Free Here Be Dragons by Craig Alan Page B

in her port flank, and punched straight through a dozen layers of titanium, lead, and carbon. Bits and pieces of shrapnel appeared to have nicked the ship in other places, but that damage was minor.
    “We won this round. They took their best shot and missed. We’re still fighting, and we’re going to give it back ten times.”
    “Aye, ma’am,” Demyan said. Hassoun remained silent, and she looked at Vijay from the corner of her eye.
    “Questions?”
    Demyan spoke again.
    “Have we been compromised?”
    Gabriel’s approach had been timed so that the Galilean moons—fiery Io, icy Europa, pockmarked Callisto, and gigantic Ganymede, the solar system’s largest—would be on the other side of the Jupiter. The gas giant itself was uninhabitable, and the rest of its moons were oversized boulders in space. The outsiders had almost certainly colonized at least one of these four worlds, probably deep underground. The battle at the border had been fought behind Jupiter, entirely out of their sight—but that didn’t mean that no one else had been watching.
    “Hassoun, bring up the record again.”
    The tiny holographic Gabriel hovered serenely between the four stations. A red line appeared from nowhere and lanced it, and Elena nearly winced.
    “Run it again, timeframe minus twelve hours to the attack, one hour per second.”
    The image reversed itself, and the red line spooled itself into nothingness and disappeared into thin black air. Here and there tiny red points of light appeared near Gabriel , but one by one they turned white and vanished. These flecks were ghosts, false positives. They were mostly tiny asteroids, absolutely frigid by human standards, but warm enough to stand out against the absolute zero of deep space. Some of the other false readings were the result of miscalibrated instruments, or quirks of electromagnetism. And some were genuine phenomena produced by Jupiter’s magnetosphere, yet to be properly identified. Gabriel was collecting so many gigabytes of astronomical data each day that she was now the scientific equivalent of a treasure ship, worth nearly her weight in gold.
    The watch station automatically tagged and tracked each ghost, and eventually eliminated it as a possible threat. Elena had Hassoun pin the missile’s starting location in three-dimensional space, and then ran the projected trajectory of each recorded ghost, assuming that they were physical objects with momentum. None of them came close to being a suspect.
    “No drones or ships anywhere in the vicinity,” Vijay said. “It was a mine. They have probably seeded the entire region between Jupiter and the border.”
    “But how did it find us?” Demyan asked. “Did they pick up our trail after we crossed?”
    She glanced at his hands on the control sticks. The helmsmen had strict orders not to fire the rockets and maneuver unless given the order. Otherwise, they had to trust to the ship’s defenses and maintain course. It must have been the purest torture to watch the knife approach and remain completely still beneath the blade’s touch.
    “We’ve been shifting trajectory every few hours, correct?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Demyan said.
    He projected their course for her to see. Before the border, it was a perfectly straight line, but the second Gabriel had passed the lagrange point it became wobbly and irregular, and curved towards Jupiter.
    “Vijay, could you track a target on a course like that?”
    He shook his head.
    “Nobody could.”
    Ikenna spoke up from the watch station.
    “It’s ready, Captain.”
    He reset the projector for ten seconds before the missile ignited. This time a ghostly white sphere emerged from its position and expanded, growing fainter as it did so. Its leading edge struck Gabriel and bounced back on itself, and returned to its point of origin. The missile started its burn a moment later.
    “There. Active radar, wide band, low power. Second Officer Okoye’s been digging it out of the static for