Thank Christ.
“So,” Moore began, clearly eager to cut to the chase now that the straggler had arrived. “What was it?”
Sengupta rolled her eyes. “Whaddya think they burned through the felching spoke it was an attack.”
Who, Brüks wondered, and held his tongue.
“I was hoping for a bit more detail,” Moore said mildly, unfazed.
Lianna obliged. “Basically they turned a magnifying glass on us. Focused microwave pulse, about half a gigawatt judging by the damage.”
“From where?” Moore asked.
Lianna bit her lip. “Sun. Northern hemisphere.”
“That’s it?”
“Even Bicams have limits, Jim. It’s pure hindsight; differential heat stress on different facets of the structure, spoke trajectory—basically they just back-calced how the different parts were lined up at the time, figured a bearing from the angle of the hit.”
“Coulda done that ourselves,” Sengupta grumbled.
“Who?” Brüks blurted out. “Who hit us?”
Nobody spoke. Sengupta regarded something in his general direction the way she might examine a bit of fecal matter scraped off her boot.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lianna said after a moment.
Moore pursed his lips. “So the hive didn’t see it coming.”
She shook her head, as if reluctant to admit to the shortcoming out loud.
“Tran, then.”
“It’d be one for the books if a baseline caught them with their pants down.”
Moore’s eyes flickered to stern. “Under normal circumstances, certainly. They’re not exactly operating at a hundred percent.”
Gray icons, clustered in the hold. “Uh—” Brüks cleared his throat. “What are they doing back there, exactly?”
“Convalescing,” Lianna said. “Bug hit them a lot harder than it hit us. We’ve pumped up the pressure to speed their recovery, but it’ll still be days.”
“So after the break,” Moore mused.
Break?
Lianna nodded. “We’ll have to boot up at least a week early on the other end. They want the option of going hands-on.”
“Hands-on where?” Brüks wondered. “What bre—”
Sengupta cut him off with an exasperated whistle through clenched teeth, turned to Lianna: “Didn’t I tell you?”
“If you could hold on to your questions for the moment,” Moore suggested, “I’ll be happy to fill you in later.”
“When you won’t be wasting everyone else’s time,” Sengupta added.
“Rak,” Lianna began.
“Why is he even here does anyone expect him to actually do anything other than feel included?”
“Is that what I’m feeling,” Brüks remarked.
“It’s not exactly Dan who’s wasting our time right now,” Lianna pointed out.
Sengupta snorted.
Moore waited a beat before getting back to business. “Are there any weapons that could do this from that range?”
Lianna shrugged. “You’re the spook. You tell me.”
“I’m not talking about baseline tech.”
“This doesn’t look like a dedicated weapon. More likely someone hijacked a bunch of powersats to fire simultaneously at the same spot. Probably a one-shot deal, too; you don’t get that kind of output by staying inside the rated specs. Probably blew the circuits across the whole network, maybe even past their healing threshold.”
“Wouldn’t matter anyway with a twelve-minute lag. They had one chance to anticipate our position and they blew it. Rakshi, are—”
“Quarter-second thruster squirts random intervals between six and twelve minutes. You won’t even feel ’em but those fuckers won’t be forecasting me again.”
Twelve-minute light speed lag, Brüks reflected. From the sun and back. So we’re six light-minutes from the sun, which puts us, puts us…
One hundred eight million kilometers. Close as Venus, if he remembered his basic astronomy.
“—impact our tipping point?” Moore was asking
Lianna nodded. “But not enough to matter. They’re working through the revisions now. Another couple of hours, they say.”
“And what about our tail?”
Sengupta painted invisible strokes in the air. A window opened on the dome: some kind of plasma plot, three red spikes erupting from a landscape of violet foothills. The details wobbled in real time but those peaks stayed constant. Up in one corner arcane annotations nattered on about DISCRIMINANT COMPLEX and INFRARED OCCLUSION and MICROLENSING.
Heatprints of some kind, Brüks guessed. Cloaked, judging from the annotations, but apparently Sengupta had magic fingers.
They were being followed. This just keeps getting better.
“So.” Moore considered. “Two prongs or two players?”
“Prongs, probably. The Bicams think the shot was meant to disable us enough to let them catch up.” Lianna hmmed. “I wondered why they didn’t just throw a missile at us…”
Sengupta: “Maybe they will now their big trip wire went kaput.”
“We could use that,” Moore mused. “Rakshi, how much warning would we get if they fired on us?”
“Fired what you want the whole catalog?”
“Standard ass-cracker. Ballpark’s fine.”
She wiggled her fingers, for all the world as if she were counting on them. “Seven hours eight minutes if the range doesn’t change. Give or take.”
“Then we better get started,” Moore said.
“That is easily the most unenlightening briefing I have ever attended,” Brüks grumbled, pulling himself back into the southern hemisphere. “And given the number of departmental committees I sit on, that’s saying something.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that.” Lianna looked back from a bulkhead handhold. “Come with me. Got something that might help.”
She turned like a fish and sailed through the nearest spokeway. The very sight made Brüks a bit queasy. He followed at his own awkward pace, back through the cube-infested southern hemisphere, into the ball-and-socket that had swallowed her. Lianna dropped easily ahead of him, fending off Coriolis with a push and a kick; she was ten meters down the spoke before she even grabbed a hoop. Fuck those acrobatics: Brüks grabbed his own hoop right off the top, swung around and fumbled his foot into another before he weighed more than a couple of kilograms. He couldn’t be bothered to work out the acceleration of free-falling bodies that gained weight with each meter, but down the length of the spoke he was pretty sure they all ended in splat.
Commons. Another hab identical to those he kept escaping: a two-level propane tank from his grandfather’s backyard barbecue, grown monstrous and pumped full of stale air. The upper level, at least, was less crowded than Repair and Maintenance: chairs, privacy screens, a half-dozen half-emptied cubes, a table. The usual bands of epiphytic astroturf. A framework of pencil-thin scaffolding extended from one wall. The facets of a personal tent—bone yellow, tough as tendons—stretched like latex between those vertices. A couple of sticky chairs faced each other amid the clutter.
Lianna was over by the fabber, rummaging through a freshly popped cube. “Got it.”
The cowl she held up looked a little like a bondage hood for plumbing fetishists, studded with washers and tiny screws that traced a fine grid across the skull. It left only the lower face exposed: mouth, jaw, the tip of the nose. Two especially prominent washers sat embedded over the eyes.