Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  “So the Arachne system won’t be on a ship?” John asked.

  “The Arachne is designed to manage a wing ship. It won’t be happy or fully healthy without one, but it’ll be okay for a while, until we can put it in a ship,” Gerhard said.

  “Doc, Jenny doesn’t own a ship.”

  “Well, she will when this stuff is installed,” Gerhard said. “Danny can just give it to her if he wants the Arachne brain to run it.”

  John knew that the plan was to install the Arachne in the next ship that Clan Danny Gold acquired. There was even talk of buying the Fly Catcher from Clan Kox.

  Doctor Hughes was smiling. “That’s very generous of you, Doctor Schmitz. My understanding is that such brains are rather expensive.”

  “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you, Doc,” John added.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gerhard said, with pleased embarrassment.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  When Danny was told about the plan, his comment was, “Well, it’s a good thing she owns her own ship then, isn’t it?”

  “What?” John asked.

  “The Skull System authorities have concluded that the Brass Ass is forfeit to Jenny as payment for the attack on her.”

  “Why did they do that?” In John’s experience, the local system authorities weren’t in any great hurry to go giving starships to little orphan girls.

  Danny laughed over the comm. “Turns out Eddy’s status as king of Franklin came in handy after all. The Skull system government wants legitimacy pretty badly.

  “We’ll have a place to put Arachne by the time Jenny is out of surgery. When are you going back in, by the way?”

  “Not for several hours at the earliest. Probably not until day after tomorrow. Doctor Hughes, the doctor here who handled the emergency surgery, wants to bring up a neurosurgeon from the planet.”

  “That’s fine then. Plenty of time to plan.”

  “Plan what?” John asked.

  “Don’t worry about it, John. You just stay there with Jenny.”

  Chapter 29

  I’m not going to torture you, or exact revenge. I don’t give a fuck about revenge. I’m just going to shoot you in the head and then go have dinner.

  Quinton Williams to Philip V. Dedalus in a bar on Donnybrook Station One, shortly before dinner

  Location: Skull Station, Shuttle Port

  Standard Date: 12 30 632

  Eddy walked into the shuttle port to find Danny Gold, Tanya Cordoba-Davis, Sara Electrum, and Gunny Dugan waiting.

  He was tired after the long day, but still felt his heart rate start to climb and called it to heel. The time for that was coming, but not yet. “What’s the plan?”

  “We’ve been chatting about that while you were dealing with your legal issues,” said Jimmy Dugan. “Did you know that these flexsuits can turn off their beacons?”

  “No, I didn’t. I thought that was illegal.”

  “It is, but remember we have our own suit bot,” Danny said. “It takes a special code and, as a safety precaution, the code has to be entered by the wearer.”

  Eddy grinned. “It’s so nice to be working with criminals. What’s the plan?”

  Gunny Dugan grinned back, but it was a fleeting expression. Jimmy wasn’t thrilled with Danny’s plan, especially when it came to Tanya’s part in it. “Danny wants me to sit in the shuttle and yak at the crew, while you, Tanya, Sara, and Danny go over there in flexsuits and sneak in.”

  “That’s stupid,” Eddy said, and Jimmy Dugan started to smile until Eddy continued. “Have the professora yak at them. She’s better at it.”

  Jimmy lost his smile.

  Eddy looked at Jimmy, then added, “And put Chuck Givens in the shuttle. He can keep their attention on the shuttle while the professora yaks at them. And that will let Jimmy here go along to babysit Tanya.”

  Eddy found the expression on Tanya Cordoba-Davis’ face to be priceless. Eddy, it must be admitted, wasn’t all that greatly enamored of the Cordobas. And Tanya wasn’t just some soldier in the Cordoba forces. She was actually a Cordoba. Granted, she was a Cordoba-Davis . . . but that still meant that she was related, if distantly, to the chairman of the board of the Cordoba Combine. Jimmy and Fred were okay, and the other officers were at least people he could put up with. But any chance he got, he would stick it to Tanya. He couldn’t help it.

  Danny looked at Eddy, and Eddy looked back with defiance. But all Danny did was nod. “Your plan is better than mine. And you’re right. Jimmy may not have our reflexes, but he’s trained.”

  A quick comm call got Givins on the way to the shuttle and the professora onto the comm with the pirates, explaining that a boarding party was going to be coming aboard from the shuttle.

  “Look, lady, I don’t give a shit what sort of papers you may have gotten from that bitch Sylvia. You ain’t boarding this ship without my say so and y—”

  “That will be quite enough of that sort of language, young man. I am a full professor of linguistics . . .”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Danny shut the comm repeater with a flick of his mind and sent a message to Givens, telling him to start evacuating the air from the shuttle. Given’s flipped down the faceplate on his helm and touched the panel, confirming the order. The pumps started pumping as the shuttle left the docks. The Brass Ass was five hundred kilometers behind the station, in parking orbit. The shuttle wasn’t even pushing. It would accelerate for three and a half minutes, then turn around and start slowing. The whole trip was going to take less than eight minutes, and leave the shuttle a half a click from the Brass Ass. What the crew of the Brass Ass weren’t going to realize—hopefully—was that as the shuttle was slowing, Danny and his merry band were going to climb out and jump off, then float over to the Ass and enter without knocking.

  The Ass was tiny compared to the Pandora, but it was still a jump-capable ship. It had three sets of four sails and it was almost as long as the Pandora, if a lot more slender. The crew had quarters, but those quarters were dispersed throughout the ship. The command crew was forward with the front-wing crew, and the mid-wing crew and stern-wing crew might not see the command crew for days at a time. The armaments were stored near the wings, with most of them near the front wings. On a standard deployment, a good half the crew would be up front between command crew and armaments crew, with watches of four crew each at the center and stern sections.

  What Danny didn’t know was where the crew was now. And that was important information because it would tell him where to enter.

  “Captain Gold, turn your comm back on,” came Givens’ voice over the override channel. “Those nut jobs just threatened to send a hunter-nuke at the station if I don’t turn back.”

  Danny turned his comm on and heard the last of the exchange even as he checked location and vector with the shuttle’s brain. They were two minutes into the trip, traveling at a bit over fifteen hundred meters per second.

  “Mr. Bangcock, I’ve informed the station and system authorities of your threats,” Rosita was saying in her “professor dressing down student” voice. “You’re not making yourself any friends in the system with that sort of talk.”

  “Fuck off. They know I’ll do it. I’m fucking crazy and you don’t want to mess with me.”

  “Well, I don’t actually care about your threats, Mr. Bangcock. However, I will defer to station protocols in this matter. Miss Avery, what is your judgment?”

  Sylvia Avery came on and managed to sound almost as calm as Rosita. “We would prefer that this be settled peacefully, but if that ship fires a nuke at us, it will be destroyed, your property or not. I think the course of wisdom would be for you to have your shuttle stand away at a reasonable distance while you negotiate. You can always use more forceful means if negotiation fails.”

  “Very well. What would you consider a reasonable distance?”

  “You turn that shuttle around and send it back to the station,” Jonathan Bangcock shouted.

  “That’s not
going to happen and you know it, sir,” Rosita said frostily.

  Danny listened to the argument and watched the clock. With every second they were going ten meters per second faster. At this point, even if they were to turn around, they would be most of the way to the Ass before they stopped, assuming that they kept the same accel.

  The clock ticked down as they argued over whether the shuttle would stand off or go back, and they reached turn over. Givens flipped the shuttle in a smooth, flowing turn and they were decelerating toward a zero-zero intercept.

  It was time. Danny opened the lock and climbed out onto the skin of the shuttle. With the shuttle decelerating, moving on the skin was like holding onto the side of a cliff or a skyscraper. But the shuttle was designed to allow it when needed, so there were hand and foot holds. Danny worked his way around on the hull of the shuttle as the others climbed out.

  Suddenly the Ass’ wings came up to full power. Any ship in space near a star or other radiation source always kept their wings up at low power as a way of deflecting radiation around the ship. Even stations had wings for that purpose. Now, though, the Ass was bringing its wings up to full power, the force needed to move a ship or to throw a missile or salvo of round shot.

  Bangcock was threatening to throw a nuke again. And, under pressure from Silvia, Rosita was agreeing to have the shuttle return to the station. Danny gestured and headed for the lock, followed by the rest.

  When Bangcock’s threats convinced Rosita to call off the shuttle, Chuck increased the decel, and the weight on the boarding party increased. Danny got the figures on the new decel—fifteen meters per second, one point five standard gravities—and grabbed the handhold a little tighter. This would make the timing tighter, and it would mean they would spend more time in free fall.

  Danny waited and ran calculations in his head. Then it was time. He let go and pushed off in one smooth motion and was floating free, with the ship decelerating off his new flight path. He looked around. The others did well. Jimmy was a bit behind, but jumped a little harder. Danny tossed him a weighted line and saw Tanya doing the same. There might not be gravity in space, but there was mass. Jimmy grabbed Tanya’s line, and she reeled him in.

  The extra distance was making this more difficult. They were spreading more than they should. Like the shot pattern of a shotgun, they were separating. More lines were tossed and reeled in until they were all clumped together. Danny located the ship and used his radio beacon’s locational sensor to place them and their vector. They were going to miss. Not by much, maybe a hundred meters. They had small plastic canisters of compressed gas. Danny took careful aim and fired a controlled burst, then waited while the new course settled in.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jimmy was embarrassed by the fact that his jump was off, and he was using his helmet comp to do the same calculations Gold was doing. He figured they would need another squirt, just a small one. But he waited. And waited. And Gold didn’t act. Jimmy started to pull his own canister, but Gold signaled “no.”

  Jimmy ran his calculations again and realized that Gold was heading them toward the bow of the ship, not the midship. It was getting close now, and everyone started adjusting their position so they would land feet first. It was going to be a hard landing. They had a velocity of close to fifty meters per second when they jumped, and they were going to stop in considerably less than a second. Jimmy bent his knees and pointed his hand rocket. Then he waited. Closer . . . Closer . . . Now!

  Jimmy fired, and for half a second he slowed. Then he hit the hull of the Brass Ass and felt the impact from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. But he took it, letting his knees bend to absorb the shock.

  They were down, with the electromagnetic soles of their flexsuit feet holding them to the hull.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Tanya recovered from the landing and made sure Jimmy was attached before releasing the line. Then she headed for the access panel. The most common place for a wing ship to need maintenance was on the wing masts, so that was where the emergency hatches were located. Those hatches, by design—even on a warship—were set so that they couldn’t be locked. You don’t put locks on emergency doors. The hatches would have alarms, but there was little they could do about that.

  There was a hatch at each wing. Tanya waited as the others all got to their hatches, then pulled hers open and rushed in, followed closely by Jimmy. In through the access lock, and they were in a service corridor. Twenty feet to the controls for the Forward C wing, and the crewman looked up as Tanya shot him. The same thing was happening at the A, B, and D forward. There were still the mid and stern sails, and they were probably manned if these were. But they didn’t have enough people to do anything about that right now. Tanya, with Gunny Dugan at her back, headed for the bridge.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  On the bridge, Jonathan Bangcock’s interface sent him a warning just as Rosita Stuard was demanding that he allow the shuttle to return and pull him and his crew off the Brass Ass. There were too many things going on at once, and it took him vital seconds to respond to the warning. By the time Jonathan looked, none of the forward sails were responding.

  Jonathan wasn’t actually a stupid man, but neither was he a man to think things through. It took him too many seconds to realize what happened. The shuttle that had been moving right at him . . . that strange maneuver . . . just as it was getting ready to go back . . . that had it moving almost right at his ship . . . the bitch from the Pan picking just that moment to insist that he respond. . . .

  “They’re on the ship!” Jonathan shouted. He turned and manually pressed the button that would flush their last hunter-nuke. The forward sails were already down, but the ship’s automatics tried to compensate by using the mid and stern D sails to fling the nuke. It wasn’t thrown. It was barely even lobbed. But it was tossed from point blank range.

  Five hundred kilometers is nothing. The wings on the Brass Ass extended a hundred kilometers. That distance would barely be enough room for the sheath on the nuke to blow, but when it hit Skull Station, there wouldn’t be a Skull Station anymore.

  Jonathan forgot that he didn’t have the activation codes for the nuke, and no one else who mattered knew them. Not until much later.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Robert and Petra were both tied into the system. After Rosita talked with Sylvia and assured her that nothing would be allowed to threaten Skull Station, they loaded shield missile Charley into the tube. Charley was sitting there in its Faraday cage with a wired hookup to the ship’s systems feeding it tactical data up to the microsecond, and it knew full well how fast it would have to react. There was a puff of gas from the Brass Ass and a nuke flung out to the wings. Only the mid and stern wings responded to the presence of the nuke, but they still managed to push it out at kilometers per second.

  There was no time to consider. None. But there was also nothing to consider. All the considering was already done. There was a station over there with a quarter of a million people on it. Robert and Petra gave the signal and Charley was on its way.

  Three quick wing flaps, each imparting velocity in a fraction of a second. Then Charley was there and spinning out his cable at a range dangerously close to the Pandora. But the Pandora cut its wings entirely as soon as Charley was out.

  The cable was less than a quarter of the way uncoiled when Charley fed it power. Still, it was almost too late. Charley caught the nuke in its wing, but barely, and the slack in the cable changed what should have been an encounter of mutual destruction into something more like a calf roping at a rodeo. Or even a do-si-do at a square dance. The nuke was grabbed by the expanding magnetic field and flung around in a loop. But it massed almost as much as Charley and Charley was pulled as it pulled on the nuke. They spun in a circle and sailed away outsystem.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Sylvia knew for just a second that she and a quarter of a million people whose lives she was responsible for were dead. She knew that Rosita Stuard was wrong and made prom
ises she couldn’t keep.

  Then the Pandora launched something, and Sylvia knew just a flicker of disappointed hope. Even another hunter-nuke was unlikely to be able to stop—

  There wasn’t time to finish that disappointed thought before the two missiles went off into a crazy orbit.

  Sylvia never before experienced a space battle. She was born in the Skull System and raised here. But she’d seen vids and re-creations of hundreds of battles, everything from pirate attacks to full-fledged battles. And what she just saw was flatly impossible. Missiles blew up. They didn’t grab other missiles and waltz them across space.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Sylvia, in spite of her pirate image, wasn’t prone to profanity. Still, no one in her control room was nearly as shocked by what she’d said as by what they just saw.

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” said Peter Mullins. “But whatever you do, don’t get in a pissing match with the Pandora.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jonathan was watching the screen with a lost expression. He just remembered that the hunter he ordered flung wasn’t armed. He was dead and—

  “What the hell?” The Pandora just threw a missile of its own and—

  “Impossible!”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  That was when the hatch opened and a teenager in a flex suit with a gun in his hand came through. No one even noticed.

  Eddy almost shot them anyway. He didn’t know what happened, but he felt the slight jolt of the ship as it threw something.

  Then Danny came in. By the time any of the pirates could look up from the screen, the bridge was full of armed people.

  It was way too late to offer up any resistance.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Mr. Givens,” Rosita said over the comm. “Would you please go fetch Charley? According to Ms. Allen, it’s still functioning fine.”

  Chuck Givens was almost as shocked by the do-si-do of Charley and the nuke as anyone else. He’d seen the sims and the recordings of the first battle between the Pan and the Ass, but none of that prepared him for this. Still, he was an officer, and if there was one group of people that he didn’t want to have this technology, it was pirates. He turned the shuttle around again and tried for an intercept with Charley.