by B. V. Larson
I gave her a grin and blew her a kiss, then ran out of the place.
Sure, I should have zapped her with the wand one more time to keep her from causing trouble, but I felt bad about having done it twice already.
Needing a distraction, I killed the external force walls around the forward section of the ship. They were going down in the same order as before. They were trying to block me, but I could still manipulate their force fields.
I knew shutting down the force walls would panic the officers. The radiation levels in this star system were extremely high. I was glad to be far from the core suns. The suns were about a hundred thousand times as bright as Sol, but we were a lot farther out than Earth was. Even so, without a protective force field, orbiting Rigel was like being inside a blast furnace.
As I ran below decks, plenty of skinny guys in space suits came up toward me. They were repair crews heading toward the region I’d just sabotaged.
They were stunned to see me. I took that moment’s hesitation to attack. I paralyzed the ones wearing armor. Those not wearing armor got knocked to the deck with a left hook. Either way, they all went down. It seemed to me that Imperials simply weren’t good at handling surprising situations aboard their own ship.
Gwen and the rest of my tiny crew had broken free and were coming up to meet me the other way. We found each other on deck seventeen, and everyone was out of breath.
“These guys are wimps,” Samson puffed. His red knuckles were the only explanation I needed.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think they’re used to less gravity where they’re from. Maybe they’re born in space, I don’t know or care. What I want to know now is how we get the hell off this ship.”
Gwen shook her head and put her hands on her knees to pant. “I’ve been scouting with my sym. There’s nothing but a few life pods for the officers. They won’t get very far.”
I nodded. “To the hangar then,” I said.
“What? Back to Hammerhead?” Samson asked. “We barely had any fuel, and the core was drained anyway.”
“I know, but she’s all we’ve got. Besides, we know how to fly her.”
We ran to the midsection of the ship, the belly itself. We reached the cargo bay where our ship was, and I was surprised to find very few people there. Apparently, calling battle stations didn’t send a large contingent to this part of the ship.
We found Hammerhead and jumped aboard. Our reactor coil had regained some juice, and we were soon whooping.
“The Imperials drained our core, but it was a temporary effect,” Dr. Chang said. “The core has slowly recharged itself. We’re about a quarter full now.”
“That will have to be enough,” I said, climbing into the pilot’s seat.
Focusing my mind, I communicated with my sym: “This is it. We’ve got to open that big door.”
I concentrated, but nothing happened.
“They’re blocking us,” I said in a panicky voice. “I can’t do anything.”
“Let me try,” said Gwen.
She concentrated. A minute passed, then another.
I was becoming impatient. We had the cannon online again. I directed Mia to swivel it around and aim it at the big bay doors.
“The back-blast will kill us,” Dr. Chang cautioned.
“To say nothing of the decompression,” I added. “But we have company.”
Crawling out onto the hangar deck was a small army of armored troops. They were spread out, with weapons lifted high.
“Mia,” I said, “take care of those guys, will you?”
She swiveled the gun smoothly. The enemy, seeing the danger, scattered and threw themselves behind cubes of cargo.
Mia released a happy sound that could have been a growl or purr—it was hard to tell sometimes. Then she opened up with her cannon.
Troops were blasted, and the red contents of their armor splattered the walls. Scorch marks and gouges showed on every surface touched by the big gun.
The troops returned fire, throwing gravity grenades that rocked our small ship. A hundred flashes of energy splashed over the wings and hull, pitting and pockmarking my poor, heavily abused fighter.
I heard a gasp, and then I found we were in sudden, unexpected flight.
The gasp had come from Gwen. She’d thrown her eyes wide at last, and it was as if she’d come up from a deep, deep dive into the sea. Perhaps she’d been holding her breath all this time, without knowing it. Whatever the case, she’d managed to get the big bay doors open.
Bodies of armored troops flew up out of hiding and tumbled past us, limbs flailing. All around them sailed the crates they’d used for protection.
Merciless, Mia shot at them, swiveling her gun this way and that.
Then we were flying, too. The hangar door had blown open, and Hammerhead was sucked out into space.
It all happened so fast. I barely had time to register it all. But by the time the velvet black of open space appeared, I had the controls in my hands and spun the fighter around to face the exit.
“Rigel…” I said. “Samson, put up every radiation shield we have or we’ll be cooked!”
He worked the air around his seat like a pro. I was glad to have him in that moment. There was no substitute for a good support-man in a cockpit like this one.
Driven out into open space with the rest of the debris, the blinding light touched each armored troop and cargo crate like an intense torch. They went white, so white that no unshielded human eye could bear to watch without being damaged.
“Dampen the hull ninety-nine percent!” I ordered.
The chamber dimmed, but it wasn’t enough. The light was still blinding us.
“Full opacity!” I ordered, keeping my eyes shut. Even through my helmet, the darkened hull, and lots of other filters, the light was intense and painfully leaking into my eyeballs.
Samson’s fumbling fingers found the right part of his interface at last, and the light suddenly cut out. We were enveloped by darkness. I opened my eyes and looked around in a wary squint.
The hull was solid steel again, emitting no light at all. Outside, the glare had to be extreme. We’d come out too close to the beacon star when we’d jumped, I realized now. It was a rookie mistake, but after all, I wasn’t really an astronavigator—not an experienced one, anyway.
Soon, we regained control of our battered craft and flew purely on instruments.
“Radiation levels are high,” Dr. Chang said in a remarkably calm voice. “We’ll be eating potassium iodide tonight—assuming we live.”
“Break out the pills now,” I said, and we all took a handful.
I chewed the bitter compound and swallowed it, coughing. “Any report on Splendor?” I asked.
“She’s gone, Chief,” Gwen said. “She was venting, but they must have regained control long enough to jump out again.”
“I thought starships couldn’t jump again that fast…” I said.
“They can if they’re willing to take grim risks,” Dr. Chang explained. “Let’s hope the ship was destroyed.”
For some reason, that thought gave me a pang. As mean of a woman as Lael was, I didn’t want to think I’d caused her death.
“Why didn’t they destroy us?” Samson asked.
Gwen grinned. “I took the liberty of disabling their weapons systems when I had the chance.”
“Damn,” I said, looking at her. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
She beamed, eating up the praise.
=42=
Despite the turbulent nature of our brief time in each other’s company, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Captain Lael. We were lightyears apart now—and she might well be dead—but to my all-too-human mind, that didn’t matter. I felt I should be able to look around and find her again because I’d been with her so recently.
Why was I still thinking of her? It wasn’t just because she had possessed haunting beauty. I’m not that shallow—at least, not all the time.
An outside observer might reas
on I could be dreaming about revenge for her mistreatment of my crew, but it wasn’t like that, either.
What I was feeling was a sense of pride. I’d beaten her fair and square. If her ship had survived the damaged force-containment fields I’d left her with, I was pretty sure she was thinking of me right now, too.
How could she not be? Leo Blake, a lowly savage to her way of thinking, had waltzed aboard her ship and commandeered it for a spin. Just thinking about that made me grin.
“Why are you so happy?” Mia asked me with a hint of suspicion. She was eyeing me, and I gave a guilty start. “What did that bitch-captain do to you in her quarters?” she asked.
“She put me in a cage and shocked it, mostly,” I said. “But I managed to get the upper hand using my sym in the end. I’m just happy we all got away with our lives.”
“We did more than that,” Dr. Chang said. “Much more. We embarrassed the enemy. That could be good—or very, very bad.”
“How could it possibly be bad, Doc?” Samson asked.
“Because, now they know who we are. The Imperials have noticed the creatures known as humans, and they’ve singled us out as dangerous. The only question is: what are they going to do about it?”
My grin faded. I realized he was right. The Imperials weren’t the kind to take a setback lightly. They were hard-assed, arrogant, and intolerant of any kind of rivalry. They might even come after Earth.
“We have to get back to the Fleet,” I said. “We need to report in, pronto.”
“Leo…” Gwen asked, “why didn’t you just take us home? You could have taken that Imperial ship anywhere.”
I gave her one of those, “are you crazy?” looks.
“What you’re suggesting wouldn’t have been easy,” I said. “Getting home on our own would have required a very long stellar-jump. Earth is deep in Rebel territory, far from the Orion Front. And old Sol isn’t much of a beacon star for navigation. Remember too, I barely knew what I was doing. If I’d tried for Earth, I’d probably have scattered us to Andromeda.”
“For another thing,” Samson said, taking my side, “I don’t think Earth needs an enemy cruiser in orbit.”
“No, but…” Gwen went on thoughtfully. “Leo, I guess you should have destroyed that ship. You should have exposed their core as we escaped.”
Coming from Gwen, the idea seemed uncharacteristically ruthless. I looked at her in surprise.
“You really think I should’ve killed them all?” I asked.
“That’s what I would have done,” Dr. Chang answered for her. “Our situation is infinitely worse now. You revealed we had power over them. I know you had to in order to allow us to escape, but the mistake you made was in leaving them alive to tell the story.”
“You’ve got a point…” I said. “But they just took a blind jump away from Rigel with a damaged ship. They might be dead or lost.”
“You can’t know that,” Gwen insisted, “and now, they know we came from Earth.”
“True…” I admitted.
Despite our escape, they appeared to be unhappy. I couldn’t blame them they more I thought about it. We’d seen enough dead worlds that were dotted with cities compressed to black mounds of ash. We all knew humanity’s survival was at stake.
“As it is, we’re going to have to rejoin the Rebel Fleet,” Gwen said, sounding depressed. “I’m not looking forward to that.”
Looking around Hammerhead’s cramped main deck, I realized it was time for a pep-talk.
“Like it or not,” I said, “we’re the best fighters Earth has right now. We’re her best hope for a defense in space—for your world too, Mia.”
She nodded.
“We’re trained,” I said, “we’ve got new know-how when it comes to hacking enemy systems, and we’re flying a warship again.”
“A tiny one,” complained Samson.
“Gwen,” I said, “have you got a fix on the Rebel Fleet?”
“I’ve got a signal, but it’s garbled. Rigel A and B are putting out so much radiation I can’t get anything other than a directional fix.”
“Give it to me.”
She did, and I set our course for the distant outpost I hoped was waiting there. The course intersected with a large rock in space about the size of Earth’s Moon. The region around Rigel’s stars was so saturated with light and atomic and subatomic particles, we suspected the Fleet had taken refuge behind this star-blasted rock for protection.
Rationing our fuel, I figured we could make it out there in two days. The main worry was that the Fleet would pull out before we got to them. If they did that, we’d likely sail out into deep space and never be found again.
“We’ve got a choice to make,” I said, working the numbers. “We can either blow our fuel and get up to high speed, taking us to that rock faster. That’s option A.”
“What’s B? Self-destruction?” Samson complained.
“Either of these paths might lead to that,” I admitted. “Option B is to coast, saving enough fuel to slow down when we get out there to that rock they’re hiding behind.”
Gwen shook her head. “Why bother doing that? The Rebels can chase us down and grapple us or refuel us with a tanker. I vote we blow the fuel to get back to them as fast as possible.”
“Hold on,” I said, lifting my hand. “If we do it that way, we’ll be going pretty damned fast by the time we get there. If they leave that rock before we arrive we’ll sail away into the dark. Even if they come back later, they’ll never find us.”
“Oh…” she said, thinking it over. “I get it. We’d have to use more fuel to slow down, and they might be occupied or just miss our fly-by. We don’t know when they’ll gather here again at this beacon star.”
“You got it. Well, which option sounds best?”
They all looked glum and uncertain. My fantasies about passing the buck on this one were fading fast.
“Hmm…” I said. “I think we should split the difference. We’ll fly out using most of our fuel, but save enough to slow down when we get close. That should at least give us a few days to hang around the area and get noticed.”
They agreed reluctantly. What I wasn’t telling them was that, according to my calculations, we only had about two weeks of good air left. We had to get rescued soon, or we were going to suffocate. Rebreathers and carbon-scrubbers only worked for so long before a small ship with five passengers became toxic.
With our plan in place, things were fairly quiet on the flight outward. After about thirty hours, Gwen came to me and whispered in my ear.
“Leo?”
“What’s up?”
She looked guilty. It was an expression I wasn’t accustomed to seeing on her face.
“What?” I repeated. “Did you eat the last candy bar or something?”
“No, nothing like that. But the radio signals we’ve been following—they’re gone. I’m not getting anything from that rock we’re flying toward. There’s nothing else out here to get a fix on, either.”
I stared at her, and she lifted her eyes and stared back.
Was this it? I thought to myself. Were we screwed, destined to float away in space forever? We’d be dried out fossils inside of a month.
“Hmm,” I said, “I can’t do much with our course or speed. We’re locked.”
“I know,” she said. “I ran the oxygen numbers after we decided to do this, and I saw why you’d chosen to take this option. There really wasn’t much of a choice, was there?”
“No,” I said quietly. “Don’t bother to mention that to the others. No point.”
She shook her head. “No point.”
We parted, and I caught Mia watching us. She had a funny look on her face, but I didn’t know what it meant. Her facial expressions were just different enough from human ones that I had trouble tracking them. Was she worried? Jealous? Pissed? I had no idea. Hell, I wasn’t even good at reading the emotions of human women.
I smiled and gave her a friendly nod then went back to my st
ation. I felt her predatory eyes on me for several seconds afterward, and I finally couldn’t stand it any longer. I turned to look at her and demand to know what she was thinking—but she was gone.
The feline types were good at vanishing quietly when they wanted to.
The next two days crawled by. Periodically, I conferred with Gwen—but there was nothing else indicating life or technology in the system.
We began the deceleration process on schedule. The ship had been coasting for a while, but now we wheeled around, put all our shielding toward Rigel, and braked hard.
The rumble of the engines was continuous. To save fuel, I had Samson turn off the anti-grav system. That made us uncomfortable, but it gave us several more hours of time to be spotted.
To keep himself busy, Dr. Chang had been working on a gizmo. He showed it to us on the third day of the journey.
“It works like this,” he said, displaying what looked like a lead-lined crate with some electronics packed inside, “this transponder will beep every six minutes for about a month. We’ll fire it out of the airlock toward the back of that rock as we pass by. With any luck, it will survive impact with the planetoid and sit there beeping for attention.”
By this time, my crew had all figured out that there wasn’t any welcoming committee out here—if there ever had been.
“That’s great, Doc,” Samson said. “But we aren’t going to last a month. We’ve got less than a week, tops, before the air runs out.”
No one was happy about our situation, but they seemed resigned to it. They weren’t depressed or angry. All I sensed was a serious, quiet desperation.
“We’ll try it,” I said. “I assume you put information aboard the device about our course and speed?”
“Certainly. Anyone who finds this will be able to locate us.”
I nodded, and we all worked together to make it happen. We loaded the transponder into our airlock and shoved it out into the brilliant blue-white light. Even at this distance, with every filter set to maximum, Rigel was blinding and deadly.
The following hour was a bleak one. We all kept quiet, conserving our air. We were out of happy-thoughts to spread around to cheer one another up. Morale was scraping the bottom of the barrel.