Reality Dysfunction — Expansion

“Thanks, Joshua,” Sarha said gently.

“My pleasure. Now, damage assessments please. Dahybi, can we jump?”

“I’ll need time to run more diagnostics. But even if we can jump it isn’t going to be far. Those three nodes were physically wrecked by the gamma pulses. Our energy patterns will have to be recalculated. Ideally, we need to replace the nodes first.”

“We’re only carrying two spares. I’m not made of money. Dad always jumped with nodes damaged and —”

“Don’t,” Sarha pleaded. “Just for once, Joshua. Let’s deal with the present, OK?”

“Somebody’s jumped outsystem,” Melvyn said. “The grav-detector satellites registered at least two distortions while we were performing our dodo impersonation, I think there may have been a wormhole interstice opened as well. I can’t tell for sure, half of the satellites have dropped out.”

“There is no jamming from the voidhawks any more,” Dahybi said.

“OK, great. Warlow, Sarha, how are our systems coping?”

“Number two generator’s out,” Warlow said. “I’ve shut it down. It took the main strike from the gamma rays. Lucky really, most of the energy was absorbed by its casing. We’ll have to dump it when we dock, it’s got a half-life longer than some geological eras now.”

“And I’d like you to stop using the number one fusion-drive tube,” Sarha said. “The injection ionizers are damaged. Other than that, nothing serious, we’ve got some leaks and some component glitches. But none of the life-support capsules were breached, and our environmental-maintenance equipment is fully functional.”

“Got another jumper,” Melvyn called out.

Joshua reduced thrust to one gee, cutting drive tube one altogether, then accessed the sensors. “Jesus, will you look at that?”

Lalonde had acquired its own ring, gloriously radiant stripes of fusion fire twining together to form a platinum amulet of immense complexity. Over five hundred combat wasps were in flight, and thousands of submunitions wove convoluted trajectories. Starships initiated high-gee evasive manoeuvres. Nuclear explosions blossomed.

The Lady Macbeth ’s magnetic and electromagnetic sensors were recording impulses nearly off the scale. It was a radiative inferno.

“Two more wormhole interstices opening,” Melvyn said. “Our bitek comrades are leaving in droves.”

“I think we’ll join them,” Joshua said. Just for once in her life, Sarha might be right, he conceded. It was the now which counted. Lady Mac was already two thousand kilometres in altitude, and rising steeply from the pole; he shifted their inclination again, carrying them further north of the ecliptic and away from the conflict raging above the planet’s equatorial zones. Another three thousand kilometres and they would be out of the influence of Lalonde’s gravity field, and free to jump. He made a mental note to travel an additional five hundred klicks—no point in stressing the nodes, given their state. About a hundred seconds at their current acceleration. “Dahybi, how is the patterning coming?”

“Reprogramming. Another two minutes. You really don’t want to rush me with this one, Joshua.”

“Fine, the further we are from the gravity field the better.”

“What about the mercs?” Ashly said. It wasn’t loud, but his level voice carried the bridge easily.

Joshua banished the display showing him possible jump coordinates. He turned his head and glared at the pilot. Why was there always one awkward bastard? “We can’t! Jesus, they’re killing each other back there.”

“I promised them, Joshua. If they were alive I said I would go down and pick them up. And you said something similar in your message.”

“We’ll come back.”

“Not in this ship, not in a week. If we dock at a port, it’ll take a month to refit. That’s without any hassle from the navy. They won’t be alive in two days, not down there.”

“The navy said they’d pick up any survivors.”

“You mean that same navy which right now is shooting at our former colleagues?”

“Jesus!”

“There isn’t going to be a combat wasp left in thirty minutes,” the pilot said reasonably. “Not at the rate they’re expending them. All we have to do is sit tight for a couple of hours out here.”

Instinct pushed Joshua, repelled him from Lalonde and the red cloud bands. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ashly, but no. This is too big for us.” The coordinate display flipped up in his mind.

Ashly looked desperately round the bridge for an ally. His eyes found Sarha’s guilty expression.

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Joshua?”

“Now what!”

“We should jump to Murora.”

“Where?” His almanac file produced the answer, Murora was the largest gas giant in the Lalonde system. “Oh.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “There’s even an Edenist station in orbit to supervise their new habitat’s growth. We can dock there and replace the failed nodes with our spares. Then we can jump back here in a day or so and do a fast fly-by. If we get an answer from the mercs, and the navy doesn’t shoot us on sight, Ashly can go down to pick them up. If not, we just head straight back to Tranquillity.”

“Dahybi, what do you think?” Joshua asked curtly. Most of his anger was directed at himself; he should have thought of Murora as an alternative destination.

“Gets my vote,” the node specialist said. “I really don’t want to try an interstellar jump unless we absolutely have to.”

“Anybody else object? No? OK, nice idea, Sarha.” For the third time, the jump coordinate display appeared in his mind. He computed a vector to align the Lady Mac on the gas giant, eight hundred and fifty-seven million kilometres distant.

Ashly blew Sarha a kiss across the bridge. She grinned back.

Lady Macbeth ’s two remaining fusion drives powered down. Ion thrusters matched her course to the Murora jump coordinate with tiny nudges. Joshua fired a last coded message at the geostationary communications satellites, then the dish antenna and various sensor clusters started to sink down into their jump recesses.

“Dahybi?” Joshua asked.

“I’ve programmed in the new patterns. Look at it this way, if they don’t work, we’ll never know.”

“Fucking wonderful.” He ordered the flight computer to initiate the jump.

Two kinetic missiles hammered into the frigate Neanthe , almost severing it in half. When the venting deuterium and glowing debris cleared, Arikara ’s sensors observed Neanthe ’s four life-support capsules spinning rapidly. Still intact. Kinetic missiles found two of them while a one-shot pulser discharged eighty kilometres away, stabbing another with a beam of coherent gamma radiation.

Admiral Saldana clenched his teeth in helpless fury. The battle had rapidly escalated out of all control, or even sanity. All the mercenary ships had fired salvos of combat wasps, there was simply no way of telling which were programmed to attack ships (or which ships) and which were for defence.

The tactical situation computer estimated over six hundred had now been launched. But communications were poor even with the dedicated satellites, and sensor data was degraded by the vast amount of electronic warfare signals emitted by everybody’s combat wasps. One of the bridge ratings had said they’d be better off with a periscope.

When it came, the explosion was intense enough to outshine the combined photonic output of the six hundred-plus fusion drives whirling round above Lalonde. An unblemished radiation nimbus expanded outwards at a quarter of the speed of light, engulfing starships, combat wasps, submunitions, and observation satellites with complete dispassion; hiding their own detonation behind a shell of scintillating molecules. When it was five hundred kilometres in diameter it began to thin, swirling with secondary colours like a solar soap bubble. It was three thousand kilometres ahead of the Arikara , yet it was potent enough to burn out every one of the sensors which the flagship had orientated on that sector of space.