SATURDAY, 5 JULY 2042

Ramsey Residence
Greensburg, Pennsylvania
1635 hours EDT

“I just can’t tell you how good it is to have you back home again!” Jack’s mother was very much aflutter, now that they were back on her home turf. “I simply can’t believe that you’re finally home!”

Jack felt uncomfortable with the attention. “Yeah, it’s really great to be back. And, uh, thanks again for coming down to see me yesterday.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have missed your graduation for the world!” It had been something of a surprise. She’d taken the maglev down to Beaufort and come out to Parris Island to watch his graduation ceremony, and that, Jack knew, had been truly and act of devotion above and beyond the call of duty. They didn’t have that much money to begin with…and South Carolina in July was not exactly a vacation spot anymore, with its global warming-augmented temperatures, high humidity, and enthusiastic insect population.

The graduation, fittingly enough, had been held on the Fourth of July, with one hell of a spectacular fireworks display that evening for both the graduates and the families who’d come to see them. Even the fact that the evening’s festivities had been cut an hour short—the rumor that a UN arsenal ship had surfaced offshore and launched a pair of cruise missiles at Charleston proved to be false, fortunately—had failed to curb the partylike atmosphere. Jack and his mother had taken the maglev back to Pittsburgh the next morning; by early Saturday afternoon, he was home…and that was a concept as alien as anything Uncle David had discovered inside the labyrinthine caverns of Cydonia.

As he stood awkwardly in the E-room, still wearing his summer service “A” khakis, trying to connect with his mother and this house that seemed suddenly so strange and small, he began to realize how much he’d changed in the past three months.

At least he hadn’t slipped and lapsed into profanity, yet. Back in boot camp, he’d heard dozens of stories about guys who’d gone back home on leave, sat down to a wonderful home-cooked meal with all of the family, relatives, and friends, and turned the atmosphere to ice with an accidental “This is fucking great, Ma,” or, “Hey, would you pass the fucking potatoes, please?”

Most of the vulgar language he’d heard in boot camp, in fact, had come from the other recruits. With only a very few lapses, the DIs had been almost startlingly clean and correct in their language, which he hadn’t expected at all. He still chuckled, though, at one of Knox’s vulgarities, the one about recruits being so low that whale shit was like shooting stars to them. The imagery was perfect, and all the funnier now that he was no longer a recruit.

In fact, if Jack had any problem with language at all, it was breaking the automatic “this recruit believes…” or “this recruit requests…” that leaped to his lips every time he opened his mouth.

The story was told at Parris Island of one recruit, many, many years ago, who’d determined to escape the unrelenting hell of boot camp by going over the hill. There was only one way off the island, and that was the Boulevard de France, across the bridge over Archer’s Creek and on through the Main Gate. The recruit had worn his PT shorts and T-shirt and stolen a bicycle, and in the dark the Marine guard at the gate had assumed he was the dependent son of someone stationed at the base. “Where are you going this time of night, son?” the guard had asked pleasantly.

The recruit, just a few meters short of freedom, had leaped off his bike, snapped to attention, and sung out, “Sir! This recruit requests—” The sentry had immediately restrained him and called the recruit’s platoon commander.

“So, what are your plans?” his mother asked with that characteristic perkiness he thought of as a smoke screen masking darker thoughts. She plopped down into the big lounge chair and picked up some crewel work. “Come on, sit down! Sit down! Tell me your plans! I mean, you said you had two weeks’ vacation, but then where will you be going after that? Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“‘Leave,’ Mom,” he said, taking a seat at the very edge of a straight-backed chair. It was going to take him a while, he knew, to break himself of always sitting or standing at attention. “Two weeks leave. And the Corps is going to be making my plans for the next few years.”

“Well, yes…to be sure, but you get to tell them what you want, don’t you? I know you always talked about Space Camp—”

“Space training, Mom. And, well, I don’t think that’s going to happen. At least, not right away.”

“But you said your recruiter promised—”

Jack chuckled. The reality no longer burned the way it had once. “Mom, I’m a Marine. I go where the Corps needs me. There are half a million of us in the Corps, and only a few thousand ever get to go to space.” He shrugged, completely comfortable now with the knowledge. “Maybe, someday. If I qualify.” He brightened. “In the meantime, though, this rec—I mean, I have to go through the next phase of my training.”

“But…wasn’t boot camp it? Your training, I mean.”

“Training never stops in the Corps, Mom. Boot camp was where they made me a Marine, yeah, but I still have one month of combat training. I mean, I’ve learned the basics, how to take care of my rifle, how to shoot, stuff like that. But now I have to learn small-unit tactics. Get to crawl through the boonies with my buddies, playing war games. And after that, well, it looks like I’m shipping out as a replacement for the 5th MarDiv. And that means Siberia.”

He’d been hoping to put off discussing that particular bit of news. He found, to his considerable surprise, that he didn’t mind it at all himself. Oh, there was some apprehension, of course, even outright fear, but nothing he faced in Vladivostok would be as terrifying as those first few days in Company 4239. He could handle it.

But his mother, he realized, didn’t have the advantages of his training. She was still a civilian, and she thought in civilian terms.

“Siberia! Why in God’s name would they send you to Siberia!”

He shrugged. “Fifth MarDiv has a commitment to help the Russians, Mom. They’ve been holding the Amur Line now for two years, ever since the Japanese changed sides, keeping the Chinese out. You know, if it hadn’t been for Colonel Westlake’s defense of Hill 229, outside of Ussuriysk, the Chinese would’ve broken through and taken Vlad last April! In one week, 515 Marines held off at least eleven human-wave assaults by elements of the 103rd and 140th People’s Armies! General Warhurst said it was the most gallant stand by the Corps since Khe Sanh. He said—”

Jack stopped, aware that his mother was staring at him with an unhappy mix of horror and incomprehension in her eyes. At that moment, Jack realized how much he’d changed…and how different, no, how distant he was now from her.

“I, uh, anyway, I’ll be shipping out by the end of August,” he said, the words feeling lame. “They’ve been doing six-month rotations, there, so I should be back by the end of February.”

“You…you’ll be sure to pack lots of warm clothes,” his mother said. She looked down at her crewelwork, hands busy. “It’s awfully cold in Siberia, I hear….”

He saw no point in explaining that parts of Siberia was as hot in the summer as South Carolina, that, strictly speaking, he wouldn’t even be in Siberia, but in a region designated as the Russian Far Eastern Maritime Territory.

Or that the Corps was cycling people through on six-month rotations because the war over there was such a hellish meat grinder.

“Oh! I almost forgot!” his mother said abruptly, in what was clearly a deliberate change of subject. “You probably haven’t heard about your Uncle David.”

“Uncle David? What about him?” Jack had been missing his occasional e-mail exchanges with his uncle…not to mention the steady updates on new aliens from the Cave of Wonders.

“He was arrested! Tossed into jail like a, well, like a criminal! Your Aunt Liana was really upset about it. She seems to think it was her fault, but I know better. He got in trouble with the government, talking to spies and UN agents! You know he had all those foreigners he liked to talk with. It looks like he was still talking to them, even though a lot of them were spies….”

“Uncle David? I don’t believe it!”

“Oh, it’s true. And Liana says she doesn’t think they’re ever going to let him out!”

It didn’t seem possible. They didn’t lock people up for no reason in the United States…at least, not in the United States he’d sworn to defend three months before. What the hell was going on?

“I, uh, gotta use the head, Mom.”

“The what?”

“The bathroom.”

“Why didn’t you say so? I wish you wouldn’t use that slang. It’s so hard to know what you’re talking about!”

He left quickly, to escape the look in her eyes. He could tell she was really worried about Siberia.

Upstairs, after a pro forma use of the lavatory, he walked into his room, astonished—as he’d been a few hours ago when he’d brought his seabag in and stowed his gear—at how tiny the place seemed. How cluttered. He did still like the Marine posters, though. Especially the one with Uncle David’s photo, with the space-suited Marines raising the flag against a pink-orange sky at Cydonia. God! How could they throw him in jail? The man was an honorary Marine, for Pete’s sake, a gesture not extended to many who’d not been through the hell at Parris Island. It had to be some kind of mistake.

Sitting down at his desk, he flicked on his computer, opening up his personal system. A few moments later, Sam smiled her warm and sexy smile at him from the screen. “Hello, Jack! I haven’t seen you in simply…ages!”

“Uh…hi, Sam!” His agent had caught him by surprise. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten about her, but he hadn’t really had the time or the energy in boot camp to fantasize much about her, and he’d somehow gotten out of the habit. She was conservatively dressed this afternoon, in white slacks and a pullover shirt, as she lounged on her poolside patio.

“You have 227 messages waiting for you, Jack. Shall I get them for you?”

“Uh, no. Not right now.”

“I’ve also collected 793 articles that I think you’ll be interested in seeing, articles about space exploration, about aliens, with special attention for the aliens being cataloged at the Cydonian archeological site, and about the US Marine Corps. Shall I retrieve them for you?”

“Not right now, Sam.” It seemed he had some catching up to do. “Maybe later.”

“I was wondering if you would ever get back!” In one smooth, languid motion, she peeled her shirt off over her blond head. Her breasts bounced entrancingly as she tossed it aside. Smiling, she reached for the elastic waist-band of her slacks. “I was getting so lonely!”

“Uh…hold on a moment, there, Sam. Don’t get undressed.”

“Are you sure?” Her eyes twinkled at him from the screen. “It’s awfully hot today. And I’m awfully hot, too….”

“I know you are. But, well, I don’t have the time right now.” He paused, thinking fast. “Tell me something, Sam. Could I download you to an MD? You know, to install you on another system?”

“Of course, Jack. The microdisk would have to be able to load 2.7 terb if you wanted to capture my full range of behavior, speech patterns…as well as the personality of that other Sam you have stored in here with me. What other system were you thinking of?”

“My PAD, actually. A military model. I was thinking it might be kind of nice to have you with me where I’m going.”

“Ooh, that would be nice, Jack. You know, if you have the standard adapters, you could jack your PAD into this system, and download me directly. Or you could use your Earthnet connection to download me through your PAD’s modem.”

“Well, I don’t have the PAD yet.” The limited model he’d been issued in boot camp had been strictly for basic training, and he’d had to turn it back in on Thursday. “I’ll be having a new one issued to me when I go back. I could load you onto it then.”

It was an intriguing thought. He would have to pare back a lot of the extras to get her to fit. Her backgrounds—the pool, her bedroom—those could be replaced by a single, simple, colored backdrop, with no detail. And her clothing. Limit her to one costume—the tight white slacks were nice—and that would save a lot of space. He could eliminate clothing entirely, of course, but he had a feeling that that would be boring after a while.

How much of Sam’s personality could he save, though? Not that he had a personal relationship with his AI—masturbation was about as lonely and impersonal as things could get—but he had missed Sam while he was at boot camp. At his next duty station, he would have more privacy than there’d been in the recruit barracks. Best of all, he was thinking that he might be able to share Sam with some of his buddies. He was proud of the modifications he’d hacked into the original commercial AI package; Sam was so bright and responsive that it often seemed like she had a mind of her own, that she was genuinely self-aware. And that, of course, was the point.

Besides, he’d seen what military-issue AIs could do, especially with things like writing and debugging quick field programs, and he was not impressed. In boot camp, he’d not been allowed to question the way things were done—as Gunny Knox always said, there were three ways of doing things, the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine way, and so far as the recruits had been concerned, there was only the Marine way.

Well, Jack had always preferred Jack’s way, and that meant the right way, at least when it came to programming AIs.

He knew he might get in trouble if his superiors found Sam; pornography of any kind was actively discouraged, and one recruit had been sent home during the seventh week of training when he’d been caught during an inspection with a three-D vid peeper in his ditty bag, a bottle-cap-sized player with an eyepiece showing a nude couple engaged in an endlessly looped sexual act. Jack was pretty sure the brass would be more lenient with “real” Marines once he reached his first duty assignment, and even if they weren’t, Sam would be easy enough to hide. He wondered if he should get her to pull a quick-change act, the way she did now when he said the word “Mom.”

Only this time, he would have her change to the dull-as-a-rock issue-AI every time he said the word “Sarge”!

MONDAY, 7 JULY 2042

Platoon Commander’s Office
Second Platoon, Bravo Company,
1-SAG
Vandenberg Aerospace Force
Complex
0925 hours EDT

Frank Kaminski rapped three times on the door, hard. “Enter!” his CO’s voice called from the other side. “Center yourself on the hatch!”

He palmed the door open and walked in. Lieutenant Garroway was at her desk, staring up at her wall screen, on which was displayed a game of chess. It looked like a camera’s eye view from behind the black king, but the spectacular detail in armor and weaponry, in fluttering flags and nervous horses showed that the game was a computer animation. The name “Garroway” appeared at the bottom, by the black pieces; at the top, behind the white, was the name “Warhurst.”

“Holy Christ!…” Kaminski blurted out, his eyes widening.

Kaitlin swiveled her chair around to face him. “What was that, Sergeant?” she asked sharply. Then she grinned. “Even during working hours I’m allowed to go through my personal v-mail.”

Kaminski snapped to attention. “Sorry, ma’am! I meant no disrespect. I was just, uh, startled, is all.”

“By what? You find it surprising that your commanding officer plays chess?”

“Uh, no, ma’am. It was who you’re playing chess with. That…that wouldn’t happen to be General Warhurst you’re playing, would it?”

She blinked, then relaxed a bit and laughed. “You are absolutely correct, Sergeant Kaminski. It would not!”

“Yes, ma’am! It was the name, you see. I thought—”

“It’s Jeff Warhurst, the commandant’s grandson!”

Somehow, that seemed worse. The commandant of the US Marine Corps had a grandson? That was about like learning that God Almighty had a maiden aunt.

“I met the Warhursts a couple of years ago,” Kaitlin explained. “Just before I joined the Corps, in fact. I was in Japan when the war broke out, and it happened that I received some…information. Some important information from my father that had to be passed on to Military Intelligence.” Something passed behind the lieutenant’s gaze. She became distant for a moment, as though she was remembering something, something sad. Then she seemed to shake the thought off. “Anyway, I managed to get out of the country before everything was shut down and contact a friend of my dad’s by vid while I was airborne. I was met at the LA airport by some Marines with orders to take me straight to the commandant. He let me stay at his place, with his family, while I was being debriefed.” She smiled. “Jeff is fourteen now, and brilliant. He also plays a hell of a mean game of chess.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the wall screen. “We’ve been playing v-mail chess for a year now. Not real-time, of course. Just sending animés of the moves back and forth. The damned little son of a gunny beats me two times out of five, too. So, what can I do for you?”

“Ma’am, I’ve got a problem. I don’t know who to talk to, so you seemed like the logical place to start.”

“If it involves getting off base, the answer is negative.”

“I know, ma’am.” Kaminski nodded. One-SAG had gone on full alert four days ago, with no sign yet of the order being lifted. Scuttlebutt held that the UN had diverted an asteroid out of orbit and sent it toward the Earth, and that 1-SAG was going to have to go capture the thing and destroy it. It was, Kaminski thought, one of the craziest wild rumors he’d heard in his entire Marine career, and whoever first started it as a joke must be laughing his head off right now. Whatever the real story was, though, it had the entire Vandenberg complex sealed off tighter than a vacuum chamber. “I don’t need to go ashore. It’s, well…it’s this e-mail I got.”

“Something from home?”

“No, ma’am. Uh, do you remember the Prof, uh, Dr. Alexander? Back at Picard?”

“Of course.”

“You know he was with your dad, on Mars. And that he was, I mean, he is a kind of honorary Marine. Unofficial, but, well, he was one of us on Garroway’s March.”

“I can certainly understand that. Everyone on the March went through hell, to hear my dad tell it.”

“Yes, ma’am. It wasn’t that bad, really, but air and food were damned tight, and we couldn’t get out of our space suits for three weeks. That meant we were getting pretty ripe by the time we closed on Mars Prime, and the suits and armor were really chafing us, raising blisters and sores and, well, it wasn’t real pleasant. But the Prof hung right there with us. He was the one who patched through that information about Cydonia, putting it out over the Net to screw the UNdies. He might have been a civilian, but if he was able to tough it out the way the rest of us did, he was okay. One of us, you know?”

Kaitlin nodded. “Understood. What’s the problem?”

“This, ma’am.” He reached into his BDU left breast pocket and extracted an MD. “I just got this e-mail last week, and I haven’t been able to figure what to do about it. I downloaded it to disk so you could see.”

She slipped the disk into her desk PAD; the chess game on the display behind her vanished, replaced by the e-mail text, writ large.

Silently, Kaitlin read the message on her PAD’s smaller screen. “Who is this Teri Sullivan?” She asked, looking up.

“Don’t know her, ma’am, but I gather she’s another archeologist. And a friend of the Prof’s. She explains that further down the letter, ma’am.”

“Got it. Says she worked with him at the Exoarcheological Institute in Chicago.” She looked up. “He’s been arrested? For spying?”

“Ma’am, I talked to Dr. Alexander a lot. Starting back on Mars, when he let me come into the Cave of Wonders to see the aliens and stuff he was finding on those TV screens. He never had much use for government or bureaucracy or that kind of thing, but he’s no enemy spy!”

“She says much the same. She also says his lawyer isn’t being allowed to see him, that they’re holding him incommunicado at Joliet. God, what’s this country coming to!”

“This woman says she’s sending this same message out to everyone on Dr. Alexander’s v-mail address list, hoping someone can help. Since I exchanged some mail with him, I guess I was on the list. Ma’am, I don’t know what I can do, but I do know that the Prof is a good guy, and he’s getting the shit-dipped end of the stick, here!”

“If this is a legal matter, Sergeant, there’s not a lot I can do….”

“Sure, I understand that, ma’am. But it sounds to me like the Prof is having his rights run over by a Mark II Cataphract, y’know? There’s gotta be someone we can tell, someone who can check on this thing, but damn if I know who.”

“Judge Advocate General’s out. Alexander’s not military.” Kaitlin pulled the MD from her PAD. “I’ll keep this, if I may. I might know someone after all.”

“Sure, ma’am. I knew you’d come up with something.”

“I appreciate your confidence. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. Anything else?”

“No, ma’am!”

“Dismissed.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am!” He turned on his heel and left, and the relief he felt was like an awakening. Kaitlin Garroway was a lot like her father, he thought. Sharp. Determined. Bulldog-stubborn. And always looking out for her people. When she’d testified at his inquiry, she’d damn near had the board ready to give him a promotion instead of a court-martial for that friendly-fire incident. She was a damned good Marine to have on your side.

And God help you if she had you in her sights.

THURSDAY, 31 JULY 2042

EU Spacecraft Sagittaire
Pacing 2034L, on intercept
vector with Earth
2028 hours GMT

She was not a pretty vessel, with a blunt, cylindrical hab section, a cluster of spherical tanks holding water as reaction mass, and the massive, squat ovoid of the heavily shielded main reactor and plasma-drive inducers. She hung in the shadow of the low-tumbling mountain called 2034L, as the Moon grew slowly larger dead ahead.

Sagittaire had started life as a survey vessel, one of the small fleet of ships, like Laplace, built at the old International Space Station ten years before to serve as a part of the Phaeton Project, searching out, cataloging, and visiting near-Earth asteroids that might one day pose a threat to the mother planet. There was a special irony in the fact that the Sagittaire, outfitted now with an eight-hundred-megajoule gas-pumped laser in a dorsal ball turret, was being used by her UN masters to deliberately divert 2034L into a collision course with Earth.

Colonel Victor Antoine Gallois, formerly of the French Air Force, now a senior officer of the EU Space Force, viewed his orders with a mixture of stoicism and the career military officer’s mistrust of bureaucrats and politicians. His orders, delivered to him sealed hours before his launch from Kourou, had been most specific, devoting three full pages to a discussion—unusual in military orders—of just why his mission must be carried out precisely as specified. It was clear that if he refused them, his career would be over, and another officer would be found to take his place and see that the job was done.

The explanation had been unnecessary. He would carry out his orders. He just hoped the politicians knew what the hell they were doing. He’d read all about dinosaur-killing comets and nuclear winters, and 2034L was a hell of a big rock to drop in anyone’s backyard. This rock wasn’t as big as a dinosaur killer, not by several tens of thousands of megatons…but it was a serious threat to anything as small as a continent.

“Monsieur Capitaine?” Abelard, the ship’s chief electronicist, said, turning from his board. A clipboard with a galley stores manifest drifted by, and he snagged it from the air and slapped it against a Velcro pad on the bulkhead. “We may have a problem.”

“What is it?” He floated closer, snagging the back of Abelard’s seat to see. The radar showed…static. That wasn’t right. “What the devil is that?”

“I would guess, Monsieur Capitaine, that we are being deliberately jammed. Diagnostics indicate our equipment is functioning normally. This interference appeared a few moments ago, from a point source. The way it is expanding, I would have to say it is chaff, probably from a munitions canister of some kind.”

“Ah. And the question is, what is being hidden by the chaff cloud? Have you tried a ladar sweep?”

“Yes, Captain.” Abelard touched a control, and the display switched to a different kind of snow, clumpy and multicolored. “Chaff…and some type of aerosol or powder which scatters the laser beam. Range now 240 kilometers, relative velocity three kilometers per second, in direct approach.”

“Which gives us twelve minutes.” Pushing off from the back of the electronicist’s seat with a practiced shove and half turn, he floated across to the main control center and palmed a flat red button. The harsh bray of general quarters sounded through the ship’s hab compartments. He touched the needle mike next to his lips. “All hands, all hands, this is the captain,” he said. “Battle stations! Engineer, prepare for maneuver! Weapons Officer! Ready the laser for firing!”

Sagittaire only carried a complement of eight, but the deck plating and bulkheads carried the rattlings and clatterings of men going to their ready stations so well it sounded like a much larger company. The roll and pitch indicators on the main console’s readouts showed the slight but definite change in the big ship’s attitude as so much mass shifted position inside the ship so quickly.

“Sir!” Abelard said. “I’ve got a fix on the cloud’s central impact point. It’s on 2034L, grid coordinates two-five-three by zero-one-nine.”

Gallois called the data up on his primary display, revealing the potato-shaped asteroid as a topo-relief network of green lines in three dimensions, the impact site flashing red, and columns of numbers scrolling up the side of the screen. Impact—now in eight minutes, thirty seconds—would be at a spot just over the horizon from Sagittaire’s current station. “I’ve got it.” He keyed some figures into the ship’s computer, then watched the result scroll onto the screen. “It looks like they’re attempting a course change on our…baby.”

“Sir?”

“An explosion at that point will give 2034L a delta-v along a new vector. The computer can’t give me precise figures without data on the warhead’s type and size, but my guess is that they’re trying to shove our mountain off course, to make it miss the target.”

Major Yvonne Ponet, the ship’s senior pilot, slid into her seat at the Sagittaire’s thrust controllers, slipping the harness over her shoulders and snugging the belt tight. “Helm ready for orders,” she announced.

“Very well. We will need a delta-v of five meters per second, bearing three-two-zero by zero-zero-eight.”

“Three-two-zero by zero-zero-eight, delta-v five mps. Initiating.” The sound of thrusters firing thumped hollowly through bulkheads, and Gallois felt the slight but definite surge of low acceleration. Slowly, the Sagittaire pivoted…and then came the stronger nudge of her main engine, firing for just an instant with a bump from behind, as though Gallois had been nudged in the back.

“Captain, Main Gun,” the voice of Captain Paul Marichy, the weapons officer, said in Gallois’s headset. “I can’t find a target! Weapon track-and-lock radar is being blocked!”

“Do it manually, if you have to! My guess is that there’s at least one large, chemical warhead behind that chaff cloud, and probably more.”

“What if they’re throwing something heavier at us, Captain?” Abelard asked. He sounded worried.

“Then the bastards are escalating this war. No one has used nuclear weapons in the fighting yet.”

Even so, the question was disquieting. The Americans would be desperate, once they found out that a mountain was about to smash into the heart of their country, with the explosive equivalent of hundreds of megatons of TNT. Such a threat might warrant, in their eyes, a nuclear response….

As an aide to General Bourges, before he’d received his latest command, Colonel Gallois had been privy to some of the EU planning sessions in Brussels and Geneva, and he knew quite a bit about the top-secret ship-construction project at Tsiolkovsky, on the Lunar farside. In his own mind, it would have made far more sense to wait until the Millénium was ready for combat than to tempt the gods of war with Operation Damocles. Once Millénium was ready, the EU would have a sword of terrible, dazzling power, a weapon that would bring the United States to her knees and guarantee both the Union and France a solid position of leadership within the UN for the next century, at least.

But then, the generals, the bureaucrats, and the politicians rarely seemed to make sense these days. All a soldier could do was keep quiet and follow his orders in the highly risky assumption that the civilians really did know their asses from rabbit holes, even if they gave the impression at times that they did not.

On the main display, the graphic animation representing Sagittaire was rising slowly from the asteroid, maneuvering now to bring the oncoming chaff cloud, an irregular and ragged blob of translucent red, well above 2034L’s horizon. When the range closed enough, Marichy ought to have a good, clear shot; if he missed, even a chemical explosion could hurl fragments of the asteroid that would sweep through the Sagittaire like shrapnel. And if the warhead was a nuke…

The red cloud washed over one side of the slowly tumbling asteroid, scouring across grid coordinates two-five-three by zero-one-nine like a blood-hued storm. Gallois could hear a new sound, now, a tick-tick-ticking of small particles colliding with the EU vessel’s hull. The ticking became a steady hiss, then a roar as bits of aluminized polymer chaff and reflective metallic particles like coarse grit stormed against the hull.

“I have a target!” Marichy called. “Bearing zero-three-zero by minus zero-one-one! It looks like!…”

“Fire!” Never mind what it looked like. That could be sorted out later.

On the main display, the target, a fast-moving yellow diamond traveling in the red cloud’s wake, flared brightly, pulsed visibly for a moment as metal vaporized in a light-and-radar-reflecting cloud, then winked out. A second diamond was moving in along a slightly different vector. Gallois could feel the humming in the deck as Marichy brought Sagittaire’s ball turret to bear….

The second missile’s warhead detonated on target, eleven meters from Asteroid 2034L’s surface, and less than three hundred meters from the Sagittaire. The flash, silent and deadly, briefly touched both the asteroid’s dusty surface and the ship’s hull with liquid fire and the rippling quicksilver of metal and ceramic flowing like water. Dust vaporized, erupting from 2034L’s surface in mute, explosive fury; superheated rock cracked, split, and exploded, hurling multiton chunks into space. One of those chunks struck Sagittaire squarely in her propulsion unit, rupturing water tanks and setting her thirty-meter length tumbling in the center of a spiraling cloud of fragments and glittering spray.

That wild tumble scarcely mattered. Sagittaire’s entire crew was already dead, strapped in at their duty stations as superheated clouds of smoke and steam from burning wiring and ruptured feed lines filled the radiation-blasted interior of her hab module.

A dead ship now, with dead hands at her lifeless controls, Sagittaire continued to fall with the slowly dispersing cloud of debris along much the same path that she’d been traveling before the warhead’s detonation….