Time

nose over tail, and the membrane, crumpled, fell away. Emma could see more sparks now as the pilots blipped their attitude thrusters, struggling to bring their craft under control.

“Not enough,” Cornelius said.

“What do you mean?” Emma said.

“If the collision had been head-on the squid missile would have wrecked that thing. Cracked it open like an egg. But that sideswipe is just going to inconvenience them.”

“You mean,” Malenfant said, “it will make them mad.”

Now little hatches in the ship’s hull slid back, and tiny, complex toys squirted out into space. They swiveled this way and that, tight and neat, and then squirted in dead straight lines over the horizons.

“Comsats,” said Malenfant. “For command, communications, control. So they can see all the way around the rock when they begin their operations.”

Emma asked, “What operations?”

“Taking Cruithne. What else?”

And then the ground shook.

They were all floating a little way upward, she saw, like water drops shaken off by a dog. When they landed they staggered. Emma thought she could feel huge slow waves working through the dust-laden ground.

Malenfant snapped, “What the hell now?”

Cornelius was pointing to the horizon.

From beyond Cruithne’s dusty shoulder, an ice fountain was bursting upward. Droplets fanned out in perfectly straight lines, gleaming like miniature stars, unperturbed by Cruithne’s feeble gravity.

“They’re hitting the squid,” she said. “Their domes—”

“Yeah,” Malenfant growled.

“How did they do that?” Emma asked. “How do you fight a space war?”

Malenfant said, “Maybe they fired a projectile. Like an anti-satellite missile.”

“No.” Cornelius pointed to the searchlight-type mount on the hull of the ship. “That looks like a laser-beam director to me. Probably a chemical laser, several megawatts of power, a mirror a few feet across.”

Emma asked, “Could they fire it again?”

“You bet,” Malenfant said. “The babies they developed for Star Wars back in the eighties were designed for thousands of shots.”

Already the ice fountain was dying.

Emma was glad some of the squid, at least, had been spared this, that they were on their way to the Jupiter-orbit Trojans, where they would be far beyond the reach of this heavy-handed military intervention.

Unlike herself.

“They’ll take out our habitat next,” Cornelius said. “Then trash theO’NeilL”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Emma said. “That would kill us.”

“They don’t know who’s firing at them. They’re going to shoot first—”

“ — and let Saint Peter sort us out,” Malenfant said grimly. “Hell, it’s what I’d do.”

Emma said, “Without the habitat, without O ‘Neill, we’ll be dead when the suits expire. Ten, twelve hours.”

Cornelius said tightly, “I think we know that.”

More hatches opened and tiny rockets hurtled out, trailing cables. The rockets fell over Cruithne’s tight horizon, and Emma saw sprays of regolith dust. The cables went taut, and the ship began to turn, grandly, like a liner towed by tugboats.

“He’s harpooned us,” Malenfant said. “And now he’s winching himself in.”

Another hatch was opening in the ship’s belly. She saw a rectangle of pale gray light, the figure of a person — a soldier — heavily armored. The soldier looked ant sized. For the first time she realized how big the ship really was.

Cornelius moved. “We have to get away. Come on.” He dragged his tethers out of the regolith, lay down flat, and began pulling himself by his fingertips over the surface. He wasn’t even bothering to anchor himself, Emma saw.

“Cornelius is in kind of a hurry,” she said.

Malenfant said grimly, “I suspect he knows something we don’t. We’d better follow him.”

Emma fell forward. Cruithne dust billowed around her, and she began to float-crawl forward, after the fleeing Cornelius.

June Tybee

June was ready by the closed hatch. Her harness, slung loosely about her suit, was attached to a guide rope that coiled loosely above her head.

Just like taking a parachute drop, she thought.

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

The hatch slid open.

Cruithne was framed in the hatchway: dark as soot, dimpled with craters of all sizes, here and there glistening blue or red. She could see the guide rope snaking, coils frozen in zero G, to a piton-tipped rocket buried in the dirt. There was no sense of gravity. It was like looking straight ahead at a wall, rather than down to a ground.

Such had been her proficiency in the zero G drills that she had been selected in the first wave. And so here she was in the hatchway of a spacecraft, and she was facing an asteroid.

Oh Christ oh Christ…

Someone slapped her on the back. She didn’t allow herself to hesitate. She gave her harness one last tug, floated forward, and pushed hard out the hatch.

She was floating between two vertical walls, as if crossing between two buildings, following the coiling cable. And when she looked down—

She looked down and saw stars.

To left and right, above, more stars. Space, above her and below her and all around her. The confinement of her months inside Bucephalus fell away, and the scale of the universe opened out from a few feet to infinity. She felt her stomach churn. Nothing, no amount of training or simulation, nothing had prepared her for the reality of this, of drifting in space.

They should have tried, though, she thought.

She clutched her weapon to her chest, focused on it to the exclusion of all else. Such weapons were her specialty — in fact she had trained others in their use. The gun was distorted in her view by her curved, tinted faceplate. It was a combination laser rifle and projectile weapon — ordinary bullets, the clips and barrels modified to take account of the vacuum. Big trigger for gloved fingers. A fancy graphite lubricant that wouldn’t seize in the vacuum. Big modular parts for easy repair. LED display to show her the laser’s power — right now, of course, it was fully charged. …

The transfer could only have taken a minute. It seemed much longer.

Here came the asteroid at last, its detail exploding, filling her faceplate. She saw how its surface was sculpted by craters, circles on circles, like the beach after the rain, like that day in Florida with Tom. But this beach was black as coal, not golden, and the sky was black too, not washed-out blue, and she was a long way from Florida.

Her radar pinged in her ear, warning her she was close.

She spread out her arms and legs, starfishing, as she’d been trained. She couldn’t tell from looking how far she was from the surface; the closer she got, the more craters and ragged holes she could see, so the surface texture was the same on every scale—

what was the word,/racta/?

It came as a shock when her hands pressed against soft, crumbling dirt.

She felt herself tipping. Then her knees and toes hit together. It felt as if she were clinging to a wall — and oh shit, she was bouncing, floating back into space. She scrabbled at the asteroid.

She was panicking.

She shut her eyes and took a deep breath.

She opened her eyes, reached for the pitons dangling from her belt, dug one into the surface, then a second, a third. Rapidly, efficiently now, she hooked her tethers to the ropes, tested them with quick tugs, and then — another deep breath, a moment of concentration — she ripped her harness clear of the guide rope, and she was no longer connected to Bucephalus.

She dug her piton out of the ground, moved her tether, crawled forward. And here she was, mountaineering up the face of an asteroid. The belly, arms, and legs of her suit were already streaked and stained black, and she had to stop every few minutes to wipe the shit off her faceplate. It was like crawling over a broad, soot-strewn hill, as if after some immense forest fire.

She could see the Bucephalus hanging in the sky like some complex metal sun. More troopers were coming down to Cruithne, sliding down the wire in absolute silence.

Holy cow, she thought, I made it. Her spirits lifted. Tommy, Billie, this will make a hell of a story for you and your kids. I hope somebody is recording this.

She saw a subsatellite sailing over her head, a little metal spider with glistening solar panels, filmy antennae. It spun and jerked, angling down in a straight line toward the horizon until it passed out of her sight. The gravity of Cruithne was too weak for useful orbits, so the subsats were using small thrusters to rocket their way around the asteroid. The lifetime of the sats was only a few hours, limited by their fuel, but that ought to be enough; if the asteroid wasn’t secured by then they would all be in trouble anyhow.

When she looked back Bucephalus was already hidden behind the close horizon. It was as if she were alone here.

She ought to wait. The orders, for now, were just to spread out over the first few hundred yards, and then to move steadily over the asteroid, keeping line-of-sight contact on a buddy basis. Then they would converge on the various installations.

Clinging to the dirt she sucked orange juice, sharp and cold, from the nipple dispenser inside her helmet, and she found a fruit bar in there and crunched it; when she pulled away a little more of the bar slid out toward her mouth.

She was in shadow right now, out of the sun, and she could see stars. The spin of the asteroid was becoming more apparent; she could see how the stars were wheeling slowly over her. And now here came Earth, fat and beautiful and blue, heavy with light, the most colorful thing she could see. It was just a mote in the sky; it was hard to believe that everything she had known before climbing aboard Bucephalus — the kids, Bill, her family, all the places she had lived, everywhere she had visited — all of it was contained in that pinprick of light.

Something sailed over her head, brilliant white in the sun. Another subsatellite?

But the thing she saw was wriggling. It had arms and legs. And some kind of cloud spreading around it, spherical, misty. Gradually the wriggling stopped. Like a stranded fish, she thought, numbly.