Boundary 2: Threshold (36 page)

"Yeah." A.J. looked serious now. "But they're having to try to get past Fitzgerald's people—and
Odin
's very badly hurt."

"How badly?" Maddie asked. Something was starting to nag at her. "Do we have any idea how many people they have left, and what the condition of the ship overall is?"

"Starting to get the picture," A.J. answered. "And I don't like it. The NERVA engine's workable, but the thrust nozzle is toast, and so is some of the venting around it. The mass-beam's totally screwed right now. Even if we could work around the lost support beam, the software's going to have to be reinstalled all through the thing after what we did to it."

His lips tightened in an almost-white line; Maddie could tell he was both furious and upset. "The habitat ring's the worst, though. There was damage all through it, and people weren't ready for this. It's . . . bad. Really bad."

Madeline felt her eyes narrow as a tight, cold feeling crept up her spine. "A.J., Jackie, give me a model of an explosion on that support rib. I want to see how it did that much damage."

"Okay." A.J. worked for a few minutes, asking Jackie to help him on some points. "Here we go . . . Hmm, no, that didn't do it. Some damage, but nothing like what I see. Okay, boost the power . . . Nope. Hmm. Well, we've got . . . but no . . ."

Maddie raised her head, looking at the image of
Odin
. "A.J., try putting fragmentation in the shell itself—say five hundred kilos of armor-piercing, maybe ten to twenty grams each."

"Okay." A few moments went by, and he sighed heavily. "Yeah. Yeah, Maddie, that does it, all right." His voice sounded leaden.

Now she knew.
"A.J., give me a plot—where are those shells from
Odin
's salvo going to be when they miss?"

"Son of a bitch . . ."

The screen lit up, showing the courses of the three shells and
Nebula Storm
. Madeline leaned forward tensely in her seat, already knowing what she was going to see.

At closest approach, the three shells bracketed the
Nebula Storm
, the alien ship at the nearly precise center of a triangle. The third shell seemed to be lagging slightly, but not much.

"Damn him. If we hadn't had so much going on, I probably would have thought of this sooner. Jackie, Larry, get us out of here."

"Don't have much fuel left, and they're gettin' kinda close," Larry said. "But . . . let's see, we need to get probably well over a hundred kilometers from them to make sure not too many of those little beasts hit us. Yeah, we've got enough to do that. Stand by—we're doing a burn. Toward the side of the third one there. That one's a little behind the others."
Nebula Storm
began to pirouette, bringing its drive to the proper alignment to take them out of the path of the oncoming weapons.

"That won't take us
into
anything else, will it?" A.J. asked.

"Not likely, but lessee . . . No, it'll take us closer to Europa in the end, close enough to do quick sightseeing from far up, but not dangerous. Jackie, drive ready?"

Jackie looked up from her controls. "Accumulators charged. How much of a burn?"

"Get us a delta of one hundred sixty meters per second. That'll do it."

"Wouldn't want to do much more than that. We're kinda tapped right now," Jackie said. "Firing in three . . . two . . . one . . ."

The adapted NERVA drive thundered briefly, shoving the
Nebula Storm
sideways. A.J. watched as the trajectories diverged. "Yeah, that'll do it. We'll be over two hundred kilometers from the nearest one when it goes off. I don't know if we'll avoid all the damage, but I don't think it can concentrate fire enough to really screw us at that range."

"Probably not," Maddie said, slowly starting to relax. "Not with a simple explosive shell. You can do a shaped and directed charge for some reasonable directionality, but there's a big difference between hitting a two-hundred-meter target at one kilometer versus hitting it at two hundred kilometers. I—"

"
Course change!
" A.J. suddenly shouted. "The three shells just did a burn! They're matched with us again!"

"I was afraid that might happen," Maddie said in careful, precise tones. "I've been underestimating Fitzgerald all along. He's a sociopath, but a very smart one. I wonder how much delta-V they can carry."

"Can't be much more than that," A.J. said. "I know what the approximate mass of those shells was. Can we do another burn?"

"One more," Jackie said. "Then we're on fumes, so to speak."

"Here's the vector."

Nebula Storm
roared again, dodging from the path of the closing shells.

Maddie watched, tensely.
Please be out, please be out . . .
 

"Shells doing another burn . . ."

"Oh, hell." That was Helen.

"But they ran out of juice."

Maddie relaxed a bit. "How far short?"

"They'll be . . . well, closer than I'd like, but a lot farther away than they were going to be if we hadn't moved. About ten kilometers, give or take."

"They'll have to blow a little before actual closest approach," Joe pointed out.

"Yeah, probably about thirty or forty seconds. Maybe a little less, depending on how fast the explosion makes them go. I doubt they're going to hit much more than a couple of kilometers per second from the boom."

"It's a moot point anyway. Our closing velocities are almost ten times that."

"How long until they hit?" Madeline asked.

"Or until they miss? We've got about ten minutes."

"Seal off all doors now. Can we lower the hab sections?"

"You mean lying flat, like before we first launched?" Jackie asked. "Yes, since we're not rotating. It'll take a few minutes, but we have enough time. I don't know if that's going to be better or worse."

"Most of the vector is forward. If we lower the hab sections, we present a smaller overall target. Lower them." She glanced at Joe. "Retract the sail and pull in the control cables."

"Understood."

A waiting silence descended upon the
Nebula Storm
. Slowly the four hab sections at the end of their long booms descended to lie as flat as possible against the hull of the alien vessel. Like a deflating balloon, the nebula sail began to shrink.

"Don't suppose going through the nebula sail would affect them?" Helen asked.

"Don't think so," Joe answered glumly. "Doesn't matter now that we're retracting it."

"Five minutes."

The great glittering nebula had faded, and the Smart Dust retracted within the hull, along with the tendril-like control cables.

"One minute."

Seconds passed. Simple calculations were made. The decision reached.

The three shells recognized the only possible target in range and adjusted shaped charges. The range was distant, but there was still a chance. The first two detonated, the third just fractions of a second behind them.

"Incoming targets," A.J. said. "Uncountable on radar—it's like a goddamn cloud. Impacts possible in . . . thirty seconds . . . twenty . . ."

Maddie braced herself, even though she knew the impacts would likely be nothing to the ship as a whole, as A.J. counted down to zero.

A storm of armor-piercing bullets ripped through space. Focused to as narrow a cone as their configurable explosive propellant charges could manage, they had still been much farther than optimum from their target. The vast majority of the man-made meteoroids streaked harmlessly past
Nebula Storm
and on into empty space.

A few, however, did not. Fourteen thumb-sized projectiles with a relative velocity of twenty-one kilometers per second slammed into
Nebula Storm
, each carrying the energy of a small cannon concentrated in an item the size of a small thumb. Even the Vault material of the alien hull, tough as it was, could not simply shrug such impacts off with impunity. The impacts, even at poor angles, ripped gouges down her sides, punched into the interior, bored through composites and metals like a bullet through butter. But the
Nebula Storm
was huge, and the chances that a handful of hypersonic bullets would hit anything critical over a two-hundred-meter-long hull were miniscule, and none of them came close.

Except for one.

The alien hull suddenly chimed to multiple impacts, blows so close together that they almost sounded as one: a high-speed machine gun. Alarms screamed out, and the bridge went black, the blackness just as abruptly relieved by red emergency lighting. "That doesn't seem good," Larry said.

"It's not," Jackie said. Her voice had a hollow, shocked quality to it.

"What happened?"

Jackie didn't answer for a moment. Then she chuckled, a laugh that carried an almost creepy overtone.

"Jackie, no offense, but what the hell are you laughing about?" A.J. demanded. Madeline stared at the dark-haired engineer with rising concern.

With apparent difficulty Jackie got herself under control. "Sorry. It shouldn't be that funny. But it is. Remember where we get our main power from? Well, that's the
second
time that goddamn E.U. ship has shot the same goddamn reactor!"

Maddie felt her lips tighten along with her gut. "The reactor itself?"

"I think so, this time. The safety seals tripped and all—I don't think we're looking at a radiation hazard—but it's totally scrammed itself." Jackie shook her head, looking grim now.

"Can we fix it?"

"I'll have to find out what's really wrong first. Give me a few minutes. A.J., Joe, help out here."

Helen and Larry nodded to Maddie. "We've got holes to patch."

"Understood," Maddie said. "Stay away from the engineering area until we know what's going on there, though."

"You got it." The two scientists cycled the lock out of the bridge.

A few minutes later Jackie sat slowly up and turned to face Madeline. Her expression gave the answer. "No."

"No chance at all?"

"Not really," Jackie said. "It didn't actually punch the core, but the amount of work we'd have to do . . . At the least we'd need a big dock or a big, flat area to work on—one with enough gravity to keep things in place, or else someplace sealed off. And without the reactor, we can't even sail around very long. We don't have the fuel to set down anywhere, even if somehow I could get enough energy."

A.J. looked at her with a horrified expression. "You're saying we're going to drift through space until we just run out of power and die?"

"I . . ." She looked momentarily defensive, then suddenly sighed. "Yeah. We are."

"I don't suppose," Maddie said, feeling unnaturally calm now that the worst news was delivered, "there's any way we could get help."

"No," A.J. said. "Not unless
Odin
can pull off a miracle."

"How long do we have?"

"Well . . . that'll take a little while to figure out. If we can get to the lander . . ." Jackie and Joe went into a combination live and electronic conference. Maddie glanced over at A.J.; the sensor expert was staring bleakly into space. "How are things on
Odin
?" she asked quietly.

A.J. shook himself and bent back over his controls. "I'll find out. Can't be any worse than it is here."

Maddie looked at the screen, which still showed the image of the huge E.U. vessel surrounded by debris. "I'm not so sure."

Fitzgerald cursed. "Move it, you bloody fat-arsed bitch!"

Mia glared at him again, probably more from the personal insult than from his giving her orders. The insult was completely unjustified, in point of fact. The Norwegian engineer had quite an attractive figure.

Richard couldn't believe how quickly it had all gone wrong. He still had a few of his people left—Johnson, Desplaines, Feeney—but the explosion and subsequent damage had wiped out over half of his team along with most of the
Odin
's crew. It had also damaged the systems all over the ship, although the vessel's material structures had taken a lot less damage than human bodies.

Still, as serious as the situation had become, it was still not desperate—
provided
that he'd succeeded in taking out the
Nebula Storm
. Or at least disabled their ship and its communication equipment, if not killed them outright. Without a functioning and mostly intact spaceship, no one could survive the orbital environment of Jupiter and its hellish magnetosphere for very long.

If there were no Ares and IRI survivors left—or wouldn't be, before they could send a transmission to the inner system—Richard thought he could still salvage the situation. Well enough, at any rate. Other than his own people, no one still alive aboard the
Odin
had any idea what had caused the catastrophe with the exception of Horst Eberhart and Anthony LaPointe. If Richard could take them out of the equation, he'd have plenty of time to remove the evidence of the coilguns and plant evidence that indicated the disaster had been caused by enemy action coming from the—now happily destroyed—
Nebula Storm
.

That evidence probably wouldn't fool a really good and determined forensic team, once they returned to Earth orbit. But Richard was quite sure his patrons at the ESDC and in the E.U. Commission of Enterprise and Industry would see to it that whoever investigated the affair would be safe and reliable.

There was still Mia Svendsen, of course. She'd have to be silenced also, eventually. He still needed her expertise, but he couldn't allow her to mingle with other survivors of the crew. That was going to be a tricky situation, but he was confident he could deal with it. Right now . . . 

And then he thought to check the
Odin
's course. Straight for Io, possibly the least hospitable spot in the solar system outside of Jupiter itself or the surface of Venus. He growled and gestured to Jackson to keep an eye on Svendsen; he moved ahead of her, with Feeney ahead of him taking point.

God damn them!
That spineless Hohenheim, A.J. Baker and Horst Eberhart. Together they had managed to bugger
everything
up. He'd had the situation completely under control until they'd created a total cock-up in the coilgun systems. Baker, well, he could understand that, but couldn't the general at least realize that taking out the
Nebula Storm
would end up being for the good of everyone in the long run? Fitzgerald had been hired to do a job—so had the blasted general himself, for the love of Christ—and then bloody
everyone
had to keep getting in the way. To put the cherry on top, they'd managed to get the
Odin
turned into a colander. Mia Svendsen had told him that it was going to take her weeks to get the engines back on line—and they didn't have weeks before their up-close meeting with the most volcanic body in the system.