Captains Clarissa Kragen, Gennaji, and Ildico square off. But something’s not quite right…
When she jumped out of the Artemis cargo hold, waving goodbye to the Hopper and her crew aboard her, Riss had experienced a familiar dread. Even the quantum entanglement cabling tether, which she knew would guide her, could not eliminate the fear that, somehow, she would veer off into the endless vacuum of space.
The blackness rushed up to meet her, envelop her.
And she embraced it. Eyes and arms wide open.
Unlike her dreams, this time a wave of acceptance seemed to pass through her.
She had walked where none had gone. She had become part of a greater whole. The darkness was within her as well as without.
She laughed, the noise sounding only inside her helmet.
Now, finally, she understood the exhilaration her navigator must feel in his vidgames. Relaxed, she toggled her suit rear thrusters. The entry port to the mining station rapidly approached, and Riss realized she had never seen the port from outside a ship. It looked so huge, and yet so tiny and fragile.
Was that all that kept the forces of chaos at bay? The only barrier preventing the internal atmosphere of Ceres from escaping, suffocating and freezing everyone inside? Surely, they could create something of more substance.
Suddenly she could sense the gravitational field of the dwarf planet. Faint, but present. Like ribbons extending, overlapping. All she had to do was tug on them a little…
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