Alexander remembered the debates. They had lasted for nearly an entire season, and in the end Salmagundi’s essentially insular nature won out. The star had not exploded, and the scientists accepted the idea that something had simply caused it to burn itself out.
The thought that the object Flynn Jorgenson described was somehow a remnant of that event was disturbing. Enough that members of the Triad who, like Alexander, had been present during that first event were dusting off the rhetoric from the earlier session as if the decade-old incident were still being debated.
The Great Triad had a memory broad and deep. No member forgot any slight, any error, any insult—to the point that every word spoken had such a ponderous history associated with it that it was wondrous that anyone spoke at all.
The debate launched into a tangent about Xi Virginis, and Alexander was about to use his authority as the chair to rein in the arguments when the comm on the table in front of him began flashing. He picked up the device and hit the receive button. The device was muted, so the caller’s voice was translated to text that silently scrolled across the screen in front of an image of the woods southeast of Ashley.
The text jerked, stuttered, and mistyped some words, and Alexander could almost hear the panicked excitement of the caller embedded in the fragmented text.
“WE LOST THE MINGLASERS. OBJECT EMITTED SOME SORT WEAPON. DESTROY TWO OUTBUILDINGS MULTIPLE MISSLE HITS.”
The text kept scrolling past an image of a ruddy translucent dome shedding the effects of multiple missiles.
“Order!” Alexander snapped at the room before him. The arguments broke off instantly, and a sea of elderly tattooed faces turned toward him.
“There has been a development,” Alexander said. He then piped the feed from his comm to the room’s main display screen and unmuted it. The flat, shaky images came from someone’s handheld comm. As the view of Mr. Sheldon’s camp filled the giant curving screen above the meeting table, another missile trail sliced the right side of the image in half, ending in the skin of the hemisphere. The hemisphere beyond the rolling explosion turned a deeper red, almost black, as smoke and flame lapped across the surface.
The voice accompanying the image was shaky. “The thing has taken hits from every missile we have. I have no idea how, but it has a mass-capable Emerson field.”
Alexander spoke to the comm in his hand, “Can you please repeat the damage?”
The speaker took a deep breath and said, “We lost the mining lasers and crew. It . . . ate . . . two of our outbuildings closest to the impact site. The shield you see there is two hundred seventy-five meters in diameter.”
“Has it grown? Moved?”
“No.”
“Then conserve your weapons. Let us consider it.”
“Did you hear me? The mining crew is gone. We don’t even have bodies.”
“Conserve your weapons.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexander remuted the comm and looked out at the Grand Triad. “It seems,” he said, “we face a larger threat than we anticipated.”
The debate erupted again. This time Alexander waited only until the first obvious lines of argument played themselves out. When he spoke, he was the first one to mention nukes.
It was admittedly drastic, but he was protecting their whole way of life.
PART THREE
Prodigal Son
More individuals are born than can possibly survive.
—CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Test of Faith
Sometimes you get a miracle. Don’t expect another one.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.
—CHARLES the BOLD (1433-1477)
Date: 2526.6.3 (Standard) 750,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534
For the first time in her life, Parvi physically felt when a ship fired its tach-drive. A very slight physical jerk as all the indicators on the console in front of her soared toward the red. None showed dangerous levels, but the drive came out of the jump hotter than it should have. The one damping coil that they’d gotten back up to 75 percent capacity was much too narrow an aperture to cool off the drives. The indicators were still edging upward.
Parvi held her breath until, one by one, very slowly, the readouts started going back down.
“Isn’t that a beautiful sight?” Wahid said, and Parvi silently agreed.
Then she realized that he wasn’t talking about the fact that the Eclipse’s engines weren’t going to melt. She looked up and saw a blue-green planet filling most of the holo above the bridge console.
“I have radio traffic all over the place,” Tsoravitch announced. “Video, audio, data traffic. Our sensors are completely saturated. I have commsats, and at least half a dozen major population centers on the coast of the main continent.”
Parvi saw Mosasa smiling out of the corner of her eye.
“We made it,” Wahid said over the PA system. “We fucking made it!”
Parvi looked at the planet hanging in the holo as she asked, “How close are we?”
Wahid was grinning, “A fucking bull’s-eye. Point-seven-five million klicks out.”
“Shit,” Parvi stared at the meters on the console in front of her.
“What’s the matter?” Wahid said.
“We’re too close,” Mosasa said, the smile leaving his face. He turned toward Parvi. “How long before the drives cool to safe levels?”
Parvi shook her head. “I don’t know. At the current rate, twelve hours, but we only have one damaged coil working. Venting continuously that long, it may start to degrade or fail entirely.”
“How much of a problem are we talking about?”
Parvi leaned back.“Worst case, if the coil fails completely, the drives will still go cold in about forty-eight hours all by themselves. Being hot that long increases the chance of an eventual failure. We’re also vulnerable if someone operates a tach-drive too close to us. That will cause the drives to heat up again.”
“Damn.”
Mosasa turned to Tsoravitch. “Our first priority, make contact with the surface. We can at least warn away outgoing tach-ships and request them to send someone up for repairs. Bill? Are you on-line here?”
“Yes.”
“Can you do anything to help cool the drives?” Parvi asked Bill.
“We unfortunately lack the equipment. We did everything possible before the jump.”
“What kind of danger are we in?” she asked. “What if someone does tach in on top of us?”
“A high-efficiency twenty light-year jump arriving within a two-million-kilometer radius will severely damage the drives. The effect drops off exponentially as the jump distance and drive efficiency decreases.”
“I just wish there was an AU or two between us and the planet,” Parvi said. “How the hell did we get that kind of navigational error?”
“Most probably a significant concentration of dark matter directly between here and the former location of Xi Virginis which caused an unexpected space-time curvature. I will be able to give a more thorough analysis once I’ve been able to review the telemetry data from the jump.”
“At this point,” Mosasa said, “Our main concern is contact. And once the drives are cold, I want preparations for landing.”