The Dragon Never Sleeps

— 39 —

The Outsider broke off the Web in the Closed System M. Meddinia. It boiled off its mask as it drove toward the system's archaic, ramshackle station. It should have shed its disguise before invading Canon space.

It had not finished when its gaseous surround was backlighted by the violence of XXVIII Fretensis breaking away.

The Guardship wasted no time asking questions. When the corona cleared, twelve riderships were running free and swarms of smaller craft were boiling off. XXVIII Fretensis seemed to be disintegrating.

A barrage preceded the riders. Boiling through space ahead of shells and missiles were a half dozen glimmering balls spit from Hellspinner pits. The best Twist Master ever had no hope of a hit at that range, though. The idea was to frighten the Outsider into raising its screen. Hellspinners terrified anyone who knew anything about them.

The Outsider stuck out its tongue. It did not raise screen. It took M. Meddinia 4A under fire.

The one Hellspinner that looked like the worst throw broke down and in and brushed the Outsider. Tonnes of matter erupted in a geyser of shattered nucleons.

The fastest attackers raced toward the hit, looking for a soft spot.

XXVIII Fretensis developed data on the Outsider's displacement. WarAvocat ordered a supplementary launch. A ship that large might carry secondaries of its own.

It did, but none were active. The Outsider had come expecting no resistance. In quickly, a message delivered, and out, silent and unseen....

The attackers closed in. The Outsider raised screen. Word went back: The screen was Guardship quality.

The Outsider could not have been in a poorer position. It could not deploy riders. A more powerful enemy lay between it and access to the Web. And it was deeper in the gravity well.

Attackers englobed the Outsider. They floated just meters off the screen. XXVIII Fretensis rotated to present its broadest face, closed to three hundred meters. At that range even the most inept Twist Master could not miss.

A hundred pulsating green eyes burned on the Guardship's face.

WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis ordered his Hellspinners loosed. Those balls of mad energy drifted onto the Outsider's screen like the slow fall of a fine oil mist onto the surface of a summer-warmed pond. Rainbow points spread and faded slowly. Fighters darted to the impact points like fish to motes of food. They pounded those spots, probing for an opening or weakness.

The screen withstood the salvo. But the Twist Masters had permission to loose at will. No screen could absorb Hellspinners long.

The Outsider finally grasped the gravity of its situation. It began to move.

Its assailants moved with it.

Here, there, soft spots in the screen yielded. A one-meter gap opened and persisted for seven seconds. An interceptor put one hundred rounds of 40mm contraterrene shot through the hole. The Outsider's skin blossomed, a garden of small fires.

Other gaps opened. Some attack craft chose marksmanship, gunning for specific installations. Others just blazed away. None tried running the gaps. A screen shielded both ways. A fighter inside would become the target of every Outsider weapon otherwise unable to fire.

The gaps grew larger and lasted longer. The Twist Masters began pairing, hoping to get a second Hellspinner through a gap cut by a first.

The Outsider dropped inside the orbit of the station.

The riders armed their axial cannon, which hurled 250kg projectiles at 8000 meters per second. The projectiles spun off slivers of contraterrene iron as they rattled through a target.

Orders went out to the attackers: penetrate the screen and silence the Outsider's drives.

WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis had guessed the reason for the Outsider's move planetward. It meant to eliminate evidence by throwing itself into atmosphere.

Cluster shells began getting through. So did Hellspinners and massed barrages from the secondaries. The Outsider was ablaze within the envelope of its shield, surrounded by a shrapnel metalstorm. The attack ships that went in had to use their own lesser screens till they reached firing position.

The Outsider offered only token counterfire. And that soon fell silent.

One salvo stilled the drives. But too late. The Outsider was in a groove that would take it into atmosphere in thirty-eight hours.

WarAvocat XXVIII Fretensis ordered the attackers to concentrate on shield generators. When permanent gaps appeared, he began recovering his secondaries.

XXVIII Fretensis began laying in all the fire it could, including 100cm axial clusters at 12,000mps capable of penetrating to the Outsider's Core—if it had one.

On the Outsider's far side, which had suffered little damage, attackers began opening a path for boarding parties already on the move.

The invaders found nothing alive. In the few hours they had they learned very little. They collected biological and technical samples and got out in time for XXVIII Fretensis to pound the hulk into fragments unlikely to be large enough to do damage when they reached the planet's surface.

As the Guardship turned toward the Web, M. Meddinia station broke communications silence with a laconic, "Thank you, Guardship."

The only Guardship casualties were two bruised and embarrassed pilots whose interceptors had collided during a race to be first through a gap in the Outsider's screen.