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.Simeon, whose hand had happened to close on the handgun first, was pointing the weapon after the apparition, on the verge of babbling.He pointed again, helplessly."I saw it, too, I saw it, too!" Branwen was already on the intercom, trying to raise help.Iskander Baza was the next crew member to encounter the intruder.He came across it in one of the small tunnels that served the compact ship as corridors."Without hesitation Baza drew the small hand weapon he liked to carry at all times and fired.The gun was a short-range beam-projector of a type that he considered unlikely to do any serious damage to the essential equipment within the ship.Iskander's shot hit—whatever it was—but the beam appeared to have no effect except to make the apparition withdraw.By now all the crew members, with the possible exception of the lethargic Page 97ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlCarmpan, werealerted to the fact that some kind of emergency was in progress.Everyone not at battle stations was scrambling to get there.But for the moment no one saw anything else strange aboard the Pearl.Space in the proximity of the ship was a different matter.There were suddenly a swarm of spacegoing vehicles nearby; or else they were constructions or congregations of hitherto unknown life forms; or else they were things that no ED human had ever seen or even imagined before.Whatever they were, they were suddenly detectable around the ship in considerable numbers by the people who were on watch.A fight began, because the people on the Pearl considered themselves under attack.The Pearl's heavy weapons thundered out, striking at flickering, evolving, changing nothingness.CHAPTER 18Even in those first few seconds of alarm and scrambling desperation aboard the Pearl, it was already obvious that none of the blasting, melting, disintegrating weapons usually employed in space combat were at all effective against these mysterious encroaching shapes.Domingo had been in his combat chair at the start of the crisis and was still there.Even with all his instrumentation before him, his first indication of trouble was the alarm on the intercom, the voices of his crew announcing the presence of an intruder on the ship.Such was the subtlety of the invader and of its fellows just outside the hull.Whatever the things were out there, they were very difficult to see, hard to detect on any of the instruments that the captain presently had in use.A gabble of speech grew steadily on the intercom."They're not ships, I tell you—""I can see that.They're not berserkers, either.""Not any kind of berserker I ever heard about.""Not like any… not like any thing I've ever seen."Before they could push each other completely into panic, Domingo roared for silence, then made specific demands on specific people for readings, reports, information.In moments the incipient panic had subsided.The coordinated use of instruments even began to bring in some useful data.Within a matter of seconds after the first alarm, using a helpful observation or two passed along by other crew members, Domingo had managed to adjust his instruments so as to be able to get a better look at the things, whatever they were, that had his ship surrounded.What he beheld were bizarre entities of varying and almost indeterminate size and shape.There were dozens of them swarming, flitting by his ship at ranges varying from only a few meters out to several score kilometers and at speeds that ought to mean ship or machine and not any kind of self-propelled life form.But somehow, as he studied them, the impression that these were life forms gradually dominated.Seemingly they were able to avoid the centers of the blasts from the Pearl's armament while passing unharmed through the outer regions of the explosions, even through zones where steel would have been vaporized.The forms, whatever they were, appeared to be altering themselves from moment to moment, changing their very structure somehow, so beam weapons that would have chewed up a berserker's shields passed through them harmlessly.It was almost, the captain thought, as if these things surrounding him and his ship could at will become no more than illusions.The time elapsed since Branwen and Simeon had sounded the first alarm was still less than a full minute.Domingo shouted to his crew: "Cease fire.We're not doing any good [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]