The Naked God - Flight

Century the concept finally began to seem practical. Asteroids were already being hollowed out and made habitable. Now it was only an engineering and finance problem to propel them out of Earth orbit and across the gulf to Proxima Centauri. There were no theoretical show stoppers; fusion or antimatter engines could be built to accelerate the giant rocks up to speeds of anything between five and twenty per cent of lightspeed, depending on which physicist you asked. Generations of crew would live, tend their machinery, and die within the rock as they crawled across the emptiness, with the anticipation that their descendants would inherit a fresh world.

Sadly, human nature being what it is, century-duration flights were just too long, the ideal of colonization too abstract to motivate the governments and large institutions of the time into building these proposed space arks. The real clincher, inevitably, was cost. There could never be any return on the investment. So it seemed as though the fresh start idealists would just have to go on dreaming.

One such thwarted dreamer was Julian Wan, who, more resourceful than his colleagues, persuaded the board of the New Kong corporation to research faster than light travel. His pitch was that it would be a small, cheap project testing the more dubious equations of Quantum Unification Theory, essentially a few wild theoretical physicists with plenty of computer time. But if it could be made to work, the commercial opportunities would be phenomenal. Noble concern for human destiny and the search for pure knowledge never got a look in.

New Kong successfully tested the ZTT drive in 2115, and the arkship concept was quickly and quietly discarded. Beautifully detailed plans and proposals drawn up by a multitude of starflight societies and associations were downloaded into university library memories to join the ranks of other never-made-it technologies like the nuclear powered bomber, the English Channel bridge, geostationary solar power stations, and continent birthing (the so-called Raising Atlantis project, where fusion bombs were proposed to modify tectonic activity). Then the Tyrathca world of Hesperi-LN was discovered in 2395, along with the news that it was actually a colony founded by an arkship. The old human plans were briefly revisited by history of engineering students, interested to see how they stood up to comparison with a proven arkship. That academic interest faded away inside of a decade.

Joshua, who fancied himself as something of a spaceflight buff, was fascinated by the dull blip of light which Lady Mac ’s sensors were focused on. It was in a wildly elliptical orbit around Hesperi-LN, with a twelve thousand kilometre perigee and four hundred thousand kilometre apogee. Fortunately for their mission, it was just under three hundred thousand kilometres away from the Tyrathca planet, and climbing.

They’d emerged two million kilometres out from Hesperi-LN; a distance which put them safely beyond the planet’s known SD sensor coverage. The Tyrathca world was not a cradle for the kind of space activity found above industrialized human worlds. There were a few low-orbit docking stations, industrial module clusters, communication and sensor satellite networks, and twenty-five SD platforms supplied and operated by the Confederation Navy. Not that there was a lot of worry about pirate activity, the Tyrathca simply didn’t manufacture the kind of goods which could be sold on any human market let alone the underground one. The Confederation was far more concerned by the prospect of blackmail by a rogue starship captain armed with ground-assault weapons. Although they didn’t have consumer products, the Tyrathca did mine gold, platinum, and diamonds among other precious commodities for their indigenous industries. And the colony had been established in AD 1300; rumours of vast stockpiles accumulated over millennia persisted on every human world. Any bar or dinner party would have someone who knew somebody else who had been told of a first-hand witness who’d walked through the endless underground caverns filled with their glittering dragon hoards.

So the Navy maintained a small cost-ineffective outpost to guard against the possibility of any inter-species incident. It had been abandoned, along with all the other human-maintained systems, when the Tyrathca broke off contact. According to the briefing Monica and Samuel had given to the Lady Mac ’s crew, the Tyrathca would find it difficult to keep the SD systems functional for very long.

“But we have to expect them to try,” Monica said. “Their ambassador was pretty damn insistent that we don’t intrude on them again.”

Joshua and Syrinx assumed the SD network was on-line and fully functional, and planned their tactics accordingly. The goal was to land an explorer team on Tanjuntic-RI, who would attempt to locate a reference to the Sleeping God in the arkship’s ancient electronics. Getting them inside unnoticed was the big problem.

Both craft were in full stealth mode when they emerged. Jumping into the system, Joshua had aligned Lady Mac so that her vector would carry her in a rough trajectory from the emergence coordinate towards the arkship. As long as he didn’t have to use either the fusion or antimatter drives, the starship would probably remain undetected. At this stage, they were back up; there to rush in and provide covering fire in case things got noisy and Oenone had to rescue their team. They were using passive sensors only, with just the chemical verniers firing occasionally to hold them stable; every nonessential system was in stand-by mode, reducing the power consumption and with it their thermal emission. Internal heat stores were soaking up the fusion generator output, although they could only last for a couple of days before the thermodump panels would have to be extended to dissipate the heat. Even that wasn’t too much of a problem, the radiation could be directed away from the SD network sensors. They’d have to be extremely unlucky to be discovered by anything that guarded Hesperi-LN.

“Picking up some radar pulses from the SD network,” Beaulieu reported. “But it’s very weak. They’re not scanning for us. Our hull coating can absorb this level easily.”

“Good,” Joshua said. “Liol, what about spacecraft activity?”

“Infrared’s showing twenty-three ships using their drives above the planet. The majority are travelling between low orbit and the SD platforms. Four seem to be heading up for high polar orbits. I’d say they’re complementing the platforms. But none of them are moving very fast, half a gee maximum. They are big ships, though.”

“That’s how the Tyrathca like them,” Ashly said. “Plenty of room to move round in the life support sections. It’s like being inside a bloody cathedral.”

“Offensive potential?”

“If they’re armed with human-made combat wasps, considerable,” Liol said. “With that drive signature I’m assuming they’re Tyrathca inter-planetary ships; they have a dozen asteroid settlements to provide the planetary industries with several kinds of bulk microgee compounds. Which means their payload is considerably larger than ours. They’re like highly manoeuvrable weapons platforms.”

“Wonderful.” Joshua datavised the new bitek processor array they’d installed during the last refit. “Oenone , what’s your situation?”

“I remain on schedule, Joshua. We should be rendezvousing with Tanjuntic-RI in another forty-two minutes. The exploration team is suiting up now.”

Unlike the Lady Macbeth, Oenone had been able to accelerate and manoeuvre after emerging above the planet. By reducing its distortion field to a minimum, the voidhawk could accelerate at half a gee towards the arkship. Given the distance involved, the network satellites were unable to pick up such a small ripple in space-time. The disadvantage was, with such a reduced field the voidhawk couldn’t perceive a fraction of the local environment it usually did. If for some unaccountable reason, the Tyrathca had surrounded Tanjuntic-RI with proximity mines, they wouldn’t know until they were very close indeed.

Syrinx always hated being dependent on just the sensor blisters and passive electronic arrays. The voidhawks’ ability to pervade a huge spherical volume of space around the hull was intrinsic to their flight.

We managed like this in our Navy days,Oenone said, unperturbed.

Syrinx grinned in the half-light of the bridge. The crew toroid’s internal power consumption was minimal as well. You mean back when we were young and foolish?

This is not a foolish venture,the voidhawk chided. Wing-Tsit Chong considers it of the utmost importance.

Me too. But this part just brings back memories.of Thetis, though she didn’t mention him. Lately she’d started to wonder if her brother had managed to elude the beyond as that ever-damned Laton had promised. Mild feelings of guilt had kept her away from his strange stunted existence within the Romulus multiplicity before they left. Really, what was the point in preserving him when his soul was free?

What is our best landing point, do you think?Oenone