“Two hours, approx,” Clare said.

“Get me an image.” Redwing considered what they could do. SunSeeker had no substantial defenses against projectile or high-intensity laser weapons. He had learned a simple rule back in the brief, enormously destructive Asteroid War: that any mass hitting at three kilometers per second delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT. And SunSeeker was moving well above 100 km/sec now. Add to that any incoming kinetic energy of an attacker. Square it. Any interesting space drive was a weapon of mass destruction, even to itself.

That was why the ship had auto-laser batteries run by the Artilects, designed for interstellar travel. They could hammer a rock the size of your fist or smaller into ionized atoms in a microsecond. But above that mass level, not much. They might deflect it a bit, which could be useful. That’s all. Throw a living room couch at SunSeeker at these speeds and they would suffer a hull breach.

“They’re small, can maneuver faster than we can,” Clare said. “Accelerating at three gravs, too.”

“So maybe robotic,” Redwing said. This was not looking good. “How do they navigate in the jet? Can we tell?”

“Looks like magscoops, same as us. Smaller, of course.”

Clare brought up the same telescope Beth had used and sought out the small moving dots. “Less than a hundred meters across,” she said. “Cylindrical, with an ionized propulsion signature.”

Redwing said, “Maybe they didn’t take us seriously before. Slow reflexes.”

“No,” Karl said flatly. “We’re missing something here.”

The ship strummed with long rolling waves and sharp pops and snaps. No one spoke, and Redwing listened to his ship while all around him his crew worked to find out more about the roiling jet that streamed by, into the magscoop and their fusion chambers. The shipboard Artilects were working as well, but seldom spoke or called attention to themselves. They were built and trained for their talents to sustain, not for imagination and quick responses to the wholly new.

Into the long uncomfortable silence Beth said quietly, watching the screens, “That shock wave pushing out the jet in the Knothole—it’s hit the membrane. At high velocity.”

They all turned and saw it on max amplification. Beth had used the overlay yellow and orange to signify plasma and lag fields, and strands of these showed the jet striking the boundary of the Bowl biosphere. Filmy gases escaped into space, pearly strands they saw in the visible. Redwing knew what this meant. The plasma’s high-energy particles, encased in the sheath of magnetic fields, would deliver prickly energies. This would fry away the long-chain organic molecules that made the gossamer boundaries. Those separated the Bowl’s many compartments, holding the great vaults of air above the living zones. So it would all go to smash and scatteration in a blizzard of unleashed furies.

He tried to imagine what that meant to those living there. Then he made himself stop.

A booming roll came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.

“Plasma densities nearby are rising. Our exhaust is getting blocked again,” Beth said.

“This is how it started before,” Karl said. “To break down air, the voltage is—”

“Megavolts,” Clare snapped. “Got it. If that happens, stay flat. Stick your head up, it’ll draw current, fry you.”

“You think they—it—is trying to kill us?” Beth said. “This could be communication.”

“Strange way to do it,” Redwing said.

“Retaliation for thrashing the jet, I’d think,” Fred said. He had come onto the board so quietly no one noticed him.

“I’m getting rising inductive effects close to our skin,” Beth said. “Must be Alfvén waves rippling in on the scoop fields. Higher electric fields—”

Redwing felt his hair stand on end. He hit the deck.

Sparks snapped. Everyone flopped onto the deck and lay flat. A bright yellow-white line scratched across the air. More lines sputtered. They arched and twisted. Some split, and yellow green strands shaped a tight shape—

“Human form!” Fred said from the deck. “They’re making our image. They know what we are.”

The shape wobbled and throbbed in the fevered air. Carved in shifting, crackling yellow lines, it was like a bad cartoon. Stretched legs, arms flapping, wobbly head, hands first spread then balled into fists, the whole body flailing. Then it was gone in a sizzle and a flicker.

Beth said, “Can they see us?”

“Who’s ‘they’ anyway?” Clare said. Her face was flushed, lips compressed. “They’re trying to jam our fusion burn, get us to stop, I suppose. So they’re sending us an echo, an image of us to—make some kind of communication?”

The shape popped up again. Outlined in crackling yellow and orange, the figure wriggled and sputtered.

“Let me try…” Clare raised a hand slightly into the singed air. A long moment. Then slowly, twisting and shuddering, losing definition in the legs, the figure moved, too. It raised its left hand, mirror image to Clare’s right. Air snapped around the dancing yellow image. The hand flexed, worked, wriggled itself into … fingers. A thumb grew, extended, turned red, and contracted. Now the crackling image filled itself in, a skin spreading yellow-bright and warped and seething. The body grew a head, and it struggled to make a mouth and eyes of pale ivory. The electrical fog flickered, as if barely able to sustain the sizzling voltage.

Clare slowly flexed her fingers. The fingers twitched, too, suffused in a waxy, saffron glow. The body hovered in the air unsteadily, holding pattern, all the defining bright yellow lines focused on the shimmering, burnt-yellow hand.

“Let’s try to signal—,” Redwing began.

The arc snapped off with a pop. There was nothing in the air but a harsh, nose-stinging stench.

Clare sobbed softly. Fred jumped up and turned in all directions, but could see nothing to do. The only sound was the rumbling fusion engines.

“Let’s get back to stations,” Redwing said.

Clare laughed with a high, nervous edge. She got up and resumed the copilot chair. Everyone got back into bridge position, unsteady and pensive.

Fred said, “The low-frequency spectrum has changed.”

“Which means?” Redwing asked.

“It’s got a lot more signal strength. Let me run the Fourier—” His fingers and hands gave the board complex signals through its optical viewers. “Yep, got some FM modulation, pretty coherent.”

“Someone sending? Now?” Beth said. “Maybe they want to talk?”

“This is really low-frequency stuff,” Fred said. “The antennas we use to monitor interstellar Alfvén waves, to keep watch on perturbations in the magscoop. Never thought we’d get a coherent message on those!” Fred brightened, always happy to see a new unknown.

Karl had gotten up and now stood behind Fred’s chair. He said, “That fifteen kilohertz upper frequency—look at the spike. Amazing. Antennas radiate best if they’re at least as large as a wavelength, so … that means that the radiator is at least thirty kilometers across!”

Redwing tried to imagine what big structure could send such signals. “Is there anything on radar of that size in the jet?”

The answer came quickly: no.

“How can we decode it?” Clare asked. She stood and walked over to see Fred’s Fourier display.

Fred said, “I can look for correlates, but—hell!—we’re starting from knowing nothing about who the hell is—”

This time Redwing barely had time to register the prickly feeling on his hands and head before a crackling burnt-yellow discharge surged all along the bridge, snarling. The air snapped as they again dived for the deck. Redwing hit and flattened and saw Clare choose to stand against the nearest wall. A tendril shot forth and caught her. She twitched and crackled as the ampere violence surged through her. Her mouth opened impossibly wide, and a guttural gasp escaped—and then the mouth locked open, frozen. Smoke fumed from her hair. Her legs jumped and her arms jerked and she fell.