“Mostly surface shipping, unfortunately, not space.”
“Why do I have the feeling that there’s more to this than I want to know?”
“Because you ought to, and because that’s true of most things in life. Anyway, it’s pretty easy to see what they’re up to--trick the prize crew into abandoning the bridge, toss them overboard in life rafts, and bet the rest of the prize crew is more interested in rescue than pursuit.”
Veronica’s brow furrowed as she leaned into the schematic, “They got Part 1 done pretty well. I think we overplayed our hand with our high-speed snipe hunt game. Part 2 is not so much, though - the Cache has a fourteen hour air supply, they can hold out until 204 gets here if worst comes to worst, but I’d rather not let it.”
Yeboah glanced at the schematics.
“So we start reaching into our own bag of unpleasant surprises.” suggested Kellie, “I’m willing to bet he doesn’t realize we can board from a hull service airlock. He can’t keep the ship depressurized for too long if he wants to go anywhere–his engine is still disabled and he can’t get to the engine room without repressurizing.”
Veronica added, “And if they’re as broke and desperate as you think, they probably don’t have enough air onboard to repeat that depressurization trick they just pulled.”
Yeboah put her finger on an airlock on the ventral side. “Like this one. My dad used to fly a D-42 before he had a bad ejection that ended his med certification. This airlock is locked out a lot because it’s in a position that’s shadowed from camera surveillance - but the lockout might not be guarded well enough from a software hack attempt. And I seem to recall that back at the academy, a certain Lieutenant enlisted a certain Sub-lieutenant for a similar exploit.”
Veronica laughed into her hand. “Nobody’s going to let me live that down for the rest of my career, are they?”
“Nope, so you might as well learn to enjoy it, Skip. The notoriety of having organized the biggest hack in the history of the Academy’s something worth bragging on.” Alyse thumped her on the back.
Veronica looked anxiously through the plastic canopy bubble as she manipulated the docking clamps. “We need to keep this quick. They’re going to be making their move pretty soon.” The small corvette was floating free now, in a precisely controlled spiral around her larger prey.
“We’ve got enough power to keep up with them if they’re dumb enough to make a break for it; what do they think they can get by forcing us to shove off?”
“Patience, Captain,” replied Alyse, “I think we need to give them twenty minutes or so, so they’re completely absorbed in repairing the lenses of their warp drive.”
Yeboah added, “If we jump on reconnecting too quickly, we’ll give the game away before it’s time for us to make our move, and we might force them into making a quick move.”
Veronica nodded at her crew. “I just feel guilty about leaving Leblanc and Bowman over there, y’know? We could have done this with a different configuration on the ship.”
“No we really couldn’t have. We needed pilot, organizational ability, and engineering talent over here and that left out the two lowest-ranked crewers. Those two have good heads on them, they’re not going to get too badly banged up, I think.” Kellie lounged in the gunnery seat while she watched Veronica deftly maneuver the tiny starship in a spiral around the transport. Her precision piloting skills were enviable.
“I think we’ve got a potential docking port at one-twenty degrees from where we started, Skip,” sang out Yeboah, “I’m going to pop downstairs to the sensor console to check it, but I think that’s our target.”
“I see it. There’s a ring on the hull, I just want a good map of it before we lock into it.”
Yeboah smiled, “Give me a second and I’ll have their grandmother’s graduation photos. We’ll be back in. Patience, Skip. Patience.”
Kellie shook her head, “Don’t lock onto the hull. They’ll hear that, and we’ll lose the element of surprise this op depends on. Just slave the Two-oh-Seven’s autopilot to keep her within five meters of the hull, and we’ll do a suit jump.”
Veronica laughed softly, “you two are absolutely nuts, and I’m proud to be working with you. Let’s get to it, before they catch on.”
*
“Looks like they’re making their move.” Ress watched the small starship alter its course around the bigger cargo hauler. “Not sure what it is, but we should make ours first–have the crew surround their enlisted and we can try to make them see reason.”
His commlink crackled, “Jonah, I don’t think I like what you’re doing. Taking hostages has more than enough room in it to put our necks firmly in a noose. I’ve been against this damn thing from the start.” came Mattingly’s stressed baritone over the speaker.
“Matt, you’ve been the doomsayer of this thing for the whole trip. Now I admit that taking drugs onboard without a cover cargo might not have been the smartest thing, but I think we can all agree that we didn’t even have that much of a choice. But you’ve been dragging your heels on getting the damn Navy off our boat that I thought for a while you might have decided to turn your coat for them.”
“What the fuck!? You’re insane. I love this boat, I’d never…” Mattingly’s voice crackled and popped as he was suddenly shouting in his escape pod.
“Or maybe I’ve been thinking clearly for the first time since we got boarded,” said Ress, cutting Mattingly off, “Being stuck on an airless ship gives you time to think, you know. Maybe you fucking lost your nerve, or figured ratting would get you a lighter sentence.”
“I can’t even believe I’m having this fucking conversation, Jonah. I’ve never rolled on you. Never. And we’ve been in trouble a lot worse than this.”
Ress pulled his temper back from the brink, “I’m sorry, Matt. This fucking thing has had me running on high stress and not very much sleep since we started it. I hated signing that loan with Ifrit as much as you did, but I had to keep a brave face for the crew. So let’s bury the hatchet and get our asses down to the engine room. I’ve got a plan. It’s a shitty plan, but it’s the only plan I got. To give the plan some teeth, though, we gotta get the engines back online.”
“And the Squids?”
“I don’t like hostage-taking any more than you do, Matt, but we’re probably going to need to bargain them for a head start. They probably have more ships incoming, and whatever else the Interstellar Navy is, they’re an honorable set of militaristic racketeers. Force them into an agreement, and they won’t renege on it.”
“So what we have to do, right now, is make them understand that we mean business?” Mattingly looked warily optimistic.
“Never said it was an easy sack of snakes we got handed. Just that we’ve got one we might be able to use.”
“Christ, Jonah, please tell me you’re not seriously thinking of what I think you’re thinking.”
“I wish I had any other choice, Matt. It’s not going to make me any happier to do this than it is you. But the kind of charges that two hundred k-tons of drugs are gonna get us will have us as very old men before we even have a chance of breathing free air again, and I don’t know about you but prison stations don’t agree with me. They didn’t when I was in the Navy and they won’t in the civilian world, either. So let’s get the hell out of here, while we still have a chance.”
“I’m really not happy with this situation now, but I don’t really see an alternate. They’ve backed us into a corner and we’ve only got a few ways left to get things turned around. But Jonah, if this comes to what I think it might, I want different cells. Don’t take me wrong, but everything about this run has been Hell.”
“Tell me about it. Goddamn Navy. Goddamn me for a fool.”
Chapter 11
The repairs took place at breakneck speed, each man working hard to get the lenses realigned with their driver coils. As the schematic had shown, half of the lenses had been broken entirely, so they’d had to move some around to get prope
r warp field coverage, or the whole thing would collapse when they went to light speed.
Ress laughed with the irony. When they’d started this run, they’d had to replace the damage of a mere two blown lenses–but those had gone with their entire driver coil arrays, and the driver coils now were intact.
Jonah Ress sat down in the helm seat in the auxiliary control room, not questioning why there wasn’t a Navy person there.
His uniform was filthy from crawling through the tunnels of the ship’s engine room reconnecting the warp lenses that could still be salvaged. There were snags in the tunic that meant that it would probably have to be discarded entirely.
The Navy people had gotten even better at their running game in the brief interim of depressurization.
“They’re somewhere in Hold Country, Ress, but damn it, we can’t pin ‘em down!” Foley’s voice had been pregnant with frustrated rage.
“Good, people. Remember, take them alive, we need them to get free from these guys.”
Ress hovered over the helm as he checked his course.
A proximity alert bit into his consciousness just as he was examining his course.
Another corvette, less than a hundred-thousand kilometers away and shedding velocity–and energy–fast.
He bit straight through his lip. The compensators hadn’t had the chance to spool up after he and Matt had jury-rigged them. The central core of the ship was protected already, but the holds. The damned holds…
Without full thrust in the next fifteen seconds, the noose would be inescapably closed.
Cracked vinyl gave under him in the auxiliary captain’s chair, blunt fingers flew along the emergency controls. Doing this would kill every person in his holds, along with those Navy assholes. Some of those people he’d been friends with for over a decade. Benson, Foley, Pritchart, they were all going to be missed. Ress comforted himself, thinking that most of his crew would probably still be in the acceleration-shielded central core of the ship rather than the holds.
“You made me do this. This is your fault.”
The results of an unprotected jump to six hundred gees would be unpleasant in other ways as well. He’d probably damage most of the cargo, which would put him in deep water with Duke Ifrit. And of course, he’d have to stop at a shadowport to hose out his holds.
A burst of paranoia and nerves drove Ress to double-check his helm’s telltales. He set in the course and acceleration. Six hundred gees for fifteen minutes would reduce any person in his holds to something vaguely resembling pâté.
His hand hovered over the COMMIT button.
“Nerves, Ress,” he told himself. I’m sorry, but there’s just no other way. He slapped his hand down on the button.
All of the telltales on the helm lit up bright red ERROR messages. The helm screen itself lit up with an archaic blue screen. May not accelerate at greater than nine gees without compensation active.
“Override, dammit!” He punched down on the button again.
ERROR
Ress stared in disbelief at the helm as it shut down. Furiously, he flipped the panel wide… and beheld a mess of cut and redirected wires beneath it. Someone had not only been in here but torn apart his controls just like on the main bridge.
He tried to hold his temper. Of course, the Alliance women were going to be sneaky. Women always were, and Navy women worse than any other kind.
Shifting over to the navigation console, he booted up the backup helm control program he had installed over there. Every smuggler had different ways of dealing with the Navy. Ress glowed with a vicious rage as he repeated the acceleration command and pushed the COMMIT button. He was far beyond rational thought, reacting with the pure rage of an animal being trapped in its own den.
This time the blue screen came up with the message, NOTTA CHANCE!
Ress restrained the urge to snatch the console from its roots and hurl it across the room. First, because he’d just tear his fingernails trying and it wouldn’t actually help anything. Second, because he had one more avenue available to him. Well, two more. He could wire his tablet straight into the engine control runs, bypassing the normal control system entirely…
There was the clearing of a throat, and Ress started, leaping up, back, and spinning as much as he could in the cramped command seat of his control room.
He found himself at gunpoint. The black grooved barrel of a 10mm handgun stared him down, and his hands slowly went up, so that the tall blonde woman behind that gun barrel could see that he wasn’t about to make any sudden moves. She crossed to the conn of the tiny bridge and sat down. From the two stripes on her shoulders and matching stripes at her wrists, she was only a Lieutenant, but she sat in his chair like God had put her there, and he fumed quietly. “If it was this easy, all the time, anyone could do it,” she mocked in her contralto voice.
“I’ll kill you.”
“No, you won’t,” the new voice belonged to that strangely young-looking woman wearing the stripes of a Master Chief Petty Officer, “You’ve already tried, and done a laughably bad job of it. I’d wager that your crew would be less than amused to find out that you tried to take them with us. We’re not going to tell them, because we’d like to have untainted testimony against you at the trial, but I’d still make that bet. By the way, you just added about… twenty? Twenty-five? Counts of attempted murder to the rap sheet we’re filing on you, Ress. You’re going away for a long time.”
That damned, overly-youthful petty chief gave him an incongruously sunny smile and keyed the intercom. In a syrupy-sweet voice she intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your prize crew speaking. We will be docking shortly. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright and locked position and prepare to be taken into custody. Thank you for flying Pan Alliance Galactic Airways, and we wish you better decision-making skills after you’re released from prison.”
Ress felt his mouth go dry. His crew had been sent on a damn snipe hunt after… whom, now, anyway… while these two set up their trap on his own auxiliary bridge. Their snipe hunt had itself been a snipe hunt set up by the Alliance crew to catch them off-guard and let them think they were calling the shots. But that also meant he still had a chance to come out on top--there were still two of their people and a lot more of his people in the holds. They could still turn this around.
Taking on a well-prepared spacer in light skinsuits with no helmets and only light handguns would be suicide, but it might be days before the flygirls were relieved by their mother ship, and a lot of things could happen in a few days.
“So you’ve managed to get me,” he said, “but you’ll never keep me.”
Veronica’s exultant laugh cut into Ress’ fantasy of a quick escape, “Mr. Ress, if you believe that, you’ve got another think coming. Four on the Floor is closing in our position as we speak. She’ll be here shortly–and Avenger is only a day out from our rendezvous. We’ll have you and your people–there’s no way you have left to win.”
“Perhaps we don’t need to win.”
“Oh, please.”
Chapter 12
Louis Bowman watched the mood in the hold turn positively sulfurous. Men were pulling weapons, and even naval powered armor might not necessarily protect him from the sheer mass of attack.
Of course, that depended on him being willing to let them hit him first. He did have a pulse rifle in each arm and a laser mounted on a pointing arm behind his shoulder. If worst came to worst, the set of explosive rocket-propelled grenades would put a hole in the skin of this measly little eggshell and kill everyone who wasn’t suited up. But that wouldn’t be exactly the best result, would it?
Louis and Natasha looked at each other nervously. Their survival for the next few hours might well depend on how well this crew listened to their captain’s orders. They were close to being back to back, and they knew that they wouldn’t be able to hide once the crew sprung their ambush.
Captain Gray’s plan had been a good one, but it had always carried the r
isk of the two of them becoming cornered. Even her misgivings about exposing the two most junior members of her crew to the greatest danger had been… well, maybe not baseless, but certainly pointless. They weren’t qualified for what she and Kellie had to do.
So they had cheerfully flown down into the cargo holds, presenting themselves as the most tempting targets they could. Despite the fact that Ress’ crew had been ordered to force them to give chase, the two had come under pursuit as soon as Kellie’s mocking announcement had gone out on the intercom. When they had full attention on them, they bolted for the furthest reaches of the ship that they could. The complicated, double-sided chase had become a dangerous competition between everyone involved, and every time Louis and Natasha had heard the hull creak a little bit louder, they told themselves it was just their imagination.
It was a snipe hunt, all right, and both young spacers’ adrenaline junkie sides reveled in it. They’d even gotten good at running and hiding, but sooner or later, they’d run out of places to run–this was not their ship, after all, and even having a real time schematic of the entire thing was no substitute for knowing it as one only knows one’s home.
“There’s only one of them in their ship, Captain, I say we take it and make ‘em trade.”
A contralto voice shot back over the speaker, “Don’t be stupid. We’ve cut every single control panel out of the ship. You can repair your control runs but you’ll never accomplish it before the Avenger returns to pick us up.”
“So?”
Sub-lieutenant Yeboah’s voice came over the speaker. “Also, we have a machine gun set up at the boarding tube. Which means trying to board our ship is going to end up with all of you very dead. Believe it or not, that’s an outcome we don’t want.”
Natasha and Louis looked at each other. The panic in the hold was building, and they were still isolated from any way out of it. “Captain, please don’t taunt the prisoners, we’re still in danger in here.”
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