Event Horizon (Hellgate) by Mel Keegan

How long did they hold together before they gave you the slip?”
    The pilot shrugged eloquently. “Five to ten. Long enough to get a gunship in the air and go chase a handful of smoke.”
    The data was fluctuating wildly, as if Etienne were trying to get a firm image on a body of water which was changing from moment to moment. Marin was half mesmerized by the warp and ripple of something that looked like a solid object one second and like a high-frequency energy signature the next. “Like bouncing a light off a spinning glass ball,” he mused, “and sometimes the light passes through, and sometimes it bounces off.”
    “Exactly.” Jazinsky pointed out a peak and a trough in the data. “ Here , it’s solid enough to be an object. Here , you’d swear it was just an energy pulse. Look at the velocity – whatever it is, it’s cruising at a fraction under a million kilometers an hour.”
    “Not much under light speed,” Vaurien said thoughtfully.
    Perlman came closer, intent on the flatscreen. “They’d drive you nuts, doing this. They come in on a heading from Naiobe or one of the gravity wells of the supergiant stars, so fast, a gunship had to fly an intersect course, we’d never catch them. Then they stop , the sort of brutal braking maneuver that’d pulp any living pilot. They taunt you, make you follow, before they just vanish . One time, I followed one of these handfuls of pixie-dust right into the dark zone behind Ulkur. Jesus, Neil, d’you remember?”
    “I’ve spent a year trying to forget,” Travers muttered. “Thing is, Barb, I never saw a Hellgate ghost outside of Hellgate. Gill?”
    “Never,” she agreed. “But don’t ask me how this adds up.”
    “They cruise on momentum at this speed,” Vidal said quietly, “like they got a slingshot off the gravity well of the black hole. They stop dead in space, and on a whim they vanish back into the cracks.” His brows arched at Jazinsky. “This is a lot like how it felt like to fly transspace. Surfing gravity tides and temporal currents – and there’s no shortage of those in this neck of the woods.”
    With one hand flat in the small of her back, Jazinsky straightened. “Etienne, bring a probe online. Intercept, fast as possible.”
    “Probe 215, launching,” the AI responded. “Time to intercept, 150 seconds.”
    A graphic depicting the probe appeared in the navtank, and the overall scale of the image shifted to accommodate probe and target. Oberon was on the extreme rim of the display, while a plot of the ghost’s trajectory winked on in soft green lines.
    “Where’s it going?” Travers wondered. “You said it’s holding a set course?”
    “If it’s an energy pulse, it would,” Marin said thoughtfully. “They can’t deviate after transmission.”
    “And if it’s an object,” Vidal added, “it’s going somewhere .”
    The observation was intriguing and it was Vaurien who said, “Etienne, extrapolate on the trajectory plot. Give me an evaluation of this thing’s probable destination or target.”
    They might have expected some small delay before the AI had the information, but Etienne pulled it directly from standard navigation routines. “Destination is Borushek. Departure vector is identical to that of the Tycho .”
    Every head in the Ops room came up, and Vaurien’s brows knitted into a frown. “A handful of pixie-dust wouldn’t assume an exact heading for Borushek, or anywhere specific. It’s an object. Your imaging data is being screwed up Barb. Cloaking, or deliberate jamming. And since it’s an object we don’t recognize, it’s a safe bet it’s Zunshu, probably arrived via the same event that brought the automata.”
    “And it ,” Vidal whispered, “is on its way to Borushek.”
    “ It ,” Hubler corrected, “is on its way right into the middle of the minefield Asako and me just seeded.”
    “The smart question being, will the mines react to something that doesn’t even look like an object most of