The Night's Dawn Trilogy (484 page)

“At last,” Liol said eagerly. He closed his eyes and accessed the image.

Beaulieu hadn’t activated any visual enhancement programs to counter the redness. All Joshua could make out was a big brilliant-white
shape gliding up towards a rendezvous with Tojolt-HI—the same configuration as the ship already docked to the rim: five huge
globes clumped round a drive unit and scoop. Except these globes were glowing a vivid purple-white, brighter than the photosphere.

“It surfaced twenty minutes ago,” Beaulieu datavised.

The cosmonik replayed the recording.
Lady Mac
’s sensors had detected a magnetic anomaly within the photosphere, hundreds of kilometres wide, the flux lines twisting into
a dense wood-knot pattern. But it was moving faster than orbital velocity, and growing larger. Visual sensors started tracking
it, showing the endless scarlet haze. At first it was as unruffled as a sea mist at dawn, then the impossible happened and
long streaks of shadow rippled across the picture. They were actually folds in the gas. Something underneath was stirring
the igneous hydrogen atoms, creating swirling currents in the calm envelope. A bright patch of white light started to shine
up through the red plasma. The ship rose up smooth and clean through the outer layers of the photosphere, scoop first, pushing
a vast bow wave of glowing ions ahead of it. Each of its five globes was shining as bright as a white dwarf star, radiating
away enormous quantities of electromagnetic and thermal energy. Thick scarlet coronas avalanched from the lip of the scoop,
purling gently all the way back down into the body of the red giant. The remainder of the nimbus was sucked down into the
ship’s funnel, growing steadily brighter as it progressed, until it was consumed by a dazzling white flame burning brightly
at the throat.

“The globes have been dimming since it surfaced,” Beaulieu said. “Their external temperature is dropping in concert.”

“Looks like you were right about it being a ramscoop, Josh,” Liol said cheerfully. “It’s got to be where they get their mass
from now the asteroids have been consumed. Fancy that, mining the sun.”

“That thermal dump technology is damn impressive,” Sarha said. “It’s got to be superior to anything we have. Shedding heat
while you’re
inside
a star. God!”

“Simply compressing and condensing photosphere hydrogen into a stable gaseous state wouldn’t generate that much heat,” Alkad
said. “They must be fusing it, burning it down into helium, perhaps even all the way to carbon.”

“Christ, they must be desperate for mass.”

“The iron limit,” Joshua mused. “You can’t fuse atoms past iron without having to input energy. Every other reaction until
that element generates energy.”

“Is that relevant?” Liol asked.

“Not sure. But it makes iron their gold equivalent. It can’t hurt knowing what they value most. It’s the trans-iron elements
that they’ll be running out of.”

“The fact that they’ve resorted to this extraordinary method gives us some considerable leverage,” Samuel said. “We’ve seen
little evidence of molecular engineering compounds in the diskcity structure. Our materials science will allow them to exploit
mass far more efficiently than they do currently. Every innovation we bring has the potential for inflicting vast change upon
them.”

“This is what we have to decide,” Syrinx said. “Liol, have the ELINT satellites revealed anything that might help us?”

“Not really. They’re holding station a thousand kilometres above the darkside now, which gives us excellent coverage. It’s
pretty much what we observed as we flew in: trains moving about and very little else. Oh, we picked up a couple of nasty-looking
atmospheric vents. The tubes must have ruptured. There were bodies in the gas stream.”

“They must fight a constant maintenance battle against structural fatigue,” Oxley said. “That’s a lot of surface area to cover.”

“Everything’s relative,” Sarha said. “There’s a lot of Mosdva to cover it.”

“I wonder how inter-dependant the dominions are,” Parker said. “For all Quantook-LOU says about driving a hard bargain on
the cargo and mass which Anthi-CL sends to the inner dominions, they have to ensure supplies are preserved. Without fresh
material, the tubes would decay. The inner dominions would react strongly to such a threat, I imagine.”

“We’ve confirmed eighty dead areas across Tojolt-HI,” Beaulieu said. “They amount to just under thirteen per cent of the total.”

“So much? That would tend to indicate a society in decline, possibly even a decadent one.”

“Individual dominions might fall,” Ruben said. “But overall their society remains intact. Face it, the Confederation has inhabited
worlds that don’t exactly thrive, yet some of our cultures are positively vibrant. And I find it significant that none of
the rim sections are dead.”

“The other major source of external activity is based around those dead sections,” Liol said. “It looks like major repair
and reconstruction work. Those dominions certainly aren’t decadent, they’re busy expanding into their old neighbours’ territory.”

“I can accept they’re socially comparable to us,” Syrinx said. “So based on that assumption, do we offer them ZTT technology?”

“In exchange for a ten-thousand-year-old almanac?” Joshua said. “You’ve got to be kidding. Quantook-LOU is smart, he’ll know
there’s something very wrong about that. I’d suggest we build in an exchange of astronometrical data and records along with
whatever commercial trade deal we can put together. After all, they’ve never seen what lies on the other side of the nebula.
If we offer them the ability to break free of Tyrathca-dominated space they’ll need to know what’s out there.”

“I’ve told you,” Ashly said. “ZTT isn’t a way out.”

“Not for the proles,” Liol said. “But the leadership might take it for their families, or clans, or members of whatever cause
they rally round. And it’s the leadership we have to deal with.”

“Is that the kind of legacy we really want to leave behind us?” Peter Adul asked quietly. “The opportunity for interstellar
conflict and internal strife?”

“Don’t get all moral on me,” Liol said. “Not you. We can’t afford those kind of ethics. It’s
our
goddamn species on the brink here. I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”

“If, as intended, we’re going to ask a God for its help, perhaps you should consider how worthy we’re going to appear before
it should you follow that course.”

“What if it considers obliterating your foes to be a worthy act? You’re assigning it very human traits. The Tyrathca never
did that.”

“That’s a point,” Dahybi said. “Now we know why the Tyrathca managed to get where they are with zero imagination, how does
that reflect on our analysis of the Sleeping God?”

“Very little, I’m afraid,” Kempster said. “From what we’ve learned about them, I’d say that unless the Sleeping God explained
itself to the Tyrathca of Swantic-LI, they simply wouldn’t know what the hell it was. By calling it a God, they were being
as truthful as only they can be. The simplest translation equates to our own: something so powerful we do not comprehend it.”

“Just how much will ZTT change the diskcity society?” Syrinx asked.

“Considerably,” Parker said. “As Samuel points out, just by being here we have changed it. We have shown Tojolt-HI that it
is possible to circumvent Tyrathca space. As this is a species with an intellect not dissimilar to our own, we must assume
they will ultimately pursue that method. In effect, that gives us control over the timing, nothing more. And allowing them
access to ZTT now may generate a portion of goodwill among at least one faction of a very long lived and versatile race. I
say we should pursue every effort to make the Mosdva our friends. After all, we now know that ZTT or the voidhawk distortion
field ability are hardly the last word in interstellar travel, the Kiint teleport ability has taught us that lesson.”

“Any other options?” Syrinx asked.

“As I see it, we have four in total,” Samuel said. “We can try and get the almanac through a trade exchange. We can use force.”
He paused to smile apologetically as his fellow Edenists registered their disapproval. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we have
that ability, therefore it should be examined. Our weaponry is likely to be superior, and our electronic and software capability
would definitely be able to extract information from their memory cores.”

“That’s an absolute last resort,” Syrinx said.

“Totally,” Joshua agreed firmly. “This is a culture which wages war over any spare mass on a scale we’ve never seen before.
They might not have sophisticated weapons compared to ours, but they’ll have one hell of a lot of them; and
Lady Mac
is in the front line. What are the other two?”

“If Quantook-LOU proves uncooperative, we simply find a dominion which will help us. We’re not exactly short of choice. The
last option is a variant of that: we leave straight away and find a Tyrathca colony.”

“We’ve established a reasonable level of contact with Quantook-LOU and the Anthi-CL dominion,” Sarha said. “I think we should
build on that. Don’t forget time is a factor as well, and we came here so we wouldn’t have to deal with the Tyrathca.”

“Very well,” Syrinx said. “We’ll follow Joshua’s tactic for now. Set up a major commercial trade, and tack on the almanac
data as a subsidiary deal.”

______

Joshua kept the same team with him when he returned to the diskcity. This time they were shown directly to Quantook-LOU’s
private glass bubble.

“Have you found trade items within your ship, Captain Joshua Calvert?” the Mosdva asked.

“I believe so,” Joshua said. He glanced round the translucent chamber with its barnacles of alien machinery, vaguely disquieted.
Something had changed. His neural nanonics ran a comparison check with his visual memory file. “I’m not sure if it’s relevant,”
he told his crew through the affinity link, “But several chunks of hardware bolted onto the piping are different now.”

“We see them, Josh,” Liol answered.

“Anybody got any ideas what they could be?”

“I’m not picking up any sensor emissions,” Oski said. “But they’ve got strong magnetic fields, definitely active electronics
inside.”

“Beam weapons?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t see anything that equates to a nozzle on any of them, and the magnetic field doesn’t correspond to
a power cell. My best guess is that they’ve rebuilt this whole chamber as a magnetic resonance scanner: if they’ve got quantum
interface detectors sensitive enough they probably think it will allow them to look inside our armour.”

“Will it?”

“No. Our suit shielding will block that. Nice try though.”

“Did you examine the processor I gave you?” Joshua asked Quantook-LOU.

“It has been tested. Your design is a radical one. We believe we can duplicate it.”

“I can offer more advanced processors than that. As well, we have power storage cells that operate at very high density levels.
We offer the formula for superstrength molecular chains; which should be very useful to you, given your shortage of mass.”

“Interesting. And what would you like in return?”

“We saw your ship returning from the sun. Your thermal dissipation technology would be extremely useful to us.”

The negotiation took off well, Joshua and Quantook-LOU reeling out lists of technology and fabrication methods. The trick
was in trying to balance them: was optical memory crystal worth more or less than a membrane layer that could guard metal
surfaces against vacuum ablation? Did a lowenergy carbon filtration process have parity with ultrastrong magnets?

As they talked, Oski kept monitoring the new hardware modules. The magnetic fields they put out were constantly changing,
sweeping across the translucent bubble in waves. None of them were able to penetrate their suits. In return, her own sensors
could pick up the resonance patterns they generated inside the Mosdva. She slowly built up a three-dimensional image of their
internal structure, the triangular plates of bone and mysterious organs. It was an enjoyable irony, she felt. After forty
minutes, the magnetic fields were abruptly switched off.

Liol was paying scant attention to the negotiations. He and Beaulieu were occupied reviewing the data coming in from their
ELINT satellites. Now they had the observation subroutines customized properly, there was a lot of activity to see on the
darkside. Trains moved everywhere, following a simple generalized pattern. Large full tankers made their way inwards from
the rim, offloading cargo at the industrial modules, then once they were empty, they turned and went directly back to the
rim. Goods trains, those loaded with items produced inside industrial modules, ran in every direction. Liol and Beaulieu were
beginning to think they might even be independent trading caravans, forever touring round the dominions. Something Joshua
hadn’t asked was if the Mosdva had currency, or if everything was bartered.

“Another vent,” Beaulieu commented. “It’s only seventy kilometres from the captain’s location.”

“Christ, that’s the third this morning.” Liol ordered the closest satellite to focus on the plume. Bobbles of liquid were
oscillating amid the gas squirting out towards the nebula. Ebony shapes, radiating brightly in the infrared, thrashed around
inside it, their motions grinding down the further away they got from the darkside. “You’d think they’d have better structural
integrity after all this time. Everything else they do seems to work pretty well. I know I wouldn’t like to live with that
kind of threat looming over me, it’s worse than building a house on the side of a volcano.” His subconscious wouldn’t leave
the notion alone; there was something wrong about the frequency of the tube breeches. He ran a quick projection through his
neural nanonics. “Uh, guys, if they suffer structural failure at this rate, the whole diskcity will fail inside of seven years.
And I’ve included some pretty generous rebuilding allowances in that.”

“Then you must have got it wrong,” Kempster said.