Starplex

Suddenly, a streamer of green fire shot out of the wall, like a neon whiplash against the night. It continued to stretch out until it had extended over fifty thousand kilometers from the shortcut.

“My God…” said Rissa.

“Tell me that’s not a weapon,” said Jag, rising to his feet, and standing with both sets of arms crossed behind his back. “We would have been incinerated if we hadn’t moved the ship.”

“Could it—could it be the Slammers?” asked Lianne.

The green streamer was now falling back toward the vast luminescent circle of the shortcut. As it did so, it broke up into fiery segments, each thousands of kilometers long.

“Thor, prepare to go into hyperdrive on my order,” Keith said.

“All stations, secure for hyperdrive,” said Lianne’s voice over the loudspeakers. “Is it a forcefield of some kind?” asked Rissa.

“Unlikely,” said Jag.

“If that is a ship’s exhaust,” Keith said, “it must have the biggest goddamn ramscoop in history attached to the other end.”

“Diameter is eight thousand kilometers,” said Jag. He had already recalibrated the units on the scale bars twice. “Ten thousand…”

“Thor, thirty seconds to hyperdrive!”

“All stations, alert,” said Lianne. “Hyperdrive in twenty-five seconds, mark.”

Another tongue of green flame shot out of the widening circle.

“Hyperdrive in fifteen seconds, mark,” said Lianne.

“Sweet Jesus, it’s huge,” Rissa said, under her breath. “Hyperdrive in five sec—hyperdrive initialization canceled! Automatic override!”

“What? Why?” Keith looked at the pair of computer eyes mounted on his workstation. “PHANTOM, what’s happening?”

“Gravity well is too steep for safe hyperspatial insertion,” replied the computer.

“Gravity well? We’re in open space!”

“Oh, Gods,” said Jag. “It’s big enough to curve spacetime.” He moved out from behind his console and jogged in front of the cluster of workstations. “Reduce display brightness by half.”

Rhombus’s ropes flicked. The view of the giant green circle dimmed, but it was still flaring, overexposed.

“Halve it again,” snapped Jag.

The view grew dimmer. Jag was trying to look at it, but it was still too bright for eyes that had evolved under a dim red sun. “Once more,” he said.

The view darkened further—and suddenly there was detail visible on the green surface: a granularity of lighter and darker shades…

“That’s not a ship,” said Jag, his own voice, audible beneath PHANTOM’s translation, the staccato barking of Waldahud astonishment. “It’s a star.”

“A green star?” said Rissa, amazed. “There’s no such thing.”

“Thor,” Keith snapped, “full thruster power—perpendicular course away from the shortcut. Move!”

The alarm began to warble again. “Level-two radiation warning!” shouted Lianne overtop of it.

“Force screens to maximum,” Keith snapped.

“Can’t do both, boss,” shouted Thor. “Full thrusters can’t be combined with maximum screens.”

“Priority to thrusters, then! Get us out of here!”

“If that’s a star,” said Rissa, “we’re way too close, aren’t we?” She looked at Jag, who said nothing. “Aren’t we?” she asked again.

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Way, way too close,” he said softly.

“If the radiation doesn’t fry us,” said Rissa, “the heat will.”

“Thor, can’t you get any more speed?” Keith said.

“No can do, boss. The local gravity well is steepening rapidly.”

“Would we do better to abandon the mothership?” asked Lianne. “Perhaps our smaller ships could escape more easily?

“Forgive me, but no,” said Rhombus. “Beside the fact that we don’t have enough auxiliary vessels to evacuate everyone, only a few of them are outfitted with shielding for close approaches to stars.”

Lianne had her head tilted to one side; listening to private communications over her ear implant. “Director, we have panicked messages coming in from all over the ship.”

“Standard radiation precautions,” snapped Keith.

“Those will be inadequate,” said Jag softly as he moved back to his workstation.

Keith looked over at Rissa. One of her monitors was displaying plans for Starplex, showing the two mutually perpendicular diamonds intersecting the wide central disk. “What happens,” she said, turning to him, “if we rotate Starplex so that the ocean deck is at a right angle to our line of travel?”

“What difference will that make?” asked Keith.

“We could use the seawater as radiation shielding. The ocean is filled to a depth of twenty-five meters. That’s a lot of insulation.”

Lights on Rhombus’s web winked on and off. “It would certainly help—everyone who isn’t on or below the ocean deck, that is.”

Lianne spoke up. “We’ll all be fried unless we do something.”

Keith nodded. “Thor, rotate Starplex as described.”

“ACS jets firing.”

“Lianne, devise a plan to evacuate all personnel from decks thirty-one through seventy.” She nodded.

“PHANTOM, intercom now!”

“Intercom on,” said PHANTOM.