Permanence

"Behind your shield, Bequith, that was a laser shot!" shouted Harp. A moment later the black hull material next to Michael exploded into vapor before splashing back to heal itself. "We're under fire! Infrared lasers! Target and fire, men!"

Around him, Harp's men popped up to shoot, then retreated behind their shields. The shields began to smoke and shake, but there was no sound, and nothing to see— except, when Michael looked down by his foot, where that second shot had hit the hull he saw a little constellation of glowing blue spheres, none bigger than his thumbnail. They drifted, serene and self-contained, like newborn stars.

Fire. He was seeing fire. The laser shots were igniting the hydrogen/oxygen mix that filled the shack. But what would have become a Hindenberg-class inferno under gravity behaved quite differently here.

His shield warped; he felt the heat through his gloves. Michael felt a surge of fear and adrenaline as it finally hit home the kinds of energies that were aimed at him. He drew his laser and cleared a window in his shield to shoot through. He had been dreaming for months of what his first combat against the R.E. would be like; now that it was here his mind was fixed only on the moment.

Behind him, the autotroph being was speaking, but he had no time to listen as glistening, mirror-clad men began flipping into the air from the balloon-habs, and more threads of flaming air converged on him.

"PREPARE TO ABANDON ship," said Rue. The tungsten plate under her feet was glowing hot in places, and its edges had become ragged from laser fire. The constant battering by the Banshee's laser defense system had knocked the plate past the construction shack, and Rue had gotten her people to focus their hand jets on firing tangentially to their course. The trick had worked; the construction shack was eclipsing the Banshee. After a last few agonizing seconds, the lasers of the Banshee vanished behind the black curve of the shack, and they were safe.

"Everybody kick off," she said. "Head for the shack." They dove for it: Rue, Rebecca, Mina, Blair, Barendts, and the three remaining soldiers. One of them was waving his sensors at the black hull.

"I read energy discharges," he said. "A firefight, looks like."

"Any way to tell who's who?" she asked.

"One group is small, appears to be pi

The shack was just a big blot to Rue. "Which is closer?" she asked.

"We're equidistant. But we need to get to an airlock anyway, Captain."

"No, we don't." Rue sighted along the quilted surface of the shack. The material's bubblelike surface clearly showed the patterns of magnets that underlaid it. "Target your lasers on the exact center of the dome of hull material directly ahead of us. We'll make ourselves an airlock there."

"Ma'am?"

"Just do it!"

She couldn't see the beams, but four glowing spots appeared on the hull, quickly converging into one. Then suddenly the hull wasn't there anymore. In its place a blast of black droplets was spewing into space, revealing a three-meter hole in the shack's hull.

"Quick! Before it heals itself!" She jetted through the black rain and found herself in a vast space lit by red light and galaxies of little blue stars. Air was rushing around her, trying to push Rue back through the gap, and spiraling with it came thousands of those little stars. She and Jentry had played with flames like this when she was young and she knew what was about to happen: As the beads were sucked into the moving air they merged and became tongues of fire. For a few moments Rue was licked by a passing inferno.

Her people were through, and just in time as the array of magnets supporting the hull shifted and the ferrofluid reached out to close the wound they'd made. The long tongue of flame halted, became a large irregular ball shape, then died from the inside out. Its outermost skin fractured into hundreds of tiny beads, which began drifting away as if nothing had happened.

New lines of stars appeared— one, two, four, all lancing through the space around her. Rue and her people were floating, vulnerable, in the crossfire of a battle.

"Where?" shouted Barendts. "What the hell is all this?"

The swirling clouds of firebeads made it hard to see, which was probably good just now, she thought. One thing Rue did make out was a standard balloon-hab, attached to some kind of very large machine dead ahead. "Make for that!" She jetted toward it.

One of the marines screamed as his suit jetted white fire. Barendts whirled and fired back along the telltale line of firebeads joining the dying man to a blurry figure near a balloon-hab attached to the shack's hull. He was rewarded with a jet of fire at that end. "We're dead unless we get inside now!" he shouted.

Rue reached for the white surface of the balloon-hab. No time for niceties this time: She shot the material with her laser, burning a long ragged tear in it. Despite the pain in her hand, she used her gloves to force the tear in. Pushing against the air that was coming out, she climbed through.

Big flapping white sheets were flying at her. She dove to the side, cursing, and dragged at the things to keep them from covering the breach. Balloon-habs were a bit too efficient at sealing leaks, sometimes. The others clambered through her hole one after the other, then rolled out of the way while the white panels slammed against it and glued themselves into an uneven patchwork.

"This— this is the new ship," panted Mina. "They've attached this hab to the nose of the new cycler as a place for the crew during takeoff. The theory is that once the cycler's at speed it'll calve off a bunch of its own habs, the way Jentry's Envy did. At that point they'll have it make up a human-friendly one, like you did. Then they can move out of the habs."

They hung in a small pie-slice of a larger doughnut-shaped structure. This chamber was crammed with crates of supplies. "Who's they?" asked Rue, eyeing the lack of space. "Crisler can't be moving the whole Banshee crew in here."

"Some of the science team, and marines loyal to Crisler," Mina said. "He'd be returning on the Banshee with the real prize."

"Real prize?" Rue gestured around to indicate the whole vessel they had come to. "This isn't it?"

"No. There's something else— but I don't know what it is. Only that it's small enough to be carried by one person."

"We'll worry about that later," Rue said. "If Cori

THERE WERE A good ten of Crisler's marines hunkered down next to their balloon airlock on the far side of the shack. Even with the nose of the cycler between them, there was little cover here. Michael was wreathed in a gas of bubbling black ferrofluid; laser shots had half destroyed his shield and he had several burns on his suit. Both sides were laying down a covering fire to prevent the other from getting out of sight behind the cycler.

"The ancient pact is turned on its head," said the autotroph. It had been silent until now; it must have completed translating the Chicxulub script that covered the outside of the ship.

"What have you learned?" Herat asked it.

"Professor, this is hardly the time," said Michael incredulously. Their little squad was outma

"No better time," said the professor. "Now, tell us what those inscriptions say."

"The ancient pact is turned on its head

The hermit who carries the lamp now hands it on