The Outsider stuck out its tongue. It did not raise screen. It took M. Meddinia 4A under fire.
The one Hellspinner that looked like the worst throw broke down and in and brushed the Outsider. Tonnes of matter erupted in a geyser of shattered nucleons.
The fastest attackers raced toward the hit, looking for a soft spot.
XXVIII Fretensis developed data on the Outsider's displacement. WarAvocat ordered a supplementary launch. A ship that large might carry secondaries of its own.
It did, but none were active. The Outsider had come expecting no resistance. In quickly, a message delivered, and out, silent and unseen....
The attackers closed in. The Outsider raised screen. Word went back: The screen was Guardship quality.
The Outsider could not have been in a poorer position. It could not deploy riders. A more powerful enemy lay between it and access to the Web. And it was deeper in the gravity well.
Attackers englobed the Outsider. They floated just meters off the screen. XXVIII Fretensis rotated to present its broadest face, closed to three hundred meters. At that range even the most inept Twist Master could not miss.
A hundred pulsating green eyes burned on the Guardship's face.
WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis ordered his Hellspinners loosed. Those balls of mad energy drifted onto the Outsider's screen like the slow fall of a fine oil mist onto the surface of a summer-warmed pond. Rainbow points spread and faded slowly. Fighters darted to the impact points like fish to motes of food. They pounded those spots, probing for an opening or weakness.
The screen withstood the salvo. But the Twist Masters had permission to loose at will. No screen could absorb Hellspinners long.
The Outsider finally grasped the gravity of its situation. It began to move.
Its assailants moved with it.
Here, there, soft spots in the screen yielded. A one-meter gap opened and persisted for seven seconds. An interceptor put one hundred rounds of 40mm contraterrene shot through the hole. The Outsider's skin blossomed, a garden of small fires.
Other gaps opened. Some attack craft chose marksmanship, gunning for specific installations. Others just blazed away. None tried running the gaps. A screen shielded both ways. A fighter inside would become the target of every Outsider weapon otherwise unable to fire.
The gaps grew larger and lasted longer. The Twist Masters began pairing, hoping to get a second Hellspinner through a gap cut by a first.
The Outsider dropped inside the orbit of the station.
The riders armed their axial cannon, which hurled 250kg projectiles at 8000 meters per second. The projectiles spun off slivers of contraterrene iron as they rattled through a target.
Orders went out to the attackers: penetrate the screen and silence the Outsider's drives.
WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis had guessed the reason for the Outsider's move planetward. It meant to eliminate evidence by throwing itself into atmosphere.
Cluster shells began getting through. So did Hellspinners and massed barrages from the secondaries. The Outsider was ablaze within the envelope of its shield, surrounded by a shrapnel metalstorm. The attack ships that went in had to use their own lesser screens till they reached firing position.
The Outsider offered only token counterfire. And that soon fell silent.
One salvo stilled the drives. But too late. The Outsider was in a groove that would take it into atmosphere in thirty-eight hours.
WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis ordered the attackers to concentrate on shield generators. When permanent gaps appeared, he began recovering his secondaries.
XXVIII Fretensis began laying in all the fire it could, including 100cm axial clusters at 12,000mps capable of penetrating to the Outsider's Core—if it had one.
On the Outsider's far side, which had suffered little damage, attackers began opening a path for boarding parties already on the move.
The invaders found nothing alive. In the few hours they had they learned very little. They collected biological and technical samples and got out in time for XXVIII Fretensis to pound the hulk into fragments unlikely to be large enough to do damage when they reached the planet's surface.
As the Guardship turned toward the Web, M. Meddinia station broke communications silence with a laconic, "Thank you, Guardship."
The only Guardship casualties were two bruised and embarrassed pilots whose interceptors had collided during a race to be first through a gap in the Outsider's screen.
— 40 —
Jo slammed into the suite. She was in a grim mood. Vadja had the monitor. Degas and AnyKaat watched over his shoulders. Jo demanded, "Any sign of the krekelen?"
"Not a whiff," AnyKaat replied.
"What's going on?"
Vadja said, "We've maybe got a breakthrough, Sergeant. Course, I only hear the Commander's end. But it sounds like they're talking."
"Good. About damned time."
"Something eating you, Sergeant?"
"I just spent a watch poking around on the bridge. Making a pain of myself. It wasn't Timmerbach's turn to be on but he showed up ten minutes after I did. Looked like he dragged out of his rack in a panic. Worked his butt off trying to keep me from poking in the wrong places. But I still saw enough to know he stuck it to us when he skipped that strand. Him and Cholot are up to something. They think they're going to hand us the dirty end. Wish he'd hurry up."
"Want me to buzz him?"
"Don't bother. Time won't matter. I just want to break some bones."
Degas asked, "Did you get into the system deep enough to cull those biomass figures?" He was convinced that the krekelen had killed somebody and assumed his identity. Haget rejected the notion. Jo was drifting toward Degas's viewpoint.
Degas headed for the door. "I'm going to the galley. That thing has to eat."
Jo looked at AnyKaat, who said, "Instead of looking for the man, he looks for his footprints. Like checking with cooks and stewards on what meals went out when and where."
Vadja leaned back. "The Commander has had enough. He's working on his graceful exit."
Jo leaned past him. Haget was by-the-booking it out the door.
"Way to go, Commander!" Vadja enthused. "Look at there. He broke away clean."
Jo rested a hand on Vadja's shoulder. "How's your arm, Era?"
"Hurts bad enough. I don't think it's going to fall off."
Macho bastards were all alike, male or female. She had talked the same damned way. Was it just soldiers' territory? A defense mechanism that kicked in when you were vulnerable?
Haget shoved into the suite, flopped into a chair. "Jo. Can I impose on you?"
"That's what I'm here for."
"Ask a steward for an analgesic, some soda water, and whatever that liquor was you were swilling the other night."
"Headache?"
"Low grade. Nerves. It would have become a killer if I'd stayed down there."
"You got through?"
"Sort of. It's decided to cooperate. Sort of. Its thinking right into your head isn't as convenient as it sounds. It hurts."
AnyKaat called the stewards while Jo listened.
Haget said, "It's ground gained. Maybe we'll manage some back-and-forth now."
"Did you get anything?"
"Only that it's real anxious to get back to V. Rothica 4. It claims one of its own is marooned there, a child, that it overlooked when the Traveler was there."
"If it missed this kid when it was there, how come it knows now?"
"There's where communications break down. Maybe it couldn't explain. Maybe I just didn't understand. But it's positive and it can't figure out why we won't jigger the clockwork of the universe to help. Hell with it. I don't want to think about it. Answer the door."