The spheres began revolving around each other again, and now she caught quick glimpses of the manacle on one of them. Then their revolutions slowly drew to a halt, the sphere without the manacle occluding the other from her view. Laser strikes threw it sharply into silhouette, and streamers of plasma fire and debris shot out all around it. Then something seemed to distort space, flattening the one sphere she could see into an ellipse. The wall of distortion sped towards her even as she started the craft’s engines and grabbed the joystick. It struck. The entire craft rippled, emitted a tearing crash, and bucked as if someone had taken hold of the very fabric of space and snapped it up and down like shaking dust from a carpet. The screen disintegrated, blowing out the air supply, metal visible around her suddenly contained whorls and ridges. Then she blotted out any view by coughing blood onto her visor. It felt to her as if someone had smacked an iron bar simultaneously against every bone she contained, then shoved a barbed harpoon through her and twisted it, knotting up her insides.

I am going to die.

Her suit diagnostics made no sense at all, however the static cleaner still operated and shed the blood from the surface of her visor down around her chin. Now she could truly assess the damage to her craft: some god had taken hold of it and twisted it up like an old newspaper.

Gravity weapons.

So it seemed the so-called friendly sphere had killed her. She focused out at vacuum, and a cliff of draconic flesh rose up before her. Something wrong: this part of Dragon was no sphere at all, but egg-shaped with an odd twist in it, with fluids boiling out into vacuum from an opening gashed down one side.

Ah, the other guy, was all she thought, before a writhing wheel of pseudopods—the business end of a fast-moving tree composed of those things—slammed up, closed around her vessel, and dragged her down.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Though the underspace interference field knocked her out of U-space nearly fifty AU from the centre of the action—further than Pluto is from Earth—from which action the light of numerous explosions was only now reaching her, Orlandine was still in the same trap as those ECS attack ships. And she was also exposed in open vacuum between the inner system of planets and an outer ring of asteroids shepherded by a collection of cold planetoids.