'By your hasty demeanour I suspect they have arrived?'
'You suspect right.' Jebel stepped aside and drawing his thin-gun waved Conlan to the door. The killer shrugged, stood and walked over, eyeing the weapon as he passed. Jebel supposed he had considered going for it and rejected the idea. 'The airlock is down there on the left.'
'Do I get a suit like yours?' Conlan asked as they entered the corridor.
'No need. This lock leads directly into the Boh complex.'
Reaching the lock, Jebel gestured for Conlan to open it. The exterior door already stood open, having been shunted aside for the embarkation tunnel to connect. They pulled themselves through the tunnel in zero gee, then finally clumped down on the grav-plates in a short tunnel leading to a junction with one of the complex's corridors.
'Go right.'
The corridor led past accommodation units for the runcible staff, and finally terminated in a secondary Control Centre, previously in operation while the runcible was being built, but closed down when the AI took control. Moria had, however, since brought this place back online.
'Choose a console.'
Conlan moved ahead, shrugged, then plumped himself down beside the nearest console. Jebel removed an optic cable from one of his pockets and tossed it to the man.
'Remember—your life depends on what you do next.'
'Oh I do understand that.'
While Conlan opened up his aug and plugged in, Jebel studied his surroundings. A row of screens to his right gave him a clear view across the runcible, with Boh, the gas giant, looming behind. Within the room a horseshoe of consoles faced a bank of screens, many of which were running tech data way above Jebel's knowledge; some however, showed different views outside. On one he could see a spacesuited figure busily at work undoing an access hatch, elasticised lines holding the figure in place. By the size and shape he guessed that to be Lindy. Another screen showed a partial view of their docked ship and still others showed star-speckled blackness. He returned his attention to Conlan.
The man now sat bolt upright, his eyes closed. Speaking out loud he delivered the message as instructed, though if anything lay hidden in his words, Jebel guessed he wouldn't know until too late.
'Yes, I have control of the Trajeen cargo runcible, and through it, control of the Boh cargo runcible… There are a few technicians still aboard here at Trajeen, but—No, they can't—not with the AI knocked out… No, none on the Boh runcible. You are clear to take it… Yes, I look forwards to that.'
The conversation was brief, and of course much more than Conlan's life depended on it. The lives of nearly a billion souls hung in the balance. Conlan leant back and opened his eyes. 'Y'know, even from a translation you can pick up a lot.
'Oh yes.'
Conlan turned to face him. 'Unless your mines work, everyone is going to die here. I reckon I stand the better chance in a cold coffin in vacuum.'
Maybe the man believed that. Probably they were weasel words to try and get Jebel to drop his guard a little.
'So what else do I have to tell him?'
'In a little while you'll tell Immanence that those few technicians remaining aboard the Trajeen cargo runcible have managed to seize back some control, specifically of the positional drives of the Boh runcible.' Jebel turned to look at him. 'Those technicians will fire up those drives to open the Boh gate.'
'I don't understand.'
'You don't have to,' Jebel told him.
8
8
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand—
Great, now she was getting a headache, which added to the feeling, despite her having applied for and received planetary processing space, of her head being filled to bursting point. Despite the early arrival of the Prador vessel, it had been necessary to slow the runcible's orbital speed to bring it to the right place at the right time. All her previous calculations she'd completely erased, since they no longer applied, even very roughly. The calculations she presently ran were a living thing. She knew the result, the solution, but necessarily needed to keep altering the input values in keeping with data received from theOccam Razorand the test sensors out at Boh. Sometimes, deep in all this, she lost sight of her ultimate aims, but looking out through her owneyesat the changing horizon, storms and cloud banks passing underneath her, snapped her back to reality. If she failed, that view might well change, horribly.
Returning her attention to the Trajeen runcible she again checked her preparations, hesitated for only a moment, then initiated the Skaidon warp. Her view altered immediately as the shimmering meniscus flickered into being beside her. Though the present drain on the fusion reactors lay within acceptable limits, she knew that later the need would rise beyond those limits, so onlined extra power from the solar collector satellites. The power they supplied, by maser, to the gateposts, slotted into her calculations and gave her greater manoeuvring space. She now gave the instruction for the gateposts to begin parting, though she did not yet intend to throw them out to their full extent, since their tendency to drift while the entire runcible was being moved could wreck everything. She now considered some other calculations.
The C energy, though not a true representation of what would instantiate beyond the meniscus because of the exponential progression that took place actually at the meniscus, was very substantial. Moria briefly considered taking the Boh runcible buffers completely offline, ran some calculations, and felt a sudden thrill of horror at the results this rendered. The Boh gate itself would last about.005 of a second, and it seemed possible the entire energy burst could actually ignite the gas giant itself—turn it into a small, swiftly burning sun. Not a great idea. She could not do that; however, she did not have to work the gate as intended for the transmission of cargo ships. The output velocity did not have to be the same as the input, for she could borrow some of the C energy and add it to the latter.
The energy calculation ran roughly at a
While some second-children brought him lunch, Immanence ruefully observed the Polity dreadnought, and damned himself for not turning back to destroy it when it was more badly damaged than this. He had mistakenly believed it to be either a lifeless hulk or crippled beyond the ability to go anywhere, and transmitted its location to other, smaller, Prador vessels, thinking it now a problem beneath his notice. However, its presence here did not particularly worry him, because even scanning from a distance it appeared the damage was by no means completely repaired. It might be able to travel, but if it actually tried to attack he knew he could destroy it.
He continued studying the vessel while he mulled over the recent message from the human Separatist. As per plan they had seized control of the Trajeen cargo runcible, and because of that the Boh runcible was now his for the taking. He decided that when he finally travelled inwards to Trajeen itself, he would send Gnores or Scrabbler to collect those Separatists, to bring them aboard for dinner… But that pleasant prospect lay in the future, meanwhile he must decide what to do about this damned Polity ship. Should he turn back and destroy it before seizing the Boh
