Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley Read Free Book Online Page B

the bridle threw up images and scans, saying, ‘The claim jumpers must have spoofed our assets and fed us fake telemetry – there was some serious throw-weight emplaced around the mirror. One-shot X-ray lasers, shrapnel missiles, ship-killing warheads . . . But they didn’t use them. They tried to cripple us, but they did not try to destroy us.’
    ‘Because they discovered that all the other stromatolites are gone, and they want what we are carrying,’ Tony said. ‘That’s good. It means that they will not do anything that could endanger our cargo. And that means that they will not do anything that could endanger
us
.’
    But if Raqle Thornhilde had told the claim jumpers about the expedition to the slime planet, they would know who owned
Abalunam’s Pride
. They would know where his family lived. He would have to deal with that as and when. Right now, he still needed to make good his escape.
    As the mirror of the wormhole throat dwindled into the starry scape he dropped a couple of drones that would keep watch for the claim jumpers’ frigate, and reprogrammed and deployed a drone that clamped itself to the ship’s prow. It was a poor replacement for the arrays which had been burned away when he had taken out the disrupter needles, but at least he could see where he was headed.
    The mirror orbited a brown dwarf, a small sub-stellar object whose dim disc rapidly expanded ahead as
Abalunam’s Pride
swung past on a gravity-assist manoeuvre. Ragged shadows of silicate vapour clouds stretched across the faint violet glow of the brown dwarf’s inner layers like dirt streaked across a failing neon globe, suddenly filling the sky and then whipping past and falling away as the ship flew on. Its velocity had increased by the small amount of orbital energy it had stolen; it was now aimed at the brown dwarf’s sun, a K0 main-sequence star over six billion kilometres away, with a swarm of more than five hundred mirrors orbiting at the inner edge of its habitable zone.
    Powered by zero-point energy, warping the gravitational constant to create a local propulsive gradient,
Abalunam’s Pride
drove towards the mirror-swarm and safety at an acceleration equivalent to 2.3 g, the maximum acceleration permitted by her bias drive, the maximum acceleration of the bias drive of every Ghajar ship, from A-class jaunt ships to U-class haulers. After more than a hundred years no one knew if this was an inherent property dictated by fundamental physics, or a limit built into the drive for some inscrutable reason – some argued that it was the maximum acceleration force the Ghajar, which appeared to have been fragile gasbag colonies of specialised individuals, had been able to survive. But it meant that, after using the wormhole to traverse thousands of light years in a blink of an eye,
Abalunam’s Pride
would take eleven days to cross the void between the brown dwarf and the mirrors orbiting the K0 star.
    Tony moved around as little as possible in the heavy pull of constant acceleration, spent most of his time on his bed’s silicon-gel mattress. One of the ship’s hands gave him full-body massages and spread soothing salves on his aching back and limbs. He sent a text message via the q-phone.
All well. Homeward bound as instructed
. He wanted to talk to Ayo about the close encounter with the claim jumpers, Opeyemi’s interference and the execution of Fred Firat, but because his uncle had taken control of the q-phone link it would have to wait. He made regular checks on the drones stationed at the mirror orbiting the brown dwarf, and Junot Johnson kept him informed about the wizards. After arguing about whether they should continue to work after the execution of their boss, they’d turned to intense discussions about the data they’d obtained during their stay on the slime planet. It seemed like a hopeful sign to Tony. He was also monitoring Lancelot Askia. The man spent most of his time sleeping or grimly exercising, and as far as