The Arrant Knave had hit a freak micro-meteor. An actual, macroscopic rock, in deep space. Ress had never even been within a hundred kilometers of a space-borne micro-meteor before. But the lateral radar in the belly hadn’t had the resolution to pick out the damn rock before it had hit his ship and knocked a hole in its #4 cargo hold.
“Other than that time we got stuck in a Terril laser trap, we’ve never hit anything bigger than a fleck of paint,” Ress moaned. He hadn’t personally been at the helm when the actual strike occurred, and by the time he realized what was going on, they were already at maximum thrust. At that point, turning around and sheepishly loping back would have been the worst of both worlds.
Even then they might have made it to FTL if the Allied fighter hadn’t jolted their compromised structure with a kiloton-range nuclear warhead less than a tenth of a second’s flight ahead of him. Ress’ reflexes had wrenched the helm to starboard, but Knave had had too much momentum to completely avoid the blast, and the fringes of a nuclear explosion had lashed his ship broadside and completely destabilized the already fluctuating warp drive. A loosened gear bag had come depressingly close to killing Mattingly during the jolt. There were red lines through half of the newly-replaced warp lenses and the other half needed to be refocused before they could be reengaged at FTL speed, so Arrant Knave was right now a very expensive, high-tech asteroid. And now he had an Allied boarding party walking all over his ship, taking condemning evidence of him and his ship. He had to get away from these self-righteous Navy assholes–by guile if he could, but if he had to fight them, he would. He had to.
The Interstellar Navy had always treated drug runners as if they were the source of the chemicals in their holds, which was clearly nonsense –Ress’ job was to ship them from someone who did to a buyer, and he planned to receive his pay for delivering a hold full of valuable cargo. And they were impossible to bribe–unlike the Triangle Republic Navy they were in the general case annoyingly incorruptible. He didn’t know a chemistry set from a cooktop. It didn’t matter whether that cargo was molecular circuitry or neuroactive chemicals; the job was the job, and he was proud of getting his jobs done, no matter what anybody said about it.
Ress was even proud of the fact that he’d never muffed a delivery. After all, he had said, there were two kinds of businesspeople in this world–the ones who would get a job done even if it meant crawling over their momma’s corpse, and the ones you couldn’t count on.
If he couldn’t run away from them, then, Jonah Ress promised to kill them. It was easier to beat a murder rap where the only witnesses were dead than to beat a smuggling rap against living witnesses.
*
Sitting in the cockpit of Two-oh-Seven, Alyssa Yeboah was keeping her eye on everything going on inside the freighter. Unknown to Jonah Ress, she had hacked her way into the ship’s central network and planted an expert system there to feed all the information coming through its networked camera and transducer system into her console. Monitoring data streams for relevant intelligence was easy work for Navy computer systems, and Ress and Mattingly’s covert conversation had definitely fitted into the ‘relevant’ category.
“Lieutenant Gray, I think I may have found the captain of this bucket.”
“Good work, Sub-lieutenant. I’m coming back to Two-oh-Seven for a power nap, can you tag off with me for about two hours?”
“Aye-aye, Ma’am. I’m on my way to the power suit locker, see you in a few minutes.”
Veronica made her last jump to the boarding tube as Yeboah was stuffing the last of her braided locks into her power suit’s snoopy cap. “Thanks for this. I’m not that tired yet, but we’ve still got about eighteen hours before Two-oh-Four relieves us, and we need the maximum number of us on alert.”
“It would be really useful to have enough of us to have three rolling shifts of two. I don’t think the Alliance counted on corvettes being used for solo boarding when they sent out the RFP for a five-person crew.” Yeboah made a face.
Veronica returned it. “Probably not. Leblanc’s going to be the only person online in Two-oh-Seven for the next two hours, do you think she’s good for it?”
“I think so. She’s a kid, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders. And she’s nineteen and been through Marine training, you know, she’s not exactly a child.”
Veronica slid herself the rest of the way out of her power suit, wincing. No matter how carefully they padded those things, mechanical pieces always found some way to pull or pinch, and there were red lines all up her legs and down her arms. She rubbed them carefully, flexing her fingers as she walked into the ship’s interior.
A Navy shower still consisted of wetting down with as little water as possible, then turning off the water to lather before turning it back on to sluice off–again with as little water as possible. Shower completed, she wiped down the walls of the head and turned on the heat-drier. The water vapor would be filtered in the recycler along with the greywater generated by her shower, and then it would be circulated back into the ship’s water system. Nothing that could be preserved was wasted aboard a corvette, but it took several hours for the water used in showering to filter back into the tanks.
Her shower completed, Veronica put on a pair of soft black pants and a PROPERTY OF NAVY ATHLETICS t-shirt, and padded barefoot to the tiny galley.
She remembered part of Yeboah’s lecture on the layout of her ship–The food’s pretty depressing. We sneak aboard what we can from the mess, but the majority of what we have on-board is 3L ration packs that taste slightly worse than the cardboard their packages are made out of. Bread and leafy vegetables are the best thing to get aboard, and Alyse is a genius at getting both of them. After that are fruits–oranges, apples, that sort of thing.
The contents of a roast beef and gravy 3L pack would make a serviceable sandwich filling, if she could find that bread Yeboah had talked about, and maybe some lettuce. She found both in an insulated bag with Kellie’s name stenciled on it. The lettuce was actually green. God knew where she had gotten it, really, since actually green lettuce was not exactly usual provender aboard an ISN starship. Tinged with brown, maybe, but green lettuce could just as easily have been gold-plated, that was how rare it was.
To her plate, she added one of the oranges that had been her contribution to the sneaked-aboard food provisions, and she took a squeeze-bottle of juice. She finished the sandwich with a generous dollop of spicy brown mustard and took a big bite, doing some overdue paperwork as she ate. The captain of an Alliance ship–even if said captain was “merely” the command pilot of a corvette–was never truly off-duty.
In the back of her mind, she was starting to put together a plan. Their next objective was to subdue the smuggler crew without violence, and that would take making the bad eggs identify themselves so she could remove them. A small smile creased the corners of her lips with each bite of the sandwich.
She finished her sandwich, pushing the last inch of it into her mouth all at once, then looped the text and audio files she’d just created and sent them to Kellie’s suit computer.
Stretching, she realized that she had definitely been spending too much of the last half-hour avoiding rack time. She stepped into her bunk and then triggered its retraction. A moment later she was inside the wall and gravity flipped on its side, shifting her from standing to lying in bed, and she barely had enough time to recognize how sleepy she really was.
Chapter 9
Veronica woke and checked her clock. Ninety minutes exactly. As soon as she felt sure her legs would support her, she toggled her wakeup cycle and felt gravity rotate back to the deckward position, then the wall of her bunk opened away from her and she stepped out, walking to the head to swipe some toothpaste across her teeth. Spitting foam into the basin, she was bringing the last details of her plan into focus as she pulled on her skinsuit and made sure to check the plumbing connections (obnoxious and painful) and then slid herself into the middle of her power suit.
“Ye
boah, this is Gray, I’m on my way in. Relieve Leblanc on the flight deck and let her get a nap.”
“Aye-aye, Ma’am.”
“Bowman, you online?”
Kellie’s voice responded, “Negative, Ma’am, I sent him in for a nap about a half hour after you.”
Veronica nodded. “Roger that. When did you sleep last?”
“Before we hooked up, Ma’am, but I’m still good to go. I’m used to this.”
“Belay that, Chief. After we wake Bowman up, you’re taking a nap next. We’ve got fourteen hours before 204 gets here, and we need to keep the peace until then.” Veronica ran through her sleep cycles in her head. Stimtabs and power naps over two days of work was the opposite of ideal, but at least it wasn’t going to kill their functionality. If Two-oh-Seven had not been as close as she was, it would have been a lot worse. “In the meantime, meet me in the auxiliary control room. I have an idea that I’ve been playing with in my head while I’ve been sleeping.”
“By your command.” Veronica chuckled at the odd response. Making her way through the freighter, whose corridors were starting to become a little less unfamiliar, she quickly found herself next to one of the only three armored spaces in this entire ship–the auxiliary control center.
“Captain.”
“Alyse. You ready?”
“Aye-aye. If it’s a meeting you’ve in mind, let’s have it in a way that we can’t be eavesdropped on.”
Veronica cocked her head.
“Seal your suit.” She closed the doors to the airlock on either side of them.
Veronica Gray and Kellie Alyse huddled together between the companionway and the auxiliary control room. A cramped internal-access airlock, this one would maintain atmospheric pressure even if the entire rest of the ship were compromised - and was just barely large enough to accommodate two power suits. Even more cramped than the equivalent on a warship of this size, it just managed to fit in a captain’s repeater, a helm station and a sensor platform–the minimum required by law for a secondary bridge. Indeed, the service airlock probably had more actual space in it than the control room, once the consoles were taken out of the equation. Veronica rolled her faceplate closed after Kellie, and then the chief hit the airlock cycle button.
“I’m pretty sure the redheaded dumbass is their skipper,” said Veronica, pressing her faceplate to Kellie’s. Her nap had done more than just given her some much-needed sleep after twenty hours of wakefulness–it had given her unconscious mind time to mull over the information that they had gathered over the last several hours.
Kellie’s laugh reverberated through their faceplates. “I’m sure he is, too. He’s way too conveniently dopey whenever we ask him questions, and the other crew members are frustratingly vague on what he does. We just need to give him enough rope to start a cozy little riot.”
“We need to frustrate him enough that he’s reacting to us, and not acting–and that he’s flying solo, not collaborating with his crew. Which I think I know how to get started on. The easiest and fastest way to piss off any spaceship captain.”
“Screw with his feeling of having control over his ship.”
“And over himself. This guy’s your typical smuggler punk–he thinks he’s a lot harder than he really is. Let’s do it.” Veronica re-pressurized the airlock and the two went in separate directions, prepared to do their mischief to the control systems of the mid-haul freighter Arrant Knave.
*
Jonah Ress smiled most unpleasantly. His plan was working perfectly--Mattingly had set up a ship-wide snipe hunt for the intruders as soon as there were only two of them on board, and they had abandoned the bridge and engineering in a futile attempt to chase all his people down. The stealth systems of those damned suits made them hard to directly track, but it was easy to follow the hair-raising electricity of their jump systems. And it didn’t matter exactly where they were, as long as they weren’t here.
It had taken more than an hour of skulking through the accessways to get to his bridge without being spotted and giving it all away, and he was hot, dirty, and angry. But he was finally on the bridge of his ship, and he was going to teach that damn Navy crew a lesson in overconfidence. The fact that he hadn’t slept in a full day was irrelevant.
The helm console was a mess.
Ress turned to the engineering telltales to look at the damage his engine had taken. It wasn’t good–there were cracked lenses in half of his driver coil arrays, and the inertial compensator was offline. If he tried to get up to speed right now, he’d lose the other half his engine, but not before every single human being on his ship was mashed to hamburger. At this rate he might have to take another run from Ifrit just to cover repairs.
The consequences of that could wait until after he was safely back at FTL speed.
“Look, Matt, I’m on the bridge, but there’s a problem. The Alliance goons stripped out the helm console and wiped the nav. I need a couple of wire strippers and some solder.”
“Jonah, you might need to get to the engine room for that. Shit, they’re coming back, I gotta go.” Mattingly cut the comm link, leaving Ress alone with his frustration. At least he’d sounded about as frustrated as Ress felt, which perversely made him feel better. The anger of being boarded was pretty damn primeval - the enemy was in his home.
The engine room was sixty meters abaft the bridge and a deck down. Ress was not going to fucking crawl through air ducts that much further on his own goddamn starship! Not when he didn’t have to, anyway.
He flipped open a secret compartment on the bottom of his armrest. He’d installed one of these on every ship he’d ever owned–a secret hardware override for all of the ship’s functions. It was completely undetectable if you didn’t know exactly where to push on the side of the pedestal. It was totally secure. It was redundantly backed up to multiple places in the command chair’s wiring. And it would wipe every system on the ship and reinstall from hard storage backups, overriding any lockout or hack the Navy might have put in place.
Ress crowed in triumph as the consoles rebooted with full access. His monitors were showing the signs of a fierce internal chase - but an inconclusive one, frustratingly enough so. The two power suits were probably the younger pair of crewmen - on top of being naively eager to abandon their stations, they weren’t doing a very good job of following his men and women through the mazelike arrays of cargo containers. On the other hand, that also meant they might give up and start heading back. He couldn’t have that.
Ress remembered his merchant marine training. It might have been a couple decades rusty, but it was still valid enough. The last resort of every captain in a boarding situation is to depressurize the ship. He nodded fiercely and plugged in his personal tablet to the control systems of the ship. Everything looked green and clean, and he grunted in satisfaction as he hit the button that would open hidden stopcocks in the ship’s hull that had no purpose other than to completely drain his ship of air. Another button sealed and hard-locked the airlock doors.
A distinctive ululating alarm went off through the ship. The Alliance spacers would have no idea what it meant, but his did. Intentional depressurization imminent, find a hidey-hole. Men and women went scrambling for the nearest safe cover. Either the escape pods in their bays between the holds, or hidden life capsules built into the spinal core of the vessel.
The Alliance crewers would probably figure out what was happening in time to save themselves–they seemed to be on top of everything else he’d done so far, and they should have more than enough time to seal their suits. This was his almost-out-of-options plan. He didn’t have much left. Throwing himself on the mercy of the court was about as likely to work as flapping his arms to generate a warp field.
He pulled on his helmet and a pair of space gloves, turning his uniform into a full-on spacesuit–the bridge was one of the last two airtight spaces in the ship.
Next he had work to do down in engineering.
Chapter 10
In the corne
r of her eye, Natasha Leblanc noticed a readout that had been stable at 609 torr begin to decline. Her high school education reminded her that torr was a measure of air pressure - barometric pressure in millimeters of mercury.
“Bowman, it could just be my instrumentation - is pressure dropping?”
Bowman yelped softly.
“It’s not just my instrumentation - seal up for extravehicular.” Their helmets locked closed and air seals wuffed tight.
“Skip, Alyse, Yeboah, where are you guys?”
Veronica’s voice crackled over Leblanc’s helmet radio. “We’re on Two-oh-Seven, locked out through the ship side of the airlock. Do you two think you can get to the main airlock?”
Natasha glanced at Louis, whose helmet moved as if he were scanning a map in front of him–which in a sense was what he was actually doing, on a computer-rendered version of said map. That was worrying.
Louis spoke up, “Not without some serious cutters here - there’s at least two structural bulkheads between here and there that close automatically when air pressure starts dropping.” He looked at his pressure readout - less than 100 torr, but at least the drop in pressure was tailing off. “We can’t open our helmets now - pressure’s too low.”
Yeboah came in on the line. “You’re near a service airlock. Can you get there?”
“Not in these suits.”
“As long as you two are safe right now, you guys hole up out of the way. Do not under any circumstance enter an escape pod. We’ll be back in, but we need a solid plan before we attempt rescue. If they start coming back out of hiding, you guys give ‘em a merry chase like you were doing before.”
Veronica braced herself against the table over a 3d schematic of the D-42 class. “Kellie, tell me what you know about these damned things. You said you ran a shipping firm before you joined the Service.”
Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) Page 7