She found Prince Dell and tiptoed into the short hallway. There’d never been such a commotion in the chalet before, not even when the old-timers were planning the new colony. Whatever was going on must be terribly important, which could make eavesdropping interesting.

The voices stopped.

“Come in, Jay,” Tracy called from the lounge.

Jay did as she was told. It was impossible to get away with anything when Tracy was around. Seven of the ancient adults had joined Tracy, sitting and standing round the lounge. Jay kept her head down as she hurried over to the big armchair Tracy was sitting in, too shy to say anything.

“Sorry, poppet,” Tracy said as Jay slithered up onto the cushions beside her. “Did this noisy rabble wake you?”

“What’s the matter?” Jay asked. “Why’s everyone here?”

“We’re trying to decide if we should petition Corpus for intervention,” Tracy said. “Again!”

“Something’s happening on Earth,” Arnie said. “We didn’t realize it at first, but Quinn Dexter might be about to do something extremely dangerous.”

“Corpus won’t intervene,” Galic said dejectedly. “There’s still no reason. You know the rules: only if another, unaware species is endangered. Quinn Dexter, according to the textbooks, qualifies as human. Therefore this will be self-inflicted.”

“Then the textbook should be rewritten,” Arnie grumbled. “I wouldn’t classify him as anything close to human.”

“Corpus won’t intervene because the President will use SD weapons, that barbarian.”

“Not in time to stop Dexter, he won’t,” Tracy said. “Especially if B7 intervenes and delays the fire command.”

Jay snuggled up closer to Tracy. “What’s Dexter going to do?”

“We’re not absolutely sure. It might be nothing.”

“Ha,” Arnie grunted. “Just you wait and see.”

“Are you watching it?” Jay asked, suddenly not at all sleepy.

Tracy glared at Arnie. There was a mental exchange, too. Jay could feel it even if she couldn’t make out individual words. She’d been getting good at that lately.

“Please!” Jay begged. “It’s my world.”

“All right,” Tracy said. “You can stay up and watch for a little while. But don’t think you’re getting to see any gory bits.”

Jay beamed at her.

The adults settled down on the other chairs, packing three onto the settee. Tracy’s television was switched on, showing a deserted street of ancient buildings. A tight tapestry of red clouds were glowing overhead. Jay shuddered at the sight. They were just like the ones on Lalonde.

“That’s London,” Tracy said. She handed Jay a mug of hot chocolate.

Jay propped Prince Dell up against her tummy so he’d have a good view, and took a contented sip of the creamy drink. Someone was walking down the middle of the street.

Lady Mac emerged a hundred million kilometres out from the F-class star, five degrees above the ecliptic. As it was an uncharted system, Joshua ordered the combat sensors to deploy and conduct a fast preliminary sweep. Their response time was quicker than the more comprehensive standard array, if there was anything out there on a collision course, they’d hopefully discover it soon enough to jump away.

“Clean space,” Beaulieu reported.

For the first time in thirty hours, Joshua managed to relax, sagging back into the cushioning. He hadn’t realized how tight his neck and shoulder muscles had become, they were lines of hot stone under his skin.

“We did it!” Liol whooped.

Amid the noisy round of self-congratulation, Joshua ordered the flight computer to extend the standard sensor booms. They slid out of the fuselage along with the thermo-dump panels. “Alkad,” he datavised. “Get Kempster out of zero-tau, please. Tell him we’ve arrived.”

“Yes, Captain,” she replied.

“Beaulieu, Ashly, activate the survey sensors, please. The rest of you, let’s get Lady Mac into standard orbital configuration. Dahybi, I still want to be able to jump, we’ll keep the nodes charged.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Fuel status?” Joshua asked.

“Sufficient,” Sarha told him. “We have forty per cent of our fusion fuel left, and fifty-five per cent of the antimatter remaining. Given we burned fifteen per cent of the antimatter to move Lalarin-MG, we’ve got enough to get us back to the Confederation. We can even jump around this system, providing you don’t want to explore every moonlet.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to,” he said. The Swantic-LI message hadn’t mentioned where in the system the Sleeping God was; in orbit around a planet or orbiting the star by itself.

The crew loosened up as Lady Mac changed from flight mode to her less demanding orbital status. They drifted around the bridge, used the washroom. Ashly went down to the galley and fetched a meal. Prolonged exposure to high gees was severely tiring. And eating anything substantial during the acceleration was unwise. The mass put a lot of pressure on internal organs, even with artificially strengthened membranes. They devoured the spongy pasta cakes eagerly, chasing runaway squirts of hot cheese sauce round the bridge.

“So if it sees the whole universe,” Liol said, talking round a mouthful, “Do you reckon it knows we’re here?”

“Every telescope sees the whole universe,” Ashly said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they can all see us.”

“Okay, it detected our gravitonic distortion when we jumped in,” Liol said, unperturbed.

“Where’s your evidence?”

“If it knows about us, it’s keeping quiet,” Beaulieu said. “Sensors haven’t found any electromagnetic emissions out there.”

“How did the Tyrathca find it then?”

“Easily, I would think,” Dahybi said.

Under the direction of Kempster and Renato, Beaulieu launched their survey satellites. Sixteen of them were fired, racing away from Lady Mac at seven gees. They were arranged in a globular formation, keeping the starship at their centre. After two minutes their solid rockets jettisoned, leaving them flying free. The main section was an omniphase visual-spectrum sensor array, a giant technological fly’s eye, looking every way at once. Between them, they formed an ever-increasing telescope baseline, capable of huge resolution. Its only real limit was imposed by the amount of processing power available to correlate and analyse the incoming photonic data.

The sweep was conducted by registering every speck of light with a negative magnitude (in standard stellar classification the brightest visible star is labelled magnitude one, while the dimmest is a six—anything brighter than a one has to be a planet and is assigned a negative value). Their positions were then reviewed five times a second to see if they were moving.

Once the planets had been located, the telescope could be focused on them individually to see if the extensive spatial disturbance Swantic-LI had referred to was in orbit around them. They were assuming it was a visible phenomena; the Tyrathca didn’t have gravitonic detector technology. If nothing was found, a more comprehensive sweep of the system would have to be conducted.

“This is most unusual,” Kempster datavised after the first sweep was completed. He and Renato were using the main lounge in capsule C, along with Alkad and Peter. Their specialist electronics had been installed, transforming it into a temporary astrophysics lab.

Joshua and Liol swapped a look shading between surprise and amusement. “In what way?” Joshua asked.

“We can only detect a single negative-magnitude source orbiting this star,” the astronomer said. “There’s simply nothing else out there. No planets, no asteroids. Lady Macbeth ’s sensors can’t even find the usual clouds of interplanetary dust. All matter has been cleared away, virtually down to a molecular level. The only normal occurrence is solar wind.”

“Cleared away, or just sucked into the spatial disturbance,” Sarha muttered.