Time

“Malenfant.” It was Cornelius. “Listen to this.” He tapped at his softscreen, and a recording played in Malenfant’s headset. Words, too soft to make out.

“It’s the screech,” Cornelius said. “It came from the artifact, a broad-spectrum radio pulse that—”

“Turn up the volume, damn it.”

Cornelius complied.

It was, of course, Michael — or rather, his translated voice.

I found my stone.

Emma Stoney:

The three of them beat a hasty retreat back to the dome.

Cornelius dragged off his suit, went straight to his softscreens, and started working through the data.

Malenfant patiently gathered up the discarded equipment. He hooked up their backpacks to recharge units. And then he got a small vacuum cleaner to suck up the loose dust.

Emma grabbed his arm. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“We’ll all be finished if we forget the routines, the drills, our procedures.”

“We lost Michael. We all but kidnapped him, brought him all the way to this damn asteroid, and now we lost him. His oxygen will expire in—” She checked.” — ten more hours.”

“I know that.”

“So what are you going to do? “

He looked exhausted. He let go of the cleaner; it drifted to the floor. “I told Cornelius he has one hour, one of those ten, to figure out what we’re dealing with here.”

“And then what?”

He shrugged. “Then I suit up and go in after the boy.”

Emma shook her head. “I never imagined it would come to this.”

“Then,” Cornelius said coldly, “you didn’t think very far ahead.”

“Your language is inhuman,” Emma said.

Cornelius looked startled. “Perhaps it is. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure Michael is fully human. He’s been one step ahead of us since we arrived here. It may be he knew exactly what he was doing when he walked through that portal, where he was going. It was his choice. Have you thought of that?”

An air-circulation pump clattered to a stop.

Malenfant and Emma stared at each other. After so many weeks in the O’Neill and the hab bubble, she’d gotten to know every mechanical bang and whir and clunk of the systems that kept her alive. And she knew immediately that something was wrong.

She followed Malenfant to Cornelius, who was sitting on a T-chair by the hab’s mocked-up control board. The softscreen display panels were a mess of red indicators; some of them were showing nothing but a mush of static.

“What’s happened?”

Cornelius turned to Malenfant, the muscles around his eyes tight with strain. “It looks like something fried our electronics.”

“Like what? A solar flare?”

“I doubt it.”

Malenfant tapped at a softscreen. “We’re not in any immediate danger. The surface systems seem to have gone down uniformly, but a lot of the hab systems are too stupid to fail.”

Emma said, “Have we taken a radiation dose?”

“Maybe. Depending what the cause of this is.”

“My God.”

Cornelius had produced an image on the softscreen.

It was a star field. But something, an immense shape, was occluding the stars, one by one. In the middle of the black cutout form, a light winked.

“That’s a ship,” Malenfant said. “But who—”

With a mechanical rattle, all the hab’s systems stopped working, and silence fell.

Cornelius turned to Malenfant. “Too stupid to fail?”

Emma felt hot, stuffy, and her chest ached. Without the air circulation and revitalization provided by the loop systems, the carbon dioxide produced by her own lungs would cluster around her face, gradually choking her.

She waved at the air before her mouth, making a breeze, fighting off panic.

The softscreen image, relayed by some surface camera, fritzed out.

“I think we’d better suit up again,” said Malenfant.

June Tybee

June lay loosely strapped into her couch. She was one of ten troopers in this big circular cabin, which was one of five stacked up at the heart of Bucephalus. The troopers in their armor looked like a row of giant beetles.

Her suit, after weeks of practice, felt like part of her body, even the bulky helmet with its thick connectors. The suit was colored charcoal gray, nearly black. Asteroid camouflage. It had been a relief for June when the order had come, just before the brilliant flash of the EMP bomb, to close up her visor. The troopers ought to be rad-shielded, here at the heart of the ship. But it didn’t do any harm to be wrapped in the suit’s extra shielding.

Now the covers on the cabin windows snapped open. The windows were just little round punctures in the insulated, padded walls. But they were enough to show her the stars — and something else.

A shape, charcoal black and massive, came swimming into her field of view. It looked like a barbecue brick that somebody had been taking potshots at. But there were structures on the surface, she saw: little gold domes, what looked like a spacecraft, a glimmer of electric blue.

There were whoops and shouts, and June felt her heart thump with anticipation.

It was Cruithne. They had arrived.

But then a series of bangs hammered at the hull of the carrier. She knew from experience what that was: blips of the attitude-control thrusters. But such a prolonged firing was unusual.

She felt a ghostly shove sideways. It took a while for a ship the mass of Bucephalus to change course. But right now it was trying mighty hard.

And something new came sailing past the window. It was a golden sphere, rippling and shimmering. It was inexplicable: beautiful, even graceful, but utterly strange — a golden jellyfish swimming up at her out of the darkness.

Suddenly it came to June where she was, what she was doing, how far she was from home. The Bucephalus suddenly seemed very fragile. Fear clutched at her chest, deep and primitive.

Emma Stoney:

“Jeez,” Malenfant said, his radio-transmitted voice crackling in

her ear. “It’s the cops.”

Emma was out in the open, locked into her suit, staring at the sky.

The ship was like nothing she had seen before.

It was a squat cylinder with a rounded snub nose. She could see no rocket nozzles at its flaring base. It had two giant finlike wings on which were marked the letters USA, and it had a USASF roundel and a Stars and Stripes painted close to the base. There were complex assemblies mounted on some parts of the hull: an antenna cluster, what looked like a giant swivel-mounted searchlight. The hull was swathed with thick layers of insulation blankets, pocked and yellowed by weeks in space.

Somehow it disturbed Emma to see that huge mass hanging over her in the Cruithne sky: a sky she had become accustomed to thinking of as empty save for the stars, the gleam of Earth, the lurid disc of the sun.

A few yards ahead of her a firefly robot was maneuvering, working its pitons and tethers, in a tight, neat circle, over and over, its carapace scuffed and blackened with dust. It was scrambled, like the equipment in the hab module.

But their suits were working fine. Malenfant had gotten into the habit of burying the suits under a few feet of loosely packed regolith. Just a little more protection, he always said. Now Emma was starting to see the wisdom of that.

“He’s coming down over the pole,” Malenfant murmured now, watching the ship. “Looks like a single-stage-to-orbit design. See the aerospike assembly at the base there? The base would serve as the heat shield on reentry. It’s one big mother. How could they assemble it, fly it so quickly, chase us out here?”

Cornelius shrugged, clumsy in his suit. “Shows how seriously they take you. Anyway now we know what happened to the electronics.”

“Oh,” said Malenfant. “An BMP.”

Emma asked, “BMP?”

“Electromagnetic pulse,” Cornelius said. “They set off a small nuclear weapon above the asteroid. Flooded our electronics with radiation.”

“My God,” Emma said. “How much of a dose did we take?”

They had no dosimeters, no way to answer the question. Emma felt her flesh crawl under her skinsuit, as if she could feel the sleet of hard radiation coursing through her body.

“Anyhow it was seriously dumb,” Malenfant said. “It’s made it impossible for us to talk with them.”

“Maybe they thought they had no choice,” Cornelius said. “They didn’t know what they were flying into here, after all—”

And then Emma saw something new: a sac of water, encased in rippling gold fabric, sailing up from the surface of Cruithne toward the intruder.

Malenfant clenched a fist. “God damn, it’s the squid. The ones who stayed. They’re fighting back.”

Emma’s heart sank. They were doomed, it seemed, to a battle, whether they wanted it or not.

Sparks burst from complex little clusters along the hull of the ship. The great ship began to roll, deflecting ponderously. But it wasn’t going to be enough.

The converging of the two giant masses, in utter silence, was oddly soothing to watch, despite her understanding of the great and deadly forces involved: they were like clouds, she thought: complex clouds of metal and water and fabric.

The water bomb’s membrane snagged on some projection on the ship’s hull. The water within gushed out, blossoming to vapor in a giant, slow explosion. The ship was set tumbling erratically,