gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap (7 page)

At the same time she was closing up her own suit. She pushed a button on the small control unit on her wrist, then said, “Follow me.”

They went to a hatch in the floor, one that opened up into the cargo bay. There was a ladder attached to the bulkhead, one she climbed down without waiting for him. Fine; she knew where she was going, and he didn’t. The ship rocked again, and this time the missile must have hit the cockpit, killing the controls, as all around him was plunged into darkness. A series of red emergency lights switched on immediately, but something about their illumination was faint and wavering, and Derek guessed they weren’t long for this world, either.

He grabbed the ladder and let himself drop — or at least, he attempted to. His stomach seemed to swim up into his throat as he found himself floating. That last hit must have killed the artificial-gravity generators.

“Here,” came Cassidy’s voice through the speaker embedded in his helmet, and he felt her gloved fingers touch his, yank him away from the ladder. He was glad of her touch, glad to hear her speaking, because those things helped to center him somewhat, to make him feel as if he wasn’t spinning through an unending darkness. Her grip was stronger than he’d imagined it would be, given her somewhat fragile appearance, tight and unyielding. “You okay?”

“Yes,” he said, although he wasn’t sure how accurate that assessment actually was. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He’d been to the Moon several times, but that was the limit of his experience with space travel, save the trip to Titan, when he’d been drugged within an inch of his life to keep him from putting up any sort of a struggle. His interests had always been focused on Gaia, on making the planet beautiful and livable again.

“Good,” Cassidy replied, although something in her tone told him she didn’t really believe his answer. “Hang on — I need to get two of the spare oxygen tanks. And after that I’m going to open the cargo bay doors.”

The first part of that sounded sensible enough. The rest? “You’re going to what?”

“One more direct hit, and the ship is gone. So we need to be gone, too.”

“Where exactly do you plan to go?”

A low chuckle came over the speaker. “You’ll see.”

He didn’t know how to answer that, so he remained silent as they bumped along a wall, then stopped at the locker. Her gloved fingers fumbled with the latch — the process made even more difficult because she didn’t let go of him with her other hand — and then she had it open, was pulling out two long, silvery cylinders before handing one to him.

“Hang on to that like your life depends on it,” she instructed. “Because it probably does.”

Tucking the cylinder under one arm seemed the best solution, so he did that while she grasped the second one. They bumped along the wall, feeling the ship shudder under them once again.

She muttered, “Dead in space, and they’re still firing on us. Bastards.” But she didn’t stop, continued to keep them moving through the cargo bay, until she paused at a control panel that had a flashing red light mounted on top of it.

Not sure exactly what she was planning, Derek watched as she briefly slipped the cylinder she carried under one arm so she had a hand free to reach out, grasp the lever, and pull it down. Immediately, a set of large doors began to retract into the ship’s hull, showing a vast panoply of winking stars. There was no rush of air being sucked into the vacuum of space, as the cargo bay had never been pressurized in the first place.

Cassidy paused there, staring out into the blackness, and then he saw her give a brief nod. “Got you, you fucker.”

“Got whom?” he asked.

“Hang on,” she answered, which wasn’t an answer at all. Taking the cylinder from under her arm, she fiddled with the valve on top. Immediately afterward, air began to stream from it, propelling them out of the protection of the ship and into open space.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted into the mic. “We need that air!”

“All the air in the world isn’t going to do us any good if we don’t have some way of getting out of here. Look.” She couldn’t point, as one hand was occupied with the cylinder, using it as a sort of miniature propulsion unit, while the other was still clinging to him with a death grip, but she did sort of incline her head into the blackness.

Maybe there was a faint glint of something there…or maybe he was just imagining things. “What is it?”

“One of our friends. Usually, when a ship is disabled, they leave pickets like this, keeping an eye on things, while the others in the squadron go in for a closer look. That means he’s separated from the others, and a target.”

“A target?” Derek repeated. His head was spinning slightly, and he didn’t think it was just because of the over-oxygenated air mixture he was currently breathing. “How can he be a target when we don’t have anything to target him with?”

“We have ourselves,” she said calmly, still propelling them forward, heading toward that faint glint, the one that now was resolving itself into the shape of a sleek two-man fighter.

And while he attempted to puzzle that one out, the GDF ship grew closer and closer. Now Derek could see she was coming up from behind, out of the pilot’s visual range.

“Don’t they have sensors that could pick us up?” he asked in a murmur, worried that the GDF pilots might somehow be able to scan their communications.

“Not likely. These fighter craft aren’t built to scan for lifeforms, just ships and objects above a certain size. We’re below that threshold.”

That sounded encouraging. At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering how Cassidy Evans, pilot of one of the system’s more rundown freighters, was privy to this sort of information. “And you know all this how?”

Another one of those low, grim chuckles. “About five years ago I dated a fighter pilot whose squadron was stationed at the base at Luna City. He liked to talk a big game, but since his main duty seemed to be providing escort duty to diplomats and muckety-mucks getting ferried back and forth from Gaia, I doubt he ever saw any real combat. But, as I said, he liked to talk, and I liked to listen. Yeah, he was telling me things that could’ve gotten him court-martialed if anyone ever found out, but I didn’t share any of it, and he bought my big-eyed ‘gee whiz’ act. Anyway, you never know when you might pick up something valuable that could help you later on.”

That was for damn sure. “So what’s the plan?”

She closed the valve on the oxygen cylinder and let it drift away, its work done. They were now still moving slowly toward the ship and would continue to do so, now that they’d been set in motion. “All these ships have an external emergency release for the cockpit canopy. You access it from a panel directly behind the gunner. I’ll pop it, and then we’ll yank those bastards out of their comfy padded seats and let them find out how fun it is to breathe space.”

“Surely they have flight suits — ”

“Yes, they do. Rated for exactly three minutes of exposure to vacuum. So maybe their friends will come along and rescue them before then, but I kind of doubt it.”

This whole plan sounded like it was predicated on any number of “ifs,” and Derek didn’t find any of it very appealing. But they were committed now. It was the lives of the two men in that ship, or his and Cassidy’s. And considering that the members of that squadron hadn’t shown any compunction about firing on an unarmed vessel, he decided he’d probably better put aside his squeamishness.

Now the ship was only a few meters away. He held his breath, thinking that surely its occupants must see them, must realize they weren’t alone out here. But he and Cassidy were approaching in what was effectively a blind spot, so maybe she’d been right. All he could do was hope the ship wouldn’t get some kind of signal from its compatriots and switch on its thrusters, or the two of them would be instantly incinerated.

The little ship seemed to drift there in the empty space between worlds, though, not moving, doing as Cassidy had said, which was keeping watch while the others did their dirty work. From behind him, he caught a brilliant orange flare at the very edges of his peripheral vision, and he realized the
Avalon
must have been fired on again, this time being utterly destroyed.

Maybe there was the faintest of sighs coming from the helmet speaker. He realized then that Cassidy had just lost her home, the only one she’d ever known. The barest of pauses, and she said, “Let’s do this. I’ll get the emergency release, then take care of the pilot, since I need to be flying this thing. You get the gunner.”

She made it sound so easy, as if the whole thing required no more effort than pulling on a pair of pants. No going back now, though, so he replied, “Got it.”

“On my mark. One…two…three!”

And her gloved fingers were on the surface of the ship, pulling herself along, while Derek did the same, moving on the opposite side of the vessel from her so she could access the emergency release and then pull herself forward unimpeded. A second, then two, and the canopy flipped backward, revealing two men wearing zero-g suits and helmets, but not the heavy spacesuits he and Cassidy had on. The helmeted heads swiveled around, trying to see what had caused the malfunction, and Derek yanked himself upward, grasped the buckle of the man’s harness and undid it, even as the gunner swung his hand at Derek’s helmet, attempting to crack the duraplast visor.

A wave of fury went over him, and he returned the favor, only with more success, as the gunner’s helmet wasn’t latched as firmly to his suit as Derek’s own was. The black helmet went tumbling out into space, the man’s eyes widening in fear as Derek pulled him free from his harness and kicked him in the stomach, sending him hurtling into the dark.

He looked forward, thinking he would need to assist Cassidy, but she’d had much the same thought, had torn the helmet from the pilot’s head and taken advantage of his shock to undo his harness and push him out of the cockpit.

“Get in!” she shouted, and he managed to squeeze himself into the gunner’s seat, although the bulky spacesuit was making the procedure more difficult than he would have liked. But somehow he managed to accomplish the task, and the canopy dropped over their heads just as he was buckling the harness over his chest.

The fighter craft leaped forward, moving away from the remains of the
Avalon
. All around him readouts were blinking, but he couldn’t decipher the information they were attempting to relay.

“Hang on,” Cassidy said as the ship continued to accelerate. “I think our friends’ buddies just realized something went wrong with their picket ship. We’ve got to outrun them.”

“How can we outrun them if they’re flying the same kind of ship?”

“Because we have a head start.”

He’d never had this experience of speed in any other ship he’d been on, not the shuttles that had taken him back and forth to the Moon, and certainly not in the sluggish
Avalon
. It almost sounded as if the engines were whining, which he knew was impossible, since sound didn’t carry in vacuum.

It was impossible to look back, so he had to trust Cassidy, trust that she knew what she was doing.

And hope like hell that she knew what she was doing.

CHAPTER FIVE

She’d never flown a ship like this before. If it weren’t for their current dire circumstances, in that first moment of acceleration, she would have thrown her head back and laughed out of pure joy.

This thing was fast. So fast, so sleek and responsive. She had no doubt the personnel in the other fighter craft were desperately trying to contact her, but since they were all on a different frequency from the one her suit and Derek’s shared, she heard nothing. Only blessed silence.

The readouts told her the other eleven ships were regrouping and coming after them. So much for attempting to rescue their stranded comrades. Although the enormity of what she had just done would probably catch up with her later, right now she wouldn’t let herself think too much about that, especially not when it was either those two GDF pilots or her and Derek. Not much of a choice.

“Deploying countermeasures,” she said, falling into the no-nonsense delivery of a military pilot, even though she doubted her companion cared about protocols. In that moment, it seemed it would help to keep her head on straight if she did everything by the book…even if it was a book she’d never actually read.

Derek’s voice came through the helmet speaker. “Countermeasures?”

“Basically, drones that carry traces of fuel, designed to clutter up the space between us and an enemy, fool their missiles.” She touched the button on the screen, and at once the cluster of countermeasure devices fell behind them and began to spread out, confusing the signal they were leaving behind and, hopefully, mucking with any missiles the remaining GDF ships might fire at them.

That task done, she began scanning the other readouts, seeing where they were in terms of fuel and oxygen. Yes, they’d blown a whole lot of atmosphere into space when they popped the canopy, but the backup oxygen tanks had already kicked in. There was plenty left, at least a good twenty hours’ worth, and they still each had a few hours of air left in the tanks attached to their spacesuits as well.

Fuel levels were also good. These ships were system craft, and so they didn’t possess the subspace engines necessary to propel a vessel the unimaginable distances between the stars. No, their propulsion systems wouldn’t have seemed too strange to engineers from several hundred years in the past, although they were far more efficient, capable of reaching speeds no long-ago shuttle or probe could have hoped to match.

The best thing to do would be to push the little starship to the utter limit of what it could manage. Yes, if their pursuers were dedicated — and crazy — enough, they might do the same, but then they’d risk stranding themselves among the outer worlds. Titan was the last outpost of civilization, except for the one place she was pretty sure a bunch of GDF ships really wouldn’t want to go…which meant it was the perfect destination for her and Derek.

Cassidy poured on the power, watching in satisfaction as the red blips indicating their pursuers began to drop behind. Smaller blips emerged from those moving dots, and she knew they must have fired. Missiles were faster than ships, but they still had to find their target.