Death Sentence (17 page)

The ventilation system sighed to a halt and the inside of Jamie's barrel suddenly turned black. The only light left was a faint glow from a few essential displays that would remain powered-up during the transit-jump and the ghostly pale image of part of the
Adler
's hull, now lit only by the distant stars. Hannah moved her head a bit to check one of the displays, and he saw her head as a jet-black silhouette in front of the viewport. "All nonessential systems now safely powered down," Hannah announced. "Transit-jump in twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Jump!"

The universe turned flaring bloodred with light that blasted in through the viewport, illuminating every nook and cranny of the
Sholto
's interior in blinding bright crimson. Jamie covered his eyes and gritted his teeth, bracing himself for whatever else might happen. But nothing else did.
Not so bad this time,
he told himself.
Just a little light show.
As long as the light didn't leave them dazzled or blinded--and as long as there wasn't some other invisible, nastier sort of radiation along for the ride--they ought to be all right.

There was nothing left to do but wait it out. It was almost impossible to predict how much subjective time a transit-jump would take, but usually it was no more than a few seconds, or a minute.

It was only after about twenty seconds that Jamie sensed the vibration, the rhythmic shudder, that seemed to be coursing through the ship, fading out, and then reappearing, a little more powerful each time, each pulse coming faster and with greater intensity. What had begun as a barely perceptible background sensation built rapidly into something that seemed certain to shake the ship apart. The structure of the ship began to creak and moan. The interval between periods of vibration shrank until the shaking was nonstop. The noise was getting worse as well.

"Hannah!" Jamie called out.

"I have no idea!" Hannah yelled back, answering the question Jamie was about to ask.

"Can you do anything?"

"I don't dare try!" she shouted back. "Any change right now would probably just make it worse. All we can do is hang on!"

Jamie resisted the temptation to ask how much longer. Hannah could have no better idea of that than he did.

Then, as abruptly as it had appeared, the lurid glare of bloodred light vanished, dropping him back into darkness, and the shaking ceased so suddenly and completely that it was as if a switch had been thrown.

Jamie was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when the whole world abruptly lurched hard to the left and dropped into a violent spin. Jamie could see the stars streaking and whirling past that one little patch of black sky. Suddenly he was being spun and tumbled about violently enough to pull him half-out of his acceleration chair, held in place only by his restraint harness.

They had gotten through the transit-jump. But the ship was out of control.

TWELVE

VACUUM UNDER PRESSURE

The sky and the stars were whirling past them, spinning and gyrating wildly. Hannah blinked hard and tried to concentrate, forcing herself not to be affected by the mad tumbling whirl that was scrambling her inner ears.

"What happened?" Jamie shouted from below and behind her.

"Stand by!" Hannah called back in a tone that she sincerely hoped relayed the message
shut up and let me work the problem.
She was forced to wait and watch as the automatic sequencer brought the ship's systems back online. If the maneuvering system didn't get back online quickly, she wasn't sure she was going to be sufficiently alert and conscious enough to deal with the problem.

Just as the controls powered up, Hannah found something else to worry about. The reinforcing cables she could see out the pilot's viewport were
flexing,
bouncing and twisting, stretching and recoiling.

"Dammit!" Hannah cried out. "The cables are going! Hang on while I try to damp out this tumble. Attitude thrusters on!" The
Sholto
had no sophisticated automated tumble recovery system--and certainly not one that was up to autorecovery with the deadweight of the
Adler
strapped to the nose of the ship. Hannah was going to have to do it on manual. Somehow. One axis at a time. Kill the end-over-end pitch-down tumble first. She fired her stern Y-axis thrusters hard, at full force--and saw the number three cable snap in two right in front of her eyes, sending an echoing
bang
resounding through the hull--and, more disturbingly, she saw a plume of gas jetting out from somewhere beyond her field of vision. Whatever that was would have to wait. She had to get the ship out of its tumble before it tore itself apart.

She gritted her teeth and kept the thrusters burning, even as she heard another almighty
bang
from somewhere belowdecks, and then, a half moment later, a terrifying loud thump and a prolonged scraping noise. Something had just broken loose and slammed into the
Sholto
's hull. She glanced at the strain meters and saw that cable six had dropped from off-scale high to zero. Too late now. She checked her rates and saw that the tumble was slowing, though not fast enough to suit her. She brought the tumble through pitch down to a rough first approximation of zero, then worked to kill the smaller Z-axis spin through yaw. It wasn't as bad as the tumble had been, but it was still a fast rotation. It took some time for the Z-axis thrusters to bring the rates down enough so that they weren't scary.

That left her with the X-axis spin along the long axis of the combined ships. She didn't kill it at once. She had another job to do first.

She had two broken cables out there, and both ends of each were no doubt flailing about wildly, likely to swing around and smash into the hulls of the ships or do other mischief in unpleasant and unpredictable ways the moment Hannah relit the engines. For the moment, the barrel roll might keep the broken cables safely at bay, thanks to the centripetal effect--unless there was some weird harmonic resonance in play that would keep them swinging and oscillating unless or until they smashed into something. She didn't dare take the time to power up the external cameras and do a visual inspection--precisely because a broken cable could smash into either ship at any moment.

Furthermore, she couldn't keep even the uncertain protection of the spin going forever, and the broken cables would be a menace as long as they were attached to the ship. She had to get rid of them. And the cables were an all-or-nothing deal. She would have to jettison the two broken sets and the four unbroken cables all at the same time.

A quick glance at the strain gauges convinced her that wouldn't be a bad idea. At least two of the surviving cables looked ready to snap themselves. There would be consequences--real and serious consequences--to dumping the cables, but Hannah saw that she had no other choice.

She set up the jettison-cables command. She wanted to activate it the moment the command was ready, before she could have second thoughts. "Cable jettison!" she shouted, as if Jamie was going to be able do anything about it. No time for any chitchat. A display lit up, announcing COMMAND SEQUENCE READY, and she slammed her palm down on the button.

Bang bang thud Bang bang thud
and the four whole cables and two broken ones were cut loose from the
Sholto
and the
Adler
simultaneously.

No need for the barrel roll anymore. After all the rest of it, killing their long-axis spin and their residual pitch and yaw seemed almost too easy. Hannah let out a deep sigh of relief and slumped backwards against her pilot's chair and called back to Jamie. "All right," she said. "We're secure. I think."

There wasn't any answer for a moment, and she popped open enough of her restraint harness to let her twist around and look down at him. The autosequencer hadn't brought the main cabin lighting back on yet, and the lower deck was little more than murk and shadows. "Jamie?" she called out. "You still with me? Jamie?"

"Oh, yeah," said a muffled voice. "Just about. I didn't want to answer before my stomach decided whether to hit the eject button. Ah, you'll be--mmphhm--glad to know it decided against. But it was a close vote."

Hannah grinned and twisted back around to face her control panel and the half dozen warning lights that were blinking for her attention. "Special Agent Mendez, my friend--you don't know a thing in the world about
how
close things can get."

She remembered the venting she had seen just after the cable snapped. They were going to have to check that next, before anything else happened. She released her harness the rest of the way so she could get up close to the viewport and see more of her ship's exterior, and the
Adler
.

What she saw proved that
she
hadn't known how close things could get, either. She immediately shut down the autosequencer before it restarted the environmental systems or the ship's internal gravity. They didn't need any more variables at the moment.

The spaceside end of a broken cable was floating motionless outside the ship, about ten meters away from her face.

The other end had smashed clean through the
Adler
's starboard viewport.

Ten minutes later, with Jamie at her side, she had every external camera available pointed at the problem, but none of them told her much that she didn't already know. She had very carefully brought the
Sholto
's ventilation system back online while leaving the
Adler
in vacuum and left the grav systems on both ships shut down. The artificial-gravity fields were supposed to stay inside the hull, leaving the exterior of the ships unaffected, but the induced gee effect could leak outward at times, and both ships had been knocked around enough to detune any grav system. Until that hunk of cable was clear of both ships, she didn't want to try any experiments.

"It's the
Adler
end of cable number six," she said quietly. "When the cable snapped, that half of it whipsawed somehow, and smashed right through the starboard panel of the
Adler
's viewport. A hole that size must have vented every millibar of pressure out of her cabin in twenty seconds. And no, there's no reason besides dumb luck that it wasn't the other end of the cable, or that it didn't smash through
our
viewport instead and leave us breathing vacuum."

"The venting didn't cause that violent a tumble, did it?"

"What? Oh, no, not at all. I'm sure all that atmosphere blowing out added to the tumble, but not by all that much. This"--she gestured at the cable smashed through the viewport--"was pretty much the
last
domino to fall. Nowhere near the first. The only noticeable transit-jump effect we got was a very mild red-lighting. Perfectly harmless. But what I can read from the autolog, we also ran up against a very slight pseudogravity field during the jump--not enough for us to feel, but enough to cause trouble. Not all that rare, but not common, either. The
Sholto
's jump generator could handle the jump effect pseudogee field,
or
the off-balance mass of the
Adler
, but not both at once. The interaction between the two induced just enough of a gravity flux to induce a tumble that built up during the jump, but that had no effect on us until we were dumped back into the normal universe. Probably the techs back home will be able to read our event logs, figure exactly what went wrong, and tweak and twiddle and tweedle the jump generators so it won't happen next time--but that doesn't do
us
much good. But, anyway, I figure we were already spinning in three directions inside the jump--but we just didn't feel it until we popped back out here."

"Where
is
here?" Jamie asked.

Hannah checked her nav displays. "Good news there," she said. "Right on the money, in the Metran System, and on a clean initial course for Metran itself. Except of course that we have to start our braking maneuvers pretty soon or we'll just shoot past the planet and head right back out the other side of the star system."

"But now that the reinforcing cables have failed, can we put on the brakes?"

"The cables
didn't
fail," Hannah said. "If they hadn't been there to take the strain, it would have been the docking rings that would have had to take it on--and probably torn themselves to shreds."

"Okay, I take your point," said Jamie. "But I'd suggest that having a cable snap, then bury itself in a viewport wasn't exactly what Gunther's team had in
mind
when they attached them."

"I won't argue--but we're alive right now because those cables snapped instead of the docking rings shredding. As to whether we can fire up the
Sholto
's engines and brake the combined vehicle--we'll have to inspect things as best we can. My guess is that yes, we can, if we don't crank the thrust up too high. But--I think it's obvious that we shouldn't attempt another docked transit-jump. We've lost the cables; and both ships have damage to the hulls caused by cable strikes--plus the smashed-in viewport window. Space knows what hidden damage there might be. We'll have to jump the ships back individually--or else abandon one of them here and fly both of us back in one of them.
That's
going to complicate matters."