“Roger, Port Master,” Kris drawled, “we understand this port is closed. We’re just running some tests. We’ve been parked here a while and, if you’ll excuse my comment, things are getting a bit interesting on your station. Just in case Pier Eleven were to, maybe, fall off, my owner wants to know I could maneuver to a new dock.”
“I understand your owner is antsy. Just you understand I have orders to shoot anyone departing the station.”
“Assuming they still have power,” Kris whispered, resting her hand on the console mike. On it, but not totally over it.
“I heard that. We all have our problems tonight. Just you don’t go adding any more to my growing list.”
“Roger, Port Master, over and out.” This time Kris did wait to say anything further until the mike showed a solid red light. “That ought to keep him off our back for a while.”
“But did you have to give me a heart attack doing it?” Penny said, leaning back in her chair so she could see Kris. “I know getting out of here is like, top and highest priority, but you might want to see what I found.”
“I can watch the board,” Tom offered.
Kris trotted over to look at Penny’s board.
“I have quite a comm set here,” Penny began. “You want to know what the President is saying, listen here.” She punched a button and the President’s harsh twang came through solidly. “His accent gets worse when he’s under pressure,” Penny said, “and that’s about as bad as I’ve ever heard it.”
“What else do you have?”
“How about Sandfire?”
“Him!” came from both Kris and Tom.
“He doesn’t say a lot, but when he does, he says it on this channel. Actually, it’s about fifty-nine channels, but this rig knows his schedule for jumping as well as his code.”
“You sure?”
“He’s ordered his ninjas back to ‘the castle.’ He also ordered somebody named ‘Bertie’ and his team to the same location. I don’t know where that is, but it doesn’t sound like he’s still hunting us.”
“That’s not good.” Kris turned and walked slowly back to her station. While Sandfire was turning the station upside down, he was chasing the wrong fox. If he was pulling his teams back, that meant he’d given up and was trying something new. “Keep track of Sandfire. Let me know of any traffic from him. What’s the President doing?”
“There seems to be an uprising going on dirtside. The Arab quarter was first to send people into the streets. Then the university district had a rally to hear some Senators, some of whom you’ve met. It got out of hand, and now other areas have streets jammed with people. When orders came to use force to break them up, a lot of the cops refused and joined the protestors. Our buddy Inspector Klaggath was on the net encouraging any doubters to ‘jump in, the water’s fine.’ ” Kris smiled at that, wondering if the Inspector had lake water in mind.
“Sandfire’s insisting they can beat the revolt. Izzic’s the nervous type who wants his problems solved yesterday. He’s issuing a lot of orders. My guess is too many. Order, counterorder, disorder.” Penny said, quoting the old military warning.
“Kris, we have a problem,” Jack announced on ship net. “Somebody’s come down the gangway and found our sleeping beauties. They’re demanding we open up.”
“I think that’s our cue to leave,” Kris said, slipping into her seat and belting herself in while her eyes checked her board. “I see a green board.”
“I confirm a green board,” Tom answered.
“I have the conn. Nelly, release all moorings,” Kris said as she gave her forward reaction jet a light tap.
Nothing happened.
“I do not have control of the mooring points,” Nelly answered. “I am working on them.”
“Work fast, Nelly.”
“Mooring eleven-d-one, this is the Port Master. We showing you trying to release your mooring points. All mooring points have been centrally locked. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Sorry, Port Master,” Kris said, tapping her mike on. “We were testing things, and a subroutine got activated. Computer error. Won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t. Wait one.” The net went dead with a harsh click.
“Oh, oh,” Tommy said. “I think someone just got through.”
“Who am I talking to?” came in a new voice.
“Repeat your question,” Kris said. “We’re not on land line, and our radio traffic is breaking up. You know how it is.” Kris tried to ramble on but was cut off.
“This is the Port Duty Officer. Who am I talking to?”
“Nelly Benteen,” Kris said, taking the name of a friend from first grade.
“What’s your ship?”
Kris tapped the mike. As it went red, she glanced around. “Anybody know the name of this bucket of bolts?”
“Terrorists on yacht at pier eleven-d-one. You are in violation of—”
“Nelly, kill that channel.” It went quiet.
“Sandfire appears to have a couple of ships,” Penny said. “He’s ordering them to cast off and take station to keep us in port.”
“Nelly, it would really be nice to get out of here.”
“Try your jets.”
Kris did.
“Try them harder.”
Kris tapped the ship’s speaker. “Jack, Abby, get ready for a hull breach. I’m backing out of here, and the pier isn’t exactly cooperating.”
Kris took a deep breath, gave Jack about as much time as she could to secure himself inboard from the hull, and ordered the bow thrusters to 25 percent. The ship trembled under her but went nowhere. Using her fingers, she edged the power line up slowly to 50 percent. The ship bucked in place. Somewhere metal tore.
Hope that’s the dock.
At 63 percent something let go. The ship creaked and groaned as the tie-downs trundled down the pier at three times the authorized speed. As the bridge passed the end of the pier and the station spin swung the landing away, Kris got a short glimpse of twisted metal and whipping cables. It didn’t look like she was leaving much if any of her hull behind.
“Any castoff you can walk away from is a cause for celebration,” Tom said. “Isn’t that what the old Chief said?”
“I don’t think he had this in mind,” Kris muttered as she steadied ship, dampened her reverse headway, and looked for room to rotate ship.
“Are you sure?” Tom grinned.
“I’m sure I’d like to know if I’m being targeted,” Kris said.
“None of the ranging lasers from the station are on us,” Penny said. “I have their net, and it really sounds like a Tiger and Rabbit cartoon. Five will get you fifty they haven’t had a live fire drill in years.”
“You ready to bet your life?” Kris asked.
“Aren’t we?”
“I hate to interrupt this validation that you both need to attend Gamblers Anonymous, but we have company,” Tom said, pointing at the screen. Three long, thin hulls cruised slowly around the edge of the station.
Kris hit her reaction jets, spun ship, and put headway on fast.
“We’ve got a problem down here,” Jack said from the ship’s system.
“Sorry about that, Jack, but we’ve got worse problems up here. Sandfire has three ships on our tail.”
“I really think you ought to see the problem I’ve got down here.”
“I can’t leave the pilot seat, Jack.”
“I’ll bring it up to you.”
“How could you have a worse problem than mine?” Kris muttered as she fed the main engines all the plasma she could afford to lose at the moment. Her hands played on the directional jets, jinking a bit up, a bit down, anything to spoil a firing solution.
“Kris, I have a message from Sandfire,” Penny announced.
“I’m listening,” Kris said as the elevator opened behind her.
“Ah,” Sandfire beamed confidently, “Princess Kristine, we can do this the quick way or the slow way. Either way, I have you. I have three heavily armed cruisers in range of your little runabout. Surrender, or I will blow you out of space.”
“Cal, you can’t fire on this ship while I’m on it,” came from behind Kris.
She turned.
Hank Smythe-Peterwald flashed her one if his billion-dollar smiles. “Hi, Kris. I thought you passed on joining me on my yacht.”
Kris swallowed hard. She’d planned to hijack a ship. She didn’t plan to kidnap anyone. Definitely not Hank Peterwald.
Hank’s smile wavered as a flash of light lit up his face. Kris whirled back to the screen. The station was blowing up.
The first explosion came from her ten kilos of dust mites. They exploded out one side of the yard. For a moment, the station rotated on, top fine, bottom fine, the yards and docks in the middle showing one huge bite out of it. Another, larger and slower explosion roiled around inside the yard, growing as it found more to feed on, casting light out the gaping hole that went from red to yellow to white. In quiet majesty, the walls of the yard bowed, then blew out almost lazily.
As if refreshed by that, the next round of fireworks was an expanding ball of explosives that shot through the growing cloud of wreckage with lightning speed, sending fragments of ships and station twisting and spinning into space. A big chunk clipped one of Sandfire’s ships, sending it careening into the next.
“So that’s what a signature Longknife job looks like.” Hank breathed slowly.
25
“Grab anything handy,” Kris shouted as she poured more plasma into her engines than she wanted to. Now was no time to blow out her reactor by using so much plasma that when the flood of cold reaction mass she was pouring in met what little plasma was left, the critical core temperature would plummet below the fusion level.
Maybe not, but I need to move now!
The ship—correction:
Barbarossa,
Hank’s yacht—took off with a lurch, sending Jack, Abby, and Hank to their knees. As Kris balanced reactor temperature against acceleration against a rapidly closing wall of gas and wreckage, the new arrivals crawled for seats: Hank on Kris’s right, Jack right next to him, Abby next to Tom.
“What are you doing with my ship?” Hank asked, proprietorship showing as he strapped himself in.
“Trying to stay ahead of that mess,” Kris answered, just remembering to change “my mess” to “that mess.” Now was no time to bring Hank in on all she’d been up to of late. Boys tended to be slow and so excitable about such things.
“What happened?” Hank breathed as he took in the screens.
“Some sort of industrial accident I would guess,” Kris evaded.
“And you’re just running off in my ship.”
Kris eyed the reactor and upped the feed from the fuel tanks. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was available.”
“Yes, there were only four or so guards protecting it. Father warned me you Longknifes have a very lackadaisical view of property rights when it suits you.”
“Sorry if I disappoint you,” Kris said, cutting the main engines and rotating ship so the power plant and engines weren’t in the direct path of the fast-approaching shock wave. It did put the command deck face into it.
“Hold on, folks,” Kris shouted. The wave front hit, slamming them against their restraints as it shoved the ship back, then sideways, trying to roll it. Gyros struggled against the forces arrayed against them. Kris added her own efforts to the battle, hitting the overrides and raising the power of the control jets, sending them more reaction mass, more electricity.
The ship held steady . . . or close enough.
Now came the big stuff. Chunks of station. Hunks of ships. Girders, walls . . . blessedly, Kris spotted no bodies. Now the control jets slid the ship up or right, left or down as Kris played a lethal game of dodge it.
“Alpha, gamma, seven, seven,” Hank muttered in incantation beside Kris, “Omega, zed, epsilon, one, nine, eleven,” he finished, and the board in front of him came to life. “Extra armor to the bow.”
Eyes on the wreckage coming her way, Kris asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m no Navy type like you, but I like to know enough about my ship to keep my hide in one piece when it matters. This is a smart metal ship, and I think I just thickened up the bow.”
“Tom, I’ve got the conn. Slave your station to Hank’s and see what you can do,” Kris ordered. Tom’s assigned station on the
Typhoon
was defense.
“I’m locked out,” Tom shouted.
“I grant open access to all stations,” Hank said.
“I’m in,” Tom said.
“We’re going to take a hit down our right side,” Kris shouted.
“I’m on it,” Tom said, hands dancing over his board. The ship shuddered, then groaned as the glancing blow Kris had settled for tumbled down the right side of the hull.
“Damage?”
“I’m fixing it,” Tom answered Kris.
“Good man,” Hank whispered.
“Not a bad ship. Not bad at all,” Tom said, giving high praise for a space born.
“Cost enough it ought to be,” Hank said through gritted teeth as Kris slammed the ship sideways. A tumbling ship’s stern, laser cannons twisting at the end of cables, struck a glancing blow.
“I’m on it,” Tom said before Kris got a word out.
Kris took a moment to expand her collision avoidance screen. It looked clear, but she needed a bigger picture. “Anyone at a sensor suite station?” she asked and got no reply.
“My code should have released the entire command deck,” Hank said, glancing around. “Isn’t that a sensor suite your man is seated at?” he said, waving at Jack.
“I wouldn’t know a sensor suite from a luxury suite,” Jack grumbled.
“I’ll slave the station next to me to that one,” Penny said. “Yep, it’s sensors. Kris, I’m sending you the overview screen.”
A screen opened at Kris’s left elbow. It rated more space than life support at the moment, so Kris squelched them to expand the view. The area was a mess, about what she’d expected. She spared a quick glance at the station. The thick wall she’d sliced through to get her nanos in had channeled the explosion out, not up or down. The Hilton was probably well shaken, but it and the rest of the lower station still sat atop the beanstalk. The Top of Turantic was also there, now floating above a big chunk of empty space but holding on to a few tenuous connections to the lower station.