"How do you know it's whistling toward us?" she asked in as calm a voice as he was using while her fingers flew over the controls. "There's no sound in space."
Simeon could detect just a micro-tremor of fear in her noncommittal tone. "If I think it whistles," he answered, "it whistles."
"Perimeter says it's like nothing they've ever seen before either and-" she paused and licked her lips "-it's about to cut a broad swath through the proper traffic pattern."
Simeon took full control of the traffic control boards. He could see and respond to the necessary changes in traffic patterns faster than any unshelled human. He was simultaneously redirecting and responding to dozens of ships.
Suddenly Channa started cursing. "Damn their eyes and innards! These damned civilians are asking questions instead of doing what they're supposed to in emergency routines. Now you see why I didn't like you calling those false alarms. No one's paying a blind bit of attention to this genuine emergency! Wolf-cryer!"
"I've put it on every public screen. They'll know it's no drill," Simeon said, his voice velvet with malice, "and it's coming straight at us. I don't think it'll stop."
I didn't realize you could banter when you're terrified, he thought with tight control, though it helped being able to set your analogue of adrenal glands.
Channa stared, stunned, as the screen filled with the alien ship. "You haven't activated the repel screen? Hit it for God's sake!" She pressed her rocker switch just a fraction of a second behind Simeon.
Joat gritted her teeth and wiped eyes and nose on the back of her sleeve. It was a good shirt, and clean. Dumb, she told herself fiercely. Dumb, dumb, dumb bitch, dumb gash, just like the captain told you you were. Especially when he was drunk. He'd always been worse then.
She turned her attention back to the little computer. It was the best she'd ever been able to steal, a real Spuglish; jacked into the station system right now, with the skipper-unit she'd cobbled up to keep the station from knowing just where or why.
Ship schedules / departures / outsystem, she told it. Machines didn't lie to you! You could trust machines and, if they didn't do what they were supposed to, it wasn't because they had lied. Maths and machinery could be believed.
A barking sob broke through her lips, spattering drops on the screen. She bit down on her hand until the pain and the taste of her own blood let her continue. Then she wiped the machine down with the tail of her shirt. Machines didn't let you down, either.
Departures, the computer said. Look, Joat, you don't have to leave here. Trust me, we're-
"No!" she screamed.
Joat stuffed the scramblers into her pockets and went off down the duct at a scrambling crawl, ignoring projections and brackets that only slightly impeded her progress. The motions were reflexive, with a graceless efficiency.
Nobody's going to give me away again, she thought. Get me used to eating regular and school and everything, then give me away! The thought went round and round in her head, filling it, so that it was minutes before the klaxon penetrated her self-absorption.
"Oh, shit," she whispered in a still small voice, listening. Then she turned and went back the way she came, faster still. The computer was back there, and without it, she wouldn't be able to find out what was really going on.
Her spacesuit was there, too. This sounded serious.
"THIS IS NO DRILL! REPEAT, THIS IS NO DRILL!" The words rang down the corridors and hallspaces, without the melodramatic klaxons Simeon had always used. "Nonessential personnel report to secure areas. Report to secure areas. Prepare for breach of hull integrity."
This time the citizens of the SSS-900-C listened, hastening into suits, gathering children and pets and heading for the central core or section shelters. Crews pelted onto their ships, even as moorings were detached and entry locks irised shut and each "all on board" signal was relayed to Simeon. Emergency crews flocked to their assigned stations. Infirmary patients who could not be moved were placed in individual, independently powered life-support units. All too soon, most of the citizens of SSS-900-C could only wait, imagining their station crushed like an egg as the invader plowed into them.
Simeon worked frantically, ordering ships of all sizes out of the projected path of the incoming ship, brutally suppressing the knowledge that ships with ordinary, unshelled pilots could barely handle the split second timing he was asking of them. So far, so good-no one out there seemed destined to die today. For a heart-stopping moment he thought the alien might be decelerating, but the blaze of energies sputtered and died. It's only shed 7% of relative velocity, he calculated dismally. Not nearly enough.
"Why didn't they program mobility?"
"Who?" Channa asked distractedly. "Where?"
"In me! In this station! I can't duck! I've no weaponry to blast it out of my way. I can't even fend off such mass. All I can do is watch. What lasers I've got can just about handle a decent-sized meteor. The best I can do is warm up his hull a little, and I have to wait till he's up my ass to do it! Damn! This station is like a paraplegic spaceship!"
"Whoa! Did you see that?" Channa shouted. The mass had seemed to deliberately veer aside from an ordinary asteroid miner vessel, something the miner pilot himself probably couldn't have done. "Watch," she said, "there! Did you see? It jigged just a bit to miss that incoming ferry traffic. It is being guided."
"But by what?" Simeon asked. He ran calculations on the ballistics of those maneuvers. The deviations were absolutely minimal for the effect. "It's traveling so fast now, no human pilot could stop it and stay conscious. They don't answer any radio messages. They're ignoring the damn warning flares. Shit, maybe they think we're welcoming them. Ah, good!"
"But they are decelerating again, Simeon," Channa said, glancing up from her own screens to the main viewer before she went back to other chores which she had assumed.
"Yeah, marginally longer this time. No, cutting out-no, decelerating again. Rate of energy-release… God, but they're still not dumping enough velocity! And still on a collision course!" His voice went slightly wild. "They must want to destroy me!"
"I don't see any weapons," Channa said, trying to finish her current task in time.
"Who can tell in that jumble of struts and boxes and crap! Besides, that thing itself is a weapon." Simeon had just one card to play and at exactly the right moment for maximum effect. "You're not even suited up, partner. At least take shelter in my shaft core, Channa."
She shook her head, "Not till I'm through evacuating the alien quadrant. 'Sides, those Letheans scare easily enough as it is without me appearing in full gear."
She had managed at last to get through to the leader of the Lethe contingent. A people so formal that emergencies required a ceremony, mercifully brief, for deferring the usual endless courtesies in favor of survival. Had Channa not performed the ceremony and explained the situation to them, they would have died rather than commit such a breach of manners as assuming that something was actually wrong. She broke the connection at last and exclaimed, "Joat!"
"She has a suit," Simeon said, "first thing I gave her. She's probably in it right now. Why aren't you?"