THE SOLAR SYSTEM GENERALLY
Out of the darkness of the outer Solar System, seventy-eight relativistically flattened spacecraft flashed past Jupiter toward the Asteroid Belt in a diamond-shaped wedge formation. Oort-controlled detectors picked up the lead ship before they reached Jupiter’s orbit and began sweeping the path before the spacecraft with concentrated neutrinos.
Thirty of the Marauder vessels disintegrated on contact. The rest missed the concentrated neutrinos and continued on course. 50,000 kilometers ahead, unseen because they were popping into and out of null-space too quickly to be detected, Kimberly, Dale, Sally, and Brad, each in a new Federation spacecraft, were keeping pace with the Marauder vessels.
Four trailing Marauder craft detected the increasing neutrino flux and
