Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend had expressed herself again. Now the would-be pirate had one less engine to complain about. Unlike her own powerplants, half-buried in the hull, his stood out from his ship on stanchions, one set of which she had burned through. While it slowly floated away from the rest of his vessel, leaving the pirate with only two engines, Wilson was finally certain that he recognized the man’s voice.
“Now you’re gonna do exactly what I tell you, Shorty,” the young asteroid hunter announced. “Or I’ll do what I have to do—again! Power down your remaining engines and take your weapons offline. Turn on all of your running lights while you’ve still got the power to do it. And tell your three little friends hanging out there to do the same thing, right now, if they don’t want a similar dose of their own.”
Wilson knew intuitively that individuals like Shorty lacked the temperament to work by themselves. He was willing to bet anything that the same three thugs Shorty had had with him back at Holbrook Station—whom he thought of as Boils, Fatty, and Beanpole—were with him now.
The young man was running something of a bluff, himself. Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend couldn’t shoot anybody she couldn’t see, and she was seeing passively, by radio, just now, and by memory. But maybe—Oops! He remembered just in time to disable the ship’s targeting system, so Shorty could reply to his ultimatum without getting shot at again.
“Okay, okay!” Shorty surrendered grudgingly to Wilson and his particle cannon. “Hey guys, do what he says. Switch on your running—wait! Wait! Wait! He can’t see you! That’s why he wants your running lights switched on. Forget about that crap, and cut the bastard to pieces!”
“But—” said another of the pirates.
Wilson tapped forearm buttons again, reactivating his ship’s targeting system. Remembering what had happened on the radio while it was turned off, the particle beam cannon swiveled around to shoot at whoever had just spoken, punching a big hole through his living spaces, then fired on Shorty again, nearly cutting away another of his engines.
Her first beam had struck deeply into the second ship. The way Wilson had set it up, the particle cannon “listened” for a target by radio, but “looked” for an engine’s heat signature. The targeted vessel, however, got a laser beam off that nearly cut Wilson out of the chainlink he was clinging to. Fortunately, he was a small, very quiet target, and the blow to the aggressor threw its pilot off his mark.
“Stand down, the both of you,” Wilson said. “Unless you want much worse.”
That there were at least two other hostile ships out there, Wilson was certain. At any moment, he realized, they’d be backing Shorty, firing on him and his friends. He wondered where his friends were now, and why they weren’t fighting, but didn’t want to break radio silence again.
As Wilson clambered awkwardly across the chainlink like a clumsy spider, looking for someplace where he could throw himself free of the stuff and “run” for his ship, a third enemy vessel maneuvered slowly through the group consisting of the other seven ships, the chainlink Wilson was climbing along, and the odd black asteroid this whole thing was all about. As the intruder moved, rolling and jerking this way and that to avoid becoming a target, it fired a laser at Mikey’s little craft. Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend used the fellow’s laser emitter as a target and blew that weapon out of the side of the vessel with her particle cannon. Air, vapor, and bits of debris spewed from inside the ship.
“Yeehaw!” cried Mikey. “You missed me! Nyaah nyaah nyaah nyaah nyaah!” Apparently he had made it back to Albuquerque Gal. Voiceless microphone clicks indicated that Marko and Scotty were still alive, as well.
Somebody—the fourth pirate—finally collected enough nerve to fire on Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend. A thin green laser beam took her in the nose, straight through the pilot’s canopy. There goes my herb garden, Wilson thought, and my tomato and strawberry plants. The enemy ship managed to peel away before Wilson’s could draw an accurate bead on her. That meant there must be some damage to her targeting system.
Drawing his .270 REN, Wilson fired at the enemy’s stern, hoping to crack her fragile ceramic nozzle liners. Seeing no effect, he put the gun away, cast himself free of the chainlink, aimed himself at his ship, and fired a short burst from his suit rockets. In a few seconds, he was through the portside airlock, headed forward to inspect the damage.
As he floated forward, toward the transparent nose of the little spaceship, he reflexively drew his Herron StaggerCyl again, rolling the massive cylinder out into his left hand. With an index finger, he pressed the ejector rod, dropping the twelve-round moon clip, with its empty cases, into his right hand. That went back into an insulated pocket of his envirosuit, and from another, he took a new clip with twelve fresh rounds, dropped it into the cylinder, and closed the weapon.
The beam had missed his pilot’s seat and console, and there was a surprising amount of air left in the ship. Jetting to the entry hole, he found that the plastic clipboard he usually wore Velcroed to his thigh while piloting had drifted over the hand-sized hole and closed it.
The other hole, on the opposite side of the nose, was clogged with papers—printouts of last Sunday’s Lunar Times funny pages. Next time, he wouldn’t worry so much about keeping a tidier ship than he did. He got a couple of emergency patches from a box on the rim, where the canopy attached to the rest of the ship, pulled the wad of papers from the almost perfectly-round hole the laser had left, and slapped the patch in place. Similar to the plastic “sky” of Pallas, in a day or two, he knew, it would blend with the plastic of the canopy and disappear.
Repeating the process at the portside of the canopy, he glanced at the gauges on the arms of his envirosuit and started to take it off—until he realized that there were rock pirates out there, somewhere, still engaged in a ridiculous slow-motion battle with him and his friends.
Clearly, they were amateur pirates.
Maybe even amateur amateurs.
Wilson swung himself up into the pilot’s seat. Apparently there wasn’t any damage to the targeting system. Somewhat like problems he sometimes had with his pocket computer, the ship had simply confused itself when called upon to aim at the badguy, sound a decompression alarm, and then cancel the alarm because the pressure-drop had stopped itself.
He carefully inspected the navigation and location system screens, marked Shorty’s presence, those of the other two vessels his little ship had fired on with her great big cannon, and some places that the fourth ship might be. The transponders on his three friends’ vessels, Marko, Mikey, and Scotty, had protected them from his ship’s particle cannon. He didn’t know where the boys were, however, relative to their ships.
He set Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend’s sensors to look for the heat signatures of three deep space envirosuits, found them almost immediately, and found a fourth hanging from a strap near one of his own engine’s service ports, prying at it with something that resembled a crowbar.
***
“What?”
Whatever had been going on in Adam’s sleeping mind popped like a bubble as he awoke. He couldn’t remember anything about it—but he did recall that it had been a lot more pleasant than his current reality.
“Dr Ngu—I mean, Adam?” The girl was bending over him, touching his shoulder. “I’m sorry, but your flight will be ready in just a few minutes.”
This time, the young receptionist—Emily, her name was—had awakened him, rather than merely startling him out of a reverie. She’d also brought him a baggie of very hot, very dark coffee, with ampoules of half-and-half, Pallatian honey, chicory liqueur, and dark chocolate syrup.
Oh well, he thought, at least he hadn’t drooled on anything. As he sat up, the magazine he hadn’t been reading slid off his lap, onto the floor.
“Take this with you if you wish,” she told him, picking up the magazine.
“No, thank you, Emily. I never want to see it again as long as I live.”
He didn’t know whether to be happy or not th
at his family line had a habit of nodding off during moments of high stress. On the one hand, it had always made time wasted in waiting areas like this one go by very quickly. And, he’d been told that his father—captured on Mars by a UN/US combat unit (led, ironically, by his mother)—had pulled two benches together and taken a nap before facing interrogation. It had terrified the Earther forces who had mistaken it for a fearless indifference.
On the other hand, it often seemed as if he were missing half his life.
Maybe if he led a less stressful one …
“Would you care for some assistance with your baggage?” Emily asked.
Injecting his coffee with cream and chocolate (Adam could take chicory or leave it), and unfolding the sipping tube, he stood, shook his head, and took a drink. He didn’t want to ask for it but he wished he’d been offered brandy to put in his coffee. He had fallen asleep tense and was now stiff all over. Sleeping that way had also cut off circulation in his legs, and her question made him feel at least a hundred years old. “No, thanks, Emily. I’ll just carry it on. Good exercise.”
The girl chuckled politely, and in that crystalline instant, Adam discovered that, as often happened with him, his unconscious mind had solved a problem while he napped. On most occasions, naturally enough, it happened to be an engineering problem, and he’d learned, over the long course of many years, to trust his unconscious mind—which he’d come to believe was rather a better engineer than his conscious mind was.
This time, however, it was a completely different matter, and it made him wonder. At its best, love never makes a lot of sense, he knew, and yet, somehow, it makes all the sense there is to be found in life.
Almost hating himself for it, but certain it was the right thing to do, he thumbed a single button on the wallet-sized pocket computer that also served him as a phone. He saw Ardith’s pretty face on the tiny screen, startled, her lovely eyes reddened, her eyelids still swollen.
“I got as far as Port Admundsen,” he told her. “May I please come home?”
Walking to the reception counter, he scribbled a note in the margin of one of the tourist brochures: Can this ship make it to Mars?
Emily raised her eyebrows, then wrote back, Maybe, but could you? Can’t land except on Deimos or Phobos. No facilities for that long a haul.
Adam nodded, then wrote, “I’m sorry. Please have them stand down.” He gave her an apologetic look. She smiled back at him, trying to understand. She knew it had something to do with his wife, but nothing else. Her father and mother fought all the time, and always made up spectacularly.
Meanwhile, Ardith had made a strange little noise it was hard to interpret. She turned her handset to scan the luggage laid out on the bed.
“I was coming to get you.”
***
Wilson opened the portside airlock cautiously. When he’d come back to Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, he’d approached it as a door in a wall before him. Now it was a trapdoor in a floor he was about to climb up through.
References were always changing like that in a strange world of weightlessness. In ordinary circumstances, he found it absolutely charming.
Now, as well as he could, given the bulky helmet of his suit, the young hunter peeked through the narrow crack he’d made by opening the door as little as he could and still see aft. Sure enough, there was a human figure out there, wearing a patched and battered envirosuit, thoroughly intent on prying his portside engine access panel open. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble at the task, because he was weightless and his feet came off the surface every time he exerted himself.
Magnetic boots, that age-old favorite of the movies, were no good, of course, most of a spaceship’s surfaces being non-ferrous. Instead, a suit was held as firmly in place as its wearer wished it to be by billions of microfibers, copied from those on an insect’s foot, This fellow’s boots must have been as old and worn out as the rest of his suit.
In an instant, Wilson was through the airlock door, up onto the outside of the ship. with his enormous revolver in his hand, its laser designator splashing scarlet on the chest of the would-be saboteur’s suit.
“You make any dents in my ship with that thing,” Wilson warned the intruder, “and you’ll pay to have them fixed!” It took a few moments for his communications system to cycle the message through all of the likely frequencies, during which his aim with the twelve-shooter never wavered.
Without a word, the stranger threw his prybar straight at Wilson, slapping his chest in an attempt to draw the weapon he carried there. The five-foot bar came at Wilson end-over-end. In the frozen moment, aware of every minute irrelevancy, he observed that one end of the thing was sharply pointed, while the other end had been forged out into a spatula shape. It must be some kind of geological tool, he reasoned.
Or a giant manicure instrument.
Wilson stepped aside easily and snatched the prybar with his free hand. It was titanium, the shaft between the ends octagonal in cross section.
His laser beam lit up the back of his antagonist’s right hand, where it lay on what Wilson could see was an autopistol grip of some kind. The beam was followed by a 90-grain .270 bullet that struck the pistol grip, entirely by accident, rather than the offending hand. It must have stung, because the figure jerked his hand away and cried out.
“You almost hit my goddamned suit, you sonofabitch!” The voice, just as Wilson had expected it to be, was Shorty’s. “You coulda got me killed!”
“I meant to hit your suit, Shorty.” Wilson kept the laser on him. “I figured a little explosive decompression might be just the thing for what ails you. If you lived, you could always change your name to ‘Lefty’.”
The smaller man emitted an infuriated shriek and launched himself at Wilson with all of his strength. When the pair of figures collided, Wilson lost his footing, fell on his back, and let go of his revolver, although it remained fastened to his equipment belt with a four-foot lanyard.
Shorty was on top of him, straddling his chest. The microfibers on his knees seemed to be in better shape. Wilson let go of the prybar, as well, this time deliberately, snatching, instead, at the half- exposed autopistol in Shorty’s chest pocket and wrenching it free. He pushed it into Shorty’s belly and began putting pressure on the trigger. Shorty grabbed the prybar before it could drift away and held it high overhead to strike Wilson in the faceplate with the pointed end.
In another instant, one or both of them would die.
“Maidez! Maidez! This is the East American spaceliner City of Newark to anyone on these frequencies. I repeat, this is the East American spaceliner City of Newark to anyone on these frequencies! We are in midflight Earth to Mars, just following turnover and are being hijacked! I repeat, we are being hijacked! Here are our precise coordinates—”
The voice cut off suddenly and was not heard again. Shorty shifted his prybar to one side and let it go, to stand more or less where he left it. Wilson handed him his pistol—an Eveready 6000 hand laser—found his own revolver at the end of the lanyard, and stowed it in its pocket. Shorty said, “Go ahead. I’ll make what repairs I can and follow.”
“Let’s sort our friends out and I’ll help you with repairs. Better get that bar back, Shorty, you may need it. My little sister’s on that ship!”
And her coach, Jasmeen, as well, Wilson thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: CONVERGENCE
Principles are not meant for times or circumstances when abiding by them is easy. They’re for when it’s hard. They’re not meant to be thrown over in an emergency, or suspended “for the duration”, but to be honored no matter how dangerous or difficult it gets.
Otherwise, what the hell good are they? —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“And so I hopped up on the back of the wagon and said, ‘It’s technical!”
The Captain’s table erupted with laughter, and many of the guests applauded, including that awful Mrs. Erskine, who had finally had her invitation.
Capta
in West made pushing motions with his hands indicating his humility, but nobody believed him. The man was a great storyteller, and he had polished it to a fine art over many years of mastering shiploads of often-difficult passengers whom his crew privately called “beasts”.
“Now,” said the Captain, “since they’re just about to serve us a spectacular dessert, who will enjoy a little of this hundred-year-old East Texas brandy with me?” He took Llyra’s glass. “You can’t learn if you don’t have a chance to learn, can you? Then again I’ve forgotten that you’re a Pallatian.” He poured and then reached for Jasmeen’s glass.
There were no liquor laws, nor much of any other kind, on Pallas. Llyra didn’t really like the stuff (she’d tried it first at home with her mother three or four years ago) but she sipped at it to be polite to the Captain—as spectacular in his own way as any dessert—whom she and Llyra had come to adore. She was interested, speaking strictly scientifically, in the way the brandy seemed to crawl all over her tongue.
“Mrs. Erskine?” Across the table from Llyra, the woman handed the Captain her glass and even managed a smile. When he had finished with serving the ladies, he announced, the men would all have to fend for themselves.
Llyra was seated next to the Captain, on his right—again—and well aware of the honor it represented. The first night, he’d told her how he missed his family back in Wyoming, and pulled out a long plastic wallet insert, with dozens of holograms of his wife and three children.
Seated between Llyra and Jasmeen was that nice old man they’d met on the Solarium Deck a few days ago. He was almost tall enough, she’d informed him, to be a native Pallatian. He’d just smiled warmly and told her he was originally from Tucson, Arizona, out in western West America.
Although these days, for the most part, he lived and worked in the Moon.
“Then why do you go to Mars?” Jasmeen had asked him. “If is not too—”
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