Bokelskere.no

After another three seconds the fissure reached twenty kilometres in diameter, and stabilized. One side collapsed inwards, exposing the wormhole’s throat. Three small specks zoomed out of the centre. Oenone and the other two voidhawks screamed their identity into the general affinity band, and implored: HOLD YOUR FIRE!

For the first time in its five hundred and twenty-one year history, the Jovian Consensus experienced the emotion of shock. Even then, its response wasn’t entirely blunted. Specialist perceptual thought routines confirmed the three voidhawks remained unpossessed. A five second lockdown was loaded into the combat wasps.

What is happening? Consensus demanded.

Syrinx simply couldn’t resist it. We have a visitor, she replied gleefully. Her entire crew was laughing around her on the bridge.

The counter-rotating spaceport was the first part to emerge from the gigantic wormhole terminus. A silver-white disc four and a half kilometres in diameter, docking-bay lights glittering like small towns huddled at the base of metal valleys, red and green strobes winking bright around the rim. Its slender spindle slid up after it, appearing to pull the dark rust-red polyp endcap along. That was when the other starships began to rampage out of the terminus, voidhawks, blackhawks, and Confederation Navy vessels streaking off in all directions.

That was when the other starships began to rampage out of the terminus, voidhawks, blackhawks, and Confederation Navy vessels streaking off in all directions. Jupiter’s SD sensors and patrol voidhawk distortion fields tracked them urgently. Consensus fired guidance updates at the incoming combat wasps, determinedly vectoring them away from the unruly incursion.

The habitat’s main cylinder started to coast up out of the terminus, a prodigious seventeen kilometres in diameter. After the first thirty-two kilometres were clear, its central band of starscrapers emerged, hundreds of thousands of windows agleam with the radiance of lazy afternoon sunlight. Their bases just cleared the rim of the wormhole. There were no more starships to come after that, only the rest of the cylinder. When the emergence was complete, the wormhole irised shut and space returned to its natural state. The flotilla of patrol voidhawks thronging round detected a capacious distortion field folding back into the broad collar of polyp around the base of the habitat’s southern endcap that formed the bed of its circumfluous sea.

Consensus directed a phenomenally restrained burst of curiosity at the newcomer.

Greetings, chorused Tranquillity and Ione Saldana. There was a distinct timbre of smugness in the hail.