Lucy knew how slowly time moved for her when she was waiting, but this was ridiculous. Though it was too
damn dark to check her wrist-aid for the time, she was sure more than ten minutes had passed. There was nothing she could do but wait in the dark, and mentally rehearse the moves that would get her to Lock Six. As best she could remember, Six should be on the opposite side of the deck.
"Here's the tea," Wendell announced in a loud, clear voice as he came in. Cynthia nearly jumped half out of her skin.
"Oh—you startled me," Cynthia said, trying to regain her composure. She took her tea and smiled at him. "Thanks.
"No problem. So how's it look out there?"
"Very quiet. No one changing orbit, so far as I can see."
"Good. So I guess we can talk a bit, then, now that you're caught up."
That was exactly the last thing Cynthia was in the mood for, but it would cover for her when all hell broke loose in a minute or two. "I guess so," she said, smiling. She was just beginning to strain her imagination, trying to think of a topic she could possibly discuss with him, then a shrill beep, beep came on at the radar room's security console.
"Oh, hell," Wendell said as he crossed to see what the alarm was.
"What is it?" Cynthia asked. Either they had caught Lucy or Gremloid had just tossed his diversion into the main system.
"Hold on a sec—I'm not that good with this thing. All—oh, no big deal, not our section. Fuel leak in the zero-gee section. Happens all the time. They'll get it fixed.”
"Oh."
"So, anyway," Wendell said cheerfully. "Know what I really liked about last night's show?"
"Tell me."
The alert might not have bothered Wendell, but the two sentries in Bay Three got pretty excited. It was more than a beep, beep to them. A huge voice shouted down at them, "Evacuate and seal off this compartment. Explosive fuel leak detected. All personnel evacuate this compartment." A siren started, and the booming warning voice repeated again and again. The two of them were out the personnel hatch in nothing flat.
Lucy watched the two of them get out and dog the hatch behind them. Then she pulled herself up from behind her packing cases and kicked off toward Lock Six. Everything going well so far—
There was a clank and a thud as the personnel hatch was pulled back open. Lucy grabbed at a handhold and pulled herself down, taking cover behind a pressure vessel. The main lighting came on, dazzling her eyes.
"We saw you, whoever you are. You should have remembered that hatch has a viewport. Come on out."
"Sergeant Mosgrove, that could be a real leak warning. It's still repeating. Let's get out of here."
"Shut up, Sammy. Whoever is in here jiggered that alarm to get us to leave our posts. You want to steal a ship? Go ahead and try, you lousy CI bastard. I knew you creeps couldn't be trusted."
"How do you know it's a CI?"
"Who else would be after a ship?" Mosgrove growled. "Come on out, 'cause we're coming in."
Lucy's heart was pounding fit to break through her ribs, and she found her gun in her hand. She pulled herself along the ropes and cables that held down the cargo, peering around the packing cases, trying to get a sight line. The booming voice repeated its warning. Soon other sentries would come, to check on their comrades. She didn't have time to fight these guys. If she could get to Lock Six . . . It should be a small lock, its hatch set flush with the deck. There. Ten meters away, across open deck—
She spotted one of the Guards and fired before she could think. A young kid, maybe nineteen, and he screamed as her laser chopped his hand off.
Mosgrove, a sour-faced man of indeterminate age, came up behind the younger man, and Lucy felt a terrible pain in her left hand and caught a whiff of cooking meat. Mosgrove had fired and hit her. She fired her own weapon right in his face, and her enemy became a corpse before he could lift a hand to shield himself.
Lucy forced herself to take their guns. She might need weapons where she was going.
Ninety seconds later she was cycled through Lock Six and strapped into the pilot's chair in a Hero-Class lander.
She thought of two men, one dead and one maimed, and she didn't feel very hero-class herself. Then she started flicking switches and trying to remember what she could about now the Guards flew these things.
The radar room was wired into Launch and Recovery Control, of course. Cynthia's own radars were watching a lot further out than the skin of Ariadne. L&R would call her, ask to confirm an unauthorized launch the moment it happened. Cynthia chatted aimlessly with the endlessly dull Wendell, waiting for the call. The comm light lit up. "Excuse me a second, Wendell." She hit the answer key. "Radar room here." She had to keep her voice calm.
"Cyn, this is Schiller over in L&R. We've got a sensor light here showing an open docking collar where a lander's supposed to be. Is that a bum sensor or did a ship really drift loose over there?"
"Hmm. Stand by. I'll have to reconfigure for a close scan. But we got a reading of a fuel leak over there."
"Yeah, we got that too. Sounds like a right nasty malfunction."
"Could be the lander's pilot cast loose to get clear of a possible explosion."
"Yeah, we thought of that. Got it yet?"
"Hang in there Sam. The controls seem a little sluggish for some reason."
Sam Schiller wasn't especially concerned up until that moment. Little malfs like this were what he was here for.
But then something strange happened. As he listened over his headset, Cynthia started whistling, badly.
Cyn never whistled. It wasn't in her character. Neither was the tune, a breezy little bit of froth. Cyn was big on the classics, and on the Atonalists. But that tune sounded familiar. A very old pop song that had been dredged up out of someone's memory for some reason. What was it? Schiller remembered some of the CIs singing it to tease—
Whoa. That was it. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. They had used to kid Calder with it, back on the Venera.
And Wu was no ladder. Schiller had been, once, but living in the enemy's lap had drained that from him and left a residue of paranoia imagination. "Ah, Cynthia. I've got a lot of what sounds like room noise on the line. Please switch to your headset, and I'll do the same."
"Stand by." There was a click. "On headsets now."
Schiller plugged the tiny speaker into his ear. "Okay, if I keep my voice down we're private at this end. You trying to tell me something?"
"Affirmative."
Great. Some Guard was breathing down her neck. At least the L&R sentry was across the room. "Understood. Something's up, but you can't tell me because of our babysitter. He can hear what you say, but not what I say."
"Affirmative," Cynthia's voice said, a strange, false light-heartedness in her tone.
"So who the hell is on that lander?"
"You'll have to trust the readings I just gave a bit longer, Sam. Let's just take our time and do it right, so we don't lose one."
"Okay, Calder's on that thing, somehow, and you want me to stall. What the hell is going on?"
"No info yet, Sam. Stand by." There was a long pause. "I have some sort of very close-in radar contact. We might need to put in a call to Search and Rescue."
Sam Schiller wasn't very good at this sort of thing. He was glad Cynthia could think fast. Search and Rescue was one banged-up old cargo ship and whichever two Guard pilots who wanted a chance to catch up on their sleep. The longer it took to rouse them, the longer it would be until someone figured out there was an escape in progress and called Fighter Command. And the way Cynthia was running things, there wouldn't be anything on the record to show the CIs had aided the escape or impeded the Guards. Unless they were tapping the intercom, in which case Schiller knew he was going to be shot. Schiller reached for the S&R phone and swore to himself. He didn't want to be good at this sort of thing.
At least laser wounds didn't bleed much, though this one hurt like hell. It really didn't look too bad, a slash of angry red along her w
rist and her pinky. There were already signs of some nasty blistering, though.
There wasn't time for painkillers or first aid. She had to get this tub out of here, below the radar horizon. And this was the second time she had ridden a Guard ship without knowing the vehicle's name. If Hero-Class boats even rated names. Might just be a number.
She had kicked free of Ariadne with maximum thrust of her maneuvering jets. Now she spun ship and set up for retro-fire. Get down, get away, then worry about fancy stuff.
She punched some buttons and brought up the inertial tracker in a set of ground coordinates. It had taken hours with C'astille to figure out the coordinates of Lucy's landing site. The Outposter had some trouble with human mapping conventions, but nothing compared to the trouble Lucy had with the native's charts. C'astille wanted her several hundred kilometers north of the Guardian contact site.
Lucy knew that if she missed that landing site by too much, she was a dead woman.
With any luck, the landing site would be on the far side of planet from her current position, with the bulk of a whole world to hide her movements. There hadn't been any way to time it out. She swore a blue streak when the navigation computer showed her that the landing site was, at the moment, almost directly beneath her lander. The Guards would have perfect line-of-sight on her all the way in if she made a direct approach. So much for luck.
Okay, it was bloody well time to work with what she had. A minimum power reentry would land her about one hundred eighty degrees away from where she was now. She checked the map display in the inertial guidance computer. There was open ocean on the opposite side of the globe. That was a start. Two minutes later the nameless lander fired its engines in retro-fire.
Twenty minutes. Cynthia Wu felt the sweat coming out of every pore in her body. Twenty lousy minutes was all she and Sam had been able to buy for Lucy. Now all hell was indeed breaking loose. One dead, one badly injured in Bay Three. Fighter Command, up on Nike Station, had jumped with both feet four minutes ago and would have their fighters scrambled in another two. They had patched into the radar feed from Ariadne, and Cynthia had no way of cutting the feed. They were running her radars by remote now, combining her radar returns with their own. All Cynthia could do was watch the radar screens and pray that Lucy could get herself lost. And fast. If she could hit atmosphere, get behind the planet, out of line-of-sight, she might pull it off.
First the Ariadne's beacon slid behind the planet and winked out, then Nike's. Loss of signal. Over the radar horizon. Thank God. If she couldn't see them anymore, then they couldn't see her. Lucy rode her lander down, and finally the damn thing hit air. A plume of superheated air grew around her, became ionized, glowed fiercely in the darkness as she slid into the night side of the world below. She had to assume some ship or station overhead would spot so bright a thing as a night reentry. But without good radar and careful tracking, things that only Ariadne and Nike were equipped for, the Guards wouldn't t have enough to find her, especially if she were maneuvering in the atmosphere—something she very much intended to do.
She wanted to try an old idea, dreamed up in the very beginning of space flight, or perhaps even earlier. Rock skipping. Instead of plowing straight down into the atmosphere, she would use the lander's energy of velocity to bounce in and out of the upper atmosphere several times. It would play hob with her heat shield, but she only wanted to use the thing this once. She pitched the lander around until her conical shape produced more lift than drag and started gaining altitude once more, until she was flung clear of the sensible atmosphere. Back in vacuum, her lander again became a purely ballistic vehicle, her velocity still very high, in the thousands of kilometers an hour, but just barely sub-orbital. The little craft soon began to fell again, this time half way around the world from her first entry. Lucy swung the nose around again, the conical lander in effect becoming a large, crude airfoil. Again she was flung clear of the air, but this time not so high, not so far.
She checked the situation in the guidance display. Outpost was spinning on its axis, and the Guardian orbital stations were moving in their orbits. Her planned landing site was now well out of their line-of-sight. And her oddball entry was probably enough to lose any fighters they might have scrambled.
The landing site was barely in range for a gliding reentry. Her lander started to fall in toward the planet again, for the last time. She was going to make it. Then all she had to do was sit tight and wait for C'astille's people to find her. She hoped they took their time. Lucy felt about due for a breather.
Fighter command never tracked her second and third entries, just the first. The computers tracked that one as terminating in open ocean, and a human couldn't survive long on Outpost anyway. The Guards listed Calder as died trying to escape.
Cynthia and Sam were afraid they were right.
CHAPTER TWELVE Aboard HMS Impervious, in Orbit of Britannica
Commander Joslyn Marie Cooper Larson, Royal Britannic Navy, couldn't help liking the poor old dear. Oh, there was no doubt that he had a strong fondness for the bottle, and there was probably truth to the rumor that he had been posted to Britannica thirty years ago to keep his slightly drunken self as far as possible from London society and politics. But none of that mattered. Great Uncle George—or Captain Sir George Wilfred Thomas, when they were in uniform—was a most courteous, thoughtful, and hospitable man.
If the mark of a true, blue, gentleman was the ability to behave well under trying circumstances, then Sir George had proved himself to be among the truest and bluest. He was master of the HMS Impervious, one of the carrier ships Joslyn's husband Mac had campaigned against. Sir George had been the reserve captain, charged with maintaining her in storage, for the last ten Earth years. And yet Sir George hadn't held Mac's words against Joslyn, though she couldn't have blamed him if he had. Instead, he had most gallantly asked her to serve as official hostess at tonight's reception. A visiting delegation of flag-rank officers from half the members of the League was there in celebration of the Imp's recommissioning. If anything, Sir George seemed delighted at the chance to twit the stuffier officers with his choice of a hostess.
Sir George himself was splendidly turned out in an elegantly tailored formal dress uniform, a chestful of ribbons for who-knows-what glittering against the sleek black of his jacket, all his braid and insignia brushed and polished and perfect. He smiled and joked with everyone as the reception line moved past, the picture of a hale and hearty old man, his tall, thin figure the natural focus of attention. There was not the slightest hint of a hair left on his smooth-polished scalp, and his snow-white eyebrows bounded up and down as he talked. The only wrinkles on his face were crow's-feet and laugh lines. Fondness for the bottle or no, his complexion was fresh-scrubbed, pink and healthy, with no trace of the mottled skin or liver patches one might expect, and the grip of his handshake was still firm and strong.
It was a festive night. Hangar One, decorated with bunting and flags, with thick carpeting rolled out, a walnut dance floor laid over the steel decks, and a Navy band playing an elegant old refrain, looked as if it had been designed to double as a ballroom—as indeed it had.
Joslyn looked lovely that night, and knew it, and enjoyed the feat. The Royal Britannic Navy didn't have a uniform for officers, female, formal evening, but instead expected its female officers to "select a gown of color, cut, and style suitable to the occasion." It was one of the few regulations Joslyn actually enjoyed obeying. She had literally let her hair down, out of the usual tight braid, and it fell in long, full, golden-brown waves to lie on her bare shoulders. She wore a flowing, strapless evening gown of midnight black, woven of a sheer, glistening fabric that caught the light as she moved. She was tall and slender, and the gown suited her exactly, adding a special grace to her every move. She wore a single strand of pearls around her throat, and matching pearl stud earrings. Her blue eyes and peaches-and-cream complexion completed the picture of a charming and lovely young upper-class woman. She was that, but she
was also a skilled pilot, and perhaps the most experienced combat veteran aboard the Impervious. She had killed her share of Guardians, a hard fact to keep in mind as she greeted the guests with a charmingly shy and youthful smile.
Joslyn was glad, now, that Uncle George had asked her to play the part of hostess. She didn't know or care if it was some complicated political ploy of his, or if he simply thought it would be fun. Joslyn herself could have held a few grudges against a few people, but she had concluded it wasn't worth the effort. The Office of Personnel for one, but then they had only cut the orders the Britannic High Command had told them to cut, if the scuttlebutt was to be believed. She greeted Admiral Samuel Whitmore of the High Command with a smile, and thought daggers at the bugger, just in case he had been the one with the gallows sense of humor, posting her to a ship her husband said was a deathtrap.
She didn't so much mind being posted away from Mac. Oh, she missed him terribly, of course. And she was furious at Whitmore and anyone else in the Royal Britannic Navy who might have been behind the order that had yanked her home and away from the Survey Service. But she was Navy, from a Navy family, and one had to expect to be separated from a husband in wartime. That came with the territory of military life. If Mac had been a civilian, they'd probably be just as far from each other right now, for all practical purposes.
And she had the comforting knowledge that Mac was safe. For far too long in those dreadful months in the New Finnish system, she had been alone in the I.M., waiting, never knowing from moment to moment if he was dead or alive, knowing only that he was in constant danger.
At least now she knew he lived. And they could write each other, send recordings. That should have been enough. But she loved him very much.
Yet it was good to be home, or at least in orbit around home. And she could catch a shuttle down to Kings Town Field and be home with Mummy and Dad in twelve hours whenever she could wangle a pass. She felt more British than she had in a long time. She had travelled widely, seen many ways of doing many things, but it was good to be home, and be surrounded by the ways she had learned as a child. It was good to be where everyone knew the importance of warming the teapot properly, and trivets and elaborate gardens and digestive biscuits and driving on the left side of the road were quite normal, the done things, rather than quaint, charming old customs, survivals of an earlier age.
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