Then right at the end came the only question the neutron star inhabitants asked: Is Yirella with you?
That was embarrassing.
In a pleasing way.
Dellian was sitting up beside her, a befuddled expression on his face as he scratched his neck, then his arm. Yawned.
‘Your other boyfriend’s back, then,’ he mumbled as he considered the data rolling through his optik.
Yirella resisted a sigh of exasperation. He was never going to let that go. She’d tried to explain to him that giving the seedships independence and freedom was her idea, her gamble, her responsibility. And she was only too aware, had she confided in him what she’d done, that burden of knowing would’ve chewed him up. Yes, it should have been a formal proposition to council, duly debated and voted on. Except it would have been voted down. Kenelm’s reaction alone proved that, and sie wasn’t the only one with that view on her utter irresponsibility. So every time she tried to mollify Del it came across as petulant and self-serving, which had to stop. She was confident he would ultimately forgive her, or at least stop snarking, given enough time – say, a couple of centuries.
‘So it would seem,’ she replied.
‘What now?’
‘Nothing. I expect Ainsley is just confirming we’re not a disguised Olyix attack.’
‘What about us making sure this isn’t an Olyix ambush?’
She pressed her teeth together, refusing to show him how that riled her. ‘Good call. Cinrea is on watch. I’ll tell hir.’
‘Don’t suppose I’m needed.’
‘Did the bridge call for you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good, then; they don’t think we’re about to be shot at.’ She quickly put a tunic on and left the cabin. When the door shut, Dellian had rolled over to face the wall, his eyes closed.
‘Saints,’ she hissed quietly.
A white icon slipped into her optic. ‘Trouble in paradise?’ Ainsley asked.
‘And you can go to hell, too,’ she snapped at him.
His chortle was immensely annoying. ‘It’s good to see you. Genuinely. How was the flight?’
‘Eventful.’ She told him about Kenelm, and the group of Utopial devotees Emilja and Soćko had gathered to steer exodus generations.
‘Well, we did think it would be something like that, didn’t we?’ Ainsley said. ‘Two thousand years of political fraudulence, though; gotta admit, that’s impressive. My father used to tell me that when he was a kid, change – in culture and technology – was so endemic that people were complaining no one had a job for life any more. I wonder if Dad would approve of this particular reincarnation of sinecure.’
Yirella smiled. ‘I thought politics was a calling, not a job.’
‘You’re young. You’ll learn.’
‘So what in the sweet Saints have people built here? They changed the star’s rotation rate!’
‘Yeah. How better to announce to the whole galaxy: Here we are. This civilization got very smart, and . . . libertarian isn’t the word, and post-scarcity communism doesn’t fit, either; I’m not quite sure how to describe their politics. Put it this way: they were very argumentative once they started to think properly for themselves. But they did agree to majority consensus. It brought a tear to my eye.’
‘So are they going to fight the Olyix?’
‘You’ll see. It’s quite a congress they’re putting together for you.’
‘They, uh, asked about me.’
‘Ah, yeah, about that; I may have pushed your role in our little conspiracy to facilitate their society.’
‘Oh, Saints.’
‘Don’t go all morose on me. It’ll work in your favour.’
‘You think?’
‘I predict. But then, predicting is how I made my fortune when I was human.’
‘I checked. You inherited a fortune.’
‘I inherited a small fortune, and turned it into the greatest accumulation of wealth in history.’
‘Yeah, almost as big as your ego. So what next?’
‘You finish decelerating, they send a portal over to the Morgan. You all go through to the congress. Simple.’
‘Nah, nothing ever is. Not in these times.’
*
As the fleet approached its negotiated parking orbit a million kilometres out from the ring, the Morgan’s sensors started to capture the warm particles in high resolution. Yirella, Ellici and Wim formed one analysis team, gathering in a small conference room to pore over the images and data tables compiled by the genten. The room’s walls were all but invisible behind the thick hologram projections – a perspective that seemed to place them at the heart of the little system, sitting on the surface of the neutron star itself.
‘There’s some standardization,’ Wim observed. ‘There are thousands of particles that have a similar size and mass; we’ve given them a preliminary type classification. Not that it matters, because they all have exactly the same external skin – that copper colour. So we don’t know what any of them actually are.’
‘And there’s nothing under a kilometre,’ Yirella said. ‘But their thermal emission ratio is fairly constant across the types.’ She studied close-up images of what looked like asteroids but seemed sculpted from polished copper. Their surfaces moved, though – slowly, the bulges and dints undulating with a lethargic arrhythmia. As she watched the time-lapse images she had a disturbing flashback to a biology lecture featuring a foetal sac with a teratological embryo shifting around inside.
The thought was deeply uncomfortable, so she gave up and called Ainsley. ‘What the hell are those things?’
‘Habitats, ships, factories, stores of processed materials, labs, experiments, sensors; everything you’d expect from an advanced civilization.’
‘But they all have the same surface.’
‘It’s a development on the mirrorfabrik shielding you use,’ Ainsley said. ‘The cloak protects them from the neutron star radiation. It’s useful for defence, too.’
‘That’s odd,’ Ellici said as she pulled up more detailed sensor data. ‘Really odd. The neutron star has an unsymmetrical gravity field.’
‘How can that be?’ Wim mused. ‘There’s no theory that can account for uneven mass distribution inside a star, let alone a neutron star.’
‘It’s got to be those inner stations,’ Ellici said. ‘The hundred and fifty big ones. Their gravitational emissions are off the scale. They must be affecting it.’
‘We saw what the Resolution ships could do at the Vayan ambush,’ Yirella said. ‘This could be a
