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.
This time Rue took up position behind a stack of boxes and Sola went to the door. He was three steps from it when it flew open. A crimson flash caused her faceplate to polarize momentarily; then she saw Sola tumbling backward, his chest smoking. Another flash and the boxes in front of her exploded.
Rue rolled across the floor, firing her taser as she came back to a crouch. Sparks flew around the doorway, then someone leaped through it. The man was in a pressure suit and held an antipersonnel laser.
The laser looked just like the one she'd seen dangling from an arm of the submarine back on Oculus. This might even be the man who'd shot Max.
Rue jumped to one side just as he fired. She fired back, raising another cascade of sparks from the boxes where he now crouched. Even a near miss with the taser might short out his suit's systems, leaving him helpless— but she was having no luck.
Fire engulfed her hand. The taser exploded and the slap against her palm spun Rue around. She fell back against the smoking remains of the table.
He stepped out from behind the boxes, between her and the inner door now. The door opened and another figure dressed in an R.E. suit entered.
He glanced back, then casually took aim at Rue with the laser. She flinched and scarlet light blinded her.
There was no pain. As her faceplate depolarized she saw the man in front of her collapse to his knees and then fall on his face. The back of his suit was a blackened mess.
The soldier who had fired stepped over his body and knelt in front of Rue.
"Are you all right?" The voice was that of a woman. Rue shook her head in confusion.
The soldier reached up and undogged her own faceplate. "It's me, Mina!"
Mina. This was the woman Rebecca had begun seeing when they were aboard the Envy. She was one of Crisler's people, but obviously not on his side.
Suddenly Rue understood why Rebecca had left Oculus with Crisler. "She came back for you," she stammered.
"Come on," said Mina. She extended her hand to help Rue to her feet. "I've been managing to swing shifts so I could be with your people," she said. "It paid off, I guess."
Rue stooped to examine Sola. His eyes were open and lifeless.
She forced herself to turn away. With difficulty she made sense of what Mina had just said to her. "Are they here?" she asked.
"See for yourself." Mina pointed to the inner doorway. She could see two people standing on the other side. Rue ran to the door.
Rebecca and Blair both ran forward when they recognized her. They were alone in this small room. Both began talking at once and Rebecca grabbed onto Rue's gloved hand like a free-faller reaching for a safety line. A hot stab of pain in her hand made Rue pull back. She looked down and realized with a shock that her right glove was burned and fused. Waves of pain were radiating from her hand.
"I've been shot," she heard herself say. She had to keep her priorities, she reminded herself. "Where are Corinna and Evan?"
"They're aboard the cycler mother," said Mina. "Crisler's using them as explorers."
The room was spinning. "Rebecca, my people are outside," Rue said. "Get them…" She couldn't manage the rest, as everything blurred and roared together. For a few seconds she was sure she was going to pass out and she sat down heavily on the deck waiting for it. The tide slowly receded and she looked up to see the four remaining members of her squad crowding into the room.
This place had been set up as a prison cell. The walls were cut off near the top, as elsewhere on this level, but here they'd been stapled into the folds of hull material. There were four cots, a small table and a footlocker.
Blair was grimly rummaging through the locker. Rue's men clustered around Sola; he was obviously dead.
Rebecca was crying. "Rue, you're alive," she said. "They told me you'd drowned."
"How did you get here?" asked Blair. He was filling a satchel.
"It's a long story," she said, trying to smile. "Are those your records, Blair?"
He nodded to Rue, looking grimly relieved. "They were going to wipe it all. All my work." He had recorded everything, from the day they left Erythrion to Rue's discovery of the Lasa habitat builder at Jentry's Envy.
"What do we do about Sola?" asked Barendts sharply. "Leave him?"
They had discussed this before the mission. Casualties might have to be left behind; these men were here because they had accepted that risk. Now that they were in the situation, though, Rue found herself shaking her head.
"We take him as far as we can," she said. "If we have to abandon him to escape, then that's what we'll do. But I'm not leaving anyone behind if I don't have to."
"Have you taken over the ship?" asked Rebecca.
"Not yet," she said. "That's next on the agenda."
Mina nodded sagely. "So those are your ships out there."
"Yeah." Rue waved one of her men over. "I'm hurt, can you give me something?"
All four of them were suddenly looming over her, scrambling in their belt pouches for analgesic patches. "Your glove's been wrecked," Barendts pointed out. "We'll have to seal it."
"Go ahead."
He sprayed the glove with a plastic aerosol that hardened on contact. Meanwhile Rue fumbled her faceplate open with her other hand and let someone apply a patch to her forehead, which was the only exposed piece of skin large enough. She was sure she looked like a dolt now, with a military-black square on her brow like a little target. But there was nothing for it and anyway, the pain was receding now like a half-remembered dream.
"Crisler'll have to surrender now," said Mina. She took Rebecca's hand. "You're sure the halo'll have me?"
"Of course."
"I know you must have taken a cycler to Maenad," said Mina. "What I can't figure out, though, is how you managed to bring a big enough force with you to be able to take over Crisler's other ships. And you faked the transmissions perfectly— I mean, you even got the voices and faces right."
Rue and all her men turned to stare at Mina. "What?" said Rue.
"Admiral Crisler relayed the chatter through inscape," said Mina. "Half an hour ago— we watched the video feed from here, from the freighter and the other cruisers…" She stopped. "Why are you staring at me like that?"
Rue got to her feet. "What freighter? What cruisers? How many?"
"The… the three cruisers. You know, the old decommissioned ones Crisler had refitted and moved to Maenad."
Rue looked at her men. They looked back expectantly.
Sola was gone. It was up to Rue now; she would have to improvise. "Plans have changed. Everybody, get ready to abandon ship. Mina, tell me more about these ships."
Mina looked confused now. "They came out of hyperdrive an hour ago, just twenty thousand klicks away. Like I said, a freighter and three decommissioned cruisers. Crisler managed to get the rights to them after they were liberated from the rebels a couple years ago. They signaled us right away. I thought you must have been aboard them, I mean that you faked out Crisler… But if those aren't your ships, where did you come from?"
"Ma'am," said one of the soldiers, "we can't abandon ship. We'll be fried as soon as we leave the hull."
"Maybe not," said Rue. "I have an idea. Anyway, Crisler's got reinforcements coming. If we stay here…"
"But our boys will take them out," said the soldier.
Rue checked the time in her suit's HUD. "They appeared much closer to here than we did," she said. "Crisler's ships may reach us before our interceptors reach them. In which case, he's got both us and the construction shack as hostages. No, we've got to get back to our own ship and get out of here."
But we'll go through the shack if we can, she told herself. I won't leave Corinna and Evan behind if there's any way to get to them.
* * *
TEN MINUTES LATER they crowded into an airlock above the collapsed levels of the habitat. They had encountered no more resistance on their way here; it seemed that Crisler's people were spread out, perhaps mostly in the construction shack. If there was a way to get up past the hub and down to the other habitat without being lasered, they might well have been able to take over the Banshee. The hardened defenses of the starship were too strong, though.
Rue undogged the cover over a small quartz window and gawked up through it. "Yeah, there they are. See?" She stepped back and let Barendts look.
"Big black plates," he said. "Halfway up the cables. What the hell are those?"
"Antimatter generators," said Rue. She'd heard all about this stuff from a scientist who'd chatted her up shortly after they embarked for the Envy. "The Banshee can direct the particle stream coming in from the ramscoop through those tungsten plates. The radiation mostly just heats the plates on the way through, but a tiny fraction gets converted to antimatter and collected with magnets. That way, the Banshee can replenish her antimatter supply just by, say, orbiting close around a star and turning on the ramscoop."
"So?" said Barendts. "What's the point?"
"The point is those plates are designed to be put in the way of energy beams. The Banshee's lasers aren't going to get through one."
Barendts nodded. "So if we cut one loose…"
"Exactly. Do you think we can get there outside?"
Barendts shook his head. "We'll have to go up the elevator shaft." The shaft was an inflated tunnel that paralleled the cables, joining the habitat to the central hub of the ship.
"All right, let's do it."
They piled out of the airlock. A set of elevator doors faced the airlock in the attic of the habitat. Two of her men set to prying the doors open.
Blair was pacing up and down, trying to get comfortable in his suit. They'd taken suits from the tasered R.E. soldiers for both Blair and Rebecca. Blair's was too small.
Something behind the door broke and they slid open. Barendts jogged over and stuck a mirror on a pole out into the shaft. He examined it for a few seconds, then said, "There are autoguns in there. Antipersonnel tasers, I think."
"Can we take them out?" she asked. If not, they were stuck here.
"Simplicity itself," said Barendts. He laid the mirror pole down on the deck so that the mirror was inside the shaft, righted it so the mirror pointed upward and unslung his laser rifle. "Guys, come here. Sight off the mirror."
Rue was amazed at their ingenuity: they proceeded to shoot up the shaft by bouncing their shots off the mirror on the pole. The tasers inside the shaft had no way to shoot back, except at the pole itself. Several did just that, sending cascades of sparks back along it. Barendts and his men were standing well back and they ignored the jolts.
Sparks and bits of flaming metal fell down from above. After a minute, smoke drifted down as well. Then there came one of those rushes of air like a god inhaling and the smoke vanished. The pole twirled and would have fallen into the shaft if Barendts hadn't grabbed it. He peered into the mirror for a long while, then said, "That's all of them. Let's go."
Climbing the shaft was simplicity itself. There was a ladder inset into the wall. Barendts and two of his men went first, then Rue, with the others behind her.
The shaft towered up to a seemingly infinite height. It was almost half a kilometer to the hub from here. But as Rue climbed, her weight lessened and it became easier the farther she went. About halfway up, Barendts said, "Elevator coming."
The other men swore. "What is it?" asked Rebecca. "Reinforcements?"
"Probably," said Barendts. "Captain, may I have your permission to get ugly on this wall here?"
"I thought you were going to put up one of those inflatable airlocks and drill through inside it."
"The elevator would run over it. Yes or no? It's coming!"
"Yes!"
Barendts swung out from the ladder and slammed a disk-shaped charge against the wall of the elevator shaft. It stuck and he swung back. "Everybody hold on!"
The explosion was deafening, even through the suit. The ladder shook and tried to throw Rue off. She held on and looked up again to see smoke swirling and disappearing into a miraculous gale that had sprung up in the shaft.
Above, the elevator car had stopped moving. Rue could see the shapes of hatches in its floor. If those could be opened from the inside, then she and her people were about to be lasered.
"Come on!" shouted Barendts, his voice way too loud in Rue's headphones. He swung out and around again, but this time he was holding onto a line that he'd tied to the ladder. He disappeared into the gale. The man behind him followed an instant later.
There was no time to think. Rue grabbed the line and swung out. The wind caught her instantly and pushed her straight at a ragged black hole in the side of the shaft. She fell sideways out into night.
Barendts had calculated perfectly. As the wind vanished into vacuum around her, Rue fell against the outside of the shaft. Looming over her was one of the petallike tungsten plates. It hid any view of the hub above— so the lasers there could not touch her. One by one the others shot out of the bright tear in the side of the shaft and Barendts's men caught them. When they were all hanging from the lip of the tear— not so hard, since gravity was much reduced here— Barendts clambered up and began gluing handholds to the underside of the plate.
Rue could hear several persons' ragged breathing coming through the com lines. She said, "Everybody up now. We're going to have to use our suits' reaction jets to fly this thing. When Barendts cuts us loose we're going to fall, but coriolis effect will take us away from the habitat. Our main task is to keep the plate from spinning. If we cut loose at the right time we'll be aimed at the horizon of the shack and if we can get over that, we're safe." One after another, they climbed up. "No, don't grab with your hands," said Rue as Mina clutched at one of the new grips on the plate. "Put your feet through them. The plate is going to be our new 'down' when we cut loose. We'll fly it like those guys on Earth used to fly on ocean waves. What did they call it? — surfing."
She demonstrated. Soon they were all hanging feet-down off the plate, with the glowing habitat below and the stars streaming past under that. "Ready," she said to Barendts.
He had attached another charge to the gimbal joint that connected the plate to the shaft. Now he unslung his laser again and prepared to laser the charge.
"Ten, nine, eight, seven…" Barendts was counting down. As the Banshee slowly spun, he was lining up so that centripetal force would throw them at the shack. "…three, two, one—"
He fired the laser and a silent explosion silhouetted him. The plate shook over Rue's feet— but nothing else happened.
"Oh, shit," said Barendts. It hadn't worked.
"Everybody shoot the joint!" shouted Rue. The others unslung their lasers; she saw one rifle fall away; it arced out over the stars for a few seconds before vanishing in a flash of light. Destroyed by the hub lasers.
"Wait," said Barendts, "We have to line up another throw at the shack. We'll miss it if we drop now!"
"Too late!" Rue saw shadows moving inside the ragged hole in the side of the shaft. Whoever had been in the elevator car, they were out now and coming.
Bright spots appeared on the gimbal joint and in a few seconds metal was flaring intolerably bright. I hope the joint's not tungsten, too, she thought.
Without warning they were falling. Everybody seemed to be shouting or screaming, up turned down, the habitat whipped by and the stars were tumbling past—
"Jets forward!" shouted Rue as she brought up her own reaction pistol. She fired and several others did too. The plate wobbled under her feet, the Banshee's cables and shaft came into view and then the hub was peeking over the edge of the plate.
Light flashed and someone screamed. Rue was momentarily shrouded in smoke but she kept her feet braced in the straps and fired her pistol. After several agonizing seconds, the hub crept down over the plate's horizon again. Just as it did, the edge of the plate began glowing dull red, then orange.
"Who did we lose?" asked Barendts.
Silence for a few seconds. Rue looked around, but visibility was limited in her suit and in this dark.
"N-nobody," said Mina finally. "The laser caught my reaction pistol— blew it out of my hands. I've got a little leak in my glove, but nothing I can't seal."
Rue was watching the stars turn. "Jets back," she said. "Two second burst." They all fired and stabilized the plate again.
She could see the construction shack. It was above and to her left, but it was hard to know if they were headed in that direction. The plate they were riding was massive; she doubted if they could change its trajectory easily.
The metal under her feet glowed again, then faded. At least it looked like the plate would hold.
There was a long silence, as it sank in that they had, for now anyway, escaped. Then Blair's dry voice filled Rue's head.
"Well, Captain, this may not be the best ship I've crewed for you, but right now I wouldn't trade it for anything."