As the enormous Starfish ship bolted, about one hundred seconds ago, the two smaller ships had broken free of the station. They had done so with so much force that Nbaro had felt it in real time through her hips and on replay she watched as they imparted a slight wobble to the asteroid’s steady rotation. Both of them had fired their engines before breaking away.
Insane. Now the station was venting a plume of ammonia from the Starfish side… all that was a minute ago.
Three bubble ships dropped into reality fifty seconds ago, just above the systems ecliptic and moving fast. They didn’t arrive out by the comet belt as Pisani had predicted, and they didn’t prowl; they came in like a cavalry charge.
But Morosini, or perhaps Pisani, played a canny game. The only energy passing through space was informational; comms and bursts of radar and ladar from remote sensors. The Bubble ships had energy shields and Nbaro had the leisure to see what a giveaway they were, glowing like miniature suns as their owners shot after the fleeing Starfish Behemoth.
One of the Bubble ships fired a lance of fire at an asteroid. One of the dozen or so stationary emitters acting as the Athens went off the air.
Then a fourth ship appeared. This was still ‘past time’; Now Nbaro learned what had caused the flash. The fourth Bubble ship, bolder or more foolish, had emerged into real space and was gone in a flash of blue white light that suggested the near perfect transfer of matter to energy.
Hit an asteroid? Nbaro guessed, but stayed with the action as the lead Bubble opened fire, the plasma carrier-beam of her main armament striking the largest Starfish ship. A system full of sensors helped her estimate the range; the particle beam was traveling across an incredible nine thousand kilometers of space, a lot farther than their theoretical estimate.
The two smaller Starfish ships emitted massive pulses of energy. It was like watching the flash of a mirror on a cloudless day, but neither Nbaro nor the overlay from the AI could tell her what weapon the Starfish warships had used.
A wall of clutter began to emerge from the asteroid belt; like a three-dimensional line of blindness. Nbaro had seldom been outside the clutter looking in; it was remarkably effective. She read it at a glance; Athens hadn’t just studded the asteroid belt with sensors, but also with chaff dispensers and sand casters. The clutter emerged as a wall, a smoke-screen on a god-like scale, covering a deep band of sky and almost a third of the horizon. The starfish ships accelerated towards what looked like a wall of nothingness; the end of the universe, a vast and threatening cloud. It was like dark magic.
The Bubbles thought so too. As one, the three ships, each separated by about three thousand kilometers, turned. The turn was about eleven gs. They powered off on a new vector, almost straight ‘up’ above the ecliptic. All three reached out with their plasma beams which Nbaro ‘saw’ only as pale green lines in a darkness.
All three fired at separate targets. One hit the station, striking the asteroid somewhere over in ‘starfish country.’ The other two were shooting at targets that she couldn’t identify and could only hope were decoys. Then all three fired at the Starfish behemoth.
None of the DHC armaments had loosed a shot. None of the Athens spaceframes had revealed themselves; no torpedoes launched. But the wall of clutter was threatening in its immensity and the relative mystery of its appearance, and the ‘Bubbles’ ran.
The vast Starfish ship went through the wall of chaff and vanished, but it had taken damage and was trailing gas and other material like a comet. Its escorts unleased whatever hellish energy weapon they carried a second time and followed.
It all happened in front of her augmented senses.
Morosini said <Do not engage!>
Command, the rarely used frequency that over-rode all other comms, spoke. It was Pisani.
‘Do not engage. Repeat, do not engage,’
Nbaro was intrigued to see that even the radio message went out from a dozen in-system repeaters, not from the Athens.
The three ‘bubble’ ships were vectoring straight ‘up’ from Nbaro’s perspective, and she guessed they were trying to get a look ‘over’ the wall of chaff that the humans had erected. The starfish had run through the wall and were now lost to her instruments.
Why aren’t we shooting back?
Another particle beam struck the rock, this one less than a kilometer away. The asteroid was now venting ammonia in three places; two from particle beam hits, and one where a starfish ship had apparently left the ‘airlock’ open on purpose.
To kill Feather Dancer?
The result was that the rock began to tumble. It was moving. It wasn’t moving fast… but the venting ammonia was acting like a rocket engine. Three rocket engines.
<Morosini, did the Starfish mean to blow Tradepoint?> she asked.
<I fear that it looks that way.>
The venting ammonia would tip the rock out of its stable point and cause it to fall in towards one of the stars, or so it appeared to Nbaro.
She was tabbed by Qaqqaq. ‘Okay, Nbaro. The walls on the ammonia container are double-thickness already. I think that it’ll hold up to hard vacuum and I think that the insulating property will keep our guest warm enough for… two hours? Maybe?’
Dorcas came on. ‘We can’t know how long Feather Dancer can take extreme cold.’
‘Doesn’t ammonia freeze?’ Nbaro asked.
‘At -77 degrees Celsius,’ Qaqqaq said.
‘What if we ran pipes around the outside? Warm pipes?’ Nbaro said.
‘We’re not coming back here, right?’ Qaqqaq asked.
Dorcas sounded sad. ‘Maybe not ever,’ he said.
Qaqqaq’s voice was confident. “I’ve got it. I won’t say the ammonia won’t go sour, or whatever, from the starfish breathing it. I don’t have an oxygenator that will work in ammonia.’
‘Someone better get to work on that over in Athens,’ Dorcas said. ‘Damnation! What do they eat?’
‘Okay,’ Nbaro said, ‘I have two flight Two shuttles inbound. Commander Jha is on the line with Space Operations planning the load out of existing xenoglas and everyone’s kit. What’s my timeline, Naisha?’
‘I need forty minutes,’ the engineer said.
Nbaro was watching the three bubble ships. They were thousands of kilometers away, and her simulation said that they would see the fleeing starfish again…
All three ‘bubble’ ships fired their beam weapons, and then there was a flash, like the death of a distant sun, and one of them was gone, an expanding radioactive cloud on instruments. Simultaneously, something cataclysmic happened beyond the wall of clutter, a pulse that showed right through the cracks in the expanding sensory wall.
Forty minutes was a long time in a space battle, and Nbaro was doing nothing. It wasn’t helped by the fact that no one else she knew was doing anything, except the crew of the station, who were all packing, and the pilots of the Flight Two shuttles, who’d dropped away from Athens with a strong electromagnetic push and didn’t light their engines until they’d given their mother ship plausible deniability.
On the other hand, she had forty minutes.
<Morosini, I have forty minutes until Qaqqaq clears me to lift the starfish> she sent. <I’m going to get my kit>
Morosini didn’t deign to answer. She was out of her cockpit and out of her ship in seconds, moving in zero g to the hatch, cycling the airlock…
Inside the station, everyone was deceptively calm. It was likely that lacking neural laces, they didn’t even know they’d been under fire from beam weapons. There was no artificial gravity, and she left her helmet on, bouncing down one passageway and ‘up’ the next, past the galley’s new location, and into the corridor of her own space. People were moving with efficiency; no one seemed to be panicking.
She got her hatch open and got her carbine, her precious sword and armour, and her kit bag. She passed Gunny Drun in the corridor heading out; he was in a power-assist suit, the servos whining as he walked.
‘Ms. Nbaro!’ he said. ‘I’m on your ship.’
‘You’ll need a pressure suit,’ she said.
‘Roger that,’ he said.
As it turned out, she had Qaqqaq, Drun, Dorcas and Wilson Akunje. And they were to be the last people off the station.
She dropped into her hatch and filed her flight plan from her acceleration couch and then watched Qaqqaq on her V/R as she and two engineering techs turned the overflow tank for the ammonia from the airlock and the space in which it sat on station, into a sealed, airtight box with a space heater run off a generator that fit in a four-by-four meter shipping container. It was a lesson in tool use and efficiency, and Nbaro didn’t break in and interrupt.
Sometimes she’d watch Dorcas as he packed the robots into their cases, and his lab equipment and the chemical sniffer, the various computers…
On to palettes.
‘Ready for the forklift,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘But we’re going to move the starfish last, so we can get everything and everyone else out, and so it’s not freezing in vacuum any longer than it needs. I have no idea if that little space heater is going to help at all. This isn’t engineering! This is guesswork.’
The first Fight Two bird came in hot, thrusters firing all the way to docking, a so-called ‘shit-hot’ maneuver. The techs and spacers from the station had the whole bird loaded in ten minutes; incredibly fast work to the participants, agonizingly slow to the observers.
Ten thousand klicks ‘above’ their heads, the two surviving ‘bubble’ ships had changed vector to pursue the starfish, both firing their beam weapons and receiving fire. The Athens and her compliment continued to sit tight.
Seconds after the Flight Two shuttle burned its way in, a beam weapon struck the asteroid. It missed the cargo shuttle by perhaps two hundred meters. The only immediately visible result was the reaction at ‘ground’ level where the rock split and boiled away under the power of the beam, so that wisps of what looked like smoke and were probably powdered asteroid rose to mark the location of the impact.
Nbaro was watching.
‘Heads up folks,’ she said. ‘We’re under fire from the bubbles.’
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