He only had time for one guess.
Had to get it right first time.
He whispered a prayer. Made his decision.
The Katana.
Now to find it.
He’d accessed a map of the launch zone while he was working in the chapel, and had tried to memorize the locations of his possibles. But he was used to storing data in his BCI for later reference. Without the BCI, his memory had gone to shit. He couldn’t even remember the number of the Katana’s parking space.
He ran along the fluorescent orange lines that marked out the 1000m2 spaces, noticing how few ships were parked dead center, how many had barely made it into their allotted space at all. That was a giveaway that human pilots had landed them. Trekkies—career astronauts—knew how important it was to keep your own abilities up to scratch, instead of relying on computers for everything.
His lungs burned. The Trust Deficit … the Close Your Eyes And Hold Out Your Hand …
“Return to the terminal immediately. Return—”
“Turn right at the Teething Trouble. Two spaces down, on your left.”
That hadn’t been the voice of his sharesuit.
“Who’s that?” He cut across the corner of the Teething Trouble’s parking space.
“A friend. Keep going. You’re almost there.”
Mendoza now saw the Katana ahead of him. A Superlifter, its hull dulled by a zillion little dents, suggesting that it usually plied the Belt, where there was more microdebris. The logo adorning its nose depicted a winged giraffe.
The ship had already assumed its vertical launch position, which put the crew airlock high above Mendoza’s head. As he stared up at it, panting, the outer hatch swung open and a rope descended.
“I know. A rope?” the voice said. “But we’re not allowed to deploy our drones or nets here. Organics don’t set off any alarms. Grab hold and we’ll pull you up.”
Mendoza wrapped his gloves in the rope. It was an act of faith. He ascended in jerks and starts to the airlock.
An EVA-suited individual, tall and skinny even by spaceborn standards, hauled him into the chamber and coiled up the rope. When the lock had pressurized, Mendoza removed his helmet with a grunt of relief.
It continued to blare its warning in his hand. He hardly noticed.
His rescuer had removed his own helmet, revealing a face that Mendoza knew.
Kiyoshi Yonezawa had grown a moustache. Still, Mendoza recognized him.
They had last met on board the Vesta Express, millions of klicks from here.
“Christ, that thing is loud,” Kiyoshi said. “Gimme.” He took Mendoza’s helmet and whacked it against the inside of the airlock’s outer hatch. It fell silent.
“Was that you, talking to me in my helmet?”
“Nope,” Kiyoshi said. “That was my kid brother.”
“I need to go to Mercury.”
Kiyoshi wasn’t listening. “Come on, get strapped in. We’re launching in nine minutes.”
xi.
Mendoza tumbled into the Superlifter’s bridge. Cramped, horseshoe-shaped, it smelled fetid. Fr. Lynch sat nearest to the airlock, in the comms officer’s couch. His tense expression did not relax, but his voice was warm. “You made it, God be praised! I’m sorry I left you behind, Mendoza, but I thought you’d be all right with Franckel and his people. There was no time to tell you …”
“It was my fault,” Kiyoshi said. “I wanted to get moving. We were supposed to be gone by now, but our launch slot got moved back.” Mendoza realized that Kiyoshi had been there in the squatters’ hab in the shipping terminal. He’d been the guy in the bandanna. Now he threw his long legs over the pilot’s couch. “Thankfully, we’re cleared to launch now. Hey, guy, I said strap in.”
Mendoza squeezed behind him, heading for the astrogator’s couch, which was unoccupied.
“Not there!”
“For crap’s sake, bro,” said a disembodied voice. It was the voice that had guided Mendoza through the launch zone. Male, youngish, with the same slight accent that tinctured Kiyoshi’s English. “He can have my couch. I don’t need it.”
“No, that’s OK.” Mendoza retraced his steps and sat down in the co-pilot’s couch. The co-pilot didn’t have much to do on a Superlifter. It was a prestige position. The couch recontoured itself to cradle his body. Kiyoshi spoke tersely into the radio, confirming to the Spaceport Authority that he was ready to launch.
The bridge had no windows, of course. Windows had gone out with chemical rockets. But the co-pilot’s couch had its own screen. Mendoza tested out the fingertip controls and found an external optical feed. Out in the launch zone, nothing was happening. The distant terminals reclined against the crater wall like sleeping lions. He couldn’t believe it would be this easy to get away.
The hum of systems built to a roar. The Superlifter rattled like a can full of pebbles. Kiyoshi glanced over at Mendoza’s screen. “What are you doing?” he yelled above the din.
“I was worried they might be coming after me!”
“Who, security? Nah! You’re just another illegal emigrant!”
Mendoza realized that Kiyoshi did not know what he’d just gone through. None of them did.
“It’s Derek Lorna! His phavatar killed five people! I barely escaped!”
“Later,” Kiyoshi said distractedly. To someone else, he shouted, “The toroidal field magnet isn’t acting fixed!”
“It’s fine,” the disembodied voice said. “It’s just a problem with the display.” Mendoza assumed Kiyoshi’s brother must be sitting at the far end of the horseshoe, beyond the unoccupied astrogator’s couch, out of sight.
“The toroidal whatsit, is that not a crucial component?” Fr. Lynch asked. He sounded uneasy. Or maybe Mendoza was projecting. He had never flown on a spaceship this small. It felt like it was shaking itself apart.
“Kinda, yeah! If it fails, we’ll splatter 30-million-degree plasma all over the spaceport!” Kiyoshi bared his teeth in a grin.
The roaring and rattling went on. Only when g-force clamped down on his body did Mendoza know they’d launched. The pressure caught him in a less-than-ideal position—head turned towards Kiyoshi, one arm across his lap—and rapidly grew unbearable. He could not lift his arm off his lap. With his head pinned sideways, he stared helplessly at the others. Kiyoshi lay breathing heavily, his mouth open. On Kiyoshi’s other side, Fr. Lynch looked like a dead martyr. Both men took on a gaunt appearance as the g-force pulled their faces tight on their skulls.
Mendoza’s cast interpreted the gees as an ongoing impact. It compressed his ribcage even more in a misguided attempt to brace him. He grew short of breath. Grayness ate at his vision.
The g-force vanished.
Gravity itself vanished.
All over the bridge, things floated up into the air: empty drink pouches, disposable screens, a box of drywipes, a Hamleys teddy-bear the size of a toddler.
Fr. Lynch popped upright in his couch. “Lord! Could you not have taken that a bit easier, Yonezawa?”
“2.36 km/s isn’t a spacewalk,” Kiyoshi said. He floated forward in his straps and squinted at his screens.
“I’ve done that launch plenty of times before, in a spaceplane,” Mendoza found his voice. “It was never like that.”
“Spaceplanes don’t launch vertically. Don’t be a wimp. You’ve got padding, you should have been OK.” Kiyoshi reached over and slapped Mendoza’s stomach, but his smile did not last. “Hey, Jun. Does it look to you like that thing over there is pointing a laser at us?”
“Yes,” said the disembodied voice.
“Does it, moreover, look like a targeting laser?”
“Yes.”
“You think that’s SOP?”
“Hang on,” the voice of his brother said. “I’m trying to talk to it … Oh.”
“What?”
“Yo, Belter scum,” said a new voice, from the comms screen in front of Fr. Lynch. “Looks like you forgot to go through customs.”
&
nbsp; “Belter scum!” Kiyoshi yelped. “I was born inside Venus’s orbit. At least get your insults right.”
“Sorry about that,” the voice said, not sounding sorry at all. “Just applying statistical averages. Mostly, when people try to smuggle shit off Luna, they turn out to be Belters. And your destination is 6 Hebe, unless you’re lying about that, too. What happened to your customs declaration?”
“I filed it,” Kiyoshi said. His fingers danced in the air, keying commands into virtual consoles that only he could see.
He probably had filed it, Mendoza thought. And then it had vanished. How very mysterious.
“Yeah? Because I’m not seeing it here. So, tell you what, Katana, why don’t you just return to Faustini Spaceport and we’ll re-do that declaration, make sure it’s accurate and complete. I’ll have an inspection team standing by to check your cargo hold, just in case. Ho, ho, ho.”
“Did this asshole really just say ‘Ho, ho, ho’?” Kiyoshi shook his head. “I’ll return if you like, but I should warn you that the toroidal field magnet in my tokamak has been acting up. I want to run an eyes-on inspection before attempting another burn.” He grinned at the others, holding up crossed fingers.
“Is that so? Thanks for letting me know. In that case, safety considerations require me to frag you in orbit. Alternatively, you can quit with the pathetic dissimulation and return to the spaceport as instructed.”
“Radar scan completed,” said Kiyoshi’s brother. “It’s a Precision Orbital Risk Management System.”
“Susmaryosep,” Mendoza gasped. “A PORMS.”
He had tangled with a PORMS on 4 Vesta. That one had threatened to frag him, too. The difference was, he didn’t think this one was bluffing. Barely an hour had passed since he witnessed the coldblooded murder of five people. “We can’t go back! They’ll kill us!”
“There are eight PORMSes in orbit around Luna,” Kiyoshi’s brother said. “Four are in low frozen orbits, at inclinations of 27º, 50º, 76º, and 86º. That last one’s the guy we’re dealing with.” He added something in what Mendoza assumed was Japanese. Kiyoshi shot back a reply in the same language. “Well, no,” his brother said. “Because the other four are in stable, highly elliptical orbits that go out to 8,000 kilometers at apoapsis. Basically, they’ve got you covered from all directions. The one thing you might be able to do is land near the equator and evade them on the surface, or under it.”
“We had this discussion,” Kiyoshi said. “I’m through with Luna. And I’m certainly not going back with the House of freaking Saud on my tail.”
“It’s not the House of Saud that’s behind this,” Fr. Lynch said. His hands were folded in his lap, knuckles bone-yellow. “It’s Derek Lorna and the Hope family.”
“Show me the daylight between them,” Kiyoshi said. “There isn’t any.”
“Well, Katana? We’ve modelled your mass profile based on your velocity and thrust capacity, and the numbers do not match your declared wet mass. What’ve you got on board that you didn’t declare?”
“Heads up” Jun shouted. “It’s targeting us!”
“Christ!” Kiyoshi grabbed a square white cardboard box out of the air and brandished it. “The only thing I didn’t declare was a few pastries!”
The Superlifter accelerated. All the rubbish floating in the air drifted back to the floor. A dirty sock hit Mendoza in the face.
“What are you doing, you lunatic?” Fr. Lynch shouted. “You can’t outrun the PORMSnet!”
“Transferring into a higher orbit,” Kiyoshi said. The box of pastries had sunk onto his lap. He typed on its greasy surface. Mendoza strained for a glimpse of Kiyoshi’s screens, but the box blocked his view of all but a corner of what appeared to be a radar plot. Two PORMSes showed up as sullen red stars. The dotted lines of firing vectors reached out from them.
Mendoza happened to know—because it was Derek Lorna’s idea of small talk—that the PORMSes orbiting Luna were not actually big-ass guns, the way most people imagined them. They were modular arrays of lasers 100 meters across. They synchronized their laser beams to vaporize space debris, and it was claimed that they could also handle PLAN fighter ships, if the PLAN ever dared to assault Luna in the future.
So they would have no trouble at all with a Superlifter.
For the second time in as many hours, Mendoza prepared to die.
“Hey!” barked the PORMS operator. “This is your final warning, Katana! Cease maneuvering immediately, or there won’t be enough of you left to bury!”
Still typing with one hand, Kiyoshi opened the box on his lap and took out a fist-sized, golden-brown pastry. He bit into it. Cream flecked his moustache. “Been nice talking to you, too,” he said with his mouth full. “Bye now.”
Mendoza’s perception of gravity increased. The ship startled to rattle again.
Kiyoshi’s brother shouted something in Japanese.
Kiyoshi shouted back, his eyes wide and angry, gesturing with his half-eaten pastry.
All at once, the rattling ceased.
Weightless once more, the clutter resumed its mid-air gavotte.
“Oh boy,” Kiyoshi muttered. He slumped back in his couch and ate another huge bite of pastry. His fringe stuck to his forehead, lank with sweat. Mendoza, too, was soaked in cold sweat. He breathed shallowly, unsure whether he could count on surviving for another few minutes or not.
Shockingly loud, the PORMS operator’s voice bellowed, “Oi! Katana, where the fuck are you! Where’d he go? Asshole was right THERE!”
An eldritch grin split Kiyoshi’s face. “And here we go,” he murmured, “slouching right past you, under your stupid goddamn nose. Heh. I love this part.”
“He’s GONE! How could he just fucking DISAPPEAR? What the FUCK?”
Kiyoshi twisted a virtual dial, cutting the PORMS operator’s rant off.
Fr. Lynch coughed. “Would I be right in thinking you just deployed the secret weapon I’ve heard about?”
“Yup. The Ghost.”
“Your man seemed to think we’d disappeared.”.
“As far as he was concerned,” Kiyoshi said, “we did. We vanished off his radar. His targeting systems are no longer able to track us by infrared, visual imaging, or—”
A klaxon erupted. Kiyoshi’s eyes widened. He bounced out of his couch, vaulted over Mendoza, and plunged through a hatch in the rear of the bridge.
“Are we hit?!?” Fr. Lynch yelled. He seemed to be staring at the astrogator’s couch, where there was nothing except the box of pastries Kiyoshi had put down.
The klaxon fell silent.
The lights went off.
Hit! Drifting in the dark!
Kiyoshi returned to the bridge. “Looks like we took a glancing hit from a single laser. Spread targeting: the PORMS operator cranked his field of fire as wide as it would go, and got lucky. It ablated a section of our drive shield. That might have given our position away, if the laser reflected back to the PORMS. But we’re still not dead, so I guess he decided we weren’t hot enough to be a ship.”
Kiyoshi squinted around in the dark for his half-eaten pastry. Mendoza pointed. Kiyoshi snagged it out of the air and strapped himself in again.
“Have to keep the lights off for now,” he said with his mouth full. “In fact, everything’s turned off that can be. It might get a bit hot in here.”
“Let me test my understanding,” Fr. Lynch said. He seemed to be talking past Kiyoshi, to the empty astrogator’s couch. “This Ghost system makes ships invisible.”
“He can’t answer you right now,” Kiyoshi said.
“Is there something wrong with him?”
“No,” Kiyoshi said. “It’s just how the system works.”
Mendoza interrupted, “How does it work? Are you saying we’re fully stealthed?”
“Yes, which is why we’re not using the radio. Or any of our active scanning systems.” The radar plot had gone blank. “This part I don’t like,” Kiyoshi said, frowning. “Good thing space is so big. We�
�re not likely to bump into anything.”
“But that’s impossible,” Mendoza said. “I mean, heat emissions from the drive.”
“We’re coasting at the moment.”
“Still. The temperature inside a tokamak is hotter than the sun. You can’t stealth that. It’s not possible.” Mendoza glanced at Fr. Lynch for confirmation of this self-evident fact.
The Jesuit was staring at the astrogator’s couch. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Don’t look if it bothers you, Father,” Kiyoshi snapped. “It’s not real.”
Mendoza had no idea what was going on.
Kiyoshi wiped the back of one hand across his mouth. Mendoza noticed that he was purposely not looking at the astrogator’s couch. He twisted around to face Mendoza. “So now we’ve got a few minutes to kill, why don’t you tell me what happened back there? They didn’t lose my customs declaration on account of one illegal emigrant.” He nodded at Fr. Lynch. “Or even two.”
“Are you familiar with the name of Derek Lorna?” Mendoza said.
“Heard of him.”
“Well, Father Lynch may have mentioned that he was after me. He was afraid I’d reveal that he tried to rig the election … did rig it, in the end. To make a long story short, he caught me. I got shot; that was your friends, Father. The squatters.”
Fr. Lynch shook his head. “They were on edge after that business at Farm Eighty-One. Did you frighten them?”
Mendoza almost laughed. Me, frighten THEM? “I was pretty frightened myself. I woke up in a clinic at the spaceport. Derek Lorna saved my life, but only so I could help his B team steal the election. After we finished the job, he killed them all, to stop them from talking. He’d have killed me, too, but I got away.” He closed his eyes. He remembered how the waterfall in the chapel had acted up. If not for that, he’d be dead now.
“I’m sorry,” Fr. Lynch said. “I underestimated Lorna. I thought we’d thrown him off our trail.”
“What election?” Kiyoshi said.
“Don’t you watch the news?”
“There’s a lot to keep track of.”
It was humbling to realize how little this stuff mattered to other people. “The election for the directorship of UNVRP? The outfit I work for?”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 105