Drifter (19 page)

Orlow wanted to say "yes," but shook her head instead.

"Besides," Tawson said smugly, "if all goes well, you and your crew will receive a bonus."

Money didn't mean much to Orlow. She loved the process of running her ship. Had it been up to her, Orlow would've said, "To hell with the bonus, let's stay on schedule."

But Tawson was an exec, the kind that gets ahead more on politics than profit, and wouldn't understand. And neither would Orlow's crew. They
liked
money, and the ones near enough to hear were grinning with anticipation, eager to grab an easy bonus.

The captain sighed. She had very little choice but to see it through. She issued a stream of orders.

Lando's hands were damp. He wiped them on his thighs. The freighter was close now, so close that its huge landing bay filled the main screen and flooded the control room with light.

He saw acres of scarred deck, worn traffic decals, and a double row of beat-up shuttles. They were short, stubby ships, equipped with in-system drives, and used for bringing ore out of the asteroids. Each vessel had a large white number painted along its flank.

Wendy licked dry lips and looked at Lando. What would he do? The edges of the hatch slid by and she felt something heavy land in the pit of her stomach. They had arrived in the monster's belly.

Lando fired the ship's repellors as
The Tink
came under the influence of the larger vessel's powerful argrav generators.

There was movement over to the right, and Wendy saw some space-armored figures spill out of a lock and take up positions along the right side of the bay.

Lando lifted an eyebrow in surprise. Either the vessel's captain had stripped the crew or called out the shuttle pilots. The second possibility seemed most likely.

A voice came over the comset. "This is Dulo Tawson, Executive Vice President Employee Utilization, Sector One. Put Lester Haas on-screen."

Lando looked at Wendy, and she shrugged. Lando replied voice only. "Haas here. Sorry about the video, sir. Most of the gear aboard this ship is little more than junk."

There was silence for a moment as Tawson thought that over. Given the circumstances, there wasn't much he could do but go along with it. "I understand. You're in control?"

Lando smiled. "Yes, sir. No problems here."

"Good. We're releasing the tractor beams. Follow the yellow robo-guide and land as indicated."

"Yes, sir."

Lando felt
The Tink
jerk slightly as the tractor beams were released. This was the moment that he'd been waiting for. He ignored the hovering robo-guide, activated the ship's weapons systems, and started to turn.

Tawson sounded angry. "Haas? What the hell are you doing? Turn that…" Lando killed the comset.

Blue light flared as the freighter's crew opened fire with blast rifles. The energy beams didn't even register on
The Tink's
force field.

The smuggler spun the ship on its axis. The hatch was straight ahead. Safety beacons strobed bright red as the massive black- and yellow-striped doors started to close. The bastards were trying to trap him inside the bay!

Lando thumbed a protective cover out of the way and touched a button.
The Tink
shuddered as a pair of missiles raced for the doors.

"Hang on!"

The words and the explosions came together. Wendy was pressed back into her seat as Lando applied full emergency power and blasted towards the hatch. She closed her eyes and waited for the impact. It never came.

She opened her eyes. Man-made lightning probed the darkness around them as it tried to find and destroy their ship.

Lando smiled and started to speak. Something hit
The Tink
and sent her spinning out of control. Most likely a missile, since energy beams don't pack any mass.

Alarms began to hoot, bleat, and wail. The NAVCOMP spoke in its usual measured sentences:

"This ship has sustained major damage. I repeat, this ship has sustained major damage. The hyperdrive is inoperable, the in-system drive is seventy-percent effective, the life-support system is ninety-one percent and falling…"

Lando decided to ignore the rest and concentrate on controlling the ship. Some of the ship's main steering jets had been destroyed and others damaged. Gradually, bit by bit, the smuggler found ways to balance the ones that still worked against those that were damaged but still operable.

Control was reestablished seventy-four seconds later. Lando activated the tac tank and took a look. The freighter was still there, a blinking red blob, and made no attempt to follow. Lando knew that might change, and change fast, once they realized that
The Tink
was something more than a drifting hulk.

Lando scanned both the systems readouts and the tac tank, looking for options. There weren't any. He couldn't jump to another system as long as the hyperdrive remained belly-up, and he couldn't outrun them with a damaged in-system drive. And, just to keep things interesting, the life-support systems were heading south as well. They'd be wearing space armor in another fifteen or twenty minutes. He had to hide, but where?

Wendy bit her lip as Lando looked at the tac tank. It was a tossup between Terra and Mars in terms of distance, but while the red planet was still a little bit wild and woolly, Earth was the province of government and the large corporations. Not a place where smugglers spent much time. Lando touched some keys. Mars it would be.

The freighter was not a warship, so the com officer doubled on weapons. "They have the ship under control, Captain. They're heading for Mars."

"So what?" Captain Orlow said sourly. "We have a landing bay that can't be pressurized, plus damage to the Number Four power feed. Why did they route the damn thing past the hatch anyway?"

"Never mind that," Tawson said tersely. "Get this bucket going. I want those people, and I want them now."

Orlow turned towards the executive and placed her hands on her meaty hips. "Oh, you do, do you? Well, guess what? We're done playing cops and robbers. This ship's damaged and I'm taking her in."

Tawson's face grew dark with anger. "You forget yourself, Captain! I'm an executive and you'll do what I say!"

Orlow's mouth turned downwards. "What you say doesn't pull any G's out here, mister. I'm the master of this ship. Besides, it will take about a quarter-million to repair the damage to this ship, and we'll see how the home office likes that."

Tawson swallowed. Orlow had a point. What had seemed like a sure-fire opportunity to impress his boss had turned into a full-scale disaster.

It wasn't clear what had transpired aboard the other ship, but it seemed likely that Haas was dead, or being held prisoner.

Although Tawson didn't really care what happened to the ex-bounty hunter, he
did
care about his reputation in the company, and couldn't afford to back off. No, he'd have to see the whole thing through. Headquarters would ignore the quarter-million if he succeeded, but Sol help him if he failed.

Tawson cleared his throat. "I'm sorry about the damage, Captain Orlow, but if they get away it will reflect poorly on both of us, and we should do our best to stop them. Surely you can see that?"

Orlow was somewhat mollified by the executive's more reasonable tone, and knew that he was right. Right or wrong, the incident would reflect on her as well, and given the shortage of commands, she couldn't afford to ignore politics altogether. Still, Orlow had to think about the safety of the ship, and any further risk was completely unacceptable. A compromise was in order and the Captain had an idea that might work.

Orlow forced a smile. "You have a point, Executive Tawson. And, although I can't go along with any plan that would place this ship in further peril, I can still offer some assistance."

Orlow explained her plan to Tawson, and his face lit up with grim excitement. He nodded enthusiastically. "Captain, I like the way you think. We make a good team. We'll find those vermin and stamp them out. The credit will be shared equally."

13

The Tink
came in low and slow, her nav beacons blinking on and off, sliding into an awkward turn as the smuggler babied the damaged thrusters. Mars had very little atmosphere, so it took lots of power to hold the ship up. Lando had been living in his space armor for the better part of a day. His hands felt clumsy.

Mars Prime was huge. The city rose before them like a dark blanket of plastic and steel, once home to seventeen million souls, now little more than shattered domes and empty streets.

Oh, there was life all right, dark forms that scuffled, whirred, and clanked through the city on even darker errands. They were all that was left of a brighter past in which heavily laden colony ships had landed every day of the year to be stripped of useful metal and absorbed into the city. Mars Prime had grown at the rate of one square mile per month back then, absorbing some of Terra's excess population, and functioning as a sort of socioeconomic relief valve.

But history is fickle, and what might have been one of the empire's great cities had become a monument to technological change instead. Just when Mars Prime had reached its height, and seemed assured of lasting status, a woman named Dortoro Nakula had perfected the Nakula Drive.

Though slower than the speed of light, the Nakula Drive was a huge improvement over the propulsion systems available at that time, and when combined with recently developed suspended animation techniques, it made travel to other solar systems a real possibility.

It was only a matter of months before huge colony ships were under construction and thousands of would-be settlers had signed on to fill them. There were paradise planets to be settled, or so the promoters promised, and the land rush was on.

Why so many of the residents of Mars Prime were willing to fling themselves into space aboard untried ships will never be fully understood. Maybe it was the fact that Mars Prime was packed full of people with nothing to lose; maybe conditions were so bad that a roll of the dice looked better than what they had; or maybe it was a form of mass hysteria.

Whatever the reason, Lando knew that within a period of ten short years Mars Prime had become little more than a ghost town. Now it was almost empty, populated by the leavings of the great exodus, and the ghosts of those who had died in the blackness of space. Their ships were little more than drifting graveyards, their desiccated bodies sealed inside coffinlike animation chambers, their dreams fallen like dust around them.

Some of those ships were still being found, distress signals beeping, hundreds, or even thousands, of lights away from their original destinations. The thought made Lando shiver.

Mars had other cities, of course, bright, well-kept places, built since the early days of space travel, since the time of the great leaving, but they were elsewhere and out of sight.

Darkness gathered as Lando skimmed the periphery of the city. Phobos was low on the horizon. A speck of white against the backdrop of space. Lights could be seen below, pinpoints of life in the dark warren of broken domes and wreckage-strewn streets, maggots living within the corpse of a long-dead city.

Wendy wrinkled her nose. The instrument panel threw greenish-gold light up across the lower part of her helmet.

"It looks pretty ominous down there. Are you sure this is the best place to land?"

Lando gave a shrug. "No, but the other possibilities would be even worse. This isn't the rim, you know… they have rules around here. Lots of them.

"If we land at one of the nicer domes, they'll want to know how we got shot up, who did it, and why. We'd give our version, Mega-Metals would provide theirs, and you can imagine the rest. We'd be ass-deep in lawyers, your cargo would end up under a battalion of microscopes, and the entire plan would go belly-up. Mars Prime might be ugly, but it's relatively safe."

Wendy frowned. "Okay… but how does that square with your call to the navy?"

"That was different," the smuggler said evenly. "Mega-Metals was busy hauling us in. The navy looked pretty good right about then."

A diamond-shaped pattern of lights snapped into existence below. No radio procedures, no formalities, just a "come on down."

Lando killed speed and fired the ship's repellors. Some worked and some didn't. Gloved fingers poked here and there as he tried to balance them out.

"And now we're doing just fine," Wendy said, watching dark duracrete rush up to meet them.

"Yeah," Lando said as he glanced her way. "Now we're doing just fine."

One of the damaged thrusters went belly-up right at the critical moment, and
The Tink
hit with a spine-jarring thump.

As usual, the ship gave a groan of protest, slumped to port, and leaked fluid. Only this time the leaks were real and would have to be fixed.

A figure in shiny black armor appeared in front of the ship, held up a pair of luminescent light batons, and waved them to the right.

Lando swore, fired
The Tink's
repellors, and followed the green cones into a dimly lit bay. Then, on a signal from the figure in black, he lowered the ship onto blast-scarred duracrete.