Andy was about to say they couldn’t do that when he paused, considering how much time they might have if they maintained a spin with Cruithne that kept it between them and the Benevolent Hand, blocking their sensor reach for at least a little.
The row of mounted cannons grew as they approached, until the dual-cannons in each mount towered above them. Each set of cannons sat on a gimble that allowed nearly three-hundred and sixty-degree target acquisition. Electric conduit the size of Andy’s thighs ran from the body of the ship to control boxes at the base of each mount. There were six sets of cannons mounted around the circumference of the bow. Eleven more point-defense cannons than Sunny Skies had ever carried.
Fran kicked off lightly and sat on the edge of the electrical control box.
Fran said, putting a hand on her hip.
Andy watched her bend over, waiting for instructions on how she wanted the local systems checked.
Fran laughed.
Focusing on the mounting bolts, she worked her way around the pedestal verifying the torque load while Andy logged in and assigned a position number and checked the other information the rudimentary interface computer needed to talk to Sunny Skies. When they had finished with the first cannon, they moved to the next one, which proved to be identical to the first.
They were making good time when Fran broke the head off a bolt on the seventh pedestal’s mounting plate.
“Dad!” Cara yelled. “Something is coming close to us!”
“What?” he asked, ears ringing. “What’s coming?”
“It’s a gray thing. It’s a bunch of gray things.”
Andy turned in time to watch the dark forms of three triangle-shaped drones appear out of the dark near the habitat wheel. The drones evened out in what looked like a standard strafing run as they neared Sunny Skies.
The technician fell back on her heels and turned to gaze in the direction Andy was pointing.
Andy didn’t wait for her to explain further. “Cara! Sweetheart. The display to your lower right with the red outline. Do you see it?”
Cara didn’t answer at first. “I don’t see it,” she said finally. “I don’t see it.”
Andy tried to stay calm as the drones came closer. They were lined in glowing yellow markings. “It’s got a red border, just like a picture frame. That’s the auto-defense. Just press your finger to the screen. Just do that.”
“I don’t see it, Dad. I don’t. Wait! I see it.”
To Andy’s right, the four cannons within view leveled and rotated in unison as they performed start-up checks. Through his Link, Andy highlighted the nearest fast-moving objects—the drones—and marked them hostile.
The cannons swiveled and locked on, firing high-intensity x-ray lasers through five centimeter apertures. The three drones glowed brightly and then broke apart into debris before they reached the square opening of Airlock One.
Andy took a deep breath and let it out. “Good job, Cara. You did it. Good job.” He couldn’t tell if Cara was laughing or crying in-between disjointed breaths.
“We did it,” she said.
“Nice work,” Fran added. “You’re better than half the crew I work with now, Cara.”
“Aren’t we on a crew now?” Cara said, still sounding like she was in shock.
“Yeah,” Fran replied. “I guess we are.” Nodding, she turned back to the broken bolt. In two minutes, she had the last fragments of steel out of the hull’s threads and a replacement tightened into place with the torque wrench.
As he finished the software and power checks, Andy had the battle display up and kept checking the space above them.
She shrugged.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
STELLAR DATE: 08.27.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Near Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony
“Zanda,” Ngoba Starl whispered. Then louder, “Zaaaaaaanda! Answer me.”
The pained voice of Lowspin’s leader reached from the overhead speakers throughout Sunny Skies’ command deck, making Andy think for an instant that Starl was hid
ing in the ceiling. Fran stopped in the middle of the room with a shocked expression, listening to something over the Lowspin battle net only she could hear.
When she came back, she pulled her hands through her sweaty blond hair and said, “It’s him. Starl’s alive.”
Wherever he was, the only signal being broadcast over Cruithne, its ring and every ship surrounding the station, was Starl’s choked voice calling for his rival gang leader, Riggs Zanda to answer him.
“We were boys,” he said. “We were friends down in the first sections where the gravity was never right. Sometimes we’d flight and then fall. You were always sick, stumbling around saying the gravity or the lack of oxygen was making your head strange. You were my brother, Zanda. Answer me!”
Cara and Tim sat at what had once been the engineering control console. Tim was reading the book of poetry he’d found somewhere. Cara held a set of oversized headphones squeezed against her ears, checking the various broadcast frequencies around Cruithne, pulling up waveforms on the display and listening in for something interesting.
“Whoever this Zandy guy is,” she said, swiping away another wave graph, “he sure doesn’t want to answer Mr. Starl. Lots of people are talking about him.”
“Oh, yeah?” Andy asked. “What are they saying?”
Cara relaunched a screen she had just closed. Switching it to the overhead speakers, she caught a voice in midsentence saying, “Nah, man, they were like brothers. It’s a sad thing. Turned against each other like this. We shouldn’t be fighting other Cruithne. It’s not right.”
“Are we fighting them?” another ragged voice asked. They both sounded like they were talking from cramped spaces. “I haven’t seen anything but those damned drones, and word on the street fighting is that it was all private security and off-station mercs.”
“Right, private security from Heartbridge that the Havenots have partnered-up with.”
“You think Zanda’s crew would have set him straight.”
“You know he doesn’t take criticism from nobody. That was the whole start of their split. When he was Lowspin, he didn’t want to listen to anybody.”
“Hey, did you see Jandis in the shower this morning? Damn, I’d love to—”
Andy cut the audio feed from his station.
“Dad!” Tim complained.
“That’s enough,” Andy said. “You want to go back to your room?”
“No,” Tim said. “I want to stay up here. But why can’t we listen?”
“Some things aren’t for kids. That was one of them.”
Cara smirked at Tim as he struggled to find an argument.
“Zanda was part of Lowspin?” Andy asked Fran. “Nobody’s mentioned that before.”
She nodded. “Before Starl became the crewchief, we had a grizzled old mama bear named Chala. I guess she raised Starl and Zanda. Everybody says Lowspin was more of a local crew when she was in charge. Then Zanda and Starl took over when she died and started working their way out, focusing more on short-run pirate attacks, skimming cargo, running contraband between Terra and Mars. It was all stuff other crews had done at one time or another but Chala just hadn’t been interested in it.”
“Were you part of the crew back then?”
She laughed. “Me? No, I was long haul then. I didn’t start working repairs on Cruithne until the hauler I was on got towed into station as scrap. I was stuck on Cruithne and needed a job. Lowspin’s been a good gig since then. I don’t have do anything but my job. Doesn’t really matter who I call boss. They don’t give me a lot of grief about side work, either. Recently, Starl got pissy if I did work for the Havenots, but that hasn’t been a big deal.”
“How many gangs are there on Cruithne?”
“Depends on how you define gang. A crew like Lowspin, with probably a thousand loosely associated, give or take, and a place to call home in the Span Club, with their own set of repair docks and a flotilla of a hundred ships? That’s a big crew. Some might call that a syndicate, an organization, whatever.” She grinned. “Starl would like to call it an institution but that’s wishful thinking. It’s not a crew anymore, though. That’s just a call-back to the old days. Maybe five like Lowspin.”
Fran counted out fingers. “Lowspin. The Havenots, Regal Flight, Iron Core and Rack Thirteen. I guess that’s five. There are hundreds of smaller crews, neighborhood to neighborhood covering the various kinds of business someone might be looking for, from drugs to sex to stolen ships. I’ve got a few different crews I buy parts from. Don’t worry too much about where the gear came from as long as it’s good quality. Might have even been Lowspin at some point.”
“When I was in the TSF, if we did a layout inspection on a squadron, we had to lay out every ship’s inventory at the same time or the crew chiefs would steal from each other to make their tool kits straight.”
“Some things are universal.”
“Zanda!” Starl shouted, voice cracking at the end of the name. “Why don’t you answer me? You try to kill me, then don’t have the decency to face me. I’m right here, listening. Speak to me!”
“I want to shut him up but I’m worried the next outburst is going to be the last thing he says,” Fran complained.
“What’s wrong with him?” Tim asked.
“He’s hurt,” Andy said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. They probably have him on some kind of medicine so he doesn’t feel it.”
“Medicine makes it so you can’t hurt?” Tim asked. “Have you ever used that?”
“Sometimes,” Andy said.
“Can I get some of that medicine?”
“You hurt, kiddo? Where?”
“I don’t want it now. I want to save it for when you need it. You’re always hurting yourself.”
Cara barked laughter and Fran gave him a wink, smiling.
“You all think you’re pretty funny,” Andy said. He glanced at Fran. “What’s the status on the message you sent about a separate run?”
She shook her head. “Everybody’s held down by the TSF. They’re saying not to do anything until they have the drones under control.”
“The TSF said that? Who did?”
“They’ve got somebody on the Port Authority channel sending out orders over the Lowspin battle net. It’s the only channel anybody’s paying attention to right now.”
“So, if we go, we’re going alone.”
“A couple captains have said they’re going anyway and the TSF controller keeps saying they can’t guarantee the safety of any ship leaving the approved traffic lanes. Otherwise it’s going to be chaos.”
“Sure,” Andy said, chewing his lip. “I think it would almost be safer to move back into the dock, power down everything but the environmental systems and wait for all this to blow over.”
“You really want to get caught in a TSF lockdown? You know that’s what they’re going to do once they bring in re-enforcements. The whole station is a crime scene. Nobody’s getting in or out. This is our only real chance to leave, and even then I’m worried about what’s going to happen when you show up at Mars 1. You can’t hide where you came from.”
“We don’t have to go to Mars 1 immediately.”
“You need to get there somewhat immediately. You’ll need to refuel before you head on to Jupiter. Have you thought about where you’re going once you hit the Jupiter’s vicinity?”
“I’ve been to Kalyke a few times. They know me there, but it won’t create problems. At least I don’t think it will.”
“Don’t owe anybody money?”
“Not currently,” Andy said.
“I like Kalyke,” Cara said. “We got ice cream in their main station. It had strawberries in it. They said they grew them there.”
“You know you could grow strawberries right here on your ship, if you wanted to,” Fran said.
Cara’s eyes got wide. “We could? Where? In mom’s old garden room?” She looked at Andy. “Dad, I want to do that? Why haven’t we done that?”
“Time and
capital, kiddo,” Andy said. He was trying to make sense of the holodisplay as it shifted to capture each attack wave between the TSF fighters and Heartbridge’s drones. Although he thought he had spied a few human-piloted ships in the Heartbridge swarm now, which made him wonder if the TSF was finally wearing them down.
Starl’s voice rang out wetly in a new appeal. “Zanda! I waited for you all night after that first job, bleeding in the alley with that kid’s knife in my gut. You said you’d come back with mama but you never did. I waited for you until I learned I was going to have to drag myself home. I learned then. I should have remembered.” He drew a long, difficult breath. “I remember that girl you loved, Zanda.”
“Will they get this asshole in an autodoc already?” Fran muttered. She glanced back at the kids and said, “Sorry.”
“All this time, Zanda,” Starl said. “All this time I thought I had a brother. I thought if nothing else in this life made sense, that if we are surrounded by the vacuum of death like the priest said, at least on our little rock of Cruithne, we had brotherhood, friendship. We could build something. Eke out our places. There could be law to stand on.”
Fran rolled her eyes and looked ready to turn off the channel, when her eyes glazed and she stared into the distance as new information came over the battle net.
“We stood together, Zanda. Do you remember when we talked about leaving Cruithne? Do you remember when we were ready to throw a dart into that old astromap of Sol and find some new place? Take our little crew and our ships and go build our own world. We were tired of the oppression, the poverty, the cruelty. You said—” Starl laughed but fell into coughing. “You said we could find a place. A place! There is no place to call home. You run and you run. If you aren’t willing to fight where you stand, there will be no peace. That’s what I used to believe. Anyway. It’s too much. Maybe all we can do is run. Maybe we should help others when they ask for our help. When they want to find a home.”
“It’s a cover,” Fran said quickly. Her hands flew over the console as she pulled up a new overlay on the holodisplay. The TSF ships grew indistinct and hundreds of ships grew brighter. “Starl just transmitted your destination.”
Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1) Page 20