The Belt called the comet "Glacierville" and they needed it for water. There were twelve ships hanging around the comet. Two were cutters, there to carve off iceberg-sized chunks of ice. Three were drive ships, designed to attach themselves to the ice chunk and serve as thrust units to propel it to the Belt. Two more, which sat on the surface at the Glacierville bubblebase, were ordinary transports for people and cargo. The remaining five, two large and of wicked configuration, three others sleek and agile, were military craft.
Glacierville orbited the Sun at a mean distance of 83 A.U., inclined 54 degrees to the ecliptic, and was currently as far from the sun as it would ever get. The comet was almost entirely water ice, a 140-kilometer-wide reservoir. It had been discovered around the time of the Belt War of Independence, and had helped the Belt survive that war when the Solar Union had denied them access to the water facilities in the moons of Jupiter. Glacierville had gone out of service during the calm period from 2070 to 2090 when the Belt was once again allowed through treaty to mine the Jovian minor satellites for water.
But now there was another war on, and the Belt had been forced to return to deep space to ensure its water supply. Though it wasn't politically acceptable among the members of the Solar Union to deny the women and children of the enemy their precious water, whether or not it would remain that way depended entirely on the course of the war. If the Solar Union started to lose, the System Patrol ships would come.
Hence, the presence of the Belt military ships.
Jason Hanson was looking at those ships on the main viewscreen. He particularly enjoyed watching the sleek fighters, even though at the moment they weren't doing anything except station keeping. He had tried to become a fighter pilot ten years ago, but he didn't have the reflexes for it. Instead, he'd done his stint in the Belt Defense Forces as a transport pilot, a position insufficiently romantic to make him want to reenlist after his first hitch. Now he was a cutter pilot, proficient in maneuvering his ship as it bored the holes and dropped the charges that broke off kilometer-wide pieces of Glacierville.
But he still liked looking at the fighters. "Cutter One to Cutter Two," came over the radio. "What are you up to, Jase?" It was Mitch, the pilot of the other cutter. The cutters were large, every bit as big as a midsized luxury spaceliner, but almost all of their bulk was given over to the boring lasers and the charge hold. The pilot's cockpit jutted out from the front of the cutter like an afterthought, and the typical crew complement of such a ship was one.
"I'm just looking at the warbirds, Mitch."
"Again? But they're not doing anything. If we're lucky, they'll never do anything out here. You still wishing it was you in that pilot's seat?"
"Of course," Jason answered. "I still love the old Lulubelle, but she's no hot fighter." Having found the official designation of his ship short on imagination, Jason often referred to her as Lulubelle. "Haven't you ever wanted to ride something that can kick you in the ass to sixty gees?"
"I did," Mitch replied. "Her name was Candi Kane. And yes, that was her name. No shit." They laughed.
Jason reoriented the viewscreen away from the warships to watch the activities near the comet. He and Mitch had separated a "berg" a couple hours before, and the thrust ships were still attaching themselves to it. Once they were finished, Mitch and Jason would have to go back in to slice off cumbersome projections to give the berg a convenient thrust axis. It looked like the third thruster had almost finished securing itself, and Jason awaited the first test-firing that would tell the berg crew where Jason and Mitch needed to do the trimming.
Suddenly a fighter streaked through Jason's view, accelerating at full.
"What the hell?" Jason said. "Hey, Mitch—where's that fighter going? Can you see it?"
"It's not just one fighter," came back. "They're all moving out. They must have spotted something way out on their scanners because I sure as hell can't find anything on mine."
"Which way did they go?" Jason asked, adjusting the viewscreen in a so-far-fruitless attempt to find the ships.
"Right into Orion."
Jason tweaked the viewscreen and caught the intense glow of the military drives. "Found them, Mitch. I still can't see what it is they're after, though."
"I'm trying to pick up their cross-talk," Mitch said. "But nothing doing. They're hushed."
A nova appeared briefly, whiting out the viewscreen, then settled down quickly into a fourth star in Orion's belt, only to fade rapidly to nothing.
"Holy shit! What was that, Jase?"
Jason watched the screen grimly. "That was one of the fighters. Whoever is out there just destroyed one of the fighters."
The four remaining drive flames diverged in random directions. The two biggest flames, those of the light cruisers, winked several times, and Jason's trained eye told him they were on their way back to Glacierville. He still couldn't see what they were fighting—the drive flames from the Belt ships were the only ones out there.
Something appeared on Jason's scanners. He noted the position and adjusted the viewscreen to those coordinates. Spotting it, he magnified the image.
He wasn't sure what he was looking at.
It was a spaceship, at least that much he was sure about, but the configuration was unheard of. It seemed composed all of odd twists and turns, with snaky projections from the front and the sides. It had an oddly organic look, yet was clearly made of metal. A bronze statue of an octopus Jason had once seen at a zoo came to mind.
The ship just hung there with its front pointing at Glacierville. Jason backed off on the magnification and the body of the comet came into view.
"Are you looking at what I'm looking at?" Mitch said, his voice startling Jason.
"Yeah. That's no System Patrol ship, is it Mitch?"
"No." Then: "Do you suppose they're little and green?"
At that moment, the tip of the frontmost projection on the alien ship lit up brightly. Down on Glacierville the bubblebase erupted in a fierce explosion.
"They're opening fire! Mitch, we have to do something!"
"I am doing something," Mitch said. "Engines to full, Jason. I'm going to try to run. Whoever they are, they're going to have to worry about the warships first."
"Good luck," Jason said. And Mitch would need it—a cutter couldn't pull more than a gee. "But I'm not going to run," he said to himself. There was something else he wanted to try.
The strange vessel suddenly streaked away, a dazzling white line, then nothing.
Jason expanded the viewscreen image, backing off until he could see almost a full hemisphere of sky. He spotted Mitch's cutter right away, picking up velocity pathetically slowly.
"What do you think you're going to do, Jason?" Mitch asked with more than a trace of sarcasm.
"I'll let you know. Besides, how far do you think you're going to get if that ship comes back? Did you see it take off?"
"Dammit, Jase! What else can we do? We don't even have Dykstra shields for God's sake. You saw what happened to that fighter."
Jason was distracted from answering that question by what was happening outside. "Look in the southern half of Orion, Mitch."
Jason could see the drives of the light cruisers. They were several degrees apart. Suddenly one of the ships turned briefly into a glowing pearl—a bomb had spent itself against the ship's Dykstra shield. Another pearl appeared down and to the right.
There had been no drive flame there, and Jason assumed one of the Belt ships had gotten off a missile of its own.
A fireball flared on the extreme left of the view. "Damn, that was another one of our fighters," Mitch said.
"I couldn't tell," Jason replied. "We have three ships left, then."
"At the moment."
A set of three pairs of white streaks converged in the region of the light cruisers. Pearls appeared around each ship, but instead of fading, grew brighter and brighter. Almost simultaneously, the pearls collapsed to be replaced by incredible explosions that again momentarily overloaded the viewscreen. The screen came back up just in time for Jason to witness the last fighter going up, which again knocked the viewscreen out for a welcome three-second-long respite.
"That's that," Mitch said. "Maybe they'll leave now."
Jason was watching Mitch's cutter again. A white streak terminated near him. Cranking up the magnification, Jason could see the alien ship. "There's one behind you, Mitch!" he yelled.
The alien fired and Cutter One turned into a thousand pieces with no shortage of hellfire and smoke.
"Oh damn."
Jason noticed the berg he and Mitch had carved out. Another of the aliens was by it. One by one it drilled the thruster ships, and the explosion of the last was hammerblow enough to cause the berg to shatter. Then the ship turned and started accelerating toward Lulubelle.
But Jason had been waiting for this. He was already lining up his ship properly. The lasers used in cutting comets apart, though not tuned to the optimum frequency for attacking shields, were nevertheless among the most powerful ever constructed by the Belt.
Jason picked his moment. He let the alien have it with the full fury of the cutting beam. A pearl, followed by a most gratifying glimpse into hell, and the ship was no more.
Jason expected the others to come get him. Instead, he witnessed seven white streaks that disappeared into the vastness of interstellar space.
He turned up the radio transmitter to full. "Is anybody out there?"