He had laughed. “Easily done … though it might take a few years. Are you willing to wait? Give me four years.”

“I’m in no hurry. Four years, then. I think I can manage to remain unmarried in the meantime.”

And so, for the past three years, Ross had tended his Blue Sky Mine, never leaving, never giving up hope, never interested in reconciling with his old father. He had worked diligently in the Golgen clouds, where the harvesting grounds were a particularly rich source of stardrive fuel.

Now, at the age of thirty, he was clearly on the road to paying off the enormous industrial structure. It was a matter of pride for him, and it would allow him to prove himself in front of his father. This year, he would finally meet his goal; their marriage date had already been set.

Now, with a gust of cool wind, the huge skymine shuddered in the air. The white doves fluttered from their roosts, and four more took wing. Ross looked over the deck rail and watched the angry knot of flashing fireballs, deep lightning storms like a boiling electrical sea. Coming closer.

The intercom startled Ross as the captain on watch located him. “Big disturbance below, Chief. Something large, unlike anything we’ve seen before.” The watch captain had spent his entire life on Roamer skymines; Ross thought the man had seen every possible atmospheric phenomenon by now.

He raised his voice as the biting wind grew louder, whistling around his hood. “Do you think we should move the skymine?”

The captain responded immediately. “The disturbance is moving too fast, Ross. We couldn’t maneuver around it, even if we tried.”

Then the thick cloud decks split open like a blister, and Ross strained his eyes to see, to believe. An awesome crystal shape emerged from the silent depths, a shimmering diamond globe that rose higher… growing larger.

“Shizz! Do you see—” The speaker crackled with static, as if the local intercom transmission had been disrupted.

Ross stared, and finally, with even greater amazement, realized what he was seeing. A ship.

The alien vessel was a huge sphere studded with triangular protrusions, like intersecting pyramids half caught within a glass bubble. Blue lightning crackled from the points of the pyramids, connecting them with an electrical spiderweb, arcs jumping from tip to tip. A weapon of some kind, a bizarre structure from the deepest strata of the gas world. He couldn’t imagine what sort of mind might have built it—or what it wanted.

Ross staggered backward, releasing his hold on the support rail. “Take us up!” he shouted, but he didn’t know if the watch captain could hear him. “Give me another kilometer of altitude—hell, make it ten!”

Still the alien ship kept coming, silent and ominous. By comparison, the skymine looked like a gnat in the air.