Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera (25 page)

“The tug is on the move.”

It was twenty-four hours
later. The ship had slowed the shell’s rotation to a crawl so that one of its
micro black holes could be extracted. In the meantime Tallis had built her tiny
vessel. The product of her labors was a remotely-controlled vehicle consisting
of a superconducting magnet and an over-ramped push drive; the squat structure
was barely twenty centimeters long. Now it was drifting towards the orbiting
mines.

In the buggy’s cabin
everything was quiet. Carson had retreated another three light seconds for a reason
that was completely logical and that he loathed: if the tug triggered the mines
there was nothing to be gained by he and Aiyana being caught in the
conflagration that would kill Tallis and his destroy starship.

The cabin’s display
showed a schematic of the twelve mines relative to the ship. They were deployed
at the vertices of a kilometer-wide icosahedron with the vessel in the center,
a clever arrangement designed to create an impenetrable barrier.

“But there’s a weakness
in the topology” Carson had explained to Aiyana. “Removing any one mine opens up
a gap big enough for us to pass through.”

Before it could disrupt
the configuration Tallis’s tug had to get outside of the perimeter of the minefield.
The tiny vehicle was on radio silence as it moved away from the ship. One meter
aft it dragged one of the shell’s charged black holes. Its trajectory was
agonizingly slow; the black hole, smaller than an atom, had a mass of one
hundred million tonnes. The procession was aimed at the midpoint of one of the
icosahedron’s triangular faces – as far away from the mines as possible.

Carson fretted as they
waited for news. “The huge unknown is what are the mines sensing? It can’t be
mass – not that close to a starship – but is it heat signature, radar, physical
observation, or what?”

“But they must have some
sort of lower limit” said Aiyana “otherwise a micro-meteorite could blow the
whole lot.”

“Good point. Oh God! How
long is this going to take?”

In fact it was four hours
before the ship finally reported the tug was through. Now, like an angler trailing
a lure at the snout of a fish, the tiny vessel began using the black hole’s
gravitation to tease a mine out of position. Eight more hours passed until the
ship signaled that a path had been cleared.

“The tug has returned the
black hole to the shell” the ship finally announced. “In the meantime, look
what I found.” The fuzzy image of a small spacecraft covered with antennas
appeared on the display.

“It’s a remote
observation platform – they must have left it to keep an eye on things.”

“Any sign of the Clan
starship?” Aiyana asked.

“Nothing, it’s probably
hours away.”

“That’s good news” said
Carson. “Well, let’s give their little spy something to watch.” He moved the
buggy to within four hundred kilometers of the ship.

“I’ve downloaded the
flight path” said the little vessel “and I’m switching to an all-oxygen
atmosphere.”

“Why?”

“Because once this starts
the inertial dampening will be so powerful you won’t be able to breathe.”

“Oh great. Say, you know
you’ve got a heat alert going?”

“Yes, that’s one of my
batteries, I’ve had them on maximum charge for hours. Don’t worry, they won’t
stay that way for long – I’m about to dump it all into the push drive.”

“I’m holding shell
spin-up at ninety-nine percent” the ship said. “Are you guys ready?”

They buckled into their
acceleration couches.

“Let’s do it”

Moments later they were
rendered them as immobile as flies in amber.

T minus six seconds

The buggy’s push drive,
gulping energy at the rate of three million megajoules per second, hurtled the
little craft forward with an acceleration of ten thousand standard gravities. The
drive could operate at this level for eight seconds without melting.

T minus four

The little craft reached
a velocity of two hundred kilometers a second. By now the distance to the ship
had been halved. It threw the push drive into reverse. The superstructure
groaned in protest.

T minus three

Three light seconds away
from the ship the observation platform registered the buggy’s charge. It
considered its options. Did the operatives think that their high velocity would
avoid triggering the mines? Had they discovered an unknown flaw in the
configuration? Was it a bluff using a remote controlled vehicle? Its orders
were to preserve the starship if possible but prevent it departing at all
costs. Perhaps it should play safe and blow the mines.

It spent too long
thinking. One tenth of a second after detecting the buggy’s forward motion the
platform was rammed by Tallis’s tug travelling at one third the speed of light.
Destruction was instantaneous.

T minus two

The buggy stopped
decelerating as it passed through the gap in the minefield at a velocity of four
kilometers a second.

T minus one point eight-seven-five

Using the massive
gravitational gradient of the shell the buggy took just 78 milliseconds to
execute a perfect semicircular turn. It dropped through the ship’s north axis
desperately shedding speed. Still moving at a velocity of one hundred meters a
second it crashed into the landing dock.

T minus point zero
five

The ship completed the
last one percent of shell spin-up. Space-time folded round the vessel as it
surged forward at a nominal acceleration of ten billion standard gravities.

T

The starship’s backwash
of exotic particles, gamma radiation, and gravitational waves triggered every
sensor in the minefield. Within two microseconds every mine underwent
hyper-accelerated implosion; one hundred thousand kilograms of neutronium and
anti-neutronium fused then blossomed into a ball of pure energy ninety
kilometers in diameter.

Four hours later Renshu
was tottering home from a long evening at the Firkin.

“Look darling” said the
pretty young woman on his arm “a new star! Isn’t that supposed to be good
luck?”

“I do hope so my dear, I
do hope so.”

“Aiyana, Carson, wake
up!”

Carson blinked, and blinked
again. Aiyana was slowly unbuckling her flight harness.

“Aiyana, Carson, talk to
me!” the buggy wailed.

“We’re okay” he assured
the machine. He looked at Aiyana again. “We are, aren’t we honey?”

She nodded, adding a weak
smile.

“That’s a relief – I was
worried. You both passed out on impact.”

“And how are
you
?”
Carson asked the buggy.

“Well I lost a battery,
the landing gear is wrecked, and I think I bent my chassis, but apart from that
I’m fine.”

Carson grinned. “Good job,
little guy” he said as he followed Aiyana into the ship.

“Where are we?” she
asked.

“Eight minutes out from
the Falk system” said the ship.

“Did the mines blow?”

“They must have. We put
on quite a show as we left.”

“Well I’m off to take a
long, long shower” Aiyana announced. They had been confined to the buggy’s tiny
cabin for over forty-eight hours.

“Better get some rest
too” Carson added. “We’re stopping to take a navigational fix then we’re heading
into the system.”

“You still want to try
for the stuff on Falk’s satellite? But suppose they spot us? They found the
ship once and they could do it again. Besides, the buggy is in no state to make
another long trip.”

“We’re not returning the
outer edge of the system; we’re going to fly the ship directly to the moon
before Tabarak can regroup.”

“Oh great! We’re going to
take a starship through a solar system! Now who was it who gave me a
patronizing lecture about hitting solid objects at superluminal speed?”

“Believe me” said the
ship “compared to what we’ve just been through, this is a prudent, cautious
maneuver.”

Aiyana threw up her
hands.

“Whatever! The sooner we
get out of here the better.”

Ten hours later they were
in the buggy hovering above the surface of the Rose. They had materialized five
light seconds from Falk, although every minute the planet and its satellite retreated
another nine hundred kilometers as they followed their mutual orbit around the
sun.

“My frame of reference
doesn’t change” the ship explained. “Usually that’s not a problem because all
the stars in this part of the galaxy are moving in the same general direction,
but it doesn’t work so well with planets.”

“What happens outside the
local arm?” Aiyana asked.

“Then the fun really
starts: if you go to the opposite side of the Milky Way you’re travelling at six
hundred kilometers a second relative to the local systems.”

“Mountain peak coming up”
said Carson.

Apart from the pinkish
hue bestowed by Falk’s M class sun, the cratered landscape that rolled beneath
them seemed identical to countless other airless worlds. The ground began to
rise as the buggy followed the upward slope of the desolate terrain. Carson imagined
the titanic impact that created the mountain; if the colliding asteroid had
been any larger the moon would have been shattered, and Falk would be a ringed
planet.

“How are you doing nest
mate?” Aiyana asked Tallis – her portable nest was bolted immediately behind
their cabin.

“
This world has no smell. It is [untranslatable]
flying in the dark.
”

“There they are” said
Carson.

Instinctively they both
leaned forward. Thirty ancient containers were arrayed in a semicircle on the
mountain’s rounded summit. The buggy positioned itself ten meters above the
hoard. Carson and Aiyana, clad in their new environment suits, opened the hatch
and peered down at the ground.

“Wow!” said Aiyana, “they
could have been here yesterday.”

In the lunar soil surrounding
the modules was a maze of footprints, perfectly preserved in the hard vacuum. On
closer examination Carson could see that there were two types: one set had been
made by the kind of environment suit commonly in use during the fourth
millennium, the other, heavier impressions, were an unknown design.

“Oh God! Those deep
prints must have been made by the Techs – they’re eight thousand years old.”

Four of the modules had
been cut open, their covers sprawling in the dust. It was around these units
that the more recent footprints were clustered.

“So here’s what I think
happened” said Carson. “The settlers of Falk stumbled across this cache four
thousand years ago, soon after they arrived in the system. They cut their way
into a few modules but all they found was, by their standards, old junk. They
took a few souvenirs, including Samuelson’s tablet, although I doubt any of
them could read Ancient English, and the whole find was forgotten as the
culture retreated to its present state.”