The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  Daniel glanced through the bridge port. The truck he'd bought in San Juan was trundling out of the jungle with the sixth and last of the High Drive motors they'd removed from the wreck of the country craft. The Chief Engineer and six of his team were aboard also, returning to their duties in the Sissie's power room.

  The timing was perfect. There must be another twenty-odd personnel still in the jungle, but the truck could ferry them back at leisure. Six techs and the chief were the minimum required to move the corvette a very short distance under her own power.

  Daniel smiled, because he was thinking and a smile was the default option to which his face returned when he didn't have conscious reason for another expression. Mr. Pasternak and six of his people in the Power Room, and Lieutenant Daniel Leary at the command console. . . .

  He grinned more broadly. And Hogg, of course, because he didn't kid himself that he'd be able to convince Hogg to disembark for safety's sake.

  The truck disappeared beneath the curve of the hull, but the remote camera Dorst had placed on their first visit still provided imagery of the burned-over meadow. The vehicle pulled up at the boarding ramp after very carefully negotiating the web of cables now linking the Princess Cecile and the Goldenfels.

  The Power Room staff filed into the corvette while a rigger drove the truck to the edge of the clearing where the other motors had been off-loaded. The vehicle was stone-axe simple, although as imported machinery on Todos Santos it certainly hadn't been cheap. It was battery-powered with an open bed and cab, a bench seat, and four all-terrain tires. Most of the Sissies could drive it well enough—in contrast to an aircar—and it could carry far greater weights without risk. High Drive motors weighed the better part of a half ton apiece.

  Tarps covered the motors that'd already been retrieved. That was probably a pointless concern, seeing that they'd spent the previous sixty years upended on the hull of the wreck, but Daniel didn't see any percentage in increasing the degree of risk even minusculely.

  Woetjans came down from the hull wearing the boots and gauntlets from her rigging suit with her utility uniform. Her boots banged on the deck, making sure Daniel was aware of her presence before she entered the bridge. A dozen of her riggers had tramped through the airlock only minutes before, so her arrival wasn't a surprise.

  "Good work, Woetjans," Daniel said. "I didn't expect you to finish the job for another day at least."

  Woetjans scowled, loosening her gauntlets finger by finger before stripping them off. "Guess it'd be a waste of time asking if you're still going through with the damn fool notion," she said as she concentrated on the gloves.

  "We have to go through with it, Woetjans," Daniel said, rephrasing his reply rather than accept her formation. "Short of bringing a dock ship out from Cinnabar, this is the only way we're going to get the Goldenfels back in working order. And we need the Goldenfels, you know."

  "I don't know what we need," the bosun said. "I take your word for it, sure; but sir, she's easy three times our mass. If you lose a few cables, and you're going to lose a few cables, she'll settle back and it'll be the Sissie flipped over too. Or worse!"

  "Six, this is the Power Room," Mr. Pasternak announced on the command channel. Pasternak was a humorless and ambitious man, neither of them an endearing trait; but he knew his business and didn't waste time. For those virtues Pasternak would have the option of serving in any vessel that Daniel commanded. "The board's green. We're ready at this end any time you need power. Over."

  "Roger, Mr. Pasternak," Daniel said. "Break. Ship, this is Six. All personnel save the Power Room crew must disembark immediately. The Main Hatch will remain open for two, repeat two, minutes only. Get out and get clear, Sissies. Remember that these cables can part at both ends and fly God knows where, so don't trust being a hundred yards out. Six out."

  Daniel called up a hull display on his console and began closing the ship. Plasma from the thrusters drifting in through the hatches wasn't a danger, but the risk of a line galling on a lifted cover was something else again. What he planned to do wouldn't be easy and might not be possible. He was covering all the bases he could.

  Woetjans still stood by the console, a grim look on her face.

  "Woetjans," Daniel snapped, "get your ass off this ship now. Do you hear me? You're no bloody use aboard and you just might manage to distract me. Now, I said!"

  The bosun's face went blank in shock. She'd seen Daniel angry before, but not at her—and she was a spacer through and through, steeped in the chain of command. She'd been presuming on a relationship with Daniel that went beyond captain and warrant officer, but the snarled order slammed her back into RCN discipline.

  "Aye aye, sir!" she blurted. She broke into a lumbering run as she left the bridge and started down the companionway. Hogg, who'd just come in by the airlock, stepped aside for her and gave Daniel a quizzical glance.

  Daniel sighed. "I'm nervous about this, Hogg," he admitted. "I bit her head off. Though if me snapping at her saves her life, then I'll have one less thing on my conscience if this goes to Hell."

  "Nothing's going to Hell," Hogg said equitably, sitting down on the gunner's couch. "Except maybe us after a lot more years."

  He nodded toward the companionways and added, "Mistress Mundy'll be up pretty quick. She started over from the wreck when Pasternak arrived."

  "Bloody Hell!" Daniel said. "She's got no business here. Any more than you do, Hogg!"

  "I do have business here," Adele said calmly as she stepped out of the up companionway and walked onto the bridge. "I've set all the screens aboard the Goldenfels to feed through the signals board, which will transmit the images—"

  She sat at her own console and brought up a display with over forty segments.

  "—to me, for forwarding to you as required. You'll have a realtime display of what's going on aboard the Goldenfels as you right her."

  Daniel stared at her. "Oh," he said. "Ah. Actually, that might be useful. I didn't realize it would be possible."

  The best they could expect from this violent maneuver was straining of the Goldenfels' hull. If in fact the freighter started to come apart as it lifted—and the Sissies hadn't been able to check all her structural members without removing hull plates, a task for which they lacked both time and equipment—then the Princess Cecile would be involved in the wreck unless Daniel set her back down immediately. Internal imagery might give him warning that he wouldn't otherwise get.

  "That's why you have me, captain," Adele said calmly. She clamped down her acceleration harness, then gave Daniel one of her wry smiles.

  Daniel checked the time, then noticed something missing. He didn't like Tovera, but . . .

  Aloud, frowning, he said, "Adele, where's Tovera?"

  "She said she'd stay on the ground," Adele said without expression.

  "She figures if the Goldenfels' crew's going to try anything, it'll be now," Hogg said, amplifying the simple statement. "She's got a point, and we figured one of us aboard was enough to take care of the ship's rats if they make a break from the hold."

  "Yes, I suppose that's true," Daniel said. Hogg sounded vaguely regretful. Well, we all learn we have to make choices in life.

  With a smile spreading across his face, Daniel checked his display. The eight thrusters showed green, ready to go, and the only opening was the main hatch.

  "Ship, this is Six," he said, his finger touching the virtual keypad. "Closing ship."

  He felt the vessel quiver. The main hatch was a thick steel plate. Even with the whole Sissie as an anchor for the hydraulic jacks swinging it down, closing the hatch moved the hull as well.

  Whereas the Goldenfels was many times heavier than the corvette. Well, they'd move her anyway; and with the help of luck and the good Lord, they wouldn't wreck both ships in the process.

  "Lighting thrusters," Daniel said, starting the trickle of reaction mass into thruster throats where electrons were stripped off and the dense nuclei expelled violently.

  The
Sissie trembled again, this time getting a greasy, unbalanced feel. The present impulse was too little to lift the corvette's mass, but it unloaded the vessel enough to make it feel unstable.

  Daniel grinned again. It was going to get a lot worse before it got better. If in fact it got better.

  The display was still green. Oh, there were details that could become important—that's why six techs under Mr. Pasternak in the Power Room were watching the displays. Daniel had other things to attend to.

  "Ship, I'm increasing thrust," he said. He opened the feed nozzles to 20%, then edged power up to 23% until the Sissie came off the ground. Daniel slid the corvette sideways until she started to tilt on her axis. He'd drawn taut the cables connecting her to the Goldenfels; now—

  "Hang on, Sissies, here we go!" Daniel said as he opened the starboard thrusters another 3%, countering the pull of the freighter's mass. The two ships were knit together by a web of rigging cables, beryllium monocrystal of great tensile strength.

  Great strength didn't mean infinite strength. The cables weren't meant to lift a starship, and no matter how skillful Daniel and Woetjans' riggers were, some cables would take more of the strain than their neighbors did.

  Daniel increased power, another percent on the port thrusters, 2% to starboard and then another percent on Starboard 3. He couldn't have said why he'd fed more power to Starboard 3, couldn't even guess, but the corvette suddenly stabilized instead of skittering like a hog on ice.

  "She's coming!" somebody shouted on the command channel. Somebody outside the ship, Chewning or Dorst, they were still on the net. "She's—"

  And then the net was clear again, a quick jerk of Adele's control wands.

  The wire-frame image of the freighter on Daniel's display was starting to tilt on her axis. A legend would've given the rotation in degrees, minutes and seconds if Daniel wanted it, but he didn't, he was controlling this by feel because there were too many variables to do it any other way.

  A hair more power to the starboard thrusters, not to pull the Goldenfels but rather to skid the Princess Cecile sidewise to port. The freighter's rotation meant the cables attached to her dorsal masts had started to slacken. One had kinked and parted, a ringing crash like the sound of a plasma bolt striking the hull in vacuum.

  "Come on, you fat bitch!" Daniel said, but he shouldn't've been swearing at the Goldenfels; they'd treat the freighter well and she'd be their friend. More power and the Princess Cecile slid measurably to port. The Goldenfels was coming, great God almighty she was coming, she was coming over, yes, by God she—

  The freighter reached her balance point and hung. The Princess Cecile danced in a tethered hover, bobbing between the ground and ten feet in the air. Asymmetric strains made her porpoise as well, bow and stern rising and falling alternately. If the Goldenfels slipped back, her mass would flip the corvette into the ground on the other side of her unless the cables parted first; and they wouldn't, not all of them.

  One of the Goldenfels' masts tore out of the hull plating, jerked skyward on the pull of two cables. The freighter rotated another few degrees before her lifted outrigger rolled toward the ground at increasing speed. Maybe it was removing the mast's weight, maybe it was recoil from the shock of metal shearing; maybe it was luck.

  Hogg cheered but Daniel didn't have time to. Instinct urged him to chop his throttles, but he'd thought the situation through over the past four days. He boosted power to his port thrusters, lifting that side against the inertia of the starboard thrusters. They were trying to spin the corvette onto her back now that the freighter's mass didn't anchor her through the taut cables.

  The Princess Cecile rose twenty feet before Daniel got control, real control, and brought her into balance. He'd begun lowering her with her thrust reduced to 21% when the Goldenfels' outrigger hit the ground in a crash like the earth splitting.

  The freighter bounced into the air again in a doughnut of yellow-gray dust swelling out around the hull, lifted by the shock rather than the touch of the steel outriggers. The compression wave buffeted the Princess Cecile but Daniel didn't overcompensate, just let the ship rise and fall; and, falling, kiss the ground to settle. They were twenty yards closer to the Goldenfels than they'd been when he lit the thrusters.

  "Shutting down," he said by rote; and did so, cutting the feeds to the thrusters. In the hissing silence his ears still remembered the clash of the Goldenfels hitting, then hitting again. Bloody hell, they'd be lucky if they hadn't dismounted the fusion bottle in her Power Room. . . .

  Daniel drew in a deep breath, then expanded his exterior display. The cables were a knotted tangle rather than the neat cat's cradle Woetjans and her riggers had strung; the outriggers lay across loops of them. They'd wind up leaving half the gear behind because they didn't have time to dig out each strand and coil it. . . .

  Adele had cut in the external audio pickups. People were cheering. People were cheering Captain Leary.

  Daniel slowly began to grin.

  CHAPTER 27

  Adele looked worn as she came around the end of the outrigger where Daniel stood looking up at the freighter's stern. Mr. Pasternak had left several minutes before to return to the Goldenfels' Power Room where he was rewiring the High Drive installation. Daniel had stayed to . . .

  He grinned. He hadn't stayed for any particular reason beyond the fact that he was exhausted and nobody happened to be shouting at him right this moment, forcing his attention onto the next problem. If Adele was tired, she wasn't the only one. The past . . . seventeen days . . . had been very hard. Daniel felt obscurely pleased to have remembered the length of time they'd been here on Morzanga.

  Adele followed the line of his gaze to the hull above. She frowned. "Are those cracks serious?" she said. Her lips pursed and she added, "That is, they are cracks, aren't they?"

  "Yes, I'm afraid that my righting technique did more damage than the blast that threw her onto her side had in the first place," Daniel said, looking up again though he knew perfectly well what he was going to see. "Still, it couldn't be helped."

  The outrigger struts were attached to the hull frames. They hadn't broken when the ship slammed down harder than the shock absorbers could compensate for, but they'd bent—and, bending, had buckled hull plates around the base of each strut. Straightening the plates would be a dockyard job and a major one at that.

  "About thirty percent of the Goldenfels' spaces no longer hold air," he continued. "Fortunately the main passages are axial and airtight, so we can close off compartments and still have use of the ship from stem to stern. Since we're a skeleton crew, we don't need even as much volume as we have left."

  He grinned. "We're a well-gnawed skeleton at that, I fear."

  "She isn't the Goldenfels," Adele said absently as she knuckled her eyes. "That was her cover name. According to the bridge computer she's actually HSK2 Atlantis, an Alliance naval unit."

  She looked at Daniel. "There's a separate bridge unit that isn't linked to the ship systems," she explained. "That's why I wasn't able to access it before when we. . . ."

  She stuck her hand out, then turned it over to mime the way the freighter had flopped onto its side. The gesture was perfectly clear, but it amused Daniel to realize how very tired they must both be that they were unable to call up familiar words.

  "Pasternak'll finish with the High Drive soon, probably within twenty-four hours," Daniel said, trying to swim through the fog that surrounded his mental processes. He really needed rest, and for the life of him he couldn't imagine when he was going to get it. The dilemma made him smile, albeit tiredly. "I really want to lift from here. There's hundreds of the Goldenfels' crew out there in the bush with impellers. I don't think they could successfully storm the ships, not with the plasma cannon constantly manned, but I expected constant sniping."

  Adele cleared her throat. She seemed embarrassed.

  Daniel gave her a sharp look; he was beginning to come out of his fog. "Go on, tell me," he said more sharply than he'd intend
ed.

  "Before Tovera entered my service," Adele said, looking out toward the jungle, "she worked for an officer of the Fifth Bureau, the Alliance security office which reports directly to Guarantor Porra."

  "Go on," Daniel said. He hadn't known or particularly wanted to know the details, but the general outline wasn't a surprise. If Adele—and Hogg—trusted Tovera, that was enough for him.

  "She has authentication codes that the Alliance signals officer would recognize, even if he isn't himself a member of the Fifth Bureau," Adele said. "Many of the castaways retain their commo helmets, so Tovera could contact them directly and expect her message to be spread throughout the body of the crew. She asked for my help because she wouldn't have been able to determine the correct frequencies herself."

  "Ah," said Daniel. "Of course we'd have responded to snipers with the plasma cannon, but I was surprised that that implied threat had completely forestalled incidents. Tovera made the threat more personal, I gather?"

  "She said that if a Cinnabar spacer was wounded, she'd kill a prisoner," Adele said. She swallowed and turned so that her eyes met Daniel's. "She said that if a Cinnabar spacer was killed, she would kill five prisoners. And she said that Captain Leary knew nothing of this: she was with the Fifth Bureau, and it wasn't for mere Fleet personnel to question the Guarantor's purposes."

  She cleared her throat. "And I didn't stop her, Daniel."

  "Stopping Tovera . . . ," Daniel said, "or Hogg, either one, isn't a process to enter into lightly. We have enough enemies in this business that I'm not going to turn down any help that's offered."

  He rubbed his eyes but he shouldn't have, not for a moment yet, because when he was no longer looking at his immediate surroundings he caught a vision of what might have happened: Hogg holding a screaming prisoner by the hair—because Hogg was involved, had maybe planned the whole thing—and drawing his knife, he'd use his knife, across her throat.