Outriders (36 page)

She wasn’t going to make it.

He was maybe five meters away when she hit the latch to pop the pod door; almost arm’s length by the time it was open. He was going to grab her. Already, his hands were outstretched.

Without thinking, Piper dropped to a knee, ducked her head. The man crashed into her, knocked her over, and went sprawling to the deck, hard. Piper scrambled up to her hands and knees, threw herself into the airlock. Lurched up to her feet, through the pod hatch.

The man appeared at the airlock entrance as she was hitting the emergency latch to shut herself in. The door sealed just as the man reached it; so close, he had to snatch his hand back to avoid losing his fingers.

Piper took a few disbelieving steps back from the door. She’d done it. She’d made it. She was safe, for the moment.

And with that realization, she collapsed to her knees by the door, shaking, panting, crying from the terror and the relief. Displays glowed to life and the pod hummed as its systems came up. One of the screens showed a view of the airlock, where a second man had now joined the first. There was no audio, but Piper didn’t need it. The image alone was enough to communicate the fury.

Piper threw the metal-handled switch by the door, a double safety that locked the hatch mechanically and made it impossible to unlock from the outside without specialized equipment. If they wanted to come get her, they’d have to cut her out. Retrieval arms typically had a built-in interface that could do the job, but that was only a possibility if she launched and they recovered the pod. And she didn’t plan on doing that.

She gave herself a few moments to recover from the emotional toll of the adrenaline dump, and then forced herself back to her feet. There was no telling how long it would take them to find a way to get her out, but there was no question that her captors were smart. The only safe thing to do was to assume she didn’t have much time.

The pod had a ring of seats positioned to cram as many people in as possible. One, however, was ostensibly the command chair, closest to the essential controls. Piper sat there and went to work.

“
H
OW LONG UNTIL SHE LAUNCHES
?” Vector asked as he ran through the arming protocols. While the rig didn’t have much in the way of weaponry, the point defense cannons were enough to get the job done, as long as he could manually target the lifepod. He’d at least make an attempt at recovering the pod before it got too far, but he wasn’t taking any chances. If it looked like it was getting out of range, he’d just have to explain to the Woman that the girl had become
troublesome
.

“Could’ve done it by now, if she was gonna,” Kev said.

“What do you think she’s waiting for?”

“No idea. Maybe she doesn’t know how to launch it.”

“Did she get out?” Kid said from the door. Vector looked over his shoulder at her. She held up her hand before he could say anything. “It was stupid, I know, you don’t need to say it.”

Vector looked at his long-time friend, saw the hard look in her eyes. There wasn’t anything he could say that she hadn’t already said to herself; and she probably hadn’t been nearly as kind about it as he would have been.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Yeah, fine,” she answered. “Did she get out?”

“Nah, she’s holed up in a pod,” Vector said, returning to his console. “Not sure what she’s up to yet.”

“Maybe she just got scared, didn’t really think it through…”

“No, I almost caught her,” Kev said. “She could’ve run the other way, but she ran towards me instead, raced me to the pod. That was where she was headed, no doubt.”

Vector finished bringing the retrieval arm and the cannons online.

“Kid, go grab Royce and see if he has any ideas about overriding that hatch,” he said. “Maybe some of his guys know a trick or two.”

“You got it,” Kid said, and she left the control room.

“There it goes,” Kev said. “She’s trying to bring up the commo.”

“Can she do that?” Vector asked.

“Sure. Pod’s got a great array on it. It’s still slaved to the main ship, but smart girl like her, I bet she can figure a way around it.”

“Anything we can do from here?”

“Depends on what she does in there, I reckon.”

Vector eyed the console. He could force-launch the pod and try to recover it, but he knew that the girl would blast a distress signal out as soon as the pod was free. That was attention he didn’t want to deal with, not unless it was the only option.

“Let’s wait and see, then,” he said.

P
IPER WAS
deep in the lifepod’s system configuration, modifying settings and permissions. By default, the communications array was inactive unless the pod had been launched, preventing any sort of accidental interference with the main ship or erroneous distress signals from going out. But there were protocols hidden to the normal user that had to be accessible to the technicians who ran diagnostics and safety checks on the equipment.

She remembered well sitting in the lifepod connected to YN-773’s bubble, with Gennady leaning over her shoulder, walking her through the process. Remembered the quiet smile on his face at her excitement when she realized just how much of a secret world lay behind the surface of all the technology she interacted with. He’d been so generous to share his vast knowledge with her, so patient with her constant questions and curiosity. And now what Gennady had taught her out of the goodness of his nature was quite possibly the thing that would save her. Save her
again
. Piper’s eyes welled while she made the final changes.

The communications array bleeped when it woke, its display spooling out diagnostic data as it stepped through its startup routine. A distress signal would have been the best way to get some attention; they were designed to radiate signal in a specific pattern, in all directions. But even if she could have overridden the protocols that prevented it, she knew her captors could easily explain it away as a malfunction to whoever came looking. Unlike the distress signal, the communications array was tight-beam, designed for targeted transmission. If she wasn’t smart about how she used it, she’d literally just be screaming into the void. Not that she had much choice. Without launching, the array was limited by the pod’s housing in the ship.

Piper coded up a simple message; she’d been kidnapped and needed help. That was about all she knew anyway, and it was enough to get noticed. In minutes, she had a basic macro set up to cycle through the array’s effective range, blasting out thousands of messages a second to whoever might be out there. It was shamelessly brute force, with no guarantees. She had no way to know where in space she was, or what direction the nearest hop might be, but if she could let the cycle run long enough, there was a reasonable hope that her message would land somewhere. At least she told herself it was reasonable. Reasonable or not, it was the only hope she had.

The array ran her routine for about three and a half minutes before it abruptly quit. It only took Piper half that time to figure out why. Someone on the ship had counteracted her override and locked the comm array down, killing her message and Piper’s hope along with it. All of that struggle, and planning, and effort. Three and a half minutes.

Piper covered her face with her hands.

“
T
HAT OUGHT
to hold her just fine,” Kev said.

“Permanently?” Vector asked.

“Yeah, I shunted all her diagnostics off to the mainline, so we’re back in control again, and she’s locked out. She’s pretty clever, but she’s no wizard.”

“Hey, Kid,” Vector said over his communications.

“Yeah?” she responded.

“What’s Royce got to say?”

“He still thinks you ought to force launch and kill it.”

“We’ve got her contained now,” Vector said. “She can’t hurt us as long as she’s on the tether.”

“That’s fine, but his crew’s still got work to do. You want him wasting time on her?”

“Only if it’s an easy fix.”

“It’s not an easy fix.”

“Then no. They can get back to it.”

“I’ll let him know.”

“Might actually be better for us anyway,” Kev said. “I kind of wish we’d just stuffed her in one of those in the first place. She’s got food, water, everything she needs in there for a couple of weeks at least. And we don’t have to deal with her.”

“Unless she tries to come back out and run for another,” Vector said.

“Now that I know what she was up to, I can set up an override on the rest of the pods so we don’t have to worry about it,” Kev replied. “And maybe later I’ll go down there and rig a motion sensor on the hatch just to be safe.”

Vector tapped his fingers on the edge of the console, irritated that he was even having to think about this right now. But maybe Kev was right. If she really was contained, then the girl could stay in there all the way to Mars as far as he was concerned. He just couldn’t quite bring himself to believe she’d given up yet.

P
IPER LAY CURLED
on her side, her arms folded around herself, on one of the crash couches. Crying seemed like it might be an appropriate response given everything she’d been through, but she found it impossible to do so. She was too drained, too spent, to feel much of anything anymore. For a time, she lay there letting her mind run its wild course unheeded. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. She was still captive, yes, but the pod felt safer. She didn’t have to worry about people coming in and out without warning, at least. There were plenty of supplies, so she knew she wouldn’t starve to death. She’d be fine, as long as she could cope with the fact that she was all alone, lost somewhere in the middle of deep space.

And then she realized that, too, was a problem she could do something about – the being lost part, anyway.

She got up and went back to the command center, brought up the navigation interface. The display locked out course plotting, since the pod was still tethered to the main ship, but if nothing else, she could at least get some sense of where she was. Even though she couldn’t do anything else about it, just having some idea of where they’d taken her felt something like stealing back a little power for herself.

After a few minutes of scanning through the star maps and other positional data, she saw that they’d taken her out further from YN-773 in the direction of Mars, trailing the planet’s orbit. And though she wasn’t particularly well trained or practiced at reading astronomical maps, from her best guess, it didn’t seem likely that her three-and-a-half-minute burst of calls for help found anyone. She scrolled the map around, zoomed in and out, changed the angle. There just wasn’t anyone out there. Piper knew space was vast and mostly empty, but even when she found Earth and scanned around, there weren’t nearly as many hops on the display as she had expected. It finally occurred to her that the navdata in the pod was out of date. From the look of it, it might have even still had the default data from however many decades ago the pod had been installed.

Sloppy maintenance work in her opinion. Sure, there wasn’t much need for navigational data in a pod until it’d been launched, but it never hurt to be proactive. Piper had always kept the bubble’s pod on YN-773 updated with the latest from Veryn-Hakakuri’s central maps. Those maps used data regularly collected from all the company’s numerous hops and were available to any employee with access to the system. It was a simple process. She shook her head at other people’s laziness.

And then a thought jolted her.

The navigational computer.

She sat up straighter, her energy renewed.

V
ECTOR HAD TOLD
himself not to worry about the girl anymore. He had enough to keep him busy, and Kev had reassured him that there was nothing she could do to hurt them from in there. But he couldn’t help it. His gut wouldn’t let him leave it alone. And he couldn’t remember a time that he’d ever been glad he’d ignored his gut.

He stopped back by the ship’s command station, just to check. Kev’s feed was still monitoring activity in the lifepod where the girl was, and as far as Vector could tell, everything was still fine. She was just fiddling around with the nav map. Bored, probably. And he couldn’t blame her, really. It had to be hard on her, not knowing where she was or what was happening. He turned to leave again, but stopped at the door. Went back to the display. It never hurt to double-check.

“Hey Kev,” he said over comms.

“Yeah?”

“You got a sec?”

“Not really. What’s up?”

“The girl’s doing something with nav in the pod.”

“OK. And?”

“Nothing to be worried about?”

“What’s the feed say?”

“Looks like she’s trying to update the data on it, but it keeps failing.”

There was a pause before he responded.

“I’ll be there in a second.”

It was a couple of minutes before Kev arrived, and he had grease on his hands, even though he’d obviously tried to wipe them before he sat down to look.

“Well, that’s weird,” he said after he’d scrolled back through the log of activity. “You’re right, she’s trying to pull new maps in, but wherever she’s trying to connect is kicking her back out.”

“Are we blocking it?”

Kev shook his head. “Not on purpose. I think it’s something
she’s
doing.”

He tapped out a few commands on the console, opened new windows on the display that meant nothing to Vector.

“I’m just gonna track this back, see where she’s grabbing the data…” He trailed off, and then a few moments later cursed to himself.

“What?” Vector asked.

“She’s hitting Veryn-Hakakuri’s plot data,” Kev said, and the urgency in his voice made it sound worse than the words. “And failing the security check. Over and over again.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know exactly, but you can bet VH isn’t going to ignore that forever.”

“Could they track the source?”

“Eventually they might,” Kev said. And then his face changed. “She’s piggybacking off our relay.”

“Shut it down,” Vector said.

“I can’t,” Kev said. “The pod’s nav system is totally independent, it’s not hooked into the mainline at all–”