“To give you a sense of scale,” said Edimar, “here’s what El Cavador would look like beside it.” A rendering of El Cavador appeared next to the hormiga ship. It was like holding a grape next to a cantaloupe.
“How can a ship that big move that fast?” said Bahzim.
“It doesn’t even look like a ship at all,” said Selmo. “It’s circular. There’s no up or down. It looks more like a satellite.”
“It’s too big to be a satellite,” said Segundo. “Besides, we know the pod came from inside the ship. How it left the ship at such a high speed is anyone’s guess, but it must have. What stumps me is that I can’t see any obvious entrances or exit points.”
“What about this wide opening here at the front?” said Bahzim, pointing.
Segundo shook his head. “If I had to guess, I’d say that was a ram drive. Victor suspected the pod was powered by one, and this looks like a similar design. The ship scoops up hydrogen atoms, which at near-lightspeed would be gamma radiation, then the rockets shoot this gamma plasma out the back for thrust. It would be a brilliant propulsive system because you’d have an infinite amount of fuel, and the faster you move, the more hydrogen you’d pick up and therefore the more acceleration and thrust you’d generate.”
“Scoop-field propulsion,” said Concepcion.
“Is that even possible?” asked Bahzim.
“Theoretically,” said Segundo. “It would only work on a ship built in space and intended for interstellar travel, though. You couldn’t use a propulsion system like that to exit a planet or atmosphere. Too much G-force. You’d die instantly. But in a vacuum, you could accelerate quickly, safely. I wouldn’t exactly call it a clean form of propulsion, though. It would be putting out massive amounts of radiation. You wouldn’t want to fly behind it. Even at a great distance. If it’s powered by gamma plasma, the plasma would likely interfere with electronics and sensors as far back as, say, a million kilometers or so. Stay in its propulsion wake too long, and it would cause tearing on the surface of the ship. And at closer distances, you’d probably get a lethal dose of radiation. Be right behind it, and you’d be disintegrated instantly.”
“Lovely,” said Selmo.
“What I don’t understand,” said Bahzim, “is how they can even see where they’re going. I don’t see any windows or visible sensors. The surface is completely smooth.”
“It looks smooth, but it isn’t,” said Edimar. “At close inspection you can detect seams, indentations, and ridges. Like these circles.” She typed a command, and four massive circles appeared on the ship, side by side, around the bulbous end of the teardrop. “We don’t know what these are,” she said. “Doors maybe. Or perhaps smaller ships that detach from the main ship. Whatever they are, they’re massive.”
“The whole thing is massive,” said Bahzim. “Which makes me wonder about defense. How does it protect itself against collision threats? It would get pulverized by asteroids without a good PK system. But look at it. No pebble-killers. No guns. No weapons whatsoever.”
“I couldn’t discern any weapons either,” said Edimar. “But it does have a PK system. I’ve seen it. Any object on a collision course is completely obliterated. Asteroids, pebbles, comets. All vaporized by lasers from the surface of the ship.”
“The surface?” said Bahzim. “Where?”
“That’s just it,” said Edimar. “From any where on the surface. It can fire from any spot on the ship. It’s like the entire ship is a weapon.”
“How is that possible?” said Bahzim. “Lasers have to come from something.”
Edimar shrugged. “Maybe there’s some system below the surface that unleashes them. Maybe it has thousands of pores all over its hull that open and release the lasers. However it works, it’s more powerful than anything humans have because it can fire as many of these as it wants at once. So instead of firing a single beam from two cannons like we do to hit a collision threat, the hormigas can fire a whole wall of laser fire.”
The room was silent a moment.
“That’s not exactly comforting,” said Concepcion.
“Nothing about this is comforting,” said Selmo.
“Do we know what the lasers are composed of?” asked Segundo.
“No,” said Edimar. “But I don’t think it’s photons. Their beams can be up to a meter thick and they act differently than our lasers. If you’re right about the ram drive, if they’re using gamma plasma as propulsion, it’s not far-fetched to suggest that they use coherent gamma rays as their weapons, too. I mean, why not? If they can harness gamma plasma for propulsion, why not harness it and laserize it as a means of defense?”
“Weapons and fuel from the same substance,” said Concepcion. “That’s certainly economical.”
“Laserized gamma plasma?” said Selmo “That makes our PKs sound like a joke.”
“They are a joke,” said Bahzim.
“The composition of the lasers is all speculation,” said Dreo. “What we do know is that their lasers only target collision threats. The hormigas aren’t blasting everything in sight. They’re conservative with their fire. They follow the same protocol of any other ship in that regard. Unless the object is set to collide with them, they ignore it.”
“That’s good news for us,” said Edimar. “We’re moving in the same direction as it is alongside the starship’s trajectory. We’re not on a collision course. When it passes us, it should ignore us.”
“Unless it’s blasting every ship in sight,” said Bahzim. “Just because it didn’t blow up a bunch of rocks out there, doesn’t mean it won’t gun us. What do we know? Maybe its mission is to destroy every human ship it sees. It didn’t exactly leave the Italians alone, and they weren’t a collision threat, either.”
“We won’t be close to it when it passes,” said Dreo. “We’re moving parallel to its trajectory but at a great distance. It’s never fired on anything remotely close to this range.”
“So it will pass us before we reach Weigh Station Four?” asked Concepcion.
“Yes,” said Edimar. “Which obviously means it will pass the weigh station before we reach the station, though not by much.”
Concepcion turned to Segundo. “Any luck with the radio?”
They had been trying for weeks to contact the weigh station, but without any success.
“Radio’s only working for short distances,” said Segundo. “We’ve been sending out messages to the station, but all we hear back is static. There’s a lot of interference.”
“Maybe the hormigas are scrambling radio,” said Bahzim.
Segundo shrugged. “Who’s to say they even know what radio is? They may have another communication system entirely. Or the problem might be the radiation their ship is emitting. Maybe that’s disrupting transmissions somehow. Even at this distance. I don’t know.”
“So the station still doesn’t know the ship is coming?” asked Bahzim.
“Not unless they’ve detected it themselves,” said Segundo. “Which is possible, but I doubt it. It’s not heading directly for them-it will miss them by a hundred thousand kilometers-so their computers probably won’t alert them. And you know the guys they have manning the control room. They’re overworked dockworkers, picking up overtime. They’re not experts like Toron or Edimar. If it’s not a collision threat, what do they care? If I had to guess, I’d say the station is completely unaware.”
“The upside,” said Dreo, “is that based on the hormiga ship’s prior behavior, it will probably leave the weigh station alone and move right on by. We’ll get there a day later, and we can use their laserline then.”
Concepcion leaned forward, staring down at the starship in the holospace. “For the sake of everyone on board that station, I pray to God you’re right.”
Podolski was hiding in a small rented room adjacent to a noodle shop on Weigh Station Four when the authorities found him. They kicked in the door after Podolski didn’t answer it, and he cowered to the back corner of the room. He could tell at once that they weren’t real police officials. They were rough men, dressed like the men Chubs and the ship’s crew had killed at the docking tunnel before rocketing away and leaving Podolski here, stranded.