“The freighter will be ready for us,” Kari Wang, captain of the Eleven, said. “As soon as we get close they’ll jump. Meantime, they’ll do as much damage as they can.”
“Who let them get that close?” Captain Gruen demanded.
“No idea,” Sale said. “How heavily armed is their ship?” She scowled at the screen, then turned to look behind her. “Ean.” She was beside him in an instant. “Do you need oxygen? What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t any of you notice?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Ean got to his feet. “I’m fine, Sale.”
“What are you doing down there, then?”
“I fell.” The recoil as another bomb hit the station knocked him down again. “You wanted something.”
“I want to see that ship. I want to see their specs.”
He had no idea what she meant, and Radko wasn’t here to translate. He guessed, and pulled a feed from one of the cameras on the bridge of the attacking freighter.
He’d prevented a nonfleet ship from using weapons once before, hadn’t he? But that had been by stopping the order going out through line five rather than by stopping the actual firing of the weapon.
Sale tapped a board on the image he’d put up for her. “Give me a close-up of that.”
He zoomed in. It looked like the weapons board on the Lancastrian Princess. The stats looked the same, too, with everything green and the bars high.
“Shit. There’ll be nothing left of us in an hour.”
Dead bodies lay everywhere on the station. People in the outer sections crowded into the inner sections, trampling the slow and the weak.
Another explosion, this one from a slightly different place. The freighter was moving down the side of the station, planting minibombs as it went. Ean pulled the feed tracking the freighter from an external camera on the Wendell.
Sale pounded the board. “We’re a sitting target, and we can’t do a thing.”
“Isn’t the station armed?” Ean asked.
“No.” Sale looked away from the bodies. “Let’s get you to a shuttle, Ean.” Her voice was bleak, full of the horror of walking away from all this. “You, too,” to Rossi.
They couldn’t walk away and leave a station full of people to their fate.
“Can’t we do something?” Ean asked.
“Our job is to protect you. Not them. Let’s move, Ean. Before they clog the shuttle bays in their panic.”
“Too late for that.” Ru Li indicated the shuttle bays on the side of the station opposite the freighter. The passageways were jammed with people headed for the shuttles.
“Where’s the station manager?” Sale demanded. “He should be stopping this.”
“In hospital, sweetheart.” Rossi had stayed calm and immovable throughout. Did he ever panic? “He had a heart attack last night. Remember.”
How convenient was that heart attack now?
“What about his second then?”
“Fighting fires,” Ean said, and he meant it literally, for the older man who’d been present in the stationmaster’s office last night was using a fire extinguisher to put out an electrical fire. “What can we do, Sale?”
“Get you to safety.”
That wasn’t what Ean had meant.
“The shuttles are too dangerous,” Bhaksir said.
Leaving by shuttle was only going to save those on the shuttle. There were two thousand people on Confluence Station. Ean looked around for inspiration. The station was part of the Eleven fleet. Could the lines do something?
“Are they shooting at shuttles, or just at the ship?” Sale asked.
“The ship, but they’re not dodging the shuttles either.”
Another explosion spun them in a crazy circle until line four—gravity—kicked in.
Sale looked at the screens. “They’ve another layer of station to destroy before they get here. Ready some lifepods for the linesmen.” She turned to Ean and Rossi. “You two do what you can to disrupt them in the meantime.”
“I hate to point out the obvious,” Rossi said, “but mere tens need to be closer to the lines to do much.”
“Ean then. I don’t care what you do. Put static in the lines for all I care. Blast them with noise at full volume. Anything to distract them.”
Noise might be a deterrent. Ean chose someone having hysterics and forwarded it through to the freighter. He pushed the volume up on the comms and continued to keep it up.
As a deterrent, it worked for about two minutes.
He had to hold them off for an hour, and according to Kari Wang, the freighter would jump before their own ships got close enough to attack, anyway.
He couldn’t hold them off for that long.
How did he reduce the time for a ship to get there, to fight them? There was only one way that he could think of. Through the void.
The only fully armed ships were the Lancastrian Princess and the Eleven, and the Lancastrian Princess was not around.
Ean sang to the lines on the Eleven. “We’re being attacked.” He showed them the freighter and Confluence Station. “You need to jump close enough to defend us.” He changed his tune to target specific lines. Line seven, to keep the ships together in the void, but to allow them to jump a single ship. Line nine, to enter the void, and line ten to make the jump.
Rossi lunged at Ean. “Stop him. He’s crazy. He’ll kill us all.”
He was too late, for they were in the void.
In the infinity that was the void, Ean had time to straighten the damaged lines on station.
That wasn’t right. The Eleven was supposed to jump, not the station.
They exited the void. Ean couldn’t tell who was swearing the loudest. Sale, Kari Wang, or the freighter captain.
“Ean,” Abram said, and Ean concentrated on that, for everyone else was yelling at him. “You’ve switched places with the Eleven, and Captain Kari Wang is heading at full speed for the freighter.”
The station wasn’t supposed to jump.
“Ean,” Abram was insistent. “If you don’t do something in the next three minutes, she’ll hit it.”
The Eleven rocked then anyway, under a shot intended for Confluence Station.
“Protect yourself,” Ean said to the Eleven. “That field.” For it was the only thing he could think of. Then added hurriedly, “But don’t kill us.” The field had a limit of two hundred kilometers. Abram insisted each fleet ship stayed at least twice that distance apart.
“We won’t destroy you.” The lines were a comforting sound in his head. “You are of our line.” The resonance on line eight changed to include the special song that was the green protective field.
Inside the freighter, the captain was yelling, “Reverse thrusters. And for the lines’ sake, get that jump ready.”
The song extended in a thick, green stream. It reached the first of the fleeing shuttles, flicked them like motes of dust. Ean thought he heard the sonorous song of the void underneath it.
It reached the freighter.
“Jump,” the freighter captain said.
The freighter lines disappeared.
Ean pushed Rossi away and dragged himself to his feet. There was a difference between a jump and a push, and that had been a push. But where had the Eleven pushed the freighter to? The void? He thought he’d heard the void come in at the end.
Rossi snarled. “You are insane.”