by Mel Odom
The unknown ship made no response to Angstrom’s latest hail. The three smaller craft sped toward Khloe.
I accessed the cockpit cam. Captain Angstrom and his people armed themselves, strapping on pulse weapons designed to disrupt an organic’s central nervous system and a bioroid’s equivalent of the same. While with the NAPD, I’d carried a similar Synap weapon. Other detectives and police officers had hated my pistol, calling it a “Ghandi gun” because I could not employ lethal force. The other detectives had believed in lethal force when a suspect resisted arrest with a weapon.
Some of my coworkers in New Angeles blamed my inability to carry a more deadly weapon as what had gotten Shelly killed. I could not argue the point.
Slug-throwers inside a spaceship were not a viable option. Without gravity, bullets tended to stay in motion and might find a weak spot in a ship’s walls. Air was a precious commodity for human crewmen. Even with the scrubbing technology to remove the carbon dioxide buildup and reuse air, only so much could be carried on a voyage. In fact, having the scrubbers sometimes made captains cut back on the air shipping with them in favor of cargo space.
Every now and again, a “dead” ship coasted into port, descending on autopilot. Subsequent port authority investigation would discover a scrubber had failed out and the crew had asphyxiated during transit.
I had worked one of those cases when I’d been assigned to the Moon.
“Captain, they’re not stopping.” Kaloust, the ship’s first mate, stood at the sensory array in the small cockpit. He was thin and hard and dark-skinned. Tribal tattoos stood out on his face and exposed arms. He wore a coverall, but the top was tied around his waist, leaving him in a sleeveless t-shirt.
Angstrom sat in the captain’s chair and watched the sensor screens. A dozen of them occupied the space at the front of the cockpit and showed various views from around Khloe. The captain sat forward tensely, elbows resting on his knees. He was a thin and angular old man with a shaggy beard the color of bleached alabaster. The skin around his hazel eyes was deeply wrinkled, eroded by a hard life and anxious moments.
“They’re not going to stop, Kaloust.” Angstrom took a deep breath and let it out. “Not until they have our cargo.”
Looking a little nervous, the first mate turned back to Angstrom. “What are your orders, sir?”
During the transit, I had examined the files on Angstrom and his crew. Angstrom had been a spacer all of his life, getting Khloe from his father. Kaloust had put in a few years as spaceport security, but he’d developed an addiction that had cost him his job. He’d since cleaned up, but the mark on his records was permanent. He was what my partner would have termed a “good” man because he had faced up to his problems and gotten on with his life.
The rest of the eight-man crew ran the gamut of spacer experience. Two of the older crew, Brenda Delroy and Jamal Ngola, had almost as much time in space as Angstrom.
None of them had military experience.
“We could surrender,” Whitney Taylor said quietly from her navigation board. She was in her early twenties. During conversations I’d overhead, she’d signed on with Khloe because she’d wanted to be in space as soon as possible. “All they want is the cargo, right?” She was a petite woman with her hair cut short and the tattoo of a Japanese dragon around her neck in neon purples, blues, and greens.
“We’re not surrendering.” Brenda Delroy, heavyset and grey-haired, pushed back in her seat. She was the ship’s cargo handler, the person who figured out how the shipments were to be packed, who checked all the final contracts.
“I didn’t sign on to die for a shipment,” Whitney argued, looking at Angstrom. “You can fire me if you like, Captain, but you’re not paying me enough to fight whoever’s coming for us.”
“You won’t be fighting them to protect the cargo,” Angstrom said flatly. “Or for the pay you’re getting. You’ll be fighting them to survive.”
Whitney’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“Khloe’s worth something too. Either sold as a vessel with forged documents, or parted out for salvage and scrap.” Angstrom scowled. “And they won’t want any witnesses to what they’re about to do.”
“The comm to Gullivar colony just got cut.” Kaloust pushed back from the comm board with an angry, helpless look on his weathered face.
Angstrom placed a hand on the butt of his Synap pistol and stepped over to join his first mate. “You sent vid of the ship?”
“I did. Starport Authority told me they’d received the transmission.”
“Did they identify that ship?”
Kaloust shook his head. “They said they were going to ping the ship, let them know they’re aware of the situation.”
Whitney looked hopeful. “Then those people will back off, won’t they? I mean, they know Starport Authority is watching. They won’t want to risk getting caught.”
Angstrom clenched his jaw before speaking. His gaze stayed on the vid on the sensor screen. “Starport Authority can’t reach them out here. They know that. At this point, they’re not concerned about getting caught. For all we know, they’re running low on fuel too and need what we have to get out of space.”
The possibility left the crew silent and fearful. I recognized the facial indicators and body language I had been programmed with and learned while working with Shelly.
Taking a deep breath, Angstrom stared at the monitor display of the ship and the three rectangular craft now closing on Khloe. “Keep recording that ship. Everything that goes on. If things turn out badly, bundle it all off into a buoy, set up the beacon, and shoot it toward Mars. They’re not going to pick our bones without us taking our pound of flesh.”
“Aye, sir.” Kaloust sat at the comm board and began taking care of his task.
“Good plan, but the captain’s planning for defeat.” The voice was soft, feminine, and familiar.
I was suddenly aware of Shelly Nolan standing behind me. I had 360-degree vision through vid transmitters all over my body—bioroids are not limited to eyes only, that would have been a design weakness—and I had not seen her arrival. She was just there. No one sneaked up on me unless there was a blind spot or they came at me incredibly fast.
Dressed in her black thigh-length jacket, her dark red hair cut at collar length, wraparound black sunglasses covering her eyes, Shelly Nolan looked professional and composed. That was how I most remembered her when I thought of her, but I preferred the memories of her playing with her children, reading them stories and laughing at their recitation of their day’s events.
I had not seen Shelly’s family much since we had buried her. They had to struggle through their grief, and I had to learn to go on without my partner at my back. Working cases since her death always felt like something was missing.
Shelly looked at me and I saw my twin reflections in her sunglasses. “You can’t let these people be killed, Drake.”
I couldn’t. My programming was already searching for a way to help. Preserving human life was deeply ingrained in my neural operating system. And that part of me that had been Simon Blake pushed me to do something as well. He, too, had laid his life on the line for others.
“We could flood the cargo hold with oxygen,” Kaloust was saying. “Give ourselves some room to run or fight.”
Angstrom shook his head. “We don’t have enough oxygen on board for that.”
That was true, and that was one of the reasons bioroids and bots were used to load and unload cargo. We didn’t need oxygen. Humans in spacesuits were clumsy and slow in comparison, and oxygen was expensive. Recycling only stretched supplies so far, which was also true of water, and having humans work the airless cargo holds on the Moon and on Mars would have been wasteful as well as expensive.
“Then we can suit up,” Whitney said.
“The air in the envirosuits will only last a few hours.” Angstrom shook his head. “One nick in the wrong place and you’re going to die a slow death. Same for escaping out into spa
ce. On top of that, you’ll be slowed down, like running in quicksand. Even if they let us off the ship in suits, we’d suffocate before rescue could reach us. No corp or government agency would waste credits to save us.”
I walked to the utility closets attached to the rear hulls. Tools and other equipment were stored there. I laid my hand against the compartment I wanted and pulsed an electromagnetic charge through my palm that spun the tumblers on the lock. The compartment opened to reveal the gleaming Synap pistols inside. They were part of a shipment Angstrom was ferrying to one of the colony’s security corporations.
The Synap was larger than a slug-thrower, built boxy and thick. It fit my hand like it belonged there and my programming immediately weighed and measured the heft, recalibrating because there was no gravity, no air resistance in the cargo hold.
“That’s not going to be much against armed men.” Shelly stood beside me and looked unsettled.
She was a construct of my need for self-education, a guidepost I’d established after losing the real Shelly Nolan. Miranda, the Haas-Bioroid technician I had met on Earth and later convened with on the Moon, had told me that. Curious herself, Miranda had wanted to further study my condition and continued association with Shelly’s “ghost,” especially since the neural channeling I had undergone had been spliced so heavily with Simon Blake’s memories.
Since I was being hunted for a murder I didn’t think I had committed—or at least didn’t remember committing—Miranda hadn’t been able to assuage her curiosity.
“I know.” I dropped the Synap pistol into a pocket of the coverall I wore to carry tools for handling the ship’s cargo. I opened another compartment and took out an industrial grade gel-grenade launcher and ammo pack. Shouldering the gel-grenade launcher, I closed the compartment and walked toward the manual exit hatch.
I had to override the security on the hatch, but it opened easily. The breach caught the attention of Captain Angstrom and his crew. Kaloust flicked one of the interior cams over to the cargo space and I saw myself on the screen as I climbed the ladder leading to the hatch. He tried to close the hatch, but I prevented his attempts.
Kaloust leaned toward the screen. “What is that Frank doing?”
Angstrom tapped the comm on his chair to open a channel to me. “Frank 5DE7CE, what are you doing?” That was the designation under which I was currently identified.
“I’m trying to save your lives, sir.” I hooked in a tether to the D-ring on the wall, pushed the hatch open, and peered out into the black velvet of space.
Chapter Four
I eased out of the hatch and put one foot onto the hull, pulsing an electromagnetic charge through my foot to keep me attracted to the surface. The dulled clank of contact registered through the audlink I had to Khloe’s internal systems, but I heard nothing through the airless void around me. Pushing myself from the hatch, I stood and got my bearings, making certain to keep the tether line behind me unfouled.
Khloe spun gently as she traveled, not enough to create any real kind of gravity within the ship, just residual movement left over after jumping off the Moon. Phobos wasn’t near enough or big enough to affect Khloe’s trajectory.
Jets on the three flat boxes of the boarding vessels flickered like bright daggers as the auto-pilot systems closed the distance to Khloe. The three craft came around, all of them targeting different sections of the cargo ship on which to land. Khloe resembled a short submarine, blunt and cylindrical to ease through thin atmosphere without breaking up.
Three hundred meters long and fifty meters in diameter, she was capable of delivering a medium-sized payload, from gourmet (on Mars for the moment) food and spices to small farm machinery and mil-spec vehicles. Martian colonial corps hadn’t yet gotten the license to manufacture all machinery, and they levied large taxes for any inbound equipment in an effort to keep colonists from seeking local suppliers to meet their needs.
“Frank 5DE7CE, you cannot kill those men.” Angstrom had returned to the command chair and was watching in tense anticipation.
“Sir, I am not going to kill them.” I set myself, allowing my electromagnetic pulse through my feet to take hold as best as it was able, and pulled the launcher around to my shoulder in the firing position.
The Jinteki gel-grenade launcher was designed for mining. That was how it was going to be implemented in Gullivar colony. Mars was rich in magnesium, sodium, potassium, and chlorine, all of which were used in various industries. Mining companies scratched the natural resources from the planet’s surface or extracted them from underground, then shipped them back to the colonies on mag-lev trains. Nothing on Mars was thrown away. Everything was used, recycled, and used again.
At just over a meter in length, the launcher was fourteen centimeters in diameter. The muzzle was square. Ammunition for the launcher resided in two reservoirs at the back of the weapon. The explosives were a binary formula, not capable of detonation until combined. I took off the safety and the keypad and trigger flipped out for use.
I dialed in a delivery load that would provide maximum concussion without breaching the shuttle’s wall integrity, aligned the sighting mechanism, and squeezed the trigger.
A bright blue amorphous blob of gel-explosive shot from the launcher and streaked across the distance separating Khloe from the advancing craft. Upon impact, the blob spread quickly as I had intended, covering 2.19 nearly square meters with a thin membrane.
I punched the detonator button and the pool of gel-explosive detonated with a harsh flash and no noise. Immediately, the shuttlecraft altered its direction, knocked off-course by the explosion. It slid under Khloe like a rectangular shark.
Hacking into the shuttlecraft’s emergency broadcast systems, I took four steps to my left to bring my next target into acquisition. The people on the frequency spoke Portuguese.
“Somebody’s on the outside of the ship’s hull! He’s got a grenade launcher! I’ve been hit!” Anxiety filled the man’s voice.
“Calm down.” The woman’s voice was more professional. “Can you get back to the ship?”
“No. Some of the thrusters are offline. I’m out of control.”
“Work it out. See if the auto-pilot will reconfigure, if not, we’ll get you before you drift too far.”
“But what if—”
“Clear the channel. We’ve got work to do. Joao, Alfonso. Can you get to that ship?”
“On it, boss.”
“Only a moment more.”
I calculated the damaged shuttlecraft’s next trajectory and noted that it would not—as I had believed based on the mathematical progressions I had formulated—fall prey to Phobos’s weak gravitational well, nor did it have control of its course as it once had. The blast had taken out three of the small thrusters, which was the maximum I had planned for. Two would have sufficed, but three was even better.
The shuttlecraft fired its thruster again and slid farther away. It would take time for the automated system to re-route in order to regain control. By then Khloe would be gone.
“Don’t leave us out here!” The anxiety reached a new level.
“Clear the freq!”
Hearing the panic in the shuttle pilot’s voice immediately initiated an urgent response within me to help. Part of the programming to keep humans safe was maintaining their sense of safety. Driven to assuage his panic, I was torn, but only briefly, over what I was supposed to do.
Then my priorities finalized and I dialed in a second gel-grenade as Khloe revolved and brought the next shuttle into view. I shouldered the launcher and fired again, adjusting for the recoil.
The second gel-grenade spread across the front of the shuttle and exploded when I pressed the detonator. The bright flash of the blast filled 122 degrees of my vision for 1.4 seconds, then subsided. This explosion was close enough to send a wave of heat over me.
Out of control, two of its thrusters offline, the shuttle’s autopilot tried to adjust but succeeded only in changing the vector enough to ensure
it slammed against Khloe. The vibrations echoed through me as I skimmed through Khloe’s diagnostics and checked for damage.
Angstrom cursed. “That was too close, Frank.”
I replied, “Khloe’s hull integrity remains solid, Captain. All systems are operational. Life support is maintained.”
“Another few centimeters and it could have gone the other way.” The fear in the captain’s words was brittle and edged.
I did not bother to respond. I knew that a few centimeters would have made a difference. Mass, velocity, and the dispersal of the blast had all been factors in the decision I’d made. Discussion was pointless. One of the shuttles still remained a threat.
I walked as quickly as I dared, making sure to keep one foot solidly anchored while I disengaged the other. I was slowed by having to keep the anchoring foot locked.
In herky-jerky fashion that had a rhythm of its own, I walked forward while at the same time moving laterally around Khloe. After seeing what had happened to the first two shuttles, the third had jockeyed for a position on the other side of the cargo ship.
I ran Khloe’s schematic through my memory and saw that there was an emergency hatch on that side as well. It opened into the forward compartment of the cargo bay next to the command center where the crew waited.
“Frank,” Angstrom called, “do you see them?”
“Yes, Captain.” I focused on the top of the shuttle just as it came into view. The shuttle had already docked, latched firmly onto Khloe’s hide like a tick. “I am making my way there now.”
I shouldered the grenade launcher because I could no longer use it and slid the Synap from my pocket. I continued closing on the shuttle, aware that I only had 19.8 meters of tether remaining. Using Khloe as my reference, I estimated that the shuttle sat only ten meters away.
An access hatch opened on the shuttle’s starboard side and a figure dressed in an envirosuit emerged. The polarized face shield kept me from seeing the man’s features as he turned toward me and raised a heavy-caliber slug-thrower.
