“They’re going to kill the habitat, aren’t they?” Sarha said. “Just like Laton did all those years ago. Those bastards! It can’t hurt them, it can’t hurt anybody. What kind of sequestration is this?”
“A bad one,” Warlow grumbled at an almost subliminal volume. “Very bad.”
“I’m picking up lifeboat beacons,” Melvyn said with a rush of excitement. “Two of them. Somebody escaped.”
Joshua, who had felt eager triumph at their successful jump to Murora and anger at the station’s violation, was left empty, leaving his mind in an almost emotion-free state. His crew was looking at him. Waiting. Dad never mentioned this part of captaining a ship.
“Melvyn, Sarha; recalibrate the injection ionizers for the number one fusion tube. Whatever thrust we can get, please. I’m going to need it. Ashly, Warlow, get down to the airlock deck. We won’t have much time to bring them on board, make sure they come through as fast as possible.”
Warlow’s couch webbing peeled back immediately. The cosmonik and the pilot went through the floor hatch as though they were in a race.
“Dahybi, recharge the nodes. I’ll jump outsystem as soon as we have them on board.” If we get them on board.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Stand by for combat gees. Again!”
On the other side of hugely complex schematic diagrams, Sarha smiled knowingly at the hard-used martyred tone.
Lady Macbeth ’s fusion drives ignited, driving the ship towards the twirling wreckage of the station. Thermo-dump panels hurried back into their recesses as the gee force climbed. The starship’s sensors tracked the two fusion drives forty thousand kilometres ahead. Joshua was wondering how long it would take for them to spot the rescue attempt. If they use the sensors the way they do the fusion drives they may never see us. Maranta was only accelerating at half a gee.
Melvyn and Sarha finished their work on fusion tube number one, and gave him control, warning it wouldn’t last for long. Joshua brought Lady Mac up to five gees, and held her there.
“They’re launching combat wasps,” Dahybi said.
Joshua observed the flight computer plotting purple vector lines. “That’s odd.” The six combat wasps were flying around Aethra, forming a loose ring. Their drives went off when they were two hundred kilometres from the habitat, coasting past it. Submunitions burst out from two, and accelerated towards the slowly rotating cylinder.
“Kinetic missiles,” Joshua said. “What the hell are they doing?”
Bright orange explosions rippled across the rust-red polyp surface.
“Injuring it,” Sarha said with terse determination. “That kind of assault won’t destroy it, but they’ll inflict a lot of harm. Almost as if they’re deliberately mutilating it.”
“Injuring it?” Dahybi asked. The normally composed node specialist was openly incredulous. “What for? People injure. Animals injure. Not habitats. You can’t hurt them like you can a mammal.”
“That’s what they’re doing,” Sarha insisted.
“It does look that way,” Joshua said.
The Maranta ’s drive came on again, followed a few seconds later by the second ship.
“They’ve seen us,” Joshua said. It had taken eight minutes, which was appallingly sloppy detection work. Lady Mac was over halfway towards the lifeboats. Less than twenty thousand kilometres away now. The other ships were barely five hundred kilometres distant from the squealing beacons. “This is where it gets interesting.” He launched eight combat wasps and upped the Lady Mac ’s acceleration to seven gees. The drones shot ahead at twenty-five gees. An answering salvo of twelve emerged from the two starships.
“Shit,” Joshua exclaimed. “They’re running for Aethra.”
“Clever,” Melvyn said. “We can’t use the nukes when they’re close to it.”
“No, but I can still use the gamma pulsers for offence.” He fired off a string of coded instructions to the combat wasps. “And it may give us the time we need to pick up the lifeboats. None of their combat wasps are targeting them.” He thought for a moment. “Sarha, broadcast a tight-beam warning to the lifeboats. Tell them to deactivate their beacons now. Anyone warped enough to maim a habitat won’t think twice about snuffing refugees.”
The first combat-wasp conflict took place five thousand kilometres from Aethra, a ragged rosette of plasma sprawling across six hundred kilometres. Joshua watched several attackers come through unscathed and launched another salvo of five drones, programming three to form a defence-shield formation. The bridge’s gravity plane shifted sharply as he initiated an evasion manoeuvre.
The children were crying with their voices and minds. Gaura broadcast a soothing harmonic in the general affinity band, adding to the compulsion of the other adults. What I need, he thought, is someone to calm me.
The lifeboat was a sturdy cylinder ten metres long and four wide. It had no propulsion system apart from the solid-fuel booster to fire it clear of any conceivable emergency, and reaction thrusters to hold it stable while the refugees waited for rescue. Like all the systems on the station it was spacious and well equipped. There were eight seats, lockers with enough food for a fortnight, and a month-long oxygen supply. For Edenists, even disasters would be inconvenient rather than dangerous.
Such arrogance, he cursed inside the confines of his own skull, such stupid blind faith in our technological prowess.
Right now there were fourteen adults and five children crammed inside. There hadn’t been time for them to reach another lifeboat. With a hubris which hindsight revealed to be quite monstrous, the disasters which the designers anticipated had all been natural. Even a meteorite strike would leave most of the wheel intact, and evacuation would be a calm rational process.
What had never been even a theoretical contingency was insane Adamist starships slicing the station apart with lasers.
It had all happened so fast. Now little Gatje and Haykal hugged Tiya, their mother, faces distraught as she kept them anchored. The air was too hot, it stank of vomit. Aethra couldn’t hide its torment over the kinetic missile attack that bit deep into its shell from the young impressionable minds. Candre’s death convulsions as she went through explosive decompression was still causing wintry shivers along Gaura’s spine. The combined psychological stresses of the last fifteen minutes was going to leave a trauma scar that would take a long time to heal even for the well-balanced psyche of an Edenist.
And it was all his fault. As station chief he should have taken precautions. He had known about the civil strife on Lalonde. Yet he had done nothing.
It is not your fault,aethra said softly into his mind. Who could have anticipated this?
I should have.
From the information you had, this was not predictable.
I had enough data from Ilex. It was chaos on the planet when they left.
These starships did not come from Lalonde. They are mercenaries, recruited elsewhere.
I could still have done something. Put people into apartments closer to the lifeboats. Something! How are Candre and the others?
I have them. But now is not a good time to begin raising my consciousness to multiplicity status.
No. And you? How are you?
I was angry, frightened. Now I feel sorrow. It is a sad universe where such wanton acts can take place.
I’m sorry we brought you into existence. You have done nothing to deserve this.
I am glad I live. And I may yet continue to live. None of the craters is more than twenty metres deep. I have lost a lot of nutrient fluid though, and my mineral-digestion organs have been damaged from the shockwaves.