“You dance well,” Rafe said in her ear. “So you’re not a cold fish after all . . .” Then, moving slightly away, “Is that better?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know—” She hoped her cheeks weren’t flushed with more than implant effects. This was not the time or the man.
“Bad experience,” he said. “Switched implants in the men’s room at an embassy ball, thought I could hide out pretending to be drunk for a few hours, but no such luck. Had to get up and dance—it would have started a war if I hadn’t—and just a few minutes later, I was fine. Mostly. Getting shut of that odious woman, though, that took a while.”
Ky moved around the room again, this time smoothly, and five blunts went into the pillow from various angles. “Time to suit up,” she said. In the suit’s privacy no one would notice what she was feeling, surely very dangerous feelings on the eve of battle. Rafe looked at her, a very knowing look that seemed to go straight to her core, and she looked back steadily, willing herself not to blush, not to react.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. He turned to his own suit and began to clamber into it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
The last moments before the curtain goes up . . . the last moments before the music starts . . . Ky looked at the stage she’d designed, the music she would start, as Fair Kaleen’s grapples reached them, as they were drawn closer to the other ship, as the transfer tube bulged out and adhered to the hull around their emergency exit hatch. All the arguments over: Martin still thought he should be where she was, but she had final responsibility. It was her job.
Her stomach knotted, then unknotted. She and her father’s implant were mostly in accord now, with no more balance problems, no sensory problems that she recognized. She hadn’t had time to familiarize herself with all the faculties, the way he had chosen to organize the proprietary information, but the ship command functions all worked. She shouldn’t, she hoped, need more than that. Foremost, already set up, were her links to her own ship’s functions, and those of Fair Kaleen. Osman would have made some changes, in the years he’d commanded the old ship, but buried deep in its command layers, in kernels hardened from the attack she planned, should be responses to her Vatta command dataset that he could not anticipate and counteract. If she could get there.
In her earbug, she heard Lee describing—breathlessly—the chaos on the ship. “We’ve got her safe in the captain’s cabin, you saw that, and it’s secure, but Quincy’s done something—”
“Never mind about that.” Osman’s voice sounded impatient. “We’ll send a team over to take care of it, whatever it is. But you’re sure the captain’s secure?”
“You can see that,” Lee said, sounding grumpy. “I just don’t want Quincy to disable the ship and have us stranded out here—that old woman’s crazy enough . . .”
Via the implant, Ky could tell that the other ship was broadside-on to its course, as were they: the safest close-maneuver configuration, since neither could fry the other with insystem drives if someone turned them on. This also meant that rotation about the long axis could impart angular momentum to objects shed from a hatch, right back down the course. She had a use for that, if she survived the next few minutes.
“Send someone down to open up,” Osman ordered Lee. “Or I’ll blow the hatch.”
“I am, I am,” Lee said hastily. “Jim, go unlock the door.”
“Why is it always me?” Jim said in a sulky tone for the camera, but in moments he jogged down the central corridor, winking at Ky as he came past her, pulling up the hood of his pressure suit.
“Right side,” Ky reminded him. He said nothing, but nodded. As he undogged the inner hatch, Lee spoke up suddenly. “Jim—look out—Quincy and that idiot Beeah are out of the cargo bay—”
“I’m on it,” Jim grunted. “Don’t worry—” He was now in the emergency air lock, working on the outer hatch. “Damn, this thing is stiff—” Ky assumed that Osman would have an optical link set to observe through the tiny safety window as well as monitoring transmissions.
“It’s always been a problem,” Lee said. “I told you—we had trouble with it at Sabine—but hurry up!”
“Send me some help,” Jim said, making a dramatic lunge at the hatch’s controls.
“Can’t—have to hold the bridge—can’t let them get to the—” Realistic sounds of gunfire cut him off.
“Damn it!” Jim snarled and lunged again as if frantic. This time he hit the controls, and the hatch opened halfway. He shoved, then flattened against the right side of the air lock as Ky cut the restraining line and the EMP mine, powered by every elastic lashdown cord on the ship, shot past his knees, through the twenty meters of transfer tube, and crashed into someone in a pressure suit, knocking him back into Osman’s air lock. The man had been holding a fat disk that Ky recognized—in that instant’s glimpse—as a limpet mine.
“Get that hatch closed!” she said to Jim, and raced to help him, mentally counting seconds. Damn, damn, damn, damn . . . outer hatch dogged . . . inner . . .
Whoomp. Ky opened her mouth to comment. WHOOMP! Lights flickered, an alert signal buzzed. She peeked through the small emergency viewport in time to see a cloud of debris in her own ship’s exterior lights, and the abrupt disintegration of the transfer tube. Grapple lines flailed. Something rattled against the viewport; she ducked, then looked again. Pieces of space armor . . . trailing clouds that glowed red in the spotlights. Her gorge rose; she swallowed against it. A second and third burst of debris from Fair Kaleen’s air lock, then a steady stream . . . and the intership distance increased; the other ship began a slow rotation about her longitudinal axis. Ky realized with horror that the ship’s air was bleeding out, the automatic systems disabled by the dual explosion of two mines, not one—and one of them a hullbuster. If the air lock hadn’t already been open, Fair Kaleen would have had a hull breach.
She imagined the howling gale of decompression, terrifying in the darkness when their lights failed. Some compartments would be spared . . . those in pressure suits might survive for hours, even days . . . but depending on the damage done by the pair of mines, the ship might be helpless.
That wasn’t what she’d meant to do. In her mind, a tiny voice explained to a nonexistent parent that it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It was just supposed to mess up the command systems . . . she closed the inner hatch of the air lock and shook her head at Jim’s questions. She had to figure out what to do now. How long would Fair Kaleen’s systems be down before the automatic reset tried to restore functions? Would the loss of pressurization change that? How much damage had Osman’s own mine done? How many of his crew were dead, and how much resistance would she face if she tried to board? And was he himself dead—had he been in the air lock—or was he still aboard, fighting to regain control of his ship and come after her?
“What was that?” she heard someone yell.
“Them,” she said. Her implant displayed data on the debris still impacting their shields, a flowing mass of numbers—dimensions and presumed mass of particles, their velocities and vectors, hundreds, thousands of tiny impacts. She shut off that analysis as too confusing, checked on her own ship’s integrity and systems function, relieved to find that no serious damage had resulted. On her way to the bridge, she stopped by her cabin to let Stella know they had won the first round.
“Get this thing off my head,” Stella said; Ky helped her get out of the pillowcase, the bindings. She followed Ky to the bridge, where Lee had the controls.
“Can you snug us in against his ship?” Ky asked Lee. Stella, released from her role as a bound captive, leaned on the bulkhead.
“It’s rotating,” Lee said. “It’ll be a tricky maneuver. What’s the purpose?”
“For one thing, he’ll be blind to where we are, even if he gets his main scans back online—we’ll be too close. For another, even if he figures out where we are, attacking us will destroy his own ship. In the time it takes him to figure it out
—if he does—we have the chance to get in and convert the ship’s systems. Or we can just keep clobbering them with successive EMP attacks. And his allies, those two warships, will certainly attack us if we’re separated from him, but possibly not if we’re attached.”
“You’re assuming Osman’s still alive and in control,” Stella said.
“I hope not, but for now—yes. It’s safer that way. At least we’re not still attached, and everyone in that transfer tube or air lock should be dead. Controls in all powered suits should be gone, too.”
“Unless he has mechanical overrides,” Martin said, arriving at that moment. “But you’re probably right. And I imagine anyone aboard is too busy trying to survive to try to get to us.” He grinned at Ky. “That was a brilliant idea after all, Captain. But how did you know they’d have a mine with them?”
“I didn’t,” Ky said. “I knew they’d try some trick to disable the crew here; I was actually thinking some kind of chemical weapon. Knock you all down alive, take all the implants—”
Stella shuddered. “That would have been horrible.”
“I can match us to his ship,” Lee said, “but it’ll take a while. I have to get his current vectors, and then match rotation.”
“Do we have enough power to stop the rotation if we’re attached?”
“I don’t know. We can slow it, probably. Why—oh. So we can hide from the other bad guys?”
“Yeah. If they shoot, I want that buffer between us.”
“Right. We leave our defensive suite up, though?”
“Absolutely,” Ky said. “Even if it’s not working perfectly, it’s all we have.”
She called Quincy to ask about progress in the repair. “Toby did it,” Quincy reported. “Better for him to be busy. Oh, and that dratted pup came up with the part he carried off before. Toby says it was defective to start with—it’s mislabeled. It would’ve failed when we turned the system on.”
“Toby is quite the little genius,” Ky said.
“He’s a good kid,” Quincy said defensively. Ky felt her own eyebrows go up.
“I never said he wasn’t—I think we’re lucky to have him—” And not her own sulky teenaged self, though maybe she wouldn’t have been as bad on another ship.
“Well . . . fine.” Quincy cleared her throat. “Are we . . . still expecting boarders?”
“No. Let me put this on all-ship—” Ky switched channels. “Status report, everyone. Osman tried to double-cross us, have someone carry a limpet mine aboard. We won the toss. Our mine detonated his, both of them in his air lock. His ship’s disabled, losing air out the open air lock, and some of his crew are . . . gone. We’re in pursuit now, trying to match courses and rotation; we still have his allies to worry about, but we have a couple of hours’ grace. Stay in your pressure suits, but you can open up and have something to eat.”
A moment’s silence, then a cheer from somewhere back down the passage. “Does this mean I don’t get to shoot anyone?” Rafe asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Too bad. What are your next plans, Captain?”
“I’m working on them,” Ky said. “I didn’t expect what did happen.”
“Don’t admit that,” Rafe said. “I was admiring your prescience. I expected treachery, but not that he’d mine our ship before he got you and the implant.”
“He wanted the mine in place,” Ky said. “That was easy to figure. He could have set it off later. But I failed to consider that both mines might detonate together in his ship . . . and I should have.”
“Ma’am, with your permission I’ll go remove the booby traps I set up before someone bumps them.”
“Of course, Martin,” Ky said.
“I’d have thought the EMP from one would’ve turned off his,” Stella said. “Don’t all mines have electronic controls?”
“Yes,” Ky said. “But the limpets like his are also pressure-sensitive—it’s what keeps you from prying them off your ship if you find them before they go off. I got just a glimpse, but it looked like ours hit the limpet square on, with enough force to knock the man carrying it back into the air lock . . . and then it was just the usual few seconds’ delay.”
“Well, food sounds good to me,” Stella said. “I’ll be in the galley if you need me.”
“We have a problem,” Lee said. “Their ship’s moving more irregularly . . . I can still match it, but until something smooths out their motion, our artificial gravity’s going to be hard put to cope with the irregularities.”
“Try it,” Ky said. “I’ll let everyone know to expect some problems.”
Minutes crawled by. Ejecta from the other ship’s air lock flashed against their defensive screen, but nothing penetrated. The scans showed the other ship’s complex motion. The air lock was forward of the ship’s center of mass, so its effect as a maneuvering reaction engine had created an erratic rotation rather than a smooth roll about the center axis. Lee edged Gary Tobai in slowly, using the nav computer to model and then match that eccentricity.
“If we aren’t matched exactly, their greater mass could give us a fatal whap,” he said. “The least relative motion’s close to their center of mass . . . that’s where we should grapple. Nearscan’s accurate enough, but there’s too much data with all that junk she’s spewing.”
“You think it’s too dangerous?” Ky asked.
“Dangerous, yes. Too dangerous . . . compared to what, I’d have to say.”
“I don’t want to lose that ship,” Ky said. “If it keeps losing atmosphere and tumbling, it could be ruined . . . or Osman might find a way to get it back in operation.” If only she’d had a trained boarding team . . . the military could do it; if she’d had a squad of Slotter Key marines . . . but nobody on her ship—except her, and she could not leave the ship—could go out there, board a tumbling ship, and deal with whatever was inside. If the sturdy traditional Vatta systems reset themselves—and they might—Osman could regain control, and then . . . then things would be far worse.
And time was ticking away. The enemy warships would be in range in a few minutes.
She had the other mine. She had the skills herself . . . or she had had them, what was now a year and a half ago, standard. Her scores on EVA maneuvers had always been clears, no faults.
On maneuvers she had practiced repeatedly, in the zero-g gyms. Standard maneuvers, in standardized conditions. This was . . . this was nonstandard.
A dull clank reverberated up the main passage. From the hull? Something had made it through the screens?
“Helmets!” Ky said, before analysis had begun to catch up with instinct. She’d forgotten, she’d turned the exterior analysis module off. “The hatch—” She was moving now, down the passage, boosting the implant feeds, grabbing for pickups as she went.
Air lock in use, the implant told her. Outer hatch open, inner hatch shut . . . “Shut outer hatch,” she said, to the implant.
UNABLE TO COMPLY. PHYSICAL BLOCK OF OUTER HATCH, came up on her display.
Jim had closed it. She knew she had secured both hatches. But emergency hatches could be opened from either side—
A blinding flash of insight: not all those hurtling bodies out of Osman’s air lock had been casualties. His crew was trained in boarding techniques, and she had not sent anyone outside to be sure their hull was clean . . . idiot that she was, with that misplaced sympathy for the crew she’d assumed was dead or dying. After a moment, her heart steadied again, and she felt an icy calm.
“Enemy aboard,” she said. “Everyone get your suits sealed; section seals coming down.” Her implant showed who was where . . . scattered, since she’d given them permission to relax from the first alert. Two in the head, one in the galley, some at duty stations, some in their bunks. The icons moved now, but not quickly enough . . . the section seals came down, securing them wherever they were, with whatever weapons they had in hand at the moment.
“Expect decompression,” she said. It was the simplest way for the enemy
to disable them; they were probably rigging a way to shut the ship up again quickly. She herself was now cut off from the bridge, from her cabin, from the other mines in cargo 3; the elegant little handgun she’d bought at Lastway, loaded now with frangibles, was the only weapon she had. Other than the one between her ears.
That one stopped her before she entered the last stretch of the passage to the air lock, still out of sight of the enemy. Her implant’s display gave her a visual of the air lock . . . two figures in pressure suits. What blocked the outer hatch was a suit of space armor, apparently immobile. Through the implant controls, she zoomed the image. Inside the faceplate of the armor, a ghastly image—a face blue-gray, mouth open, eyes wide with horror, dulled with death. She changed the focus of the pickup, and saw that the two pressure-suited figures were indeed working on the inner hatch, attaching the ends of a hydraulic cylinder . . . they did not appear to be safety-lined in yet, though she saw coils of line around the shoulders of one of them. She didn’t recognize the weapons they were carrying, but the tool set they were using on the hatch would certainly open any other hatch in the ship, in time.
If there was enough pressure—and she opened the inner hatch—then they could be blown out themselves . . . if that armor wasn’t stuck too tightly. It probably was; they wouldn’t have left themselves in that vulnerable position. The implant gave her a quick calculation of the amount of force needed to dislodge the armor . . . no, they’d wedged it in well. It would take another fifty kilograms of mass, and she didn’t have that handy, not with the mines now sequestered behind a compartment lockdown, where they could do no good. She could manually open and shut each one, but she knew that would take too long.
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