第111页
"Which direction?" Will asked. "North or south? East or west? Any matches of those permutations to the random signal sources?" He moved closer to Linda's station.
"There," she said. "Twenty-seven degrees north, one hundred eighteen east."
Fred told them, "Set course to those coordinates. Give us a nice and easy deorbital burn. We've got to—"
"Hang on," Linda said. "Picking up contacts. Wait… recalibrating." Her hand flicked over the control surfaces. "Multiple silhouettes in high orbit. The system missed them; it's not set up to detect something so small. Objects are three meters long. On the central viewer."
Fred moved to the holographic display.
Floating before him was a simple structure: Three cylindrical booms sat parallel to one another. From the end-on view they formed an equilateral triangle. In the center of this sat a sphere, a quarter meter in diameter. The booms were a brushed matte sliver metal. The resolution was just good enough to see a swirled pattern etched onto the alloy. The sphere glowed dull
red, as if it were heated from within. Nothing connected the sphere to the associated rods. There were no shimmering energy fields, either.
"A bomb?" Fred asked. "Dr. Halsey's new technology?"
"No radiologicals detected," Linda reported.
"Satellites?" Will offered.
"I'm reading two thousand four hundred twenty-three of these objects in orbit," Linda said. "That's overkill for a COM network. Wait, they're breaking orbit."
With a flick of her hand she shifted perspective in the central tank and Onyx drifted in the center. Bloodied Spirit was a glowing purple dash among the stars.
"Image enhancement online," she said.
A haze of red dots swarmed in the black of space and slowly drifted toward them.
"Shields!" Fred barked at Will.
"Responding. Full strength confirmed." Will rechecked the alien controls. "No error," he said. "They're up this time."
"If those aren't nukes," Fred told them, "there's no way something that small can penetrate Covenant shields."
Fred watched the holographic viewer as the hostiles approached. It was like watching a tide come in, and Fred remembered one of Deja's childhood lessons: jellyfish swarming the tide lines on an Australian beach. One sting from the tiny invertebrates caused tissue necrosis and paralysis. A hundred was overkill-lethal.
"Back us off. Will," he ordered.
"Something's happening," Linda said.
The image in the viewer zoomed in on a cluster of the spacecraft. Seven of them moved into a line.
The view pulled back and revealed other identical formations. Seven of these lines stacked into an elongated triangle, and the spheres within the forty-nine-craft pattern glowed red-hot.
"Hard to port!" Fred cried. "Emergency power to shields."
The deck tilted.
"Answering hard to port," Will cried.
A blast of golden light overwhelmed the image in the viewer.
The frame of Bloodied Spirit resounded like it had been struck with a hammer. The artificial gravity failed and Fred gripped the railing.