Threshold

  But the most critical thing was the Nebula Storm. She had the data, and in a few hours she'd be transmitting it. The whole mission would then be over—unless she never transmitted. I'll bet you think you're nice and safe, thousands of kilometers away. Well, old Richard and his friends have a few more surprises for you.

  Weaponry had been one of his specialties from way back, in his days in the military. As soon as he recognized the limitations of the coilgun, he'd had people looking for ways to at least minimize those. And then he'd tailored the best ideas for application in the scenarios he thought might eventually emerge.

  It was nice when your careful planning paid off in the end.

  Anthony and Horst burst into Anthony's cabin. Horst glanced around, looking for something to tend to Anthony's arm. Something about the window caught his eye. He drew in a shocked breath as he realized that he had not, in fact, imagined the deck quiver under his feet as the ship's orientation changed. As if to confirm his realization, another rumble passed through the Odin.

  "Oh, God," he breathed.

  "What is it, Horst?" Anthony followed his gaze. "Do you think . . . ?"

  "Fitzgerald's going to fire on Nebula Storm!" Leaving Anthony to search for his own bandage materials, Horst sat before the room's terminal and brought up his own access.

  "But does it matter?" Anthony said painfully, starting to clean out the wounds with the cabin's first-aid kit. "You know how little they must move to avoid the projectiles."

  "Yes, I do. But Fitzgerald knows that, too." He brought up the work he'd begun weeks ago. Now that there was no more need for subtlety . . . "Time to disable the guns for good."

  But when he saw the results, he hissed. "That bastard has his own application suite!"

  "Yes, he would. Not taking chances with General Hohenheim locking him out."

  "It just means I'm having to improvise a bit more, and on a lower level, with the shutdown." Horst frowned in concentration, then began to grin. "But I think I will beat him. He's still loading the guns. Just a few more minutes."

  Fitzgerald slammed the port shut, sealed it, and activated the loading cycle. "Now we're ready to go, my friends. A little gift from the Odin for you all. Actually, four little gifts, each with something extra."

  The coilguns—one on each of four support ribs—signaled readiness. Even as he pressed the final button that started the firing cycle, Richard's eyes registered that one of the status lights had just gone amber. But his finger was already in motion, and sluggish neural impulses could not be recalled.

  The first coilgun cycled, magnetic fields synchronizing in perfect timing, grabbing the shell and accelerating it outward with immense force, hurtling directly toward the Nebula Storm at over fifteen kilometers per second. The next gun also cycled, neither A.J.'s Faerie Dust nor Horst's last-minute interventions quite able to affect it. The third would not have fired at all if Fitzgerald had relied on the original control suite, which was by now totally crippled by Horst and by the general, who had just locked the system down. As it was, one of the embedded controllers failed and the acceleration rings associated with it shut down. As the firing cycle had already begun, however, the following rings tried to compensate, mostly successfully. Now it was the fourth and final shell's turn, and it too began to accelerate at hundreds of gravities. But there were now no fewer than three different agencies trying to control the coilgun, at levels ranging from parts of the hardware up, and the embedded controls were no longer receiving reliable signals.

  Halfway down the acceleration ring, the field inverted, unstably reversing twice. The shell's own controller, minimally complex in order to survive the hellish environment, miscued and took the sudden deceleration and heat to be impact. And did what any good armed shell should do in that situation: it detonated.

  The explosion tore apart the Odin's fourth mass-driver support rib like a firecracker on a straw, blasting shrapnel throughout the area. Some of that shrapnel was from the rib itself, but the rest was payload—high-density depleted-uranium pellets, coated to enhance penetration. The semi-smart shell had not had time to set for a directed blast, but at that short range the Odin still covered a huge fraction of the sky; there was no way to miss, and thousands of pellets did not.

  Like the blast of a monstrous shotgun, the storm of armor-piercing bullets ripped into Odin, both the main body and the wide-flung habitat ring. Never meant for atmospheric entry, Odin's hull was strong enough to take micrometeorite impacts. It also had design contingencies, alarms, safety features, and emergency procedures meant to deal with one or two unexpected larger holes. But this was not just one or two holes, and the personnel who might normally have been in a position to respond were busy with a mutiny, on one side or another.

  The explosion and impact were puny compared to the mass of the huge ship. It did not reel under the blow, was not sent spinning and fracturing; it continued relentlessly on its way, outwardly almost unchanged.

  But the interior of the Odin had become a charnel house.

  Chapter 37

  "Almost . . ." A.J. suddenly sat up. "Oh, that's bad."

  "What?" Jackie looked worried.

  A.J. ignored her for the moment. The status reports for the coilguns had stopped abruptly. The Faerie Dust was probably cycling, looking for more data, until it met another contingency to act on. But the last data he'd gotten . . .

  "Something bad's happened. I can't tell what, though. I think we've been fired on, but something went wrong with the fourth shot."

  "They got off three shots?" Madeline said, in a tone of mild reproof. "You seem to be slipping, A.J."

  "Gimme a break," he muttered as he tried to redirect the motes on Odin to new assignments. The responses were not encouraging. "Fitzgerald had his own control protocols, as well as the original layer, and someone—I'll bet Horst—was trying to shut him down on their end. The combination was like having a four-way duel with blindfolds."

  "I got them on radar," Joe said. "The shots, that is. They're pretty darn close for quick shots, but none of them are coming anywhere near us. Well, on a cosmic scale Fitzgerald was dead-on, but on a personal scale he's still way off."

  "How close?" Madeline asked.

  "Kilometers off, all of them. We won't even have to dodge. My guess is that even though A.J. and Horst weren't able to stop the firing, whatever they were doing probably screwed up the targeting. Even just a little nudge would be enough."

  Some of the Dust finally responded with some data. And it looked like . . .

  "Larry, give us a close-up of Odin," A.J. said, feeling a coldness begin to seep into his chest. "Fast."

  "Second that." Joe's voice suddenly had no humor in it. "I'm picking up other targets near Odin. Looks like debris."

  The screen blanked, then returned. At the current range, even with the highest-resolution imagers A.J. had been able to put in Nebula Storm's systems, the huge ship looked like a diatom. But they could make out enough detail to see that the perfect symmetry of Odin was no longer perfect.

  "What happened, A.J.?" Jackie demanded. "Are they going to be okay over there?"

  "I can't be sure what happened, exactly," A.J. said. "Not at this range. Not with all the other crap going on, when I'm having to get low-bandwidth answers to my questions. Something went badly wrong on the last shot. I'd guess that Fitzgerald's last shell blew up in the middle of firing, probably because we were all screwing around with the controls at the same time. Hell, it might not even have been the shell. If the magnetic drivers went wrong, they could probably have fired the shell the wrong way or something like that. I don't know the details. Everything that was going on shut down a lot of the Faerie Dust, too. I've lost a lot of it—I knew it'd happen with it being that close up to the firing, but still . . . Anyway, I'm trying to get more info. I'm really worried by the fact that they haven't reestablished communications. That means that whatever Fitzgerald set up wasn't just a temporary glitch."

  "You can't tap into their comm systems an
d get them working?" Helen asked.

  "I wish. I know I pull off a lot of crazy stunts sometimes, but there really are limits. It's not like TV and movies where the super hacker is really a magician who uses techno-jargon. Wish it was. I could just spout off some obfuscating phrases and hey, presto, I'm running all their systems. But all I have access to right now is Faerie Dust which isn't even in the right locations and that can't communicate anything to me except in short low-bandwidth pulses, and we're still far enough off that we've got fractions-of-a-second comm lag, though that's shrinking. I've given the Dust some instructions to concentrate in some of the other systems I know something about. But since the Dust doesn't come with jet engines or rockets, it's going to take a while for it to get there."

  "I see." Madeline's brow furrowed for a moment. "Can you get anything out of our sensors?"

  "Lemme see what I can coax out." He shifted to the onboard sensors of Nebula Storm, which included visible, ultraviolet, infrared, radar, and a number of others. A picture of the space around the distant Odin began to build up. Filter . . . spectroscopics . . . Oh, not good.

  "Definitely worse than just the one accelerator rib. I'm getting significant gas and vapor around the ship. She's leaking atmosphere, reaction mass, maybe other stuff like a sieve. Best guess—when it happened, it shredded a large part of the rib and blew pieces of it into Odin."

  "And they're still headed straight for Io," Larry added.

  "You'd think they'd have been able to calculate that right after the main burn, though," Jackie said, puzzled. "Why didn't they shift orbit? They can't be completely out of fuel."

  "No, they probably have a little left," A.J. agreed. "I dunno why they wouldn't have shifted."

  "It's obvious," Madeline said. "Given the amount of time, we know that dodging even something the size of Io wouldn't take much effort from them for quite a while. They don't need kilometers per second of delta-V for that, just a relatively few meters per second, and they have enough for that. So, instead of correcting right off, they were waiting to find out where we were. They needed to know the strategic and tactical situation before making that move."

  "Except that the longer they wait, the harder it's going to get," Joe continued. "And with a mutiny and now what looks like major damage, I'll bet no one's thinking about that right now."

  Jackie looked at Larry and Joe. "Can we match up with Odin? Do anything to help them?"

  Larry sighed. "We're closing at about four kilometers per second. We can bias that for a closer approach at course intersect if we want, but we don't have the power to make up the delta-vee difference. If they manage to miss Io . . . taking just the right orbit flyby, they might be able to come close to matching up with us at Europa. Maybe." The Ares astronomer shook his head. "I think they'd still have to do a minimal Oberth even there, and I don't think they have that much left. I think it'd take at least a kilometer-per-second burn."

  Joe looked depressed and angry. "Even if we did . . . I really don't know what we could do. We can't tow them clear. Even almost dry in the tanks, Odin masses something over ten thousand tons. We don't have the room on board to take more than a few refugees, and I don't know how far we could push life-support."

  "Then the only thing we can do is keep trying to warn them," Madeline said decisively. "Jackie, I want you to broadcast a warning to them, with details of exactly when they will impact and a constantly updating timetable of how much they have to shift their current course to escape. A.J., keep trying to get information out of their systems . . . and find some way to deliver a message. Can you do that?"

  A.J. studied the meager data he was getting back, compared it with what he knew of Odin, its systems, and its crew. "I think so. I just hope I can do it fast enough."

  Alarms screamed throughout the Odin, almost deafening Horst and Anthony. Horst's display flickered, paused in mid-update, and then went to local. "The shipboard net just went down."

  "But I thought that was impossible!" Anthony said with a stunned look.

  Horst felt the back of his neck prickling as though something horrid was creeping up on him. Which maybe it was. "Nothing is impossible. But that is a very improbable thing to have happen. A distributed network it is, not so centralized . . . Some nodes are coming back. I am trying to find out . . ." As he managed to force some kind of status evaluation out of the crippled network, the full horror began to sink in. "Dear God," he breathed.

  Most of the habitat ring had suffered some kind of damage. A few cabin segments—including Anthony's—had been in the shadow of Odin's hull, shielded from the debris and shrapnel, but the vast majority of the habitat ring, standing so far out from the main hull as it did, was in line of sight of the explosion. Damage ranged from single punctures to shattered composite viewports to segments so riddled with holes they looked like a section of sponge. The entire facing side of Odin's hull was riddled with holes, random punctures through hull, support networks, power conduits, and stored supplies. One of the external cameras showed an image that Horst quickly blanked out: an image of debris slowly moving away from the Odin—debris that showed several human silhouettes.

  Anthony was looking over his shoulder, muttering something that sounded like prayers. "Horst, how bad is it?"

  "I am trying to get more accurate information. Connecting to the controllers for the main systems. But it is very bad." Horst knew that most members of the crew, during the last few hours, had been in their cabins or in the hab-ring laboratories. The main hull was for command or bridge crew and engineering, for the most part, especially during maneuvers. Which implied something he did not want to think about. "Connected, finally. A lot of discontinuities in the network . . . Well, one good piece of news—the Munin is undamaged and can probably be launched."

  "But it cannot hold that many people, yes?"

  Horst hesitated for a moment, but there was no reason to evade the issue. "There may be not that many people left to load on," he said grimly.

  Anthony stared at him, wordless for a moment. "You . . . you cannot mean that."

  "I am very afraid that I do," Horst said quietly. "We need to get into our suits now. According to the data I am getting, any route we take out of here will take us through vacuum."

  Anthony nodded silently, and began—painfully—to pull on his suit. "Where do we go?"

  "To the Munin first. It has independent systems, including its own communications, life support, and power. We need to be able to tell Nebula Storm what has happened. Maybe they can help. And we can use Munin as our own fortress, if Fitzgerald and his people survived. Assuming, at least, that the bastards are not yet on board it." He went to shut down the terminal, but stopped as an unusual signal was highlighted by his application. He sat back down. "Who . . . ?"

  The signal was coming from one of the surviving controller units on the Odin's driver-support ribs. But it wasn't a normal control or update signal. It looked like . . .

  Suddenly he understood. Decoding the signal didn't take long. Reading it, however, he almost wished he had taken longer. Anthony saw it in his face as he turned. "Horst, what is wrong now?"

  "I just got a message from A.J. Baker, through some of the Faerie Dust he still has on board. And he tells us that soon we will have a much worse problem to worry about."

  Anthony froze. "Oh, God, I had forgotten! Io!"

  "Yes. Io."

  The astronomer resumed putting on his suit. "We must find a way to get control of Odin very soon."

  "We will have to use the laterals. The NERVA drive is no longer usable."

  "What?"

  "Oh, the reactor and so on is basically intact," Horst said bleakly. "But the thrust nozzle is shredded. Try a burn with that kind of damage, and it will vaporize. I have no idea what would happen after that."

  "Then," Anthony said, clumsily forcing his wounded arm to cooperate, "we have even less time than I thought."

  Hohenheim struggled slowly back to consciousness. How long have I been out? What happened
?

  He tried to move, but found that something impeded his movement. Opening his eyes, he gasped.

  Below him, space rotated slowly, majestically. Jupiter passed him, and other distant objects. Nowhere was there a sign of the Odin. He was alone, spinning through the void, four hundred million miles from Earth.

  Not while still feeling gravity, I am not. He moved his head; everything seemed to be working. He looked around, trying to ignore the vertigo of space all around him.

  Looming above him like a constantly falling skyscraper was Odin. Looking down his body, he could see that he lay facedown across one of the habitat support ribs. The part of the cabin unit that would have been under his upper body had been blown away somehow. His legs and abdomen were trapped under wreckage that had fallen on top of him rather than being sucked out into vacuum. He was hanging, in effect, off the edge of a cliff that dropped off into infinite space.

  Do not move yet. It seems stable for the moment. I do not seem to be badly hurt. What happened?

  It came back in a rush: the Nebula Storm's victory and face-saving offer, Fitzgerald's treachery . . . Yes, and then he'd realized that real fighting might break out, since Fitzgerald controlled the armory. So he ordered the bridge crew to prepare, and . . .

  Disaster. He'd gotten into his suit, but the others had not yet finished when the doors opened. The lockdown had been subverted. They hadn't managed to kill him, but he'd forced them to split up. He hoped that they hadn't killed the few people remaining on the bridge. So he'd diverted them away in one direction, managed to take down one who'd relied more on guns than bare-hand skill, and . . . and come to his cabin. And then there had been a shockwave and impact. . . .

  Something had gone dreadfully wrong. Looking down the length of Odin, he could see the mangled ruin of the fourth support rib. To the right and left of him, the habitat ring curved down and away, riddled with holes, missing pieces as far as he could see. Some of the drifting debris he could make out was not mechanical or structural in nature, either.