“I’m registering a strong magnetic emission,” Beaulieu said as they closed the last kilometre. “But the ship’s thermal and electrical activity is minimal. Apart from an auxiliary fusion generator and three confinement chambers the Beezling is basically inert.”

“No thruster activity, either,” said Liol. “They’ve picked up a tumble. One rotation every eight minutes nineteen seconds.”

Joshua checked the radar return, computing a vector around the crippled old ship so he could reach its airlock. “I can dock and stabilize you,” he datavised to Captain Prager.

“Not much point,” Prager replied. “Our airlock chamber was breached by particle impact; and I doubt the latches will work anyway. If you just hold station we’ll transfer across in suits.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Captain,” Beaulieu said. “Two fusion drives. They’re on an approach vector.”

“Jesus!” He accessed the sensors. Half of the image was a ghostly apricot-coloured ocean illuminated by the planetary-sized aurora borealis storms which floated serenely above it. The nighttime sky which vaulted it was a perfect orrery dome of stars where the only movement came from tiny moons racing along their ordained pathways. Red icons were bracketing two of the brighter stars just outside the ecliptic. When Joshua keyed in the infrared they became brilliant. Purple vector lines sprouted out of them, projecting their trajectory in towards him.

“Approximately two hundred thousand kilometres away,” Beaulieu said, her synthesized voice sounding completely uncaring. “I think I can confirm the drive signatures; it appears to be our old friends the Urschel and the Raimo . Both plasma exhausts have very similar instabilities. If not them, then there are certainly possessed on board.”

“Who else?” Ashly grunted morosely.

Alkad looked around frantically, trying to make eye contact with the crew. They were all looking at Joshua as he lay on his couch, eyes closed, his flat brow producing neat parallel furrows as he frowned in concentration. “What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Take the survivors on board and run. Those ships are too far away to threaten us.”

Sarha waved her hand in annoyance. “They are now,” she said in a low voice. “They won’t be for long. And we’re too close to the gas giant to jump out. We need to be another hundred and thirty thousand kilometres away. In other words, up where they are. That means we can’t boost straight up; we’d fly straight into them.”

“So . . . what then?”

Sarha pointed a finger at Joshua. “He’ll tell us. If there’s a vector out of here, Joshua will find it.”

Alkad was surprised by the amount of respect in the normally volatile crew woman. But then all of the crew were regarding their captain with the kind of hushed expectancy that was usually the province of holy gurus. It made Alkad very uneasy.

Joshua’s eyes flipped open. “We have a problem,” he announced grimly. “Their altitude gives them too much tactical advantage. I can’t find us a vector.” A small regretful dip at the corner of his mouth. “There isn’t even a convenient Lagrange point this time. And I wouldn’t like to risk it anyway, not while we’re so close to a gas giant as big as this one.”

“Fly a slingshot,” Liol said. “Dive straight at the gas giant and go for a jump on the other side.”

“That’s over three hundred thousand kilometres away. Lady Mac can probably accelerate harder than the Organization ships, but they’ve got antimatter combat wasps, remember. Forty-five-gee acceleration; we’d never make it.”

“Christ.”

“Beaulieu, put a com beam on them,” Joshua said. “If they respond, ask them what they want. I’m sure we know, but if nothing else I’d like confirmation.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Doc, how do we go about firing the Alchemist at them?”

“You can’t,” she said simply.

“Jesus, Doc, this is no time for principles. Don’t you understand? We have no other way out. None. That weapon is the only advantage we’ve got left. If we don’t kill them, they’ll get you, and Peter.”

“This is not a question of principle, Captain. It’s not physically possible to deploy the Alchemist against starships.”

“Jesus.” He couldn’t believe it. But the doc looked frightened enough. Intuition convinced him she was telling the truth. The navigation program was still producing flight vectors. Dumb forced-calculation, trying out every conceivable probability to find one which would let them escape. The plots flickered in and out of existence at a subliminal speed, miniature purple lightning bolts crackling around the inside of his head. Throw in wild card manoeuvres, lunar slingshots, Lagrange points. Pray! It didn’t make the slightest difference. The Organization frigates had thoroughly outmanoeuvred him. His one hope had been the Alchemist, a super-doomsday machine, a nuke to kill a couple of ants.

I have come so far I can actually see the ship it’s stored in. I can’t lose now, not with these stakes.

“Okay, Doc, I want to know exactly what your Alchemist does, and how it does it.” He clicked his fingers at Monica and Samuel. “You two, I’ll stay in Tranquillity if we survive this, but I have to know.”

“God, Calvert, I’ll stay there with you if that’s what it takes,” Monica told him. “Just get us out of this.”

“Joshua,” Sarha said. “You can’t.”

“Give me an alternative. It gets Liol’s vote. He’ll be captain then.”

“I’m crew, Josh. This is your ship.”

“Now he tells me. Datavise the file, Doc. Now, please.” Information leapt into his mind as the files came over. Theory, application, construction, deployment, operational parameters. All neatly indexed with helpful cross-referencing. The blueprints of how to slay a star; in fact, build enough and you could slay an entire galaxy; or even just . . . Joshua flicked instantaneously back to the operational aspects. Pumped a few figures of his own into Mzu’s coldly simple equations.

“Jesus, Doc, it wasn’t a rumour. You really are dangerous, aren’t you?”

“Can you do it?” Monica asked. She wanted to shout the question at him, jolt him out of that infuriating complacency.

Joshua winked at her. “Absolutely. Look, we came off badly down in that ironberg yard because that’s not my territory. This is. In space, we win.”

“Is he serious?” Monica appealed to the rest of the bridge.

“Oh, yes,” Sarha said. “If anyone gets hostile with Lady Mac , they just crash straight into his ego.”

•   •   •

High York posed a difficult problem of interpretation for Louise. The AV pillar in the Jamrana ’s lounge shone its image down her optic nerve throughout the entire approach phase. There was no colour, space was so black she couldn’t even see the stars. The asteroid was different to Phobos’s chiselled cylinder, a grizzled irregular lump which the ship’s sensors seemed incapable of bringing into proper focus. Mechanical artefacts were shunting out of its puckered surface at all angles, though she wasn’t quite sure if she had the scale right. If she had, then they were bigger than the largest ship ever to ply Norfolk’s seas.

Fletcher was in the lounge with her. From the few comments he made he understood even less of the image than she did.

Genevieve, of course, was in her tiny cabin playing games on her processor block. She’d found a soul mate in one of Pieri’s younger cousins; the pair of them had taken to locking themselves away for hours at a time to tackle battalions of Trafalgar Greenjackets or skate through puzzles of five-dimensional topology. Louise wasn’t entirely happy with her sister’s new hobby, but on the other hand she was grateful she didn’t have the duty of keeping her amused during the flight.

High York’s disk-shaped spaceport traversed the AV image, eclipsing the asteroid itself. A high-pitched whine vibrated out of the lounge walls, and the Jamrana drifted forwards. And still there was no glimpse of Earth. Louise had really been looking forwards to that. Pieri would align a sensor on the planet for her if she asked, she was sure; but right now the whole Bushay family was involved in the docking procedure.