by Diane Carey
He kept watching, baffled, as his father wandered past Robert April and Veronica.
April was settling against the wall beside Veronica, glancing around at their makeshift coffin as they both pulled the safety suits on. With one leg in, he paused to listen.
“Do you hear that?” he said. “They’re turning us for proper tractoring. They must think we’re all dead.”
Struggling to find the armholes inside her jump suit, Veronica took a deep breath. “Why would they tow the ship if they think we’re dead?”
His face still puckered in distress, George Kirk took a couple of deep breaths, then looked up at the creaks and moans of their vessel.
“I think I know,” he said bitterly. “I think we’re being salvaged.”
“We told you, don’t get in the way, you skinny shit.”
Big Rex Moss’s voice boomed as he stretched his wide torso forward, got his son by the ponytail—their favorite handle when dealing with Roy—and yanked him well to the side.
Offering his father only the smallest glance, Moss the younger didn’t move any farther back than his father pushed him, and he kept talking, more to himself than to the others.
“It might still have decoders we can sell,” he said. Then he plunged into thought. “Think of what those can be worth on the gray market. State-of-the-art chips . . . maybe a reaction-control magnathruster . . . just the hull and ducting material’s worth salvage . . . we should move it out of the area and get it parted before its home ship comes back—”
“What home ship?” Caskie demanded.
“You don’t think something that size got all the way out here by itself, do you? What am I saying? Someone like you would think—”
“Nobody asked you,” Rex grunted in his very deep voice. He gestured at his son, then jabbed a thumb aft. “You go back and sit and mind your shields.”
Roy stepped into the cabin portal, but didn’t leave. He watched the adults and reminded himself that many a conqueror had been only nineteen. He sent them a mental warning and wished they were psychic.
But they were too stupid to be aware of anything but themselves. That was his safety net. They were all watching the screen as though they’d never seen a Federation ship before.
“Keep the tractor on,” Burgoyne said. “We got no choice. Slice those ingines off the main body and bring ’em round to ayr hold. Caskie, you’re gonna have to find the registry mahks and burn ’em off or nobody’ll dare buy from us. We’re gonna have to pynt the flippin’ thing as well. Lookit all the trouble it’s gonna cost us. What’s Starfleet doing belchin’ round in the Zone, innyway? Deadnecks dunno to steer clear or what?”
“Deserve what they get,” Caskie repeated. “Deserve it, that’s all.”
He licked his thin lips and hungered at the idea of cutting and burning.
Behind the Sharks, Roy Moss rubbed the fuzzy juvenile beard he was trying to grow and imagined it as thick and woolly. Someday he’d be given that beard.
Someday he’d be given everything, by everyone around him.
Until then . . . he’d have to mark time, and take.
“Salvaged? Isn’t that rather a leap of logic?”
Robert April rearranged his legs on the hard deck and glanced around at his tiny audience.
“I’m in Security, remember?” George grunted.
“Oh . . . sometimes that does slip my mind about you. Sorry. Go on.”
“I’m talking about the gray market. It’s a spaceborne black market run by a mixed-bag splinter group. Klingons, Andorians, Orions, Terrans, anybody. Usually people who can’t even make it in their own culture. They just band up together. They fence stolen equipment or illegally salvage wrecks. It’s called a ‘gray’ market because it deals half the time in legal circles. It runs in such wide boundaries it’s almost impossible to crack down. Makes me sick.”
George raked a fingernail on the deck until it hurt. Helped him think.
“Until now I’ve never heard of them creating their own salvage by attacking operational ships on the cruise. Makes me wonder how many vessels are logged as lost for unknown reasons but are really attacked, the crews slaughtered, and the ship ends up being parted out so they can’t be recognized, then sold back into legitimate parts markets. Damn, it gives me the floods to think about it.”
He choked on the last phrase and fell silent until he collected himself.
They were all sitting now, conserving energy and letting their environmental suits warm up so they could at least function in this cold tank. The suits made them all look slimmer than usual, even over their clothes—a pleasant illusion that came with the insulated one-piecers.
When he spoke again, his voice was calmer, more insidious. His eyes narrowed, and he looked up at Robert.
“It also makes me want to survive so they can’t do this to anybody else. And I’ve been thinking. If they think we’re dead, they’re going to want to part out the electronics and hull of the ship. If they drag us very far away, any hope for help gets pretty damn thin.”
“Have you got a plan?” the captain asked.
“I’m going to bet they’ve never stumbled onto a Starfleet ship before and they don’t realize what they’re up against. That was the pause after I hailed them. They realized they were in trouble and they didn’t know what to do about it. Bet they were shouting at each other, too. Finally they decided they were committed, so they went ahead and knocked us out. They figure we’re dead. They think they’re towing a hulk, and that gives us a little time. If we can use that time to build weapons, just enough to disable them—”
“That’s a big ship out there, sir,” Veronica said.
“Size doesn’t matter. The ship doesn’t matter.” George waved a hand and scooted a little closer, fostering a sense of conspiracy that was as good as an injection of vitamins right now. “It’s the people inside we’re fighting. This kind of group is hard to keep together. They’re not exactly famous for loyalty to one another.” He lowered his voice, then added, “I’m going to get them to fight among themselves.”
Tap.
“The only catch,” he added, “is that once we do anything, they’ll know we’re still alive.”
Tap. Tap, tap.
Their heads swiveled, all in different directions, brows puckering.
Tap . . . tap . . . tap, tap.
Veronica voiced a near whisper. “What is that?”
“It’s not mechanical,” Robert offered, puzzled. “Too irregular. George, do you think—”
But George was already twisting toward the companionway. He gasped, “The airlock! Carlos!”
Vaulting to his feet, he was at the hatch mechanism in a second.
“George, no, wait!” Robert scrambled up and grabbed him.
“He’s in there! He’s gotta be in there!”
“Wait a moment,” Robert insisted. They squared off in the cubby. “If you’re wrong and you open that hatch . . . we’re all dead.”
Across the hold, Jimmy Kirk watched the expression on his father’s face. Was the sound made by somebody in the airlock? One of the intruders boarding their cutter? Had the upper hatch been ruptured? If so, there was instant suicide in opening this lower hatch.
Was it just the quirky noise of the lasers or the tractor beam on the damaged hull? Or was it what his father thought it was?
Risk all their lives for one person? Was that how these things worked? He’d never heard of that before. He’d heard of one person risking everything for many, but never the other way around. That didn’t make sense.
His father wanted to open the hatch. Captain April didn’t. Who was the captain now that the mission had gone crooked? Which would prevail?
What would I do?
“I’m opening it,” George said. “Everybody back.”
Without further argument, Robert herded the two young people aft, handed them helmets and oxygen masks and helped them get those on. Then he put on his own, and nodded at George.
George did
n’t have his on, but he didn’t care. He was fixated on that noise.
Tap, tap . . . tap . . .
He glanced back to see if the others were as far away as possible and had their units on.
Then he grabbed a basic wrench out of the tool caddy and banged on the hatch. Once. Twice.
Tap, tap.
Determination tightened his muscles. He pawed through the caddy for a magnetic lock turtle, found one, and clunked it onto the hatch, where it stuck like a trooper. A few seconds, and it had the right numbers. Then it flashed a tiny green light at him, and he cranked on the hatch handle.
The hatch opened so fast, it almost broke George’s arm—and the weight that piled on top of his drove him to the deck and almost broke everything else. He shoved it off instantly, shot to his feet, slammed the hatch shut again, then bent over.
“Carlos!”
Lying in a heap under him, Carlos Florida tried to turn over. There was a small emergency oxygen mask strapped to his face, sweat pouring down his neck and saturating his gold uniform shirt, and he looked like he’d been beaten, but he was alive.
George turned him over frantically, and by the time he got him into a sitting position, Robert had tossed off his helmet and was kneeling there also and helping.
“Carlos?” the captain began. “Are you all right, my boy?”
Drained of every last thread of strength, Carlos forced his eyes open and tried to nod. He tugged weakly at the mask on his face, now probably doing more harm than good.
“I’ll get it,” George said, and pulled it off him. He dropped the mask and began rubbing Carlos’s half-frozen arms and shoulders. “You okay?”
Carlos sucked air, nodded again, and whispered, “Thanks . . . thanks.”
“Is the cabin blown?” Robert asked.
“No . . . still on . . . no air, though . . . ”
“The airlock?”
“Okay . . . so far . . . ”
“And you got in at the last moment?”
Veronica showed up with a blanket and handed it to Robert, who wrapped it around the shadow of a man.
“They . . . targeted . . . engines and life . . . life support,” Carlos gasped. “Purposely left our main section intact.”
While he stopped for breath, George said, “We know. We figure they’re parts pirates. They’re salvaging the cutter, but they don’t know we’re still here. Did you get the SOS out?”
Carlos shook his head. “They hit the . . . the SOS buoy . . . soon as it jettisoned. Knew just what to do . . . I guess they didn’t like me swearing at them in Spanish. They hit the cabin and that was it . . . I saw the laser port heat up . . . barely made it in there in time.”
He gestured sluggishly upward at the hatch.
Digesting everything, George sighed and grumbled, “No SOS.”
“Nope . . . ”
“Well, never mind. We’re gonna find some other way. I’m sure glad you’re here.”
He rubbed Carlos’s shoulders, stirring up that precious circulation, and venting some of his own frustration and relief.
“Damn, am I ever,” he added. “Thought we’d lost you, pal. That’s not what we came out for, y’know?”
Carlos blinked up at him and panted around a grin. “Thanks,” he croaked. “I know it was a risk, opening up the hatch for me.”
“Not enough of one,” George said quietly. “Not even close to enough.”
Still aft, still in his helmet, Jimmy stared. His father wasn’t the tender type. So what was he looking at?
As he warmed up, Carlos reached out and offered a solemn handshake to George.
“What’re we gonna do now?” he asked.
George Kirk straightened up, got right to his feet, and stood there like a gunfighter.
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to rip the wall off this hold and get directly into the engines and nav mechanisms, and we’re gonna drive this beast from down here. They can tractor us all over hell for all I care, but you can bet your mother’s silk underwear it’s going to be the nastiest bitch of a ride those spiders have ever had.”
TWELVE
“Can you make out a heading? Where are they dragging us to?”
Crammed into a rectangular hole in the wall sheeting they’d just ripped away, George Kirk and Carlos Florida muttered back and forth at each other.
“Laterally,” Carlos answered. “They’re dragging us across the edge of the Blue Zone.”
“Probably to a place where they can dismantle us.”
“Please, George,” Robert April commented from outside the hole, where he was trying to hold a flashlight on the work they were doing. “Don’t use phrases like ‘dismantle us.’ You may find it shatteringly accurate if we aren’t very industrious.”
If he was kidding, he was doing it dryly.
“Or damn lucky,” George commented. “You know what’s strange about all this? They came out of the Zone at light-speed. Why aren’t they going at light-speed now?”
“Maybe their mechanical set-up is . . . I don’t know what.”
“I do,” George said. “I’ll bet their tech is so piecemeal, they can’t work the tractor and the warp drive at the same time. I’ve heard of that happening. At least, not without a complicated warm-up process. Maybe that’s what they’re doing. Warming up for warp. That gives us a little time, but I don’t know how much.”
“I’ll take it,” the captain said. “It’s all we’ve got. George, it might also explain why we’re being pulled along the edge of the Blue Zone. They may be giving themselves a way out in case any other ship appears.”
“You mean if we get lucky and the Enterprise comes back to find out why we never showed up on Fara—”
“Yes. We’ll be smartly pulled in there, merrily crushed, and no one will have a clue what happened. They might ruin their catch this time, but they’ll remain on the hunt.”
“Not if I can help it,” George said. “I’m not going to wait for an opening. If they figure out at the wrong moment that we’re still alive, it’s all over. We’ve got to be in charge of that moment.” He fought with a stuck cap on one laser emitter and groused, “Y’know, sometimes I’d be happier not being able to figure out how criminals think.”
“Oh—we have something here,” Robert said, squinting at a flicker on the bared machinery. “George, do you see this? They’ve shut down their tractor beam to twenty percent. We must be coming up to speed.”
Confused, Jimmy spoke up against his own plan. “Why would they shut it off? I thought they were pulling us!”
“They think we’re dead,” Carlos pointed out.
“So what?”
“So they’re conserving energy,” Captain April said. “If they knew we were alive, they could keep the tractor on and prevent us veering off.”
Inside the wall, George’s voice snarled, “I’m betting they’re taking the time to reroute their tractor from impulse to the warp engines, getting ready to go into light-speed. That’s all the time we’ve got.”
“I’m working as fast as I can, sir,” Carlos added.
“I know you are. Shut up and concentrate.”
What sounded like a reprimand to Jimmy apparently wasn’t taken that way. Carlos was chuckling and muttering, “You’re getting power crazy, aren’t you, sir?”
Beside Jimmy, Robert April smiled.
A smile, at a time like this!
Jimmy shook his head and grumbled, “I don’t get it.”
The captain looked at him. “It’s only at warp speed that one must keep constant thrust. At sublight you get up to speed and whatever you’re towing will fly on in a straight line . . . oh, almost forever. Warp speed isn’t natural, you see. Sublight and hyperlight are rather like the difference between rolling down and rolling up a hill. At sublight there’s no resistance. Nothing to slow us down in the void of space. The only time you would use more power is to turn or stop or speed up. Until some force acts upon us, we’ll coast at this s
peed indefinitely. I’m surprised you haven’t gotten that in school. It’s one of Newton’s basic laws.”
Jimmy clamped his mouth shut. All he needed was to blurt some comment about how seldom he paid attention in school. Or how often he skipped. What could he say? That he knew Newton’s laws but hadn’t bothered to think about applying them? Great.
“Don’t worry,” his father promised from inside the wall. “We’re gonna get acted upon.”
“I don’t know what the big deal is,” Jimmy said. “These are just stupid pirates. How come it’s so hard to figure out what they’re thinking?”
“Stupid people don’t survive in space,” his father cracked from inside the wall. “Never underestimate your enemy.”
Beside him, Carlos sank back after failing to gain access to whatever he was working on, and sighed in frustration.
Pausing, George asked, “You all right?”
“Let me . . . rest my arms . . . I’ll be—”
“Ensign Hall! Know anything about laser emitters?”
Beside Jimmy, Veronica got up, crossed the deck, and crouched before the opening. “Yes, sir, I do.”
“Carlos, back out of here.”
Jimmy watched from his corner as Captain April helped Florida out. Veronica crawled right in. The hole was small and her legs were tangled with his father’s legs. Jimmy scowled. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t like the sight of it.
“What is it we’re trying to do?” she asked, her voice muffled now.
“We’re surviving, that’s what. We’ve got to live long enough to warn the Federation about these snakes. Fries my fanny that our lost ships could’ve been pirated rather than lost fair and square in space.”
“Sir . . . I mean, what are we trying to do in here.”
“First order of battle, Ensign. Disable your enemy.”
“Sir, they’re about ten times our size.”
“They’re not ten times madder than I am right now. We’re going to take off all the safeties and funnel all our power into one surge through these happy little chopper lasers. One blast at combat intensity, that’s all I want.”
“That’s all you’ll get,” Carlos said from where he sat resting between Robert April and Jimmy. “These cutters aren’t exactly the cavalry or even the covered wagons. These are the choo-choo trains meant to go in well after an area is secured. You can jury-rig until that star collapses, and there won’t be enough juice on this whole ship for more than one combat blast. And, sir? We don’t really know what it’ll do to this ship, do we? Could knock out life support . . . the whole emissions systems might blow . . . who knows what we’ll have left? After that—”