More chaff and chalk clogged the area surrounding the station. Some of it came from the base itself. The rest from the ships swirling about.

“Whoa!” Falconi said as a white-hot needle erupted from a patch of seemingly empty space, snapped across almost nine thousand klicks, and lanced one of the spherical Jelly ships through the middle, like a blowtorch through styrofoam.

The damaged ship spun out of control, wobbling like a top, and then exploded in a blinding blast.

“Oh fuck yeah!” Sparrow shouted.

The live feed darkened for a moment to accommodate the surge in light.

“What the hell was that?” Kira asked. A twinge at the back of her skull made her wince … ships burning in space, motes glittering in the blackness, the dead uncounted …

Falconi glanced at the ceiling. “Gregorovich, pull in our radiators. Don’t want them getting shredded.”

“Captain,” said the ship mind, “the odds of a wayward particle disrupting our most necessary thermoregulation at this range is—”

“Just yank them. Not going to risk it.”

“… Yessir. Currently yanking them.”

Another white-hot needle shot across the screen, but it only managed to singe a Jelly, which corkscrewed away far faster than seemed possible.

To Kira, Hwa-jung said, “Those are Casaba-Howitzers.”

“That … means nothing to me,” said Kira, not wanting to spare the time to look up a definition.

“Bomb-pumped shaped charges,” said the machine boss. “Only in this case—”

“—the bomb is a nuke!” said Trig. He seemed overly excited by the fact.

Kira’s eyebrows climbed. “Shit. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”

“Oh yeah,” said Sparrow. “We’ve had Casaba-Howitzers for ages. Don’t use them much, for obvious reasons, but they’re fuck-simple to build, and the plasma moves at a good chunk of light speed. Makes it nearly impossible for anyone to dodge at close ranges, even those squirrely bastards.”

In the display, more explosions flared: human ships this time, the smaller support vessels around Malpert bursting like popcorn as the Jellies hit them with lasers and missiles.

“Dammit,” said Falconi.

Another Casaba-Howitzer darkened the display, taking out a second Jelly. Even as the crew of the Wallfish cheered, one of the two remaining Jellies blasted straight toward the Darmstadt while the other opened fire on the refueling platform next to Malpert Station.

The platform erupted in an enormous fireball of burning hydrogen.

Then the mass driver fired again: jets of plasma shooting out from vents along the acceleration tube. The slug missed the Jelly by the destroyed platform—the aliens weren’t stupid or careless enough to fly across the line of the muzzle—but the slug hit something else Kira hadn’t noticed: a satellite floating close to Malpert.

The satellite vanished in a blast of light, vaporized by the force of the impact. The spray of superheated materials shotgunned the nearby Jelly, peppering the ship with what amounted to thousands of micrometeoroids.

“Shi-bal,” Hwa-jung breathed.

Falconi shook his head. “Whoever pulled off that shot deserves a raise.”

The damaged Jelly jetted away from Malpert at speed, and then the ship’s engine sputtered and went dead, and the vessel started to spin as it drifted away, powerless. A large gash marred one side of the hull. From it spewed gas and crystalizing water.