A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence)

by Robert Taylor

  He looked at Veltin, who was still grinning like an eager child. “Alright! The ship is yours Mr. Veltin. God help us all!”

  Veltin turned back to the piloting console, slipped his hands into the control waldos and settled himself into his seat.

  “Hang on to your butts! It might get hairy!” He muttered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The PDC’s were caught completely by surprise when the Ulysses suddenly lurched outwards from the station. Their single man crews had just enough time to react and thrust their vessels clear of the customs vessels path. There was no time for any thought of firing on the ship. Getting out of its way was the only concern. The Ulysses was not a big vessel, but it was big in comparison to the tiny PDC’s. An impact with the customs vessel would certainly be fatal for any of the little craft.

  Having scattered the tiny craft, the Ulysses then plunged back down towards the station’s hull and sped off along it, just meters from the surface.

  It was a maneuver that would have been impossible in a ship equipped with a normal reaction-mass drive. The Gravity Drive, by contrast, allowed a vessel to push and pull against any gravity source nearby. The more sources of gravity there were, such as a planetary system, the more vectors that were available to the ship to use for movement. Add in a limited ability to ‘sail’ at an angle to gravitational forces, and the ship became almost as maneuverable as if it was an atmospheric craft.

  The PDC’s, startled like flies around a suddenly not-dead corpse, set off in pursuit, maintaining a healthier distance from the hull of Tantalus Station. Unfortunately, the higher ‘altitude’ meant that any firing solution ran the risk of striking the station if it missed its target. Accordingly they withheld their fire, being content to follow.

  *****

  In the medical center, Lewis had finally found a spacesuit.

  It was better than the ones that Hamilton and Johnson had on and was intended solely for use in emergency decompression situations. It appeared that, as well as swanky offices, the senior admin staff also had a number of other perks.

  Hamilton and Johnson had to help Lewis into it, however. The planetologist was physically weak from the treatment she had received.

  “We need to hurry!” Hamilton pointed out. “They won’t stay locked behind the security doors for long.”

  Lewis shrugged. “They are probably already reviewing the camera footage from in here. I expect we’ll have visitors in moments.”

  “Especially now that we’re all terrorists.” Johnson added.

  Lewis scowled. “What?”

  “Long story.” Hamilton told her. “Just get the damn suit on!”

  Once all the seals had been checked they hurried back to the big picture window in the admin office. Lewis tried to heft the plasma cutter but she was in no state to do much. Their ‘rescue’ had allowed all the adrenalin that had fueled her up to that point to ebb away. She was drained.

  “Here, give me that!” Hamilton said, taking the cutter from her. There was a momentary flash of irritation in her eyes but she didn’t put up any protest.

  Hamilton pointed the cutter at the steelglass panel. “Brace yourselves, I’ll make a hole first, to relieve the pressure difference, then cut once everything has subsided. Darken your visors!”

  The two women hurried to comply. Hamilton knew the visors would darken automatically anyway, but the warning was well-intentioned and gave them something to focus on. For his part, he merely placed the cutter against the panel, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

  The plasma flame burned at over nine thousand Kelvin and was hideously bright. The flame was short, less than six inches, but the effect of it on the steelglass was immediate.

  Even before he’d decided it was safe to open his eyes, the plasma had cut a hole and inch in diameter right through the panel.

  Air hurtled through the narrow channel, quickly cooling the sides of the hole back down. In a matter of minutes, the entire air supply in the locked down section was vented into space, along with countless pieces of paper and small items such as pens and the like. A data pane momentarily made a temporary patch over the hole, but a blast from the cutter melted a hole right through it and the evacuation of the atmosphere continued unabated after that.

  Hamilton switched over to the suit’s comms channel they had selected prior to beginning his cutting.

  “You two okay?”

  “Yeah.” Johnson nodded. Lewis waved a hand in weary agreement.

  “Right then.” Hamilton turned back to the panel and began cutting a hole big enough for them to get through.

  The cutter was more manageable in a vacuum. Whilst the air had been present, the backwash of heat from the cutter was quite fearsome. Hamilton’s suit had protected him in the brief moments the cutter had taken to melt a hole through the panel, but the suit’s alarms had gone off, warning him of the danger. In actual rescue operations the cutter’s operator wore heavily protected clothing to offset the danger from the heat.

  Now, though, there was no air to heat. Only radiated heat and radiation was a threat now, and the suits they wore coped with those more than adequately.

  The cutter made light work of the panel and Hamilton soon had a hole four feet square in the window. As he cut through the last piece of steelglass holding the orphaned section in place, it fell outside the window, bounced on the outer sill and then slid down the hull a few inches before starting to float away.

  The gravity extends a little way beyond the window panel. Hamilton thought. At least we’ll be able to step outside without drifting away.

  He climbed out through the hole he’d made after giving it a moment for the edges to cool, still carrying the plasma cutter. It was quite heavy, but he reasoned it might come in useful later. He clipped it to his waist once he was out and then helped the other two climb out.

  Johnson, of course, took his offer of help easily. Lewis did too, showing just how exhausted she was. Normally she’d have made some snarky comment about his act of chivalry. Today, however, she just grabbed his arm and used it to steady herself as she clambered out to join him.

  Once outside, they stood near the panel, reluctant to leave the weak gravity field that extended beyond the pane.

  “What now?” Johnson asked.

  “Now,” Hamilton said. “We make our way down to the Morebaeus. She’s our only hope of getting out of here now.”

  Lewis snorted. “That junker? I had it in mind to wander about then cut our way back in someplace else.”

  “We’ll still need to get aboard a ship at some point.” Hamilton pointed out. “The Morebaeus is our best bet.”

  “Need I remind you the hyper drive is next to useless?” Lewis added.

  Hamilton shook his head, the gesture lost in his helmet. “Not really.”

  “Spill it, Hamilton!” Lewis growled with a little of her usual fire.

  Hamilton chuckled. “Okay. Here’s the deal. When the Morebaeus arrived here, she was intercepted by a customs vessel commanded by an old… friend… of mine. I told him the deal with Walsh and Vogerian, the whole story. The rest of you were still in cryo.”

  “We know all this.” Johnson said.

  Hamilton pointed at Lewis. “She doesn’t. They dragged her off for psi testing. She didn’t get to meet any of the Ulysses crew.”

  “Anyhow, as I was saying,” He continued. “Rames, the captain, and I came up with a getaway plan if it all went pear-shaped, which it did. Mostly that was to use the Ulysses to escape, but we at least, have missed that boat, as it were. We had a fallback option to use the Morebaeus as a means of escape. As you pointed out, Lewis, it was pretty broken, drive-wise. We’re lucky we even made it to this system. But we were a long way out when we emerged from hyperspace. A long way. Given our damaged drive, it took quite a while for the Morebaeus to limp here. Quite a while indeed. Long enough for the Ulysses tech crew to fix up the power core on the Morebaeus to a useable state. It would never pass inspection, but it’ll perfo
rm a normal jump now. We just have to get to it.”

  “How do we do that?” Johnson asked, looking down towards the berthing ring. The medical center was a lot closer to it than Q-section had been. The docking arms and vessels were clearly visible. Even so, they were at least three hundred meters away.

  “Walk.” Lewis sighed, tiredly.

  “I mean, how do we not float away?” She clarified. “Do we have magnetic boots?”

  Lewis snorted again.

  Hamilton shook his head. “Nah. Magnetic soles and all that nonsense went out of fashion long ago. For a start, the magnetism, weak though it is, interferes with sensors and so on. Plus, a magnetic hull is like a homing beacon for certain weaponry. These days everyone uses fibergrip.”

  “What’s that?”

  Hamilton fished in his outside suit pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a pair of socks. He pointed to the gray area that surrounded the window, then to the various gray pathways that seemed to lead off from it.

  “Parts of the hull are coated in a special nano-fiber matting. These socks.” He waved the pair he’d gotten out. “Are made of a similar material. Put the two together and they stick.” He bent down and touched the sock to the gray mat. As he pulled it away, the grip it exerted was obvious.

  “Oh. Okay.” Johnson said. “So it’s like Velcro, then.”

  Now it was the other pair’s turn to look confused.

  “Velcro.” Johnson explained. “It was a similar product back in my day. One part was a fluffy mat, the other a sort of nylon hook-like product. The hooks caught in the fluffy mat and held things, but enough force could pull them free.”

  Lewis and Hamilton exchanged glances.

  “Perhaps she’s not so useless after all.” Lewis admitted, bitchily.

  “And maybe you’d prefer it back with your doctor friends?” Johnson snapped back.

  For a moment the two women glared at each other.

  “Enough of this!” Hamilton told them. “We’re wasting air. Get your socks on and let’s get going.”

  Grumbling, the women complied, still casting irritated glances at one another.

  Great. Hamilton thought as he pulled on his own socks. Just what I need, the two of them trying to push each other off into space.

  Not that he really thought it would come to that. Johnson was far too civilized for anything like that and Lewis was too weakened by her ordeal at the hands of the medics. The planetologist might be crazy, but she was smart enough to know she needed them.

  “Plant each foot carefully,” He told them. “Roll your back foot forward to release the fibergrip. It’s easier and less exhausting than trying to wrench it free.”

  Slowly, they set off. Travel in this way would be slow and tiring. Johnson took a few minutes to properly get the hang of the weird gait necessary to walk, but then it was a slow, steady slog towards the berthing ring. It might only be three hundred meters away but it was clear that it was going to take them some time.

  *****

  The Ulysses reached the berthing ring and hurtled between two docking arms, executing a bizarre roll and twist as it went through so that the ship was now heading along the berthing ring, effectively circumnavigating the station at its widest point.

  The PDC’s flew outward, beyond the berthing ring’s extents and then followed, now further away from the cutter and in an even worse firing position.

  On Ulysses’ bridge, Rames sat clutching the arms of his chair with white-knuckles. Glancing around, he saw that none of Hamilton’s companions seemed in the slightest concerned by the pilot’s crazy flying. Veltin himself was laughing and crowing like a lunatic as his exploits threw their pursuers further behind. Quite how the pilot was managing to change their thrust vector so quickly was something that Rames did not understand. Gravity Drive aside, the man was gifted, he had to give him that, even if he did seem slightly insane. He used the standard thrusters in conjunction with the Gravity Drive in ways nobody was ever taught to do.

  Grimes, at least, had the grace to look alarmed by the wild piloting.

  A couple more dives up and then down back through the berthing ring threw their pursuers even further adrift. Finally, the PDC’s gave up any direct pursuit and simply maintained pace some way away. Although the small craft had a power-to-mass advantage over the Ulysses, effectively being designed to intercept incoming threats, they had nowhere near the same level of hull thrusters available to them as the cutter had. Accordingly, they were less maneuverable.

  Veltin maintained his orbit of the berthing ring, content now to let the PDC’s sit at a distance.

  “Mr. Veltin. What’s your plan for getting away from this situation?”

  The pilot actually looked away from the viewscreen and half turned to the captain. “Nothing complex. Run like hell towards the planet, orbit it, then run like hell until we can Skip out to our jump point.”

  Rames watched alarmingly as the viewscreen showed them approaching a docked ore carrier. They appeared to be heading straight at it.

  Without even looking back at the screen, Veltin’s hands twitched in the waldos, sending the Ulysses on a graceful arc to pass beneath the huge vessel.

  Rames tore his eyes away from the screen and looked at Klane and LeGault, to his right.

  “What’s happening with the opposition?”

  LeGault said. “Destroyer is still holding off, ready to block or Skip if we head directly away, out to space. That cruiser, the Shiva, is now undocked and moving away from the station. Looks like they’re getting the assault craft ready for launch. At least, they’ve opened the hangar doors port and starboard.”

  “Klane?”

  She shrugged, her prosthetic eye casting a demonic glow over that side of her face. “Shields are as good as they’re going to get. I’ve adjusted the bias aft, since we’ll be running away, mostly. Might as well have most protection there.”

  Rames nodded. “Alright, let’s get the hell out of here!”

  The Ulysses lurched violently under Veltin’s hands, the ship suddenly breaking away from the station and hurtling towards the planet at full thrust.

  The PDC’s lunged after the fleeing cutter but it did have a fair head start. It would take them a few moments to close to weapons range.

  “Cruiser’s launching the assault craft now!” LeGault warned. On his screen, a swarm of small ships suddenly appeared around the Shiva and headed their way.

  “Intercept time?” Rames asked.

  “PDC’s will be in range in about twenty seconds. Assault craft in maybe three minutes.” Klane responded.

  “That’s not enough time!” Rames muttered angrily. They might shrug off attacks from the PDC’s, but the Assault craft were another matter. If the PDC’s could be likened to a swarm of bees, then the Assault craft were a pack of wolves. They were designed to run down their target and disable it, then board, or tear it to pieces, as required.

  “Relax.” Veltin told them casually from the helm. “The Assault craft’ll get nowhere near us.”

  Rames frowned. “We’ll find out in a few minutes.”

  A few seconds later there was a buffeting sensation as one of the PDC weapons found its mark. All eyes turned to Klane.

  “Nothing to worry about.” She stated.

  Rames was muttering under his breath. It was something about everyone taking the situation too casually.

  There were several more thumps on the shields as the PDC’s began to close range. It began to become a regular patina of increasing noise, like a rain shower. Then abruptly, it stopped.

  “What the?” Rames muttered. “Now what?”

  It was Grimes that answered. “Tantalus has recalled the PDC’s. Seems like it was enough to just run us off.”

  Rames shook his head. “They’re just letting the military handle the situation. They got in their whacks. It’ll look good on their reports. Now they’re letting the military deal with it.”

  “Well,” Klane stated. “At least it’ll let the shi
elds recover some.”

  “Don’t worry about!” Veltin said. “I’ve got it covered. Those naval jarheads won’t give us a problem. I…” He stopped and then, to Rames’ horror, once again turned away from his instruments to address the captain. “No offense meant, captain. You and yours are clearly way above the average bunch of goons that they stick in ships.”

  “Thanks.” Rames growled darkly.

  “Anyway,” Veltin continued, turning back to the display, in which the planet now loomed hugely. “It’s always the same with the military mind-set. You run a pirate down, you’re happy. A pirate gets away and they give you a bigger engine, or more powerful weapons. Or a Skip Drive, or Gravity Drive. It’s always the same. Bigger, faster, more power. Like using a hammer to crack an egg. It gets the job done, but there’s no finesse. No one ever learns to use the tools they have effectively. Which is why, when you do get someone who can use the tools effectively, they run rings around the clumsy opposition.”

  His hands twisted in the waldos and then pushed forwards. The Ulysses lurched at a steeper angle towards the planet.

  “Of course,” Veltin continued his monologue. “It’s not just the tools you have to be able to use effectively. It’s your environment as much as anything. Utilize the surroundings to your advantage and your enemy’s disadvantage. First rule of combat piloting, really.”

  Puckett glanced across from the nav console. “I guess I must have missed that one at flight school. Don’t you think we’re going in a little steep?”

  Veltin sighed and slipped his left arm free of its waldo to pat Puckett condescendingly on the shoulder. Somehow, the Ulysses maintained its steady dive towards the planet even with Veltin not actively controlling it with both hands.

  “I know what you’re trying to do.” Puckett told him. “But we haven’t done any calculations! The angles, velocities and so on. Plus, this isn’t an atmospheric capable craft!”

  Veltin returned his hand to the waldo. “Bah! She can take a little heat! She’s a good ship!”