“You guess?” I asked.
Chiraine had been quiet for a while, just staring at the Levirion, mesmerized. But she looked up and asked, “So how do we get it to work?”
Ana-Zhi said, “Hang on there, princess. I’m not sure we should even be talking about this.”
“Of course we should,” Chiraine said. “What other choice do we have?”
“We can try to run,” Ana-Zhi said. “Get to the outer rim.”
“You know as well as I do that we won’t be able to outrun a Hammerhead-class Scout,” the Sean bot said.
“Then we turn and fight.”
The Sean bot made a little robotic snorting sound. “Their shuttle is more heavily armed than we are.”
That was kind of an exaggeration, but he was right. There was no way the Vostok could match the firepower of the Baeder.
“Getting back to Chiraine’s question—how do we get it to work?” Narcissa asked.
“Not you too?” Ana-Zhi shook her head.
“Dervock L77 doesn’t specify how exactly the Levirion works,” the Sean bot said.
“Great,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Other than it needs to be activated by a—and I quote—dire inferno. Whatever that is.”
“Dire inferno?” Chiraine made a face. “So we burn it?”
“The Mayir researchers who studied this were of the opinion that the dire inferno referred to a significant power source,” the Sean bot said. “And I was thinking that the Fountain’s reactors might just do the trick.”
Ana-Zhi burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny, Z?” the Sean bot asked.
“Are you even listening to what’s coming out of your tight little robot mouth?”
“How about you enlighten me,” the Sean bot said sharply.
“It’s just that if we could turn the Fountain’s reactors on, we wouldn’t need your little magic pyramid. Would we?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Ana-Zhi.”
Ana-Zhi turned to Chiraine. “Tell him what you told us, princess.”
Chiraine explained about the Shimese research she had uncovered that indicated there was a strong possibility that the Fountain didn’t fully close.
“If we could power the Fountain back up, it might provide one-way access back to Tor-Betree.”
15
Maybe the Baeder had been damaged more than we thought, or maybe the Mayir were just supremely confident that we couldn’t get away. Whatever the reason, they didn’t come after us for nearly three hours. And by that time, we were almost at the Fountain.
Chiraine had spent the time scanning through the data the Sean bot had liberated from the Mayir’s research computers. She had compiled it with her own data and was now running multiple semantic searches on the Levirion, trying to find out anything else that might help us.
In the meantime, the Sean bot had decided to clone a partition of our point defense and targeting AI systems and basically reprogram them.
“You sure that this is the best time to be doing this?” I had asked him.
“Are you kidding me? These systems are so primitive, it’s no wonder you had to go manual.”
After locking in a course to the Fountain, Narcissa, Ana-Zhi, and I had retired to the galley for some lunch and moxa. Narcissa had routed the long-range scanner display down to the galley’s datapads, so we could keep one eye open while we rested up and ate.
I was halfway through my second cup of moxa when the klaxons went off.
We all met back up on the bridge, where the first thing I noticed was the Fountain looming up in our main viewport. It seemed so close that we could pass through its immense torus at any moment. But I knew that our true destination was the mushroom-shaped control station perched on the edge of the Fountain’s ring.
“How far away is the Baeder?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Based on their current speed, eleven minutes until intercept,” the Sean bot said.
“And how long until we reach the control station?” I asked.
“If Ana-Zhi tightened our approach like she’s supposed to, maybe ten minutes. Nine and a half, best case scenario.”
“Not good enough,” the Sean bot said. He explained that if we could get inside the hangar, there would be less chance of the Mayir blasting us into oblivion because they wouldn’t want to risk damaging their only way back to our galaxy.
I pointed out that the Mayir might not be so logical about things.
“We’ll see,” the Sean bot said. “There’s the hangar entrance.”
“I got it,” Ana-Zhi said. She adjusted our course with the maneuvering thrusters.
“I need to take over,” the Sean bot said. “Move, please.”
“Yes, captain,” Ana-Zhi huffed as she got out of the pilot’s seat.
“No offense, Z, we’re going to try a hard slide in, and I’ve got the trajectory figured out.”
“Oh yeah? That’s what the navsys is for.”
The Sean bot slammed the main thrusters and the Vostok’s engines groaned in complaint, shaking the entire superstructure as we did a hard burn. “Hang on!”
“Somehow I don’t think the navsys would have allowed a move like that,” Narcissa said.
“What does the scope say about the entrance tunnel?” the Sean bot demanded. “I really hope it’s less than one hundred meters.”
Narcissa double checked the ranging scanners and then announced, “One hundred ten.”
“This is going to be close.”
Up on the main viewport I saw the hangar entrance getting larger and larger as we raced towards it. But still it was a relatively small dark rectangle on the surface of the station’s massive domed solar collector.
We were all silent for several minutes as the Fountain loomed closer and closer. It really was a remarkable feat of engineering.
“I’ve found schematics!” Chiraine looked up from her data pad with a big grin on her face.
“How?” the Sean bot asked.
“It’s from the Rhya themselves. Part of the 2355 technology exchange. I had them loaded during mission prep.”
“Well done, young lady. Route everything to screen four, if you please.”
Chiraine did so and the screen lit up with a detailed 3-D view of the control station. It really did look like a giant mushroom, roughly a kilometer tall with a two-hundred-meter diameter central core.
The hangar was located inside of the solar collector, which formed the cap of the mushroom.
“It looks like this thing isn’t much more than a giant capacitor,” Narcissa said.
“That’s not
