Joss knit his brows together, then abruptly let them loose. "Fortune favors the brave," he said. "Or something like that.
But plainly we can't wait for HQ to get off their butts." He shook his head. "What is going on with them?"
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"With luck, this will all be over by the time we need to find out. Meanwhile, let's make our preparations.
Think a moment."
"Yes," Joss said. He gazed thoughtfully at the radar image of the asteroid. ' 'It looks to me as if a lot of the inside of that is gone. Slagged out and being used for service and so forth."
"And hiding their ships."
"So the actual population is probably pretty small."
"I would think so. Mostly ship's crews and maintenance people. You couldn't afford to have a large population here when you had some big paramilitary operation preparing. It's not even a question of cost.
There's the matter of security as well, of too many people knowing too much."
Joss nodded. "All right. So there won't be twelve million storm troopers with guns in there. How long do you think it'll take you to get at the vital parts? You want to take the main power out, I suppose, and the hardware of the radar. I won't be able to target that, though the masts and dishes and so forth will be no problem. But the hardware has to go. Otherwise an emergency setup could be rigged, and our friends could be called back to save the day."
"I couldn't give you an estimate as yet. I think we need to make one close pass," Evan said, "in to about twenty kilometers, to get a good look with our own radar, and with the mass detectors and your RF-detecting equipment. After that I'll know, and I can drop right away."
"Drop?" said Joss.
"Drop, of course; did you think I was going to ask you to land on that rock, you fool? You stay wingloose and do as much damage as you can, and then guard the upper echelon. I'll just bail out the airlock and make my own way down. You'll want the dropping pass to be closer."
"I should think so," Joss said. "Otherwise you'd take a week to get down, with those titchy little jets of yours."
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"I'll have you know that I can make twenty mips when I'm in the mood."
"And your mileage is crap," Joss said. "Never mind that. I'll start plotting the recon sweep. You had better send a note to Lucretia, and make sure you tell the pad to scramble and pack it before it squirts. I don't want those clowns with their braided lasers hearing anything but a burp from this direction. And we're not going to start the blowing-up part of the operation before another three hours or so have passed. I want a good safety cushion between me and them, thanks."
"That seems fair," Evan said; and truly there was no arguing it.
It took Joss some time to set up his reconnaisance sweep; and then they went back to waiting again. Evan found this hard, even with his suit waiting for him, even with crossword puzzles to keep him busy. And images of Mell kept intruding. He spent a while writing the message to Lucretia, describing what they were going to be doing, and approximately when; he checked his suit over and over again, paying especial attention to the weapons systems. His beamers in particular were overcharged, which suited him well, and he was well stocked with the little Dart missiles that loaded from his backpack. All his electronics were in order.
There was nothing to do but wait.
And then two hours had passed.
There was still no word from Lucretia. Joss glanced over at him from the command console and said, "Time."
Evan went and got into the suit.
He was twitching slightly as he did so. Usually when he was working in the suit, he was in atmosphere of some kind or another. It was, of course, perfectly spaceworthy. But it was also vulnerable to exactly the same kinds of accidents that less well-armored pressure suits suffered. He could blow a gasket as easily as anyone else, when the suit was in strenuous use.
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As far as he knew, though, it was in perfect condition. He would shortly be finding out.
Joss was already adjusting controls at the command console. "All right," he said. "Going to start swinging in now. You might want to lock yourself down. This is going to be tight and fast. I've been monitoring the frequencies they're using, mostly UHF, and I'll jam all of them that I can on the first pass, and pick up the rest on the second. But the less chance we give them to notice that anything untoward is happening, the better, Ready?"
Evan climbed into the seat next to Joss's. He had already spent some time readjusting the straps, "Let's go," he said.
Joss kicked in the iondrivers.
It was a wild ride, even faster than when they had been running from the altered mining ship, and Joss apparently had no concern for what rapid shifts in gee forces might do to a man's stomach. Evan was beginning to regret the late morning's Spaghetti Carbonara, and said as much.
"Shouldn't eat food that goes down so easy," Joss said, and grinned.
Evan rolled his eyes at him—not hard, since they were in the tightest part of the sweep around the asteroid, the top of the hyperbola. He turned his attention to the holograph. It was filling in with added detail of the asteroid; he could see the masts at either end of it now, like those at Willans, the tight-beam transmittal dishes, and the domes containing the power plants that maintained them. "Those are for you, I think," Joss said. "Here's my business."
He pointed in at the artificially enlarged holes in three places on the asteroid's surface. "The airlocks are down in each of those," he said. "If the correlation I'm doing between the radar and the mass-readers is correct, there's a hangar cave behind each one. Blow the doors off, and it's going to make repairs a lot harder for these people to do in the future. If they have a future. Any ships inside them won't, if I have my way. At the same time, there
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should be pressure-lockable doors inside, so I think we can count on not killing everybody in the place with explosive decompression."
"Good," Evan said. "I'll try not to take too long about the sweep, through, after you've blown the doors."
"Yes, well, you'd better not," Joss said, "because it's going to be difficult for me to make pickup on you if you get in trouble. If I ram this ship into the side of an asteroid, Lucretia is going to cancel both our expense accounts."
"She's such a cheapskate," Evan said, letting loose his grip on his seat slightly, as the gee forces declined somewhat with Joss's easing up on the hyperbolic orbit.
"Now, while you're in there," Joss said, "you're going to have to find out if the place has computers for me. And if it does, you take this." He rummaged around down beside the command console, and handed Evan a small black box about three inches square, with a shiny metal contact panel on one side.
"This," Joss said, "is a comms pack and latchkey for recalcitrant machinery. Odds are I can get access into their computers, if you can get this onto any contact pad or exposed wiring that the computer has.
Make a hole, if you have to. I just wish we still had my cable."
"You'd need a much longer one," Evan said, tucking the access box into one of the pressure-tight bays on his forearm, the one that held spare grenades.
"Too damn true, but I still miss it. Those alligator clips were useful. If you can get this thing in the right spot, I should be able to dump their whole computer memory, at least everything that's presently running in the machine, into ours. And there ought to be something in it that will explain where our friends just went in such a hurry, and why. And who knows what other happy information we'll find at the same time? Do that first if you can. Then run around and wreak some random damage to keep people from interfering with my download.''
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"I think I can manage something of that kind," Evan said.
"I just bet you can. All right," Joss said. "Take a good look at that holo. You want to copy it into your armpad?"
"I have it stored as a sketch already."
"Good. So shout for pickup when y
ou're ready. And stay away from those airlocks until I'm finished with them."
"I'll do that."
"Good. Evan—"
With a look of mild embarrassment, Joss held out a hand. Evan took it.
"Break a leg, you dumb Taff," Joss said.
"Godspeed to you too," Evan said, and headed for the airlock.
He felt the gee forces beginning to pile up again as Joss started the second pass, the really close one. "I'm going to be firing," Joss shouted at him, "so for pity's sake, don't get in my way!"
"The first thing they taught us in Para was to jump backwards," Evan said, as he climbed into the airlock and sealed his helm.
"Oh? What was the second?"
Evan told him. Joss laughed so hard he started to choke.
"All set," Evan said.
Joss finished his choking and said, "Are your comms on scramble?"
"Yes, they are."
"Good. Never hurts to check. Fifteen seconds."
Evan sealed the inner door of Nosey's airlock, waited for the air to exhaust, and opened the outer. Stars wheeled past it; Joss was turning hard.
"Ten seconds. Backward and to your left as you're facing the lock," Joss said. "That's the far end of the asteroid, and the first mast."
"Right you are."
"Five seconds. Three, two, one, jump!"
Evan pushed himself out the lock, hard, and kicked his
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jets in downward and leftward. The ship slipped silently by behind him; he saw the gleam of dim sunlight off the broad silvery parabolic scoop of the iondriver. Evan tucked himself into a ball, gave himself another push of the leg jets, and
"fell" toward the asteroid's surface as quickly as he could.
Off to his right, he could see Nosey diving around toward the first of the huge airlock apertures, not intending to go straight in, but to pass over low. As she did, two bright streaks leapt away from her, down into the hole. A moment later, a huge bloom of blue fire and dust came billowing out. The fire only lasted a second, but the dust kept rising from where the missiles had fallen, a plume already a quarter-kilometer long and still growing. Evan uncurled a bit, eyeing his first target, the comms mast at the narrow end of the asteroid. There was no point in waiting; he could manage a precision strike very well from here, and not have to wait around.
He turned one arm forearm-up, pointed it at the base of the mast, and curled a finger back to hit the patterned release in his palm. The missile kicked out of his arm, pushing him back a little with the recoil. Without thinking, he bent his knees as he fell, corrected with his leg jets, and fired off another, just to be sure. You can never tell, sometimes the cable that serves things like this is armored. . . .
Evan counted silently. On five, the mast blew off the end of the satellite in a rain of splinters of metal and stone. The second missile hit the place where the mast had been anchored, dug a two-meter-deep hole in it, and revealed a thick buried cable, now snapped off short.
Good, Evan thought, and turned his attention to the business of landing. The surface of the asteroid was some three hundred meters below him now and coming up fast. This was no problem; landings in zero gee were something a suited sop was trained in until they presented no more problems than jumping off a bottom step. He landed, bounced hard; the suit's restringing had been a good job,
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and he got much more bounce out of the landing than usual. The first leap bounce was fifty meters long at least, and carried him almost to the next set of antennaes, a dish grouping.
What is it about architects that makes them put all the antennae together in the same place? Evan thought absently, as he pointed another small missile at the middle of the grouping. Sure, the cabling is simpler, but people can come in the middle of the night and do stuff like— this— The dish antennas shattered, leaping off the surface of the asteroid and flying in all directions.
That's the VHP and UHF done, then, and any tight-beam micro they may have. As soon as I get the other one— He bounced faster, concerned that no one had even come out to shoot at him yet. What were they all doing in there? Playing pinochle?
A shudder ran all through the surface of the asteroid when Evan next touched ground. Here comes Joss, he thought, and sure enough in less than thirty seconds the sleek long shape of Nosey came swooping around again, in a tighter approach even than last time, barely fifty meters above the surface, and heading straight for another of the big airlock apertures. Evan saw the bombs rocket down into it, saw the dust and flame come streaming out again, as Joss skimmed past around the other side of the asteroid and was gone.
Diw, but he can fly that thing, Evan thought admiringly as he made his way swiftly across the grey-brown surface to the second mast. He got another missile ready for it. Odds were he wouldn't need them inside the station; for doors and walls he had grenades, and for anything else, his beamer was charged.
"News in from Lucretia," said a voice in his helmet. "You're not going to like it. Details later. Meanwhile, just got the third big hole, and all five of the chicks in the nest. She's all yours."
"Right-o," Evan said, and let his missile loose at the
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second mast. The missile hit it hard, at the base, and the whole thing toppled.
He bounced over to the base just to make sure. The cable had in fact not been severed. He beamed it; it split in a brief haze of smoke and sparks. Then he turned and headed for the nearest of the shattered airlocks.
The hole itself was still intact. Evan swan dived off the edge of it, using his jets to give him some extra push. The airlock doors below had been massive semicircles. They were now a ruin, the thick metal bent back inward. He continued his dive down through them, through the second set of doors—which Joss's bombs had also taken out—and down into what had been the hanger.
The hangar was a spherical area which had been slagged out of the rock; ships had been tethered to its walls and floor. There were hulks there that had been miners' ships once. Joss had beamed them. How he managed it, Evan wasn't sure. He hadn't seen it happening. The hangar had airlocked pressure doors hi several of its walls. Evan chose the middle one, opened it, ducked inside.
There were still lights here, and power; Joss had not yet found the power plant, which was all right with Evan. Alarms were howling all over the place. Well, it could hardly be avoided, with Joss blowing the doors in, and five ships dead in their hangars. No matter. Inside his helm, Evan did the pattern of eyelid-flickers that brought down the radiation-sensitive filter. It was RF he was looking for: computers of the kind Joss was after still tended to leak it. There was a dun glow to his left.
He started off that way, looking around him as he bounced through the corridors. This place was everything that Willans should have been and wasn't: neat, clean, new. Surprisingly new; these hallways could hardly be more than a year old.
He was distracted by a man coming out in front of him, with a gun. The man shot at him.
Slugs? Evan thought with surprise, as the stream of high-velocity bullets piled into him. Normally one didn't use aoo SPACE COPS
slugs in an airtight environment, preferring beams. At any rate, the servos took the difference, helping him keep his balance. He staggered slightly, walked straight into the stream of bullets. The man looked at him in shock and his ammunition clip abruptly ran out. He turned to run away and change it.
Evan lifted his right arm and let the built-in machine gun do the talking for him. The man fell twitching to the floor in a spray of red.
Evan headed past him and looked at a sign on the wall of the T-junction of the corridor. It was in Japanese, both kanji and katakana.
So much for the classical education, Evan thought sadly. He didn't understand Japanese. He consulted his RF detector: it still said left. Experimentally, he tilted his head first up, then down, to see if there was a variation of reading. A little more on the up side, he thought. All right: I want a lift, then.
From around a corner ahead of him, a group of men burst out, all armed. Evan noticed that they were each wearing a sort of coverall that amounted to a uniform; there were what seemed to be rank tags on the sleeves, and possibly name tags as well. But then he had other things to think about, as they opened fire on him.
It was beams as well as slugs this time, and relatively high-powered ones at that. But that was one of the things reflective armor was for, and Evan hadn't kept polishing it for his health. The shine was as much a part of the defense as the ablative coating underneath. He walked right into the stream of fire, the bullets bouncing off all around him, the reflected beams glancing harmlessly off. All right, he thought, let's see if I can't leave one of you lads alive.
He began shooting, with care and resolution: head shots.
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One by one he picked them off with short bursts of the machine gun, wanting to conserve his own ammunition, until there was only one man standing. The look of panic in that man's face was awful, and Evan could understand it perfectly; the horror of the faceless, invulnerable suit bearing down on you was a weapon he had learned to exploit a long time back. The man fired his gun uselessly until it was empty, then turned to run. With great care Evan swept his beamer across the backs of the man's knees, effectively hamstringing him. Screaming, the man fell down.
Evan bounced over to him, grabbed him by the back of his coverall, and jerked him to his feet, shaking him to keep him from going into shock. "Where are the master computers?" he said.
The man stared at him in utter terror. "Where are the computers?" Evan repeated, and for good measure put his hands around the man's neck and began to squeeze. That was something most people understood, especially when they knew something of the power inherent in a suit. Nobody wanted his head twisted off like a chicken's.
"Uh-uh-up one," the man said, "far end."
"Thank you," Evan said. He clouted the man on the side of the head hard enough to keep him asleep for about a day, and dropped him. It was always nice to know that your equipment was giving you the right information.
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