Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  “She’s not nine hundred stanyers old.” Natalya felt a laugh forming in her chest. “She can’t be a day over five-fifty.”

  The joke set Zoya off and the stress kept them laughing through the security lock, down the small craft dock, and up to the tiny scout craft resting on its skids at the far end.

  “Mercy Maude,” Zoya said. “Could you have parked any farther away?”

  Natalya just shook her head. “Cheapest slip. Not like I had a lot of spare credits, what with tuition and all.” She watched Zoya’s gaze take in the ship. “She’s not much to look at but she’s all mine.” She crossed to the lock amidships and keyed in a code to open the outer doors before leading her grav-trunk up the small ramp and into the lock. Zoya stood outside the ship, her grav-trunk behind her. Her gaze kept sweeping the ship. “Come on if you’re comin’. We need to leave and you’ve got the address.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Zoya said, jamming herself and the trunk into the lock. “I guess I never really appreciated it before.”

  Natalya keyed the lock sequence and the outer door closed so the inner could open. “One of the last exploration-class scouts still in service.” The door opened and she led the way into the ship proper. She patted the bulkhead as she passed. “Oswald Newmar flew a ship just like this one when he started filing claims in Venitz.”

  Zoya shook her head. “You sure it’s still spaceworthy?”

  Natalya grinned at her. “Well, this is a hell of a time to ask. Stash your trunk in there. We need to get out of here.” She nodded at a stateroom door and elbowed her way into a compartment across the passage, guiding her grav-trunk through the narrow door and locking it down. “I’ll get the engines warming up and file a flight plan for Halpern.”

  “Why Halpern?” Zoya asked, having difficulty with the narrowness of the small ship’s doors and the width of her grav-trunk.

  “It’s farther away and it’s not where Margaret Newmar said to file.”

  Zoya locked the trunk down and followed Natalya to the cockpit that served as bridge. “Well, she gave us a destination. You thinking of ditching that, too?”

  Natalya shook her head. “She never said it out loud. Nobody inside could have overheard.”

  Zoya stared at Natalya as she dropped her butt into the pilot’s couch and started slapping keys. “You’re not paranoid or anything, are you?” Zoya asked.

  Natalya threw her a smile. “Claustrophobic. Not paranoid.”

  Zoya looked at the tiny spaces around her. “Claustrophobic? And you fly a scout?”

  The ship vibrated and the blowers started a low whispering as the ship’s systems came online.

  “Once we’re out there, there’s plenty of room. I’ve never felt claustrophobic in space.” Natalya patted the seat next to her. “Sit. Navigation console. You remember how to lay a course?”

  Zoya made a rude sound and dropped into the couch. “Who taught you how to use the Mark Twelve consoles, huh?”

  Natalya grinned. “And who taught you orbital mechanics?”

  “As if. I knew more about orbital mechanics at twelve than you do now.” Zoya keyed the console open and started typing commands. “These aren’t Mark Twelves.”

  Natalya laughed. “No. Fourteens. One of the Plunkett fast packets upgraded. I picked these up for scrap value last spring. Took me all damn summer to get them installed and calibrated.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Buckle up,” Natalya said, pulling her own harness into place and snapping it down.

  Zoya looked up, her eyes wide in surprise. “Already?” She fumbled with her belts for a moment, untwisting them so they’d line up properly.

  “No, but any tick now we’ll get clearance and I want to be moving before they change their minds.”

  Zoya pulled out her tablet and slaved it to the console, transferring the coordinates for their jump.

  Natalya watched the comms screen for the permission from traffic control to undock. “Come on, come on. How long does it take to let us out?”

  Zoya chuckled. “We’re not exactly high on their priority list. You remember working there in our third year, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I remember.” She sighed. “But normally I get buzzed right through.”

  “I’m guessing that normally you don’t have a potential TIC problem making every heartbeat feel like a stan.”

  Natalya snickered.

  A yellow warning message popped up.

  “Uh oh.”

  “What?” Zoya asked.

  “We’re on hold.”

  “Yellow-hold. Probably just traffic outside,” Zoya said.

  Natalya took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Yeah. Probably.”

  “As long as it’s not red-denied.”

  Natalya nodded, her eyes not leaving the comms and her hand on the maneuvering controls.

  A very long four ticks elapsed before the green-for-go message popped up on the console.

  “Yes,” Natalya said, stretching the hiss out as she pulled shore-ties and triggered the lockdowns to release.

  The ship lifted just off the deck and began floating toward the exit lock. As they approached, the lock’s tattletales flipped from yellow to green and Natalya slipped in. Behind them the inner door closed and the orbital’s heavy compressors started sucking the atmosphere out of the lock.

  Time slowed for Natalya. The wait in the airlock never bothered her, yet she found herself tapping her fingers on the arm of her couch.

  Zoya glanced at the pattering digits and smiled.

  Natalya forced herself to grip the arm. “I just keep thinking, this would be a good place to keep us locked down until they can figure out how to get to us.”

  Zoya nodded. “Probably, but the easiest thing is just pump the atmosphere back in and tell us to back out slowly.” She nodded at the pressure indicator on the bulkhead outside. “It’s almost vacuum now.”

  A few more heartbeats. The green-for-go light blinked on over the exit door and Natalya goosed the thrusters to push them out of the orbital.

  Comms popped a blue informational message for the exit vector to leave the orbital traffic control. Natalya cross-loaded the instruction to helm and followed the guiding signal out of the swirl of ships, cargo handlers, shuttles, and small craft that surrounded Newmar Orbital. The kickers rumbled the spaceframe as they came online and the ship picked up speed.

  “There’s the delay,” Zoya said, nodding out the starboard armorglass port. A massive freighter under tow was still sliding into the dock on their starboard side.

  Natalya nodded. “I’ve got clearance to burn for Burleson as soon as we’re clear of the inner markers.”

  “How far out do we have to go?”

  Natalya offered a smile. “Half a day. No more.”

  Zoya’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “What?”

  “Half a day. We’ll be able to make a short jump if we can find a clean spot to jump to within two Burleson units.”

  “Two units?” Zoya’s face clouded. “I thought this was a scout.”

  “Oh, the ship can jump twelve, fourteen units from clean space. From this mess?” Natalya waved a hand to indicate the space around them. “We’d need to go out at least two or three days before we’d be safe to jump that far. We’re so small we can make short jumps just a few stans out of port. Once we get out there, we can jump a long, long way.” She glanced over at Zoya. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Someplace called Dark Knight. It doesn’t show on the charts.”

  “Dark Knight Station?”

  “Yeah, you know it?”

  “Heard of it. Toe-Hold space. That’s what she meant about outside TIC control.”

  “Margaret Newmar is sending us to Toe-Hold space?”

  “Don’t look so surprised. Lots of people go there.” She shot a smile at Zoya. “That’s where this ship came from. My father got it from the Junkyard.”

  “Really? Somebody junked this?”

  Natalya l
aughed. “No. The Junkyard is a station out near Ciroda. It’s a kind of dumping ground for ships, tanks, station parts. All kinds of stuff.”

  “Junk.”

  “Well, some of it is. You should have seen the Peregrine before she got cleaned up.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “Not much that a persistent engineer with a half-decent yard nearby couldn’t fix. My father and mother replaced the fusactor. That was the most critical piece. They’d been tinkering on it for stanyers. Finally got it where they wanted it and gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday so I’d have a way to get to the academy.”

  “Nice birthday present.”

  “Yeah. Well, they split up. Mom went to be chief engineer for Consolidated Freight and I think Dad’s back out in Toe-Hold space. I haven’t heard from him since I started at the academy.”

  “You’re my roommate for four stanyers and you never mentioned any of this before?”

  “Never came up.” She glanced at Zoya. “What do your parents do?”

  Zoya’s face closed down. “Long story. It’s complicated.”

  They cleared the inner markers and Natalya pushed the throttles forward. The murmuring vibration in the space frame ratcheted up. Natalya looked at Zoya and raised her voice to speak over the noise. “We’ll be clear in a couple of ticks and can coast a bit.”

  “Do you know of any place nearby that we can jump to?” Zoya asked.

  “Pull up the waypoint menu on the console. Label is ‘Picnic Area.’”

  Zoya pulled up the menu and snickered. “Now I know what you did instead of summer cruises.”

  Natalya pulled the throttles back and the kickers resumed their low grumble. The quiet was a blessing. “Hey, I did my time. I got most of those from other pilots.” She grinned. “Lotta old timers around Port Newmar. They remember these scouts and they’re more than happy to share what they know.”

  Zoya laid in the plot and watched the timer start ticking down. “You weren’t kidding. At this rate we’ll be out of the system in another two stans.”

  Natalya nodded and slapped the release on her seatbelt. “Want some coffee?”

  “You have coffee aboard?” Zoya grinned.

  “Yeah. Coffee is just water and beans. We have water and the beans don’t have much mass. I don’t mind a cup of tea now and again, but when I’m out here, there’s just something that makes me want coffee.” She lifted her chin. “So? You want a cup?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s been a long day and I could use it.”

  “Me, too. I still feel like I’ve got my head in a bucket or something.” Natalya made her way back to the passageway and the tiny galley beyond. “You don’t suppose they spiked my tea with something, do you?”

  Zoya didn’t answer for a few moments.

  Natalya stuck her head back around the corner. “What? They didn’t, did they?”

  Zoya shook her head. “I have a hard time imagining they’d do something like that. To what end? Not like any of them was going to take you home as a plaything. Did you see those guys?”

  Natalya laughed at the image and went back to fixing the coffee.

  “Nats? You might want to come out here.”

  The high-pitched squeal of a collision alarm filled the tiny space.

  Natalya jumped as if she’d been stabbed and threw herself into the couch, her eyes scanning the displays. She slapped the override on the alarm. “Where?”

  Zoya pointed to her scanner display. Two blips showed intercept courses. The ships were small and fast. The range markers seemed to be melting away as Natalya looked.

  “TIC interceptors?” Natalya asked, not quite believing her eyes.

  “That’s what the transponders show.”

  Natalya checked her boards again, double-checking the comms array. “They haven’t tried to hail us.”

  “They’re burning like crazy,” Zoya said. “They’ll catch up with us in a stan.”

  “Are we sure they’re coming for us?”

  Zoya shrugged. “No idea. I saw them pop up on the scope just before the alarm spotted them.”

  Natalya stared at the screen, measuring the angles and velocity in her head. She buckled her seat belt again and reached for the throttle. “Hold on. Let’s see if we can learn anything.” She pushed the throttle all the way up and the heavy thrusters kicked hard. The noise and vibration practically rattled her teeth, but Natalya watched their velocity increase. Their projected tracks changed on the displays and the intercept courses slowly crept backward to cross behind them.

  “Maybe they’re going someplace else in a hurry,” Zoya said, almost shouting to be heard over the noise.

  Natalya squinted at the screen, hoping against hope it wasn’t what she thought it was. She kept the throttles up, even as the engineering console showed the strain on the big engines approaching the redline.

  For a few ticks, it looked like a false alarm; then the blips shifted on the screen. Their new projected courses intersected with the Peregrine in just over a stan.

  Zoya looked at Natalya, her face pale in the subdued cockpit lighting.

  Natalya sighed. “Looks like they know.” She pulled the throttles back enough to keep the engines from burning out and the screaming vibration faded a bit.

  “Intercept in seventy-five ticks,” Zoya said.

  Natalya looked at the navigational plot. “They’re going to catch us before we can jump.”

  “Can you get any more out of the kickers?”

  Natalya looked at the engineering displays, flipping through the readouts and trying to find something that might give them an edge. She shook her head. “If I redline them, they can still catch us in time and they’re not really broken in that well yet. They might blow.”

  “Not really the way I want to escape,” Zoya said, her eyes bright but her face still pale.

  Natalya looked at her comms panel. “No hails.”

  “Maybe they’re not after us?” Zoya’s question hung there.

  Natalya didn’t answer. She just gazed at the displays.

  Zoya’s fingers started flying over the keys on her console.

  Natalya’s head snapped around as she tried to figure out what her roommate was doing. “Astronomical data? What are you looking up?”

  Zoya shook her head. “Maybe nothing. Maybe the answer. Hush.”

  A warbling screech filled the cockpit and a computerized voice chanted. “Weapons lock. Weapons lock.”

  Natalya slapped the keys to silence the alarm and looked at the scanner display. The small icons blinked red. Both ships had target lock on the scout. “The bastards!”

  Zoya shook her head. “Hush.”

  After a tick, Zoya looked at Natalya. “If we shift course we might be able to outrun them.”

  “Shift how? Why?”

  “The system’s calculating mean Burleson thresholds for a ship of this class, right?”

  Natalya’s brain stuttered once but she caught on. “Yes!”

  “We have that big gas bag out there, but most of the mass of the system is on the other side of the primary. If we come to this heading and goose it, we can probably outrun the interceptors and jump before they catch on.” She pointed to a course laid out on the navigational console. “Hit it.”

  The small ship twisted and slowly reoriented its trajectory. The interceptors didn’t lose lock and didn’t slow down. They simply adjusted their courses.

  Natalya felt like there wasn’t enough air in the ship as she waited for the computer to recalibrate the intercept.

  When the displays settled, the distances were too close to call.

  “Pull back the throttles,” Zoya shouted.

  “They’ll catch us.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “And I’ve got a feeling we’ll need that extra boost before we’re done. Slow down. Save them for now.”

  Natalya pulled back so the engines stayed out of the red and tried to gauge the distances and times. The computer said they’d be caught.


  “They’re not trying to catch us,” Zoya said.

  “How can you be sure?”

  Zoya looked at her. “They didn’t lock weapons for practice.”

  Natalya felt her stomach drop. “Maybe they’re just trying to warn us. How soon before they’re in firing range?”

  “TIC interceptors have paired missile bays. Smart munitions. Kinetic warheads. Ship-to-ship range something over half a million kilometers,” Zoya said. “Exact range is classified.”

  The emergency klaxon screamed and the computer voice said, “Weapons fire. Weapons fire. Weapons fire.”

  Natalya found the voice oddly calm, given the message. For a brief instant she wondered why they didn’t program the voice to make it sound more urgent.

  “Punch it!” Zoya said.

  Natalya slammed the throttles forward again and slapped the alarm off. The noise from the engines mostly drowned it out anyway.

  “Four tracks. Both ships fired two birds,” Zoya shouted.

  “How soon?”

  “Half a stan.”

  Natalya’s fear melted away, leaving a molten anger. How dare they? She’d done nothing wrong. She didn’t kill that idiot. Zoya had done nothing at all. And TIC was trying to kill them both. No evidence. No jury. No trial. Just the silent interceptors in space.

  “How far are we from Newmar?” Natalya asked.

  “Too far,” Zoya answered. “By the time this is over we’ll be in that gas bag’s shadow anyway. Nobody’s going to be able to see anything.” She sat back in her couch, panting. “This can’t be happening.”

  “It’s happening.”

  “This can’t be happening,” Zoya said again.

  “It’s happening, Zee. What do we have?”

  “I got nothing, Nats.”

  “Set up the plot. Prime the Burleson for jump to the Picnic Area.”

  “You can’t jump this close. We’re inside the limit.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a safety margin built into the systems.”

  “If we try to jump too close, the drives may take us apart,” Zoya said.

  “If we don’t jump, those missiles will take us apart. What gives us better odds?”

  Zoya stared for a moment and then her fingers began flying. “You’ve got engineering.”