The Night's Dawn Trilogy Read Free Page A

ahead. Omuta was a small, unremarkable star directly in front of
     the coordinate. Two more jumps, and they would have been in the system’s Oort cloud, the sparse halo of ice-dust clouds and
     slumbering comets which marked the boundary of interstellar space. They were approaching from galactic north, well outside
     the plane of the ecliptic, trying to avoid detection.
    She had helped plan the mission profile, offering her comments to a room full of senior navy staff who were visibly nervous
     in her presence. It was a syndrome which had affected more and more people in the secret military station as her work progressed.
    Alkad had given the Confederation something new to fear, something which surpassed even the destructive power of antimatter.
     A star slayer. And that prospect was as humbling as it was terrifying. She had resigned herself that after the war billions
     of planet dwellers would look up at the naked stars, waiting for the twinkling light which had been Omuta to vanish from the
     night sky. Then they would remember her name, and curse her to hell.
    All because I was too stupid to learn from past mistakes. Just like all the other dreaming fools throughout history, wrapped
     up with seductive, clean equations, their simplistic, isolated elegance, giving no thought to the messy, bloody,
physical
application that was their ultimate reality. As if we didn’t have enough weapons already. But that’s human nature, we’ve
     always got to go one better, to increase the terror another notch. And for what?
    Three hundred and eighty-seven Dorados: large asteroids with a nearly pure metal content. They were orbiting a red-dwarf sun
     twenty light-years away from Garissa, twenty-nine light-years from Omuta. Scoutships from both inhabited systems had stumbled
     across them virtually simultaneously. Who had actually been first would never now be known. Both governments had claimed them:
     the wealth contained in the lonely metal chunks would be a heady boost for the planet whose companies could mine and refine
     such plentiful ore.
    At first it had been a squabble, a collection of
incidents
. Prospecting and survey ships dispatched to the Dorados had been attacked by “pirates.” And, as always, the conflict had
     escalated. It ceased to be the ships, and started to become their home asteroid ports. Then nearby industrial stations had
     proved tempting targets. The Confederation Assembly’s attempt to mediate had come to nothing.
    Both sides had called in their registered naval reserves, and started to hire the independent traders, with their fast, well-equipped
     ships capable of deploying combat wasps. Finally, last month, Omuta had used an antimatter bomb against an industrial asteroid
     settlement in the Garissa system. Fifty-six thousand people had been killed when the biosphere chamber ruptured, spewing them
     out into space. Those who survived, another eighteen thousand with their mashed fluid-clogged lungs, decompressed capillaries,
     and dissevered skin, had strained the planet’s medical facilities close to breaking point. Over seven hundred had been sent
     to the university’s medical school, which had beds for three hundred. Alkad had witnessed the chaos and pain first hand, heard
     the gurgling screams that never ended.
    So now it was retaliation time. Because, as everybody knew, the next stage would be planetary bombardment. And Alkad Mzu had
     been surprised to find her nationalistic jingoism supplanting the academic aloofness which had ruled her life to date. Her
world
was being threatened.
    The only credible defence was to hit Omuta first, and hit it hard. Her precious hypothetical equations had been grasped at
     by the navy, which rushed to turn them into functional hardware.
    “I wish I could stop you from feeling so much guilt,” Peter had said. That was the day they had left the planet, the two of
     them waiting in the officers’ mess of a navy spaceport while their shuttle was