Only too aware, now, of the deadliness of his deceptively quiet surroundings â¦
⦠Gregory stood up.
Despite being insulated by the surrounding vacuum, he could feel his shipboard utilitiesâwhich with helmet and gloves doubled as an emergency environmental suitâstiffening around him, could feel the cold as though it literally were seeping in.
Impossible, of course. Heat was escaping his body, not cold seeping in, but that was what it undeniably felt like. His feet ⦠he couldnât feel his feet anymore, and his legs were starting to burn.
He felt oddly tranquil, despite the pain, despite the sudden realization that he may have just made a serious mistake. The landscape was serene, dark, utterly silent. It would have been easy to step out of the ruin of his Starblade and onto that flat, rock-strewn plain. That step, he knew, would have been lethal.
He also felt heavy. The planetâs gravity was dragging at him with almost twice the pull of home. But he managed to stand up straight ⦠and raise his arms.
Overhead, St. Clairâs fighter descended like an unfolding blanket ⦠the alien robots encircling it at a range of thirty meters. The blackness descended on him, scooped him up, folded him in â¦
And Gregory screamed with pain.
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2015
Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover art by Gregory Bridges
William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007483792
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007483839
Version: 2015-04-23
For Deb, and, as ever, for Brea
âWhat the hell is that?â
âDunno, Control,â replied the voice from Kapteyn Orbital. âIt ⦠it just popped up on our screens out of nowhere. Itâs coming in fast ⦠almost a half c. Itâsââ
Commander Gerwin Dressler flinched as the projected holoscreen floating above his workstation lit up with an intense blue-white light. Something had just slammed into the research platform orbiting the local star at half the speed of light, converting five thousand tons of metal, ceramics, plastic, and organic crew members into a rapidly expanding cloud of hot plasma.
The base AI was saying that the object was in fact a diffuse cloud of particles, a cloud many astronomical units across and massing trillions of tons. There was other stuff in there, too, though ⦠enigmatic structures, half-glimpsed constructions, things large and inexplicable shrouded within the particulate cloud.
And that cloud would be reaching Heimdall in seconds.
With a thoughtclick, Dressler sounded the base alarm.
âWhat is it?â the voice of Captain Roessler said in his head. He sounded groggy; it might be high noon local time, but by the base clocks, set to Greenwich Mean Time and measuring days and nights convenient to human biology, it was the wee hours of the morning.
âWeâve just lost Kapteyn Orbital, sir,â Dressler replied. âHereâs the data â¦â
âThe Americans?â
âNo, sir. Something ⦠something else.â
Something very else.
He waited as the stationâs commanding officer reviewed the scant data transmitted from the orbital. God, the sky outside was so beautiful â¦
The dome housing the base command and control center was set to project the view outside at the moment, showing a skyâdeep blue to brilliant violetâdominated by the immense curve of the gas giant, Bifrost. Kapteynâs Star, an M1.5 red dwarf less than a third the mass and radius of Sol, shone almost directly overhead. At a distance of 3.5 AUs, Kapteynâs Star was shrunken to little more than a bright red pinpoint. Sharp eyes could distinguish its disk, but the much closer gas giant commanded the eastern sky at the moment, currently at half phase. The bands and swirls of pale brown, salmon, and white sweeping up from the glaciers on Heimdallâs horizon to the curve of Bifrostâs limb were clearly visible. Phantasmagorical aurorae circled the gas giantâs poles to either side and were answered by the dancing curtains of light across Heimdallâs northern sky.