Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  ***

  Captain Alan West left the elevator on the third level and made his way as quickly and quietly as he could to a little-known staircase—normally used to bring room service to the most elite passengers—he used to go back up to the kitchen. He recalled that the upper entry was hidden from the rest of the kitchen by several moving racks of pans and utensils. He’d argued with the chef about it just before departure.

  And lost, for which he was now annoyed to feel grateful.

  The kitchen was deserted, although he was willing to bet the hijackers had sentries posted just outside, in the dining room. He made certain that Llyra and Jasmeen’s pistols were secure in his pockets—for some reason it was important to him—took his own ten millimeter in his right hand and the weapon he’d taken from the dead flight engineer in the other, and approached the swinging doors with their frosted porthole windows. Sure enough, someone was standing to the left of the doors, but no one to the right where the tables were piled.

  He saw two hijackers on the perimeter where they’d put the passengers—the Ngu and Khalidov girls were at this end of the crescent they formed—and somebody was in the middle of the room, striding up and down, waving a submachine gun around, and haranguing the prisoners. No matter the cause, these idiots were all alike, somehow.

  West took a deep breath, grateful for all the combat ranch time he and his wife had put in, back home in Wyoming, strode forward, and pushed the right-hand door open. His left hand was already raised, and he shot the sentry through the skull with Minde’s gun without even looking. He also had his right hand raised and used it to kill the haranguer.

  Blessed silence.

  Before the other hijackers could react, he ran to the passengers, firing both guns as he did. He saw one of the hijackers go down—he couldn’t tell which gun he’d done it with. It didn’t matter. On his knees, firing back at the remaining hijacker who’d taken cover behind an upturned table, he let go of the weapon in his left hand, extracted the other pistols from his pockets, and tossed them to the girls, then regained Minde’s gun and made sure that the hijacker kept her head down.

  Suddenly, there was a burst of noise beside him. Llyra had her pistol raised and pointed at the kitchen doors, where a body—one of the gray-clads—now lay on the floor between them, propping them open.

  Jasmeen had been shooting at the individual behind the table, and was less surprised than anyone else when intermittent gunfire started coming from the opening in the ceiling where the spiral stairway stood.

  Briefly, a female face appeared, upside-down, seeking targets. It disappeared and suddenly a hand was visible, filled with lethal hardware, spraying the dining-room down in hopes, apparently, of hitting somebody—anybody.

  Bullets sang around Jasmeen—she heard a grunt behind her, but didn’t dare look back—as she held her fire, waiting for the right moment. Finally, the shooting stopped. Krystal stuck her head down again, and Jasmeen shot her. The woman sagged, then tumbled down the stairs.

  Jasmeen’s impulse was to get up and run to her, to make sure she was dead, if nothing else, but Llyra took hold of Jasmeen’s arm to stop her.

  “The Captain’s injured!” she whispered.

  “Oh, I am not! I’ve hurt myself worse in my basement woodshop.”

  “Is possibility,” Jasmeen answered. “Human sacrifice makes good bookends.”

  Captain West’s white dinner jacket, already smudged and stained from his adventures getting here, now had a neat hole beneath the center of his right collarbone, and was soaked with blood. Jasmeen found a couple of clean linen dinner napkins, folded them, and pushed them under his jacket, front and back. She then turned to Mrs. Erskine.

  “Make him lie flat on floor,” she told the older woman. “Keep steady pressure on wound—here’s another napkin—until I find help.”

  The woman looked terrified until Jasmeen showed her what to do. Llyra smiled, remembering all the times that Jasmeen’s first aid training, a mandatory study for skating coaches, had come in handy. She’d even set a broken bone once—not Llyra’s—at the rink in Curringer, using a pair of lip-balm tubes as splints.

  Only then did the two girls get up. Several other people were on their feet by now, milling around the ruined dining room, most of them avoiding contact with the dead bodies. More than one of the male passengers was attempting to convince the others that he was in charge.

  In a clear, commanding voice, Jasmeen announced to the crowd, some of whom were still huddled on the floor, “Is best you all stay here. Worst may be over, but we don’t know. We will be back as soon as possible.”

  “Two little girls?” said a large individual, pretty obviously from Earth. “Not on your life! I’m a retired police chief. Give me those guns!”

  A head taller than the man, Llyra leveled her pistol on his face. “You’re not in New Jersey any more, Chief. We do things differently out here. Sit down and shut up.”

  Grinning, Jasmeen glanced over at Llyra. “We are great big girl now?”

  “No,” Llyra whispered back, imitating Jasmeen’s accent. “We are little girl with great big gun!”

  “She’s still alive!” The cry came from the spiral stairwell where Krystal lay draped along the lowest half dozen steps. “She’s still breathing!”

  People began to get up, if they had still been sitting on the floor, and drift slowly in the direction of the stairwell. They had things in their hands, now: knives, forks, broken plates. One woman had even taken off her shoe and was trying it for weight and balance—the heel could be a deadly instrument. Looking at each other, Llyra and Jasmeen followed them, but there wasn’t any way to slip ahead of them.

  There was no easy way that they were going to prevent what was about to happen. Nobody would listen to them now. A noise ceased abruptly which they hadn’t even noticed before now. A couple of the big dining room windows had been penetrated by gunfire. All this time, they’d been whistling shrilly as air escaped through them into space. Now they had automatically resealed themselves, and the whistling stopped.

  The passengers gradually surrounded Krystal, determined to have their revenge on her. By a kind of evil magic which was still not very well understood, even in the twenty-second century, they had been transformed—or had transformed themselves—into a mindless herd, waiting only for one of their dullwitted number to make the first move. The woman with the shoe was closest now, raising it high over her head. Jasmeen and Llyra could no longer see Krystal through the crowd.

  “Hold it right there!” said a voice from nowhere. “Don’t come any closer!”

  The voice was a man’s. The face that went with it, once he’d started down the stairs, was one they’d never seen before. He was relatively young, Llyra thought, and, well, extraordinarily handsome, wearing a white summer suit—stained black here and there, and splashed with blood—and he carried with him a submachine gun in each hand, tucking the short shoulder stocks under his arms at his sides. He walked down the spiral stairway from the lounge, stopped, and now stood over Krystal, threatening the passengers.

  “You two!” He waved one of his submachine guns at a couple of the people up close. “Yes, I mean you! Pull her down very gently and carry her over to that elevator! Be careful!” He indicated the elevator that couldn’t be seen from the Captain’s table where Llyra and Jasmeen had been sitting at dinner, what now seemed like a year ago. Llyra thought hard about shooting the man, but feared that he might just massacre the rest of the passengers to get to her, if she missed. She glanced over at Jasmeen, who shook her head, agreeing with Llyra’s tactical assessment.

  “Anybody else makes a move toward us, I’ll kill them where they stand!” Llyra hated being ordered to do what she’d already decided to do.

  The stranger followed the two passengers with Krystal into the elevator, ejected his unwilling helpers, let the doors close, and was gone.

  “Life support!” the Captain said suddenly. His voice was still strong and his eyes were clear. �
��Miss Ngu, Miss Khalidov, can you hear me?”

  “Yes?” Llyra turned to him where he lay. Mrs. Erskine was still there.

  “They’ve shut down all the life support systems—air, heat—I saw it on the bridge consoles. I got a distress call off, early on. You must move these people to the core where they’ll stay warm longest. Collect every emergency oxygen bottle from the ship—they’re scattered around with the fire extinguishers—and take them to the core, as well.”

  Jasmeen nodded. “Trust us. You will be all right?”

  “I’m less hurt than I am pissed off,” said the Captain.

  “Then we’ll start by getting you to the core,” Llyra said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: SPACE OPERA

  A person had better be prepared to defend himself in this world, because, thanks mostly to the laws of Physics, nobody—not your neighbors, not your friends, not even your family, and especially not the police—can be counted on to be there when you need them.

  I’ve repeated this observation many times in speeches I’ve given over the years. When the day comes that someone in the audience asks me, “What’s the police?”, I’ll know that someone was listening. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “Warning! Catastrophic engine failure in thirty-two seconds! Warning! Catastrophic engine failure in thirty seconds! Warning! Catastrophic engine failure in twenty-eight seconds! Warning! Catastrophic—”

  Wilson reached to his left forearm to switch the channel his suit radio was receiving on. Shorty saw him, and signaled to Marko and Scotty.

  “You here, Commodore?” Shorty asked, having switched frequencies, himself.

  Wilson said, “None of us is going to be here if we don’t get this done!”

  The four of them were laboring, tools in hand, in the two-foot space between Shorty’s vessel and its bad engine—the one Wilson had shot off, then helped reattach to the ship, La Diabla, or She Devil as Wilson now thought of her—before it exploded, taking most of the vessel with it. La Diabla had been warning them like this for twenty minutes, during which they’d discovered that the mechanism for jettisoning engines that were about to fail catastrophically had failed catastrophically itself during the firefight or afterward, when the engine had been rewelded onto its four stanchions, each of which now had to be cut manually.

  “Okay, here we go, gentlemen!” Mikey chose that moment to jet into the center of the narrow space with a package under his arm. “One Gabney Mark Four probe motor, sans probe! Very expensive—I’m sure glad it isn’t mine. I’ll just install it at the center of gravity and back away. You guys sing out when your stanchions are cut and I’ll fire!”

  It was hard going, as the stanchions—in effect, each bore a twelfth of the ship’s mass, multiplied by acceleration—were tough. There weren’t enough torches available—Scotty and Marko had them—so Wilson and Shorty had resorted to hacksaws to cut the bad engine free.

  “I’m clear!” Marko shouted. He shut his cutting torch off to back away.

  “Me, too!” cried Scotty. He had a bad moment with a tangled hose, but got it clear of the engine and itself, and joined Scotty where he hung.

  Wilson was only about halfway through the stanchion. It had just occurred to him the try the particle cannon or one of the lasers he had aboard Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend—but only too late to do any good. In some ways, he thought, it was the story of his whole life so far.

  “I’m clear!” shouted Shorty.

  “Then the three of you get out of here!,” said Wilson. “Away from the—”

  In that instant, the stanchion broke free, Wilson jetted backwards, away from La Diabla as fast as he could, and Mikey fired the probe motor which, slowly at first, but gathering speed rapidly, took the failing engine away. At about two miles, by Wilson’s estimate, it exploded.

  “That was close,” said Scotty.

  Marko managed a relieved whistle.

  “Hey, you guys, we’ve got the board finished, in here,” said Casey McCarthy, the person formerly known to Wilson as “Beanpole”. He and Merton Kwembly—”Boils”—were aboard La Diabla now, making all the adjustments necessary for thrusting on two engines instead of three.

  They’d taken Pimble Pharch—”Fatty”—with them, mostly to keep an eye on him, but he’d proven himself helpful. It had been his idea to use the probe motor—he’d had it in his “junk” compartment—when they couldn’t get the explosive bolts to work.

  “Okay, gentlemen, good job!” Wilson said. “But the coffee break’s over for now! Everybody back to your ships! We’ve gotta make gees again!”

  They were about three quarters of the way to catching up with The City of Newark, but had had to drop out of acceleration to deal with this problem, and they’d lost two hours. As Wilson plunked himself back in his pilot’s chair, Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend was showing an image.

  “I’ve still got a radar lock on her! Shorty, are you ready? Good. Then it’s blast on five, four, three, two, one, now!” He hit ENTER on his keyboard and slammed backward into his chair at one point two gees.

  “Hey, Commodore!” It was Scotty. He was going to have trouble keeping up. “We haven’t discussed what we’re gonna do when we get there.”

  “Second the motion,” replied Mikey.

  “It wasn’t a motion,” Wilson replied. “And this isn’t a body that accepts them. I don’t know what we’ll do, because we don’t have any information on which to base plans or decisions. Just keep your eyes and ears open and maybe something will come to us in the time that’s left.”

  Over the next several hours, they batted it back and forth, but, as Wilson had predicted, they couldn’t plan without more information. He had a couple of meals, he slept, and so did the others, by turn. A break came when his radar, programmed to warn him of any changes, beeped.

  “Seems we’ve got ourselves two targets out there! We’re close enough to resolve that many blips. Somebody has docked with City of Newark.”

  “Judging from the profile and proportion to the liner, I’d say she’s a Swan-class private hull,” said Marko, who had the highest resolution radar in the little squadron. “They’re built flat, like a cockroach or a manta ray, with enough power and structural integrity to land anywhere but Earth. We’re seeing her stern-on. I toured one once at L-Five. Not as much room as a liner, but what there is is choice!”

  “What do you suppose she’s doing with the City of Newark?” asked Mikey. His Albuquerque Gal was just to Wilson’s port and a little ahead.

  “Mating?” Scotty, aboard Nessie, suggested.

  Shorty said, “No, it’s the getaway yacht. And probably a stolen one.”

  Quickly, Wilson checked on the SolarNet, looking for stolen spaceships. Sure enough, a Swan-class vessel was missing from Lunar orbit.

  “It’s the White Winged Dove, gents, out of Armstrong City,” he announced. The owner is some Earthside mining corporation. I wonder what ‘gypsum’ is. She’s been gone for two days, and they found the chairman of the board and his girlfriend, plus the pilot and co-pilot, floating in stationary orbit over Armstrong, enjoying space without a spacesuit.”

  “Geez,” said Shorty. “Wow. Just gimme plain old robbers every time. These guys with political agendas gimme the creeps.” He shuddered, and the others could hear him do it over the intership radio.

  Lights lit by themselves across his control panel as Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend made large and small adjustments to match the City of Newark’s acceleration, velocity, and course. Suddenly, Wilson was experiencing a third of a gee—Martian gravity—and it felt relaxing.

  “Everybody else make the change?” he asked.

  One by one, the others reported in. They were all on course for rendezvous with the hijacked City of Newark, and arming their weapons.

  ***

  Unbelievable, thought Crenicichla. It’s absolutely unbelievable. They’re all dead, every single last one of them. Her gaggle of ragtag hooligans, my overpriced and overrated clones, everybody but
me and poor Krystal, and I can’t get this godforsaken spaceship started by myself!

  At least it wasn’t a matter of security systems and passwords. The stolen yacht had been deserted when he’d carried Krystal over from the City of Newark. Her engines were cold and she was being pulled along at one third gee by the liner. He’d meant to look at her commissioning plaque when he’d come aboard, but had forgotten to. It was peculiar, not knowing the name of the vessel you were attempting to start and run.

  Some kind of bird—White Swan—or was that the class of the vessel?

  He’d also intended for at least two of the clones to remain aboard and ready for a quick getaway, but apparently, given the flexible, ad hoc way Null Delta Em liked to run things, in the rapidly-growing crisis aboard the City of Newark, Krystal had found other uses for them, and they’d eventually met their individual fates. What a damn waste.

  After taking care of Krystal as best he could and running forward to begin the start-up cycle, he’d closed all four airlock doors and securely bolted those of the yacht. At least he and Krystal were safe for a while. The wretched, world-wrecking, capitalist reactionary bastards who’d messed up the radical environmentalist statement of the century would perish, freezing, gasping for breath, or in a splendid collision.

  He almost wished that he could be there to see it. He hoped that they lasted long enough, even without the life support he’d ordered powered down, to watch Phobos looming bigger and bigger outside their windows. Imagine the screaming, when they figured out what was going on, the hair-tearing, the soul-rending anguish. It was a heart-warming thought.

  His hands raced over the keyboards, slowly eliciting the desired responses. Not much longer, now, and they would be away from here at last. He began to think about where they would go, to let things cool off. Someplace isolated, lonely, a little romantic, but with good restaurants.

  But another thought intruded on him …