Henry Lo Wang and his troops lay on the floor in the hallway outside shipping and receiving while a hurricane of air shot through the breach they had made in the wall and out through the still-closing elephant door. When the door finally closed, the wind abated. The men and women had begun to stand when they felt the floor vibrate with the surface explosion.
Henry Lo’s eyes narrowed while he dusted off his suit. “I’m beginning to get very angry.”
Zheng, who had been pressed up tight next to his boss in a protective manner, pressed the com-nub in his ear. “Gunderson, report?” He listened and then said to his boss. “He’s not sure, sir, but he can’t raise ship five.”
Henry pressed his own com nub and said, “What’s going on, sergeant?”
Gunderson said, “Trying to lock it it down, Mr Wang. Lost a man outside the S&R door.”
Henry Lo took the com nub out of his ear and said to Zheng, “We’re going to have a look ourselves.
Like a can of agitated soda, the Princess Belle twisted in a lopsided spin, sending the loose passengers and vomit into a fury of random flight. Bert jolted and bounced among the screaming humans as they collided with one another and the walls. With the speed of a cat’s paws reaching for an abundance of prey, he did his best to reach out and place himself in harm’s way, holding people and putting his body between tender flesh and the sharper edges of the walls, shelves, handles, and ducts.
Ken, with his canopy still open and vulnerable as hell on the outside of the ship, got a glimpse of the fast approaching police ship with each revolution. In his panic, he was unconsciously holding his finger on the trigger of the rock cutter, sending an endless beam of destructive light in a crazy random pattern that whipped around with the
Belle
until the fuel cell gassed out and the tool became as useful as a club. “Caleb. You seeing that? Caleb. You seeing that?”
On Caleb’s side of the ship, the rain of debris sounded like a hail storm on a car roof. “I got the door closed. I don’t see shit. What you got?”
“Police ship closing on us fast.”
“Spruck. Ears still on?”
Spruck’s agitated voice piped through Caleb’s ears. “I’m firing retros every which way.
Sssh
, trying to get a handle on this.”
“Am I safe to open?”
“Uh. I don’t have any hull breaches. Debris is pretty much past us. Go for it.”
Caleb hit the button and his protective door swung up. The star field in front of him spun in a sickening way and he became almost instantly nauseous. He scanned as best he could. Commanded his helmet to find heat. Which it did—hot debris from the still expanding surface explosion. “I got nothing.”
Ken said. “I’m looking right at him. My cutter is dead. The pilot is probably just trying to line up a shot.”
Caleb yelled at Spruck, “Dude, you hear that! Can you stop this fucking spinning and put me Saturn side? We’re about to be toast.”
“Doing my best!”
Caleb looked back down at the moon and noted that it seemed closer— like they were flying in some kind of arc. “And Spruck, I don’t think we made orbit. Seems like we’re falling.”
“Something went wrong with the slingshot. And I can’t fire up, and yes, if we don’t catch a missile or get cut in half by a laser, we are going to plow into the ground. And no I can’t offer a soft landing.”
“I just did that on the last moon I was on. I’m still sore. Can we not crash into the ground, please?”
Ken said, “It’s not going to fucking matter! The cop has parked a klick away. He’s lining up!”
Caleb said, “Spruck, just hit the retros on my side and spin Ken to moon side.”
In the cockpit Natalie said, “After all the talk I’ve had to listen to. Belle this and Belle that, and Belle blah blah Belle blah blah.”
Jennifer blurted, “Can’t you just think it? The retros I mean?”
Spruck said, “I don’t like wiring my brain to a machine. Nat, you do it.”
Natalie tapped her flight helmet saying, “I don’t have a clue how it works, baby.”
Jennifer unsnapped her safety harness and reached forward, grabbing Spruck’s helmet off and slamming it on her own head. Spruck yelled, “Hey!”
Trying desperately to not get smashed about the cockpit, Jennifer said, “Pilot! System meld!”
Natalie said, “Think not spinning anymore!”
Jennifer concentrated on where she wanted to point the ship. Small thrusters on the sides of the ship fired until suddenly the spinning stopped. The ship was still falling, but it was stable.
“Great! Spin Ken to moon side!” yelled Caleb with higher voice than he liked to project.
Jennifer thought it and spun Caleb to face the approaching cop. Caleb smiled as he spotted the ship and lifted his cutter. He would use the same technique; point it at the windshield and blind his prey. It might not actually cut at this distance, but the pilot didn’t know that. He brought it up, aimed, pulled the trigger and . . . nothing. Out of juice. He looked at the tool. Made sure the switch was on, that he had a thumb on the safety and the trigger together . . . nothing.
The police ship came to a slow halt and didn’t shoot. No laser fire, no missiles popping out of a bay. Caleb looked down at the ground. It was coming up fast. Nice, he thought, you just want to watch us go splat.
The nose of the
Belle
was pointed perfectly at the gray, pockmarked dust, giving the cockpit’s occupants an exemplary view of their final resting place.
Jennifer said, “I’m thinking fly, rockets ignite. Nothing’s happening.”
Spruck yanked Natalie’s helmet off and slammed it on his own head, saying, “Belle? You finish with the engine diagnostics, hon?”
“Yes, handsome. On Earth, June 15 of last year, you disconnected the fire switch from my mainframe. You said, quote, “I can do this. I don’t need some fancy bitch ship’s computer to tell me when to push the button. I’ll fly this baby.”
Spruck’s face lit up. “Oh yeah.” He said, “Pilot system meld,” and thought about pulling out of the terminal dive while reaching forward and pushing the engine ignite switch. There was a vibration through the hull and then, boom, the ship shot forward—the ground coming up really fast.
As she was slammed back into her seat, Spruck’s original helmet flying off her head, Jennifer screamed, “Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!”
The
Belle
said, “Would you like me to fly, handsome?”
“For fuck’s sake, yes!” said Spruck.
A preprogrammed robotic voice said, “Autoflight engaged. Please provide a destination?” The ground was coming up perilously fast now. “Where do you want to go, handsome?” asked Belle.
“Orbit! Orbit’s fine. Far side of Albiorix!”
At the last possible moment, the ship pulled out of its dive and headed on a trajectory calculated to fill Spruck’s desire. In the main cabin, Bert did his best to save whom he could from injury. There was a lot of screaming, a lot of broken bones, contusions, and a lot of vomit. Outside, Caleb watched the cop ship open fire. Lasers glassed the ground where they would have struck. Then a missile bay opened up. “He’s firing a missile.”
Spruck got his head together. “Belle. Full defensive measures.”
From Caleb’s perspective, the ship around him disappeared into the star field. The engines cut off and the rear cone closed around the exhaust nozzles. At nearly the same moment, a bright flaring drone shot out from the belly, mimicking the former thrust trail of the
Belle
while concurrently firing a pulsing laser display at the windshield of the cop ship, effectively blinding any visual sensor. The missile dropped out of the cop ship and bee-lined toward the drone. The explosion briefly interrupted the illusion of a star field that the ship’s skin was projecting, revealing it for a blink. When the illusion came back, it appeared to Caleb as if he was floating through space alone. He hit the door close button and told Ken to do the same.
Spruck smiled at Natalie. “Huh? What do you think? Told you that loan would pay off.” He turned toward Jennifer, and spoke in an Oxford educated accent. “I’ve got a cloak of invisibility.”
“Cool trick,” she said. “Fancy ship. Why though when all drugs are legal?”
Natalie spoke for him. “There isn’t a single upgrade that this gadget junkie didn’t sink every penny into.”
“Saved your ass, didn’t it?” he said with arms proudly crossed.
The cockpit door opened to reveal Bert. “Jennifer, Dr. Saanvi requests your assistance. Several of the passengers have suffered injuries.”
Caleb and Ken climbed back into the ship, Ken floating to and embracing his son. Caleb moved past moaning people where Jennifer and Saanvi, among others, were applying first aid. He floated into the cockpit. “Nice specs for a Winnebago. Is the cop still on us?”
“Nope,” said Spruck with a self-satisfied grin.
“Then we stick with the plan.”
“You mean go back there?” asked Natalie.
“We’ve got to get to our shuttle. It’s still the only way we all get out of here. They won’t be expecting us. I say we finish an orbit and put down on the ramp next to it, cloaked like this. It means going back inside the base, but the loading tubes all connect at the same nexus. I can have her heated up and ready to fly in five.”
Natalie said, “Five minutes might as well be an hour, baby.”
“Then we create a diversion?” said Caleb, his confidence weakening.
Caleb sighed, “Why didn’t you say any of this when I suggested the plan in the first place?”
“Brother, all I was thinking about was getting out of there. You’d have to be a moron to think they will just let us land and transfer people to another ship and take off.”
Caleb bristled at moron, but it was hard not to agree with the assessment.
Spruck continued, “Did you see how close that was? I mean, they bust through that wall seconds before we took off.”
Caleb pulled himself down into Jennifer’s abandoned seat and buckled in. “How invisible is this thing?”
“Radar absorbing enviro-mimic coating—engine’s off, I’m just a bit of space junk. With all of the destroyed ships out there, another piece of the wreckage. In fact, we’re lucky we haven’t hit anything.”
Caleb asked, “Can we maneuver?”
“If I use the retros, I’m still hard to see. Can’t land or speed up a lot without projecting some significant thrust. Then I’m like a Christmas tree. Or so the manual says.”
Caleb was silent for a moment. “Can you put down in a crater long enough for me to jump off?”
“Probably.”
They took another orbit to work out the plan. Then Spruck skimmed the surface as low as he dared. The base landing zone was coming up fast. He already had the crater in mind. It was half a klick south of the walkabout maintenance lock.
Caleb seriously questioned his sanity as he stood once again in the exosuit on the outside of the
Belle
. His mother’s thick Yankee accent popped into his head along with a breeze smelling of pig shit and fresh cut summer grass. She was saying, “You’re an idiot, boy. Gonna get yourself killed and I won’t be sorry. I won’t miss ya. Nope. Go ahead and jump off that barn roof, but give me a sec to make certain there’s a pitchfork in the hay.”
Then he thought about the look in Natalie’s eyes when he told them what he was going to do. The woman exuded an inaccessible sultriness without even trying. One of those people whose every move seems to say,
I am built for sex—but not for you
. Yet, her eyes grew hungry as he laid out the plan, hungry for him. Caleb would swear it. Jennifer had even given him a hug before he climbed through the suit hatch - not even making the slightest attempt to angle her chest away. Nothing but firm B cups, maybe B pluses, smooshed up against him. He’d held her an extra beat to allow for a more accurate measurement. She didn’t even shove him away. Then Saanvi had to have some, too, and damn if he wasn’t getting some wood. The three women were driving him to distraction, and damn if he didn’t have half a chub while standing outside getting ready to jump off a space ship—again. All he had to do was safely land, walk to the farthest fucking tunnel from the shuttle, acess the interior, not get caught or shot, get to the shuttle, take off and quickly land again to load a bunch of people out of the
Belle
without getting any of them killed. Piece of cake.
Spruck relaxed about the pilot meld, let his brainwaves do the talking, and actually enjoyed watching his desire come true. The Belle slowed down, retros firing only, just enough for Caleb to jump. As Caleb yelled, “Geronimo!” Spruck thought to speed up again, and so it was. He giggled to himself over the ease of it. “Why have I been resisting?”
“Resisting what, baby?” asked Natalie.
The benefit of Albiorix’s low gravity for daring-do was happily apparent for Caleb. He hit the ground from a twenty-meter leap and only had to take a few bounding steps to slow down, keeping the momentum up just enough to bounce up the side of the crater and stop at its lip.
In the distance, the remains of the crashed cop ship were still leaking enough volatile gases to keep a meager fire blazing away. A robo-fire-vehicle continued to spray foam down on the mess. There was no one searching the wreckage for survivors.
Nice
, thought Caleb.
Glad I ditched that outfit
. Another cop ship sat on an adjacent landing pad where he’d landed the
Phoebe
shuttle. Natalie had assured him that Albiorix security focused on detecting ship landings, not random people walking outside, at least at a distance. Seismic detectors around the moon would relay any unexpected landings. No one apparently ever considered a full scale assault. It was about detecting and discouraging smugglers and undesirables. There were cameras closer in, and if the new residents were watching, and why wouldn’t they be watching, Caleb would eventually be spotted walking toward the base. As had worked for him for most of his life, if something went wrong Caleb would improvise. His instincts had gotten him out of countless scraps before, why not this one? His exosuit was as common as any others. He’d walk up and find an airlock near the landing pads. Spruck had shaken his head no and gently suggested that this was the definition of a half-baked plan. Instead, he filled Caleb in on the tightness of the close-in security and how it was weakest at the walkabout entrance where the fuel depot was.