“I say we use the plasma cannon and take out the entire docking port and destroy their shuttles.”
“That’s a very risky option, Miranda. We could compromise the integrity of the station if we blow the dock. Everyone on the station could die, including Steph.”
“But we don’t know if they’re on the station. They could be somewhere else, or even dead already,” said Cyrus.
“I know, but can we really take that risk?” Scott could see that Miranda was conflicted; her need to take action was battling with her rationality. “Let’s all just calm down a moment and think. There has to be a better way.”
Miranda gave an exasperated sigh. “Those bastards aren’t getting away with this. Not on my watch.”
“Look, we’ve got some breathing space. At the moment, they think we’re transporting this Renton guy on his way to deliver something to them, so let’s work with that.”
“Yeah, but we’re not. Are we?” said Cyrus.
“But this is a VanHeilding vessel.” Scott looked over at Miranda. “And they’re buying that for now.”
Scott moved over to the holo-table. “Max, show us the space station along with our current position.” The table blossomed to life, and they could see a detailed rendering of both the craft and the asteroid system. Scott pointed at the station. “If our objective is to disable their shuttles so they can’t escape before backup arrives, and if using the plasma cannon will risk destroying the entire station, then we need to get closer. Considering they think we’re on their side, then we just keep going until we rendezvous. Then we can take our shuttle and get ourselves up close and personal with them. Once we’re close enough, we can EVA and disable their shuttles.”
“That’s crazy,” said Cyrus.
“We’ll never be able to get that close without being rumbled. They’ll smell a rat long before we can even get our shuttle launched.”
Scott looked over at Miranda. “That’s where you come in.”
“Me?”
“They think Renton is bringing them something. Let’s say we pretend it’s not Renton, but you instead.”
Miranda screwed her face up like she had just tasted something bitter. “You’re kidding me.”
“Hear me out. They know that Fredrick VanHeilding is the boss man in that corporation, and you’re… eh, kind of related. So, you could say that you’re bringing this thing to them instead of Renton.”
“They’ll never buy that,” said Cyrus.
Miranda was shaking her head. “I don’t know, Scott. I see what you’re getting at, but would they believe me? After all, I was the flight officer on the Hermes.”
“Yes, but you left before it embarked on the mission to Jezero City. You could play the family card, pretend you’re working for the clan now.”
“Do you have any frigging idea how much I hate that idea, Scott?”
Scott shrugged. “Okay, so maybe they’ll be a bit surprised, even suspicious. But it could get us close enough to get the job done.”
Miranda went silent for a moment as she considered this crazy plan. “I’d still prefer to blast them with the plasma cannon. I’m not good with subterfuge.”
“Commander,” said Max, “they are hailing us again. What would you like me to do?”
Miranda looked from Scott to Cyrus and back again. “Screw it, Max. Let’s hear it.”
With that, a crackly voice broke over the PA. “This is Tiber again. Don’t go all coy on me, Renton. And don’t make me come over there to you. Tell me something I want to hear. Time is running out.”
“Max, open a comm channel. Not video, just audio,” said Miranda.
“Comm channel now open.”
Miranda took a deep breath. “This is Miranda Lee, and I’m handling the transaction. We have what you want, so let’s do this.” She looked over at the others. Scott gave her the thumbs up.
“Lee, who the hell are you? Renton was supposed to be doing this deal.”
“Well he’s busy doing more important shit. So, do you want to do this or not?”
The comms went silent for a moment, and Scott began to feel that maybe his plan had failed, that they had been twigged. Something wasn’t right.
“Lee, you were the flight officer on the Hermes. Why the hell should we trust you?”
Shit, thought Scott. They weren’t buying it.
“Yeah, that’s me. But you’ll find that I’m also part of the VanHeilding family. All that money’s very tempting. Beats bouncing around space in a rickety old tin can for a living. Who do you think put all this together? Who was the person on the inside? Start using your tiny brain, and let’s get this done.” Miranda was getting into her stride. “And while we’re at it, how do I know you have what we want?”
There was another long silence before a reply came. “You’re some piece of work, Lee, selling out your friends like that. Hope it’s worth it.”
“You’re beginning to bore me now. So, what’s it going to be?” Mirada gave a nod to the others. Tiber was buying her story.
“We’ll send you a real-time feed of the merchandise. Your AI can confirm it. Okay?”
“Not okay.”
Scott opened his hands in a gesture of shock. What the hell is she playing at?
“I need to eyeball the merchandise. Only then, when I’m satisfied, do we do the deal. Okay?”
Scott could barely contain himself. She was playing hardball when it wasn’t necessary. He began pacing.
“Like I said, you’re a piece of work. Okay, we’ll rendezvous. You come over here on your own. No party tricks, got it?”
“Whatever,” said Miranda as she signaled to the AI to close comms.
“Woah, that was intense.” Cyrus flopped onto a sofa.
Scott punched the air. “I knew you could do it, Miranda. You have them running scared.”
“It’s not over yet. We don’t even know how much we’re supposed to be giving them in return.”
The Perception again adjusted its vector and made for the rendezvous point. It would take them less than thirty minutes to get there, so they didn’t have much time to finesse their plan. Scott’s plan. In his mind, the hard preparatory work had been done by virtue of Miranda’s hitherto undiscovered acting skills. But more would now be asked of her.
Once the ship reached its destination, they would take the shuttle and head for the station. However, just before docking, Scott and Cyrus would exit the craft into open space and EVA to the docking port, where the two shuttles were attached. Scott would take one and Cyrus the other, and between them they would disable the craft. Cyrus had already laid out how this was to be done with the minimum amount of time and energy.
Miranda, on the other hand, would continue on to dock with the station. This would be the real test of her skills. She would enter the station and confirm that the hostages from the Hermes were all okay, then return to her shuttle, pick up Scott and Cyrus, and head back to the Perception. With the shuttles out of action, they could broadcast their location to the authorities and wait for backup to arrive, knowing that the mercenaries couldn’t escape. That was the plan. Now they would get to test it against reality.
As Scott donned his EVA suit, he wondered if maybe Miranda’s original plan to use the plasma cannon might not have been a better idea. Too late now, he thought. We’re committed. He glanced over at Miranda. She had a steely composure, and a resoluteness to her movements. She had certainty. He wondered if it was her military training that gave her such composure under pressure, or if she was just made of something greater than the average human. She too had put on an EVA suit, not that she planned to use it for its intended purpose. She put it on because it would be better for concealing weapons, of which she had two that Scott knew about. But she may well have had others.
He snapped on his helmet, leaving the visor open, and sat down in the back of the luxury shuttle. Cyrus came over and handed him a small case of tools, which Scott placed in the front pouch of his EVA suit.
; “Now remember, you just need to disconnect the flow controller on the port side of the main engine bay. You don’t need to take it out completely.”
“Yeah, got it.”
“Ready?” Miranda called out from the cockpit.
“Ready as we’ll ever be.” Scott felt the shuttle disconnect from the mothership with a barely perceptible thump as the locking bolts retracted. Miranda touched the controls, and the craft moved slowly away. On the monitors, he could see the outline of the station. They weren’t far away; a few minutes and they would be there.
He tapped a control on the arm of his seat to zoom in on the image of the station. It was gray and industrial, built for function with little or no consideration paid to the aesthetic. It was a far cry from the luxury of the craft that Miranda now commanded.
The station had a large torus, providing at least a half-gee for the occupants. There were no engines, as such, just minor thrusters to keep it in position so it wouldn’t get dragged into a collision course with one of the nearby asteroids. At the bow of its central backbone was a cross-shaped docking port with room for four shuttles, one on each spoke.
This entire facility would originally have been a hotel of sorts for the miners and crew working on the local asteroids. Since these were relatively small rocks, the gravity would be very weak, so workers would commute down to the mines and return to the station at the end of their shifts. The artificial gravity provided on the station would help mitigate against the debilitating effects of prolonged low-gravity work on the human body.
But like all mining activity over the centuries, there comes a point when the resources are exhausted or simply no longer economically viable to extract, and this was probably the case here. Whatever it was they were mining had become unprofitable, so the facility was mothballed and left as is until such a time when the economics changed. Then it would be reactivated and put back into business. Yet, the longer this type of mining infrastructure was left idle, the less likely it was to ever be used again, and so they became the hideouts—and, in many cases, homes—of smugglers, mercenaries, and disenfranchised scratchers that populated most of this sector of the solar system.
A voice broke through the shuttle PA. “We have you on track to dock at port 4. Don’t use number 3—it’s derelict. You’ll probably die if you try to use it.”
“Copy that,” Miranda replied. She turned around to Scott and Cyrus. “Okay guys, we’re nearly there. Better get ready.”
“Good luck. Sorry you have to be the one to enter the hornets’ nest,” said Scott as he made his way to the airlock.
“Yeah, don’t worry—it’ll be fine. I’ll see you back here soon.”
Scott closed his visor and entered the airlock, squeezing in beside Cyrus. He gave him a thumbs up, and tried to smile.
18
Dain Tiber
Miranda brought the craft along the side of the station’s backbone. It was a tricky maneuver, but she wanted to make sure Scott and Cyrus could exit undetected. They had reckoned that this area wouldn’t be monitored in the same way as the docking port.
The shuttle’s console alerted her to the airlock operation, and a moment later she saw both of them on her monitor, working their way along the outer hull of the station. She nudged the shuttle’s controls, taking the craft away from the side of the station, and headed for the dock.
“What are you doing?”
A sharp voice broke out of the PA, and she froze. Oh shit. Have they seen Scott and Cyrus? She tried to remain calm.
“You want to be careful coming in that way. You don’t want to scratch that fancy shuttle of yours.”
“Yeah, or I might have to sue you for the damages.” Miranda let out a long, slow sigh. So far, so good, she thought.
The shuttle came around the bow of the station and Miranda could now get a good view of the docking ports. Two were occupied with some pretty banged-up shuttles. She reckoned that Scott and Cyrus shouldn’t have much trouble disabling them, as it didn’t look like they could function in their current state. A third port had a long gash in the access tunnel, exposing the inside to the vacuum of space. Something must have collided with it sometime in the past.
The fourth looked serviceable, but she wasn’t going to take any chances, so she flipped down the visor on her EVA suit. If something should go wrong and her shuttle lost atmosphere, she would still be okay—theoretically.
Inch by delicate inch, she oriented the shuttle to marry up with the docking port. Her console flashed an alert to let her know that the onboard automated docking systems had taken over; it would take the craft in for that last few meters. A thump reverberated through the hull as the port aligned and the locking bolts fired. She put the craft into hibernation, rose from the cockpit seat, and made her way to the airlock. “Time to get the game face on,” she said to herself.
When the outer door finally opened, Miranda found herself floating in a dilapidated, dimly lit tunnel. Ahead of her were two men looking very much the worse for wear. One pointed a handheld plasma weapon in her direction and signaled for her to open her visor.
Miranda reached up and popped the visor, and was instantly overwhelmed by a foul, acrid stink. She gagged and coughed. “Ahggg, what’s that smell?”
The two mercenaries exchanged a laugh. “Gee, we’re really sorry—we’re all out of air fresheners,” said the man with the weapon as he floated in closer, aiming higher.
Miranda took a moment to adjust her position, grabbing a handle above her with one hand and placing a foot on the airlock bulkhead. She assessed the two men. One hung back a little, letting the one with the weapon do the talking. He was no threat. However, the weapon man was beginning to piss her off. She jabbed a finger in his direction. “Here’s what’s going to happen: you take that weapon out of my face. That’s if you want to keep your arm.”
His eyes narrowed, and she could see he wasn’t expecting this response from her. He hesitated, unsure of how to proceed. Miranda gripped the handle tighter and curled her body up to spring.
Hand-to-hand combat in zero-gee is an art form honed by many hours of training and practice. It’s a discipline requiring a true understanding of Newton’s third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Miranda had the knowledge and experience to be an effective fighter in this environment, and it was obvious to her that two men facing her did not.
She lunged forward, pushing herself off the side wall with all the force her legs could provide. She dropped her head and aimed for the weapon man’s head with the crown of her helmet. At the same time, she grabbed his arm to hold him to her as she impacted with his face. He yelled and cursed, and she let go of his arm as he lost his grip on the weapon. He tumbled down the tunnel, an arc of blood trailing from his nose. Miranda stopped her forward movement by grabbing a handle on the tunnel wall. At the same time, she reached out and gathered up the floating weapon, repositioning herself and pointing it at the second man.
“So, can we all stop dicking around now and get on with this?”
He raised a hand. “Sure, okay… this way.”
Miranda signaled with the weapon for him to go ahead of her. They moved down the tunnel to where the other man was nursing his broken nose. “Come on, let’s go.” She waved the weapon at him. He moved off, eyeing Miranda with extreme caution.
They took a small step elevator out to the rim of the torus and exited into almost full gravity. The two men remained in front of her and walked a short distance to a large operations area. It was dimly lit, yet she could see that the station had been stripped of pretty much everything of value that wasn’t essential for life support.
In the center of this area, several people gathered around a low holo-table. They looked over as Miranda entered, and surprise began to register on their faces. She handed the weapon, butt first, to the mercenary whose nose she had broken. He looked very sheepish as he tentatively reached out to accept it.
Miranda looked over at the crew assembled a
round the holo-table. “I’m a bit disappointed by your reception committee. I was expecting something a little more professional.”
A tall, gangly man with an exoskeleton stepped forward from the group. He had a pale, gaunt look with sunken eyes which stared at Miranda with a steely intensity. He stopped a few feet in front of her and looked at his men, particularly the one holding his bloodied face. He returned his gaze, rolled his head back, and let out a long, guttural laugh. The tension in the room dialed down a few notches, and hands moved away from weapons. “You are some piece of work, Miranda Lee. You really are. But someday you’re gonna get your ass kicked, and I hope I’m around to see it.” He jerked a thumb at the guy with the broken nose. “You—go get that seen to.”
Miranda removed her helmet. “Dain Tiber, I presume?” She asked like it was an accusation.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’d love to stay and chat all day, but can we get on with this?” Miranda moved the dial back up in the room. She was pushing her luck, and she knew it. Taking out a couple of untrained guys in the docking tunnel was one thing; there was no way she could fight her way out of this lot. Particularly when their leader had been bio-hacked with a powerful exoskeleton grafted onto him. He could crush her skull with one hand.
He gave her another cold look. “How do we know you’ve got the money? How do we know we can trust you, since you don’t have a very good track record in that regard?” This seemed to go down well with the rest of crew, and Miranda could see their body language shift into a more aggressive mode.
She moved a step closer to him and kept her voice measured. “The only reason I’m here is because the people I represent do not like being screwed with. They want to ensure the job has been done as contracted. I’m here to validate that. So, nothing happens until that happens.”
Tiber returned her stare for a second or two before signaling to one of the crew. “Take over here. I’ll show her the goods.” He turned to Miranda. “This way.” He started out of the operations room. Miranda followed, with two of the crew following behind.
The Belt: The Complete Trilogy Page 30
