In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Page 22

  Izin turned and aimed his suppressor at them. “Run!”

  Their eyes widened, then they raced back to the station’s spine to raise the alarm while Izin led the way into the refrigeration compartment.

  “How do we set the suit’s nav targeting to get us there?” I asked.

  “If we allow the suit to plot the course, Captain, it will select the most energy efficient course. That would be a slow transit, giving station security time to locate us.”

  “We can’t doing this manually.”

  “Not you, Captain. I will fly both suits at maximum acceleration.”

  He’d have to crunch two sets of numbers simultaneously in his head, something I needed an autonav to do. “Are you sure about this, Izin?”

  “You could try flying your own suit, Captain, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  No tamph humor this time. Long distance space jumps weren’t seat of your pants flying, they were complex mathematic problems with no room for error. “OK, let’s get this over with.”

  “Assuming control now.”

  My suit ceased moving with me. It now mimicked Izin’s every action, forcing me to move with it.

  When he approached the bulkhead closest to the station’s hull, he said, “Remember, Captain, any unnecessary movement inside your suit will have an inertial effect I will have to compensate for.”

  “Suppose I have to scratch?”

  “Fidgeting will require offsetting thrust which will consume power, reducing your chances of survival.”

  “OK, no scratching,” I said, suddenly itchy all over.

  Our right arms came up together, firing their suppressors as one, blasting a hole through the double lined hull. A torrent of escaping air erupted around us, sweeping us off the deck and hurling us out into space. Inside the station, alarms sounded and emergency pressure doors slammed shut, sealing off the decompressing section from the rest of the habitat.

  We tumbled away from the massive station cross-arm, out of the local acceleration field into zero gravity, then Izin fired the thrusters bringing us around to face the Merak Star docked one and a half clicks away. The sound of thrusters filled my suit’s headspace – there was no helmet – as Izin wasted no time going straight to full power. Acheron Station had few genuine viewports, but it was well lit to give nearby ships good visibility. Those same floodlights now lit us up, although from a distance we’d be indistinguishable from thrusterbots.

  I forced myself to relax, to make Izin’s job as easy as possible. There was a constant hiss of escaping air behind my neck now that we were in vacuum, while in front of my eyes, a flashing indicator warned life support was eating through my air supply as it fought to prevent the suit’s atmosphere from thinning. In the distance, our destination cross-arm appeared like a band of light against the nebula’s impenetrable blackness.

  When we were halfway there, Izin rolled the two OA suits head over heels in perfect unison and began decelerating, bringing the cross-arm we’d left behind into view. Spider-like hull crawlers were already working to patch the rupture, which station engineers would have discovered by now had not been caused by a mechanical failure.

  “How long, Izin?”

  “Three minutes, twenty seconds.”

  “They know we blew a hole in their space station.”

  “Captain, it would be better if you refrained from speaking while I’m performing simultaneous sets of complex delta-vee calculations.”

  I shut up, letting him do his thing while I watched for company. Soon I noticed a pair of bright lights moving toward us, growing rapidly in size. It didn’t take long to realize they were thrusterbots on an intercept course. Knowing Izin’s calculations were about to get a whole lot more complicated, I retrieved my suit’s suppressor specifications from bionetic memory.

  “Izin, the muzzle velocity of my suppressor is twelve thousand, one hundred and forty meters per second per forty six gram projectile.”

  “If I wasn’t so busy calculating ways to save your life, Captain, I’d wonder why you’ve memorized such an obscure number.”

  “Yeah, well we’ve got company and I’m about to start shooting.” I dialed up the suppressor’s fire controller and set the rate. “Twenty rounds per second, three second bursts. Got that?”

  “The recoil will be severe, Captain. I will lose control of your suit.”

  “That’s why I gave you the number, because they’re not coming out here to give us a wash and a wax.”

  When the two thrusterbots were only a few seconds out, they focused their floodlights on us, ensuring anyone watching saw exactly what we were.

  “I need my suit back,” I said. “Now!”

  The Shinagawa thrusterbots yawed as they slid in behind us on a collision course. They were unarmed, but they didn’t need weapons. With industrial strength arms able to move starship hull segments, they could rip our arms off like butterfly wings.

  “Releasing control,” Izin said.

  My suit came to life around me as a proximity alert began flashing. I rotated a quarter turn, bringing my suppressor to bear on the machine headed for me, but held fire, knowing I had one chance before the recoil would send me spinning away uncontrollably. When the giant bot was almost on top of me, it reached out with both its massive arms, its finger-like manipulators snapping open ready to crush me. I thrusted up, dodging the arms, then fired at its body. A muted burping sound filled the suit, spewing neutronium tipped rounds into the thrusterbot as the suppressor’s kick sent me tumbling backwards.

  My suit rang like a bell as one of the thrusterbot’s massive arms struck me side on, sending me flailing away even faster, then there was a flash as it exploded behind me. Spinning fast, close to blacking out from the g-forces, the blur of the station’s lights raced across my screen, over and over again against the nebula’s blackness, then my suit’s stabilizers fired automatically, slowly killing my spin. When I saw the thrusterbot again, it was adrift, wracked by secondary explosions flashing within.

  Off to my left, Izin was being pursued by the second Shinagawa machine. He was firing a constant stream of suppressor rounds into its hull while he manually fired his stabilizers to soak up the recoil. The thrusterbot froze as Izin circled it, continuing to fire until it exploded, hurling a giant arm at him. He narrowly dodged a collision, then glided quickly to me, assuming control of my suit and turning us both toward the Merak Star without a word. I knew he was moving fast because of the energy we’d burned through, so I kept quiet as we started decelerating again. To my surprise, we didn’t fly side by side as before. Instead, Izin flew up to me and planted his boots on my shoulders, pinning them to my suit’s head bulge.

  “What are you doing?” I asked at last.

  “Neither suit has sufficient power to complete the jump,” he said without any attempt to sugarcoat the bad news.

  Below my boots, the station’s cross-arm was racing up at us, too fast and too close now for us to stop in time.

  “I suppose crashing into the station is out of the question?” I suggested.

  “The suits would survive the impact, but our bodies would not.”

  Once again a helpless passenger, I watched Izin aim for a point astern of the Merak Star, intending to graze the cross-arm rather than crash into it. Another alert began flashing on my headscreen, warning my suit’s power supply was dangerously low. Soon, the Silver Lining’s crescent shaped hull came into view, hiding between the Merak Star’s stern and the station’s hull.

  When we were close to the freighter, Izin’s thruster died, shut down by his suit to preserve energy for life support. His power cell’s early depletion was the price of his fancy flying against the thrusterbot. With only my thruster slowing us now, Izin climbed down until we were chest to chest, locking arms as we swept past the Merak Star’s huge engine exhausts. For a moment, we were almost close enough to touch the Silver Lining sheltering behind the freighter’s stern, then we skimmed the station’s hull on an oblique trajectory. A few seco
nds later, we cleared the cross-arm, then my suit shut down the thruster, saving enough juice to keep life support going until my air ran out.

  Arm in arm, we drifted toward the Acheron’s inky blackness.

  “Nice try, Izin. We almost made it,” I lamented as he locked our legs together. If it hadn’t been for the thrusterbots, he’d have got us to the ship, but even his mighty tamph brain couldn’t calculate every possibility. “I wonder if Jase knows where we are?” One of my metal coffin’s arms wrapped itself around Izin’s shoulders as his arms embraced my torso. “I hadn’t expected to die cuddling a tamph, but I guess there are worse ways to go. You could be a snakehead, or Jase’s mother.”

  “We are where we need to be, Captain. And so there is no misunderstanding, I’m not cuddling you, I’m anchoring you. Standby.”

  “For what?”

  My suit’s free arm extended straight out from my chest, past Izin’s head, then my suppressor fired a six second burst into space. The heavy recoil stopped our forward motion and sent us drifting slowly back to the station, rotating slightly. He’d angled my arm to minimize spin, but the angle had been off a little. When I was facing the Merak Star, Izin fired a single shot behind me, offsetting our rotation and slightly increasing our drift toward the station.

  “You planned to use the suppressors all along!” I said incredulously. He’d got his calculations right after all!

  “It was your idea, Captain. Each suit has ten thousand rounds. That’s a lot of kinetic energy.”

  “When exactly did you work this out?”

  “As soon as you told me the muzzle velocity.”

  No wonder he’d flown like a fighter pilot against the thrusterbot! He knew he had energy to spare!

  “You could have told me.”

  “I assumed you knew.”

  “Is this going to be a hard landing?”

  “I’ll try not to break you, Captain.”

  Now that I knew I wasn’t going to die in the Acheron Abyss cuddling a tamph in a tin box, I began scanning apprehensively for more thrusterbots. This close to the station with our thrusters cold, we’d be hard to detect, but if they’d plotted our trajectory correctly, they’d know where we were. Fortunately, nothing approached us as we drifted back past the station, heading for the Merak Star.

  Izin shifted his arm slowly away to the right, turning us to the left, then my suppressor fired once, nudging us toward the Silver Lining. There was very little space between her hull and the freighter on one side and Acheron Station on the other.

  “It took some sweet flying to get her in there,” I said appreciatively.

  “That’s what Jase said – repeatedly – when he did it.”

  “In that case, I’ll bawl him out for scratching the paint work.”

  “I don’t believe he did any damage to the ship’s outer coating, Captain.”

  “We’ll scratch it on the way in,” I said mischievously. “Just a little scratch, enough to dock him a day’s pay!”

  Izin fired a shot from his arm cannon and another from mine, pushing us toward the Silver Lining’s starboard airlock. A short distance away, the flimsy pressure tube snaked its way between the Merak Star and Acheron Station.

  “I’m tempted to put a burst into that tube,” I said, “just for laughs.”

  “That would be inadvisable, Captain. The reaction force would push us away from the ship and alert the station to our position.”

  “Yeah,” I said disappointed as we reached the airlock, “and we still have to get out of here.”

  With over a hundred Drake ships docked within weapon’s range, that would be no easy task.

  We parked the fighting suits in the corridor outside the airlock, then Izin went to engineering to power up the ship while I went to the bridge.

  “The station’s broadcasting an escaped prisoner alert,” Jase said as I hurried to my acceleration couch. “Killing the jailer has got them real mad.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said, switching my display to sensors and searching for Acheron Station’s energy plant. One look told me the station’s neutrino emissions were indistinguishable from all the Drake ships alongside, forcing me to shelve any thought of putting an anti-ship drone where it would do the most good. “We’ll blink to the gravity mines and run through before they can catch us.” Izin already had us half way to full power, making the Silver Lining visible to any Drake ship bothering to look. “I assume you can get us out of here?”

  Jase grinned. “Getting out will be easier than getting in.”

  He took the helm, tickled the thrusters and sent us drifting out of our cramped hiding place. The big screen wrapping around our control positions all the way to the aft bulkhead showed how close Acheron Station and the freighter were as we slid into view of a Drake raider berthed astern of the Merak Star. Her hull was blackened and scarred, and she could have crippled us with a single shot, but we turned across her bow without a response.

  By the time we were clear, I had the autonav ready for a sub-light hop out to the minefield, having overridden its protest at being unable to find any stellar reference points. For a machine designed to fly blind across Mapped Space, it had a peculiar dislike of not knowing where it was.

  “There are four ships maneuvering off the station and one powering up to undock,” Jase said as he returned helm control to me. “None heading our way.”

  Five ships that could give chase at short notice was bad luck for us. I’d hoped the Drakes would all be docked and manned by skeleton crews when we ran.

  “What about the Super Saracens?”

  “The fleet’s gone. Only the refits are left.”

  A gruff voice sounded from the flight deck’s comm system. “Ship in zone theta, identify yourself.”

  I nodded for Jase to open a channel. “This is the Cormorant. What do you want?” I barked aggressively, bringing our maneuvering engines to life to put distance between us and the station.

  “Who’s your Captain?”

  “Gwandoya,” I replied. “Big guy, melted face, bad teeth. You’ve heard of him.”

  “Shut down your engines!”

  “I don’t take orders from you,” I snapped, buying time.

  “I’m the station master! No one undocks unless I say so!”

  “Screw you! I have permission!”

  “And I have six pulse cannons targeting you. Last chance, tough guy!”

  We had good inertia now, enough to carry us into clear space. “OK, OK, shutting down.”

  For several valuable seconds, we drifted away from the station, then the station master’s voice sounded again. “What are you doing? Get back to the station!”

  “You told me to shut down my engines!” I said. “Now you want them back on?”

  “Use thrusters, you idiot!” the station master ordered with rising anger.

  I nodded for Jase to pull sensors as I starting charging our spacetime distorters.

  “Hey!” the station master yelled as he detected the energy build up around the Lining’s hull. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  We blinked to the inner edge of the gravity minefield. Before our sensors had even deployed, I kicked the maneuvering engines to thirty-five g’s and began accelerating blind toward the mines. Soon we were slip sliding through heavily curved spacetime, slewing into one artificial gravity well after another.

  We soon picked up the station master broadcasting on every channel. “All ships! An unknown vessel is heading for the minefield! Zero six five by one eight nine. Intercept and destroy!” The urgency in his voice was laced with fear that we were spies about to escape with Acheron Station’s most closely guarded secret, its location. Once Earth Navy knew how to find their base, the Drakes would have to abandon it, leaving them crippled for years until a replacement could be built.

  “Here they come!” Jase warned as three of the ships maneuvering for berths suddenly went to full power.

  “They won’t risk the minefield,” I said, glancing at the
screen now filling with rotating ovoids. Each gravity mine was equipped with a pair of acceleration fields that created an hourglass depression in spacetime strong enough to collapse any bubble with devastating consequences.

  “We’ve got company,” Jase said, orienting the port side of the screen toward a stretched disk-shaped passenger ferry with maneuvering engines above and below the hull. Two short range energy weapons on her bow glowed hot as they charged to fire. Moments later, a space tug unbubbled several clicks to starboard. She was little more than a huge circular engine behind a tiny trapezoid hull armed with a belly mounted turret. Its massive engine went to full power, sending it speeding into the minefield after us.

  “The big ferry’s about to fire!” Jase warned, raising our battle shield.

  “It’s the other one I’m worried about,” I said, concerned its belly turret showed no thermal build up.

  The flash of an explosion flared ten clicks away as a third Drake ship overshot, jumping into the minefield where its fragile bubble collapsed, tearing its hull apart and detonating its energy core. A brilliant white blast sphere inflated rapidly, vaporizing every gravity mine in its path and washing over the Silver Lining’s shield. Our view screen dimmed, automatically saving us from flash blindness as the blast momentarily hid us from the two surviving Drake ships.

  “Those crazy bastards!” Jase exclaimed.

  Once the blast wave had passed, the Silver Lining stopped floundering in curved space, now free of the gravity mines destroyed in the explosion.

  “Have we got flat space ahead?” I asked, charging our distorters, waiting for the white noise to clear.

  “I can’t tell,” Jase said, staring helplessly at his overloaded sensors.

  I ordered the autonav to plot a tenth of a light year bubble thirty degrees to starboard, hoping that would throw off the Drakes and carry us clear of the Acheron without crossing any natural gravity hazards. By the time the screen cleared, the space tug had moved well ahead of the ferry. Her belly turret was still ominously cold, and now a dark square of an open hatch had appeared, marking it as a launcher, not a gun.

  “This is going to hurt,” I said softly, surprised to find any Drake ship armed with anti-ship drones. Brotherhood ships preferred crippling weapons, so they could capture and loot their victims, but ASDs were dedicated ship killers, most designed to target a ship’s energy core.