by Jack Dann
“I know where they put my toolkit. Maybe I can trick the lock,” Gerry said in her ear, very softly.
Andi looked around. She had been lying more or less facing a hatch, the one the men had gone out by, on the side of the cylinder, but there was another hatch in the flat end behind her head. She didn’t want to go where the men had gone—one of them might be right outside—but the other direction might offer another exit.
“That one,” she said to Gerry. “And I’m going to try to wake Bird.”
“Let her sleep,” Gerry advised. “She’ll make noise.” He looked into an open locker and pulled out his toolkit with a grin. In moments he was at work on the second hatch. Andi watched, her stomach knotting tighter every moment.
With a final clunk, the lock released, and the hatch slid sideways into its recess. Andi stared past Gerry’s head at the control panels of a shuttle cockpit.
“Wow!” Gerry said, too loudly, and pulled himself forward. Andi grabbed his leg.
“Quiet!” she said. “Stay down, in case—” but he had already ducked back.
“It’s outside of Base,” he said. “I can see the outside of the dome, and the sky—”
No escape that way, then, unless there was a covered access passage for the pilot.
“Let me get up there.” Andi shoved at Gerry, who was still blocking the way.
“What’re you—you can’t fly this—”
“If I can find my license—” Andi felt in all her pockets. Nothing. But the license wouldn’t work for anyone else; it had her biometrics locked into it. They wouldn’t have wanted it too far away from her, she hoped, though the man who snatched her could have put it in his own pocket for safekeeping. She stood, still dizzy from the drug, and looked at the compartment more closely. Something banged loudly, outside; she flinched and almost dropped to the floor—the deck, rather. But the banging was aft, probably in a cargo compartment. Loading cargo, the men had said. Twenty minutes—how long had they been lying there or struggling with the hatch? How much time did they have left?
Above the floor where they’d been dumped and the seats, storage lockers of various sizes lined the bulkheads, most with keys in them. Andi opened one; it was empty.
“Look in those,” she said to Gerry, nodding at the other side of the shuttle. “My license may be in one of them.” She kept trying the ones on her side. Nothing in the first, the second, the third. The fourth on her side was locked, with no key. “Gerry— come open this. Quietly.”
He fiddled with the lock. Nothing. Tried a key from one of the other lockers. Nothing. Tried again with something from his toolkit, and got it open. Inside was her license; she picked it up with relief so strong she felt dizzy all over again. She clambered through the hatch and looked out the windows.
Outside the shuttle, she saw no moving figures at all. The icy plain, stained dull orange by the light of the planet, was empty of all she could recognize as life. Far away, the ice heaped up in rough lumps on the horizon, the rugged terrain they had flown across coming to Base. On the Base side, she saw only the slight curve of the dome ahead; no other shuttle was docked within her view.
Sure for the moment that no one was walking around outside looking in the cockpit windows, she settled into the pilot’s seat and took another look at the shuttle controls. It was not the same model as her family’s. The onboard schematic showed it to be a third smaller. It had only three compartments: the one in which they’d been left, and two aft compartments. The cockpit spy-eye viewer showed her both interior and exterior of both of those: the aft-most with its big hatch open, and someone—three someones—loading cargo. Outside, the man who had first grabbed her, now holding some kind of weapon. No exit out the hatch they’d come through, then. She’d expected that.
“Can you fly this kind?”,Gerry asked. He was crouched beside her on the deck.
“I—don’t know.” She had trained for the family’s shuttle, the most stable, staid kind of transportation in the region. As close to idiot-proof, one of the training guides said, as a craft could be. This was something else. True, the panels were all familiar—the attitude indicators, the delta vee indicators, the indicators for fuel, the navigational suite. But the parameters were far beyond what the family shuttle could manage. She could go faster, maneuver more sharply . . . crash more thoroughly.
“Andi—” Gerry began.
She could at least lock the doors. Really lock the doors. SECURE HATCHES was in the same place here. If she did that, the man couldn’t get back in without shooting holes in the shuttle, and maybe not then. Would he try to destroy it? Would he even notice? It would give her time, maybe . . .
She looked for the selection under SECURE hatches and found CREW COMPARTMENT. She touched it. Nothing happened.
“It didn’t work,” Gerry said unnecessarily. “I wonder why—”
“My license.” She had to insert her license into the command slot, look into retinal scan and put her thumb on the plate to prove that the person in the pilot’s chair was actually the license holder. She did so; the command slot sucked her license in; lights blinked across the panels, and the license popped partway out.
“Ready to receive commands,” said a pleasant female voice. Andi jumped and looked around. “Welcome, Captain Murchison. Please be advised that Class C license holders may not access advanced features of this craft. Please be sure that you understand the limitations as laid out in the operating manual—”
Andi closed her mouth with an effort—Captain Murchison? Her?—and pushed the SECURE HATCH combination for the crew compartment again. This time a yellow light under “crew compartment hatch” turned green.
“Crew compartment hatch secured,” the voice said. “Continue to prepare for undocking?”
“One thing at a time,” Andi muttered to herself. The family shuttle didn’t have a voice interactive A.I.; she wasn’t used to a machine paying attention to her talk.
“Pardon?”
On the spy-eye viewer, Andi saw someone jump down from the aft cargo compartment, lower that hatch, and touch it with what must be a control unit; the hatch’s icon now showed yellow on the control panel. That man walked up to the one with the weapon, and both turned to the hatch to the crew compartment. One of them touched the control unit to the hatch, pulled it back, shook it, and touched again.
“Oh, frangos!” Andi said. “They’ll figure it out in two seconds.” She touched the SECURE HATCH ALL control, and all the hatch icons turned green. “We’ve got to undock now.”
“Understand command Undock Now,” the voice said. “Initiating release of life support umbilicals; initiating release of docking clamps. Clearance from Base Traffic?”
Banging came from behind them; on the spy-eye the man with the weapon was using it to hammer on the hatch.
“No clearance necessary,” Andi said firmly, fastening the safety webbing around herself with shaking fingers. “Emergency.” And to Gerry, “Get into that seat and buckle up.” Bird would have to take her chances; anything would be better than being stolen away to the pirates’ factories. Gerry scrambled to obey.
“Warning,” the A.I.’s pleasant voice went on. “Failure to obtain clearance may cause damage to dockside facilities, personal injury to persons dockside, and result in legal consequences including possible fines, confiscation of property, loss of license, and confinement in a correctional institution.”
“Understood.” Andi watched the play of indicators on the panels. “Initiate power supply main engine.”
The shuttle came alive with a steady thrum. She watched the output climb. If the pirates had any sense, they had already retreated down dockside and sealed off the bay . . . but in the spyeye she saw one of them—the one she thought of as the worst, struggling into a pressure suit, reaching for a helmet.
“Power-up complete,” the voice announced. “Undock sequence complete.”
“Confirm,” Andi said. The figures she had studied so carefully, the calculations she’d done o
n the test earlier that day, all seemed tangled in her head. What was the correct vector? Given the mass of this shuttle and the power output of its engines, what initial acceleration should she choose?
“Recommended options displayed,” the A.I. said, as if it understood. “Please indicate choice ...” That simplified things: she had only three choices. The A.I. unit would allow her to take off vertically, forward low-ascent, or forward medium-ascent.
“Two,” Andi said. Forward low-ascent sounded safest.
“Option two confirmed,” the voice said. “Initiating—” The shuttle shivered, then lurched a little to the left as air gusted out of the docking passage when the collar seal broke. It steadied, then, and lifted smoothly. She had an instant of unalloyed glee: free, with her own ship. She could go anywhere, anywhere at all!
“Course?” the voice asked. Andi opened her mouth to answer when another voice, not at all pleasant, snarled out of a different speaker.
“Shuttlecraft PR-275N! This is Traffic Control! Return to dock immediately! You are in violation of regulations. You are being targeted by our defense weapons and if you do not respond and return, you will be fired upon.”
“They sound mad,” Gerry said. He sounded scared.
“They probably are.” Andi hunted around for the comm controls, and finally found the transmit key. “Here—you talk to them.”
“Me? What am I supposed to say?”
“It doesn’t matter. Sound young and scared; we don’t want them to shoot us. ”
Gerry shook his head, but spoke into"the pickup. “Traffic Control? We have a problem—” His voice squeaked; he did sound young and scared.
“Shuttle PR-275N, is that you? Who are you? Who’s in command?” At least the voice wasn’t talking about shooting them this instant.
“My . . . my sister. They tried to kidnap us—”
“Your sister? Who is this? How old are you?”
“I’m eleven,” Gerry said. He paused and put on a tone of sweet reasonableness. “I don’t want to tell you who I am because you’ll tell Mama, and Mama will be really really mad at us.”
“How old is your sister? Let us talk to her.” Now the voice sounded as much worried as angry.
“I don’t think she should talk to you,” Gerry said, still in the voice of a child being very reasonable. “She’s flying the shuttle and she needs to concentrate. She waves her hands when she talks.”
“I do not!” Andi said. The shuttle was flying itself at the moment, heading away from Base on a course that would take them far away from anything she knew. Andi had found the volume control for the voice of the shuttle’s flight computer, and was able to discuss possible courses with it. What would it take to get to the habitat? Back to Base?
“Tell your sister to turn the shuttle around and come back to Base,” Traffic Control said. “Does she know how to turn it around?”
“I don’t know,” Gerry said. He turned to Andi, and, with the pickup still on, said, “Do you know how to go back?”
“I think so,” Andi said. “But I’m not sure it’s safe. If those men shoot at us . . .”
“Men shot at you?” Traffic Control said. “What men?”
“There were men who grabbed my other sister, the little one,” Gerry said. “Then they grabbed me when I tried to rescue her. Then Andi—that’s the sister flying the shuttle—came to rescue us and they grabbed her, too. They gave all of us shots. But they put us in the shuttle and thought we were asleep, only we woke up and got into the controls—”
“How old is your sister?”
Gerry looked at Andi; she nodded at him.
“Twelve.”
“You’re in a shuttle with an unlicensed pilot?!” Now it was the adult’s voice that sounded squeaky. “How’d you do that?”
“Not exactly,” Gerry said.
“Listen, I have to talk to her. We want you to be safe—”
“I can talk now,” Andi said. The shuttle was behaving perfectly; she trusted the A.I. to do what she told it.
“Look, the first thing is to get you kids back to safety—now you need to tell me your name.”
“Why?” Andi asked.
“So we can notify your parents; they must be worried sick.”
“If they don’t know, they won’t worry,” Andi said. “And besides, I need to tell you what happened, so you won’t shoot at us.”
“You need to come back here and get safely docked at Base. Look, you can let us take control of the shuttle, and we can bring it in for you—”
“No, thank you,” Andi said. “I don’t need salvage—”
“Listen, you can’t land that thing safely. Even with autopilot enabled.”
Andi said, “I’m not going back to the same place; the bad men are still there.” Suddenly she thought of Vinnie and Beth. “And they have two other girls—you’d better find them.”
“Other girls? On the shuttle with you?”
“No. On Base. They were going to give them a drug so they’d have no memory, and then leave them somewhere near Boone Concourse. They were supposed to be held until late second shift.” What time was it now? Andi looked at the shuttle’s clock, which was probably set to Base time.
“Do you know who they are?”
Vinnie and Beth wouldn’t thank her for getting them in trouble with their parents . . . but could she really trust the pirates not to hurt them? “They’re Base residents,” she said. “Vinnie Pillar and Beth Cowan. They . . . skipped class to meet me for lunch today. There’s a woman named Lil, near someplace called Paddy’s Wagon; she helped catch us arid she may know where they are now.”
“You still haven’t told us who you are,” Traffic Control said.
“I’ll tell you when I get back,” Andi said. “But you need to find them.”
“We will. But listen . . . here’s a pilot who will talk to you and help you get down safely. ”
“Hello there,” a woman’s voice said. “This is Senior Pilot Gallagher. Understand you have a little problem—”
Andi’s mouth went dry. She recognized that voice. That was the woman in uniform who had scolded her in the restroom. She said nothing, but fished the woman’s card out of her pocket to check. Yes. Gallagher, Naomi L.
Would the woman recognize her? Would it be better or worse if she did?
“I’m fine,” she said, in what she hoped was a deeper, grownup voice.
“You are now,” the woman—Gallagher said. “But let’s keep you that way. I gather you’re in the pilot’s seat, right? I want you to look at the control boards in front of you. There should be a row of lighted buttons right at the bottom. Can you tell me what color they are?”
“They’re all green,” Andi said. “And I know what they—”
“Fine,” Gallagher said. “And above them, do you see the—”
“Excuse me,” Andi said. She was not going to sit through a boring, slow-motion tour of instruments she knew better than her own fingerprints. “Please, ma’am. I have a Class C license.”
A moment’s silence. “You do.” Not a question, but a sort of stunned statement.
“I do. I passed my test today.” Best to come clean about the rest, too. She wouldn’t be able to keep her name a secret now; too easy to check with the Testing Center records. “Er ... I met you. In the restroom. You gave-me your card.”
“In the—you? You were that youngster who—”
“Yes, ma’am.” Now was the time for calm reasonableness. She hoped.
“You’d better tell me your name,” Gallagher said. “And put the visual on.”
Andi switched on the visual. Gallagher’s intent expression changed to a rueful smile.
“Good heavens, it is you . . . and you still look about eight. What’s your name?”
“Andi Murchison,” Andi said. “My Mama’s at the Clinic with Damon, my littlest brother. He’s been really sick, so please don’t bother her. It’s not just that she’ll be mad at me—she can be mad at me later. She doesn
’t need to be bothered right now.”
“I see,” Gallagher said. “Well, be that as it may, we need to get you and—who’s on the shuttle with you?”
“Gerry and Bird,” Andi said. “Gerry was on the radio; Bird’s still unconscious from whatever they gave her.”
“We need to get you and Gerry and Bird home safe,” Gallagher said. “Let’s see if you deserve that license. Take your ship off autopilot and execute a turn to the following heading.” She gave the figures slowly enough that Andi had no problem catching them.
Andi tapped the control; the A.i.’s voice murmured “Captain Murchison resumes active control.” Andi entered the commands for a right turn to the correct heading and the A.I. repeated them in the same mellow, pleasant tone.
“Excellent,” Gallagher said. “Now, I want to bring you in about sixty degrees around Base from where you were, slot 37. Start a slow descent to 500 meters; tell me what your rate will be . . . you do have a voice-active A.I. on that shuttle, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Andi said. “Do you want me to turn up the volume?”
“No, that’s fine. You don’t want to confuse our voices.”
“Descent options?” Andi said to the A.I.
“Descent options now displayed,” the A.I. said. “Please state final altitude desired.”
“Five hundred meters.”
“Is this in preparation for landing?” the A.I. asked.
“Yes.”
“Is Traffic Control authorizing this landing?” The A.i.’s tone was almost prim, though still pleasant.
“Yes,” Andi said. She looked at the descent options, all quite conservative, and chose the slowest.
“Confirming descent at one-five-zero meters per minutes ...” the A.I. said.
Andi passed this information to Gallagher and looked over at Gerry. He looked happy, though the bruise on his chin was darker now. “Go check on Bird,” she said. “See if there’s any way to put something under her head; if she’s waking up, get her into a seat and strapped in.”