Redemption Protocol (Contact) (9 page)

“Hang like a trussed chicken, I expect.”

There was relieved laughter.

Stone waggled his hand as he was struck by inspiration.

“Hey, by the way, you have to play Weaver at tennis. It’s just a shame––”

“––about the baggy shorts. Yeah, I heard.”

Stone nodded as he rubbed his stomach, looking uncomfortable.

“Too many biscuits.”

Havoc thought Stone was probably low to mid-standard and bound to suffer after such a long trip. Stone was clearly having wake up problems and had piled down the fluids to make himself feel better. He didn't look well at all. Havoc thought about having a doctor or an automed take a look at him. He checked shipnet. The nearest automed was two habs away. He was considering taking Stone over there as Fournier gestured at the holo of the target system.

“Have a look at this.”

 12. 

Tyburn stood at the far end of the table, his chair pushed to one side. He looked over at Darkwood, who reclined in a relaxed pose at the opposite end of the table.

“Your security?” Tyburn said.

“Ah. John Havoc.”

“Yes.”

It was a statement and a question.

Darkwood studied the fingernails of his left hand.

“He's the best. He's independent. He's certainly independent of the Alliance.”

Tyburn waited.

Darkwood shrugged.

“That's all. Under the Alliance agreement I had one slot for personal security. As I said, he's the best.”

“You've picked half my security detail. Is there something I need to know?”

“No.”

“We have a line of command, Darkwood. And an established security team.”

Darkwood nodded.

“Quite. I thought he could be useful.”

“Useful.”

Again, it was a statement and a question.

Darkwood said nothing.

Tyburn raised an eyebrow.

“But perhaps a little controversial?”

Darkwood leaned forward to sip his tea.

“He can't have many ethical hang-ups.”

“You have no idea.”

“You know him?”

“Who doesn't? He could be... destabilizing.”

Darkwood glanced at Tyburn, pre-sip.

“Is he as good as his reputation?”

Tyburn shook his head instinctively.

“No one is that good.”

“More muscle could prove useful.”

“He was Special Service. He's no grunt.”

Darkwood stopped, mid-sip.

“Clever muscle then.”

Tyburn shook his head as he stepped back. He would adapt – it was what he did. There was no point in pressing the issue with Darkwood – the industrialist didn’t have the first idea. Havoc was another asset to be deployed, that was all. There might even be benefits; the situation just needed to be managed. Tyburn knew the scale of the threat if Havoc got suspicious. He considered the merits of early elimination. He had the advantage of surprise, after all. One hell of a surprise.

Darkwood waved at someone through the window. Tyburn tracked Darkwood’s gaze across the Hub Hab and made eye contact with Havoc.

Been a long time, he thought.

 13. 

Havoc looked across the room at Darkwood, who was in a meeting room with Tyburn, their security lead. Presumably Tyburn would be his boss.

Tyburn leaned forward in a dominant stance while Darkwood sat back sipping his tea. Darkwood caught Havoc's eye through the window and raised his hand to gesture 'a few more minutes'. Tyburn followed Darkwood's gaze toward him and Havoc and Tyburn locked eyes. Before Havoc could get any sense of the man, the privacy glass turned opaque.

Havoc felt confused. He was looking straight through the window. The ghostly figures continued their discussion in a different part of the spectrum. His vision had adjusted instantly. How odd.

Havoc turned back to the holo and leaned in with the others. He wanted to know where he was going, cosmically speaking. Kemensky drifted back over to join them. Havoc suspected that Kemensky couldn't bear to cut himself off from the undisputed leader of his field for long.

In the holo, two stars circled each other. One was massive and the other impossibly small. The larger star was spilling mass into the orbit of the tiny one, a teardrop of gas bulging from its surface and spiraling into the brilliant accretion disc surrounding its infinitesimal neighbor. The tiny star ejected two narrow cones of blue-white light perpendicular to its disc.

Fournier gestured at the holo.

“The big star is a luminous blue hypergiant called Jötunn, after the great Norse frost giant; noted both for his voluminous blue beard and the staggering size of his member. And Jötunn
is
a giant, one hundred and seventy million kilometers across and with a mass one hundred and sixty times that of our Origin Sun. It balances precariously on the physical limit for a stellar object.”

“What happens if it goes over?” Stone asked.

Havoc chuckled. Stone would have been the kid who prods a wasp nest to see what happens.

“Hypernova,” Fournier said.

Stone’s eyes widened.

Fournier pointed at the giant star.

“Jötunn’s peak luminosity is five million times greater than our Origin Sun. It generates one megawatt at one hundred and fifty million kilometers.”

Havoc was startled by this revelation.

“Being one AU from Jötunn is equivalent to being fired on by a one Megawatt laser?”

“At point blank range continuously,” Fournier confirmed.

Havoc digested this unsavory tidbit.

Fournier pointed at the gaseous clouds streaming off Jötunn and spiraling into the colossal disc around the tiny star.

“What has perhaps ensured Jötunn's continued existence by preventing it going hypernova thus far is its tiny binary partner, the magnetar Neria. Jötunn is so large that part of its mass falls outside its Roche lobe and into Neria's. You can see the teardrop lifting off Jötunn and streaming toward Neria.”

Touvenay wrinkled his nose.

“Neria is bleeding Jötunn dry.”

“Sounds like my wife,” Stone said.

Fournier pointed at the tiny star.

“Neria’s gravity is so strong that you're actually seeing a lot of its back side when you look at the front. Its mass approaches the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit, at which point it will collapse into a denser form like a quark star or a black hole. As you'd expect, it has a powerful magnetic field.”

“Instrument affecting?” Havoc asked.

Fournier nodded.

“We could easily see instrument effects even on shielded equipment two hundred million kilometers away.”

Havoc absorbed this as Stone pointed at a geyser bursting out from the side of Jötunn.

“What’s that?”

“Ah, yes. Jötunn is very active with coronal mass ejections.”

Better and better, Havoc thought.

“Will we be in range?”

Fournier’s hand described a figure eight through the holo.

“The target planet orbits the two stars in a figure eight pattern. When the target planet orbits Jötunn, it's definitely possible for it to be caught by one of the larger coronal mass ejections. On the return path from Neria to Jötunn, the target planet also passes through the Oovort cloud, which you can see here.”

Havoc knew where this was going.

“There’s a collision risk with debris in the Oovort cloud?”

“Precisely.”

Havoc pointed at the adjacent holo that encompassed the wider galactic segment, where two translucent spheres surrounded the binary system.

“What are these two spheres?”

Fournier glanced over.

“Ah, yes. We’ve no idea. We can date the origin events though. They were ejected at sublight velocities from points consistent with the orbit of our mission target around nine thousand and six thousand years ago. We have no idea what they are or what caused them. Interesting, aren’t they?”

There was a considered silence.

Stone made a face.

“So we're looking at an unstable giant ball of death being sucked into an unstable tiny ball of death. Unstable. Death. And we're going here? On purpose?”

Fournier frowned as he reviewed Stone’s points.

“Well, yes.”

Havoc drank in the display.

“Looks good though.”

Kemensky nodded.

“As a mission backdrop, it's incredible.”

“Wonderful photographs,” Touvenay said.

“Most hostile system I've ever visited,” Havoc said.

“Same,” Fournier said.

“Same,” Touvenay said.

“Same,” Kemensky said.

“I think I've eaten too many chicken nuggets,” Stone said.

Havoc looked at Stone sympathetically. Stone looked back at him, his expression glum. Havoc was keen to hear about the mission target but Stone was dying here.

“Let's get you a drink then off to the automed.”

Stone nodded, mopping his head as they walked away. Touvenay's voice followed them over.

“He thinks that’s chicken in those nuggets?”

 14. 

Havoc walked with Stone toward two women and a man standing at the end of the bar. The three of them looked somewhat under the weather, but nowhere near as bad as Stone.

“Hi. I was going to take Stone to the automed, unless anyone here is a doctor?”

The two women turned to the tall man with silver hair. He hurriedly gulped down a mouthful of sandwich.

“Oh cock.” He took a quick slurp of his drink. “Chaucer, doctor.”

Havoc pointed at Stone.

Chaucer looked Stone up and down.

“Feeling a little under the weather, darling?”

Stone nodded.

Chaucer raised his arm toward the nearby armchairs.

“Why don’t you step into my office?”

Chaucer escorted Stone away. Havoc was left with the two women. He felt an icy breeze wafting over him.

“Hi, I'm––”

The nearest woman cut him off.

“We know who you are, Mr Havoc.”

Ah, Havoc thought, his criminal status finally resulting in the treatment that he was accustomed to.

“And you are?”

“Leveque. Psychologist.”

The small oriental girl with messily parted shoulder length hair poked her head around Leveque.

“Hi, I'm Violette Hwan. I’m a systems programmer.”

Leveque regarded him icily.

“And what is it you do, Mr Havoc?”

Havoc worked in a male dominated industry. Talking to two pretty girls was an unusual treat. Leveque's level of hostility was much more familiar. Havoc could have skewered a rabbit on Leveque's tone of voice.

“I don't know yet. I didn’t volunteer for this. I woke up here.”

Leveque nodded as she took this in, clearly not believing a word. She stared at him, focused and determined. It looked like this level of hostility didn’t come naturally to her.

“Well then more generally, Mr Havoc, what is it that you do?”

Havoc thought it couldn’t hurt to try again, given it had all been so remarkably collegial to this point.

“Please call me John.”

“Mr Havoc suits me fine, thank you.”

“Is there something you want to say to me, Miss Leveque?”

Leveque pressed her lips tightly together while she thought about it.

“Yes, yes there is. First it's
Mrs
Leveque. And I didn't volunteer for this either. I woke up in this place. I was redirected here while I was still asleep and on my way home.”

Havoc gestured toward the meeting rooms.

“Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”

Leveque balled her hands into fists.

“No, I don't mind who hears this. I’m the crew psychologist. I have a professional responsibility to treat you. And I will do that. But before that, before we get properly under way, I want to say something.”

Havoc nodded, Leveque collected herself and Havoc braced himself accordingly.

“I don't approve of you being here, Mr Havoc. On an Alliance vessel. Of which the Tyurin Republic is a part. You, Mr Havoc, are a terrorist and a mass murderer. I
knew
people on Jemlevi. You killed them. You can't justify what you did. I can't understand why you're here.”