“What did he say?” Justine asked; it came out uncharacteristically needy. She was trying to keep calm, though she saw her hands were trembling.
“The Sheldon Dynasty has every confidence in Investigator Myo, and will be happy for her to carry on her job with Senate Security unhindered. The Senator for Augusta will make that very clear to the Halgarths. We will oppose any removal proposal.”
Justine let out a long breath, almost a sob. Her eyes were watering. She knew it was hormones, and didn’t care that Campbell was seeing her like this. But the relief was incredible. She’d been too frightened to consider what would have happened if Nigel had been in league with the Starflyer.
“Jesus,” Campbell said as he stared at Justine. “What the hell is going on here?” He rose from his seat and took her hand. She sniffed, wiping away some tears.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit of a mess right now.”
“This isn’t the gorgeous Justine I remember,” he said softly. “Perhaps you should stay and get some rest, recover from your ordeal. I can’t think of a more relaxing place than Nitachie. There is a spare bed. There’s also my bed.”
She smiled weakly at his playfulness.
“We need to see Nigel Sheldon,” Paula said. “Could you please schedule a meeting with him for myself and the Senator?”
Campbell’s expression was close to indignation at the Investigator’s lack of tact. Justine’s grin broadened. “I’m afraid the Investigator’s right, we do need to see Nigel. It’s very urgent.”
“Very well,” he said with remarkable dignity. “I’ll call him again and—” He broke off, his eyes widening in surprise at the priority data sliding down his virtual vision.
Justine was seeing the same thing. An ultra-secure alert from the navy was flashing up details about hundreds of new alien wormholes opening in Commonwealth star systems.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mark!”
“Huh?” Mark snapped his eyes open. He hadn’t been sleeping on the job. No. Just quietly resting while the engineeringbot ran its new program cycle. He blinked some focus into his eyes, and concentrated on the junction between the force field generator and its secondary phase alignment module. The bot’s instrument arms had withdrawn after establishing a seal. “Yeah, looks good. Run the power test.”
“Okay, activating main circuitry now,” Thame said. He was the Charybdis technical officer, another Sheldon, a ninth-generation grandson of Nigel. It had always been difficult for Mark to work out the hierarchy the Sheldons employed. Basically, the lower the number in your connection the more important you were. Or thought you were. Though Mark had to admit, everyone involved in the lifeboat project was certainly competent. It was that little nuance of superiority they had whenever they said their name that irritated him.
A row of red LEDs set into the module’s casing came on, flashing in sequence before steadying to a permanent glow. Corresponding schematics slid across Mark’s virtual vision, complete with green icons. “Okay, we have functionality,” he said. A yawn made him pause for a moment, then he confirmed the engineeringbot’s new sequence, the fifth they’d tried, as valid to the assembly bay’s RI.
Despite every misgiving, transplanting the frigate assembly bay to the Searcher had worked. Locked up inside the mechanical labyrinth, working constantly, he hadn’t even been aware of the flight. Now they were holding station in the Wessex system’s cometary belt, waiting for Mark and his team to complete the Charybdis. None of them had slept for the last twenty-four hours, and most of them had worked their full shift before that.
The engineeringbot slid away from the generator. Mark let himself drift back behind it, watching out for girders and struts. He knew he was starting to make mistakes; his bruised face was only one reminder, result of a simple collision with a gantry junction that should never have happened. Wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t so exhausted. “What’s next?”
“Thermal coupling to the backup quantum fold initiator, portside.”
“On my way.” Mark didn’t have a clue what the initiator was, nor what it did. Frankly he didn’t care. He just concentrated on plugging the damn components into their power and support services. A schematic appeared in his virtual vision, showing him the initiator’s location. He started to crawl over the hull. Two-thirds of the active-stealth covering was now in place around the frigate. Even in its powered-down state it was eerily black, a pool of darkness rather than a surface that was simply nonreflective. The gaps waiting to be filled allowed access to systems that weren’t yet operational and needed human supervision. Bots and manipulator arms were clustered over them, along with technicians from Mark’s team. The Charybdis crew—Otis, Thame, and Luke—had taken up permanent residence in the frigate’s cabin to run diagnostics from there.
As he hauled himself along he passed the weapons scientists. He couldn’t help glancing at them, eleven ordinary-looking people in padded freefall overalls and helmets, floating around the missile. There had been quiet rumors about what the frigates would be armed with back at the assembly platform and down on Gaczyna. Superweapons capable of protecting the fleet from any threat. Mark hadn’t paid a lot of attention, even with Liz hungry for gossip each evening. Since the Searcher left, his team had talked of little else. Every time one of them had drifted by him on their way to another job they’d shared a few words; to his surprise, Mark had even joined in with the speculation, passing on what he’d heard in turn.
The assembly bay didn’t have a mechanism for loading missiles into the frigate. That was supposed to happen in another facility. So the scientists were having to improvise. The missile was strapped to a medium-mass manipulator arm, which was inching it slowly down into the magazine chamber. It looked ordinary enough, a smooth, steel-silver cylinder five meters long, with a thick central bulge. The extremely nervous respect that the scientists treated it with made the hairs along his spine creep. He no longer believed the rumors of mere planetsmashers and warped-quark bullets; whatever they’d built was insanely lethal. You only had to see their faces to know that.
That warhead was going to make genocide possible. Back on Elan when they were running from the aliens he would have happily pressed the button. Now he wasn’t so sure. It was the kind of thing that people like him never, ever, got involved with.
He arrived at the open section of hull his schematic indicated, from which an access interstice led deep inside the guts of the frigate. The initiator sat halfway along the narrow gap, a golden sphere with peculiar green triangles jutting up from it. There was a nest of unconnected thermal conductor filaments wrapped around it, with their manufacturer tags still attached. “Okay,” he told Thame. “I’m here. What have the bots tried so far?”
***
Oscar’s starship, the Dublin, was orbiting a thousand kilometers above the Finnish world Hanko when the alert came through. It had been a miserable duty so far, five people spending ten days crammed into a single circular cabin. In theory the cabin wasn’t too bad; it was a good eight meters wide, with three meters between the flat bulkheads. Then you took out the partitioned-off sleeping section, and the laughably titled bathroom facility, and the remaining available volume was considerably reduced. In zero gee such a space was a little less cramped, but that was a relative thing. The five flight couches—bulky padded shelves that had plyplastic secured i-pads, built-in human waste management tubes, and fluid food dispensers—were lined up along the rear bulkhead. Once you’d strapped yourself in, while trying not to jam knees and elbows into the person next to you, the couch slid back neatly into the operations segment. Oscar likened it to lying on the tongue of a dinosaur as it pulled you into its mouth.