Then she was in his arms, weeping. The helmet that he held in his left hand got between them, and he twisted, putting it aside. They embraced for a long minute.
"Five minutes, Fraser. I've shut down my shields."
"On my way, Captain."
The forward access hatch was an emergency portal designed for fast escapes and for servicing the microwave antenna electronics just aft of the Corrine's blunt nose. As the airlock bled air out of the closet-sized chamber, Kendric's suit ballooned and stiffened around him, making him wonder if it would turn out to be too clumsy for what he had to do. Gravity shut down inside the airlock, twisting at stomach and his inner ears. The transition staggered him, but he managed to control his outraged stomach. The outer hatch slid noiselessly open—no longer "above" him, but ahead—and he moved out into space.
The Corrine was now moving at a crawl relative to Alba Port. Both station and freighter were circling Alba at orbital velocity, better than six kilometers per second at this altitude. However, the difference in velocities between the two—the Corrine's relative velocity—was down to three meters per second. Captain White was monitoring all of the variables through his direct link with the ship's computer and scanners. Alba Port was twenty kilometers distant, angled so that its round, "upper" surface was facing the Corrine.
Strange how tiny it appeared from out here. From inside the ship, framed by the sides of the forward viewscreen and the instrument-cluttered bridge, the Port had seemed reasonably large and close. From Kendric's crouch on the outer hull of the freighter, however, Alba Port appeared to be little more than a glittering toy surrounded by stars, the vast, blue-white mottling of Alba, and a great deal of nothingness.
There was absolutely no sensation of movement at all. Alba Port, and the distant stars all appeared motionless. The only sense of movement came from gazing at Alba off the ports ide of the ship. Cloud patterns, seas, and continents moved there with disconcerting speed, as Alba Port and the spacecraft trailing it circled the world.
Kendric opened the private radio channel between himself and White. "It doesn't look like that big a target, Captain," he said.
"My senses are somewhat sharper than yours, Fraser," White told him. "You can't make out the Gael Warrior at all, can you?"
Kendric squinted through his helmet visor against the glare of sunlight off smooth metal. "I can just about make her out." She was the largest of the vessels berthed in Alba Port's multiple docking bays, and he could see her distinctive bridge tower.
"Well, I can read her name and number on the bridge tower. We're lined up perfectly on her Number ten hatch."
"Speed?"
"Three meters per second."
"Travel time?"
"From my word to release, one hour, fifty-one minutes."
"And I've been under suit life support for..."
"One minute, twenty seconds. You'll have time to spare."
Time to spare, yes, but no reserve at all for failure. He had not expressed all of his fears to T.C. He could scarcely face them himself.
His suit's life support had chemicals that removed C02 and added oxygen as needed for about two hours. Once that was gone, he would have another minute or so of air trapped in his suit. His air supply would not suddenly vanish, of course. Once the recycling stopped, the air he breathed would become poorer and poorer in oxygen, and richer and richer in COr How long before he blacked out? There was no way to tell. How long until oxygen starvation made his thinking go fuzzy, made him hallucinate, caused some critical error in judgement?
There was no way to tell. If he could reach the Gael Warrior and get inside within two hours of clearing the Corrine's airlock, he would be safe. If something went wrong and he couldn' t get in, Kendric would die moments after his air supply gave out.
He found a solid handhold near the airlock hatch, planted his hands firmly, and swung his feet into nothingness. Looking at his feet—there was no sense of "down," of course, now that he was weightless—he could see Alba Port's disk between his boots.
"I am calculating your final trajectory," White said. "Hang on tight. I am making a low-G maneuver to starboard."
Kendric felt himself surge to his right, his legs and lower body twisting. He strained at his shoulders, levering his legs back into line.
"We are on target no w... dead center. You may release at any time."
For a horrible, horrifying moment, Kendric could not let go. Then he did, and nothing happened. The Corrine's bulk hung suspended next to him, unmoving. Of course. He almost laughed out loud when he realized that he had been expecting to drop away from the freighter upon letting go. The transition to zero-G was still bothering his inner ear, and he felt as though he were falling. Which, in fact, he was, falling in orbit around Alba at six kilometers per second. And the Corrine was falling with him at exactly the same speed.
"I'm free, Captain White," he said. "Goodbye."
"Goodbye, Captain," White's voice said. "And good luck. Ah...a personal message from the young lady."
"Yes?"
"She said to say she loves you and to be careful."
"Thank you. Tell her I will.. .and that I love her, too."
"Confirmed. Stand by. I am applying final breaking thrust in four ...three... two... one...now!"
The Corrine killed her final three-meter-per-second velocity relative to Alba Port with a gentle nudge from her grav generators. From Kendric's point of view, the star freighter began sliding away at three meters per second, or better than ten kilometers per hour, a slow run for a man. From his point of view, however, it was entirely too fast.
The hardest part about falling through space was the need to stay relatively motionless for almost two full hours. He had lined himself up with his target squarely between his feet when White had released him. If he hit the Gael Warrior feet-first, he would be able to absorb Ihe shock of landing in his knees in a kind of controlled crumple. That should leave him floating, relatively motionless, close by the battleship and within reach of the numerous fittings, antennae, and handholds mounted along her hull.
If he were to become disoriented during his passage, however, if he arrived at the battleship head-first, say, his landing would have another consequence entirely. He could break his neck. Even a minor mishap could leave him with a broken arm or dislocated leg.
He dared not even try to look at the Corrine receding "above" his head or watch the station grow "beneath" his feet. To twist himself far enough to see one or the other would risk himself into a spin. Though the Academy had provided zero-G training, Kendric was not well-skilled in the gymnastics of controlling his body in free-fall. Starships, after all, manufactured gravity to order. There was usually no need for officers to put themselves through the sort of acrobatics he was attempting now. Even something as simple as moving an arm would change his center of gravity. In the weightless domain where Newton's ancient "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" reigned supreme, the slightest motion could start him tumbling. Fortunately, the ballooning of his suit under pressure made the joints stiff enough that he could relax, gently frozen in position with his arms still above his head.
His helmet was a cheap survival model, without the luxury of fancy instrumentation, but one of White's crewmen had mounted a small, digital readout above the visor. With that, he could watch seconds and minutes crawl by with agonizing slowness. Ten minutes. Twenty. Forty. An hour. His arms were aching now, cramped in their unaccustomed position, but he dared not lower them for fear of going into a tumble.
There was no radio contact, of course. His last communications with the Corrine had been broadcasts with extremely low power, unlikely to be picked up at Alba Port. More powerful transmissions might be monitored. The only sound was the steady rasp of his own breathing above the faint hiss of fresh air circulating from his backpack into his helmet.
When halfway there, Kendric could feel his legs and lower back cramping. The attempt to relax was ludicrously difficult when he did not dare to
move.
Thirty minutes to go.
It was hot. In space, the biggest problem for a small spacecraft—
or someone in a space suit—was getting rid of excess heat. Though his J suit was silvered to reflect the sun's light, it was inefficient at shedding ' the heat his body created through simple metabolism. Sweat crawled on his face and back and beaded on the inside of his visor. Would he even be able to see to maneuver when he got there?
Fifteen minutes to go.
Without moving his head, he was aware of the station, grown now to fill the sky in the direction of his feet. Already he could see outriders and antennae clusters extending out from the station disk and into his line of sight.
They appeared to be moving awfully fast. Had White calculated j correctly? If his relative speed were even only a little off, Kendric J would impale himself on one of those antennae...or miss the Gael I Warrior entirely. He would pursue his own orbit around Alba then, but he would cease admiring the view perhaps ten minutes later when his air gave out.
His elapsed time was one hour, fifty minutes. Slowly, he changed the angle of his head until he could look down between his feet. The Gael Warrior was clearly visible just ahead. Station and battleship had not been lined up square-on to the freighter when Kendric had let go of the Corrine, and so his approach was at an angle. Less than two hundred meters away, the Gael Warrior's bulk extended far to left and right, vanishing into the massive canyon of the station's docking berth to Kendric's right. To the left, he could see the shark fin of the Warrior's dorsal tau radiator, the stacked-box complexity of her bridge. She still showed ragged damage from the most serious hit she'd taken at Trothas. The entry hole of the rebel missile gaped at him like an empty eye socket as he dropped past. Below, there were lights on the promenade forward of the bridge. He could make out the shadows of people walking there.
Seconds and meters to go! Between his feet, the platform of the number one dorsal battery rose to meet him at a running man's pace, though scale and speed were hard to judge. Antennae and the fluted columns of heat radiators reached up to snag or impale. The barrels of lasers swept past...
Almost there! He looked down, relaxed his knees, dropped his arms gently, readied his hands. Relax! If he hit and bounced, he could go spinning out into space again, with no way to effect a return.
Impact!
Kendric's knees folded under him as he collapsed to the deck. He heard nothing, but shooting pain bumed through his right leg from ankle to thigh. As he groped blindly outward, his hand found a low railing set around the perimeter of the battery platform. Clumsy with
the pressure in his suit, stiff and cramped from two hours of rigid inactivity, Kendric's fingers slipped and he almost let go. He lunged with his other hand, grabbed the railing, and held on for dear life as his rebound carried him free of the deck.
He wasn't sure how long he hung there, his arms around that fragile railing, his legs swinging back into space with the rebound from the deck. The pain in his leg diminished somewhat. When he tried to move it, however, the pain suddenly redoubled. Had he broken it? Sprained it?
No matter. Dorsal Lock 10 was only a few meters that way. Captain Whitt/Corrine had been right on target. He began hauling himself toward it, hand over hand.
The airlock controls were simple, set in a recess in the deck next to the hatch. Designed for emergency use by spacers working outside who might need to get inside quickly, to operate them, Kendric had only to flip up a protective cover, grasp the handle within, and pull. Simple to operate or not, the handle did not pull.
Kendric tugged again, harder, bracing his good leg against the deck and hauling back as hard as he could, without effect. Either the lock mechanism was frozen or, more likely, someone had sealed or locked i lie hatch from the other side, possibly to keep a platoon or two of Alba Port Imperial Marines from crossing hand over hand across the battleship's hull.
If the Warrior's crew had sealed that hatch, they would have sealed others along the ventral and dorsal decks. There was an engineering access hatch farther aft, just above the vast and cavernous maw of one of the ship's I-K drive Venturis. Any Marine attempting to reach that hatch would have to make his way along the Warrior's entire length, ;md he might well give up after finding five or ten hatches forward of the bridge all locked. Would the crew have sealed the access hatches aft?
Kendric didn't ponder the question. He was already moving aft as quickly as possible. Handholds gave out near the base of the bridge lower. He lined up on a cluster of portside sensor relays, doubled up his left leg against a convenient stanchion, and pushed. In free flight once more, he sailed low across the Warrior's hull, his arms spread to grab I he relays as he swept past. Again, he nearly lost his hold. His right leg swung into the hull and he shrieked agony, but then he arrested his flight, blinked tears from his eyes, and spotted the port.
He heard a dull click, and the hiss of fresh air failed. Time'! Time? I le'd been on the suit's system for one hour and fifty-six minutes, but his exertions in the past five had used up the remaining air faster than normal. Very well. He had a minute or so of suit air remaining.
The engineering access hatch was farther aft than he'd thought. He pulled his way toward it using handholds set in the deck. Grab one. Make sure of the grip. Release the other hand. Pullforward. Find a new hand hold. Make sure of the grip. His progress was at a snail's pace.
Kendric' s breath was coming in gasps now, the air hot and strained, rank with sweat and completely unsatisfying. Each breath made him want the next one more, made him strain harder to breathe in.
He was panting now. Strange.. .the hatch appeared to be receding. The closer he got, the farther away it looked. If he could only see clearly...
He was at the hatch, his hand fumbling for the hatch release. If this one were blocked, he was dead. Kendric did not have enough air to try for another hatch.
The cover flipped up and he pulled the handle. For an agonizing instant, it refused to move. Then in what seemed to Kendric like slow motion, the handle fell outward and the hatch cycled open.
Inside, he stabbed at the controls that closed the outer hatch and flooded the lock with air. Even before the overhead light turned green, he was fumbling with the helmet connector. He could feel his lungs screaming for air, the blood pounding in his temples.
Gravity returned unexpectedly. He landed on his injured leg, and the agony rose up like a living thing, consuming him. As the inner airlock opened, he managed to remain standing, clinging to handholds set in the bulkhead. His blurred vision focused on a trio of Gael ratings dressed in what looked like Marine armor, carrying power rifles hooked to cumbersome po werpacks on their shqulders. The opening of the hatch must have sounded alarms, for they were waiting for him, their weapons leveled at his chest.
His helmet came off. Before he fainted from the pain, Kendric heard one of the ratings screaming.
"Ghost! It's a ghost!" the boy seemed to be yelling, over and over at the top of his lungs. By then, Kendric was unconscious and heard nothing more.
Permission is granted by his most gracious Imperial Majesty, Caesar Julianus, to the petitioners to open a new mining facility on the world known as Greshem. Planetographic surveys indicate that gen-nium-arsenide recovery on Greshem could be a most productive operation, given a large enough initial labor force.
Procurement of this labor force is the responsibility of the Provisional Governor's Office, Alba
—Extract from Official Letter of Grant, via VLCA transmission, from Imperial Bureau ofGalatic Resources to Vindicus Malatya, Provisional Governor, Alba, 6830
Kendric's right leg had broken in three places, once just below the knee and twice close by his ankle. After examining and setting the breaks, the Warrior's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Hutchison, explained that Kendric had probably failed to relax completely in the moment before he had collided with the battleship.
To which Kendric had replied, "Fine, Doctor. Sometime explain to me how you c
an step out of a starship and fall twenty kilometers and still stay relaxed."
Hutchison and his assistants used an osseotexor field to knit the fractures, a process that took perhaps forty-five minutes. Then Kendric was given a light brace on his lower leg that would allow him to move around almost normally, though he would need a cane for a week or two until the soreness was gone.
"And no more jumping out of starships!" Hutchison had warned him with mock severity. "Even Fleet Captains can break their damn fool necks when they pull stunts like that!"
Lenard Morganen had arrived in sickbay while the doctors were still working on Kendric. When the door slid open, Kendric heard a low buzzing, like the sound of a large crowd, in the passageway outside. As Morganen stepped through, Kendric caught a glimpse of at least a dozen starmen outside, jostling for position beyond a pair of men wearing armor.
Morganen stood by the treatment stage and looked down at Kendric with an unreadable expression. "Only a few minutes, Captain," Hutchison told him, looking up from the HV viewscreen that covered Kendric's leg.
Morganen nodded but continued to watch Kendric.
"Well... uh... Captain?" Kendric broke the silence first. There was a momentary awkwardness. Morganen had become Captain of the Gael Warrior when he, Kendric, had been relieved, though he still bore the rank of Commander. TOG Imperial rank structure no longer seemed unimportant now. "I suppose I should have requested permission to come aboard."
"Good Lord, sir. Where the devil did you come from?"
Kendric grinned. "Hitched a ride from Haetai-Aleph. We almost caught up with the Gaidheal there, but she turned and boosted before we could get close enough to tell you who we were."
Warring expressions pursued one another across Morganen's face. "That shuttle..."
"That was me."
"We thought it was a trick... using a civilian shuttle flashing its nav beacons in order to get close enough to identify us." He shook his head. "We couldn't afford to let anyone peg us as Gael ships. Not when we had to come back here. I'm...sorry. Captain..."
William Keith Renegades Honor Page 31
