Debra was beyond fatigue now, she was merely numb.  The feel of the cable under her thick glove was unreal, the pain in her shoulders and wrists from hauling on the cable was maddening.  Hand over hand starting and stopping the load (about eight hundred pounds for each of them) took a lot of stamina.  Mass accelerated in any medium, tends to remain in motion.  Weightlessness doesn’t change mass, inertia remains to be overcome.  Finally around 11:00 hours Hilds and her party felt ready leaving one gas canister (a partly emptied one) strapped to number two and ten seismic five ton charges attached to its upper half.  They completed cutting the hole into the column nearest by number three.  Using the remote valves on the tanks they jetted the hopper into the column and began welding the slug back into the wall.  Number three slowly rose to the shell end of the shaft and cut six barely separated crescents in the metal, drilled six core holes between them and planted six ten ton charges.  Number three dropped back toward the bottom of the shaft separated its crew section from the ‘work horse’ lower half and returned up the shaft halfway.  Number three closed its blast shields over its view ports.  As a diversion, incase there was anyone to divert Hilds had rigged number two to fly a brief distance (via the gas canister) and explode on contact with any thing solid.  She keyed the remote valve on the tank and waited.  About ten seconds went by and then number three and the column she was inside of shook heavily.  Hilds detonated the roof charges, counted to fifteen, and fired the remaining charges stored in the lower section of the hopper.  A ball of red-yellow light seemed to be chasing them up the tube as the blast reached them from below.  The explosion equivalent to five thousand pounds of TNT blew the lid off the tube and the upper hopper module out as well.  Debra Hilds could see the piece of nickle iron above them moving, but was it moving faster than the hopper of not.  If it was then they were safe, if not they would pile into it very soon.  Just as she was beginning to doubt the lid would get out of the way, Debra’s eyes went wide and her neck stiffened.


    Floating ten inches from her right hand was a blue ball and it was speaking to them.  “Do not fear, escape is our shared purpose, continue.”


    “What are you?” asked Debra.


    “Friendly, I will help you escape.  Please continue or your race will be destroyed in the same manner your captors have always killed their rivals” said the globe.


    As the hopper’s instruments came back on line on by one, Hilds began to cycle the small capsules hydrogen-oxygen rockets and increased their speed even more, angling the ship toward the core of the system.  As Hilds overloaded lifeboat accelerated away from the sphere, Russell’s ship the newly christened Avenger came into visual range of the sphere and hopper number three.  As soon as Carlin’s first officer confirmed it was an ore hopper ‘upper section only’, Russ changed course to intercept the escaping craft.  Apparently oblivious to all this the sphere continued to move toward Mars and very slowly fused shut the blast hole Hilds had made.  Russell was amazed at the luck he’d drawn, if his ship had been five minutes later arriving he would never have seen the hoppers smaller half.  The Avenger came alongside, and old perceptions of size and scale took a beating as Hilds realized this was a military vessel closing on the hopper.  She immediately opened the communications circuits and waited.  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    A reply from Russell Carlin was instant.  “Prepare to come aboard” he said.  Once inside the Avenger Debra Hilds promptly fainted and was taken to the Med Clinic to rest.  Russell contacted UW Headquarters via Luna base and relayed the situation.  The majority of the Security Council voted to let Carlin try out his new ship and weaponry against the sphere.  Russ could not believe this was happening, his ship had just come in sight of the object when Debra’s hopper section made its escape.  Now he could attack the sphere with his entire arsenal without fearing for her safety or her teammates.  The sphere apparently not interested in pursuing the hopper section never broke stride as it lumbered on toward Mars.  Russ signaled his first officer to man the laser gunner’s station at the center of the command room.  The two ensigns at his right and left were the mass cannon operators.  Four mass drivers were built into the ship as weapons, modified to function together or in a salvo-firing pattern.  Jeff’s contribution to Russell’s ship was its crew, half of the complement of the old Terra Twin joined to serve with Russell.  As Russell gave the order to fire a green bolt of several million-candle power lanced from the top center of Russ’s ship.  It struck the sphere at an angle and began to slice away a thirty-meter circle from one side.  As soon as the line of the cut could be seen three more beams from directly beneath, right and left of the Avenger blazed out and added their own incisions in the sphere.  Everywhere the beams vaporized the alloy on contact.  Russ now gave the nod to the mass gunners, each alternately loaded with rock and hydrogen/oxygen ice bombs.  The first salvo of bombs hit the dissected sphere.  The ice bombs worked very well, a globe of solid oxygen surrounded by explosive and insulated from the outer globe of hydrogen ‘ice’ enclosed in a honey combed steel shell.  A Murchison contact detonator, originally a mining device set off the explosives, thawing and igniting the two solid gases inside the steel casing, which exploded in hexagon shaped fragments, each weighing sixty to seventy kilos and driven at enormous speed the cut sections of the sphere were blown away from it and some completely blown apart by the bombardment.  The sphere began to try to fuse itself but wherever the green beams struck the fusion would stop.  As Russ’s mass gunners switched to rock, the sphere tried to incorporate the new material into itself, but as the boulders two to four tons in mass kept coming earlier wounds were broken open anew, rock being a poor substitute for metal.  The skin of the sphere became more brittle and some holes were now entirely abandoned as the sphere had too little material to repair all the damage.  Slowly the sphere began to rotate.  Russ had anticipated this action and planned well for it.  As the dish came into view at the sphere’s edge Russ ordered all his weapons locked on it and fired at will.  Thirty-two boulders, eight bombs and forty million-candle power of collimated green light, battered, bludgeoned and boiled away the sphere’s only external weapon.  The dish was indeed a broken thing now.  As Russ ordered his gunners to hold and re-arm, he saw a glow of white light, ghostly and dim but increasing in brightness, through the holes in the sphere.