by James Wilks
“I think so, sir,” the head engineer’s answer was nearly instantaneous. “All readouts show green. A sustained three G thrust should be a strain, but not a problem.”
“Excellent.” The captain turned to her left, shooting her first mate a look.
Without words, he turned and opened the shipwide coms. “Heads up, people.” His voice issued from every speaker on every deck. “We’re going to turn and burn for a nice little salvage stop. We’ll be pulling two-point-eight Gs for about three hours. Strap in, grab something to do, and try to ride it out. We begin burn in…” he paused and looked at Charis. The blonde navigator held up four fingers, “…four minutes.” He released the coms button and looked at Charis again. “Where’s Gwen?”
Without looking up from her control panel, she answered, “She’s with her father. It’s math lessons this hour. He’ll take care of her.”
As he finished, Charis cut the engine thrust, and a moment later, the sense of weightlessness became apparent. The navigator continued her work on the controls, and Bethany took the ship through a gentle one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pitch. After two minutes or so, an Earth much smaller than the one Staples had regarded the day before crept back into the window, finally settling above them in the skylight and somewhat to their right. Staples spent a few precious seconds gazing at it through the skylight above her chair, and then said, “Do it.”
Charis’ voice came through the speakers this time, counting down the time to thrust. “Prep for bedsores in five, four, three, two, one…”
One-and-a-half grueling hours later, Yegor spoke up again. “Captain, I’ve got chatter coming in from another ship… and it’s close.”
Staples leaned forward in her seat and almost immediately regretted it. Under the weight of the intense gravity incurred by the deceleration, her normal sixty kilograms became over one-hundred-and-fifty, a weight her medium frame was not used to. She had experienced high-G conditions before, of course, most of them had, and the body could be conditioned to deal with them through time and exposure, but it was never enjoyable.
Charis frowned, looking down at her instruments and readouts. “I’m not getting anything,” the navigator commented, making adjustments and looking over her data. “Is it far out or right behind us?”
“Right behind us, I’d say.” Yegor replied. “They’re warning us off the find; say they’ve got the prior claim.” The captain looked back at her navigator.
“No way,” Charis countered. “No way. I scanned far enough before our turn. Nothing was close enough to get there before us unless it was moving fast to begin with and willing to pull six Gs of deceleration. Even with gravity couches, that’s dangerous.”
“Hold on,” Yegor interjected, his attention clearly divided between the headset in his ear and what Charis was telling him. After a few seconds passed, he added, “They say they’re not there yet, but they have tagged the satellite with a claim beacon and will be there shortly.”
A bad feeling crept into Staples’ gut.
“That don’t fly,” Templeton stated emphatically. “Salvage code says ‘first come, first serve.’ They can’t just fly around space tagging debris and calling it theirs. So what if they’ve got a rail gun that can shoot transponders at .25c? If they don’t get there ‘fore we do, it’s ours. That’s what the code says.” He nodded at his own assessment of the situation.
Staples’ jaw tensed. “Not everyone respects the code as much as we do, Don.”
“But it ain’t legal. What are they gonna do, shoot us?”
Every set of eyes on in the cockpit was on them. Even Bethany, her hair hanging straight down about her face like icicles, her dark eyes wide, had leaned around her seat to watch the two of them converse.
“No, I don’t think anyone out here would risk that.” The captain tried to assuage her crew’s concerns. “The lanes between Mars and Earth are a little too well monitored. They’d never get away with that. But if we go to the police and tell them some rival crew stole our salvage, well… half of them see salvage as theft anyway, green line or no.” She looked pointedly at Charis. “Is there any way to tell how far out they are?”
Charis shook her head. “Not if they’re coming at our ass.” She thought for a moment. “Unless we could power down the engines for five or ten minutes, then I could get a clean radar sweep. But then we’d shoot past the satellite, which kind of defeats the point. Unless of course…”
“…We resume deceleration at three Gs or so.” The captain finished her thought. The moment stretched. The harder they pushed the engines, the more painful the ride became. Three Gs was generally considered the safety limit; no captain was happy to push their ship or their crew up to three, and certainly no one in the cockpit liked the idea, but it was difficult to plan without knowing how far away the other ship was. If the other crew had a reading on them and knew their engines were burning in their direction, they’d know the Gringolet wouldn’t be able to ascertain their position. “Five minutes to get a fix?” Staples asked.
The navigator frowned and shook her head. “I can’t promise it’ll be that short. The further out they are, the longer the wait for the radar return.”
Staples tapped her fingers on her armrest for a second while she considered, then said, “Okay, let’s do it. We need the information, and we’ve wasted too much time and fuel on this to come away with nothing. Don, let everyone know what we’re doing.” As Templeton leaned back to his shipwide coms button, Staples added, “Wait. Yegor, did that transmission contain an ID?”
“Da, Captain. It’s the Doris Day.”
Captain Logan Vey’s deep voice flowed clearly from the speakers and through the cockpit. “So it’s clear, Clea, that we’ve got the prior claim. We saw it first. We tagged it first. Our property is currently attached to it. You wouldn’t steal from another crew, would you?” Vey was speaking to her as if she were a rebellious teenager, one who had been caught shoplifting and who would regret their decision if only they could be made to see the error of their ways.
“If by property, you mean that three centimeter transponder, you can have it,” Staples retorted evenly. She allowed a trace of contrition to enter her voice. “And not that laying eyes on something matters, but what makes you think you saw this thing first, Logan?”
Due to the distance between the two ships, the response took a few seconds to come through. “The fact that I know exactly what kind of radar suite you have on that old ship of yours, and that mine is twice as powerful. I’ve got a Narda G223. Ask your Russkie or Missus MacDonnell over there; they’ll confirm that.” Staples looked at Yegor, who thought for a second then regretfully nodded in confirmation. His face changed to a shrug, which his shoulders tried to match, though the movement clearly pained him. She couldn’t blame him; the man weighed about two-hundred-and-seventy kilograms at present. The expression was clear, however: if he’s telling the truth. She suspected he was. Logan Vey’s vessel was newer, faster, and more expensive than hers.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Some kid with a high-powered telescope on earth might have seen this thing before either of us. I don’t plan on leaving it there until he comes to pick it up either. If we beat you to it, that’s it.” The captain hoped she sounded certain and flinty, but her buttocks and legs were paining her dreadfully under the strain of the engines, and she just wanted it to end.
Vey continued, undeterred. “Look, Clea, I like you. I like your ship. Don’t make me-“ Staples tapped a button on the surface inlaid in her armrest and the transmission cut off. Templeton smiled over at her. He tried to project approval, but his face was tinged with concern.
“It seems,” Staples spoke over her right shoulder without turning the chair around, “that you chose a very interesting day to visit us up here, Doctor.”
“Indeed,” the doctor replied in his richly accented voice. “As fascinating as this is, I cannot help but feel that I should be in the medical bay, especially if this ibn il-Homaar intends to make good
on his bluster.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Doc.” Templeton interjected, turning in his chair. “Medical’s twenty meters down ladder from here, and you weigh, what, two-hundred-and-twenty kilos right now? I know you like to keep in shape and all, but if you got hurt, who’d patch you up?”
“I’ll overlook your well intentioned comments about my weight, Mr. Templeton, and simply say that I can go and get ready to receive casualties once we stop,” he rolled his R’s subtly and unconsciously, “though I have the utmost faith that our captain will bring us through without a scratch.”
“If anyone can. What’s that mean, anyway?”
Iqbal raised his eyebrows. “What, ‘ibn il-Homaar?’”
“Yeah.”
“Son of a donkey.”
“Nice,” Templeton said, and swiveled back around.
Twenty minutes after the captain patched herself into the shipwide coms to outline her plan to the crew, but still thirty minutes out from the satellite, Gringolet’s thrust diminished. Had anyone been looking, the satellite itself would be clearly visible through the aft observation windows that peeked up above and below the engine housing at the back of the ship.
When they were only four minutes from the satellite, the already depressurized shuttle bay door opened and a utility vehicle the size of a 20th-century minivan was launched violently out of the portal. The UteV, as they were commonly called, was fired from a jury-rigged launcher that pushed it up to nearly three Gs of thrust in the opposite direction. This was enough to counteract the speed it acquired from the larger ship, which meant that, relatively speaking, it was not moving. Almost immediately Dinah Hazra, the UteV’s sole occupant, began thrusting the small vehicle towards the satellite. Manipulator arms unfolded from the front of the craft, which was comprised primarily of a hemispherical glass viewport.
An additional two minutes later, Gringolet’s engines flared significantly brighter, pushing well over three Gs for fifty-two seconds, and the ship came to a full stop. As it did, Bethany immediately took over attitude control from Charis, and the vessel pitched one hundred and eighty degrees, nose over end, to face the oncoming rival ship. As it did so, the cockpit realigned, tilting up ninety degrees and recreating the characteristic conical shape that her captain had recently admired on the beach. The doctor hastily flung away his safety belt and pushed himself off the bridge and down towards medical. The Doris Day was now plainly visible to the crew in the cockpit, as well as anyone else who cared to look from a forward viewing port.
Captain Vey’s Doris Day had been top-of-the-line when he acquired her, and that was none too long ago. The ship shared the roughly cone shaped outline with Gringolet, but it was a bit smaller. Because it was newer, its engines were also smaller, giving the ship an overall slimmer profile from the rear, which was exactly the view that the crew was treated to as they watched the other ship approach. Bethany made some slight adjustments based on her data readouts and visual stimuli, and Gringolet placed itself rather precisely between the oncoming ship and the satellite. The hair tie normally found round her wrist was holding her hair back, and though it floated freely, not a strand of it strayed in front of her face.
“How long until she reaches us, Charis?” Staples inquired tensely.
“At current thrust… twelve minutes. She’s coming in awfully fast, Captain. My numbers show she’ll stop before she hits us, but not more than a thousand kilometers.” Charis did not try to disguise the fear in her voice.
Templeton’s hands tightened on his armrests. “That’s real close. All she has to do is let off thrust for a few seconds and-“
“She won’t.” His captain cut him off. “Vey won’t do that. He could burn us, but getting that close would risk his pretty new ship. He’s just trying to show off and intimidate us.”
“It might be working,” Yegor muttered.
“You’re sure, Captain?” Templeton asked.
“If this be error and upon me proved…” she replied distractedly, leaning forward, her eyes pinned to the approaching engine flair in the window. Her first mate, well familiar with his captain’s proclivity for quoting classics, especially in tense situations, took that to mean that she was sure.
Instead of questioning her further, he turned to his panel and spoke into his microphone. “Dinah, how you doing out there?”
Dinah’s slightly broken voice came through almost immediately. “Just fine, sir. How are you?”
“Nervous. How close are you?”
“About eleven minutes away from the satellite. That was a tricky maneuver, launching me while under thrust, but you put me in a good position, sir.” She neglected to mention that the UteV launching mechanism was both her idea and invention.
“I don’t suppose you could speed things up?” Templeton asked.
“I promise not to get there any sooner or later than I can get there, sir.” In spite of himself, he smiled at her response, knowing he should leave her alone. The woman was an expert.
Ten minutes later, as the Doris Day was approaching zero speed, a dark disc came flying up and around its engines. The drone immediately began moving under its own thrust towards the ventral side of Gringolet. Charis picked it up right away. Rather than report to her captain, she patched herself through to Dinah in the UteV. “Dinah, I’ve got something headed towards us. Looks like a probe or a drone. Probably a drone. It’s using the ‘Day’s’ speed to fly past us. Suspect it’s coming right to you.”
“I can try to block it,” Bethany said in her reedy voice, “but then we’ll be out of position to block the Doris Day.” She sounded regretful, as if the physics of the situation were her fault.
“Hold position,” Templeton ordered.
“Can we shoot it?” Charis asked.
The first mate shook his head. “It’s too maneuverable for slugs at this range. It’d just move out of the way. A tac missile could catch it-“
“No,” Staples interrupted him. “No weapons. I don’t want this to escalate, and I certainly don’t want to give Vey the opportunity to say he opened fire on us to defend his property. Whether the satellite is his is debatable at this point. That the drone is his isn’t. Let it go. Dinah will have to handle it.”
As if to put their fears to rest, the chief engineer’s voice came through the speakers. “I’ve got it. Locked on.” Templeton blew out a breath of relief, and Yegor’s face lit up.
Once she had grabbed two support bars on the satellite with the UteV’s capture arms, Dinah began to thrust backwards towards the ship. The four small jets that surrounded the rounded viewing port in front of her propelled her steadily. The EVA gloves made her hands no less dexterous on the controls, and she maneuvered the craft with deft confidence. A few seconds after she had begun to gain speed, she looked up through the top viewing port and saw the sun reflect off the shiny black drone as it came flying around Gringolet, changed vectors, and headed straight for her. Its capture claws extended menacingly. She was sure the drone was being controlled by someone aboard the other ship. Not putting a person in it gave it distinct advantages; it was capable of thrusts and vector alterations that would pulp a human occupant. The drone was the kind of high-tech luxury her crew couldn’t afford. It isn’t fair, she thought for a second, and then shook her head to clear it. Fair was irrelevant; the situation was as it was.
Back in the cockpit of her ship, Templeton tensed. “That thing’ll tear her UteV apart.” His voice was little more than a strained mutter.
“No,” came Staples’ quiet but tense reply. “He won’t risk killing her. He’ll figure she’s wearing a suit, but still, something could go wrong. He won’t risk it.”
“Then what’s he planning?”
“We’re about to find out, I think.”
The drone descended on Dinah’s UteV like a hawk on a rabbit. At the last minute, it fired retro thrusters and stopped short of colliding with her. Its capture claws grabbed hold of the two support bars on the opposite side of the distressed
satellite, and it began to pull. Dinah looked at the thing, a jet black disc that resembled nothing so much as a giant metallic Go piece with a single red sensor eye facing her. It was a scant five meters from her craft, silently blowing thrust in the face of her vehicle, and winning the tug-of-war. She increased the thrust of the UteV to maximum, and the drone responded in kind. The support bars warped under the strain, and emergency lights on her console began to flash, but nothing had given way yet.
Dinah began to fire her dorsal jets, rotating the three connected objects in space. Then she spoke through the open com channel. “Bethany, listen to me…”
On board the Doris Day, Captain Vey looked across his bridge expectantly at his Second Mate. Beyond the window in front of them, Gringolet faced them nose-to-nose, maneuvering to keep itself between their ship and the satellite. Vey was a large man, once a very intimidating physical specimen, and though his stomach had grown in recent years and his muscle had lessened, he still possessed a formidable physique. He had fair skin and close cropped curly hair, which he ran his hands through often as if to retard its recession.
“Well?” he asked; his deep voice carried, as it often did, a hint of threat.
The second mate, a dark-skinned woman in her early thirties, was wearing a VR helmet and haptic control gloves. Her hands were clamped firmly around an invisible object, and she was gesturing towards herself with them. “She’s not letting go, but that UteV doesn’t have the thrust the drone does. If she doesn’t want to let go, I’ll just bring her along.”
The captain replied irritably, “That’s like to take more time than I’d-“
Suddenly his pilot, who had been trying and failing to outmaneuver Bethany and get around the other vessel, interrupted him with a loud exclamation. “What the hell?” Gringolet’s VTOL thrusters had turned to face them, and the ship was thrusting violently away.