"Everybody kick off," she said. "Head for the shack." They dove for it: Rue, Rebecca, Mina, Blair, Barendts, and the three remaining soldiers. One of them was waving his sensors at the black hull.
"I read energy discharges," he said. "A firefight, looks like."
"Any way to tell who's who?" she asked.
"One group is small, appears to be pinned down by one wall. The other group is near the airlock where we saw a bunch of men headed earlier."
The shack was just a big blot to Rue. "Which is closer?" she asked.
"We're equidistant. But we need to get to an airlock anyway, Captain."
"No, we don't." Rue sighted along the quilted surface of the shack. The material's bubblelike surface clearly showed the patterns of magnets that underlaid it. "Target your lasers on the exact center of the dome of hull material directly ahead of us. We'll make ourselves an airlock there."
"Ma'am?"
"Just do it!"
She couldn't see the beams, but four glowing spots appeared on the hull, quickly converging into one. Then suddenly the hull wasn't there anymore. In its place a blast of black droplets was spewing into space, revealing a three-meter hole in the shack's hull.
"Quick! Before it heals itself!" She jetted through the black rain and found herself in a vast space lit by red light and galaxies of little blue stars. Air was rushing around her, trying to push Rue back through the gap, and spiraling with it came thousands of those little stars. She and Jentry had played with flames like this when she was young and she knew what was about to happen: As the beads were sucked into the moving air they merged and became tongues of fire. For a few moments Rue was licked by a passing inferno.
Her people were through, and just in time as the array of magnets supporting the hull shifted and the ferrofluid reached out to close the wound they'd made. The long tongue of flame halted, became a large irregular ball shape, then died from the inside out. Its outermost skin fractured into hundreds of tiny beads, which began drifting away as if nothing had happened.
New lines of stars appeared— one, two, four, all lancing through the space around her. Rue and her people were floating, vulnerable, in the crossfire of a battle.
"Where?" shouted Barendts. "What the hell is all this?"
The swirling clouds of firebeads made it hard to see, which was probably good just now, she thought. One thing Rue did make out was a standard balloon-hab, attached to some kind of very large machine dead ahead. "Make for that!" She jetted toward it.
One of the marines screamed as his suit jetted white fire. Barendts whirled and fired back along the telltale line of firebeads joining the dying man to a blurry figure near a balloon-hab attached to the shack's hull. He was rewarded with a jet of fire at that end. "We're dead unless we get inside now!" he shouted.
Rue reached for the white surface of the balloon-hab. No time for niceties this time: She shot the material with her laser, burning a long ragged tear in it. Despite the pain in her hand, she used her gloves to force the tear in. Pushing against the air that was coming out, she climbed through.
Big flapping white sheets were flying at her. She dove to the side, cursing, and dragged at the things to keep them from covering the breach. Balloon-habs were a bit too efficient at sealing leaks, sometimes. The others clambered through her hole one after the other, then rolled out of the way while the white panels slammed against it and glued themselves into an uneven patchwork.
"This— this is the new ship," panted Mina. "They've attached this hab to the nose of the new cycler as a place for the crew during takeoff. The theory is that once the cycler's at speed it'll calve off a bunch of its own habs, the way Jentry's Envy did. At that point they'll have it make up a human-friendly one, like you did. Then they can move out of the habs."
They hung in a small pie-slice of a larger doughnut-shaped structure. This chamber was crammed with crates of supplies. "Who's they?" asked Rue, eyeing the lack of space. "Crisler can't be moving the whole Banshee crew in here."
"Some of the science team, and marines loyal to Crisler," Mina said. "He'd be returning on the Banshee with the real prize."
"Real prize?" Rue gestured around to indicate the whole vessel they had come to. "This isn't it?"
"No. There's something else— but I don't know what it is. Only that it's small enough to be carried by one person."
"We'll worry about that later," Rue said. "If Corinna and Evan are here, we have to find them." She pointed to a pressure door that separated this tiny room from the rest of the hab. "We go through that. Now."
THERE WERE A good ten of Crisler's marines hunkered down next to their balloon airlock on the far side of the shack. Even with the nose of the cycler between them, there was little cover here. Michael was wreathed in a gas of bubbling black ferrofluid; laser shots had half destroyed his shield and he had several burns on his suit. Both sides were laying down a covering fire to prevent the other from getting out of sight behind the cycler.
"The ancient pact is turned on its head," said the autotroph. It had been silent until now; it must have completed translating the Chicxulub script that covered the outside of the ship.
"What have you learned?" Herat asked it.
"Professor, this is hardly the time," said Michael incredulously. Their little squad was outmanned and outgunned, and Crisler's men might get reinforcements through the airlock at any moment.
"No better time," said the professor. "Now, tell us what those inscriptions say."
"The ancient pact is turned on its head
The hermit who carries the lamp now hands it on
The god who devours his children comes now for those who sought to defy him."
"Ancient pact? Hrm, don't know about that," said Herat. "But the hermit who carries the lamp? Lamp Bearers? It's talking about the Lasa!"
"Fascinating, professor, but—"
"Whoa, what's that?" shouted one of the soldiers. Michael peeked out from behind his shield, in time to see several space-suited figures explode through the shack's wall, to the accompaniment of gouts of fire.
"It's our boys, back from the Banshee!" One of the newcomers took a direct hit from a laser, flailed, and went still. "Give 'em cover, men!" shouted Harp. They all began shooting.
Michael didn't fire. He was too busy puzzling out what had just happened. Somehow, they'd targeted one of the magnets holding up the ferrofluid. As he watched, the lattice of magnets rearranged itself, and the whip of fire that had been exiting into space choked as the wall reappeared.
"That's it!" He leaned out, and aimed carefully— not at the mirrored shields of the marines that the others were targeting, but at a square black block several meters above them. Though his heart was pounding and he was sure he would be hit at any second, he waited until he was sure he had the shot, then pulled the trigger.
The magnet unit flared and exploded. Instantly, the ferrofluid wall behind Crisler's marines bubbled out and exploded. With a visible whoosh of firebeads and flame, they all went spiralling out into space.
"Good work, Bequith," shouted Harp. "But they'll just come right back through the airlock."
"Not if we mine it," he said. Without a word, one of the soldiers took a smart grenade from his belt, programmed it, and threw it in a perfect free-fall straight-throw. Moments later it reached the purple airlock disk, and stuck.
"They can still come through the wall like Captain Cassels did," said Harp. "So move it! We need to secure the habs on that cycler!"