‘I found something,’ she said, when she had everyone’s attention. ‘Quite some time ago, in fact: a source of neutrinos, near Cerberus.’
‘How long ago?’ Sajaki said.
‘Before we arrived around Resurgam.’ Watching his expression darken, she added: ‘There was nothing worth telling you, Triumvir. We did not even know we would be sent out here at that point. And the nature of the source was very unclear.’
‘And now?’ Sylveste said.
‘Now I have… a clearer idea. As we approached Hades, it became obvious that the emissions at source were pure tau-neutrinos of a particular energy spectrum; unique, in fact, amongst the signatures of any human technology.’
‘Then it’s something human that you’ve found out here?’ Pascale said.
‘That was my assumption.’
‘A Conjoiner drive,’ Hegazi said, and Volyova nodded slightly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Only Conjoiner drives produce tau-neutrino signatures which match the source around Cerberus.’
‘Then there’s another ship out here?’ Pascale said.
‘That was my first thought,’ Volyova said, sounding uneasy. ‘And, in fact, it isn’t entirely wrong, either.’ Then she whispered commands into her bracelet, causing the central display sphere to warm to life and begin running through a pre-programmed routine she had set up just before the meeting. ‘But it was important to wait until we were close enough for visual identification of the source.’
The sphere showed Cerberus. The moon-sized world was like a less inviting version of Resurgam: monotonously grey, densely cratered. It was dark, too: Delta Pavonis was ten light-hours away, and the other nearby star — Hades — offered almost no light at all. Although it had been born furiously hot in a supernova explosion, the tiny neutron star had long since cooled into the infrared, and to the naked eye it was only visible when its gravitational field tricked background stars into arcs of lensed light. But even if Cerberus had been bathed in light, there was no suggestion of anything which might have lured the Amarantin. Even the best of Volyova’s scans, however, had only mapped the surface at a resolution of kilometres, so very little could be ruled out at this stage. But she had studied the object orbiting Cerberus in considerably greater detail.
She zoomed in on it now. At first it was just a slightly elongated whitish-grey smudge, backdropped by stars, with one edge of Cerberus visible to one side. That was how it had looked to her days ago, before the ship had deployed all its long-baseline eyes. But even then she had found it hard to ignore her suspicions. As more details appeared, it became harder still.
The smudge took on definite attributes of solidity and form now. It was a vaguely conic shape, like a splinter of glass. Volyova made a dimensional grid envelop the object, showing its approximate size. It was clearly several kilometres from end to end: three or four, easily.
‘At this resolution,’ Volyova said, ‘the neutrino emission resolved into two distinct sources.’ She showed them: grey-green blurs spaced either side of the thickened end of the conic shape. As more details phased in, the blurs could be seen to be attached to the body of the splinter by elegant, back-swept spars.
‘A lighthugger,’ Hegazi said. He was right; even at this relatively crude resolution, there was no doubt about it. What they were looking at was another ship, much like their own. The two individual sources of neutrino emission originated from the two Conjoiner engines mounted either side of the hull.
‘The engines are dormant,’ Volyova said. ‘But they still give off a stable flux of neutrinos even when the ship’s not under thrust.’
‘Can you identify the ship?’ Sajaki said.
‘It isn’t necessary,’ Sylveste said, the deep calm in his voice surprising them all. ‘I know which ship it is.’
On the display, the final wave of detail shimmered across the ship, and the view enlarged until the craft filled almost the entire sphere. It was obvious now, even if it had not been completely so before. The ship was damaged; gutted: pocked by great spherical indentations, acres of the hull flensed open to reveal an intricate and queasy complexity of sub-layers which ought never to have been exposed to vacuum.
‘Well?’ Sajaki said.
‘It’s the wreck of the Lorean,’ Sylveste said.
TWENTY
Calvin assumed existence in the lighthugger’s medical suite, still incongruously posed in his enormous hooded chair.
‘Where are we?’ he asked, rummaging in the corner of one eye with his finger, as if he had just awoken from a satisfactorily deep sleep. ‘Still around that shithole of a planet?’
‘We’ve left Resurgam,’ said Pascale, who sat in the seat next to Sylveste, who in turn was reclining on the operation couch, fully clothed and conscious. ‘We’re on the edge of Delta Pavonis’s heliosphere, near the Cerberus/Hades system. They’ve found the Lorean.’
‘Sorry; I think I misheard you.’
‘No; you heard me perfectly well. Volyova showed it to us — it’s definitely the same ship.’
Calvin frowned. Like Pascale — like Sylveste — he had assumed that the Lorean was no longer anywhere near the Resurgam system. Not since Alicia and the other mutineers had stolen it to return to Yellowstone back in the early days of the Resurgam colony. ‘How can it be the Lorean?’
‘We don’t know,’ Sylveste said. ‘All we know is what we’ve told you. You’re as much in the dark as the rest of us.’ At such a point in their conversation, he normally inserted a barb against Calvin, but for once something made him hold his tongue.
‘Is it intact?’
‘Something must have attacked it.’
‘Survivors?’
‘I doubt it. The ship was heavily damaged… whatever it was came suddenly, or they would have tried moving out of range.’
Calvin was silent for a few moments before answering. ‘Alicia must have died, then. I’m sorry.’
‘We don’t know what it was, or how the attack came about,’ Sylveste said. ‘But we may learn something shortly.’
‘Volyova’s launched a probe,’ Pascale said. ‘A robot — capable of crossing over to the Lorean very quickly. It should have arrived by now. She said it will enter the ship and find whatever electronic records have survived.’
‘And then?’
‘We’ll know what killed them.’
‘But that won’t be enough, will it? No matter what you learn from the Lorean, it won’t be enough to make you turn back, Dan. I know you better than that.’
‘You only think you do,’ Sylveste said.
Pascale stood up, coughing. ‘Can we save this for later? If you can’t work together, Sajaki’s not going to have much use for either of you two.’
‘Irrelevant what he thinks about me,’ Sylveste said. ‘Sajaki still has to do whatever I say.’
‘He has a point,’ Calvin said.
Pascale asked the room to extrude an escritoire, with controls and readouts in the Resurgam style. She made a seat and sat herself beneath the escritoire’s curved ivory fascia. Then she called up a map of the data connections in the suite, and set about establishing the necessary links between Calvin’s module and the suite’s medical systems. She looked like she was spinning an elaborate cat’s cradle in thin air. As the connections were created, Calvin acknowledged them, and told her whether to increase or decrease bandwidth along certain pathways, or whether additional topologies were needed. The procedure lasted only a few minutes, and when it was complete Calvin was able to operate the medical suite’s servo-mechanical equipment, causing a mass of tipped alloy arms to descend from the ceiling, like the sculpture of a medusa.