The Quiet Pools

“Funny, that’s what Wian says, except he’s shouting.”

“Can’t we move the ship?” The question came from behind Reid, or from one of his open links—Dryke could not tell which.

Reid shook his head. “All we have are station-keeping thrusters. The drive is dead cold. Mikhail? What about the castle? Are we above your horizon?”

Dryke quickly got the HELcrew boss on a second window. “Just above, the long way through the atmosphere,” he reported back. “Between the scatter and the absorption, the boss says the best we can do is a suntan.”

“Range, three hundred kilometers.”

“Anybody seen the oars for this boat?” a gallows humorist muttered.

“You’re going to have to throw something at it,” Dryke said.

“Yeah. Any ideas what?”

“How about the Knights Peculiar?”

Reid turned away from his telecam. “Martin—plot collision intercepts for CT-5, CT-9, and CT-10. Plug in the masses—I need to know what happens to the pieces afterward. See if you can get me a deflection that’ll throw both of them clear.” He turned back to Dryke. “I knew I should have played more billiards when I had the chance.”

“Three-body no-cushion bank shot, on a warped table. Nothing to it.” Dryke’s words were clipped, his worry undercutting the joke.

“Range, one hundred ninety kilometers.”

“I can give it a pop with CT-9,” Martin called. “The others are too far away.”

“Get it moving, then.”

“Already is. Matt, I’ll do my best. But to knock it clear, I not only have to hit it, I have to hit it square center. Otherwise it’ll just blow by and kick the truck into a tumble.”

“Mister, either you hit it fucking square or I’ll put you outside to walk home.” The words were said calmly. “Bobby, bring up the PDS, just in case. Track it all the way, and if Takara slips out of the hairs, do me a favor and fry the damned can.”

“Sure,” the tech said with a grin. “I’ll cover Martin’s butt.”

“You toast that Hughes and you can cover my grandmother,” Reid said. “Mikhail, you still with us?”

“Yeah,” said Dryke. “So glad to see you’re all taking this so well.”

“Range, eighty kilometers.”

Reid said, “Yeah, well, there’s one other thing. The section has authorized me to tell you that we all quit.”

“No, you don’t,” Dryke said, matching Reid’s deadpan. “If you’re still there in two minutes, consider yourselves fired.”

“Noted. All right, everyone. Let’s be sharp. Marty?”

“On track.”

“Bobby?”

“I’ll pick it up off Takara’s horizon.”

“Range, twenty-five kilometers,” said the AIP.

Reid nodded, looking at a display off-screen. He drew a deep breath and pursed his lips. “Funtime,” he said under his breath. “Here she comes.”

Six and a half kilometers from Memphis, CT-9 glided stalwartly toward Takara, carrying the reflector before it as though it were entering the lists for a joust.

It went into the duel with two disadvantages—size and speed. At a spidery twenty-nine tonnes, it was only two-thirds the mass of the satellite. And even after a full minute of acceleration, its propulsion systems—designed for construction, not interception—had pushed it to a paltry few tens of meters per second. Since the equations being solved and plotted on Memphis’s bridge depended entirely on the mass and velocity of the objects and the location of the starship, those were meaningful disadvantages.

But CT-9 also had one meaningful advantage: a guiding intelligence. The satellite’s engine had finally burned out; it was coasting now, committed to its trajectory. Only the truck could counter and adjust, and so it sped in its own plodding way for the spot where the satellite would meet it.

The intercept point was just four kilometers from Memphis. If the two objects meeting there were perfect, incompressible spheres, the satellite would follow the track on Martin’s display and miss the earthside curve of the hull by less than a hundred meters. Elementary physics of inelastic collisions.

But these were spacecraft, not billiard balls, and no computer on Memphis could predict the outcome.

“Range, twenty kilometers.”

The chatter on the starship’s bridge had ended. Dryke watched the panoramic and the tracking plot on his display wall, both relayed from Memphis via Highstar. They said enough.

“What—”

Something was happening to the truck. The shield had broken free from three of the grapples and was twisting to one side. A moment later, it went spinning away down toward the Pacific night like a discus. As it vanished, the Hughes appeared, a twinkling star skimming Takara’s moonside pole. Dryke’s breath caught.

“Range, ten kilometers.”

“Eight—”

“Five—”

The satellite closed, the Hughes rose, and for an instant—but only an instant—they merged. The violence with which the truck was hurled aside, spinning crazily, underlined the missile’s frightening speed. If it was deflected at all, no one watching could tell.

“Oh, shit—” said Dryke.

Suddenly, the Hughes brightened, as though it were caught in a spotlight. Dryke’s mind locked, and he watched without understanding. Then the display wall strobed blinding white, like a giant photographer’s flash, as the satellite exploded.

The panoramic went black, and Dryke could barely see through the afterimage that the tracking plot had splintered into dozens of diverging lines, some heading directly for Memphis. One second, two, three, four—whatever was going to happen should have happened.

“Matt?”

There was no answer. Then the tracking plot suddenly vanished, and Dryke realized that he was hearing shouting, cheering, the bubbling over of giddy relief. “Bridge link,” he said quickly, and the scene came up in window 1. Reid was being hugged by someone. “Matt?”

Reid escaped the hug and turned toward the cam. “I guess you’ve still got a starship, Mike. You can fire us now.”

“Firing’s too good for you,” Dryke said. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to deny the Director the pleasure of firing us all at once. Did the ship get tagged?”

“We had a little bump, so we must have taken something. But it can’t have been much, because all the important lights are still green. The chief engineer’s on his way out in a boat to take a look.”

“What happened there at the end?”

Reid looked over his shoulder. “Marty?”

The tech looked sheepish. “The reflector was blocking the truck’s rendezvous radar, and I wanted a little insurance for a center hit. I thought it was worth a hundred kilos, so I threw the reflector away.”

“Highstar’s gonna ticket you for that.”

“Ticket, hell,” said Martin. “Do you know how long it’s been since I did this to my shorts?”

Reid laughed. “I’ll buy you a new pair.”

“I’ll pay the ticket,” Dryke said. “Get us a report on damage ASAP, will you?”

The postmortem was not a happy gathering. Marshall was there, and Oker. Talbot, the construction manager, and Reid were linked from Memphis. Edgar Donovan was fresh in from Los