The Ninth Circle Read Online Free PDF Page B

,” said Manny, “hit us on the beam.”
    “How in the help me mama!” Dr. Rose dropped in a reflexive duck as another crack rang through the hull with a metallic scraping.
    Any spaceship’s forward inertial screen deflected debris from its path. You never hear the forward strikes. This noise came from farther down the fuselage, where the Beauty ’s energy field was thin.
    Still another crack banged at the hull. Hard one. Sounded like there should be a dent.
    Sounded like there should be a hole .
    But cabin pressure hadn’t dropped. Not noticeably. Even if there were a slow leak, Glenn would expect a warning signal from the ship’s internal systems.
    Glenn got up from her seat, reached around the pilot, and redistributed the ship’s energy field—such as it was.
    Manny stared at small hands—not his—moving the ship’s controls. “What are you doing?”
    “We’re under attack.” Glenn hip-pushed Manny out of the pilot’s seat.
    With more sense than ego, Manny slid into the copilot’s seat without much resistance.
    Most civilian pilots never needed to redeploy inertial settings. Manny would have learned how, of course, but it was dusty knowledge.
    Manny seemed to recognize expertise when he saw it and deferred to it.
    “Can we jump to FTL?” Manny asked.
    Magical thinking, that. They both knew a jump to FTL with the ship in this condition could turn it inside out.
    Letting the vacuum in , they called it on Merrimack .
    “I think it’s too late for that,” said Glenn. “We’re hurt.”
    Glenn pushed Spring Beauty ’s speed up and maneuvered one of her exterior hull cameras outward to pick up the incoming objects.
    The objects had fallen in behind the Beauty , chasing her now.
    They were not asteroids.
    The chasers were more like demon-possessed cannon balls. They looked like miniature Roman killer bots.
    The old Roman killer bots were black orbs that carried antimatter loads. A killer bot would have destroyed the Spring Beauty on impact.
    Dr. Rose, crouching in the control room’s hatchway, yelped, “What are those!”
    Little green men , Glenn thought. She said, “Aaron, I think you should go aft.”
    She would have liked to grab one of the attacking orbs for identification, but this was not the Merrimack . Beauty didn’t have a hook. Beauty barely had a force field. Best Beauty could do here was survive.
    Poul Vrba stomped forward to the control room, stumbled over Dr. Rose getting in, and shouted, “Get us out of the asteroid field!”
    He saw Glenn in the pilot’s seat. Shouted louder, “What are you doing there!”
    Glenn told Vrba, “The asteroids are chasing us.”
    “What did you do to provoke them!”
    Glenn ignored the question. She jinked the little ship hard. Beauty did not jink well. Glenn’s stomach lurched sideways.
    Vrba caught his balance. “You did something! No being with the level of intelligence to achieve space travel would just attack a stranger without trying to communicate first!”
    “This is their first communication,” Glenn said, trying to line up an entry into atmosphere.
    And realized Vrba was right. She really was provoking the orbs. They didn’t want Spring Beauty in the atmosphere.
    A second flock of orbs converged like hornets from the starboard. They glanced off the ship’s inertial field as Glenn pushed the ship’s nose down—down according to the ship’s internal artificial gravity.
    Vrba ordered the pilot, “Do something!”
    “Whatever she tells me,” Manny said.
    Dr. Helmut Roodoverhemd, xenosociologist, climbed over Dr. Rose, staggered into the small control room, and crawled to the communications console. He spoke into the ship’s com, insisting this was a League of Earth Nations vessel.
    “We are peaceful. Permit us to pass.” Roodoverhemd translated the message into all the languages in the universal data bank and sent it out by all known communications media.
    Scientists counted on peaceful intent to get them through any