“Pulling back,” Salis said.
“Clar à test, you?”
“Moment,” Salis said, pushing off from the station. He floated out into the emptiness to where Roberts and Vandercaust waited, strapped into their own mechs. The mech’s attitude thruster brought him to a relative stop at their side and turned him back to look at their work. On the group channel, Roberts grunted.
“Víse ca bácter,” she said. It was true enough. With the guns strapped at the top and bottom of all three axes, the station did look a little like something seen through a microscope. A macrovirus, maybe. Or a minimalist streptococcus.
“In place,” Salis said. “Clar à test.”
“Three,” Jakulski said, “two, one.”
The rail gun beneath them shifted in its socket like something waking from sleep. For a moment, it seemed to drift like a reed caught in a current of aether. Then it snapped into place, jittering from one position to the next too quickly for Salis’ eyes to see the motion between, faster than the twitch of an insect’s leg. It cycled through, taking aim on each of the gates in its field of vision. With the layout they had, at least two of the guns would be able to sight every gate, and most gates fell in the arc of three. Salis had seen pictures of old fortifications overlooking the sea back on Earth. They’d never made sense to him before—too flat to apply to his own experience—but this was the same thing. The high guns that would protect Medina Station from invading ships forever. He
felt some emotion stirring in his chest, and it could have been pride or dread.
“Bien,” Jakulski said. He sounded almost surprised. Like he’d expected the gun to rip itself loose and spin out into the nothing sky. “Pull back for live fire.”
“Pulling back, us,” Vandercaust said. “Don’t put a round through us, sa sa?”
“I do, and you let me know, eh?” Jakulski laughed. Easy for him. Not like he was out here. And then, not like the guns couldn’t turn Medina to chaff too. Salis and the others pulled back fifty klicks, flipped, and decelerated for another fifty. The darkness was unnerving. Back on the other side of the gate, it was never this dark. There was always the sun and the stars.
“Stopped and stable,” Roberts said. “Hast du dui painted friendly?”
“Do. It shoots you, that’ll mean something’s wrong. Setting target,” Jakulski said, and Salis upped the magnification on his mech. There, in false-color readout, was the alien station. This far out, he could see three of the six guns. “Sensor arrays bist bien. Firing in three, two, one …”
A puff of vapor spat out the tip of the gun—charged gas making a brief extension to the barrel and putting a little more speed into the round. Salis’ mech shuddered, the magnetic spill from the rails affecting his systems even this far out. He didn’t see the rounds the rail gun fired. In the time it took for the harsh feedback tick to go from his radio to his ear, the tungsten slug was already through the target gate. Or out into the weird non-space between them. In the false-color display, a ripple passed through the alien station like what he’d see in a sphere of floating water when one part of it got touched. The ripple died out before it even circled the station once.
“La que vist?” Jakulski asked.
“Nothing,” Salis said. “It looks fine. Tu?”
“Station glow only thing,” Jakulski said. In all of their tests, the only reaction the station ever had to being pushed by the rail gun shots was a shower of photons.
“Nothing else?”
“Nope.”
“Drift?”
“No drift.”
It was what they wanted to see. The rail guns were big enough, powerful enough, that even keel-mounted on a ship, firing them would have been difficult. Mounted on turrets like they were, they should have been as much thruster as weapon, driving themselves away from whatever they were shooting at fast enough that they’d be hard to catch.
Except the station.
Whatever the aliens did to shrug off equal and opposite reactions, it only generated enough energy to throw a little light, and it didn’t seem to bring any kind of countermeasures against them. Still, Salis wasn’t exactly looking forward to heading back and checking the sockets and bases.
“You hear Casil talk?” Vandercaust said. “About why it don’t move when we push it?”
“No,” said Roberts.
“Said it does, but the ring space moves with it, so we can’t see it happening.”
“Casil’s crazy.”
“Sí ai.”
“Sending us back in?” Salis asked into his radio.