“Clear as crystal.”
They have pulled close to Belinda, with a clear view of her dark underbelly, the cargo ramp still extended, looking like some kind of drill. The directional part of her mind that evolved over millennia on a planet where up and down were certainties interprets the view as dangerous. She feels she is floating above that darkened vessel, and the moment she steps out of the airlock, she will fall toward it. In a way, it’s true, except that everything around them is falling in synchrony toward the sun, including the planets, falling sideways so fast they constantly miss. This knowledge does little to move her out of the doorway, but she is not going anywhere otherwise. She tries to take a step and is surprised to find that her feet will not lift. Somehow, they have fused to the floor.
“I’m stuck,” she says.
Slight undulations in the Homunculus’s position have caused bits of the shattered shover to float around her. They find their way out of the chamber and shimmer in the external lights.
“Your boots are magnetic,” Jack says. “Lift harder.”
She tries again. It feels as though she is pulling herself from quicksand, but with some effort, one sole at a time, disconnects from the floor. “This won’t work. I’m too slow.”
“There’s a panel on your left wrist. Like a plastic bracelet. Open it. You’ll see the controls.”
When she flips the device, a red message flashes warning that she is being poisoned with radiation. She relays this to Jack, who says there is nothing they can do. Solar wind. This far into the corona, they’ve been bombarded with charged particles since they arrived. The ships’ magnetic fields have shielded them for the most part, but a lot of energy sneaks through. It’s nothing a few days in a geno-module couldn’t reverse. Still, best not to be out there too long.
She swipes away the message and finds the boot controls, turns them off. With a tap of her toes, she drifts outside. She tests the EM-pack with a tentative spurt and finds the controls significantly less responsive than before. This is a plus. It means she won’t go spiraling with a simple tap.
Clear of the airlock, she moves out farther from the bow and spins to face the ship. The airlock has sealed. It has gone from a door to a wall. A sense of despair, desperation. Her heart races. She wonders if she will ever share the company of another human being again. It doesn’t matter now. There’s no screaming her way off of this ride.
“You still hear me?”
It’s Hunter who responds. “Copy. We’re all ears. Tell us what you see.”
“Nothing yet. I’m heading to the gun emplacement.”
The ship is just like a giant V, with the bow at the point, and the plasma cannon on the bow’s underside. She dips toward it. Black metal rushes up. The cannon’s singular barrel measures twenty feet long and half that in diameter. A long black tube with a round ball joint at its base. She gets out in front of it. Even while it points down and away, the sight gives her chills. She doesn’t know much about the make and model of this ship, but she knows that vessels with full swivel plasma guns on their bottoms were designed specifically for bombing terrestrial targets. And this machine is certainly old enough to have been in use during the heaviest fighting. How many outposts did it destroy? How many civilians ran from its shadow, vaporized before they found shelter? She can practically hear the ghosts crying out.
“I’m here,” she says.
“Copy.”
“Do me a favor and turn the cannon 180 degrees.”
“Copy.”
The ball joint spins and the cannon faces the ship’s belly.
“Hunter, is it possible that we can hit our own hull?”
“It’s entirely possible. That’s why it’s so import— keep —tact.”
“Say again, Hunter. You broke up.”
“I said, it’s why we need to keep in contact.”
“Right. No pressure.”
“None whatsoever.”
“Alright. I’ve got no vantage here. I’m going underneath.”
“Be careful.” Jack’s voice.
She keeps a healthy distance, flips so her feet point to the hull. Simpler to keep her bearings that way. Far above—or below—she spots what appears to be a distant satellite blinking through the darkness. Hope of rescue rises within her, but sinks just as abruptly. That series of lights is just the panic pod, still drifting nearby like a monument to their failures.
She thrusts onward, scanning the hull for movement. She could be flying over farmland at night, the landscape just one big shadow. Two black dunes distinguishable only by the blinking lights at their bases mark the ship’s landing gear. Worst case scenario, the hydra is up on the ship’s back where there’s no way to hit it with the cannon.
It is nearby. She feels it.
The ship’s sole gravity drive rests between the twin ends of the V. Three stories tall, its outward design is deceptively simple, a piece of conical silver that in another time could have been mistaken for an enormous warhead. There are no markings at all. And on either side of this seamless fixture, dotted along the back of the ship’s wings, is a series of powerful thrusters lined up in sequence. The farther from the grav drive, the smaller they are. These are the reason Bel could not outmaneuver the Homunculus. Tapered cylinders with holes pocked all around their surfaces, they resemble carefully carved pumice stone. Each of those holes is a secondary port that helps the ship steer.
And maybe it is just her imagination, but squinting at that polka-dot pattern of metal and shadow, she could swear she sees something in there, something long and thin, winding through the hollows like a worm through the flesh of an apple.
“I think I found it,” she says.
Chapter 56
To calibrate the cannon, they fire into the void. Enormous orbs of supercharged gas, bright as the sun itself. Lana calls out degrees, hanging back to check line of sight. The projectiles move slightly faster than the speed of sound and would blind her without her visor, so she focuses on their reflections in the hull to save her eyesight. By increments, they lower the barrel until the shots skim less than ten feet above the ship’s surface, low enough to hit the hydra if it’s as big as Jack says it is. The tricky part will be getting it into the open.
To protect against heat and radiation, modern spaceships generate powerful magnetic fields (magshields) which deflect most of the cosmic energy that can damage onboard equipment or irradiate the crew. They’d have died much farther out if it weren’t for this technology. In their current position, they are protected by the combined strength of their own shield and Belinda’s. The safest way to draw the hydra out of the propulsion jets, Lana theorizes, is to bombard it with radiation. If it is as sensitive to electrical impulses as it seems, then the sun’s energy should overwhelm it, possibly even render it blind. To accomplish this, they’ll deactivate their own magnetic shielding and drift to the edge of Belinda’s, just far enough out for sunlight to hit their stern. When the creature comes out, they’ll hit it with the cannon, and that should dislodge it from the hull, permanently.
On the bridge, Jack bites his cheek and watches Hunter at the controls. They’ve already lost 45 minutes since Lana left the airlock. That leaves about an hour and a half before Bel’s grav drive kicks on and sends her and anything in the area straight into the sun. And there’s a good chance reaching the edge of Bel’s magshield will cause serious damage to their propulsion systems. This pressure has no visible effect on Hunter. She backs them steadily into danger.
Through the observation window above them, Belinda floats, adrift beneath a white halo, still protecting them from a distance.
Lana plants herself beside the cannon. The ship thrums through her boots. There is no telling where the end of the magshield lies. All she sees is the ship releasing pressurized gas from the same ports where the hydra hides. Most of the vapor is invisible, but she startles when sudden green flares ignite around her. She suspects an explosion or hull breach, but no. The green phosphorescence swirls in arching patterns, blinking in and out, shimmering electric dust. She feels silly when she realizes what it is. The ships have created their own cloud of debris, including oxygen and nitrogen and water vapor, some from the vents and some from when Jack left Belinda. As their magnetic fields fight against the sun’s, this cloud of gas and ice interacts with the solar wind exactly like it does in the atmospheres of planets. Lana is inside an aurora. It’s stunning, and she could almost forget the danger she is in. She reaches out to swipe at the sparks, but they vanish as they appear. A photon here, a photon there. Twinkling.