across the fuselage, punching out dry plumes of grey dust as they severed the outer stress structure. Huge segments of the hull peeled free like dusky silver petals opening wide, exposing the tight-packed metallic viscera. Sharp bursts of blue light flashed beneath the surface, visible only through the slimmest of fissures; more explosive bolts, detaching equipment from the internal stress grid. The starship began to break apart, its tanks, drive tubes, tokamak toroids, energy patterning nodes, heat exchangers, and a swarm of subsidiary mechanisms forming a slowly expanding clump.
Three high-thrust solid rocket motors were clustered around the base of the life support capsule which contained the bridge; they ignited with only the briefest warning, thrusting the sphere clear of the cloud of technological detritus. Duchamp and the others were flung back into their acceleration couches, bodies straining against the fifteen-gee acceleration.
“My ship!” André screamed against the punishing force. The Villeneuve’s Revenge , the one last minuscule glint of hope for a post-crisis existence he had left, was unravelling around him, its million-fuseodollar components spinning off into the depths of the galaxy, transforming themselves into unsalvageable junk. Loving the ship more deeply than he did any woman, Duchamp forgave the eternal demands which it made for his money, its temperamental functions, its thirst for fuel and consumables; for in return it gave him a life above the ordinary. But it wasn’t quite fully paid for, and years ago he’d forsaken a comprehensive insurance policy with those legalized thieving anglo insurance companies in favour of trusting his own skill and financial acumen. His scream ended in a wretched juddering sob. This universe had just become worse than anything which the beyond promised.
Kingsley Pryor didn’t ignite the rockets on his own life support capsule. There was nowhere for him to escape to. The debris of the Villeneuve’s Revenge was churning heatedly now, agitated by the bridge’s life support capsule erupting from its centre. But it was still all sweeping towards Trafalgar, and carrying Kingsley along with it. He didn’t know exactly where he was; he couldn’t be bothered to access the rudimentary sensors surmounting the capsule. All he knew was that he’d done his best by the crew, and he wasn’t in Trafalgar where Capone wanted him to be. Nothing else mattered any more. The decision had been taken.
Floating alone in a cabin illuminated only by tiny yellow emergency lights, Kingsley datavised the off code to an implant in his abdomen. The little containment field generator represented the peak of Confederation technology; even so it pushed way beyond the kind of safety specifications normally used for handling antimatter. The ultra-specialist military lab in New California which manufactured it had neglected to include the standard failsafe capacity which even the most cheapskate black syndicates employed. Capone had simply decreed that he wanted a container defined by size alone. That’s what he got.
When the confinement field shut down, the globe of frozen anti-hydrogen touched the side of the container. Protons, electrons, anti-protons, and anti-electrons annihilated each other in a reaction that very, very briefly recreated the energy density conditions which used to exist inside the Big Bang. This time, it didn’t result in creation.
SD platform lasers were already picking off the gyrating chunks of equipment around the fringe of the debris cloud that had once been the Villeneuve’s Revenge . The bulk of the swarm was less than twenty-five kilometres from Trafalgar, on a course that would collide with one of the spherical counter-rotating spaceports. Ionized vapour from the disintegrating components fluoresced a pale blue from the energy beams stabbing through them, forming a seething bow-wave around the remaining pieces. It was as if a particularly insubstantial comet was shooting across space.
Kingsley Pryor’s life support capsule was twenty-three kilometres and eight seconds away from the spaceport when it happened. Another three seconds and the SD lasers would have targeted it, not that it would have made much difference. Capone had intended to do to Trafalgar what Quinn Dexter had done to Jesup; with the antimatter detonating in one of the biosphere caverns the asteroid would have been blown apart. Even if Kingsley didn’t cheat his way past the inevitable security checks and had to kamikaze in the spaceport, the damage would have been considerable, destroying the counter-rotating sphere, any ships docked, and possibly dislodging the asteroid from its orbit.
By switching off the confinement chamber outside Trafalgar, Kingsley would be reducing the damage considerably. Enough to salvage his conscience and allow him to return to New California claiming a successful mission. However, in physical terms, he wasn’t doing the Confederation Navy much of a favour. Unlike a fusion bomb, the antimatter explosion produced no relativistic plasma sphere, no particle blast wave; but the energy point which sprang into life had the strength to illuminate the planet’s nightside a hundred thousand kilometres below. The visible and infrared spectrum it emitted contained only a small percentage of the overall energy output. Its real power was concentrated in the gamma and X-ray spectrums.
The surrounding shoal of metal trash which had been the Villeneuve’s Revenge twinkled for a picosecond before evaporating into its sub-atomic constituents. Trafalgar proved somewhat more resilient. Its mottled grey and black rock gleamed brighter than the sun as the energy tsunami hammered against it. As the white light faded, the surface facing the blast continued to glow a deep crimson. Centrifugal force stirred the sluggish molten rock, sending it flowing out along the humps and crater ridges where it swelled into bulbous fast-growing stalactites. Town-sized heat exchangers and their ancillary equipment anchored to the rock crumpled, their composite components shattering like antique glass while the metal structures turned to liquid and dribbled away, scattering scarlet droplets across the stars.