Gods of Risk (10 page)

“Esá, unokabátya,” she said. “Eyes of the world. Toda auge. Mine too.”

She smiled, and just for a second, he thought maybe she’d lift her shirt. For good luck. The tightbeam dropped.

Two hours.

“I repeat, this is Martian frigate
Lucien
to the unidentified ship approaching the Ring. Respond immediately or we will open fire.”

Three minutes. They’d seen him too soon. The Ring was still three minutes away, and they weren’t supposed to see him until he had less than one.

Néo cleared his throat.

“No need, que sa? No need. This is the
Y Que
, racer out sa Ceres Station.”

“Your transponder isn’t on,
Y Que
.”

“Busted, yeah? Need some help with that.”

“Your radio’s working just fine, but I’m not hearing a distress beacon.”

“Not distressed,” he said, pulling the syllables out for every extra second. He could keep them talking. “Ballistic is all. Can fire up the reactor, but it’s going to take a couple minutes. Maybe you can come give a hand, eh?”

“You are in restricted space,
Y Que
,” the Martian said, and Néo felt the grin growing on his face.

“No harm,” Néo said. “No harm. Surrender. Just got to get slowed down a little. Firing it up in a few seconds. Hold your piss.”

“You have ten seconds to change trajectory away from the Ring or we will open fire.”

The fear felt like victory. He was doing it. He was on target for the Ring and it was freaking them out. One minute. He started warming up the reactor. At this point, he wasn’t even lying anymore. The full suite of sensors started their boot sequence.

“Don’t fire,” he said as he made a private jacking-off motion. “Please, sir, please don’t shoot me. I’m slowing down as fast as I can.”

“You have five seconds,
Y Que
.”

He had thirty seconds. The friend-or-foe screens popped up as soon as the full ship system was on. The
Lucien
was going to pass close by. Maybe seven hundred klicks. No wonder they’d seen him. At that distance, the
Y Que
would light up the threat boards like it was Christmas. Just bad luck, that.

“You can shoot if you want, but I’m stopping as fast as I can,” he said.

The status alarm sounded. Two new dots appeared on the display.
Hijo de puta
had actually launched torpedoes.

Fifteen seconds. He was going to make it. He started the broadcast and the exterior camera. The Ring was out there somewhere, its thousand-kilometer span still too small and dark to make out with the naked eye. There was only the vast spill of stars.

“Hold fire!” he shouted at the Martian frigate. “Hold fire!”

Three seconds. The torpedoes were gaining fast.

One second.

As one, the stars all blinked out.

Néo tapped the monitor. Nothing. Friend-or-foe didn’t show anything. No frigate. No torpedoes. Nothing.

“Now that,” he said to no one and nothing, “is weird.”

On the monitor, something glimmered blue, and he pulled himself closer, as if being a few inches closer to the screen would make it all make sense.

The sensors that triggered the high-g alert took five-hundredths of a second to trip. The alert, hardwired, took another three-hundredths of a second to react, pushing power to the red LED and the emergency Klaxon. The little console telltale that pegged out with a ninety-nine-g deceleration warning took a glacial half second to excite its light-emitting diodes. But by that time Néo was already a red smear inside the cockpit. The ship’s deceleration throwing him forward through the screen and into the far bulkhead in less time than it took a synapse to fire.

In the unbroken darkness, the exterior high-speed camera kept up its broadcast, sending out a thousand frames per second of nothing.

And then, of something else.

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