The time-delay to Herat's nod was almost imperceptible; they must be close to the shack. "Maybe there's some characteristic of the packets that we—" The window went gray, as the shuddering hiss happened again.
"How much of this can we take?" she asked Sola. He shrugged.
"Probably a lot," he said. "These ships are designed for reentry into a brown dwarf's atmosphere, after all…" Another hiss and the lights flickered. "But that's different," he said less certainly.
Herat reappeared. "Captain! The cargo packets are all broadcasting a weak transponder signal. We didn't notice it before because of the interference from the Twins. Each packet seems to be broadcasting a unique signature, but of course we don't speak Lasa so—" Hiss.
Now Rue's ears did pop. "Depressure!" shouted the pilot, even as the clamshells folded up over their g-beds and Rue found herself alone in the dark, flickering gray inscape windows her only company. She sat paralyzed for a second, then swept her hands out to open a series of diagnostics, as well as an intercom line to the others.
"…the hull's intact," the pilot was saying. "But we lost a seal around the airlock. We can grow a new one, but it'll take a few hours. The hull's acting like a lens, concentrating the laser light in a few spots."
"What about the shields? Aren't they working?" she demanded.
"Yeah, they are, or we'd have been vaporized by now."
This is the same battle the Banshee fought, she thought. Another hiss came and more indicators turned red.
"— the call signal." Herat had reappeared, his image distorted and full of static. "Our autotroph AI deciphered it. It's a—" the signal cut out for a second. " — manifest. You have to send the following string…"
"Are you getting that?" she shouted to the pilot.
"I think so." Silence— she pictured him retransmitting the signal Herat had provided. At least, she hoped that was what was happening.
"We've missed our scheduled burn," he said abruptly. "I'm going to have to expose our engines to the laser in order to decelerate. If I don't we'll overshoot or hit the shack—"
"Just do it," she said. "If this doesn't work, we'll be roasted anyway."
Crushing weight enveloped Rue. She pulled her hand up to close her fingers around the Ediacaran pendant. You've come this far, she thought at it. You can go a little further.
The burn ended. "Coasting in," said the pilot. "After all the fireworks, the Banshee sees us now. But we're coming in on the opposite side of the shack. It'll take them a while to get someone out to us."
"What about the others?"
"Other ships copying our maneuver. They're okay," said the pilot.
"Get ready to disembark," she said. She wanted to feel relieved that they had survived and were here, but she was out of time. Rue reached into the storage bins under the g-bed and pulled out the components of the army pressure suit they'd fitted for her.
She dressed quickly; as the helmet snapped in place with a satisfying click, Rue looked down at the weapons that dangled from the suit's belt. No time for relief now; no time for fear. Only time to take the most direct route to her crew and woe to anyone who got in her way.
25
RUE STEPPED INTO familiar darkness. The stars surrounded her and for a few moments they were all she saw. It wasn't until she turned around that she made out the black absence that was Apophis and, looking opposite that, saw the corresponding silhouette of Osiris. Her interceptor was gliding away, a ghostly knife-shape. It had dropped off her squad of six and would now take up station near the construction shack. That too became visible as she continued turning; it was much closer than she'd expected, a vast rectangle of darkness that must be only a few kilometers away.
Sola and the rest of the squad were feverishly setting up countermeasures to avoid detection. The interceptor had dropped them off in the middle of a cone-shaped zone of space where the cargo packets coming from the Twins were funneled inward. For a few moments, she and her soldiers would appear as part of the cloud. By the time they left the cone, they must be invisible.
While the soldiers unfurled stealth shields and started spraying a mist of liquid helium around to blot out infrared, Rue turned her attention to the shack. Behind it lay the Banshee. Crisler's starship would likely have strewn sensors all around the shack; their arrival on its other side was not so much a sneak as a way to shield the interceptors from attack.
Though not visible, she knew the other interceptor would be arriving as well. Mike and his team would be hanging in space just as she was, preparing to enter the alien structure.
Sola handed Rue a secure comm line and she plugged it into her suit's shoulder. "Good so far," he said. "Insertion as planned?"
"Yes." The squad grouped up, attaching lines to one another, then fired reaction guns to take them over the curve of the shack. Now they would find out if their countermeasures were working. Rue's mouth was dry, but she was surprised at how calm she was, now that they were finally here. She had thought about this moment for months, but in the end, her worries and nightmare scenarios were a distraction. She needed to focus on the moment and only that way would she get through it.
They'd spent a lot of time debating whether to go to the shack first, or the Banshee. Her people could be in either place, but were most likely to be aboard the starship. Even if they were somewhere in the shack, the Banshee was a better place to make a stand. Crisler could not destroy his own ship to get at them.
There was no sense of movement, of course; the stars were simply rising, slowly and gently, over the short horizon of the shack. After a few minutes something new began to rise: a bauble like a paper lantern. It was the larger of the Banshee's two balloon habitats, swinging on the end of its invisible tether. A kilometer away from it, below the shack's horizon, the smaller habitat would be swinging the other way.
She had only that one glimpse, then Sola raised one of the radar shields and blocked her view. That was okay; Rue didn't need to be reminded of the layout of the Banshee. The two six-story balloon habitats had similar internal plans and swung opposite one another from the central axis pod. The heaviest component of the starship in view was a pair of flowerlike assemblies of tungsten plates that petaled out from the cables halfway between the axis and the habitats. At the rotational axis of the system was a can-shaped weapons pod much smaller than the balloons. It held a fusion reactor and various supplies as well as missiles and lasers. Another tether trailed off at right angles from it, ending sixty kilometers away at the ramscoop and engines.
"EVA cart at Long-thirty, Lat-forty," said one of the soldiers. Rue oriented herself and looked in that direction. One of the Banshee's familiar raillike carts came into view; it must have just launched from the starship's axis.
For a tense few seconds nobody breathed as it approached. Rue was peripherally aware of one of her soldiers slowly bringing his laser rifle up to aim at the space-suited figures on the craft.
"No," she said. "They're headed for the shack."
"Agreed," said Sola. "Let them go; they're five less men for us to worry about at the Banshee."
They continued to watch as the cart lofted gently over the black surface of the shack and disappeared into the mist of stars beyond.
"They're checking out the interceptor," someone muttered.
"Good," said Rue. "It's supposed to distract them."
They had drifted far out from the shack now and were coming in line with the swiftly rotating habitats of the Banshee. Each swept past once per minute, which meant they were traveling at 180 kilometers per hour relative to Rue.
There had been spirited argument about their next maneuver. Like any spaceship, Banshee had micrometeor defenses, including automated lasers. Unlike other ships, though, its systems were of truly paranoid power and accuracy. Banshee was designed to be able to withstand deliberate attacks by missile and laser weapons. If Banshee had been at alert, they would have been spotted and targeted instantly. They could all be vaporized in a second by the ship's
countermeasures.
Banshee was also designed to resist being boarded. According to Sola, such a rotating ship was usually designed to detect the sudden addition or subtraction of mass at either end of its tethers. It could literally feel the weight of an arriving man.
Normally one boarded a rotating spacecraft at the center and then moved down an elevator or drop-shaft to the rotating portion. But if Rue's squad were successful in approaching the weapons pod and began rapelling down a tether from there, they would be doing so in full view of the targeting and weapons systems and they would be felt and pinpointed instantly.
The alternative was a much more scary maneuver. For the next few minutes, their lives would depend entirely on the largely untested equipment they'd brought. Rue tried to breathe regularly, watching the tiny screen in her heads-up display. It showed them drifting directly into the path of the swinging habitats. She looked up in time to see the larger one flash past, disturbingly close. She could practically count the oxygen tanks hanging off it. It swept majestically away, arcing up gradually until it was rising vertically, then it was cut off behind Sola's shield. Invisibly behind that shield, the smaller habitat was racing down to meet them.
"Form up," ordered Sola. He took Rue's arm and that of one other man. They put their feet into the loops of a two-meter long cylindrical rocket and clipped their waist tethers to it as well. "Lean back," said Sola. The rocket twisted under them, little jets firing, as it figured out the distribution of their mass.
"Commit," said Sola tersely. The rocket was in control now; this would either work, or they would be dead in seconds.
Rue braced herself as she'd been coached to do. Suddenly the rocket lit and they were surging forward— it felt like upward. They'd left the countermeasures behind and here came the habitat. Rue had a strange perceptual moment when she felt as if she were standing on some high peak on Treya; someone had put glowing Erythrion on a chain and was swinging the whole halo world at her.
The habitat seemed to leap at them— then it faltered and stopped, barely meters away. Rue gaped at it. Suddenly the wall of translucent plastic began to rise, as if yanked up by some capricious child god. But by then Sola's man had leapt across the intervening space and slapped a sticky patch to it. Another man had performed the same maneuver from the other rocket.
A tether attached to the patch zipped up with the wall and yanked Rue and Sola and all the others off the rocket. The metal cylinder tumbled away while Rue swung wildly and in gravity now with nothing but stars below her.
A brilliant flash lit the wall, casting a long crazed shadow upward from the dangling soldiers. "They're on to us," said Sola tersely.
"What was that?"
"The rockets. They lasered them."
Rue clung to her thin rope, heart pounding. She was disoriented by the stars spinning past and the odd feeling of looking down at them. She could only watch as two soldiers glued a transparent emergency airlock to the hull. Once it was inflated, they entered it and began lasering a hole through the hull itself.
"Incoming defenders," somebody said. The others raised their weapons; Rue craned her neck up to see things that looked surprisingly like Jentry's mining spiders clambering down the side of the habitat. They were having trouble getting around the bunches and folds of material that had been tied together after the habitat was holed, days or weeks ago, by the construction shack's lasers. In surreal silence, the robots glowed and exploded as her men targeted them.
"We're in." Sola tugged Rue's tether. She looked down to see two of her men entering the Banshee through a ragged hole in the hull. Glowing flinders plummeted past her; red-hot droplets splattered on Rue's shoulder, hissed, and went out. A whole spider fell past, its legs scrambling and one flailing limb caught Rue's tether. Feeling oddly detached, she saw the tether part.
She was falling. Rue screamed and reached out, catching Sola's ankle. For a wild second she hung above the wheeling stars. Bright flashes pulsed below her as the lasers in the Banshee's weapons pod targeted the falling spiders. If she let go, she would share their fate.
Then strong hands pulled her up and she flopped over the resilient lip of the airlock. Sola fell onto her and the airlock gulped closed. In another moment she was being dragged into bright calm light and landed on all fours on the familiar decking of a corridor in the Banshee.
Rue needed a moment to compose herself. She sat up, watching her men fan out in either direction. They were in one of the ring-shaped corridors that ran around the outside of the habitat. About five meters to her right was a T-intersection; the hallway there would lead to the hub of the round habitat.
In the other direction the smoothly curving wall was interrupted after a few meters by a tightly wadded and stapled bundle of hull material. The decking and ceiling here had been cut away and sections of the inner wall removed. The habitat was basically just a big plastic balloon and here was a spot where the balloon had been gathered and twisted to make it smaller.
"Countermeasures," directed Sola. One of the men set a squat gray cylinder on the floor and flipped a switch on its side. The solid-looking can hopped, its sides bulging and smoking slightly. Rue heard a series of loud clicks, that seemed to originate inside her head.
"What was that?" asked Rue.
"We're using optical networks and coms exclusively," said Sola. "That was an EM bomb. It made a burst of microwaves that should have fried all the electronics in the vicinity. Hopefully it'll shut down their intercoms and sensors."
Somebody had dumped a satchel full of little buglike things onto the floor. They rose on buzzing wings now and swarmed off down the corridor. "Hunt bots," said Barendts.
Rue thought she recognized where she was. "They should look one deck up, northeast quadrant from our position," she said. "There's storage spaces there that could be used as a brig."
"Come on." Sola waved his men into motion. They trotted to the nearby intersection. Before they got there, Sola raised his hand. "Hostiles!" His men crouched back against the walls; a second later, Rue did likewise.
Pure crimson light flashed out of the intersection. She saw one of the little hunt bots twirl, flaming, out of the axial corridor.
Sola pitched a grenade around the corner; Rue was thinking no that can't possibly be one of the explosive variety— and then it went off and blue-black smoke poured back. She let out a whoosh of relief, though naturally Sola wouldn't have used an explosive in here; the blast could have torn the hull open.
The smoke made normal vision impossible, but her suit's HUD display showed a sketchy view of her surroundings, rendered from laser or sonar. It wasn't an inscape display; she and her men had their inscape temporarily disabled as a precaution against spoofing.
Sola's men were diving and rolling into the side corridor now and she heard taser fire. She hurried after them on wobbly legs. She had just rounded the corner when somebody swept her legs out from under her and she fell on her back. Bright flashes and the sound of gunfire surrounded her. Rue righted herself and looked ahead— catching confused sonar glimpses of man-shapes wrestling in the smoke. Somebody's discarded taser lay near her and she picked it up before thinking to unholster the one on her belt.
One of the fighting figures went down (others running away from her beyond it) and just at that moment a powerful gust of wind blew through the corridor. The smoke glided away in a single solid mass as though suddenly reminded that it should be somewhere else. Rue sat up.
Two spider robots and three space-suited men lay on the deck. The prone men's suits were all R.E.-issue. Rue's own men were already moving on toward the hub of the corridors.
Rue got to her feet unsteadily. She couldn't help looking down at the faceplate of the man nearest her.
She recognized the face behind the glass. This was a man who had sometimes joined her crew at lunch in the cafeteria. He was quite a joker. Now he was unconscious and turning blue as he tried to breathe.
"Captain!" Barendts was waving at her to hurry up. Rue
knelt down and undogged the man's faceplate. Jared, that was his name. As soon as the glass was open he sucked in a deep breath.
"Come on!" She stood indecisively. There was no time to examine the other two. Rue ran after Barendts, feeling sick at what they were having to do.
The others were already going up the spiral staircase at the hub of the four spoke corridors. Rue caught up to them at the top of the stairs. There had originally been two more floors above this one, but now the staircase continued up in its cylinder past two sets of sealed doors. The ceiling visible through the opened doors on Rue's level was bunched and bundled. The walls had been partly dismantled, so that they only rose to head-height now, like partitions.
Rue nodded when she saw this. "If they're on board, they'll be here," she said. "Crisler wouldn't house any of his own people in such a dangerous spot." One pressure leak and the whole level would be in vacuum.
"We lost our hunters," pointed out one of the men. Sola shrugged.
"Search the old-fashioned way, then," he said. "Two men stay here; you two take that way and we'll go this way. Clockwise when you get to the ring corridor." This was Rue's chance to show she had learned her infantry-tactics lessons well; she covered Sola while he ducked through the doorway, then he knelt and waved her through. She ran past to the first door and flattened herself next to it.
The door was shut; Sola ducked past her and she hit the switch then dropped to a crouch. The door snicked open. Sola had it covered and nodded curtly to her. Rue poked her head around the corner.
The odd billowy ceiling made this wedge-shaped room look like it was half-filled by a solidified cloud. It must be cold up here: Icicles hung from the folds of hull fabric. Boxes were stacked around the room's periphery and the single table held two plates with halfeaten meals on them. There were no chairs; but another door beckoned on the far side of the room. Rue eased inside and Sola followed.
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