Permanence

"Incoming transmission," said the pilot. "It's from IR 21." That was Mike's ship.

Doctor Herat appeared again, this time looking flustered. "Rue, we've been fired on! It's not coming from the Banshee. It might be an automated system, probably an asteroid defense. It's pretty persistent, we've taken three strong hits already."

She tapped the window to reply. "Find out why! Are we too big or something? I thought we were supposed to register as one of those cargo packets 'cause we're part of the cloud. Why didn't that work?"

The time-delay to Herat's nod was almost imperceptible; they must be close to the shack. "Maybe there's some characteristic of the packets that we—" The window went gray, as the shuddering hiss happened again.

"How much of this can we take?" she asked Sola. He shrugged.

"Probably a lot," he said. "These ships are designed for reentry into a brown dwarf's atmosphere, after all…" Another hiss and the lights flickered. "But that's different," he said less certainly.

Herat reappeared. "Captain! The cargo packets are all broadcasting a weak transponder signal. We didn't notice it before because of the interference from the Twins. Each packet seems to be broadcasting a unique signature, but of course we don't speak Lasa so—" Hiss.

Now Rue's ears did pop. "Depressure!" shouted the pilot, even as the clamshells folded up over their g-beds and Rue found herself alone in the dark, flickering gray inscape windows her only company. She sat paralyzed for a second, then swept her hands out to open a series of diagnostics, as well as an intercom line to the others.

"…the hull's intact," the pilot was saying. "But we lost a seal around the airlock. We can grow a new one, but it'll take a few hours. The hull's acting like a lens, concentrating the laser light in a few spots."

"What about the shields? Aren't they working?" she demanded.

"Yeah, they are, or we'd have been vaporized by now."

This is the same battle the Banshee fought, she thought. Another hiss came and more indicators turned red.

"— the call signal." Herat had reappeared, his image distorted and full of static. "Our autotroph AI deciphered it. It's a—" the signal cut out for a second. " — manifest. You have to send the following string…"

"Are you getting that?" she shouted to the pilot.

"I think so." Silence— she pictured him retransmitting the signal Herat had provided. At least, she hoped that was what was happening.

"We've missed our scheduled burn," he said abruptly. "I'm going to have to expose our engines to the laser in order to decelerate. If I don't we'll overshoot or hit the shack—"

"Just do it," she said. "If this doesn't work, we'll be roasted anyway."

Crushing weight enveloped Rue. She pulled her hand up to close her fingers around the Ediacaran pendant. You've come this far, she thought at it. You can go a little further.

The burn ended. "Coasting in," said the pilot. "After all the fireworks, the Banshee sees us now. But we're coming in on the opposite side of the shack. It'll take them a while to get someone out to us."

"What about the others?"

"Other ships copying our maneuver. They're okay," said the pilot.

"Get ready to disembark," she said. She wanted to feel relieved that they had survived and were here, but she was out of time. Rue reached into the storage bins under the g-bed and pulled out the components of the army pressure suit they'd fitted for her.

She dressed quickly; as the helmet snapped in place with a satisfying click, Rue looked down at the weapons that dangled from the suit's belt. No time for relief now; no time for fear. Only time to take the most direct route to her crew and woe to anyone who got in her way.

25

RUE STEPPED INTO familiar darkness. The stars surrounded her and for a few moments they were all she saw. It wasn't until she turned around that she made out the black absence that was Apophis and, looking opposite that, saw the corresponding silhouette of Osiris. Her interceptor was gliding away, a ghostly knife-shape. It had dropped off her squad of six and would now take up station near the construction shack. That too became visible as she continued turning; it was much closer than she'd expected, a vast rectangle of darkness that must be only a few kilometers away.

Sola and the rest of the squad were feverishly setting up countermeasures to avoid detection. The interceptor had dropped them off in the middle of a cone-shaped zone of space where the cargo packets coming from the Twins were fu

While the soldiers unfurled stealth shields and started spraying a mist of liquid helium around to blot out infrared, Rue turned her attention to the shack. Behind it lay the Banshee. Crisler's starship would likely have strewn sensors all around the shack; their arrival on its other side was not so much a sneak as a way to shield the interceptors from attack.

Though not visible, she knew the other interceptor would be arriving as well. Mike and his team would be hanging in space just as she was, preparing to enter the alien structure.

Sola handed Rue a secure comm line and she plugged it into her suit's shoulder. "Good so far," he said. "Insertion as pla

"Yes." The squad grouped up, attaching lines to one another, then fired reaction guns to take them over the curve of the shack. Now they would find out if their countermeasures were working. Rue's mouth was dry, but she was surprised at how calm she was, now that they were finally here. She had thought about this moment for months, but in the end, her worries and nightmare scenarios were a distraction. She needed to focus on the moment and only that way would she get through it.

They'd spent a lot of time debating whether to go to the shack first, or the Banshee. Her people could be in either place, but were most likely to be aboard the starship. Even if they were somewhere in the shack, the Banshee was a better place to make a stand. Crisler could not destroy his own ship to get at them.

There was no sense of movement, of course; the stars were simply rising, slowly and gently, over the short horizon of the shack. After a few minutes something new began to rise: a bauble like a paper lantern. It was the larger of the Banshee's two balloon habitats, swinging on the end of its invisible tether. A kilometer away from it, below the shack's horizon, the smaller habitat would be swinging the other way.

She had only that one glimpse, then Sola raised one of the radar shields and blocked her view. That was okay; Rue didn't need to be reminded of the layout of the Banshee. The two six-story balloon habitats had similar internal plans and swung opposite one another from the central axis pod. The heaviest component of the starship in view was a pair of flowerlike assemblies of tungsten plates that petaled out from the cables halfway between the axis and the habitats. At the rotational axis of the system was a can-shaped weapons pod much smaller than the balloons. It held a fusion reactor and various supplies as well as missiles and lasers. Another tether trailed off at right angles from it, ending sixty kilometers away at the ramscoop and engines.

"EVA cart at Long-thirty, Lat-forty," said one of the soldiers. Rue oriented herself and looked in that direction. One of the Banshee's familiar raillike carts came into view; it must have just launched from the starship's axis.

For a tense few seconds nobody breathed as it approached. Rue was peripherally aware of one of her soldiers slowly bringing his laser rifle up to aim at the space-suited figures on the craft.