“You also need to have a lot of ships flying before that kind of arrangement becomes essential,” Ashly said. “We haven’t even detected one ship around Tojolt-HI yet. I’ve been running a constant scan.”
“They’re certainly scanning us in return,” Beaulieu said. “I’m registering seventeen different radar beams focused on us now. And I think there’s some laser radar directed our way, too.”
“No ships at all?” Joshua asked.
“I can’t find any drive emissions down there,” Sarha said. “With our optical sensor resolution, we ought to be able to see even a chemical reaction thruster flame inside that umbra.”
“Maybe they’ve used something like the voidhawk distortion field,” Dahybi suggested. “After all, Kempster said mass was precious to them. Maybe they can’t afford reaction drives.”
“Gravitonic detectors say you’re wrong,” Liol said. “I’m not picking up any kind of distortion pattern in this neck of the woods.”
“They’re not going to tip their hand this early in the game,” Monica said. “They won’t show us what they’ve got, especially if it’s combat capable.”
Sarha shifted under her restraint webbing to frown at the ESA agent. “That’s absurd. You can’t suddenly shut down all your spacecraft traffic the instant you detect a xenoc. You’d leave ships in transit. Besides, they don’t know how long we’ve been watching them.”
“You hope.”
Sarha gave an exasperated sigh. “They don’t have ZTT technology, so the only interstellar ships they can conceive are arkships. And if one of those used its fusion drive to decelerate into this system, they’d be able to track it from half a light-year out. They must be curious about us and how the hell we got here, that’s all.”
“Never mind,” Joshua grumbled.
STARSHIP LADY MACBETH
COMMUNICATION DIRECTED AT
DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL
MESSAGE
WE ARE NOT DAMAGED. WE HAVE CAPABILITY TO COMPUTE AN APPROACH VECTOR TO YOUR LOCATION ON TOJOLT-HI. WE DID NOT WANT TO BREAK ANY LAW YOU HAVE CONCERNING APPROACHING VEHICLES. ARE THERE ANY RESTRICTIONS COVERING APPROACH SPEED AND SEPARATION DISTANCE FROM YOUR PHYSICAL STRUCTURE?
CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT
DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL
COMMUNICATION TO
STARSHIP LADY MACBETH
MESSAGE
NO RESTRICTIONS CONCERNING YOUR APPROACH. WE WILL PROVIDE FINAL HOLDING POSITION COORDINATE WHEN YOU ARE WITHIN ONE THOUSAND KILOMETRES OF DOMINION TERRITORY.
QUANTOOK-LOU
DISTRIBUTOR OF DOMINION RESOURCES
STARSHIP LADY MACBETH
COMMUNICATION DIRECTED TO
DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL
MESSAGE
UNDERSTOOD. EXPECTED RENDEZVOUS TIME 45 MINUTES.
CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT
Joshua datavised the flight computer to ignite the fusion drives.
“Joshua,” Syrinx called. “We’ve found another diskcity.”
“Where?” he asked. Everyone on
“It’s trailing Tojolt-HI by forty five million kilometres, inclined two degrees to the ecliptic. Kempster and Renato were right. The odds of us emerging so close to the only inhabited structure are non-existent.”
“Jesus, you mean this redoubt civilization is strung out all around the star’s equatorial orbit?”
“Looks that way. We’re scanning probable locations for more of them. Assuming the separation distance is constant, and they’re not in wildly high inclination orbits, that would mean there’s well over a hundred of the things.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Over a hundred,” Ashly said. “That makes quite a civilization all told. How many Tyrathca do you think one of those diskcities could support?”
“With a surface area of twenty million square kilometres, I should think anything up to a hundred billion,” Sarha said. “Even with their level of technology, that’s a lot of area. Think how many people we cram into an arcology.”
“Look at it from the population perspective, and no wonder the Anthi-CL dominion wanted exclusivity,” Liol said. “The demand on resources must be phenomenal. I’m astonished they managed to survive this long. By rights they should have drowned in their own waste products a long time ago.”
“Societies only have waste products while acquiring fresh raw material remains a cheaper option than recycling,” Samuel said. “This close to the star, the diskcities are extremely rich in energy. There can be few waste molecules that cannot be reprocessed into something useful.”
“Even so, they must have strong prohibitions on reproducing. I see a circle of life like this, and all I can think about is a culture growing in a dish.”
“That analogy doesn’t hold for sentient life. The Tyrathca nature is inclined to logically empowered restrictive behaviour. After all, they regulated themselves perfectly on a ten thousand year arkship voyage. This situation is no different for them.”
“Don’t assume their dominions are uniform,” Sarha said. “I’m detecting some areas on the disk with a much higher temperature than the others, their thermal regulation has completely broken down. Heat from the star is flowing straight through. They’re dead.”
“Maybe so,” Beaulieu said. “But there’s still a lot of activity down there. We’re being bombarded with radar signals from every section. A lot of dominions are very interested in us.”
“Still no ship launch,” Joshua said. “No one’s trying to intercept us before we reach Anthi-CL.” He accessed the sensors to watch Tojolt-HI growing against the radiant crimson expanse of the giant star. Apart from the scale involved, it was similar to their approach to the antimatter station. A jet-black, two-dimensional circle cutting right into the photosphere. The cold light of the nebula behind them was unable to illuminate a single feature on the back of the diskcity. Only
“What are they all saying?” he asked Oski.
“I’m running a keyword discrimination program on the datatraffic. From the samples so far, it’s all pretty much the same. They all want us to dock at their own section of the diskcity, and each claims to have the greatest resources, as well as unique information.”
“Any threats?”
“Not yet.”
“Keep reviewing it.”
