The alarm paused for a moment. The “Ding!” the first dart made as it caromed off the metal catwalk or its rail was clearly audible. So were voices in the corridor outside the construction bay, something pounding on the door, the sliding of a foot on the floor as a worker moved toward the box of circuitry that controlled the door. So too was a “Don’t!” and a crash as Karel raised his bar once more, ignored all attempts to stop him, and destroyed the box. Esteban had turned it off. No one else would turn it on.
The second dart brought the worker down just before he reached the hatch.
The clamor of the alarm returned.
Esteban waved an arm, and the refugees followed him toward the ladder the worker he had just shot down must have used to reach the catwalk.
Pearl Angelica found herself last in the short line of climbers, struggling to hold onto the beehive with just one arm while leaving the fingers free to steady her against the ladder rungs. The others were rapidly drawing ahead, all but the one woman just before her. “What … ?” She swore when she realized that she too was trying to climb with only one hand. The other hand, the arm, was confined to a sling; even its fingers were useless. The bot set her shoulder against the woman’s buttocks and lifted. There was a muffled , “Thanks,” and they began to move a little faster.
When they were halfway up the ladder, Pearl Angelica looked over her shoulder. The workers they had left below were clustered by the door. Even as she guessed they were trying to repair or bypass the damage to its controls, the door began to open.
She wished the alarm would quit once more, that she could shout, “Look out! Hurry up! They’re coming!” and have some hope of being heard. She shouted anyway, and then she saw that Esteban must have been looking back as well. He had one arm wrapped around the side of the ladder, had swung to one side to let the others pass, and was aiming his dart gun toward the door.
She looked again just in time to see one Security guard fall to the floor and two more recoil. Then the alarm did quit for a second, and she heard Esteban swear. She swung her gaze back to him. He was hurling the gun toward the workers below.
“Idiot!” she said, but he did not seem to hear.
“Run!” he screamed at the others on the catwalk.
They ran, all of them, as the Security guards saw his gun bounce on the floor and realized he was out of ammunition and charged into the bay and began to fire their own guns upward.
The woman just ahead of Pearl Angelica on the ladder grunted and went limp. Her one good hand lost its grip on the side of the ladder. She began to lean out and to one side. The bot tried to stop her movement, to hold her in place with the pressure of her chest and the hive, to keep her safe, but then her feet slid off the rung she stood on. She seemed to shrug away from Pearl Angelica. She fell.
“She’s gone, Angie,” cried Esteban. He was sliding down the ladder to seize her wrist and yank her up, toward him, toward the catwalk and the Teller’s hatch and safety. “Come on. Hurry!”
They were both on the catwalk when Esteban grunted the same dire note Pearl Angelica had already, on the ladder, heard once too often. She spun in time to see him stumble to his knees and clutch at her roots. A spot of red was blossoming on his thigh.
For a moment, she wanted to drop the beehive, but her arm tightened around it quite automatically. With her free hand, she seized his right arm and lifted. He grunted and tried to get his feet under his weight but could only use one leg. She swore, knowing she could never have carried him one-armed on Earth or First-Stop, and staggered with him to the Teller’s hatch. She gasped in relief when Anatol slammed it shut behind them.
“I can’t fly this thing,” said Anatol.
“I can fly ours,” said the bot. She studied the cabin they were in and recognized that this ship’s similarities to the Quebec and its kin were more than skin deep. The Engineers must have stolen not only the plans for the Q-drive, but also those for the ship itself. “If this isn’t too dif—”
“I’m not dead, goddammit,” said Esteban. “I just can’t run. And I’ve studied the documentation on this thing.”
“More hacking.” Pearl Angelica’s grin said all that needed to be said about how she felt to hear him speak.
Something slammed against the outside of the ship’s hatch.
“Just get me to the pilot’s seat. And someone plug these holes in my leg.”
Pearl Angelica used his own shirt for that. Then the men carried him to the seat he wanted. He ran his fingers over the controls while she looked over his shoulder and decided that all the displays and knobs and buttons were as familiar as anything else about the ship. There were differences, of course, but she could fly it. She probably should, for she had had at least a little experience. But …
The slams against the hatch were louder now, and faster. Someone was using a hammer. In a moment, she thought, they would realize that the ship’s skin might be thinner. It probably was. Or someone would find a tool sharper than a hammer. Or …
All sounds stopped.
“Now what?” asked Anatol.
As if in answer, a loudspeaker began to bellow: “WE MUST HAVE THE MURDERER! SEND OUT ANATOL RIVKIN. WE WILL PUT THE REST OF YOU ON THE NEXT SHUTTLE.”
“It’s right against the hull,” said Karel.
“Don’t believe them,” said Cherilee Wright.
“I won’t,” said Esteban. “They just don’t want us to take this ship.”
The hammering and the alarms returned. A hissing sound announced that a torch or laser cutter had been brought into play as well.
Esteban activated the Teller’s engines. Their roar was quickly loud enough to drown out the din, yet the screams of the Security forces and workers outside the ship remained clearly audible. Through the viewport, they could see superheated gas billowing in the construction bay. The screams stopped.
“How did they expect to get it out of here?” Anatol was pointing through the port at the ceiling above them. A puncture-repair Spider was visible to one side. There was no sign of hatch or iris. The Engineers had apparently made the same mistake as any do-it-yourselfer who had ever built something—furniture, a boat—too large to fit through the home workshop’s only door.
Some of the Security guards had found shelter from the rocket blast. Bullets pounded the ship’s hull. One, and then another, penetrated and ricocheted before embedding in interior walls.
“The roof,” Pearl Angelica screamed above the din. “They must have planned to remove it.”
“But we can’t do that,” yelled Anatol.
“It can’t be that thick,” said the woman with the broken ribs, her voice as loud as anyone’s. “Go through it. Now. Before one of those bullets hits something essential.”
“Aye, aye, captain,” said Esteban. “Or one of us. But you’d better find some place to lie down.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You too, Angie.”
“The Apollo crews took off standing up,” said Anatol.
“So you’re a historian. But we’re in a hurry.”
As soon as they were all flat on the floor around his seat, he increased thrust. The ship lifted off the floor of the construction bay and hesitated. Pearl Angelica closed her eyes, not wanting to see the ceiling grow quickly closer and crumble into shards. Instead she listened to the impact and felt the ship stagger, heard the screeling of metal scraped on metal, the hiss of air where a seam gave way, the scream and pop of ruptured structure. She imagined the rush of air from the bay and the corridors beyond, the screams of the dying diminishing as the air that carried their sound sucked from their lungs, the slam of airtight barriers across the corridors.
And there was silence except for the uneven sound of their thrust and the agonized sobbing of the woman with the broken ribs. Thrust was not kind to her.
Pearl Angelica opened her e
yes. The viewport was gouged but intact. Beyond it was rich black and stars. They were free.
Even though the engines now were choking, gasping, stuttering, straining to lift them all to safety but threatening at every second to fail. She wished she knew whether the problem was some failure of the Engineers—if only they had done their own test piloting!—or some effect of their collision with the roof.
It hardly seemed to matter that Esteban’s hands were flying desperately over the controls, that the ship was wobbling on its course, its thrust dangerously out of line with its center of mass, or that he was swearing and saying, “We lost three tanks. One’s left. Just one. We can’t go far.”
An alarm was buzzing, a red light was flashing, and a synthesized voice was saying with artificial calm, “Air alert. There is a crack in the airlock rim twelve point five centimeters above the floor. Air alert. There is a puncture thirty-two centimeters clockwise from the hatch and forty centimeters above the floor. Air alert. There is a puncture … Patches are in the cabinet marked ‘Emergency.’ Follow the instructions on their backs.”
Cherilee was already on her feet, opening the locker and extracting the cylindrical canister of patches. She did not stop to read the label, for she had been a resident of the Moon for years. She had learned what to do in such cases long ago: Locate the hole, choose a patch of the right size, peel off its backing, and slap it into place. Repeat as long as air is being lost. Hesitate, and die.
She did what had to be done. Pearl Angelica prayed that it would be enough.
The buzzer stopped. The red light stopped blinking.
The ship jerked sideways, throwing Cherilee to the floor and making the others roll and slide.
“They’re still shooting at us,” said Esteban.
“What with?”
“They’re dead!”
Esteban’s hands flew across the controls, and the Teller jinked again. “Lasers,” he said. “And they’re throwing rocks at us with the railguns.”
Another lurch brought Pearl Angelica up against the base of Esteban’s seat. The beehive slipped from her grip, and the paper plug in its entrance hole fell free. One of the women grabbed the paper and shoved it back in place. “That’s all we need, eh? Bees!”
But Pearl Angelica barely appreciated the catastrophe the other had so nearly averted. She was staring at fresh blood on Esteban’s calf and crying, “Where’s Aunt Lois?”
“Can’t see,” he said.
She told herself his voice was strong. He was not bleeding to death. In fact, the blood was really only a trickle. Wasn’t it?
“We lost a radar antenna,” he added. “Only got one now, and that’s looking down, spotting rocks. There. The computer can handle collision avoidance. But …”
A loud clang interrupted his words. “That’s not perfect either. And it won’t do a bit of good against the lasers. As soon as they penetrate …”
“Call her.”
“Can’t.” He flipped a switch, and the hiss of static filled the cabin. “We lost that too.”
The Teller jerked to one side. Something crunched and grated in the ship’s stern.
“One tank left,” said Esteban. “And it’s loose. One solid hit, a couple more dodges like that, and it’s gone. And we’re sitting ducks.”
“We don’t have long, do we?” That was one of the women, her voice high and shaky.
“We couldn’t get far anyway, not on just one tank.” Anatol was on his knees beside the bot, reaching for her.
“There!” Karel shouted. Something glinted in the viewport, vanished, reappeared a finger’s width away, and vanished once more.
“Is that her?”
“What’s she doing?”
“She’s using the tunnel-drive,” said Pearl Angelica. “Macroscopic tunneling.”
Esteban grunted, “Got it.” He shook his head admiringly, though his face showed the pain he was feeling from his wound. “She’s not hovering now. Dodging, so they can’t target her. But she can’t …”
“Yes, she can!” cried Pearl Angelica. The Quebec was bigger than the Teller, much bigger. It had sleeping cabins and a cargo hold, and if it wasn’t big enough to engulf the smaller ship, perhaps it could still … “Yes!”
Laser beams are invisible in the vacuum of space. Rocks propelled by railguns move far too fast to spot except with radar. But the signs of both were plain to see in Lois McAlois’ evasive random skittering about the sky.
Their presence was also proven by the Teller’s sideways lurches and sudden changes in acceleration, by the bangs of glancing blows and the hiss of escaping air, by cries of “Air alert” and Cherilee’s scrambles through the ship with her hands full of patches.
Each of the Quebec’s leaps brought it closer to the Teller. Its image increased in size. The dancing glint was now a splinter of light. It was a spaceship, a knob-headed arrow, its fletching a cluster of reaction mass tanks. Its viewport became visible, and behind it the shadowy forms of a control console, a pilot’s seat, a pilot.
“There she is,” said Pearl Angelica. “That’s her.”
“Thank god,” said Cherilee. “There’s one patch left.”
A louder crash than any since they had breached the roof of the construction bay shook the ship. Metal screeched and snapped. “That’s it,” said Esteban. “Last tank.” The engines quit. The sound and weight of thrust abruptly stopped. The ship stopped shaking as if it were about to fall apart and began to yaw. The stars swung across the viewport. Pearl Angelica floated into the air. So did Cherilee, Karel, the other women.
“Escaping air,” said Esteban. “Like an attitude jet. But we can’t control it.”
“Air alert,” said the computer. Was Pearl Angelica coloring its voice with her own fears? Or did it indeed sound resigned now that the ship could no longer dodge and flee?
Esteban touched the controls and the computer fell silent. He indicated a digital readout. “We’re dead,” he said. “That’s the temperature of the hull over the engine room. If we could spin …” He shook his head. “In another minute, they’ll burn through the hull. Then we lose all our air.”
“We don’t have suits, do we?” That was Karel.
Where was the Quebec? It was no longer visible in the viewport.
When something clanged against their hull, they all flinched. But the sound was not that of a crashing rock. It was different, more solid, steadier, and then the stars danced in the viewport. The Moon appeared, smaller than when seen from Earth.
“She grabbed us,” said Pearl Angelica. “I didn’t know it was possible. But she came beside us and skipped us with her. We’re out of range. We’re safe.”
* * * *
The refugees had not filled the Quebec for long after Lois McAlois had matched airlocks and invited them aboard, for it had been only a short skip to Munin and the Orbitals. There the Teller had been turned over to the Engineers. The refugees had not, despite demands.
Now the Quebec was on its way back to First-Stop. With it went Anatol Rivkin and Cherilee Wright and Esteban, his true name at last revealed as Julio Lee. “But I like Esteban better,” he said.
“Not Julie?” asked Lois, and he shuddered.
The ship was crowded, and it stank, partly of the Armadons it had brought with Pearl Angelica to Earth’s solar system, partly of the cheese it was hauling back to the Gypsies, partly of the people who now overburdened its air filters. The beehive, enclosed in a cage of wire screening, was strapped to one wall of the cargo bay.
The two Gypsies and Cherilee shared Lois’s sleeping cabin. The men took the other, though neither Anatol nor Esteban was pleased with the arrangement.
“Why not?” insisted Anatol. He had stopped Pearl Angelica outside their rooms. No one else was in sight at the moment, and his hands gripped her shoul
ders gently, careful not to tear her leaves. “We did before. When you were in my room.”
“Yes,” she said. “But—”
The radio was audible throughout the ship: “Hallo, Gypsies! I hear she’s safe. And they paid the ransom. Congratulations! And tell her not to get so mechin’ close to the fire next time.”
“Is it Esteban?” He touched her wrist where she had worn the cuff he had given her. She had left it behind to instruct the Orbitals in its secrets. Esteban had promised her another as soon as the Gypsies set him up with a suitable workshop. “His artificial intelligences? That power source he came up with from the Q-drive? The better robots he’ll give your people? Does he offer a better bride-price than me?”
She jerked her wrist away from his hand. “Are you selling brides again, then, back on Earth?”
He made a face. “Or is it just that he got you off the Moon? Are you grateful?”
“You got me out of my cage. You introduced us. Should I be more grateful to you?” She shook her head. “That’s not much of a basis for an affair. Or marriage. And I like you both.”
“You want us both, then? But you’re half plant, aren’t you? Not very discriminating. As long as the bees bring the pollen …”
“And you’re half ass.” Cherilee appeared behind him. “If you say one more word, I’ll kick you. Though that’s probably overkill. Any man who talked to me like that would be out of my life forever.”
Pearl Angelica looked past him at the woman. “Where’s Esteban?”
Anatol grunted as if they each had punched him in the stomach.
Chapter Twenty
When she saw the small crowd of familiar, friendly bots and humans waiting at the Gypsy’s dock, Pearl Angelica had to struggle to hold back the flood of tears. There was Uncle Renny Schafer, pressing through the pack to wrap his arms around both the bot and his wife and say, “I thought we’d never see you again.”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 122
