Miles turned to the communications officer. "Are you picking up anything like that from the other side? Anybody waiting in the docking bay in battle armor?"
"It's scrambled," said the communications officer, "but I'd guess our reception committee to run about thirty individuals." Bothari's jaw tightened at this news.
"Thorne getting this?" asked Miles.
"Of course."
"Are they picking up ours?"
"Only if they're looking for it," said the communications officer. "They shouldn't be. We're tight-beamed and scrambled too."
"Two to one," muttered Auson unhappily. "Nasty odds."
"Let's try and even it up," said Miles. He turned to the communications officer. "Can you break their codes, get into their telemetry? You have the Oseran codes, don't you?"
The communications officer looked suddenly thoughtful. "It doesn't work exactly that way, but . . ." His sentence trailed off in his absorption with his equipment.
Auson's eye lit. "You thinking of taking over their suits? Walking them into walls, having them shoot each other—" The light went out. "Ah, hell—they've all got manual overrides. The second they figure out what's going on, they'll cut us off. It was a nice idea, though."
Miles grinned. "We won't let them figure it out, then. We'll be subtle. You think too much in terms of brute force, Trainee Auson. Now, brute force has never been my strong suit—"
"Got it!" the communications officer cried. The holovid plates threw up a second display beside the first. "There's ten of them over there with full-feedback armor. The rest seem to be Pelians—their armor only has comm links. But there are the ten."
"Ah! Beautiful! Here, Sergeant, take over our monitors." Miles moved to the new station and stretched his fingers, like a concert pianist about to play. "Now, I'll show you what I mean. What we want to do is simulate a lot of little, tiny suit malfunctions. . . ." He zeroed in on one soldier. Medical telemetry—physiological support—there. "Observe."
He pinpointed the reservoir from the man's pilot relief tube, already half full. "Must be a nervous sort of fellow—" He set it to backwash at full power, and checked the audio transmitter. Savage swearing filled the air briefly, overridden by a snarl calling for radio silence. "Now, there is one distracted soldier. And there's not a thing he can do about it until he gets somewhere he can take the suit off."
Auson, beside him, choked with laughter. "You devious-minded little bastard! Yes, yes!" He pounded his feet, in lieu of his hands, and swung about in his own seat. He called up the readings from another soldier, pecking out the commands slowly with his few working fingertips.
"Remember," cautioned Miles, "subtle."
Auson, still cackling, muttered "Right." He bent over his control panel. There. There . . . He sat up, grinning. "Every third servo command now operates on a half-second time lag, and his weapons will fire ten degrees to the right of where he aims them."
"Very good," Miles applauded. "We'd better save the rest until they're in critical positions, not tip our hand with too much too soon."
"Right."
The ship was moving closer, closer to the docking station. The enemy troops were preparing to board through the normal flex tubes.
Suddenly, Thorne's assault groups exploded from the dockside air locks. Magnetic mines were hastily fired onto the station hull, where they flared like sparks burning holes in a rug. Thorne's mercenaries jumped the gap and poured through. The enemy's radio silence burst into shocked chaos.
Miles hummed over his readouts. An enemy officer turned her head to look over her shoulder, calling orders to her platoon; Miles promptly locked the helmet in its position of maximum torsion, and the Oseran's head perforce with it. He picked out another soldier, in a corridor his own people had not yet reached, and locked his suit's built-in heavy-duty plasma arc into full-on. Fire flared wildly from the man's hand at his surprised reflexive recoil, spraying floor, ceiling, and comrades.
Miles paused to glance over to Elena's readouts. A corridor was flowing past at high speed on the visual. It spun wildly as she used her suit's jets to brake. The artificial gravity was evidently now shut down in the docking station. An automatic air seal had clanged shut, blocking the corridor. She stopped her spin, aimed, and blasted a hole in it with her plasma arc. She flung herself through it as, at the same moment, an enemy soldier on the other side did likewise. They met in a confused scrambling grapple, servos screaming at the overload demands.
Miles searched frantically for the enemy among the ten readouts, but he was a Pelian. Miles had no access to his suit. His heart pounded in his ears. There was another view of the fight between Elena and the Pelian on the screens; Miles had a dizzy sense of being in two places at once, as if his atman had left his body, then realized he was looking at them through another Oseran's suit. The Oseran was raising his weapon to fire—he couldn't miss—
Miles called up the man's medkit and fired every drug in it into the man's veins at once. The audio transmitted a shuddering gasp; the heartbeat readout jumped crazily and then registered fibrillation. Another figure—Baz?—in the
Ariel's
armor rolled through the gash in the air seal, firing as he flew. The plasma washed over the Oseran, interrupting transmission.
"Son-of-a-bitch!" Auson screamed suddenly at Miles's elbow. "Whereinhell did
he
come from?"
Miles thought at first he was referring to the armored soldier, then followed the direction of Auson's gaze to another screen, showing space opposite the docking station.
Looming up behind them was a large Oseran warship.
Miles swore in frustration. Of course! Oseran full-feedback space armor logically implied an Oseran monitor nearby. He should have realized it instantly. Fool he was, to have simply assumed the enemy was being directed from inside the docking station. He ground his teeth in chagrin. He had totally forgotten, in the overwhelming excitement of the attack, in his particular terror for Elena, the first principle of larger commands: don't get balled up in the little details. It was no consolation that Auson appeared to have forgotten it too.
The communications officer hastily abandoned the game of suit sabotage and returned to his proper post. "They're calling for surrender, sir," he reported.
Miles licked dry lips, and cleared his throat. "Ah—suggestions, Trainee Auson?"
Auson gave him a dirty look. "It's that snob Tung. He's from Earth, and never lets you forget it. He has four times our shielding and firepower, three times our acceleration, three times our crew, and thirty years experience. I don't suppose you'd care to consider surrender?"
"You're right," Miles said after a moment. "I don't care for it."
The assault on the docking station was nearly over. Thorne and company were already moving into adjoining structures for the mopping-up. Victory swallowed so swiftly by defeat? Unbearable. Miles groped vainly in the pit of his inspiration for a better idea.
"It's not very elegant," he said at last, "but we're at such incredibly short range, it's at least possible—we could try to ram them."
Auson mouthed the words: my ship . . . He found his voice. "My ship! The finest technology Illyrica will sell, and you want to use it for a frigging medieval battering ram? Shall we boil some oil and fling it at 'em, while we're at it? Throw a few rocks?" His voice went up an octave, and cracked.
"I bet they wouldn't expect it," offered Miles, a little quelled.
"I'll strangle you with my bare hands—" Auson, trying to raise them, rediscovered the limits of his motion.
"Uh, Sergeant," Miles called, retreating before the rapidly breathing mercenary captain.
Bothari uncoiled from his chair. His narrow eyes mapped Auson coldly, like a coroner planning his first cut.
"It's got to be at least tried," Miles reasoned.
"Not with my ship you don't, you little—" Auson's language sputtered into body language. His balance shifted to free one foot for a karate kick.
"My God! Look!" cried the communications officer.
The RG 132, torpid, massive, was rolling away from the docking station. Its normal space drives blared at full power, giving it the usual acceleration of an elephant swimming in molasses.
Auson dropped, unheeded, from Miles's attention. "The RG 132, loaded, has four times the mass of that pocket dreadnought," he breathed.
"Which is why it flies like a pig and costs a fortune in fuel to move!" yelled Auson. "That pilot officer of yours is crazy if he thinks he can outrun Tung—"
"Go, Arde!" cried Miles, jumping up and down. "Perfect! You'll pin him right up against that smelting unit—"
"He's not—" began Auson. "Son-of-a-bitch! He is!"
Tung, like Auson, was apparently late in divining the bulk freighter's true intentions. Verniers began to flare, to rotate the warship into position to thrust toward open space. The dreadnought got one shot off, which was absorbed with little visible effect in the freighter's cargo area.
Then, almost in slow motion, with a kind of crazy majesty, the RG 132 lumbered into the warship—and kept going. The dreadnought was nudged into the huge smeltery. Projecting equipment and surface housings snapped and spun off in all directions.
Action calling for reaction, after an aching moment the smeltery heaved back. A wave of motion passed down its adjoining structures, like a giant's game of crack-the-whip. Smashed edges of the dreadnought were caught up on the smeltery, thoroughly entangled. Gaudy chemical fires gouted here and there into the vacuum.
The RG 132 drifted off. Miles stood before the tactics room screen and stared in stunned fascination as half the freighter's outer hull delaminated and peeled into space.
The RG 132 was the final detail to be mopped up in the capture of the metals refinery. Thorne's commandos smoked the last of the Oserans out of their crippled ship, and cleared the outlying structures of resisters and refugees. The wounded were sorted from the dead, prisoners taken under guard, booby traps detected and deactivated, atmosphere restored in key areas. Then, at last, the manpower and shuttles could be spared to warp the old freighter into the docking station.
A smudged figure in a pressure suit stumbled out of the flex tube into the loading bay.
"They're
bent!
They're
bent!
" cried Mayhew to Miles, pulling off his helmet. His hair stuck out in all directions, plastered by dried sweat.
Baz and Elena strode up to him, looking, with their helmets off, like a pair of dark knights after the tournament. Elena's hug pulled the pilot off his feet; from Mayhew's suffused look, Miles guessed she was still having a little trouble with her servos. "It was great, Arde!" she laughed.
"Congratulations," added Baz. "That was the most remarkable tactical maneuver I've ever seen. Beautifully calculated trajectory—your impact point was perfect. You hung him up royally, but without structural damage—I've just been over it—with a few repairs, we've captured ourselves a working dreadnought!"
"Beautiful?" said Mayhew. "Calculated? You're as crazy as
he is—
" He pointed at Miles. "As for damage—look at it!" He waved over his shoulder in the direction of the RG 132.
"Baz says they have the equipment to rig some sort of hull repairs at this station," Miles soothed. "It'll delay us here for a few more weeks, which I don't like any more than you do, but it can be done. God help us if anybody asks us to
pay
for it, of course, but with luck I should be able to commandeer—"
"You don't understand!" Mayhew waved his arms in the air. "They're
bent.
The Necklin rods."
The body of the jump drive, as the pilot and his viral control circuitry was its nervous system, was the pair of Necklin field generator rods that ran from one end of the ship to the other. They were manufactured, Miles recalled, to tolerances of better than one part in a million.
"Are you sure?" said Baz. "The housings—"
"You can stand in the housings and look up the rods and see the warp. Actually see it! They look like
skis!
" Mayhew wailed.
Baz let his breath trickle out in a hiss between his teeth.
Miles, although he thought he already knew the answer, turned to the engineer. "Any chance of repairing—?"
Baz and Mayhew both gave Miles much the same look.
"By God, you'd try, wouldn't you?" said Mayhew. "I can see you down there now, with a sledgehammer—"
Jesek shook his head regretfully. "No, my lord. My understanding is the Felicians aren't up to jump ship production on either the biotech or the engineering side. Replacement rods would have to be imported—Beta Colony would be closest—but they don't manufacture this model any more. They would have to be specially made, and shipped, and—well, I estimate it would take a year and cost several times the original value of the RG 132."
"Ah," said Miles. He stared rather blankly through the plexiports at his shattered ship.
"Couldn't we take the
Ariel?
" began Elena. "Break through the blockade, and—" She stopped, and flushed slightly. "Oh. Sorry."
The murdered pilot's ghost breathed a cold laugh in Miles's ear. "A pilot without a ship," he muttered under his breath, "a ship without a pilot, cargo not delivered, no money, no way home . . ." He turned curiously to Mayhew. "Why did you do it, Arde? You could have just surrendered peaceably. You're Betan, they'd have to have treated you all right. . . ."
Mayhew looked around the docking bay, not meeting Miles's eyes. "Seemed to me that dreadnought was about to blow you all into the next dimension."
"True. So?"
"So—well—it didn't seem to me a, a right and proper Armsman ought to be sitting on his ass while that was going on. The ship itself was the only weapon I had. So I aimed it, and—" He mimed a trigger with his finger, and fired it.
He then inhaled, and added with more heat, "But you never warned me, never briefed—I swear if you ever pull a trick like that again, I'll, I'll—"