Zamudio was the one who finally gave the others a temporary edge — even if it probably wasn’t in quite the way he would have planned. But the Palestine’s Captain must have thought he stood a very good chance of damping his antimatter flow, or else he would not have tried stopping his engine.
The explosion had been as hard and radiantly white as I remembered from the day in the nursery when the Islamabad had gone up.
But the next day, something unexpected happened.
In the instants before Zamudio’s ship had blown up, it had still been transmitting technical data to its two allies, both locked in the same deceleration burn that Zamudio had tried unsuccessfully to abort. I could guess that much myself, even though I was not directly privy to that flow of information. That was the other odd thing. The rest of the Flotilla had become grudgingly united against me. I hadn’t really expected that, but in hindsight I should have realised that it would happen. I had given the bastards a common enemy. In a way, it was to my credit. There was only one of me, yet I had raised such fear in the other Captains that they had thought it best to amalgamate against me, despite all that had happened between them.
And now this — Zamudio clawing back from the grave.
‘That technical data was more useful than he realised,’ Armesto said.
‘It didn’t do Zamudio much good,’ I said.
By now there was an appreciable redshift between my ship and the other two Flotilla craft, beginning to fall behind me as they decelerated. But the communications software effortlessly removed all distortion, save for the increasing timelag which accompanied the break-up of the Flotilla.
‘No,’ Armesto said. ‘But in their sacrifice they gave us something tremendously valuable. Shall I explain?’
‘If it pleases you,’ I said, with what I hoped was a convincing show of boredom.
But rather than being bored, I was actually a little scared.
Armesto told me about the technical data, squirted across from the Palestine until the last nanosecond before it detonated. It concerned the attempts that had been made to shut down the flow of antimatter. It had always been known that the procedure was almost bound to be fatal, but until then the precise failure mode had been unclear, glimpsed only fleetingly in computer simulations. There had been speculation that if the failure mode could be understood sufficiently well, it might even be possible to counteract it by subtle manipulation of the fuel-flow. It was nothing that could be tested in advance. Now, however, a kind of test had been made for them. The telemetry from the ship had ended just after the failure mode had begun to arise, but it still probed closer into that instability regime than any carefully harnessed laboratory test or computer simulation.
And it had taught them well.
Enough information could be extracted from those numbers to guess how the failure mode must have evolved. The numbers, fed into the on-board simulations devised by the propulsion teams, hinted at a strategy for containing the imbalance. Tweak the magnetic bottle topology slightly and the injection stream could be neatly curtailed with no risk of normal-matter blowback or antimatter leakage. It was still, of course, hellishly risky.
Which did not stop them trying it.
My ship was falling ahead of the Brazilia and the Baghdad, and those latter two ships had flipped over to bring their engines forward for the deceleration phase. The bright spikes of those antimatter torches pin-pricked the minutely redshifted hemisphere of sky to the rear of the Santiago, like a pair of hot blue sibling suns. The thrust beams of the two deceleration ships were not to be underestimated as potential weapons, but neither Armesto or Omdurman would have the nerve to sweep their torches over my ship. Their argument was with me, not with the many viable colonists I still carried. Equally, I could consider igniting my own engine and dousing one of the two laggard ships with the Santiago’s exhaust — but the other vessel would almost certainly take that as a incitement to kill me, whether or not I still carried passengers. My simulations showed that I would not be able to realign my own flame before the other ship took me out in a single baptism of hellfire.
Not an option, I thought… and that meant I would have to live with those two enemies unless I found another way of destroying them. I was still considering the possibities when, in perfect synchrony, the two drive flames to the rear winked out.
I waited, breath held, for the twin blossoms of nuclear light which would signify that the antimatter drives had malfunctioned during shutdown.
But they never came.
Armesto and Omdurman had succeeded in quenching their flames, and now they were coasting with me, albeit with the lower velocities they had gained during the time they were decelerating.
Armesto contacted me. ‘I hope you saw what we just did, Sky. That changes everything, doesn’t it?’
‘Nowhere near as much as you’d like to think.’
‘Oh, don’t play games. You know what it means. Omdurman and I now have the ability to turn on our engines for however short a time we want. You don’t. That makes all the difference.’
I mulled this over. ‘It changes nothing. Our ships still have almost the same relative rest-mass as they did a day ago. You are still obliged to continue decelerating now if you want to make orbit around 61 Cygni-A. My ship’s lighter by the mass of the sleeper rings I ejected. That still gives me the edge over you. I’m staying in cruise mode until the last minute.’
‘You’re forgetting something,’ Armesto said. ‘We have our dead as well.’
‘It’s too late to make a difference. You’re cruising slower than me. And you said it yourself — you never sustained as many casualties as we did.’
‘We’ll find a way to make the difference, Haussmann. You’re not getting ahead of us.’
I looked at the long-range displays, which showed the vastly magnified dots of the other two ships. They were flipping over again, slowly but surely. I watched the dots elongate into thin lines, then contract again.
And then the dots were haloed by twin auras of exhaust radiation.
The two other ships were rejoining the chase.
‘It’s not over,’ Armesto said.
A day later, I watched the dead drift away from the other two ships.
It was twenty-four hours since Armesto and Omdurman had resumed the chase, demonstrating their ability to control their drive flames in a manner that was not yet within my grasp. The death of the Palestine had been a blessing in disguise for them… even if the better part of a thousand colonists had been killed in the process.
Now the other two ships were moving at the same relative speed as the Santiago, once again cruising towards Journey’s End. And they were trying very hard to beat me at my own game. There was a kind of inevitability to this, of course. My ship was still less massive than theirs… which meant they would have to shed mass if they wanted to follow the same cruise/deceleration curve as I did.
Which meant throwing their own dead into space.
There was nothing elegant about the way they did it. They must have worked overnight to smash through the same countermeasures which it had taken Norquinco nearly his entire life to circumvent… but they had the advantage over Norquinco in that they were not trying to complete this work in secret. Aboard the Brazilia and the Baghdad, every hand must have been turned towards that goal, working furiously. I almost envied them. So much easier when there was no need to work covertly… but so infinitely less elegant, too.
On the high-magnification image I watched sleeper rings peel off randomly from the two other ships, more like autumn leaves falling from a tree than anything orchestrated. The image resolution was too poor to be sure, but I suspected there were actually space-suited teams crawling around outside those ships with cutting tools and explosives. They were dislodging the sleeper rings by brute force.