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She braced herself. "Are we going to feel it?"
"Inertial shift? Of course."
"No, idiot. Are we going to feel the impact?"
He shrugged. "If we hit. Nobody's ever hit a c-vector shield that hard with something that big."
Then Temple's stomach turned on its side, and the whole auxcompcom felt like it was starting into
a spin.
The course adjustment was over almost immediately: at the speeds Aster's Hope and the alien were
traveling, one kilometer was a subtle shift.
Less than two and a half minutes. If we hit. She couldn't sit there and wait for it in silence.
"Are the scanners doing any better? We ought to be able to count their teeth from this range."
"Checking," he said. With a few buttons, he called a new display up onto the main screen
 and stared at it without saying anything. His mouth hung open; his whole face was blank with
astonishment.
"Gracias?" She looked at the screen for herself. With a mental effort, she tightened down the
screws on her brain, forced herself to see the pattern in the numbers. Then she lost control of
her voice: it went up like a yell. "Gracias?"
"Don't believe it," he murmured. "No. Don't believe it."
According to the scanners, the oncoming ship was crammed to the walls with computers and weaponry,
equipment in every size and shape, mechanical and electrical energy of all kinds and not one
single living organism.
"There's nothing " She tried to say it, but at first she couldn't. Her throat shut down, and she
couldn't unlock it. She had to force a swallow past the rigid muscles. "There's nothing alive in
that ship.''
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Abruptly, Aster's Hope went into a course shift that felt like if was going to pull her heart out
of her chest. The alien was taking evasive action, and Aster's Hope was compensating.
One minute.
"That's crazy," She was almost shouting. "It comes in faster than light and starts decelerating
right at us and jams oar transmissions and shifts course to try to keep us from running into
it and there's nobody alive on board? Who do we talk to if we want to surrender?"
"Take it easy," Gracias said. "One thing at a time. Artificial intelligence is feasible. Ship
thinks for itself, maybe. Or on automatic. Exploration probe might "
Another coarse shift cut him off. A violent inertial kick too violent. Her head was jerked to the
left. Alarms went off like klaxons. Aster's Hope was trying to bring herself back toward collision
with the other ship, trying
The screens flashed loud warnings, danger signs as familiar to her as her name. Three of the
ship's thrusters were overheating critically. One was tearing itself to pieces under the shift
stress. Aster's Hope wasn't made for this.
She was the ship's' nician: she couldn't let Aster's Hope be damaged. "Break off!" she shouted
through the squall of the alarms. "We can't do it!"
Gracias slapped a hand at his board, canceled the collision course.
G-stress receded. Lights on Temple's board told her about thrusters damaged, doors jammed because
they'd shifted on their mounts; a locker in the meditech section sprung, a handful of cryogenic
capsules gone on backup. But the alarms were cut off almost instantly.
For a second, the collision warnings went into a howl. Then they stopped. The sudden silence felt
louder than the alarms.
Gracias punched visual up onto the screens. He got a picture in time to see the other ship go by
in a blur of metal too fast for the eye to track. From a range the scanners measured in tens of
meters, the alien looked the size of a fortress squat, squarish, enormous.
As it passed, it jabbed a bright red shaft of force at Aster's Hope from pointblank range.
All the screens in the auxcompcon went dark.
"God!" Gracias gasped. "Scanners burnt out?"
That was Temple's province. She was still reeling from the shock, the knowledge that Aster's Hope
had been fired upon; but her hands had been trained until they had a life of their own and knew
what to do. Hardly more than a heartbeat after she understood what Gracias said, she sent in a
diagnostic on the scanner circuits. The answer trailed across the screen in front of her.
"No damage," she reported.
"Then what?" He sounded flustered, groping for comprehension.
"Did you get any scan on that beam?" she returned. "Enough to analyze?" Then she explained, "Right
angles to the speed of light isn't the same direction for every force. Maybe the c-vector sent
this one off into some kind of wraparound field."
That was what he needed. "Right." His hands went to work on his board again.
Almost immediately, he had an answer. "Ion beam. Would've reduced us to subatomic particles
without the shield. But only visual's lost. Scanners still functioning. Have visual back in a
second."
"Good." She doublechecked her own readouts, made sure that Aster's Hope's attempts to maneuver
with the alien hadn't done any urgent harm. At the same time, she reassured herself that the force [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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