Island in a Sea of Stars by Kevin J. Anderson

enough lifeboats for everyone, you’d better cram your cruiser as full as you can. That’s another twenty people? Thirty? We’ll need every spot.”
    Tower Three transmitted alarms, and the supervisor grew more panicked. The first smelter barge approached the distressed tower, positioning itself so it could link with the access hatch and take on a group of evacuees.
    The Tower Two supervisor called out, “Save room for us! Our systems are already failing.”
    Iswander sounded a full-fledged evacuation. Personnel in Tower One were to fill the ships waiting on the landing deck. It was complete chaos.
    The facility comm lines were a chatter of overlapping queries, shouts, and contradictory orders. On the private channel, Pannebaker broke in, “Londa and Arden are on your cruiser, Chief, and we fit twenty other people aboard. If we stick around, I could maybe take five more, but—”
    â€œI want them safe now .” He no longer had any faith in safety margins.
    â€œUnderstood, Chief.”
    The cruiser lifted off into the smoke-stirred sky just in time for Tasia Tamblyn to land the Curiosity on the open grid next to the access tube. “All right, we’re open for business. Get your people aboard.”
    Iswander dispatched a pair of large company ships over to Tower Two to rescue maybe a hundred more workers. It wouldn’t be enough, but he had no more ships to give. He promised to send more nevertheless, reassuring the doomed people.
    When the first vessel landed on the second tower’s access deck, though, the evac hatch wouldn’t open. “It’s fused shut!” the pilot cried.
    The tower supervisor yelled through the static-filled comm, “We have to get out of here!”
    â€œWe have twenty special heat-shielded worker compies,” Iswander explained, “mostly at Tower Two for the maintenance of external systems.” He reassigned the small robots to intercept and assist the evac ships, but wasn’t sure it would do any good.
    The smooth, shielded compies crawled outside the tower and worked their way to the evac hatch. Blunt-headed models designed to survive in extreme heat, they looked more like beetles than miniature humans. The robots scuttled around the hatch, using their specialized tools to attack the controls that had melted shut.
    â€œWe’re working on the problem,” Iswander said to Tower Two in his cool administrator voice. “Just hold on.” He felt lightheaded, and sweat prickled on his forehead.
    A smelter barge finally attached to the evacuation hatch on the bottom deck of Tower Three. The remaining three barges closed in, but one veered off again, declaring an emergency just like the first stranded barge. “Lower hull breach!” the pilot said. “Lava flooding the lower chambers. We’re going to get cooked in here.”
    Iswander didn’t know what to do. “Your habitation chambers are insulated. Just hold on.” His hopeful words sounded empty, but the desperate workers clung to them because they had no other choice.
    Then Tower Three failed.

10
    ELISA REEVES
    In the bloater explosion, Elisa’s ship screens went blank as emergency filters blocked the overwhelming surge of energy. Shockwaves hurled her ship backward, spinning out of control.
    Since she’d been worried Garrison might try to trick her, maybe even open fire with his low-power weapons, Elisa had kept her shields up. That had probably saved her life.
    As the cluster of nodules continued to explode in a chain reaction, her ship tumbled away, damaged and blind. Elisa couldn’t orient it, couldn’t regain engine control. It was all she could do to hold on.
    She managed to restore one screen, but the view was haphazard and she couldn’t see Garrison’s ship in the spreading inferno. The shockwaves rippled farther and farther, and even the outlying bloaters glinted and sparked, as if in alarm. Her screens