“And is each man equipped with regulation uniform and equipment?”
“I personally made certain of that, as is my duty. All fully cleaned and checked for optimal performance. Uniforms, helmets, body armor, boots—”
“Black leather boots?” interjected Warden.
“Of course.”
Warden’s datapad slammed onto her thigh like a winning touchdown. “Salvation Station has polished flooring, not carpeting.”
Sternall made a little choking noise that might have been classified as a laugh by the broadest definition imaginable. “What has that got to do with anything?”
“Black leather boots will almost certainly cover the flooring in scuff marks. If firearms are employed, scorch marks will be left on walls and surfaces.”
“So?”
“If you would go back to the Extrasolar Nation and Colony Diplomatic Protocols and refer to the section related to the maintenance of embassies and ambassadorial vehicles, it clearly states that all equipment and materials intended for redecorating official United Republic embassies must be fully rated for health and safety before use. And the safety record of marine-regulation footwear is very suspect. I can show you advertisements from the manufacturers themselves attesting to that.” Her datapad was displaying a poster for leather boots, showing them crushing the face of a long-haired young liberal with great strength and efficiency. She was sitting with a relaxed posture again and was already bone dry.
Sternall was deathly silent, so Warden took the opportunity to put a few more kicks in. “Your operation cannot be permitted until your uniforms and weaponry are fully rated for use as decorating supplies. As I’m sure you would have been aware, had you read the protocols properly.”
I heard a sound that took me a second or two to recognze as a stack of papers being angrily thrown down. “Why the hell are you doing this, Warden?!” yelled Sternall.
Warden smiled and recrossed her legs. For her, she might as well have been thrusting both fists into the air as she ran a victory lap, hooting like a baboon. “I simply cannot in good conscience permit any operation to proceed without rigorous adherence to United Republic law. Although you may find that the operation is no longer necessary.”
“How so?”
“Because by my estimate the checks will take at least six hours, and by then, Jemima will have been returned to you. And you will be able to take her home unchallenged. For some reason, I am extremely confident of that.”
There was the sound of well-maintained fingernails tapping on scattered paperwork. “Fine. Six hours.” Then the line went dead.
One by one, the little warning lights on the scanner scope, the ones indicating ships with activated weaponry, disappeared. Every ship in the fleet braked to a halt and deactivated engines. The dragon went back to sleep a bit at a time, lulled by the sweet music of bureaucracy.
Warden sank back in her seat and released a long, satisfied sigh like a deflating beach ball. A response that I was sure no amount of consequence-free, dirty hate sex could have provoked.
I gave her a knowing look as I set our course for the Jemima, and felt her irritation rise as she met my gaze. “Well,” I said. “Look at Miss Adaptable over here.”
She turned away. “There are, of course, many different species of cockroach.” Her eye fell upon the radar screen, and she sat up. “The star pilot fleet is still moving.”
I’d already noticed that. “They must be on Henderson’s payroll, rather than the navy’s. Don’t worry about it. This is where I come in.”
“I can tell what you’re planning to do,” she said. “And I don’t think it will work. They’ve been paid, and money is all that matters to a mercenary.”
I waved a hand. “A star pilot might look like a mercenary, talk like a mercenary, act like a mercenary,” I said, “but they can’t stop being a star pilot under all that. You’ll see.”
Chapter 25
After completing my transmission to the star pilot fleet, the damaged shuttle trundled its way toward the blob that marked the Jemima, and hopefully both of the kids. All the way, I kept my eye on the clustered pixels on the scanner screen that represented the fleets. The navy remained stock still, and I had a mental image of the onboard infiltration team mournfully unloading their blasters and taping cushions to the soles of their boots. The star pilot fleet was moving, but in many different directions, confused.
Warden suddenly leaned forward like a mousetrap springing and tapped the dot representing the Jemima. “It isn’t moving.”
She was right. We were catching up to it a lot faster than before. It seemed to have stopped dead a handful of light minutes from the Black’s arbitrarily chosen central point. I would have immediately pushed the engines up a notch if they weren’t already flat out.
“This is either a very good or a very bad development,” I said, gripping the joysticks in the vain hope that they might rev like a motorbike’s handlebar. “Or a bit of one and a bit of the other.”
“No food, no plans, no knowledge of the area,” said Warden. “Perhaps they have simply realized the futility of this gesture.”
I tried to fit the idea of logic and rationality into my image of young people their age. It wasn’t a comfortable fit. “Or maybe Daniel pushed the engine too hard. He can’t have had many lessons.”
Daniel had said that Blaze had been teaching him how to fly. We’d only been stranded on Cantrabargid for roughly a day and a bit, depending on how long the homebrew wine had kept me knocked out. And they would have had to repair the ship before anything else. I tried to calculate how much Blaze could have taught Daniel in that amount of time. If we went by how they taught it in flight school, he would still have been filling in multiple-choice tests on when it’s appropriate to overtake on a busy space lane.
Probably safe to assume that he wasn’t being taught by the book, then. It would certainly have been possible to learn how to start the ship and get it moving in a specific direction. Maybe even how to land it, as well. After that, it’s mostly engine maintenance, spaceway code, and building up enough practice to get the muscle memory locked in.
But he was flying the God of Whale Sharks, and a big, complicated lady like that requires an experienced hand to guide it around the dance floor. He’d probably just overheated it. I tried to remember if I’d replaced that coolant rod I’d deactivated way back before we left the Solar System. I didn’t have any specific memories of doing so. Yes, that had to be it. Daniel must have been trying to show off and the two of them were now sitting alone in the admonishing glow of red warning lights feeling like a pair of plying stupid doints.
Soon we were close enough to zoom the scanning view in a bit. The moment I did so, I noticed that the blob representing the Jemima was, in fact, two blobs, so close together that they had appeared to be one on the wider view.
“Oh, trac,” I murmured.
“What?” said Warden.
I held up a finger to suspend the discussion for a moment, because we were about to enter visual range. I noticed a red dot in the distance ahead, so with the aid of the augmented-reality view screen, I drew a shimmering green rectangle around it with my finger, then stretched it out to ten times its size. The ships were blurry but unmistakeable.
“Oh, traccy traccy ply ply bracket doints and divs.”
“What is it, McKeown?”
There was the Jemima, impossible to miss with its size and new paint job. One of the nacelles was hanging off, still attached to the ship only by a lump of twisted metal, partly charred black and partly glowing orange with heat. I was no crime scene investigator, but it seemed to me like the work of fairly standard weapon systems.
Presumably the weapon systems of the ship that was now attached to the Jemima by a filthy yellow-brown umbilical. It was slightly bigger, but not cargo-transporter-big, this was more toward the warship side of things. It was disk shaped, and whatever color its previous paint job had been, it was concealed under a brown crust of space filth.<
br />
“It’s a Zoob ship,” I identified aloud.
“The mascot creatures that turned violent?” asked Warden.
I did an ID scan of the Jemima. ID scans work by pinging another ship, and then the onboard computer does a quick internal search for the ID chips of onboard crew and lists whatever comes back. It was much more efficient than all that messing around with crew manifests we used to do, and made uncovering stowaways a lot easier.
Entirely within expectations, the scan came back to indicate that both kids were still on the Jemima. Of course, the ID-scan system couldn’t tell the difference between a chip in the hand of an alive person and one that was lying in a pile of shredded flesh—or indeed in the adorable tummy of a satisfied Zoob.
We were in short-enough range for communication now, so I opened a channel. “Jemima? Daniel? It’s me.” It occurred to me that neither of them knew what my real name was. “The person you might as well think of as Jacques McKeown. If you’re there, pick up.”
The call was taken immediately, and we heard a voice almost identical to the one I had heard some time ago. “Hay-lo. Foo-ud.”
I smartly snapped the communicator off and took up the joysticks again. “Okay, so either they’re already dead, or there’s a chance we have an opportunity to burst in at the nick of time,” I said. “Airlock’s blocked by the umbilical. But I’m pretty sure there’ll be maintenance hatches along the hull we can use. Somewhere.”
“Well, take your time,” said Warden. “I’m sure the nick of time will be happy to wait.”
I took us toward the Jemima as fast as I dared and did what’s known as a bootleg turn, so that the starboard side of the shuttle was running parallel to the Jemima’s hull. I found what I was looking for on one of the Jemima’s flab rolls, not far from the bridge. It was a square panel, locked shut with a circular switch. The Jemima was lacking in a lot of standard safety features, but you basically can’t have a ship without maintenance hatches. Only a very dense shipbuilder would construct a hull, then try to move all the infrastructure in through one airlock.
I positioned the shuttle so that our airlock door was over the hatch, then gently drifted toward it until the two hulls were pressed together. There was rubber padding all the way around our external airlock door, so technically the shuttle had an umbilical, albeit one about six inches long.
I killed the engine, squeezed awkwardly out of the pilot seat and around the scanning unit, and placed my hand on the handle of the exit door. Only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t checked the rubber seal’s integrity, and it could very easily have been damaged in the crash landing earlier.
“Fair warning,” I said. “We may die horribly the moment I turn this handle.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I turned the handle.
There was a terrifying blast as the internal atmosphere rushed to fill the small vacuum between the shuttle and the Jemima, but it ceased almost immediately. The seal was holding. I heard a little dainty pop from the hatch as the fail-safe deactivated, the one that prevents the hatch from opening in hard vacuum.
“That was hardly fair warning,” complained Warden, now beside me.
“So far so good,” I said reassuringly. I turned the circular switch and pulled. It didn’t budge an inch, and my shoulder registered a complaint. “Aaaand there it is. Now it’s bad again.”
Without a word, Warden’s hand joined mine on the switch, and we pulled together. No joy.
“Hang on. One more thing to try,” I said, casting a look around the shuttle’s interior.
“And then what?” asked Warden, tapping her foot. “We give up? Try to think of how we explain this to Blaze, Henderson, and the entire United Republic?”
“And then we try a different hatch, smart lady. Shut up.” I found what I was looking for behind one of the panels in the tiny “communal area” behind the cockpit—the tool cabinet. Containing, among other things, a sturdy crowbar that looked like it had never been used.
I dug the end of the bar into the little gap between the switch handle and the door and pushed with both hands. Metal groaned under protest, and I could feel it starting to buckle. I paused, switched my grip, took a deep breath, then put all my strength into a full body shove.
The hatch flew open. And every single pound of pressure I had been expending upon the crowbar was delivered squarely to the middle of my face.
I fell onto my back, so the pain from landing on the solid floor could combine with the pain in my smashed nose to make me the filling of a lovely pain sandwich. I made to clutch my face, forgot I was still holding the crowbar, and almost brained myself.
Warden’s face appeared in my vision once I could blink the tears away. “Do you need a moment?”
I sat up. I needed to anyway—blood was starting to run down my throat. I stuck the crowbar into the open hatch to steady myself. “No. No. All good. Ready for action. Rescue time.” I crawled headfirst through the hatch before she could argue, keeping my sleeve under my nose to soak up the blood flow. As the saying goes, a star pilot’s flight jacket has no stains, only stories.
The hatch led into the interim space between the outer hull and the internal walls, and it was through here that the manufacturers seemed to have threaded all the necessary cables and piping I might have needed to access during a technical issue.
Space was at a premium. We had to worm our way through gaps that remained punishingly narrow as it transitioned multiple times from vertical to horizontal and everything in between. The only light was afforded by slim cracks and vents in the internal walls, with the occasional diode and readout bathing me in ominous red. From somewhere around my feet, I heard the exertion sounds of Warden attempting to follow while maintaining her dignity.
After moving what amounted to about eight feet along the hull, I found a panel outlined in light, the same size as the one by which we had entered. I splayed my fingers across the square and pressed gently. Thankfully, it was as loose as a ceiling tile, as it was probably intended to be easily removed for the sake of basic maintenance. I pushed it open an inch.
The room beyond was one of the connecting corridors, I think one on the upper level that led to the bridge. It was hard to tell, because I could only glimpse a bit of it around the sweating mass of green flesh, and the underevolved mouth crammed with vicious spiky teeth, which were taking up most of the view.
I quickly pulled the panel closed again just as something that sounded like a wet, overinflated beach ball hurled itself against the other side and bounced off, gnashing random syllables.
“What’s going on up there?” asked Warden, from somewhere behind me.
“Sorting it out,” I replied.
The crowbar was still with me, so I held it in both hands and readied it near the panel. Blood continued to trickle from my nose as I took my sleeve away, and I was forced to make do with loudly sniffing it back up, which seemed to make the Zoob on the other side more and more excited as it slithered around in anticipation. I waited until the gibbering was coming from the furthest side of the room, then opened the panel an inch again.
The gibbering stopped. I counted to one, then shoved the panel with the crowbar as hard as I could, throwing it off and sending it skidding across the floor.
A split second later, the Zoob, hurtling toward me in midpounce, landed teeth first on the end of the crowbar. It had fangs all around the circumference of its mouth, like a lamprey eel. Every two-inch-long tooth was now fastened around the crowbar’s shaft like an iris door.
I shoved it violently into the corner between wall and floor just below me, then pushed hard, so that my body slid into the room as the Zoob remained helpless. All the while it gnashed and gibbered at the end of the bar like a psychotic lollipop, staring up at me with its furious, bloodshot yellow eye.
So I pinned the creature in place with one foot and yanked the crowbar free, bringing a little festive shower of broken teeth with it. Almost immediately it began fighting to get
its mouth around my foot, but only got as far as sucking on a loose shoelace before I brought the crowbar down, two handed, squarely into its giant eye.
It was like jumping on a beanbag and discovering a hitherto-unknown tear. White feathery matter, like scores of dandelion seeds, burst forth from the Zoob’s wounded eye as it emitted a sound like the air being slowly let out of a balloon.
I just kept bringing the crowbar down again and again until the noise had fully stopped and the fangs around my shoe had relaxed. Warden’s face appeared at the vent just in time for the last blow and the last little blast of white flakes.
“Maybe try not to breathe them in,” I said, panting, as she daintily waved the drifting particles away from her face. “I have a feeling they might be spores.”
She nodded and pulled herself into the room, staring at the remains of the Zoob with professional fascination. It now looked like one of those fake vomits you see at joke shops, but coated firstly with a sticky eyeball goo and secondly with a generous dusting of white fluff. “This is the life form that routinely wipes out entire star piloting crews, is it?”
I shook the filth off the end of my crowbar like it was a closed umbrella after I’d just come in from the rain. “Yeah,” I said. “Looks like they’re not hugely dangerous in a face-off. But from what everyone’s been saying, they mainly rely on taking people by surprise—”
My eyes bulged as I parsed my own words, and I spun on my heel, swinging the crowbar through the space behind me. It collided awkwardly with the second Zoob that had just pounced at my exposed back and sent it bouncing along the corridor like a basketball, thudding hollowly with each landing.
It was smaller than the one I’d already killed and seemed to be wearing a disembodied nose on a strap around its face (not a nose that resembled Daniel’s or Jemima’s, I noticed thankfully). It corrected itself before it could bounce all the way into the far wall, then started hopping toward me, chomping in excitement. I planted my feet and readied the crowbar for a baseball swing.
Will Save the Galaxy for Food Page 27