Jackson grabbed the lip of the cargo bay with the Citadel’s hands and felt it through the pressure of the skeleton. He wasn’t totally in synch with this machine, but it was close enough, and he clambered out of the cargo car and squatted just forward of the bay doors.
The clock was down to twenty-nine seconds when he got the path from Jane. He opened the door. Below was Nivaas. Half of it gleamed in the sunlight, purple and green. The other half lay in shadow. In the opposite direction the spaceport shone no bigger than a star. He was now down to twenty-three seconds.
There was a lot of traffic up here, but none of what was nearby was manned. Most of it was accelerator containers awaiting their pickups. He floated away from the car, gently reclosed the door, engaged the small thrusters in the legs and arms to orient the Citadel, then hit the main thruster to shoot away, back toward Nivaas, back toward the next car that had been launched from the accelerator. It was close and coming fast, shining in the sun.
If their navigator was right, the container he’d just bailed out of would block the SVC ship’s view, and the new container would conceal him from accelerator command.
A bipedal tank wasn’t exactly aerodynamic, but in this environment, that was irrelevant. The clock ticked down. Twenty-one seconds. Twenty. Nineteen. The gremlins would have eyes on him soon. Jackson juiced his thrusters, zoomed toward the car, and then blinked at the display.
A warning light began to flash. “Collision imminent,” the Citadel said.
Dwight must have liked to play it safe, but then again, he wasn’t the one writing the checks. Jackson pulled up the settings menu with his eye and cut the danger radius by ninety percent. “Drive it like you stole it,” he muttered. Advice to live by.
Still, he juiced the thrusters just enough to move out of the way. Suddenly the oncoming container’s rocket engine did an emergency burst and it began to veer off course. At first, Jackson wondered if this was some treachery, but then realized the car must have sensed the collision as well, but because Jackson was jamming the Citadel, the two vehicles weren’t able to communicate.
Holy hell! He was going to hit it!
Instead of secretly transferring the goods, Jackson was going to crash them. He opened up all his thrusters at ninety degrees to his current direction. They flashed, shooting out long tails of propellant.
The container was still emergency firing, this time in an opposite direction, but Jackson didn’t know if his response would be enough. Jackson flattened himself, causing the Citadel to squeeze its arms tight against its body. It probably looked something like a really big skydiver going for speed. The container flashed past, with hardly any distance between them.
Relief washed through him. And then worry. He’d just created a lot of heat. Were they going to pick that up?
But that turned out to be nothing compared to the massive explosion that ripped the Splendid Venture’s container apart. Warnings lit up all over his screens as the rocket went up. Nothing was left of the Citadel’s container but an expanding cloud of gas and shrapnel.
Jane must have remotely caused some major system to fail and had just created one heck of a mess for the gremlins and port control.
He also saw he was well past his window. Seven seconds, eight, nine, and counting. With luck, those gremlins’ cameras were really distracted right now. It wasn’t too unusual for a rocket to pop, and then their biggest priority became steering the big bits back into the gravity well in a way that they’d burn up entirely, or on a trajectory that would put them into the ocean, then policing up all the garbage they could before it damaged any other containers, ships, or satellites.
After that suspicious explosion, Jane had gone radio silent. The Tar Heel couldn’t risk sending any transmission out this way without drawing attention to themselves.
Jackson’s only hope was to stick to the path given him. At least she’d let him get out of the blast radius first. He kept flying, ping-ponging his way between the ascending and waiting containers. Originally, Grandma had pulled some strings so one of their cargo containers was supposed to have been the car in line behind the one for Splendid Ventures, but that was before the Citadel had been bumped up in the queue. He got a sinking feeling in his stomach. Had the police on-planet stopped it?
He needed some options and quick. He could just turn around and fly into port. Maybe wave hello as he zoomed past the authorities. They would surely love that.
Or he could change his vector, and float farther out into space and hope the Tar Heel picked him up, but regulations required the citizens of Nivaas to keep their orbital lanes clean of debris. They had deployed a huge fleet of garbage collecting bots to do so. One of them would certainly spot him long before the crew came to his rescue.
He could go back to Nivaas. The Citadel was drop capable and would have no problem surviving re-entry, but air traffic control would track him and quickly find out he’d stolen the machine. There would be tons of security waiting for him when he landed.
“Come on, Jane. Give me a sign…” But he didn’t dare actually transmit that, because then port control would for sure know he wasn’t debris. He cursed.
Then something winked in the sunlight between him and the planet. He zoomed in and confirmed it was another cargo car. This one was white, with a fat, red diagonal stripe running down the side.
“Ha!” That was one of theirs. Somehow—either Jane’s technical skills or Grandma’s bribery—they’d gotten it bumped up in the launch queue too. Now he just had to hope that the port jockeys were distracted and that his little dance with the previous car had gone unnoticed. Each time he was hidden by a car, he reversed thrust to slow his approach.
As he approached the Tar Heel container, the Citadel understood his subtle motions and effortlessly grappled on. Nice and easy. No sudden snap. Jackson was super impressed. This was one nice mech.
Twenty seconds after that he was right above the car, matching speed. He reeled in the grapple until he could latch on. Even though they were going orders of magnitude faster, it was far easier than the first time he’d hopped a train today. He hugged the Citadel close to the body, and hoped that even as big as it was, it wouldn’t change the car’s radar signature that much.
“Activate camo.” It took a few seconds to adjust the tones, but the Citadel gradually turned white and red. At least visually it would look like a bulbous growth on the outside of the cargo container until the camera got really close.
He looked toward the port and could actually make out ships waiting there. This was way too close.
He was so exposed. So far outside his window. He sent a contact signal through the skin of the Citadel ordering the doors to open. For a moment, nothing happened, and he began to worry something was wrong, but then the doors slowly unsealed. There was no burst of air to cause a change in course. Captain Holloway was way too smart for that. He waited, waited, couldn’t wait another second and then crawled the Citadel into its new tomb a bit too fast. Its rounded head hit the roof hard enough to dent it. The car shuddered. The Citadel barely bounced.
He sent the remote signal for the doors to close and lock behind him, and then laid the Citadel to rest on the floor of the empty container. He engaged the magnetics to stick it in place.
Now came the nervous part where he could do nothing but wait for everyone else to do their jobs.
It would be chaos out there right now. Accelerator failures were rare, but they happened. People would be angry. SVC leadership would freak out when they discovered their very expensive mech had just been obliterated. There were surely a bunch of cops, insurance agents, and accident investigators getting emergency calls right now.
That was fine. Provided Jane was right, and nobody had seen him fly out, he’d be clear. All he had to do was sit here until the port started moving containers again. Nivaas was a thriving settlement with massive amounts of trade, so they’d want to clear the lanes fast. There were dozens of freighters big or bigger than the Tar Heel waiting thei
r turn, and time was money. He just needed to kill time. It could take hours. It could take days.
Jackson checked the Citadel’s air tanks and discovered that the emergency scrubber system for resisting nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks, which could recycle a single tank for days, was working…Except it hadn’t been outfitted with any extra air tanks for extended use out of atmosphere at all.
Wow…Better hope for hours rather than days then.
Jackson shut down Raj’s air supply so he could save it for later. Then he told the Citadel to turn its supply to the absolute minimum for human survival and set an alarm for when its supply was running low…Just in case he fell asleep.
That habit had stuck from his military service. Sleep when you can because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Mech pilots had to have ice water in their veins or they didn’t survive. So it didn’t take Jackson long to come down off the adrenaline rush, and about a half an hour after that for the after shakes to stop. Then he took a nap.
* * *
He was woken up, not by the air alarm, but by the sensor warning him that the container was being moved. The cargo gremlins must have grabbed them.
The air alarm wasn’t due to go off for…Jackson glanced over…Three more minutes. Yay. He’d have to switch to Raj and hope for the best. Come to think of it, if the captain ever used this type of scam again, instead of an empty container they should fill it with air tanks, beer, and snacks.
But they were moving, which was good. Gremlins were bots designed to latch onto containers and take them in an orderly fashion to the various ships waiting in their lanes around the spaceport.
There were two ways this could go for him. They were delivering him to the Tar Heel or they were delivering him to the cops…Well, three possibilities actually, as he tapped Raj’s air gauge and saw he had about an hour to live.
Well, probably a bit longer. The Citadel’s scrubbers would keep recycling smaller and smaller amounts of useable air. He already had it turned down to where he was dull-witted and sleepy. He could probably go all the way to coma and stretch it out even longer. The next nap he took he might not wake up from. Not seeing much choice, he lowered the oxygen supply into the orange zone. If he lived, hopefully he wouldn’t have too much brain damage.
A minute ticked by and then two. His fingers were tingling. The gremlins altered the speed and direction of the container again. He flipped to the port channel and heard the normal radio traffic. Of course, if the port police were bringing him in, they might be using some other encrypted communication line. He didn’t risk an active scan of the surroundings to figure out where he was, because someone might detect that.
He waited, sleepy, as the container decelerated. There were a series of thumps as the gremlins detached. There was some bumping, more movement, and then the car came to rest.
Jackson must have faded back out, because when he came to, someone was knocking on the Citadel’s canopy.
Chapter 6
Jackson popped the Citadel’s hatch. The people floating around the container weren’t wearing helmets, so Jackson removed the front of his mask. Breathable air rushed in. He took a few quick lungfuls, happy to see familiar faces. He was home.
The Tar Heel’s cargomaster, Garrick Hilker, knitted his brows as he checked the air gauge and said, “What were you doing on the way up? Aerobics?”
Jackson shook his head. Things were still a bit blurry. “How long was I out there?”
“You’ve been parked in this box about four hours.”
“Well, at least we know this thing has one really good oxygen scrubber.” Jackson patted the Citadel’s control panel affectionately. It was funny, nothing made you more fond of a machine than having it save your life. Too bad the captain wouldn’t let him keep it. “Are we in the clear?”
“You know the drill.” Like the majority of the crew’s long-timers, Hilker was another Earther. The first people the captain had hired had all been from his home country. Their no-nonsense cargomaster was originally from one of their farming provinces…Iowa or something. “We’re never clear until the package is delivered, we have our cash, and we’re out of that system. But so far there’s been nothing from port security. It looks like they’re treating it as an accident.”
Good. That meant the cargo-jumping acrobatics had worked. As far as Nivaas was concerned, the Tar Heel was just one more unremarkable freighter among a legion of unremarkable freighters. He was feeling better already, but his hands were too clumsy to unbuckle the harness. “Give me a hand here?”
Hilker did, probably not because he gave a damn about Jackson, but because he couldn’t stash and secure his precious cargo with a human being still in it. “However, you’ve got trouble topside.”
Jackson thought about the captain, about Jane, and then knew who was mad at him. “Grandma.”
“You’ll especially have trouble if you call Shade that to her face. She’s pissed about, let’s see, how did she put it? ‘Your profligate ways.’”
“Profligate?”
“It means wasteful, I think.”
“I know.” Free from the harness, Jackson extricated himself from the cockpit and floated out into the container. Through the open door he could see they were attached to the Tar Heel’s massive interior cargo bay. With bots and lifters the bay boys immediately began to secure the mech. Even as big as it was, they’d quickly get it moved and hidden amongst their legitimate merchandise. Hilker was an artist when it came to hiding contraband.
“Now get to decon before you kill us all.”
Hilker wasn’t trying to be rude. That was just ship policy. Different planets had different breeds of bacteria, virus, fugus, and parasites. Nivaas was supposed to be pretty clean, but if you could avoid an outbreak of some strange bug onboard your ship that was always a nice thing. They were already spraying down the Citadel and one of Jane’s little bots was zipping around scanning for fleas, not the literal bugs, but the smaller cousins to Fifi, bots that could be used for spying, sabotage, or even assassination. Normal ship’s decons didn’t look for such things, but this crew wasn’t normal, and they certainly didn’t run in normal crowds. Jane’s bot darted back and forth, checking him out.
When he was cleared, he pushed away from the flea zapper, and went to the portable decon box. He shucked Raj and underclothing and put them in the containment bag Hilker provided. That would all get scanned and irradiated. Then he pulled himself into the vacuum shower. There was a blower tube at one end. In the middle was a flexible hose with a gentle, disease-murdering spray. At the other end was a grate and a vacuum tube. It was basically a wet wind tunnel. No matter how many hundreds of times he’d done it, Jackson still found showering in zero G weird, with the vacuum sucking in the myriad floating and bouncing balls of water, large and small. When he finished, he wiped down, turned it off, and pulled himself out of the tube. He was spaceman Jack again. Spic and span.
Hilker handed him a clean jumpsuit and the customary pill everyone took after being planetside, which Jackson suspected didn’t do much, but he swallowed it anyway. None of his embedded medical sensors had caught anything, but the drug would supposedly help his sensors trace burgeoning foreign bodies.
Jackson shoved off and out into the main bay. Up above he saw a familiar face. From the look of things, Tui had just got out of decon himself.
“Glad to see you’re still alive, bro.”
“Glad to see you didn’t get arrested.”
“Just barely got here.” Then Tui shouted so Hilker could hear him. “Hurry up and lock that thing down. Captain’s waiting.”
“Working on it, Chief,” the cargomaster answered.
Jackson took his time getting across the bay because he was still feeling dizzy and kind of out of it. Not that he liked to admit such things, but that had been cutting it way too close.
“You’re looking rough,” Tui said when he got close. “Bad flight?”
“The Citadel didn’t have any extra ox
ygen stowed.”
Tui grimaced. “Ouch.”
As soon as Hilker’s men finished securing the Citadel, they raced each other back across the bay, pushing off or pulling along whatever handrail or storage racking they could find, trying to win. Rodrick Su, the smallest of the crew, suddenly caught up with one of the bigger ones, climbed along his back, planted his feet on his shoulders, and shoved. Su went zooming ahead, stealing some of the big man’s acceleration.
But zero G didn’t mean zero mass. Su glanced back to gloat and struck a post, which caused him to careen away in a wild spin.
“Jackasses,” Hilker muttered.
Su cartwheeled through the air. He was going to strike his head against one of the storage struts, and wasn’t wearing a safety helmet. Jackson sprang to help him, already knowing he was too far away.
But Tui shot down like a bird of prey snagging another bird in flight. He grabbed Su’s arm. The man’s velocity pulled Tui off course. A lesser spacer might have tumbled out of control and hit the wall, but Tui, with his abnormal strength, caught himself on a perpendicular stack of shipping crates, swung Su around in a decelerating arc, and released him on a corrected and straight line for the exit.
Su floated past Jackson at a safe speed, giving him a salute as his passed by.
“One more like that,” Tui called after Su, “and I’m going to let you select yourself out of the gene pool.”
“Thanks, Chief!” Su called back.
Tui sprang back to where Jackson was, caught a handrail and steadied himself.
“One of these days,” Jackson said, “I’m getting me a set of your monkey mods.”
“It’s going to take more than that to compete with me, bro. My power comes from good, clean living.”
Gun Runner Page 7