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"You must surrender," the speakers squalled again. "You cannot flee. You have no speed. You cannot
fight. Your weapons are puny. When your shields are broken, you will be helpless. Your secrets
will be lost. Only surrender can save your lives."
She keyed her mike again. "No. You're making a mistake. We're no threat to you. Who are you? What
do you want?"
"Death," the speakers replied. "Death for all life. Death for all worlds. You must surrender."
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Gracias closed his eyes. Without looking at what he was doing, he moved his hands on his board,
got visual back up on the main screen. The screen showed the alien ship sailing like a skyborne
fort an exact distance from Aster's Hope. It held its position so precisely that it looked
motionless. It seemed so close Temple thought she could have hit it with a rock.
"Maybe," he sighed, "don't know we're the only ones awake."
She didn't understand what he was thinking; but she caught at it as if it were a lifeline. "What
do you mean?"
He didn't open his eyes. "Cryogenically frozen," he said. "Vital signs so low the monitors can
hardly read them. Capsules are just equipment. And the comp's encrypted. Maybe that scanner probe
thinks we're the only life-forms here."
She caught her breath. "If that's true " Ideas reeled through her head. "They probably want us to
surrender because they can't figure out our shields. And because they want to know what we're
doing, just the two of us in this big ship. It might be suicide for them to go on to Aster without
knowing the answers to questions like that. And while they're trying to find out how to break down
our shields, they'll probably stay right there.
"Gracias," her heart pounding with unreasonable hope, "how long would it take you to repro the
comp to project a c-vector field at that ship? We're stationary in relation to each other. We can
use our field generator as a weapon."
That got his eyes open. When he rolled his head to the side to face her, he looked sick. "How long
will it take you," he asked, "to rebuild the generator for that kind of projection? And what will
we use for shields while you're working?"
He was right: she knew it as soon as he said it. But there had to be something they could do, had
to be. They couldn't just sail across the galactic void for the next few thousand years while
their homeworld was destroyed behind them.
There had to be something they could do.
The speakers started trumpeting again. "Badlife, you have been warned. The destruction of your
ship will now begin. You must surrender to save your lives."
Badlife, she wondered crazily to herself. What does that mean, badlife? Is that ship some kind of
automatic weapon gone berserk, shooting around the Galaxy exterminating what it calls badlife?
How is it going to destroy Aster's Hope?
She didn't have to wait long to find out. lmost immediately, she felt a heavy metallic thank
vibrate through the seals that held her seat to the floor. A fraction of an instant later, a small
flash of light from somewhere amidships on the attacking vessel showed that a projectile weapon
had been fired.
Then alarms began to howl, and the damage readouts on Temple's board began to spit intimations of
disaster.
Training took over through her panic. Her hands danced on the console, gleaning data. "We've been
hit." Through the shield, "Some kind of projectile." Through the c-vector shield, "It's breached
the hull." All three layers of the ship's metal skin. "I don't know what it was, but it's punched
a hole all the way to the outer-shell wall."
Gracias interrupted her: "How big's the hole?"
"About a meter square." She went back to the discipline of her report. "The comp is closing
pressure doors, isolating the breach. Damage is minor we've lost one heat-exchanger for the
climate control. But if they do that again, they might hit something more vital." Trusting the c-
vector shields, Aster's Hope's builders hadn't tried to make her particularly hard to damage in
other ways.
The alien ship did it again. Another tearing thud as the projectile hit. Another small flash of
light from the attacker. More alarms. Temple's board began to look like it was monitoring a
madhouse.
"The same place," she said, fighting a rising desire to scream. "It's pierced outer-shell.
Atmosphere loss is trivial. The comp is closing more pressure doors." She tapped commands into the
console. "Extrapolating the path of those shots, I'm closing all the doors along the way." Then
she called up a damage estimate on the destructive force of the projectiles. "Two more like that
will breach one of the mid-shell cryogenic chambers. We're going to start losing people."
And if the projectiles went on pounding the same place, deeper and deeper into the ship, they
would eventually reach the c-vector generator.
It was true: Aster's Hope was going to be destroyed.
"Gracias, what is it? This is supposed to be impossible. How are they doing it to us?"
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