The Naked God - Flight

more. Starships came from New California every five or six days for new supplies.

Admiral Saldana’s squadron made no attempt at stealth or subtlety when it jumped into the system, emerging twenty-five million kilometres from the star. Navy starships always had a tremendous advantage against the stations they hunted. Deep inside the star’s gravity field, there could be no quick escape for the station’s crew. Defensive weapons were almost useless. Not even antimatter propulsion and warheads could produce their usual overwhelming advantage; in such proximity to the star, combat wasp sensors were almost blind.

Standard procedure for the Navy starships was to launch a volley of kinetic projectiles in a retrograde orbit. It was a tactic that would quickly exhaust the station’s stock of drones, leaving them with beam weapons alone. Against a swarm of ten thousand harpoons, their chances of vaporizing every one before it hit was effectively nil. That was assuming the station sensors were even capable of locating the incoming missiles to begin with. In most cases the hellish solar environment completely masked their approach. And the Navy vessels would never issue a warning, the station might never know of their presence until the first missile struck.

All the attackers needed was a single strike against the production system. Any large explosion would inevitably set off a chain reaction within the antimatter storage chambers. The resulting blast could at times be five or six times the size of a planet-buster, depending on how much of the substance was in store.

This time it was going to have to be a little different. Meredith Saldana waited impatiently on the Arikara ’s bridge while the voidhawks deployed around the star in small swallow manoeuvres. Each of them launched a pack of small sensor satellites to scan the huge magnetosphere in which they were all immersed.

Locating the station was easy enough, though the sheer volume of space they were searching through made it a lengthy task. The Arikara ’s tactical situation computer started to receive datavises from the satellites, blending them into a harmonized picture of the whole near-solar environment. When the information was complete, it showed the star as a dark sphere surrounded with graded shells of pale gold translucence. The innermost seethed like a restless sea as the magnetic forces fluxed and coiled, above that they smoothed out considerably.

A tiny knot of twisted copper light was sliding along a circular, five million kilometre orbit. The squadron’s comparative position was fed in, and Meredith began issuing orders. Because of their vulnerability to the star’s heat and radiation, the voidhawks maintained their orbits, enabling them to keep watch for any emerging starships. The Adamist starships flew inward. Eight frigates were vectored into high inclination orbits, a location from which they could launch a kinetic assault on the station. The remaining starships, including Lady Macbeth , aligned themselves on an interception course and accelerated along it at three gees.

When they were three million kilometres away, the Arikara pointed her main communication dish on the station, and boosted the signal to full strength.

“This communiquй is directed to the station commander,” Meredith datavised. “This is the Confederation Navy ship Arikara. Your illegal operation is now terminated. Ordinarily, you would be executed for your actions in producing antimatter, but I have been authorized to offer you transport to a Confederation penal colony planet if you cooperate with us. This offer is also applicable to any possessed who are resident at the station. I will require your answer within one hour. Failure to respond will be taken as a refusal to cooperate, and you will be destroyed.” He datavised the flight computer to repeat the message, and the squadron waited.

It took ten minutes for a static-heavy signal to emerge from the station. “This is Renko, I’m the guy Al left in charge around here. And I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here before we smear your pansy asses across the sun. You got that clear, pal?”

Meredith glanced across the bridge’s acceleration couches to where Lieutenant Grese was lying. The intelligence officer managed to grin, despite the gee force. “That’s a break,” he said. “We got Capone’s source, no matter what the outcome.”

“I believe the Navy is due a break,” Meredith said. “Especially our section of it.”

“He’ll have to stop those bloody infiltration flights now. His fleet will need all the antimatter they’ve got left to defend New California.”

“Indeed.” Meredith was almost cheerful when he ordered the computer to datavise a reply to the station. “Consult your crew, Renko. You’re in the losing position here. All we have to do is launch a single missile once an hour. You have to fire five each time just to make sure it doesn’t get through. And we’re in no hurry, we can keep shooting at you for a couple of weeks if we have to. There’s just no way you can win. Now are you going to accept my offer, or do you want to go back to the beyond?”

“Nice try, but you don’t mean it. Not for us, leastways. I know you guys, you’ll slam us into zero-tau the second we put our hands up.”

“For what it’s worth, I am Rear Admiral Meredith Saldana, and you have my word that you will be given passage to an uninhabited world capable of supporting human life. Consider your alternatives. If we attack the station, you go back to the beyond, if I’m lying about transporting you to a planet you go back. But there is the very strong possibility that I’m not lying. Can you really reject that hope?”

Along with the rest of the squadron, Joshua had to wait another twenty minutes for the answer. Eventually, Renko agreed to surrender. “Looks like we’re on,” Joshua said. They were accelerating hard again, preventing him from smiling. But there was no hiding the rise of excitement in his labouring voice.

“Christ, the other side of the nebula,” Liol marvelled. “What’s the furthest anyone’s ever been before?”

“A voidhawk scout group travelled six hundred and eighty light years from Earth in 2570,” Samuel replied. “Their course took them directly galactic north, not in this direction.”

“I missed that,” Ashly complained. “Was there anything interesting out there?”

Samuel closed his eyes, questioning the voidhawks racing along their orbits millions of kilometres away. “Nothing unusual, or dramatic. Stars with possible terracompatible planets, stars without. No sentient xenoc species.”

“The Meridian fleet went further,” Beaulieu said.

“Only according to legend,” Dahybi countered. “Nobody knows where they vanished to. In any case, that was centuries ago.”

“Logically then, they must have gone a long way if no one’s ever found them.”

“Found the wreckage, more like.”

“Such pessimism is bad for you.”

“Really? Hey, Monica.” Dahybi lifted one hand to make an appeal before the acceleration made him lower it fast again. “Do your lot know where they went? It could be important if they’re waiting out there for us.”

Monica stared stubbornly at the compartment’s ceiling, a headache building behind her compressed eyeballs that no program could rid her of. She really hated high gees. “No,” she datavised (her throat was suffering along with the rest of her), irritated she couldn’t put any emphasis into her digitalized speech. Not that snapping at the crew would endear her to them, but their relentless discussions of utter trivia were starting to chafe. And she’d possibly got a month or more to go. “The ESA was in its infancy back when the Meridian fleet was launched. Even today I doubt we’d bother planting assets in with a bunch of paradise seeking fools.”

“I don’t want to know what’s there,” Joshua said. “The whole point of this mission is discovery. We’re real explorers going out on a limb, first for at least a century.”

“Amen to that,” Ashly said.

“Where we are now is new for most people,” Liol said. “Just look at that station.”

“Standard industrial modules,” Dahybi said. “Hardly exotic or inspiring.” Liol sighed sadly.

“Okay, we’re getting close to injection point,” Joshua announced. “Systems review, please. How’s our fuselage holding out?” The flight computer was datavising images from the localized sensors into his neural nanonics. Lady Mac ’s thermo dump panels were fully extended, constantly rotating to present their narrow edges towards the raging star. Their flat surfaces were glowing radiant pink as they expelled the ship’s accumulated heat. He’d programmed a permanent spin into their vector, a fifteen minute cycle to ensure the immense thermal input was distributed evenly across the fuselage. Fine manoeuvring was slow, given the additional reaction mass they were carrying, but the balance compensation programs were handling it providing he kept tweaking them.

“No hot spots yet,” Sarha reported. “That extra layer of nulltherm foam is doing its job quite well. But it is