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Matti-Jay tapped at the armrest console. Her fingers bumped against the taut shield of the transparent bubble. Remarkably solid. She eased the acceleration.
The shudder lessened. Better. It was scary riding in a broken ship. Oh, and trying to outrun a dragon.
The crackling came again.
“Someone there?” Matti-Jay said. “Charlie?”
On the bubble’s tiny display, details about the Blue Defender’s status came up. The self-repair systems were putting workarounds in place. The little vessel might be able to take a bit more acceleration soon.
More crackling.
“Hello?” Matti-Jay said.
“Matti-Jay?” Charlie said, his voice barely understandable through the hiss and crackle. “Matti-Jay?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh boy. It’s great to hear your voice. The telemetry from your runabout shows a whole lot of damage. Loss of internal atmosphere. When we couldn’t reach you we thought the worst.”
“Ship’s damaged. I’m okay. The emergency systems worked.”
“Did you get hit by something? Space junk? Or was it an internal problem? An explosion?”
“It was the dragon.”
A pause. “Say again please. Your voice is breaking up. It looks like there’s a problem with your communications systems too.”
“There is. It was a dragon that bit the Blue Defender.” It sounded so ridiculous as she said it.
“No,” Charlie said. “I’m not receiving that right. It sounded liked ‘dagger’.”
“Dragon. Look. Turn your scopes on me. You’ll see it.”
“Scopes? We see you on radar. You’re coming our way fast. Just take care that you don’t do any damage when you swing around to slow down.”
Travel in space was a simple thing. You blasted your rockets in one direction and your ship went in the other direction. When you wanted to slow down, you used your ship’s attitude jets to turn around and turned on the rocket again. Very simple action and reaction.
When the Blue Defender drew closer to the Donner, Matti-Jay would have to spin the runabout around on its axis and burn the ultramagnetics again to slow down and match the Donner’s speed.
She just had to make sure she didn’t aim too close to the Donner itself and turn it all into a big barbecue
“You can see me? On your scopes?” she said. “Anything else?”
“Ludelle 8 is there. A couple of distant asteroids.”
“There should be something between me and the Donner. Almost a direct line.”
“Nope.”
“It’s moving faster than me.” Matti-Jay tapped the cramped armrest controls again and brought up the scan.
The dragon was still there. Over eighty kilometers from her. The distance was diminishing now. She was moving faster.
But why couldn’t they see it from the Donner?
The same way that she hadn’t known about it until it was practically on her. When she’d seen it with her naked eyes.
But why did her scopes see it now? Had something happened because she had already seen it? That didn’t make sense.
The thing had to be shielded. Who knew what, but somehow it was deflecting the detection systems. But perhaps only ahead. In its direction of travel.
“Charlie, I see it,” she said.
The thing was just a speck now. Just reflecting sunlight from Ludelle. The thing had a dark hull. Probably just part of its stealth systems.
The thing was designed–or evolved?–for ambushes.
“Matti-Jay, you’re runabout’s going way too fast. This was supposed to be just a shakedown run. And you’re damaged.”
“The Donner’s in danger,” she yelled. Her voice echoed strangely in the bubble enclosure.
“Danger?” Charlie said. “This... dragon?”
Matti-Jay sighed. It did sound ridiculous. Yet here she was inside an emergency bubble because the thing had bitten her runabout.
“There’s something coming, Charlie,” she said. “Fast. I don’t know what it is.” It’s a dragon. “But it’s what did this damage to the Blue Defender. You see all the issues coming through the signal from the runabout’s telemetry, right?”
“I see the telemetry.” Charlie’s voice was still crackly. As if he had a foil-wrapped pack of protein snacks and was crinkling it by his mouth as he ate. “You shouldn’t call it ‘Blue Defender’. It’s just a standard runabout.”
“Who cares what I call it! Look on the scopes. For the love of... just look. Get optical views on it.”
“We don’t even have you on opticals right now. You’re an awful long ways off. Even if you are coming in fast. Did I mention that you’re accelerating too much? I’m sure I did.”
Charlie could be so annoying sometimes. Like having a brother.
“You’ve got magnification,” Matti-Jay said. “Get the telescopes to pick me out. Track me in. I’m going to fly close to the thing.”
“What for?”
“I think it’s invisible.”
“Like it’s cloaked? Why would someone cloak a ship out here? Anyway, technology like that is really only experimental. I don’t think anyone’s using it, let alone flying all the way out to Ludelle to try it out.”
He was right, despite being just plain obsequious. As if he was trying to find every single argument against everything she was saying.
Which made it very clear what the problem was.
“Charlie. This thing isn’t from Earth. It’s not human-built.” She didn’t want to say that it could be alive. Which was impossible, but also impossible to avoid considering.
Here they were at an alien planet. Who knew what other forms of life there might be? Just because everyone thought that it was impossible for life to exist in vacuum didn’t mean it really was impossible.
Once, people had thought that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. Then they’d thought that faster-than-light travel was impossible.
Yet here they were. The Donner and the Blue Defender, herself and Charlie and all the others. Heavier than air and having traveled faster than light.
“You mean it’s an alien ship?” Charlie said, voice less crackly. “Copy that. Getting the scopes on you now.”
Had she convinced him? Maybe.
She was less than ten kilometers from the dragon now. And closing. It was still a speck, just a slightly bigger speck.
Less than five hundred kilometers to the Donner now. And moving at over fifteen hundred kilometers an hour. Accelerating still.
Matti-Jay would have to decelerate the runabout at some point soon.
But she and the dragon would be there in less than twenty minutes.
“I see you,” Charlie said. “On the scopes. You’re kind of shimmery at this distance. You know, with your speed and acceleration.”
“Do you see the dragon?”
“Nope. There’s nothing there. I just–”
“Look all around. It’s maybe eight kilometers from me. That the range I’ve got.”
“All right. Keep your hair on. There’s just nothing–wait. What’s that?”
“You see it?”
“Huh. That’s moving real fast.”
“Charlie.”
He didn’t reply. The sound of his breathing came through the background hiss.
“Charlie?” Her mouth was dry.
“It’s coming right for us.”
Matti-Jay swallowed. “I know.”