Now the covers on the cabin windows snapped open. The windows were just little round punctures in the insulated, padded walls. But they were enough to show her the stars — and something else.
A shape, charcoal black and massive, came swimming into her field of view. It looked like a barbecue brick that somebody had been taking potshots at. But there were structures on the surface, she saw: little gold domes, what looked like a spacecraft, a glimmer of electric blue.
There were whoops and shouts, and June felt her heart thump with anticipation.
It was Cruithne. They had arrived.
But then a series of bangs hammered at the hull of the carrier. She knew from experience what that was: blips of the attitude-control thrusters. But such a prolonged firing was unusual.
She felt a ghostly shove sideways. It took a while for a ship the mass of Bucephalus to change course. But right now it was trying mighty hard.
And something new came sailing past the window. It was a golden sphere, rippling and shimmering. It was inexplicable: beautiful, even graceful, but utterly strange — a golden jellyfish swimming up at her out of the darkness.
Suddenly it came to June where she was, what she was doing, how far she was from home. The Bucephalus suddenly seemed very fragile. Fear clutched at her chest, deep and primitive.
Emma Stoney:
“Jeez,” Malenfant said, his radio-transmitted voice crackling in
her ear. “It’s the cops.”
Emma was out in the open, locked into her suit, staring at the sky.
The ship was like nothing she had seen before.
It was a squat cylinder with a rounded snub nose. She could see no rocket nozzles at its flaring base. It had two giant finlike wings on which were marked the letters USA, and it had a USASF roundel and a Stars and Stripes painted close to the base. There were complex assemblies mounted on some parts of the hulclass="underline" an antenna cluster, what looked like a giant swivel-mounted searchlight. The hull was swathed with thick layers of insulation blankets, pocked and yellowed by weeks in space.
Somehow it disturbed Emma to see that huge mass hanging over her in the Cruithne sky: a sky she had become accustomed to thinking of as empty save for the stars, the gleam of Earth, the lurid disc of the sun.
A few yards ahead of her a firefly robot was maneuvering, working its pitons and tethers, in a tight, neat circle, over and over, its carapace scuffed and blackened with dust. It was scrambled, like the equipment in the hab module.
But their suits were working fine. Malenfant had gotten into the habit of burying the suits under a few feet of loosely packed regolith. Just a little more protection, he always said. Now Emma was starting to see the wisdom of that.
“He’s coming down over the pole,” Malenfant murmured now, watching the ship. “Looks like a single-stage-to-orbit design. See the aerospike assembly at the base there? The base would serve as the heat shield on reentry. It’s one big mother. How could they assemble it, fly it so quickly, chase us out here?”
Cornelius shrugged, clumsy in his suit. “Shows how seriously they take you. Anyway now we know what happened to the electronics.”
“Oh,” said Malenfant. “An BMP.”
Emma asked, “BMP?”
“Electromagnetic pulse,” Cornelius said. “They set off a small nuclear weapon above the asteroid. Flooded our electronics with radiation.”
“My God,” Emma said. “How much of a dose did we take?”
They had no dosimeters, no way to answer the question. Emma felt her flesh crawl under her skinsuit, as if she could feel the sleet of hard radiation coursing through her body.
“Anyhow it was seriously dumb,” Malenfant said. “It’s made it impossible for us to talk with them.”
“Maybe they thought they had no choice,” Cornelius said. “They didn’t know what they were flying into here, after all—”
And then Emma saw something new: a sac of water, encased in rippling gold fabric, sailing up from the surface of Cruithne toward the intruder.
Malenfant clenched a fist. “God damn, it’s the squid. The ones who stayed. They’re fighting back.”
Emma’s heart sank. They were doomed, it seemed, to a battle, whether they wanted it or not.
Sparks burst from complex little clusters along the hull of the ship. The great ship began to roll, deflecting ponderously. But it wasn’t going to be enough.
The converging of the two giant masses, in utter silence, was oddly soothing to watch, despite her understanding of the great and deadly forces involved: they were like clouds, she thought: complex clouds of metal and water and fabric.
The water bomb’s membrane snagged on some projection on the ship’s hull. The water within gushed out, blossoming to vapor in a giant, slow explosion. The ship was set tumbling erratically, nose over tail, and the membrane, crumpled, fell away. Emma could see more sparks now as the pilots blipped their attitude thrusters, struggling to bring their craft under control.
“Not enough,” Cornelius said.
“What do you mean?” Emma said.
“If the collision had been head-on the squid missile would have wrecked that thing. Cracked it open like an egg. But that sideswipe is just going to inconvenience them.”
“You mean,” Malenfant said, “it will make them mad.”
Now little hatches in the ship’s hull slid back, and tiny, complex toys squirted out into space. They swiveled this way and that, tight and neat, and then squirted in dead straight lines over the horizons.
“Comsats,” said Malenfant. “For command, communications, control. So they can see all the way around the rock when they begin their operations.”
Emma asked, “What operations?”
“Taking Cruithne. What else?”
And then the ground shook.
They were all floating a little way upward, she saw, like water drops shaken off by a dog. When they landed they staggered. Emma thought she could feel huge slow waves working through the dust-laden ground.
Malenfant snapped, “What the hell now?”
Cornelius was pointing to the horizon.
From beyond Cruithne’s dusty shoulder, an ice fountain was bursting upward. Droplets fanned out in perfectly straight lines, gleaming like miniature stars, unperturbed by Cruithne’s feeble gravity.
“They’re hitting the squid,” she said. “Their domes—”
“Yeah,” Malenfant growled.
“How did they do that?” Emma asked. “How do you fight a space war?”
Malenfant said, “Maybe they fired a projectile. Like an anti-satellite missile.”
“No.” Cornelius pointed to the searchlight-type mount on the hull of the ship. “That looks like a laser-beam director to me. Probably a chemical laser, several megawatts of power, a mirror a few feet across.”
Emma asked, “Could they fire it again?”
“You bet,” Malenfant said. “The babies they developed for Star Wars back in the eighties were designed for thousands of shots.”
Already the ice fountain was dying.
Emma was glad some of the squid, at least, had been spared this, that they were on their way to the Jupiter-orbit Trojans, where they would be far beyond the reach of this heavy-handed military intervention.
Unlike herself.
“They’ll take out our habitat next,” Cornelius said. “Then trash theO’NeilL”
“They wouldn’t do that,” Emma said. “That would kill us.”