by Marque
“There are two of them in the air lock,” she said to her own ship intercom. “They have some space armor wedged in the outer hatch. Decompression alone won’t blow them back out . . . it’ll take more mass.”
“How much?” Quincy asked, ever the engineer.
“Oh . . . fifty kilos would do it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare fifty kilos.” Quincy would have a fit if she knew what Ky was contemplating. Ky didn’t like it much herself.
“Reopen the seals to the rec room and grab something?” Rafe asked. “I’m there; I could toss you a chair.”
“Are you suited?” Ky asked.
“Yes. Upshift hatch is sealed; the galley hatch should hold for a brief decompression, and that would add additional volume—these chairs aren’t that heavy, but they might be enough with the additional volume.”
It was an idea, but she knew it wasn’t going to work. The implant confirmed that when she queried it.
“Captain—” That was Martin. “Give me the codes for manual opening and closing—let me come help—”
“Where are you?” Ky asked.
“I’m right beside that carton of EMP mines.”
“I’m closer,” Rafe said. “Only one seal away.”
“I have the skills,” Martin said. “Hand-to-hand in vacuum and zero G—”
Just what she needed, two men squabbling over who was better equipped to help her. She would like to have had them both with her, but they weren’t. “You’ll both stay where you are,” she said.
She rifled quickly through the emergency tool locker in the passage. Fire ax, zero-pressure sealant canister, long utility knife, prybar, boards, first-aid kit . . . she couldn’t take it all, but the fire ax and knife went on her belt.
The implant noted that while she was 92 percent likely to break the space armor loose from the outer hatch, she was 83 percent likely to break bones in the process, and 24.3 percent likely to suffer fatal injuries. But the alternative chances were worse: if Osman caught her, she’d be 100 percent dead after suffering she didn’t want to contemplate. No choice, really . . .
Her suit—customized, top of the line from Deere Ltd.—was supposed to have superlative impact resistance, a combination of reinforced panels and impact-inflated cushions. She fed the suit data into her implant, and the probability of fatal injury dropped to 6.2 percent, broken bones to 21 percent . . . that was more like it, though a bone was either broken or not . . .
She moved on down the passage. The boarders could see—if they chose to look—through the window in the interior hatch. But if she was quick enough, all they’d see was a blur. The tangled cords lay in front of her now; she hooked them with the end of the fire ax and pulled them slowly to her.
Best not depend on the strength of her grip; she detached one of the packing cords—purple, breaking load twelve hundred kilograms—and looped it through the reinforced loop on her pressure suit designed for tethers, then around the other cords, and secured it. The implant display showed that the intruders were still intent on their work—no, one of them was looking up and around now.
No more time. Ky backed into the loop of the packing cords, pulling them as taut as she could, then told Lee, “I’m opening the inner hatch.”
“But you’re—”
Her implant took over. She had time to think This was a really stupid idea—and then the combination of elastic cords and escaping air flung her down the passage. She had thought she could hold herself rigid, like a spear, until the moment of impact, but the vortex of escaping air twisted her, threatened to slam her flailing body against the hatch opening. She pulled herself into a tight ball, fists locked on the cords, and struck the boarders with her right side, slamming them into the space-armored figure wedged in the hatch. With a shriek she could feel as much as hear, the space armor broke loose in that instant, and she and the others flew out the open hatch. She could see, in the external lights, someone else splayed flat against the hull. One of the boarders was loose, floating away; the other grabbed the tether, hands alongside hers, as it reached its full extension and began to retract.
Simultaneously Ky and the boarder each took a hand off the line and tried to shove the other off. The enemy managed to grab her wrist; his grip, possibly augmented by his suit, tightened painfully. She didn’t need to hear what he was saying; she could imagine it. They rotated, struggling in the combination of forces, the lack of gravity, the pull of the retracting tether.
Ky let go the tether with her left hand, flipped it around her leg, and grabbed the clearing knife from her tool belt. Her enemy never saw it before she had slit his suit up under the right arm. Air puffed from his suit, pushing her away, yanking her arm. The suit’s repair functions oozed foam, confining the loss to that limb, but immobilizing his arm. She stabbed again, this time ripping the left arm; his hand spasmed, releasing her; they rotated away from each other.
“Five seconds to impact,” her implant warned her. Ky struggled, trying to see, to curl away from hitting the ship head-on. There—but something grabbed her leg, and pulled . . . she could feel the elastic cords stretching . . . she twisted. A hand clamped around her ankle; the suited figure trailed a thin stream that glittered in her headlamp. Powered suit. He had a powered suit—of course he did, that’s how they crossed the interval in the first place—her mind gibbered wildly. The implant threw up a screen of information about powered suits, most of which Ky had no interest in. She was trying to curl up, avoid whatever that was streaming from the other’s suit in case it was corrosive, and get that hand off her ankle. Her contortions made the other figure writhe, and their vector shifted irregularly, but he didn’t let go.
She had been told zero-g fights were chaotic, impossible to predict even inside closed spaces. Outside a ship . . . Just don’t get yourself in that situation, her instructors had said. Fine, but no help now. The suit resisted her attempts to bend over, get her hand and knife near the person clutching her; it had been possible in ship atmosphere, but not here. She tried another tactic, using alternating arm movements to impart a longitudinal spin . . . and that finally brought her arm close to the other. He had something that looked like a wrecker bar with a pointed tip in his hand, but she was inside his guard and almost behind him. She clutched him firmly to her with her right arm, and ran the knife blade up . . . in under the suit . . . up again.
The knife parted his suit from hip to shoulder; a mist clouded her faceplate briefly . . . he let go, and Ky managed to orient herself, finding her ship by its brilliant outside lights—its lights visibly nearing—as the elastic cords accelerated her back toward the open air lock.
If she stayed connected, she would smash into her own ship. If she didn’t, she was hanging out here with no power, no way to get back . . . except she was already moving back. Was it fast enough? Ky cut the tether to the cords and watched them move away from her, writhing like the tentacles of the sea creatures she had watched on the reef at Corleigh. She queried her implant . . . she would hit the ship, but not hard enough to damage the ship—or herself.
She looked around as best she could. That dark moving blot across the starfield was Osman’s ship, tumbling. The line of brilliant lights was her own, with its externals on, with its air lock still open, a larger area of light on the aft hull.
She cut her suit com back on. “Captain to bridge—”
“Where are you? What did you do?”
“I’m closing on the ship now,” she said.
“On Kaleen ?” Bewilderment and near panic were clear in Lee’s tone.
“No. On us. I went out the hatch with the bad guys—two of them anyway.” She bounced up the zoom on her helmet scan, looking for the one who had been starfished to the hull beside the hatch. He wasn’t there. Where was he? “What’s your internal scan say . . .”
“Somebody’s inside, in the emergency passage. They won’t answer; we thought it might be you with damage, maybe . . . we were just thinking of shutting the external hatch and airing up so we
could open the compartments.”
If she hadn’t been in a suit, in free fall, she’d have pounded her head with her hand. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Captains should never leave the ship in dangerous situations. She’d had that pounded into her time and again at the Academy. Never. Whatever the temptation, the captain stays aboard to deal with the peril . . . and she had flung herself out the hatch, grandstanding, as MacRobert would have said. Correctly. And one of the scumsucking bastards had made it aboard her ship.
“Lock the hatch open, Lee,” she said, even as she wondered why the boarder hadn’t closed it already to keep her out if she escaped his allies. “Don’t break compartmentalization. Scan for other powered suits between us and the Kaleen .”
Abruptly, startlingly, Fair Kaleen’s running lights came on, the beacons defining bow and stern blinking and the others holding steady patterns that outlined her shape. Either the automatic reset had worked, or someone aboard was able to get the systems up. Reset wasn’t a problem, but the other possibility . . .
Now that it was too late, she could think of other things that might have worked better . . .
“We lost vidscan in the emergency passage,” Lee said. “We’re still compartmented—”
“Good,” Ky said.
“But we don’t know where whoever that is has gone or what he or she is up to.”
She knew. She knew with the absolute certainty that had not yet failed her. He was going to blow up the ship, and her family with it, and all he needed was the time he already had. The time she had given him. A flicker of despair, the first touch of a black wave . . . but she had no time for that. “Patch me to Martin.”
“Right.” A pause, then Martin’s voice.
“Ky—Captain—what’s happening?”
“Martin, you’re in the same compartment with the mines, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Take one with green markings, like the one I used before. Open the side—you saw me do it; you know where. There’s a manual control, a dial. Turn it to the left, all the way. Point the forward end so it will intersect the emergency passage. Set it to a five-second delay and get as far away from it as possible.” An EMP pulse could be focused to some degree. Her implant threw up a schematic showing what ship systems would be in the way of that destructive beam. Too bad . . . better that than complete destruction.
“But that will—”
“Do it now!” Then she tongued shipwide, and never mind if her enemy heard it. “Disaster stations! All hands, disaster stations and hold position.”
A second passed. Another. Another. Another.
As suddenly as Fair Kaleen’s lights had come on, Gary Tobai’s vanished. Her ship—her responsibility—now lay blind, all systems knocked out by a pulse of magnetics strong enough to injure the crew in some cases.
The hypercritical part of her mind screamed at her, Really smart, Ky—now you’ve disabled your ship and you’re barreling toward it and can’t even see when to brace for impact, and that’s if Osman doesn’t blow it anyway—Then she hit, hard, the suit’s protective mechanisms cushioning the blow—but the jar was still enough to take her breath for an instant. Her gloved hands scrabbled for something to hold on to, as rebound took her away, tumbling, and the loop of elastic in her hand caught a protruding stud . . . one of the eighty-two external mounts for the new defensive suite.
There was a control, if she could just get a boot onto the hull . . . and the rotation from that one tenuous handhold brought her left heel down long enough to trigger it. She lost the handhold, but her foot was attached now, thanks to the emergency gripper attachment built into the boots. Now to get her other boot down . . . there. So fine, the nasty mental voice went on. Now you’re stuck to the side of your ship like an old-fashioned bowsprit ornament, and what good does that do? Ignoring the voice, Ky leaned over slowly and gripped the nearest external mount. The faintly adhesive pads on the glove fingers gave her a good grip. The far more adhesive pads on her boot soles grritch ed loose, one at a time, as she lifted one foot carefully, obtained a second handhold, put that foot back down, and then lifted the other.
The whole trick in moving on a hull without safety lines, the instructor had said, is not to do it in the first place. But just in case you’re blown out of your ship and onto an enemy ship, here’s what you can try. Move slowly. Always have three points of contact. Be aware of gravity fluctuations.
That at least she didn’t have to worry about, with her ship’s systems down. Artificial gravity bleed-through faults in the external containment were the least of her problems. Finding the air lock, for instance, was likely to be a harder task. Figuring out what to do when she found it . . . could wait until she found it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
The flashing beacons of the other ship stung her eyes . . . and gave, as she moved, intermittent glimpses of her own ship. After months in space, Gary Tobai’s hull was no longer as immaculate as it had been, but it still gleamed dully when the light flashed on it.
Except where the dark hole of the air lock gaped, now under her feet, just over two meters away.
Her enemy was in there. Somewhere. Armed with a ship-destroying mine, she was sure, and personal weapons as well. He could blow the ship now, but he would want to be sure she was there to see it happen, and he also wanted her implant. He would wait—at least awhile—to see if she came for him.
Clearly he could handle himself in free fall and hard vacuum, but the change from a lighted passage at one standard g to a dark passage in free fall should have done something. He should be blind, disoriented, his suit com and any electronic suit functions dead. That left his ship-killer. Had he attached it yet? Had he armed it yet?
Her implant, protected from the pulse that disabled her ship, told her the minutes and seconds since she’d left the ship. Plenty of time, if he’d gone in immediately, to attach and arm a mine, to set the delay . . .
She felt around the hatch edge. As on all external hatches, geometric shapes defined the top and bottom, making it impossible to attach hatches, transfer tubes, or other equipment upside down. She was at what would be the deck side, if gravity were on. Carefully, she worked her way around, keeping the hatch itself between her and whoever was inside. He should have been on the deck when the ship had gravity. What happened when the systems went out would depend on what he was doing, but his mental orientation should still be that the deck was down and the overhead up . . . whereas in free fall it did not matter.
She eased cautiously into the air lock, as flat against the bulkhead as possible to occlude as little of the starfield . . . in case his vision had returned. Through her gloves, she felt some vibration, as something collided with the surfaces of the escape passage. She dialed down her own faceplate’s transparency and turned up the implant’s visual display to full bright. Working off the suit’s external monitors, it gave her a ghostly pale sense of a tube with something lumpy moving erratically in it. She couldn’t identify the mine she was sure the enemy had brought aboard, or how far away he was. She needed light.
Her suit light, up to full power, blazed, searing the passage with brilliant white light—she knew that, though her view was blocked by her mirrored visor, by her enemy’s response. She had the one bit of luck she’d prayed for: he’d been facing aft, and the light hit him full in the face, half blinding him before his faceplate could adjust. The arm thrown up across his faceplate, the rotation that gave him, all gave her an instant in which to scan the passage for the . . . and there it was. At the moment, flat on what would be the deck . . . but whether already adhered and armed, or just there accidentally, she didn’t have time to find out at the moment.
She pushed off the hinges of the outer hatch, turning her light off, aiming at the spot she wanted with the clean image her exterior vid had picked up and recorded. She bounced off the bulkhead just beyond the inner hatch, flicked the light on and off again quickly, to let the vids pick up enough to refine their image. Though i
t seemed agonizingly slow, this zigzag approach got her to him before he had controlled his own rotation. Then, her light blazing directly into his faceplate, she struck, the saw-bladed knife ripping into his suit fabric.
He was bigger, heavier, undoubtedly more experienced in space brawls onship and off. He clutched her arms, pushed off the bulkhead, moving them perilously back toward the outside—and worse, toward the mine on the deck. Another kick, off the overhead, and she knew they would hit it if she didn’t change their vector. Twist, curl up to spin faster, stretch to slow . . . like a grotesque ballet, they rebounded again and again from bulkhead, overhead, deck, missing the mine by centimeters several times and only because Ky had marked it on her implant’s view and instinct drove the maneuvers that avoided it.
She got one hand loose, briefly, and ripped her gun from its holster, remembering as she did the salesman’s comments on zero-g and variable-g gunfights. No matter. Recoil would give her a vector she could not control, but she could not wait for something better.
The first shot shattered on impact, the many fragments each sharp enough to slice through a pressure suit. Her arm jerked back; she fought it into position and fired again, again, again. The helmet would be armored, as hers was; he might wear torso armor . . . but the legs, the arms . . .
Even in the created view her monitors gave her, where his blood was shown turquoise—the smaller droplets pale, the large blobs dark—it was grotesque. His grip on her other arm first clutched tighter, then loosened—the force of the impacts moved him away from her, and she was pushed back. Now she was no longer centimeters away, but a meter . . . another meter. Again. Again. She dialed her faceplate’s protection down, slowly, letting her eyes adjust, seeing finally in true colors what she had done.
