The system expanded rapidly until they had a view of a lifeless world no more than a few thousand kilometres in diameter, its surface dotted with ancient impact craters. A broad, artificially flat plain, at odds with the surrounding landscape, surrounded what seemed at first to be just another crater.
'That's the cache entrance you can see there,' Dakota continued. A cutaway view of the planetoid now appeared next to its photorealistic image. 'Same layout as the Tierra cache, in fact and, like the Tierra cache – and every other cache in existence, from what I gather – it's located on a dwarf planet too small to be geologically active.'
The cutaway showed that the cache primarily consisted of a borehole extending more than thirty kilometres beneath the surface, with hundreds of passageways of varying length extending out from this central shaft and into the remaining body of the planetoid.
'How the hell could you know all this?' asked Martinez, switching his gaze between her and Corso.
'This all comes from a renegade Shoal-member-'
'A renegade what?' said Martinez, looking like he was about to throw his walking stick at her.
'Eduard,' intervened Corso, 'as soon as we're done here. I swear.' He nodded to Dakota for her to continue.
Martinez looked far from happy, but held his silence.
'It's a dead cache,' Dakota continued. 'I learned that it was discovered by a race called the Meridians, who're long gone. They had a colony here, but they wiped themselves out while fighting over it. The physical structure is still there, but everything inside was destroyed. If we get the opportunity or the time, I think it would be a very good idea to take a look down inside the cache. Apart from the fact I want to see what it looks like, it'll give us a much better idea of exactly what we're going to be facing once we reach our final destination.'
'And these weapons we're looking for,' said Corso. 'They're inside the cache?'
Dakota tilted the interface chair a few degrees upright so she could see his face more clearly. 'No, but apparently they're close to the mouth of the cache,' she explained. 'And, strictly speaking, they're not weapons. They're a form of field technology – same idea as our own field-generators but whole orders of magnitude more powerful – according to…' according to Trader, she almost said, until she caught Corso's eye.
'The point is,' said Corso, now picking up the thread, 'there's something there that can give us an even better fighting chance against the Emissaries.'
'According to who?' asked Martinez. 'Some… Shoal-member?'
'I think maybe we should go and have that talk,' said Corso, looking as if he would rather do almost anything else. 'And maybe a good stiff drink, if your meds will allow it.'
Chapter Twenty-three
'Let me get this straight,' said Ty. 'I thought no time passed at all during a jump?'
They had come outside again as soon as the latest jump had been completed. Star-tangled nebulae hung in the void behind Olivarri. He had the whitest teeth Ty had ever seen in another human being; they positively shone when he grinned, and right now they were just about the only thing Ty could distinguish through the other man's visor.
Their three-person repair team was completed by Nancy, who was mending a spine-clamp prior to lowering a new spine into place. Ty could see her over Olivarri's shoulder, busily working away.
What lazy creatures we men are, he thought, standing here while the woman toils. The reality, of course, was that Nancy didn't trust anyone but herself to fulfil certain jobs. He found himself recalling the way her hands had gripped his hair the night before, her small lithe form arching above him, her mouth round and wide as she noisily climaxed.
'Virtual time passes. Jump-space has to find a way to deal with the sudden appearance of physical matter from our universe. So it wraps the Mjollnir in a bubble of virtual time.'
'Because time doesn't actually exist within superluminal space?'
'Exactly.' That toothy grin again. 'It's the virtual time that allows the physical matter to begin degrading.'
'But that's purely theoretical, isn't it? We don't know this for a fact.'
Olivarri was standing with one gloved hand resting on the lower curve of a drive-spine. He raised his other hand and waggled it from side to side. 'No, but it's the current best explanation, unless the Shoal have a better idea, and they weren't telling us even before they pulled a vanishing act. But virtual time at least explains why the degradation starts from the outside' – he lifted his helmeted head to look up towards the tip of the drive-spine – 'and works its way in towards the hull, rather than affecting every atom of the frigate at once. You need to introduce time, even if it's just virtual time, to explain that.'
'Like the little bubble of virtual space-time we're caught in had started to shrink.'
'Exactly. And because the virtual time that passes is vanishingly small-'
'We come out with relatively minor degradation.'
'Got it.' That brilliant toothy smile again.
Ty turned to look behind him towards the stern. He couldn't even pick out the Hyades Cluster any more, and it was only six days since they had left Redstone. A hundred metres away, a couple of spiders were hovering around another drive-spine, getting ready to repair some of that very same degradation.
He and Olivarri had decoupled the failed drive-spine, and half a dozen spiders were ready, their extendible arms gripping it at various points, to lift it away from the hull once the clamps that attached it in place were released.
Its replacement waited nearby, held in place by its own separate retinue of spider-mechs. It was a tricky and dangerous procedure, so all three humans kept a safe distance for the moment, letting the spiders do most of the work, and stepping in only where absolutely necessary.
Despite the precautions, there had already been some near fatalities. Lamoureaux had nearly fried himself getting too close to some frayed power-conduits; a hull-plate had swung loose while being detached, totalling a couple of spiders and very nearly taking Corso with it. And that wasn't even taking into account the greater risk of replacement drive-spines blowing up once they were plugged into the frigate's plasma flow, if they weren't configured in just the right way.
Given those risks, using the spiders generally, with a few human beings at hand to step in if absolutely necessary, was a fine idea in principle, except that in practice the team had to take over from the spiders on pretty much every occasion. The mechs were fine for grunt work, but the more delicate aspects of the job required human hands and minds.
'Okay,' said Nancy, 'releasing the clamps now.'
The restraints holding the drive-spine in place slid back into the hull, and the spiders arranged around it began emitting tiny jets of gas. Slowly, ponderously, the spine rose away from the hull, tilting to one side as the spiders coordinated with each other. The new drive-spine began to move forward as its own retinue of spiders pushed it towards the slot.
The work was so tedious that it was easy to fall into lengthy conversations. Nancy and Leo had spent most of this shift talking politics, and they quickly picked up the same thread again as the spider-mechs dragged the two drive-spines in different directions.
'Am I right in thinking,' asked Olivarri, 'that the only people who're allowed to vote or hold political office in the Freehold are those who've seen military service?'
'Well, mostly,' Nancy replied. 'Senator Corso's one of the exceptions, but for most of the Senate members, yeah. It's a sane principle.'