The Naked God - Flight

That doesn’t make a lot of sense,serina said. How can you know when something is as good as possible unless you keep analyzing and tinkering with the design? A bicycle is a good, efficient method of getting from one place to another, but the car came along because we weren’t satisfied with it.

I hadn’t really thought about it,ruben admitted. Now you mention it, thirteen hundred years is a long time to stick with one design, an awful lot more if you add their voyage time to that. We’re still improving our fusion drives, and we’ve only had them six hundred years.

And they’re a lot better than Tyrathca fusion drives,oxley said. We’ve been selling them improvements ever since we made contact.

You’re applying human psychology to them,ruben said. It’s a mistake. They don’t have our intuition or imagination. If it works, they really don’t try to fix it.

They must have some imagination,cacus protested. You can hardly design an arkship without it.

Ask Parker Higgens,ruben said. a slight tinge of defensiveness was leaking into his affinity voice. Maybe he can explain it. I guess being slow and methodical gets you there in the end.

Syrinx examined the twisted braid of pipes and girders that made up the spaceport’s support column. Following her silent urging, Oenone expanded its distortion field enough to pervade the dilapidated structure. A picture of entwined translucent tubes filled her mind. The number of black-crack flaws in the metal and composite was alarming, as was the thinness of individual tubes. That really is very fragile,she declared. Samuel, please be careful when you egress. It won’t take much to snap the spaceport clean off.

Thanks for the warning.

Oenone rotated gently, turning its crew toroid airlock towards the lead-grey shaft. Standing in the open hatch, Samuel’s suit sensors showed him the stars slip past until he was facing the wrinkled mesh of metal. Even though it was basically just a frayed mechanical structure, it had a quality that told him it wasn’t human. Neatness, he decided, it lacked neatness, the kind of confident elegance that was the signature of human astroengineering. Where humans would use failsofts and multiple redundancy, the Tyrathca built tough simple devices in tandem. If one was taken out of service for repair or maintenance they trusted the second to remain functional. And it was obviously a philosophy which worked. Tanjuntic-RI’s existence and triumph was evidence of that. It was just . . . reality at one degree from human sensibilities.

The voidhawk’s movement halted. Shadows plagued the hull, turning the marbled polyp a dingy walnut. Gravity in the airlock faded away as the distortion field flowed away from it.

This is as close as we can get,syrinx said. The archaeology team went in just above the bearing ring.

The spaceport support column appeared to be holding steady just past the lip of the hull. Stars waved about behind it. Samuel triggered the cold gas jets in his armour, and drifted out from the airlock. Gaps in the column were easy enough to find. The original close weave of pipes and structural girders had been loosened when the bearings seized up, opening a multitude of chinks, though it was impossible to guess which one had been used by the archaeology team all those years ago. He selected one ten metres above the huge bearing ring set in the rock.

Nitrogen puffed out from tiny nozzles around his slimline manoeuvring backpack, edging him closer to the gap. It was lined with a buckled pipe on one side, and a tattered conduit casing on the other. He reached out with his left gauntlet, and made a tentative grab for one of the flaky cables inside the conduit. Dust squirted out around his fingers, and tactile receptors in his palm told him the cable had compressed slightly in his grip. But it held. His main worry had been that everything they touched along the column would disintegrate like so much brittle porcelain.

“Okay, there’s a degree of integrity left in the material,” he datavised back to the rest of the team. “You can come over. I’m going in.”

Helmet and wrist lights came on, and he shone the beams into the black cavity ahead. When the column bearings seized up, the torque stress exerted by the spaceport’s inertia had splintered hundreds of structural girders, ripping apart the multitude of pipes and cables they carried. The result was to fill the inside of the column with a forbidding tangle of wreckage. Samuel activated his inertial guidance block. Bright green directional graphics flicked up over the monochrome sensor image, and he eased himself forward. According to his suit sensors, the spaces between the interlocking struts contained a thin molecular haze from the slowly ablating metal.

The chinks were becoming smaller, with fragments scraping against his armour as he hauled himself in the direction the graphics indicated. He pulled a ten centimetre fission knife from his belt. The blade’s yellow light shone brightly, shimmering off the strands of ash-grey metal. It cut through without the slightest resistance.

I feel like some kind of Victorian soldier aristocrat hacking through a jungle,he confided to the Oenone ’s crew.

Scraps of crumbling metal were whirling round him, bouncing and twirling off the corners and angles of the shambolic maze. The second armour-suited figure had reached the gap: Renato Vella, who was quickly wriggling along after him. One of the serjeants was next, followed by Monica, another serjeant, then Oski Katsura. Syrinx and the crew used the sensor blisters to watch them vanish inside one after the other.

Looking good,she said, sharing a quiet confidence with her crew.

Parker Higgens and Kempster Getchell walked into the bridge, and took the chairs Syrinx indicated. “They’re making progress,” Edwin told the two elderly science advisors. “At this rate, Samuel will have reached the main airlock chamber in another ten minutes. They could be at their target level in a couple of hours.”

“I hope so,” Tyla said. “The quicker we’re away from here, the better. This place gives me the creeps. Do you suppose the Tyrathca souls are watching us?”

“An interesting point,” Parker said. “We’ve not had any reports of our returning souls encountering a xenoc soul in the beyond.”

“So where do they go?” Oxley asked.

“We’ll put that on the list of questions for the Sleeping God,” Kempster said jovially. “I’m sure that’s quite trivial compared to—” he broke off as all the Edenists froze, closing their eyes in unison. “What?”

“A starship,” Syrinx hissed. “Oenone can sense its distortion field. Which means the Tyrathca detectors will pick it up, too. Oh . . . bloody hell.”

I see you,the Stryla gloated.

Etchells hadn’t realized that there was a voidhawk accompanying the rogue Adamist starship. Not until he swallowed in above Hesperi-LN, and started scanning round for the ship he’d pursued from the antimatter station. There was plenty of activity above the xenoc planet, big sedate ships powering their way into high inclination orbits, complementing the protective sphere thrown up by the SD platforms. The twin moons were sending out constant gravitational perturbations as they orbited round each other, half a million kilometres above Hesperi-LN itself. A network of sensor satellites. An unusually thick band of dust slithering above the upper Van-Allen belt. He had to move around cislunar space in small swallows so that his distortion field could complete a clean sweep above the planet. The Adamist starship was easy to locate, a tight curve in the uniformity of space-time. He focused on it, prying and probing at its composition by creating a multitude of tiny ripples within his distortion field, seeing how they reacted to the encounter, the diffraction pattern created as they washed across the hull and internal machinery. One thing was clear, it wasn’t a Navy ship. The layout was all wrong for that. And Navy ships didn’t have an antimatter drive. Its main fusion generators were shut down, leaving just a couple of ancillary tokamaks to power the life support capsules; and the biggest give-away of all: its thermo-dump panels were retracted. It was in stealth mode.

A Confederation Navy sanctioned starship on a clandestine mission in the Tyrathca system. It would have to be a very important mission to risk an inter-species clash at this delicate time. Etchells knew damn well it had to be connected to the issue of possession somehow. Nothing else would warrant approval. When he extrapolated its trajectory, he saw it was going to fly past a moonlet. He ran through a batch of his stolen almanac memories, discovering that the moonlet was actually an arkship, abandoned over a thousand years ago after a flight from an