‘Indeed. Emperor Dadaeus told me the locations of both the Gondwanan station and the Laurasian station. After I returned, I searched for them in the Operation Disconnect database. Because their purpose was unclear to us, we planted only a small number of mines in their communications equipment. Thirty-five mine-grains in the Gondwanan signal station, thirty-six in the Laurasian station, severing a total of seventy-one wires. That number might seem low, but it was enough to completely disable the signal-transmission equipment in both stations.’

‘How long is each countdown?’

‘Sixty-six hours, or about three days. Both the Laurasian and Gondwanan countdown timers begin nearly simultaneously, and the interrupt signal is usually sent about twenty-two hours after the countdown starts. The current countdown started twenty hours ago. We still have two days.’

‘Why is the countdown so long?’ asked Kachika. ‘Surely one or two hours would have been more sensible. In this set-up, if one side launched a crippling strike as soon as the other side reset its timer, they would still have almost three days to dispose of the other antimatter containment vessel by sending it back into space.’

‘The containment vessels and the ships which house them are inextricably linked,’ said Joya. ‘Any attempt to separate the two would result in the shutdown of the confining magnetic field and the detonation of the antimatter. Perhaps with concerted effort over an extended period the vessel could be safely detached from the ship and launched back into space, but two or three days would not be sufficient. Dadaeus did talk to me about the time-lag. Mad as the dinosaurs were, in this matter it seems they were uncharacteristically careful. They designed the countdown so that, in the event of something unforeseen and relatively innocuous preventing the sending of the signal, there would be time to deal with the situation. They were primarily concerned about sabotage by ants, apparently. With due cause, of course.’

‘If we knew the exact content of the interrupt signals, we could build our own transmitter and continually reset Leviathan and Luna’s countdowns.’

‘The problem is that we don’t have that information, and we have no way of finding it out. The dinosaurs did not advise me of the signals’ contents, only that they were long, complicated passwords that changed every time they were sent. The passwords’ algorithms were stored in the signal stations’ computers. I doubt any dinosaur alive knows them.’

‘So the signals can only be sent by the signal stations?’

‘I presume so.’

Kachika’s decision came swiftly. ‘Then we must repair the stations as quickly as possible.’

18

The Battle of the Signal Stations

The station responsible for the transmission of the Gond­wanan Empire’s interrupt signal was located on a barren tract of land on the outskirts of Boulder City. It was a small building with a tangled array of antennae on the roof and looked no more arresting than a weather station.