"I still don't understand what they're building here," Herat muttered. Michael didn't take the verbal bait; he was too busy trying to keep his flight straight while hauling along the autotroph canister.
"I mean, the tethers around Osiris and Apophis won't produce enough power to launch a cycler," the professor went on. "So then, what is this?" He gestured at the slowly coalescing machinery in the center of the shack.
"A colony," somebody else said. Michael was startled at the thought— but maybe it was true.
"They might have spent most of their energy to launch the Envy, and then this is being provided as a home for whomever the Envy manages to find on its ring," Michael suggested.
"Halt," said Harp. They were approaching the wall that separated this half of the shack from the rest. Michael could see circular airlocks at regular intervals around the wall. The rest was ribbed and spiked ferrofluid, all conforming to the invisible shapes of the magnetic fields that held it in place.
He knew there were no living beings here, unless the other half of this structure held habitats. If it did, this would be the only settled spot in the Twins' system, which made no sense.
The hunt bots reported no human presence here, not even that of other bots. Crisler's people must have decided to leave this gestation chamber to do its work without interference. That was a lucky break.
They sailed up to one of the airlocks, and Harp repeated the procedure of sending a bot through it first. Michael was nervous— expecting at any moment that some trap of Crisler's would be sprung on them. Nothing happened, and the bot proceeded to beam back pictures of the new space.
The second half of the shack was a single large space, like the first. But while the first contained only the ghostly shadows of machines materializing, here the objects were fully made. The entire space was crammed with a giant, bulbous, and somehow insectile thing. It was vaguely egg-shaped, Michael thought, with circular holes in the end closest to the bot. Those could be weapons… or engines.
The entire white skin of the thing was covered in intricate, multicolored lines of text— but not, Michael realized with a shock, the spiky red writing of the Lasa.
"That's Chicxulub," said Herat. Michael could hear disbelief in the older man's voice, an echo to what Michael himself felt.
"It is a cycler," Michael said doubtfully.
"It can't be," insisted Herat. "Look at it, it must be incredibly massive— built with all kinds of unnecessary metal plating and girders…"
"It's a drop ship!" exclaimed Harp. "Like our interceptors."
"No… Too delicate for that. And way too big. I have no idea what it is," Herat concluded. Normally mysteries excited him, but he seemed more uneasy than pleased at this particular one. "But if not Lasa…"
Michael laboriously turned the autotroph canister until the little window pointed toward the cycler-or-whatever. "Translate that," he instructed the autotroph being.
The bulk of the giant machine obscured whatever else might be in the chamber. Harp took them through the airlock cautiously, but so far there was no sign of hostiles. But as the hunt bots shot away to explore, Michael spotted something far down along the curve of the ship. "White light," he said to Harp, pointing. "There."
Harp deployed countermeasures, and they began crawling slowly along the inside wall of the chamber, flat invisibility shields held overhead. Gradually, the source of the white illumination revealed itself.
Here was Crisler's base of operations. Two small balloon-habitats had been inflated inside the shack, one against its outside wall, and one half-encircling the nose of the giant machine— which Michael stubbornly decided must be a cycler, regardless of what Herat said. The habitats were a patchwork of white, made of the same stuff as the Banshee's habs. In several places each was transparent; Michael recognized the material the soldiers used for temporary bubble airlocks.
The habitat attached to the shack wall was small, probably subdivided into no more than two rooms. The one encircling the cycler's nose was much larger; it looked like it held as much volume as two floors of the Banshee's habs.
"Guards visible," said one of the hunt bots. "Cameras on habs."
"Seen." Harp gestured to two of his men. "Auto-aim on the bot's signal. Get ready to take out those cameras."
"Whatever you do, don't hit the artifact," said Herat.
Michael had to laugh. "Have you deciphered the writing yet?" he asked the autotroph.
"That which I have seen," it said. "There is much that is not visible from this point. I must be allowed to circle the vessel—"
"Not now—" Michael forgot whatever else he'd been about to say. He was looking in the direction of the habs, and had noticed a change in the white glow coming through the plastic.
"Sir," he said, "parts of the hab are pulsing. Pulsing red."
Harp cursed. "It's an alert! They've seen us. No more time for subtlety, boys. Fire."
"Wait!" shouted the professor. "Maybe it's not us they spotted, but Rue's party."
At that moment they lost the feed from the lead hunt bot. Michael looked around his shield, to behold a very strange sight. Where a moment ago the air within the cavernous space of the shack had been empty, now a long line of tiny glowing beads lay strung between the balloon-hab on the shack's wall, and the mangled smoking wreck of the bot a hundred meters closer. In the second or so Michael stared, he saw some of the little beads vanish, while others seemed to split in two, or begin to drift.
"Behind your shield, Bequith, that was a laser shot!" shouted Harp. A moment later the black hull material next to Michael exploded into vapor before splashing back to heal itself. "We're under fire! Infrared lasers! Target and fire, men!"
Around him, Harp's men popped up to shoot, then retreated behind their shields. The shields began to smoke and shake, but there was no sound, and nothing to see— except, when Michael looked down by his foot, where that second shot had hit the hull he saw a little constellation of glowing blue spheres, none bigger than his thumbnail. They drifted, serene and self-contained, like newborn stars.
Fire. He was seeing fire. The laser shots were igniting the hydrogen/oxygen mix that filled the shack. But what would have become a Hindenberg-class inferno under gravity behaved quite differently here.
His shield warped; he felt the heat through his gloves. Michael felt a surge of fear and adrenaline as it finally hit home the kinds of energies that were aimed at him. He drew his laser and cleared a window in his shield to shoot through. He had been dreaming for months of what his first combat against the R.E. would be like; now that it was here his mind was fixed only on the moment.
Behind him, the autotroph being was speaking, but he had no time to listen as glistening, mirror-clad men began flipping into the air from the balloon-habs, and more threads of flaming air converged on him.
"PREPARE TO ABANDON ship," said Rue. The tungsten plate under her feet was glowing hot in places, and its edges had become ragged from laser fire. The constant battering by the Banshee's laser defense system had knocked the plate past the construction shack, and Rue had gotten her people to focus their hand jets on firing tangentially to their course. The trick had worked; the construction shack was eclipsing the Banshee. After a last few agonizing seconds, the lasers of the Banshee vanished behind the black curve of the shack, and they were safe.