Oenone and Graeae had spent four years of patrolling uninhabited star systems, providing occasional random escorts for merchant ships in the hope of engaging pirates, exercised with the Fleet on full-system defence attacks, taken part in a marine assault on an industrial station suspected of building antimatter combat wasps, and making innumerable goodwill calls at ports throughout the 4th Fleets sector. For the last eight months the Admiralty had assigned them to an independent interception duty, under the command of the Confederation Naval Intelligence Service. This was the third chase flight the CNIS had sent them on: the first ship had been empty when they reached it; the second, a blackhawk, managed to elude them with its longer swallow range, much to Syrinxs extreme chagrin. But the Dymasio was undeniably guilty; the CNIS had suspected it of carrying antimatter for some time, and this flight proved it. Now the ship was preparing to enter an inhabited system to make contact with an asteroid separatist group. This time they would make their arrest. This time! Oenone s cabin atmosphere seemed compressed by the prospect.
Even Eileen Carouch, the CNIS lieutenant who was liaising with them, had picked up on the Edenists expectancy. She was strapped into the couch next to Syrinx, a middle-aged woman with a bland, unmemorable face, the kind Syrinx supposed was ideal for an active agent. But the personality behind it was resolute and resourceful; discovering the Dymasio s hoarded cache was proof of that.
Right now she had her eyes tight closed, accessing the datavised information Oenone was providing through bitek processors interfaced with their hardware equivalents, allowing all the Adamists to see what was going on.
Dymasio s ready to jump, Syrinx said.
Thank heavens for that. My nerves cant stand much more of this.
Syrinx felt a grin on her lips. She always found a slight edge of tension in her dealings with Adamists on an individual basis; them and their emotions locked inside impenetrable bone, you never knew quite what they felt, which was difficult for the empathic Edenists to handle. But Eileen had turned out to be amazingly blunt with her opinions. Syrinx quite enjoyed her company.
The Dymasio vanished. Syrinx felt the sharp kink in space as the ships patterning nodes warped the fabric of reality around her hull; to Oenone the distortion was like a flare. One that was totally quantifiable. The voidhawk instinctively knew the emergence-point coordinate.
Lets go!syrinx broadcast loudly.
Power flooded through the voidhawks patterning cells. An interstice was torn open. They plunged into the expanding wormhole. Syrinx could feel Graeae generating its own wormhole away to one side, then the interstice closed behind them, sealing them in timeless oblivion. Imagination, twinned with genuine voidhawk sensorium input, provided a giddy rushing sensation for the couple of heartbeats it took to traverse the wormhole. A terminus opened at some indeterminable distance, a different texture of negation, seemingly curving round them. Starlight began to pour in, bending into a filigree of slender blue-white lines around the hull. Oenone shot out into space. Stars became hard diamond points again.
The event horizon had evaporated from the Dymasio s hull, depositing the starship five light-days out from Honecks sun. Its sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels emerged from the hull with the timidity of a hibernating creature venturing out into a spring day. As with all Adamist starships, it took time to check its location, and scan local space for stray comets or rock fragments. That crucial time lapse allowed the tremendous spacial flaws accompanying the opening of the voidhawks terminuses to remain undetected.
Ignorant of his invisible followers, the Dymasio s captain activated the starships main fusion drive, heading towards the next jump coordinate.
Its moving again, Syrinx said. Preparing to go insystem. Do you want to interdict? The thought of antimatter being carried into an inhabited system disturbed her.
Whats the new destination? Eileen Carouch asked.
Syrinx consulted the systems almanac stored in Oenone s memory cells. It looks like Kirchol, the outer gas giant.
Any settlements in orbit? She hadnt quite grasped how to pull information from Oenone the way she could from hardware memory cores.
None listed.
It has to be heading for a rendezvous, then. Dont interdict it, follow it in.
Let it into an inhabited system?
Sure. Look, if it was just the antimatter we wanted, we could have boarded any time in the last three months. Thats how long weve known the stuff was on board. Dymasio has visited seven inhabited star systems since we started monitoring it, without threatening any of them. Now my agent confirms the captain has found a buyer with these separatist hotheads, and I want them. This way we can wrap up both supplier and destination. We could even come out of it with the location of the antimatter-production station. Commendations all round, so just be patient.
OK. Did you catch all that?syrinx asked thetis.
Certainly did. And shes quite right.
I know, but ...she broadcast a complex emotional harmonic of eagerness and frustration.
Bear with it, little sister.mental laughter. Thetis always knew how to tweak her. Graeae had been born before Oenone , but there was a marked comparison in size; with a hull diameter of a hundred and fifteen metres Oenone was the largest of all Iasius s children. And it wasnt until pubertys growth hormones came into effect that Thetis outmatched her in physical tussles. But they had always been the closest, always competing against each other.
Ive never met anyone more unsuitable for a captaincy,ruben chided. No composure, all teenage recklessness, thats your fault, young lady. Im jumping ship when this is over, bugger what the contract says.
She laughed out loud, quickly turning it into a cough for Eileens benefit. Even though she was used to the degree of honesty which affinity fostered, Ruben always astounded her with his intimate knowledge of her emotional composition. You dont complain about my other teenage attributes,she shot back, complete with a very graphic image.
Oh, lady, you just wait till were off duty.
Ill hold you to that.
The prospect almost made the tense waiting worthwhile.
Because of the need for a more precise trajectory when jumping towards a planet than for an interstellar jump, Dymasio spent a good fifty minutes re-aligning its course with considerable accuracy. Once its new orbital vector intersected Kirchol, the starship reconfigured itself for a jump.
Weapons status check, please,syrinx demanded when the light from Dymasio s dive flame began to fade.
Combat wasps and proximity defence systems on-line,chi replied.
OK, everybody, alert status one. We dont know how many hostiles there are going to be around Kirchol, so well proceed with extreme caution. The admiral wants this ship interdicted, not destroyed, but if were outnumbered we let loose the combat wasps and retreat. Lets just hope this is the nest.