For a horrible moment, Keith thought she'd been knocked unconscious by the impact, but she soon recovered from the blow and fought to bring the heavy geological laser into position. She was having trouble holding the unit steady. When she fired, her first shot crossed her own tether line, severing it at its midpoint. Fifteen meters of nylon line came crashing down at her; the other fifteen meters whipped around far over her head like a narrow yellow snake. She was now pinned against the center of the space door by the ship's spinning.
Fong's second shot went equally wild, taking out a junction box for the in-bay lighting system. Everything was plunged into darkness.
'Jessica!'
'I'm still here, Keith. God, this is awkward.'
In the frame, all that was visible was black — black, and then a pinprick of ruby, as the laser found the rear wall.
Keith watched as the metal began to glow, soften, ripple. And then — the sound of water rushing through, like a high-pressure fire hose.
Jessica continued to shoot the laser, perforating a giant square along the rear wall. A hole here, move the laser a centimeter, another hole, shoot again, over and over. The emergency lights came on, bathing the entire bay in red.
Seawater erupted from the rear wall. The perforated square of bulkhead metal peeled back, then tore free, flinging across the bay, propelled by a geyser of water behind it.
Keith cringed. It looked as though the metal wall fragment was going to slap against Jessica, who was already being pummeled by wild fists of water, but she, too, must have seen it coming. There was an explosion of flame behind her, scorching the wall. She'd been smart enough to put on a suit with a thruster pack, and had fired herself up and away just in time. The bay was filling with water, starting at the space door and rising in toward the interior wall Jessica was soon slapped back against the door.
Once the bay had filled, Keith spoke to her once more.
'Okay, now turn around and drill a hole about ten centimeters in diameter in the outer docking-bay door. Hold the beam emitter right against the door; you don't want to boil the water around you.'
'Will do,' she said, her space suit now a diving suit. She stood on the space door and held the gray metal cone of her geological laser like a jackhammer. She then fired down between her feet. Soon, part of the space door was glowing cherry red, then white-hot, and then, and then…
Starplex spun like a top against the night, green starlight winking off its hull.
The five remaining Waldahud ships were approaching.
Two of the ships were coming in from above and three from below, heading toward the ring of docking bays. Doubtless the ship was rotating too fast for any of the Waldahud pilots to notice the tiny incandescent spot in the middle of the door to bay sixteen, a spot that glowed, flared, and burned away.
And suddenly — water began to spray out into space, flinging away from the rapidly rotating ship. And as it hit vacuum, it evaporated immediately into vapor, and then, once enough vapor had accumulated to make for considerable pressure, the water recondensed into liquid, the plankton, salt crystals, and oceanic detritus providing seeds for droplet formation, and then here, shaded from the green star by the intervening dark-matter field, it froze into ice — millions upon millions of ice pellets, flinging away from Starplex at high speed, propelled by the explosive force of all the water behind and by the centrifugal force of the rapidly rotating ship. Countless diamonds against the night, winking green in the light of the nearby star. The first Waldahud ship was hit by a barrage of ice chunks, that ship's speed toward Starplex being added to the pellets' own velocity, making for a truly high-speed collision. The initial half-dozen chunks were deflected by the ship's force screens, shields designed for guarding against single micrometeoroid impacts, not a sustained onslaught. Ice pellets ripped through the Waldahud hull like teeth through flesh, tearing up the habitat, expelled air freezing and adding to the hailstorm in space. On the bridge, Keith called out, 'Now, Thor! Rock the ship!'
Thor complied. The streamer of ice chunks angled off in a different direction, impacting a second Waldahud ship, ripping it open. Then a third ship exploded, a silent flower against the dark background, as frozen bullets ripped into the tanks containing its atmospheric-maneuvering fuel.
Thor rocked the ship the other way, and ice pellets were flung toward the fourth remaining ship. By this time, its pilot had come up with a counterstrategy. He rotated his own ship so that its fusion exhaust cone faced toward Starplex, and he fired his main engine, melting the ice into water drops, which immediately boiled into vapor before they could hit his ship.
But the pilot of one of the other remaining ships had been unprepared for this maneuver, or too preoccupied with saving his own tail by heading toward the shortcut. His course took him in the path of his comrade's fusion exhaust, and the white-hot flames tore into his vessel.
It exploded, leaving only two ships — one of which was Gawst's.
The expanding ring of water pellets deflected most of the ship debris away from Starplex, but the crew of the Waldahud craft that had tried the fusion-exhaust trick wasn't so lucky. A large, jagged piece of hull rammed into their ship and sent it spinning away, out of control — directly toward the field of dark matterlot seemed almost to regain control when he was a few million kilometers away from the closest of the great gray balls of gas, but by then he was already caught in its gravity. It would take hours for the deadly trajectory to play out its course, but the ship was destined to crash into the darmat and, at that velocity, even the kind of soft impact that occurred when regular matter hit dark matter would be enough to pulverize the vessel.
Gawst's ship was still intact, holding station with a tractor beam beneath the central disk. There was no way Thor could aim the ice-pellet stream there. Still, Starplex could keep spinning until Gawst ran out of fuel, if need be…
'Uh-oh.' PHANTOM's translation of the rippling lights on Rhombus.
Thor looked up. 'God damn,' he said.
Emerging from behind the limb of the green star were one… two… five more Waldahud fighters. Gawst had not been fool enough to use all his forces on the initial attack. One of the newcomers was a giant, ten times the size of the smaller probecraft.
Starplex's five dolphin-piloted ships had backed off, avoiding the ice barrage. But now they were linking up in formation, and heading toward the approaching attack force, determined to get to it before it could get to their mothership.
And then…
'What the hell?' said Keith, gripping his armrests.
'Jesus' said Thor. ' Jesus.'
The vast field of dark matter had begun to move, slowly at first, but now with gathering speed. It was spinning out into lumpy streamers, greenish on the side facing toward the rogue sun, inky black on the other. The streamers grew longer until they spread out over millions of kilometers, tubes of gravel with planet-sized spheres distributed along their length like knuckles on ethereal fingers.
The Starplex probeships dived above or below the streamers. The Waldahud pilots found their ships traveling in erratic courses, unable to compensate for the streamers' gravitational attraction. In the spherical hologram, Keith could see the attacking ships staggering in drunken, weaving lines, pulled off course by the hundreds of Jupiter-masses within each dark-matter ribbon.
The streamers were growing with surprising speed. Keith still had trouble with the concept of macrolife living freely in space, but of course most life-forms could move quickly when they wanted to…
The pilots of the incoming Waldahud ships were realizing that they were in trouble. One of them aborted what had clearly been an attack run toward Starplex, and was now veering off at a steep angle. Another fired its braking jets, the exhausts four ruby pinpricks against the blackness. But the darmats continued to reach for them, long, puffy fingers against the night.
If the ships had been able to use hyperdrive, they could have escaped.
But the gravity well from the green star, and the shallower but still significant wells created by the darmats, prevented that.
The farthest of the new fighters was now only a few kilometers ahead of one of the dark-matter tendrils. Keith watched as the gap was closed, the ship disappearing within the fog of gravel.
Thor provided a schematic, showing the fighter's position within the streamer — a streamer that now was no longer reaching forward, but had started pulling back, its gravity dragging the Waldahud vessel with it…
