The force of the explosion hurled Anjin, Tam, and Skurla against the starboard wall of the control room. Tam felt a wet snap in her already broken arm and knew that she had just fractured it again. As she pushed the pain out of her mind, the first thing she noticed were shards from broken pads rising into the air, needlelike and dangerous if inhaled.

Immediately, she began breathing through the makeshift air filter of clenched teeth. The next thing she noticed was Susan floating about two meters away, unconscious and drifting toward a cloud of needles. Tam removed her own shirt and tied it around the Second Officer’s head while keeping a keen eye on Anjin, whose first action had been to find a still-working pad and try to assess the damage.

The explosion had occurred on the surface, and a small voice in Anjin’s head congratulated him for anticipating a direct hit, and for programming his absorbic bombs, arrayed below the surface, to do nothing if this should happen. Against the relatively steady influx of solar radiation, energy absorption was a slow, stately process. But against the sudden surge of an antimatter detonation, absorbics always overcompensated and overwhelmed. Had Anjin’s shell of absorbics responded, the result fwould have been a horrible surge in which all the energy being released inside the comet converted suddenly to matter. The air in the control room would have flowed liquid, then crystallized, and Anjin’s eyelashes would now be as brittle as glass.

Instead, his absorbic shell had merely stood by as a slug of antihydrogen turned one cubic kilometer of rock into plasma. The shock front hammered two klicks deeper, smashing through rock and leaving rubble in its wake, shredding pipes and passageways and storage tanks as it went, weakening, pushing the ship hard to port until the last of its force was dissipated against an impenetrable mantle of Bardo cones.

Anjin and Tam had built the shield from robotic cones developed by Lex Bardo, the stunt pilot-engineer who had been mourned by millions when the first Valkyrie exploded en route to the nearest star. Bardo’s system of pressure-equalizing cones was able to respond instantly to almost any situation. After he brought Nautilus out of Mirandan orbit, penetrated the jet streams of Uranus’s equator, and probed an ocean more than a thousand kilometers deep, he became as loved as Charles Lindbergh. If the cones could survive those extreme pressures, Anjin had concluded, then perhaps they could provide added protection against antimatter bombs.

During the previous two weeks, Anjin had been calling more and more robodsfdsts away from the task of absorbic bomb production, threatening to exhaust the ship-comet’s resources in his effort to build a secondary, deep-interior coat of Bardo armor. In theory, having more than three kilometers of rock overhead was armor enough; but in practice, if not for the cones, the force of the explosion would have reached and spent itself upon the ship’s crew. Instead, it was both reflected whence it came and dissipated laterally throughout the entire defensive barrier. Inertia had sent all the contents of Sargenti-Peterson crashing to starboard, and Bardo reflection had dislodged house-sized boulders from the blast zone, enlarging the crater and producing a loss of building materials that would be missed; but the ship was otherwise intact, and might remain so if it survived the third wave of attack.