Right now there were fourteen adults and five children crammed inside. There hadn’t been time for them to reach another lifeboat. With a hubris which hindsight revealed to be quite monstrous, the disasters which the designers anticipated had all been natural. Even a meteorite strike would leave most of the wheel intact, and evacuation would be a calm rational process.

What had never been even a theoretical contingency was insane Adamist starships slicing the station apart with lasers.

It had all happened so fast. Now little Gatje and Haykal hugged Tiya, their mother, faces distraught as she kept them anchored. The air was too hot, it stank of vomit. Aethra couldn’t hide its torment over the kinetic missile attack that bit deep into its shell from the young impressionable minds. Candre’s death convulsions as she went through explosive decompression was still causing wintry shivers along Gaura’s spine. The combined psychological stresses of the last fifteen minutes was going to leave a trauma scar that would take a long time to heal even for the well-balanced psyche of an Edenist.

And it was all his fault. As station chief he should have taken precautions. He had known about the civil strife on Lalonde. Yet he had done nothing.

It is not your fault,aethra said softly into his mind. Who could have anticipated this?

I should have.

From the information you had, this was not predictable.

I had enough data from Ilex. It was chaos on the planet when they left.

These starships did not come from Lalonde. They are mercenaries, recruited elsewhere.

I could still have done something. Put people into apartments closer to the lifeboats. Something! How are Candre and the others?

I have them. But now is not a good time to begin raising my consciousness to multiplicity status.

No. And you? How are you?

I was angry, frightened. Now I feel sorrow. It is a sad universe where such wanton acts can take place.

I’m sorry we brought you into existence. You have done nothing to deserve this.

I am glad I live. And I may yet continue to live. None of the craters is more than twenty metres deep. I have lost a lot of nutrient fluid though, and my mineral-digestion organs have been damaged from the shockwaves.

Gaura’s hand squeezed the grab hoop he was holding. Fury and helplessness were alien to him, but he felt them now with a daunting strength. The physical damage can be repaired. It will be repaired, never doubt that. Not as long as one Edenist remains alive.

Thank you, Gaura. You are a fine supervisor. I am privileged to have you and your staff attend the dawn of my intellect. And one day Gatje and Haykal shall run around in my park. I will enjoy their laughter.

A solid beam of intolerable white light stabbed into the lifeboat through its one small, heavily shielded port. Space was being devastated by another hail of fusion explosions. The children started crying again.

Through Aethra’s much-degraded perception he saw the long white fusion exhaust of the third Adamist starship decelerating towards them. With its tremendous velocity it had to be a warship, but there had been no contact apart from the curt woman telling them to switch off the beacon. Who were they? Who were the other two? Why had they attacked Aethra?

Not knowing was difficult for an Edenist.

You will soon be safe,aethra said. it widened its broadcast to include the Edenists on both lifeboats. All of you will be safe.

Gaura met his wife’s frightened stubborn eyes. I love you,he said for her alone.

The blast light was fading. He looked out of the port, his mind welcoming inquisitive contacts, showing the children their solidly real rescuer approaching.

Whoever the pilot was, he was coming very close. And moving far too fast.

Space directly outside the lifeboat was filled with the brilliant fusion exhaust. Gaura flinched, jerking back from the port. It’s going to hit!

There were screams behind him. Then the exhaust vanished, and a huge spherical starship was a hundred metres away, small sensor clusters sticking out of its dark silicon hull like metallized insect antenna. Its equatorial ion thrusters exhaled fountains of sparkling blue ions, halting its minute drift.

Bloody hell!it was a collective sentiment from the adults.

The starship rolled towards the lifeboat as though there was a solid surface below it. And its extended airlock tube was suddenly coming round to clang against the hatch.

Gaura took a moment to recover his poise. A voidhawk would be very hard put to match that display of precision manoeuvring.

The lifeboat’s bitek processors reported the short-range inter-ship channel was picking up a transmission.

“You people in the lifeboat, as soon as the hatch opens we want you through the tube and into the lounge,” commanded the female voice they’d heard earlier. “Make it fast! We’re running out of combat wasps and we’ve got to pick your friends up as well.”

The hatch seal popped and it swung back. Little Gatje squealed in alarm as one of the biggest cosmoniks Gaura had ever seen floated in the airlock tube.

It’s all right,he told his dismayed daughter. He’s a . . . friend. Really.

Gatje clutched at the fabric of her mother’s suit. Promise, Daddy?

“Shift your bastard arses through here now!” Warlow bellowed.

The children gulped into fearful silence.

Gaura couldn’t help it, after all the horror they’d been through to be greeted by such utter normality, he started to laugh. I promise.

“Oh, Jesus, they’ve cracked it,” Joshua told the three crew-members left on the bridge when Lady Mac rendezvoused with the second lifeboat. Another combat wasp was curving round over Aethra’s bulk, accelerating sharply. “I knew they’d work out the numbers game eventually.” He fired a salvo of three drones in defence. It was a terrible ratio. One which the Lady Mac could only ever lose. Three defenders was an absolute minimum to guarantee an attacker didn’t get through. If he could just have flown evasive manoeuvres, or attacked, or been able to run, the numbers would have shifted back towards something near favourable.

“Jesus!” The fourth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. He had to launch another three from Lady Mac ’s diminishing reserves.

“Fifteen left,” Sarha said with morbid cheerfulness. The starship’s maser cannons fired at a kinetic missile that was sixty kilometres away. Five nuclear-tipped submunitions exploded perilously close to Aethra, reducing the latest attacking combat wasp to its subatomic constituents.

“Did you have to tell us that?” Melvyn said laboriously.

“You mean you didn’t know?”

“Yes. But I could always hope I was wrong.”

Joshua accessed a camera on the airlock deck. Warlow had anchored himself to a stikpad beside the airlock tube. He was grabbing people as they came out and slinging them into the chamber. Ashly and one of the Edenist men were on a stikpad below the ceiling hatch, catching then shoving the human projectiles up into the lounge above.

“How many more to come, Warlow?” Joshua datavised.

“Six. That makes forty-one in total.”

“Wonderful. Stand by for combat acceleration the second the airlock seals.” He sounded the audio warning so the Edenists would know. The flight computer showed his plot of an open-ended vector heading away from Murora. At eight gees they could outrun the other starships easily, and jump outsystem. That kind of prolonged acceleration would be tough on the Edenists (no sinecure for the crew, either), but it was one hell of a lot better than staying here.

“Joshua, Gaura has asked me to say some of the children are very young, they can’t possibly survive high gees,” Warlow datavised. “Their bones aren’t strong enough.”