“What’s a mining shield?” Suzanne whispered.
“Big metal plate with a handle. Used to keep boiling metal from condensing on you and as protection when you’re using explosives to break rock.”
“Will it stop solids?”
“Not sure. Probably.”
The voice spoke again. “So, you’ve got five minutes to sort yourself out and toss the money up. But when Sanjay gets here, all bets are off.”
Suzanne kept her attention up the stairs. The men, or rather people, they could hear at least one female voice, were hidden around a bend. They couldn’t show themselves to fire the shotgun, or Suzanne would have a shot. But Suzanne couldn’t very well just hike up there without getting shot herself. Jake looked around the landing they were on. There was nothing, no tools, just the airlock. Two airlocks actually: a personnel one and a cargo one. He flipped the personnel hatch opened and looked inside. Nothing there.
“Jake, we have our suits and helmets. Can’t we just dive out the airlock, and the station will spin away below us?”
“That’s not how it works. The station is spinning. If we hop out the airlock, we’ll still have some of that spin. We’ll float away from the station into space, just at an angle. They will shoot us.”
“Oh. So, we are stuck here.”
Jake had been staring through the cargo airlock window. It was a big one. What was that in the corner?
“Maybe not,” Jake said, smiling. “Into the lock. I have a plan.”
Jake fussed over the controls of the outer door of the cargo lock, then got it grinding open. He ran back to the floor, which was slowly descending, and hopped on the broomstick that he had pulled off the wall. The broomstick was a metal truss with seats, a mesh cargo box on the front, and an engine on the back. The engine combined O and H and blasted the resulting vapor out the back. There were simple aspect jets attached on the back. They had no life support or communication equipment. Just the motor, jets, and metal.
“Let’s go,” Suzanne said, hopping behind Jake as he did up the seatbelt.
“How much do you weigh?” Jake asked as Suzanne placed an arm around his waist.
“What?”
“How much do you weigh?”
“Jake, This is not the time.”
“I need to know your mass—I’m trying to figure out how much margin we have with this engine.”
“Seventy-five kilograms.”
Jake was silent. That was heavy for a girl, even a tall one. He calculated how much fuel he had.
Suzanne misunderstood his silence. She took the revolver and placed it against his thigh. “If you tell me that I need to lose weight, I will shoot you. It’s all muscle. Let’s go.”
“Suzanne, it’s not that simple. We’re being flung away from the station at a regular rate, we need to counter act that to stay in place and head inward a little bit. The ship will spin around to where we are, but we have to counteract the force to get there, and we have to decelerate when we see them, and given our maximum thrust…”
The personnel airlock next to them began to drop, and a head stuck out, followed by a shotgun.
“Jake, shut up and drive,” Suzanne yelled.
Jake pulled the throttle and they were off.
Jake immediately realized he was in trouble. He needed to steer counter to the rotation of the station to get to their ship, but that meant the station was spinning toward him at high speed. He pointed the broomstick forward and aimed directly for the next truss. He also had yellow lights on fuel for both the main engines and the aspect jets.
He pivoted the broomstick up, just a touch, and gave a bit more thrust, so that he’d just clear the mass of girders, then hurriedly rolled the broomstick to the left and punched the thrust. They just skimmed by the giant ore barge that had been attached to the top of the truss.
“Jake, are you trying to kill us?” Suzanne yelled over their local channel.
“We don’t have enough fuel to go around things. We have to go through them.”
Jake waited till they were clear then reversed the maneuvers, steering back toward the middle of the next truss.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to cancel out every move I make, otherwise we’ll just fly by the Petrel at full speed.”
Jake gave them a touch more downspin and looked ahead to judge his next move.
As they skimmed by the next truss, Jake saw a blue spot streak past them and then sparks on the girder ahead of him. What was that?
“Jake, they are shooting at us.”
“I see that.”
Suzanne squirmed around and tried to point her arm backward but couldn’t manage it. “I do not have a shot.”
“Hang on,” Jake said.
Using the aspect jets, he pivoted the broomstick around so that it was flying backwards. Suzanne now had a clear view behind her. They could see two broomsticks. There were two figures on each, a driver and a shooter. One had a shotgun, the other a revolver. Jake looked down at his board. The aspect jets had changed to red. He had very little fuel left. They would have to stay pointing this way.
Suzanne pointed at the nearest one and began to shoot. Nothing happened.
“Why am I missing them?” she said over the private channel.
Jake had turned and was trying to maneuver the broomstick backwards. He turned his head to look at his pursuers.
“They’re corkscrewing, see. They give a quick puff every second or so, then back again. You’ll never hit them with that random movement that far away. Save your ammo until we’re nearly at the Petrel. We’ll have to totally slow down to dock with it.”
“Damn,” she said. “It is too bad you could not disable that other airlock to keep them from chasing us.”
Jake felt himself blush inside his suit. He had forgotten his toolkit in his thigh pocket. He could have easily disabled the lock. He had panicked and forgotten.
“Yeah, too bad,” he said.
Jake pitched the nose up and give a spurt on the main engine to clear the next truss.
“Shit,” he yelled as he looked back over his shoulder. He had driven them up above the truss all right, right into another ore barge winching containers back and forth from the station. He pivoted the broomstick forward so he could get a better view of obstacles. Chains seemed to be everywhere. He pivoted left and right, and then stood the broomstick on its end, relative to their trajectory, and spurted it just above the second to last chain.
He would have made it too, but he forgot about the basket in the front. It clipped a chain, and the broomstick began to rapidly pivot end over end over end.
“Jake, make it stop.”
Jake looked down. The aspect jet was flashing red. Fuel exhaustion imminent.
“I can’t”
“What?”
“We don’t have enough fuel for the jets. And we’re still going in the right direction.”
Jake watched the horizon spin in around. Front truss, space, pursuers, back truss, more space, front truss. One of the pursuers was burning perpendicular to their course going “up high” over their course. A stuck engine or loss of nerve, it didn’t matter. They were out of the fight.
Jake craned his neck. Another truss was approaching. He recognized it.
“The Petrel is on the next one past this truss,” he said to Suzanne.
“What do we do? Can we stop this spinning?”
“I’ll try. But I don’t have much fuel, and I need it for deceleration.”
He began to apply gentle puffs of the aspect jets, slowing down the spin. He also pulsed the main engine as they spun around. He needed to be able to point the engine opposite their trajectory to slow them down enough, otherwise they would scream past their ship without stopping.
Or splatter against the hull like an ice asteroid.
“Jake, they are gaining on us.”
“I know, but I have to slow down.
“I have only a few shots left, and I’ll never hit them spinning
like this. Can’t we throw something at them.”
“I don’t have anything. Wait.”
Jake reached down to one of his suit’s many pockets. Was it still there, even after all the running and spinning?
It was. The handful of copper ingots he had taken in trade. He looked over his shoulder. They were approaching the Petrel. Finally, some luck was with them, they were roughly in line with it. In fact, they would impact just aft of the airlock on a container painted bright blue, labeled “Sunshine Moving.” Jake took quick look back. He firewalled the aspect jets, slowing their spin, then fired the main engine to slow them as much as he could, waited for the right moment, then threw the handful of copper slugs slightly up and sideways. Then he pivoted and drove the broomstick down and directly toward the ship.
The pursuers pivoted their broomsticks and the back figure pointed the shotgun at them. Then the driver saw the copper glinting in front of him. Not knowing what it was, he began evasive maneuvers to avoid it, pouring on the lateral thrust to bypass it. But they could only thrust one direction at a time, so they had no opportunity to dump velocity as they screamed by the ship.
Jake firewalled the aspect jets and managed to reduce their spin quite a bit before they just stopped working. No fuel. They would keep spinning for now. They were moving in the correct direction but pivoting lazily end over end. Every rotation they spun around to see the giant “Sunshine Moving” symbol getting bigger and bigger. Jake pulsed the throttle when they were pointing in the right direction. Now the main engine light was flashing red. It was going to be close.
Too close.
“Suzanne, point the gun straight up. When I say fire, shoot the gun.”
“What?”
“We need to stop the spin so I can fire the main engine. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Wait, wait, three, two, one and half, a quarter, SHOOT!”
Suzanne fired just as the engine pointed directly back at the ship. Their spinning slowed almost to a stop. Jake waited for spin to settle, then firewalled the throttle and looked back over his shoulder. It helped, they were slowing relative to the ship. Slowing, slowing.
The main engine failed. Crap.
Jake watched helplessly as they floated toward the ship. They were not moving excessively fast, but fast enough that they would break an arm or leg or a neck and bounce off the ship into the void.
Suzanne was fumbling at her belt, pulling bullets out.
“Sorry, Suzanne,” Jake said. Damn.
She didn’t say anything but finished reloading. Then she twisted to one side and began firing her revolver. One at a time, she fired directly into the center of the giant green “Sunshine Moving” sign.
Jake counted the shots. One, two, they were slowing. Three, four, very slow. Five, almost stopped.
Suzanne held her fire until they had drifted within a meter of the Petrel, then fired her last round directly at the center of the green sign. It vanished in a puff of dust, and they floated twenty centimeters away, at rest relative to the ship.
Chapter 12
“Three sevens. Read ’em and weep,” Nadine said. She leaned forward and scooped up her winnings, adding them to the modest pile in front of her.
The man across from her smiled and shook his head. “Good for you,” he said. He tossed his two pair into the center.
Nadine looked at him as she shuffled for the next hand. Short, dark, heavily muscled, and with a soft accent she couldn’t quite identify. Yummy. Maybe she should end this game early?
They had started with six people six hours ago. Juan was the only one left. Some sort of GG mining administrator or something. The others had played reasonably well but had soon realized they were outclassed. Juan was obviously the local champ, but he was having a hard time beating Nadine. He was very good, Nadine admitted. Perhaps as good as her, and she wasn’t interested in spending another six hours trying to find out how good he was at poker. Perhaps he was good at other things.
They were on a small GG satellite station, rarely visited by merchant ships. They were required to trade directly with a larger GG station in the neighborhood. Sell everything there, buy everything from it. And at ruinous prices. The staff at this station were not enthused with that arrangement and had greeted her ship and supplies with open arms. After they had bought all the PGMs for sale, Nadine had declared a twelve-hour break and broke out their most expensive food trays and a bottle of cider. Demitrios, surprisingly, didn’t drink. Sue only weighed about fifty kilograms, and because she was of earth-Asian ancestry, alcohol consumption made her break out in hives. They had locked the ship down and gone gratefully to sleep a full shift ago.
Nadine had headed to the bar and offered to share her cider with the card players. They had accepted gladly and readily gave her all types of useful intelligence: economic, navigational, and personal. She had a whole list of stations to visit and a good idea of which ones had not seen a ship in months, which ones were likely to welcome strange traders, and which ones would cause trouble.
Her comm beeped. She frowned. That would only happen if an alarm had woken Sue or Big D.
“Yes?”
“Problem,” Sue said. “Big ship just showed up on our sensors.”
“How big?”
“Hard to be sure. Three, four times our size at least.”
“Militia?”
“Doubt it. Unless cutters regularly boost at .3G. But it’s coming this way, and its big enough to have weapons. We should drop.”
“On my way,” Nadine said. She looked at her companion. I guess her exploration of everything he was good at would have to wait for another time.
“Ship’s coming. Any idea who it might be.”
“Yes, it is the Bountiful Onion. They were scheduled to arrive sometime soon. It is not very fast but it is large. And it is armed. It is best you be gone before they get here.”
“What about you? Will you get into trouble?”
“Us? What trouble. You did not dock here, just sailed by on your way elsewhere. You are not a GG ship. We do not know anything about you.”
Nadine laughed. “Here, take this,” she said, shoving the cider toward him.
“Thank you. Perhaps we will share it again, some other time.”
***
“What is that infernal bonging noise?” Captain Marchello said, entering the bridge.
Everyone looked at the first officer, who was quickly vacating the command chair.
“That is the general quarters alarm, Captain,” he said. “I’m sure it sounded different on your other ships.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Captain Marchello said. “What is happening?”
The helmsman blinked and opened his mouth. Did not all the general quarters alarms on all ships in the Delta system sound exactly the same?
“Watch your course, helm,” said the first officer, looking down and shaking his head minutely. “Captain, we have detected a ship on radar in the vicinity of the station. It is not responding to hails, and its beacon is not lit. It’s a modified freighter of some kind, but none of its type are assigned to this route.”
“I see. Pirates. Well, let’s pursue her.”
“Of course. We will go to full acceleration. Helm, calculate when we will overtake her.”
The helmsman looked up at the first officer. “Overtake her?” he whispered.
Again, the first officer shook his head. The other ship was already pulling 2G’s, possibly more. The Bountiful Onion could only go up to .5G, and things might fall off then. Even from a running start, they wouldn’t catch the other ship. The helmsman laboriously put the numbers into the computer and ran the calculations anyways. After a minute, the answer came back.
“Sir, the computer says that due the spatial geometry of the two ships, we do not have an intercept course.”
“Your orders, Captain,” said the first officer.
The captain pondered. His chess game with the doctor had been interrupted, and that was irritatin
g. These people, whoever they were, should be punished.
“Bring us into weapons range, then. Prepare the mass driver. We will teach these people a lesson.”
The first officer had a vision of them starting the first true inter-corporate war in Delta’s history. Just because the ship didn’t answer with a corporate beacon, didn’t mean it wasn’t a corporate ship.
The gunner at his console cleared his throat. “Right away, Captain. Umm, we will need to divert water resources to cool the mass driver. Should I divert the water for your sauna and shower or the crew’s drinking water?”
The first officer shot the gunner a significant look. He worried that the captain might decide to doom the crew to death by dehydration, provided he still got his daily sauna.
The captain shook his head. “Never mind, let them go. Take us into the station.” The captain stalked off the bridge.
The first officer let out a breath. “Thank the Emperor he didn’t remember we have lasers as well,” the gunner muttered. The first officer stifled a laugh.
***
“Well done, LaFleur. Suzanne, I’m impressed by that shooting thing at the end. Showed clear thinking under fire,” Vidal said. He smiled at Suzanne as he said it. Jake grimaced.
“It was nothing, Bassi.” She smiled back and placed her hand on Vidal’s arm.
Jake cleared his throat. “I’m fine as well, sir.”
Vidal looked at him. “Yes. Ah, good driving, Stewart.” Vidal turned and walked away.
Suzanne’s eyes followed him as he left.
Well, that’s that, thought Jake.
Vidal stopped and turned. “Stewart.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You’ve done well, despite yourself. You may have your comm privileges back. For now.” Vidal turned back and walked away.
Jake jumped as Zeke came up behind him and thumped his shoulder.
“Great work, Jake. Thanks for saving my sister.”
“Well, Suzanne sort of saved herself. She’s a pretty good shot.”
“Yes, yes she is. But it’s a good thing you are a much better driver than a shooter, no?”
Orbital Claims Adjuster: Adventures of a Jump Space Accountant Book 2 Page 14