Torchship (5 page)

“I can’t reach my damn slide
rule,” complained the mechanic. His voice was strained by the acceleration. “Twenty
or thirty minutes. I’ll inform you before we hit the limit.”

“That should be plenty,” said
Mitchie calmly.

***

Conditions in the hold were
starting to improve. Billy had been low-crawling on the deck to collect the
used spacesick bags and towels. With those stuffed into the trash locker the
air recycling started to clear out the smell. The groundhogs had mostly emptied
their stomachs. Bing was impressed that a couple had kept their rich breakfast
down. The panicked chatter had been silenced by the latest boost.

Bobbie was the first to
notice the snowballs. Her “Ooh, pretty,” made her friends look up. They were
too panicked to appreciate the beauty of them.

As they visibly grew in the
window everyone wound up staring at them. Professor Tsugawa shifted in his
straps to glare at Bing. He labored to yell, “Is. Your. Pilot. Insane?” at her.

Bing didn’t reply. All she
could think to say was “I hope not.” That didn’t seem helpful.

Some of the passengers closed
their eyes as the ship closed on the snowballs. The grad students traded
speculation on their composition in gallows-humor tones. Bobbie was the only
one enjoying the sight. Her eyes shone. But even she flinched as they swept
through the center of the triangle.

***

Mitchie eased the thrust back
down to ten gravs.
Fives Full
headed toward the outer edge of the rings.
She brought the nose gently back around and studied the radar to pick a path
back to the center. “Sir, is he still following us?”

The captain tracked the other
ship on the landing cameras. “So far. Not to the gap yet.” They waited tensely.
The interceptor was certainly agile enough to go anywhere they could. If the
pilot was good enough to use it fully–“There he goes! Max-accel avoidance burn.
That had to hurt.”

“Which way?”

“Plus-zee.”

“Thanks.” Mitchie shifted
course to the south side of the ring. The more ice between them and the hunter
the harder they’d be to spot again. “Should be smooth flying until he comes
back.”

“Okay. Holler if you have to
maneuver.” The captain left the bridge. She wondered where he was going but
couldn’t come up with a polite way to ask before the hatch dogged shut.

Maybe he wants to give the
passengers some hand-holding
, she
thought. A check of the cameras showed the interceptor staying ballistic. She
set a straight course through empty space below the ring. It was a chance to
relax, unkink some muscles, and look around.
This really is a beautiful
place. Piloting a regular tourist run through here would be a lovely job
. Not
one for her, of course.

Captain Schwartzenberger
undogged the hatch and came up the ladder dragging a pile of gear. “Here.” Mitchie
helped pull it up. Spread out it became two spacesuits and a thruster pack. “We
scraped through some gravel while going through the dense patches. Don’t think
it did any more than scratch the paint. But best to be safe.”

Mitchie looked up at the
bridge window, a clear dome covering the top of the ship. It wouldn’t take a
big chunk of ice to punch a hole in it at these speeds. She could get into an
emergency pod quickly enough but it would be a lonely way to wait for the out
of control ship to have a fatal crash. “Good thinking.” She put her purple suit
next to the control couch. The captain did the same with his red one.

Schwartzenberger touched his
earpiece. “Ah, he’s awake.” He’d taken the ship-to-ship off speakers earlier. He
could monitor the stream of threats and profanities without letting it be a
distraction. “Moving. Staying above the ring, not coming toward us.” He studied
the screen. Was this stalling or had their enemy come up with an idea? “By the
way, Pilot Long. Your skill is far greater than I’d believed. I apologize for
doubting you.”

She gave his stiff nod,
almost a bow, a smile in return. “Thank you, sir, but don’t apologize. Just
remember it when it’s time to write that recommendation letter.” She steered
the ship around a small iceberg as they approached the dense core of the ring.

“I’m more likely to recommend
you to the Space Guard than a merchant ship. They can use that kind of flying.”

“Guard doesn’t let pilots put
cushions under their butts, Skipper.”

“I’ll tell them to make an
exception. When did you check out the Guard?”

“When I was a shuttle pilot. They
threw me out of the recruiting office.”

“Good thing for our
passengers that they did. The SOB is ahead of us now. Still over a thousand
klicks above the ring. I’m not getting a good look at him.”

“Might just be waiting for us
to overshoot. We can’t keep this up until the Navy gets here,” said Mitchie.

“Longer than you think. We’ve
got water and converter metal for days. If we push the redline too hard I can
always make Guo suit up and we dump reaction mass in the converter room for
active cooling.”

“Whoa. Yeah, that solves
cooling. Won’t we have corrosion problems?”

“Eventually. Fixing that will
be one item on an enormous bill I’m going to hand to somebody.” Clearly the
captain thought all this was about more than one teenaged astronomy fan. “Here
he comes. Maneuvering minus-zee. Going to reach the ring ahead of us. Shit.
Launched a missile.”

“What’s the angle?”

“It’s–no. Ignore it. He’s
bluffing. He needs her alive.”

“Aye-aye.” Mitchie
concentrated on keeping the densest part of the ring between them and the
missile. She could see it now, flickering between the chunks of ice. The
missile itself was invisibly small but the rocket plume shone bright blue. It
moved across their path until it was directly ahead of them. The plume closed
on a medium-small snowball and vanished in a bright flash.

“Conversion bomb!” shouted
the captain.

Mitchie aimed the ship south
and cranked up the acceleration. The expanding cloud of snow and gas hid part
of the ring already. She had to get them clear enough to safely fly blind
before they got caught in the cloud. As it reached up to catch them she turned
the ship to put the thrust plate to the blast wave and cut thrust.

The debris from the missile
explosion was too finely divided to penetrate the hull. It hissed against the
ship with a sound like snow on a tin roof. Mitchie felt a sudden chill of
nostalgia for Akiak. Visibility behind the wave wasn’t much better. She left
them ballistic.

“Here he comes,” said the
captain. The interceptor approached from planetward, below the rings. “Looks
like he’s trying for a close pass. Rip up our tanks so we can’t run anymore.”   

Mitchie turned the ship to
face the brittle window away from the enemy and started boosting back to the
ring. Her fingers sweated as she gripped the throttle control. The other hand
pressed the intercom button for the converter room. “How’s the weather down
there?”

“Tropical,” laughed Guo. “Send
down some ice if you get a break. We’re halfway to red. Not straining things
yet.”

“Good. I’m going to have to
do some evasive here in a moment.”          

“I’ll hold her together for
you. Hot jets, pilot.”

“Approaching cannon range,”
reported Schwartzenberger.

The pilot put a gentle curve
on their course. Something that would take a human a moment to notice. The
interceptor followed instantly. “Think that autopilot has a gunnery routine, sir?”     

“They haven’t skimped on
anything else.”

“Uh-huh.” The other ship
started to flicker with muzzle blasts. She pushed the throttle in and triggered
the plus-pitch jets.
Don’t have a pattern
. Minus-yaw, lower thrust, plus
yaw. Minus pitch. Max thrust. Pull thrust back to 20 gravs. Plus yaw and minus
pitch together.
Don’t have a pattern
. Minus yaw. More minus yaw. Max
thrust. Plus pitch around that iceberg. Lower thrust. WHANG. Plus yaw and
three-quarter thrust.
Don’t have a pattern
. Minus pitch. Minus yaw. Cut
thrust. WHANG. Half-thrust. Plus pitch and plus yaw together. Max thrust for
two seconds then cut thrust for three. Plus pitch.

“Okay, he’s out of range. He’s
stopped firing,” Captain Schwartzenberger reported. “Guo, what’s the damage?”

“No pressure lost anywhere,
sir,” said the mechanic. “Felt like they just glanced off. We’ll have some
holes in the reentry protection.”

“Thank you.” He switched the
intercom off. “Nicely done, Mitchie. I think he only got that lucky because he
gave up on trying for direct hits and just shot area patterns.”

She let out a sigh. “Yeah. But
he can keep doing that–firing patterns on high-speed passes–and he only needs
to get lucky once.”

“He only has so much ammo and
so much time. If he runs out of either he’s done. For now we’re winning.”

Navigating through the ring
was almost easy now. “Winning but scared as hell.”

The captain burst out
laughing. “You’re scared? You ever think about what kind of people that guy
works for? And what they do to people who fail them? The bottom of his pressure
suit has to be full of bricks by now.”

He actually got a chuckle out
of her. “Yeah, we’ve got him sweating. And probably a nosebleed from those
anti-collision maneuvers.”

“Yep.” The captain had
spotted the interceptor again. “There he goes. Passing sunward of us, well
clear of the ice.”

“Setting up for another pass,”
said Mitchie. The fatigue made her speech rougher, the backwoods accent
creeping out.

“Eventually. He’ll want to
wait until he has a good spot.” He was being more honest than reassuring. For
once Mitchie wouldn’t have minded a boss going the other way. She stuck to the
north side of the ring. The interceptor had gone out of sight again so they
didn’t know which way to jump. Just stay close to cover and keep their speed up
so they wouldn’t be a sitting duck.

Mitchie spotted him first
this time. She’d come out into a gap in the ring and saw the torch plume on the
other side. “Dead ahead. Matched our course.” Both sides of the gap were too
far away to help. She picked planetside and headed for it at full acceleration.

Schwartzenberger studied the
radar returns. “Better sensors. He can track us from outside visual. Reciprocal
of our course gives his shells a better hit zone. He can fire a pattern at
extreme range and we can’t get outside it.” More data came in. “His course is
paralleling ours, only a few klicks off. Probably as close as he could program
it.”

“Shit! Point blank shots.”

“I see him firing. A few
patterns already on the way to us. He’s scared enough to risk killing Bobbie
now.” There was no way to safely aim at the fuel tanks coming in at that angle.

“As close as he could–damn!”
Mitchie pivoted back toward their attacker. The throttle was already at max. Intercom
time. “Hey! More thrust! All you got!”

Guo’s voice was already
strained by acceleration. “We’re redlined!”

“Gimme the real redline! Two
minutes!”

“We’ll melt!”

The captain slapped his
intercom switch, flinching as his hand came down hard on it. “Do it.” He
couldn’t have forced out a longer speech.

Guo didn’t reply.
Fives
Full
pushed a few gravs harder, a loud CRACK and scream of air announced a
cannon shot penetrating the bridge window. Mitchie felt a splinter land on her
face before the escaping air blew it away.

The captain gasped “Cut ac!
Patch!” She grimaced and pulled the throttle back to 10 gravs.

Nine seconds later he yelled “GO!”
in the sudden relative quiet and she pushed the knob to the end again. An
audible thump told her the captain hadn’t laid down in his control couch before
he gave the word.

“One patch hole?” she asked.

“Yep.” He sounded amused “Poor.
Bing. Got. Bunk.” The shot had put a hole in the bridge deck and gone into
Bing’s cabin.

The ship’s acceleration
dropped. Guo had taken back some of the extra thrust. Mitchie thought
It
must be hot as a volcano down there.
She kept steering for the interceptor.
A cannon shell flashing past the window made her flinch but not change course. She
ignored the blood trickling down her face too.

The interceptor autopilot
matched the
Fives Full’s
straight line acceleration and extrapolated as
it was taught to. When that vector reached the same time and place of its own, it
took the proper action–120 gravs of acceleration for five seconds.

Mitchie yelled “Ha! Computers
can’t play chicken!” as the plume in front of her turned ninety degrees and
brightened. She shifted her course to follow. Less than half a minute later
she’d forced it into another maneuver. She grinned wolfishly as she shifted
after it again. With thoroughly predictable results. “It’s like kicking a can
down the road!”

Captain Schwartzenberger let
her have two more kicks before stopping her. “Enough, Michigan. We’ve won. He’s
gotta be out cold.”