By reflex, Krystal’s associates sprayed the tables with machinegun fire, reducing them and every chair to rubble, smashing every dish and goblet in the heap, filling the room with the haze and unmistakable odor of smokeless gunpowder. Women passengers screamed and covered their ears, and so did more than one man. But it was too late. The powder smoke was clearing. The kitchen doors were swinging back into place.
And the knife-thrower was gone.
Huddled close to Jasmeen—who had not screamed—with her arms around her, Llyra looked this way and that for the nice old man from Tucson.
And couldn’t find him.
***
On the flight deck, they heard the machinegun fire from the dining room below. The flight deck was centered in, but several steps above—or forward—of the carpeted level of the luxurious lounge, which was now empty of human occupants, but brightly lighted to prevent any surprises.
From anybody’s point of view, the noise could only mean some kind of disaster had occurred.
Looking up from where she’d been standing at the pilot’s console for the last half hour—adapting the preprogrammed instructions for the final flight of the City of Newark—Krystal turned to the Captain, who was also standing.
“How do I get down from here—not by the elevator?” Johnnie had already started back toward Engineering.
Everything about this mission was strange. Whatever was going on down in the dining room, she could afford another moment or two. It didn’t really matter. Minde, the flight engineer, was seated in the pilot’s chair that she and the Captain stood on opposite sides of. The girl had just made the final alterations to the ship’s digitally predetermined course, then shut the navigation computer down, and disabled it by ripping out half the wiring behind it. The information stick she’d used, she broke in half and threw in a wastebin under the console.
Two dozen lesser computers, located aft within the engineering spaces, had received their orders and would follow them now, to the end.
To the death.
Nothing could be done now to alter the doom of the City of Newark.
Nothing.
Already, it was beginning to get cooler—or was that just one’s imagination? Down in the engineering spaces, two of Krystal’s people were busy shutting down unnecessary systems—life support foremost among them—so that the vessel’s engines would have every scrap of energy available for acceleration. Stopping a moon in its tracks, even a relatively tiny one like Phobos, was going to take a great deal of power.
All that was left now was to get her people safely into the escape vessel.
Resignation showing on his face, the Captain showed Krystal an emergency latch. Once pulled, a curved section of the glass wall around the control area swung away. Cradling her submachine gun and laying a steadying hand on the pistol in her holster, she jumped to the carpeted floor of the lounge and ran toward the dining room staircase.
“Keep an eye on that rascal, Minde!” she shouted as she started down the wrought iron spiral. Her mind was already concentrated on whatever was happening below, and she didn’t even slow to hear the answer.
“Don’t worry, Krystal, I—”
Minde didn’t have a chance to finish her sentence. Before she became aware of it, the Captain had taken her little chin in one powerful hand and the back of her head in the other, and twisted as hard and quickly as he could. Alan West was a very big man and an exceptionally strong one. He had only done this sort of thing once before—to a calf on his ranch born with its internal organs on the outside—but he felt the bones crack in her neck, heard her last breath rattle through her lips, and watched her eyes begin to glaze over.
The girl was dead as dead could be.
For just an instant, the Captain poked around inside himself for any signs of guilt or regret. Finding none, he shrugged and moved onward.
There was nothing else that he could do up here. The ship was done, and they had even disabled the system that let individual staterooms act as lifeboats. They required the mass, Krystal had explained, of staterooms and human bodies, to smash Phobos from its orbit.
No, no regrets at all.
He lifted Minde’s weapon from her lap. It was a Heckler & Sauer nine point five millimeter automatic pistol, so new it wasn’t broken in. The fearsome terrorist hadn’t even been carrying spare magazines. He turned, opened the inconspicuous safe under the engineer’s console, and pulled three more pistols from it. His own was well-worn, indeed, a long-barreled BNU ten millimeter magnum hunting pistol. And there was the brace of smaller pistols belonging to Llyra Ngu and Jasmeen Khalidov.
If he knew them by now, the girls’ spare ammunition carriers were probably still in their luggage. There was something about these colonials he loved. He pocketed three spare twenty-round magazines for his own pistol and also took his personal phone. There was a relay right here inside the ship that might make it useful in overcoming this gang of murderous criminals. He adjusted it to tell him quietly if anyone was calling.
Thinking hard for a moment, he decided, unlike Krystal, to ride the elevator, which had just returned. But he would enter the besieged dining room through the kitchen, where he could use the big round windows in the swinging doors to get a feel for things and maybe even preserve the element of surprise.
Somebody, he swore, somebody was going to be very sorry about all this.
***
“I’m here.”
Crenicichla answered his telephone. Not that many people had the number. He was standing at the service core in the engineering spaces where he’d just supervised two of Krystal’s people as they carefully disabled the local controls. Satisfied that his work was thoroughly finished down here—there were broken wires and components underfoot all over the deck—he was waiting for a car forward to the dining room.
The E.A.S. City of Newark’s six mighty fusion engines would now hurl her inexorably to her destination and her destiny. Nobody could change that, short of utterly destroying her, and it was far too late for that. By the time anybody was even aware that she’d been hijacked, let alone caught up to her, she would have struck her mark on Phobos, instantly vaporizing herself and dropping the little moon from the Martian sky, incinerating or smashing everyone and everything on the planet.
If by some extremely improbable miscalculation she managed to miss Phobos, she would still hit Mars, doing damage both incalculable and irreparable. Either way, it would spell an end to human aspirations in space.
For Null Delta Em, it was a splendidly no-lose situation. They could claim—whatever way it happened in the end—that it was exactly what the organization had intended in the first place. It struck him that this was one of the last few spaceflights in human history.
Something to tell his grandchildren.
” … you there? We’re having a whole buncha trouble up here, Johnnie!” He’d almost forgotten the phone. The voice on the other end was Krystal’s. He’d never heard the woman in a state of panic like this before. If it frightened her a little, it frightened him a lot. “One of our passengers just wasted Paul Luegner—on System-wide 3DTV!”
“Shit!” He felt his legs give way and his midsection turn to water. These operations were about psychology and very little else. They’d just lost the advantage, even if the rest of the mission went perfectly.
He wasn’t using video, in order to retain anonymity and prolong battery life. A good thing, he thought, that she couldn’t see his expression. As it was, it was disturbing her two people here in engineering.
On the other hand, Luegner had always been a worthless lump, in Crenicichla’s view. He’d never managed to figure out why their mutual sponsors had hired him in the first place. If it had been left to Crenicichla—and finally, it had—he’d have killed the man just before they departed this ship and let him become a martyr to the Cause.
He’d be a hell of a lot more useful that way than he had been alive.
Now some fool had beaten him to it, and the timin
g couldn’t be worse. To have a spokesman killed onscreen, just as he was declaring the dominance of Null Delta Em—that had been the plan, anyway, and Crenicichla had approved the speech—was very bad. He hoped Krystal understood that it wasn’t going to help the cause to murder innocent passengers simply out of revenge—at least not over System-wide 3DTV.
The guilty on the other hand …
“Did you catch whoever did it?” he asked, somehow knowing the answer in advance. She would have reported it completely differently, otherwise. The stainless doors slid open, and he stepped into the elevator, followed by Krystal’s people who were coming forward with him.
“No, no, he disappeared and probably didn’t even wait to see the knife hit. I guess it coulda been a she. I don’t have a passenger manifest here. Talk about your ego not being involved in your work! I have to confess it was so prettily done that I almost wish I’d done it myself.”
A thrown knife and an assassin on the other side who respects and admires the opposition. There speaks a real pro. Crenicichla laughed—Krystal was certainly his kind of girl—but he let her go on. He punched the button that would take them to the dining level she spoke from.
She said, “I’ve got as many people out looking for him now as I can spare, including some of your pretty boys in gray. But I’m thinking that anybody who can kill a man with a thrown table knife is going to be hard to find and harder bring in. I’m tempted to leave him alone to hole up somewhere, rather than waste the time, effort, and manpower.”
He would have made very much the same judgment. “Except that you don’t really believe he’s going let you or yours alone, any more than I do. The man’s got to be found, and as quickly as possible.” The elevator stopped with a subtle whish, but the doors seemed slow to open.
“I gotta agree with that, boss,” Krystal replied, “I—oh, my God!”
As much through the door as over the telephone, Crenicichla heard sharp blasts of powerful handgun fire, followed by short bursts from more than one automatic weapon, and then several more pistol shots. Careful not to use her name, he shouted at Krystal over the phone. He could hear people move around and make noise, but her only reply was silence.
He punched buttons again.
***
The individual who thought of himself as the Fastest Gun in the Moon slipped out of the service core as inconspicuously as its doors allowed.
He didn’t know exactly what Krystal and her crew were up to, but he did know Null Delta Em. Obviously, another ship had arrived, with its crew of gray-clad young men, to pick them up, which meant they planned to set some kind of destructive course and then abandon the City of Newark intending her to serve as some kind of a battering ram. It certainly wasn’t the first time something like this had been done.
Perhaps if he could get down to the engine room, he could stop them.
Sometimes he had to work to remember what his real name was. It didn’t seem to fit him any more, somehow. Luckily, neither did old age. Most men born five years either side of his birthday were slowing down a bit. None would dream of climbing down a steel-runged ladder in the heart of a spaceship to bring terror and death to a collection of hijackers. Yet that was just what he—Aaron Manzel—planned to do now.
Aaron Manzel. I am what I am and that’s all that I am. Pass the spinach.
Escaping from the dining room through the kitchen had been relatively easy, although he’d wished he’d had time enough to watch his thrown knife hit the target. He’d been looking for a chef’s blade, but he was confident that even a badly-thrown table knife would have created the effect he’d wanted. In a fraction of a second, on System-wide 3DTV, the group from Null Delta Em had gone from boasting conquerors to just another gaggle of blunderers.
They might as well not even have tried.
Gaining the corridor outside the kitchen, he avoided the elevators and opened a door in the service core. Inside the core were the cylindrical shafts and mechanics for three elevators, two of which wouldn’t go any higher than this level. A third, with the right key and the right code, went all the way to the flight deck. From inside the core, he could see where each of the cars was and what it was doing.
He preferred the ladder.
He took the pipe-like outsides of the ladder in his hands, locked the inside edges of his feet around them, too, and slid easily down to the third deck. He had brought no real weapons of any kind on this voyage, and he had no weapons now. This was where he would acquire what he needed.
Leaving the core on the third deck, he stepped cautiously into the corridor, using every one of the senses he possessed—senses that had been expertly trained and that he exercised and tested frequently—to the maximum. He couldn’t see or hear anyone at the moment, but it was interesting (to him, anyway) how often someone would give their position away with the smell of their food, or the stink of their fear.
Just now he could smell butter and garlic and Oregano. That wasn’t what was being served in the dining room. It might well be an intruder—who were those cloneboys, anyway? Where had they come from and brought Paul Luegner with them?—but it might be as simple as room service.
Sliding around the inner wall formed by the outside of the service core, he could only see about a quarter of the corridor at a time. At last he heard a door lock function. There were only four suites in this deck. He heard someone come out, into the corridor, humming to herself.
As quickly as he could, he slipped around the core to confront one of Krystal’s people, a young woman, brunette. Her arms were full of plunder from the room she’d just broken into. He recognized a tortoise shell barette he’d seen Llyra wearing. Before she could get her weapon cleared, he’d stepped in beside it, pulled a combat knife from a scabbard on her belt, and thrust it into her solar plexus, working it a little, from side to side, to find the big artery running behind the stomach.
She slipped forward to the floor and was dead.
Quickly, he wiped the knife off on her clothing, put it back in its scabbard, removed her pistol belt and readjusted it to his own size. He checked the weapon—a simple laser—and its spare charges.
Time to move on.
Leaving Llyra’s and Jasmeen’s possessions on the floor, he took the body by its heels—nice boots, he thought—and dragged it back the way he’d come. Opening the door, he pulled the body onto the tiny steel landing provided at each deck, and dropped it straight down the shaft.
Krystal and her people were stretched Angstrom thin all over the ship. Null Delta Em was one of the cheapest groups of its kind that he’d ever had to deal with. This wouldn’t do much to improve their morale.
On the fourth floor, he found absolutely nothing. Most of the half-dozen doors were swinging open, meaning that they had already been looted by the young woman he’d just killed or another of her group.
Entering the service core again, he watched what he thought of as the executive elevator—the one that served the flight deck—going upward. Neither of the other two was moving. As he slid down to the access to the fifth floor, it opened before he could reach it and one of the strange young men in gray stepped through and shut it behind him.
The man whose real name was Aaron Manzel had long observed that while hunting, or traversing dangerous pathways, no animal or human ever seems to remember to look up, even predators, who take frequent advantage of the fact, and ought to know better. This young man was no different.
Silently repeating “ten feet per second per second” to himself—the rate at which objects fall at the one-third gee at which the City of Newark was presently accelerating—Manzel drew the fighting knife from his confiscated gun belt, let go of the steel ladder, and fell feet-first on the young man, striking him on the head and one shoulder as he went by. Reflexively, the young man gripped the ladder tighter—the little sheet-steel landing was only about two feet on a side—which made him all the more helpless once Manzel reached his level.
He didn’t waste time or effort, but stopp
ed himself by throwing his left arm around the young man’s neck, pulling his head backward, and plunging the knife into one of his kidneys with his right hand, producing massive shock and instant unconsciousness. Before his victim could fall, taking both of them down the intimidating length of the core—even one third gee can be lethal—Manzel seized the ladder and held them there for an instant, as he searched the young man’s clothes.
He carried no identification, and as far as Manzel could tell, there never had been any tags in his clothing. He had a medium-framed automatic pistol and a couple of spare magazines—which Manzel took—and a set of electronic keycards, probably for this ship. Manzel pulled the knife out of the young man’s back, wiped it clean on his otherwise tidy gray suit, and let him go to join the young woman below.
He wondered what else was happening on this floor. He guessed he’d better find out. Opening the panel as little as he could, he peeked out to see another gray-clad young man, apparently waiting for the first. He was unaware that the door had been opened because his back was to it, and he was talking quietly to yet a third gray-clad young man.
Manzel silently closed the panel to think about his options. Before he got very far with that, the panel opened, and a young man’s head thrust into the opening. “Karl,” the young man shouted. “What is keeping—”
Manzel grabbed him by the wrist, pulled him all the way into the core, and let him fall screaming, but paying most of his attention to the door, where an all-but-identical young man repeated his clone’s mistake. Manzel seized him and threw him down the shaft which echoed with his screams, as well. In an instant, both were silent, and Manzel was waiting for a third figure to make itself manifest. But nobody followed.
Now Manzel crept out of the door. There were a dozen compartments on this level, and each of the doors was open. The deck was silent and unoccupied. He reentered the core and began climbing aft, to the next level.
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