"Just do it," she said. "If this doesn't work, we'll be roasted anyway."
Crushing weight enveloped Rue. She pulled her hand up to close her fingers around the Ediacaran pendant. You've come this far, she thought at it. You can go a little further.
The burn ended. "Coasting in," said the pilot. "After all the fireworks, the Banshee sees us now. But we're coming in on the opposite side of the shack. It'll take them a while to get someone out to us."
"What about the others?"
"Other ships copying our maneuver. They're okay," said the pilot.
"Get ready to disembark," she said. She wanted to feel relieved that they had survived and were here, but she was out of time. Rue reached into the storage bins under the g-bed and pulled out the components of the army pressure suit they'd fitted for her.
She dressed quickly; as the helmet snapped in place with a satisfying click, Rue looked down at the weapons that dangled from the suit's belt. No time for relief now; no time for fear. Only time to take the most direct route to her crew and woe to anyone who got in her way.
25
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.