“No!” He gripped both sides of the open pod, his features stone-carved with determination. “I won’t!” he shouted.
“In!”
“No.”
All three security men were pushing and shoving at him. Gerald Skibbow strove against them. Will tucked a leg round a nearby
girder, and smacked the butt of his TIP carbine against Gerald Skibbow’s left hand. There was a crunch as the bones broke.
He howled, but managed to keep hold. His fingers turned purple, the skin undulating. “No!”
The carbine came down again. Ralph put his hands flat against the decking above, and stood on Gerald Skibbow’s back, knees
straining, trying to thrust him down into the pod.
Gerald Skibbow’s broken hand slipped a couple of centimetres, leaving a red smear. “Stop this, stop this.” Rivulets of white
light began to shiver across his torso.
Ralph felt as though his own spine was going to snap, the force his boosted muscles were exerting against his skeleton was
tremendous. The soles of his feet were tingling sharply, the worms of white light coiling round his ankles. “Dean, switch
the pod on the second he’s in.”
“Sir.”
The hand slipped again. Gerald Skibbow started a high-pitched animal wailing. Will hammered away at his left elbow. Firefly
sparks streaked back up the carbine every time it hit, as though he was striking flint.
“Get in, you bastard,” one of the security men shouted, nearly purple from the effort, face shrivelled like a rubber mask.
Gerald Skibbow gave way, the arm Will had hammered on finally losing hold. He crashed down into the bottom of the pod with
an oof of air punched out through his open mouth. Ralph cried out at the shock of the jolt that was transmitted back up his
cramped legs. The curving lid of the pod began to slide into place, and he bent his knees frantically, lifting his legs out
of the way.
“No!” Gerald Skibbow shouted. He had begun to glow like a hologram profile, rainbow colours shining bright in the compartment’s
gloom. His voice was cut off by the lid sliding into place, and it locked with a satisfying mechanical
click
. There was a muffled thud of a fist striking the composite.
“Where’s the bloody zero-tau?” Will said. “Where is it?”
The lid of the pod hadn’t changed, there was no sign of the slippery black field effect. Gerald Skibbow was pounding away
on the inside with the fervour of a man buried alive.
“It’s on,” Dean shouted hoarsely from the operator’s control panel. “Christ, it’s on, it’s drawing power.”
Ralph stared at the sarcophagus in desperation. Work, he pleaded silently, come on fuck you, work! Jenny died for this.
“Switch on, you shit!” Will screamed at it.
Gerald Skibbow stopped punching the side of the pod. A black emptiness irised over the lid.
Will let out a sob of exhausted breath.
Ralph realized he was clinging weakly to one of the girders, the real fear had been that Gerald Skibbow would break out. “Tell
the captain we’re ready,” he said in a drained voice. “I want to get him to Ombey as quickly as we can.”
The event horizon around
Villeneuve’s Revenge
dissolved the instant the starship expanded out to its full forty-eight-metre size. Solar wind and emaciated light from New
California’s distant sun fell on the dark silicon hull which its disappearance exposed. Short-range combat sensors slid out
of their jump recesses with smooth animosity, metallic black tumours inset with circular gold-mirror lenses. They scoured
a volume of space five hundred kilometres across, hungry for a specific shape.
Data streams from the sensors sparkled through Erick Thakrar’s mind, a rigid symbolic language written in monochromic light.
Cursors chased through the vast constantly reconfiguring displays, closing in on an explicit set of values like circling photonic-sculpture
vultures. Radiation, mass, and laser returns slotted neatly into their parameter definition.
The
Krystal Moon
materialized out of the fluttering binary fractals, hanging in space two hundred and sixty kilometres away. An inter-planetary
cargo ship, eighty metres long; a cylindrical life-support capsule at one end, silver-foil-cloaked tanks and dull-red fusion-drive
tube clustered at the other. Thermo-dump panels formed a ruff collar on the outside of the environmental-engineering deck
just below the life-support capsule; communication dishes jutted out of a grid tower on the front of it. The ship’s mid-section
was a hexagonal gantry supporting five rings of standard cargo-pods, some of them plugged into the environmental deck via
thick cables and hoses.
A slender twenty-five-metre flame of hazy blue plasma burnt steadily from the fusion tube, accelerating the
Krystal Moon
at an unvarying sixtieth of a gee. It had departed Tehama asteroid five days ago with its cargo of industrial machinery and
micro-fusion generators, bound for the Ukiah asteroid settlement in the outer asteroid belt Dana, which orbited beyond the
gas giant Sacramento. Of the star’s three asteroid belts, Dana was the least populated; traffic this far out was thin.
Krystal Moon
’s sole link to civilization (and navy protection) was its microwave communication beam, focused on Ukiah, three hundred and
twenty million kilometres ahead.
Erick’s neural nanonics reported that pattern lock was complete. He commanded the X-ray lasers to fire.
Two hundred and fifty kilometres away, the
Krystal Moon
’s microwave dishes burst apart into a swirl of aluminium snowflakes. A long brown scar appeared on the forward hull of the
life-support capsule.
God, I hope no one was in the cabin below.
Erick tried to push that thought right back to the bottom of his mind. Straying out of character, even for a second, could
quite easily cost him his life. They’d drilled that into him enough times back at the academy. There was even a behavioural
consistency program loaded into his neural nanonics to catch any wildly inaccurate reactions. But flinches and sudden gasps
could be equally damning.
The
Villeneuve’s Revenge
triggered its fusion drive, and accelerated in towards the stricken cargo ship at five and a half gees. Erick sent another
two shots from the X-ray cannon squirting into the
Krystal Moon
’s fusion tube. Its drive flame died. Coolant fluid vented out of a tear in the casing, hidden somewhere in the deep shadows
on the side away from the sun, the fountain fluorescing grey-blue as it jetted out from behind the ship.
“Nice going, Erick,” AndrÉ Duchamp commented. He had the secondary fire-control program loaded in his own neural nanonics.
If the newest crew-member hadn’t fired he could have taken over within milliseconds. Despite Erick’s performance in the Catalina
Bar, AndrÉ had a single nagging doubt. After all, O’Flaherty was one of their own—after a fashion—and eliminating him didn’t
require many qualms no matter who you were; but firing on an unarmed civil ship… You have earned your place on board, AndrÉ
said silently. He cancelled his fire-control program.
Villeneuve’s Revenge
was a hundred and twenty kilometres from the
Krystal Moon
when AndrÉ turned the starship and started decelerating. The hangar doors began to slide open. He started to whistle against
the push of the heavy gee force.
He had a right to be pleased. Even though it had only been a tiny interplanetary jump, two hundred and sixty kilometres was
an excellent separation distance. Since leaving Tehama,
Villeneuve’s Revenge
had been in orbit around Sacramento. They had extended every sensor, focusing along the trajectory Lance Coulson had sold
them until they had found the faint splash of the
Krystal Moon
’s exhaust. With its exact position and acceleration available in real time, it was just a question of manufacturing themselves
a jump co-ordinate.
Two hundred and sixty kilometres, there were void-hawks that would be pushed to match that kind of accuracy.
Thermo-dump panels stayed inside the monobonded silicon hull as the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
rendezvoused with
Krystal Moon
. The jump nodes were fully charged. AndrÉ was cautious, they might need to leave in a hurry. It had happened before; stealthed
voidhawks lying in wait, Confederation Navy Marines hiding in the cargo-pods. Not to him, though.
“Bev, give our target an active sensor sweep, please,” AndrÉ ordered.
“Yes, Captain,” Bev Lennon said. The combat sensors sent out fingers of questing radiation to probe the
Krystal Moon
.
The brilliant lance of fusion fire at the rear of the
Vi l -leneuve’s Revenge
sank away to a minute bubble of radiant helium clinging to the tube’s nozzle.
Krystal Moon
was six kilometres away, wobbling slightly from the impulse imparted by the venting coolant fluid. Thrusters flared around
the rear bays, trying to compensate and stabilize.
Ion thrusters on the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
fired, nudging the bulky starship in towards its floundering prey. Brendon piloted the multifunction service vehicle up out
of the hangar and set off towards the
Krystal Moon
. One of the cargo-bay doors slowly hinged upwards behind him.
“Come on, Brendon,” AndrÉ murmured impatiently as the small auxiliary craft rode its bright yellow chemical rocket exhaust
across the gap. Ukiah traffic control would know the communication link had been severed in another twelve minutes; it would
take the bureaucrats a few minutes to react, then sensors would review the
Krystal Moon
’s track. They’d see the spaceship’s fusion drive was off, coupled with the lack of an emergency distress beacon. That could
only mean one thing. The navy would be alerted, and if the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
was really unlucky a patrolling voidhawk would investigate. AndrÉ was allowing twenty minutes maximum for the raid.
“It checks out clean,” Bev Lennon reported. “But the crew must have survived that first X-ray laser strike, I’m picking up
electronic emissions from inside the life-support capsule. The flight computers are still active.”
“And they’ve suppressed the distress beacon,” AndrÉ said. “That’s smart, they must know we’d slice that can in half to silence
any shout for help. Maybe they’ll be in a cooperative mood.” He datavised the flight computer to open an inter-ship channel.
Erick heard the hiss of static fill the dimly lit bridge as the AV pillar was activated. A series of musical bleeps came with
it, then the distinct sound of a child crying. He saw Madeleine Collum’s head come up from her acceleration couch, turning
in the direction of the communication console. Blue and red shadows flowed over her gaunt, shaven skull.
“
Krystal Moon
, acknowledge contact,” AndrÉ said.
“Acknowledge?” a ragged outraged male voice shouted out of the AV pillar. “You shithead animal, two of my crew are dead. Fried!
Tina was fifteen years old!”
Erick’s neural nanonics staunched the sudden damp fire in his eyes. A fifteen-year-old girl. Great God Almighty! These interplanetary
ships were often family operated affairs, cousins and siblings combining into crews.
“Release the latches on pods DK-30-91 and DL-30-07,” AndrÉ said as though he hadn’t heard. “That’s all we’re here for.”
“Screw you.”
“We’ll cut them free anyway,
Anglo
, and if we cut then the capsule will be included. I’ll open your hull up to space like the foil on a freeze-dried food packet.”
A visual check through the combat sensors showed Erick the MSV was two hundred metres away from the
Krystal Moon
. Desmond Lafoe had already fitted laser cutters to the craft’s robot arms; the spindly white waldos were running through
a preprogrammed articulation test.
Villeneuve’s Revenge
was lumbering along after the smaller, more agile, auxiliary craft; three kilometres away now.
“We’ll think about it,” said the voice.
“Daddy!” the girl in the background wailed. “Daddy, make them go away.”
A woman shushed her, sounding fearful.
“Don’t think about it,” AndrÉ said. “Just do it.”
The channel went silent.
“Bastards,” AndrÉ muttered. “Erick, put another blast through that capsule.”
“If we kill them, they can’t release the pods.”
AndrÉ scowled darkly. “Scare them, don’t kill them.”
Erick activated one of the starship’s lasers; it was designed for close-range interception, the last layer of defence against
incoming combat wasps. Powerful and highly accurate. He reduced the power level to five per cent, and lined it up on the front
of the life-support capsule. The infrared beam sliced a forty-centimetre circle out of the foam-covered hull. Steamy gas erupted
out of the breach.
AndrÉ grunted at what he considered to be Erick’s display of timidity, and opened the inter-ship channel again. “Release the
pods.”
There was no answer. Erick couldn’t hear the girl any more.
Brendon guided the MSV around the rings of barrel-like cargo-pods circling the
Krystal Moon
’s mid-section. He found the first pod containing microfusion generators, and focused the MSV’s external cameras on it. The
latch clamps of the cradle it was lying in were closed solidly round the load pins. Sighing regretfully at the time and effort
it would cost to cut the pod free, he engaged the MSV’s attitude lock, keeping station above the pod, then datavised the waldo-control
computer to extend the arm. Droplets of molten metal squirted out where the cutting laser sliced through the clamps, a micrometeorite
swarm glowing as if they were grazing an atmosphere.
“Something’s happening,” Bev Lennon reported. The electronic sensors were showing him power circuits coming alive inside the
Krystal Moon
’s life-support capsule. Atmosphere was still spewing out of the lasered hole, unchecked. “Hey—”
A circular section of the hull blew out. Erick’s mind automatically directed the X-ray lasers towards the hole revealed by
the crumpled sheet of metal as it twirled off towards the stars. A small craft rose out of the hole, ascending on a pillar
of flame. Recognition was immediate: lifeboat.