telemetry from the ship had ended just after the failure mode had begun to arise, but it still probed closer into that instability regime than any carefully harnessed laboratory test or computer simulation.
And it had taught them well.
Enough information could be extracted from those numbers to guess how the failure mode must have evolved. The numbers, fed into the on-board simulations devised by the propulsion teams, hinted at a strategy for containing the imbalance. Tweak the magnetic bottle topology slightly and the injection stream could be neatly curtailed with no risk of normal-matter blowback or antimatter leakage. It was still, of course, hellishly risky.
Which did not stop them trying it.
My ship was falling ahead of the Brazilia and the Baghdad, and those latter two ships had flipped over to bring their engines forward for the deceleration phase. The bright spikes of those antimatter torches pin-pricked the minutely redshifted hemisphere of sky to the rear of the Santiago, like a pair of hot blue sibling suns. The thrust beams of the two deceleration ships were not to be underestimated as potential weapons, but neither Armesto or Omdurman would have the nerve to sweep their torches over my ship. Their argument was with me, not with the many viable colonists I still carried. Equally, I could consider igniting my own engine and dousing one of the two laggard ships with the Santiago’s exhaust — but the other vessel would almost certainly take that as a incitement to kill me, whether or not I still carried passengers. My simulations showed that I would not be able to realign my own flame before the other ship took me out in a single baptism of hellfire.
Not an option, I thought… and that meant I would have to live with those two enemies unless I found another way of destroying them. I was still considering the possibities when, in perfect synchrony, the two drive flames to the rear winked out.
I waited, breath held, for the twin blossoms of nuclear light which would signify that the antimatter drives had malfunctioned during shutdown.
But they never came.
Armesto and Omdurman had succeeded in quenching their flames, and now they were coasting with me, albeit with the lower velocities they had gained during the time they were decelerating.
Armesto contacted me. ‘I hope you saw what we just did, Sky. That changes everything, doesn’t it?’
‘Nowhere near as much as you’d like to think.’
‘Oh, don’t play games. You know what it means. Omdurman and I now have the ability to turn on our engines for however short a time we want. You don’t. That makes all the difference.’
I mulled this over. ‘It changes nothing. Our ships still have almost the same relative rest-mass as they did a day ago. You are still obliged to continue decelerating now if you want to make orbit around 61 Cygni-A. My ship’s lighter by the mass of the sleeper rings I ejected. That still gives me the edge over you. I’m staying in cruise mode until the last minute.’
‘You’re forgetting something,’ Armesto said. ‘We have our dead as well.’
‘It’s too late to make a difference. You’re cruising slower than me. And you said it yourself — you never sustained as many casualties as we did.’
‘We’ll find a way to make the difference, Haussmann. You’re not getting ahead of us.’
I looked at the long-range displays, which showed the vastly magnified dots of the other two ships. They were flipping over again, slowly but surely. I watched the dots elongate into thin lines, then contract again.
And then the dots were haloed by twin auras of exhaust radiation.
The two other ships were rejoining the chase.
‘It’s not over,’ Armesto said.
A day later, I watched the dead drift away from the other two ships.
It was twenty-four hours since Armesto and Omdurman had resumed the chase, demonstrating their ability to control their drive flames in a manner that was not yet within my grasp. The death of the Palestine had been a blessing in disguise for them… even if the better part of a thousand colonists had been killed in the process.
Now the other two ships were moving at the same relative speed as the Santiago, once again cruising towards Journey’s End. And they were trying very hard to beat me at my own game. There was a kind of inevitability to this, of course. My ship was still less massive than theirs… which meant they would have to shed mass if they wanted to follow the same cruise/deceleration curve as I did.
Which meant throwing their own dead into space.
There was nothing elegant about the way they did it. They must have worked overnight to smash through the same countermeasures which it had taken Norquinco nearly his entire life to circumvent… but they had the advantage over Norquinco in that they were not trying to complete this work in secret. Aboard the Brazilia and the Baghdad, every hand must have been turned towards that goal, working furiously. I almost envied them. So much easier when there was no need to work covertly… but so infinitely less elegant, too.
On the high-magnification image I watched sleeper rings peel off randomly from the two other ships, more like autumn leaves falling from a tree than anything orchestrated. The image resolution was too poor to be sure, but I suspected there were actually space-suited teams crawling around outside those ships with cutting tools and explosives. They were dislodging the sleeper rings by brute force.
‘You still can’t win,’ I told Armesto.
Armesto deigned to reply, though I’d half expected the other ships to maintain radio silence from here on in. ‘We can and we will.’
‘You said it yourself. You don’t have as many dead as us. No matter how many you throw away, it’ll never be sufficient.’
‘We’ll find a way to make it sufficient.’
Later, I guessed at what kind of strategy that might be. No matter what happened next, the ships were no more than two or three months from Journey’s End. With carefully rationed supplies, some colonists could be woken ahead of schedule. The revived momios could be kept alive on board the ship with the crew, albeit in conditions which would border on the dehumanising, but it might be sufficient. Every ten colonists that were woken meant a sleeper ring which could be ejected, and a concomitant reduction in ship’s mass, allowing a sharper deceleration profile.
It would be slow and dangerous — and I expected that they would lose perhaps one in ten that they tried to revive under such sub-optimal conditions — but it might be just enough to offset the mass difference.
Enough to give them, if not an edge over me, than at least parity.
‘I know what you intend,’ I told Armesto.
‘I doubt it very much,’ the old man answered.
But I soon saw that he was right. After the initial flurry of sleeper ring ejections, there followed a pattern: one ejection every ten hours or so. That was exactly what I would have expected, ten hours to thaw every colonist in a ring. There would only be a handful of people on each ship with the expertise to do that, so they would have to work sequentially.
‘It won’t save you,’ I said.
‘I think it will, Sky… I think it will.’
Which was when I knew what had to be done.
THIRTY-EIGHT
‘What do you mean, you killed her?’ Zebra asked, the five of us still studying the grotesque tableau of Dominika’s death.
‘That’s not what I said,’ I answered. ‘I said Tanner Mirabel killed her.’
‘And you are?’ Chanterelle said.
‘If I told you, I’m not completely sure you’d believe me. As a matter of fact I’m having a little trouble dealing with it myself.’
Pransky, who had been listening to our exchange, raised his voice and spoke with solemn surety. ‘Dominika’s still warm. And rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. If your whereabouts can be accounted for over the last few hours — which I suspect is strongly the case — you’re hardly a prime suspect.’
