quickly.
Instructed action may cause damage to Centrocor property. Advise?
âI advise you to shut up and do what I say,â Valk told the freighter. That wasnât what it was looking for, though. He looked down, saw a green virtual key hovering in front of him, and stabbed at it.
Out in the middle of the ring, the freight hauler triggered the explosive bolts on all of its port side cargo containers at once. The long boxes went tumbling away with aching slowness, blue and yellow and red oblongs dancing outward on their own trajectories. Some smashed into passing drones, creating whole new clouds of debris. Some bounced off the arms of the Hexus, obliterating against its concrete, the goods inside thrown free in multicolored sprays.
On Valkâs screens a visual display popped up showing him the chaos. The yacht was a tiny dark needle lost in the welter of colorful boxes and smashed goods, moving so fast Valk could barely track it. But this was going to work, a gap was opening where the yacht could pass through safely, this was going toâ
There was no sound but Valk could almost feel the crunch as one of the cargo containers just clipped one of the yachtâs airfoils. The cargo container tore open, its steel skin splitting like it was a piece of overripe fruit. Barrels spilled out in a broad cloud of wild trajectories. The yacht was thrown into a violent spin as it shot through the Hexus and out the other side.
A split second later the FA.2 jinked around a flying barrel and burned hard to follow the yacht on its new course, straight down toward Geryon.
Chapter Two
L anoe had to lean over hard into a tight bank to avoid the swirl of cargo in the Hexus but he almost laughed as he worked his controls, throwing his stick to the left and then the right. Whoever was running traffic control back there was a genius.
He sobered up again almost instantly when he saw where he was headed next. Thom had been thrown for a loop by a grazing collision and now he was falling out of the sky. Up ahead lay the broad disk of Geryon, a boiling hell cauldron of a planet. Out of control and spinning, Thom couldnât fight the pull of its gravity. He was going to fall right into that mess.
Geryon was a gas giant, a world with no surface, just a near-endless atmosphere. From a distance it looked like it was tearing itself apart from the inside out. It was banded with dark storms, nearly black, that hid an inner layer of incandescent neon. The buzzing red light streaked outward through every crack and gap in the cloud layer, rays of baleful effulgence spearing outward at the void.
Lanoe barely had time to get a look at the planet before the yacht pitched nose first into its atmosphere. He burned after it, down into the topmost clouds. He tried to paint the kid again with the communications laser, not expecting a result. He didnât get one.
As he tore through the dark haze of the clouds he lost track of Thom altogether. Then suddenly the fighter burst through the bottom of a wisp of cirrus and Lanoe wasnât in space anymore.
On every side, tortured clouds piled up around him in enormous thunderheads, whole towers and fortresses of cloud with ramparts and battlements that melted away into mist every time he tried to make out details. Rivers of dark blue methane coiled and bent around waves of atmospheric pressure.
The sheer scale of it was lost on him until he saw the yacht, a tiny dot well ahead of him. It shot through a streamer of mist that arched high overhead, but the streamer was just one tiny arm of a vast storm as big as an ocean on Earth. And that was just what Lanoe could see from inside the fighter, a tiny fragment of a colossal world of clouds.
The yacht was out of place in that vast cloudspace. A mote of dust on the storm. It was still tumbling, end over endâthe kid hadnât regained control. Tiny shards of debris were still pouring off its shattered airfoil, like thin smoke that traced out
Instructed action may cause damage to Centrocor property. Advise?
âI advise you to shut up and do what I say,â Valk told the freighter. That wasnât what it was looking for, though. He looked down, saw a green virtual key hovering in front of him, and stabbed at it.
Out in the middle of the ring, the freight hauler triggered the explosive bolts on all of its port side cargo containers at once. The long boxes went tumbling away with aching slowness, blue and yellow and red oblongs dancing outward on their own trajectories. Some smashed into passing drones, creating whole new clouds of debris. Some bounced off the arms of the Hexus, obliterating against its concrete, the goods inside thrown free in multicolored sprays.
On Valkâs screens a visual display popped up showing him the chaos. The yacht was a tiny dark needle lost in the welter of colorful boxes and smashed goods, moving so fast Valk could barely track it. But this was going to work, a gap was opening where the yacht could pass through safely, this was going toâ
There was no sound but Valk could almost feel the crunch as one of the cargo containers just clipped one of the yachtâs airfoils. The cargo container tore open, its steel skin splitting like it was a piece of overripe fruit. Barrels spilled out in a broad cloud of wild trajectories. The yacht was thrown into a violent spin as it shot through the Hexus and out the other side.
A split second later the FA.2 jinked around a flying barrel and burned hard to follow the yacht on its new course, straight down toward Geryon.
Chapter Two
L anoe had to lean over hard into a tight bank to avoid the swirl of cargo in the Hexus but he almost laughed as he worked his controls, throwing his stick to the left and then the right. Whoever was running traffic control back there was a genius.
He sobered up again almost instantly when he saw where he was headed next. Thom had been thrown for a loop by a grazing collision and now he was falling out of the sky. Up ahead lay the broad disk of Geryon, a boiling hell cauldron of a planet. Out of control and spinning, Thom couldnât fight the pull of its gravity. He was going to fall right into that mess.
Geryon was a gas giant, a world with no surface, just a near-endless atmosphere. From a distance it looked like it was tearing itself apart from the inside out. It was banded with dark storms, nearly black, that hid an inner layer of incandescent neon. The buzzing red light streaked outward through every crack and gap in the cloud layer, rays of baleful effulgence spearing outward at the void.
Lanoe barely had time to get a look at the planet before the yacht pitched nose first into its atmosphere. He burned after it, down into the topmost clouds. He tried to paint the kid again with the communications laser, not expecting a result. He didnât get one.
As he tore through the dark haze of the clouds he lost track of Thom altogether. Then suddenly the fighter burst through the bottom of a wisp of cirrus and Lanoe wasnât in space anymore.
On every side, tortured clouds piled up around him in enormous thunderheads, whole towers and fortresses of cloud with ramparts and battlements that melted away into mist every time he tried to make out details. Rivers of dark blue methane coiled and bent around waves of atmospheric pressure.
The sheer scale of it was lost on him until he saw the yacht, a tiny dot well ahead of him. It shot through a streamer of mist that arched high overhead, but the streamer was just one tiny arm of a vast storm as big as an ocean on Earth. And that was just what Lanoe could see from inside the fighter, a tiny fragment of a colossal world of clouds.
The yacht was out of place in that vast cloudspace. A mote of dust on the storm. It was still tumbling, end over endâthe kid hadnât regained control. Tiny shards of debris were still pouring off its shattered airfoil, like thin smoke that traced out
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