Eric Flint - Threshold

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 Stormroared 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 theNebula 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 pastNebula 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 intoNebula 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 theNebula 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 thesecond 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 unlessOdin 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 onOdin?" 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."

Chapter 39 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 theOdin '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-providedthat he'd succeeded in taking out theNebula 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 theOdin had any idea what had caused the catastrophe with the exception of Horst Eberhart and Anthony LaPointe.