Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (11 page)

A distinctive ululating alarm went off through the ship. The Alliance spacers would have no idea what it meant, but his did.
Intentional depressurization imminent, find a hidey-hole
. Men and women went scrambling for the nearest safe cover. Either the escape pods in their bays between the holds, or hidden life capsules built into the spinal core of the vessel.

The Alliance crewers would probably figure out what was happening in time to save themselves
–they seemed to be on top of everything else he’d done so far, and they should have more than enough time to seal their suits. This was his almost-out-of-options plan. He didn’t have much left. Throwing himself on the mercy of the court was about as likely to work as flapping his arms to generate a warp field.

He pulled on his helmet and a pair of space gloves, turning his uniform into a full-on spacesuit
–the bridge was one of the last two airtight spaces in the ship.

Next he had work to do down in engineering.

Chapter 10

In the corner of her eye, Natasha Leblanc noticed a readout that had been stable at 609
torr
begin to decline. Her high school education reminded her that
torr
was a measure of air pressure - barometric pressure in millimeters of mercury.

“
Bowman, it could just be my instrumentation - is pressure dropping?”

Bowman yelped softly.

“It’s not just my instrumentation - seal up for extravehicular.” Their helmets locked closed and air seals wuffed tight.

“
Skip, Alyse, Yeboah, where are you guys?”

Veronica
’s voice crackled over Leblanc’s helmet radio. “We’re on
Two-oh-Seven
, locked out through the ship side of the airlock. Do you two think you can get to the main airlock?”

Natasha
glanced at Louis, whose helmet moved as if he were scanning a map in front of him–which in a sense was what he was actually
doing
, on a computer-rendered version of said map.
That
was worrying.

Louis
spoke up, “Not without some serious cutters here - there’s at least two structural bulkheads between here and there that close automatically when air pressure starts dropping.” He looked at his pressure readout - less than 100 torr, but at least the drop in pressure was tailing off. “We can’t open our helmets now - pressure’s too low.”

Yeboah came in on the line.
“You’re near a service airlock. Can you get there?”

“
Not in these suits.”

“
As long as you two are safe right now, you guys hole up out of the way. Do
not
under any circumstance enter an escape pod. We’ll be back in, but we need a solid plan before we attempt rescue. If they start coming back out of hiding, you guys give ‘em a merry chase like you were doing before.”

Veronica braced herself against the table over a 3d schematic of the D-42 class.
“Kellie, tell me what you know about these damned things. You said you ran a shipping firm before you joined the Service.”

“
Mostly surface shipping, unfortunately, not space.”

“
Why do I have the feeling that there’s more to this than I want to know?”

“
Because you ought to, and because that’s true of most things in life. Anyway, it’s pretty easy to see what they’re up to--trick the prize crew into abandoning the bridge, toss them overboard in life rafts, and bet the rest of the prize crew is more interested in rescue than pursuit.”

Veronica
’s brow furrowed as she leaned into the schematic, “They got Part 1 done pretty well. I think we overplayed our hand with our high-speed snipe hunt game. Part 2 is not so much, though - the Cache has a fourteen hour air supply, they can hold out until
204
gets here if worst comes to worst, but I’d rather not let it.”

Yeboah glanced at the schematics.

“So we start reaching into our own bag of unpleasant surprises.” suggested Kellie, “I’m willing to bet he doesn’t realize we can board from a hull service airlock. He can’t keep the ship depressurized for
too
long if he wants to go anywhere–his engine is still disabled and he can’t get to the engine room without repressurizing.”

Veronica added,
“And if they’re as broke and desperate as you think, they probably don’t have enough air onboard to repeat that depressurization trick they just pulled.”

Yeboah put her finger on an airlock on the ventral side.
“Like this one. My dad used to fly a D-42 before he had a bad ejection that ended his med certification. This airlock is locked out a
lot
because it’s in a position that’s shadowed from camera surveillance - but the lockout might not be guarded well enough from a software hack attempt. And I seem to recall that back at the academy, a certain Lieutenant enlisted a certain Sub-lieutenant for a similar exploit.”

Veronica laughed into her hand.
“Nobody’s going to let me live that down for the rest of my career, are they?”

“
Nope, so you might as well learn to enjoy it, Skip. The notoriety of having organized the biggest hack in the history of the Academy’s something worth bragging on.” Alyse thumped her on the back.

Veronica looked anxiously through the plastic canopy bubble
as she manipulated the docking clamps. “We need to keep this quick. They’re going to be making their move pretty soon.” The small corvette was floating free now, in a precisely controlled spiral around her larger prey.

“
We’ve got enough power to keep up with them if they’re dumb enough to make a break for it; what do they think they can get by forcing us to shove off?”

“
Patience, Captain,” replied Alyse, “I think we need to give them twenty minutes or so, so they’re completely absorbed in repairing the lenses of their warp drive.”

Yeboah added,
“If we jump on reconnecting too quickly, we’ll give the game away before it’s time for us to make our move, and we might force them into making a quick move.”

Veronica nodded at her crew.
“I just feel guilty about leaving Leblanc and Bowman over there, y’know? We could have done this with a different configuration on the ship.”

“
No we really couldn’t have. We needed pilot, organizational ability, and engineering talent over here and that left out the two lowest-ranked crewers. Those two have good heads on them, they’re not going to get too badly banged up, I think.” Kellie lounged in the gunnery seat while she watched Veronica deftly maneuver the tiny starship in a spiral around the transport. Her precision piloting skills were enviable.

“
I think we’ve got a potential docking port at one-twenty degrees from where we started, Skip,” sang out Yeboah, “I’m going to pop downstairs to the sensor console to check it, but I think that’s our target.”

“
I see it. There’s a ring on the hull, I just want a good map of it before we lock into it.”

Yeboah smiled,
“Give me a second and I’ll have their grandmother’s graduation photos. We’ll be back in. Patience, Skip. Patience.”

Kellie
shook her head, “Don’t lock onto the hull. They’ll hear that, and we’ll lose the element of surprise this op depends on. Just slave the
Two-oh-Seven
’s autopilot to keep her within five meters of the hull, and we’ll do a suit jump.”

Veronica laughed softly,
“you two are absolutely nuts, and I’m proud to be working with you. Let’s get to it, before they catch on.”

*

“Looks like they’re making their move.” Ress watched the small starship alter its course around the bigger cargo hauler. “Not sure what it is, but we should make ours first–have the crew surround their enlisted and we can try to make them see reason.”

His
commlink crackled, “Jonah, I don’t think I like what you’re doing. Taking hostages has more than enough room in it to put our necks firmly in a noose. I’ve been against this damn thing from the start.” came Mattingly’s stressed baritone over the speaker.

“
Matt, you’ve been the doomsayer of this thing for the whole trip. Now I admit that taking drugs onboard without a cover cargo might not have been the smartest thing, but I think we can all agree that we didn’t even have that much of a choice. But you’ve been dragging your heels on getting the damn Navy off our boat that I thought for a while you might have decided to turn your coat for them.”

“
What the
fuck
!? You’re insane. I love this boat, I’d never…” Mattingly’s voice crackled and popped as he was suddenly shouting in his escape pod.

“
Or maybe I’ve been thinking clearly for the first time since we got boarded,” said Ress, cutting Mattingly off, “Being stuck on an airless ship gives you time to think, you know. Maybe you fucking lost your nerve, or figured ratting would get you a lighter sentence.”

“
I can’t even believe I’m having this fucking conversation, Jonah. I’ve
never
rolled on you.
Never
. And we’ve been in trouble a
lot
worse than this.”

Ress pulled his temper back from the
brink, “I’m sorry, Matt. This fucking thing has had me running on high stress and not very much sleep since we started it. I hated signing that loan with Ifrit as much as you did, but I had to keep a brave face for the crew. So let’s bury the hatchet and get our asses down to the engine room. I’ve got a plan. It’s a shitty plan, but it’s the only plan I got. To give the plan some teeth, though, we gotta get the engines back online.”

“
And the Squids?”

“
I don’t like hostage-taking any more than you do, Matt, but we’re probably going to need to bargain them for a head start. They probably have more ships incoming, and whatever else the Interstellar Navy is, they’re an honorable set of militaristic racketeers. Force them into an agreement, and they won’t renege on it.”

“
So what we have to do, right now, is make them understand that we mean business?” Mattingly looked warily optimistic.

“
Never said it was an easy sack of snakes we got handed. Just that we’ve got one we might be able to use.”

“
Christ, Jonah,
please
tell me you’re not seriously thinking of what I think you’re thinking.”

“
I wish I had
any
other choice, Matt. It’s not going to make me any happier to do this than it is you. But the kind of charges that two hundred k-tons of drugs are gonna get us will have us as very old men before we even have a chance of breathing free air again, and I don’t know about you but prison stations don’t agree with me. They didn’t when I was in the Navy and they won’t in the civilian world, either. So let’s get the hell out of here, while we still have a chance.”

“
I’m
really
not happy with this situation now, but I don’t really see an alternate. They’ve backed us into a corner and we’ve only got a few ways left to get things turned around. But Jonah, if this comes to what I think it might, I want different cells. Don’t take me wrong, but everything about this run has been Hell.”

“
Tell me about it. Goddamn Navy. Goddamn
me
for a fool.”

Chapter 11

The repairs took place at breakneck speed, each man working hard to get the lenses realigned with their driver coils. As the schematic had shown, half of the lenses had been broken entirely, so they
’d had to move some around to get proper warp field coverage, or the whole thing would collapse when they went to light speed.

Ress laughed with the irony. When they
’d started this run, they’d had to replace the damage of a mere
two
blown lenses–but those had gone with their entire driver coil arrays, and the driver coils
now
were intact.

Jonah
Ress sat down in the helm seat in the auxiliary control room, not questioning why there wasn’t a Navy person there.

His uniform was filthy from crawling through the tunnels of the ship
’s engine room reconnecting the warp lenses that could still be salvaged. There were snags in the tunic that meant that it would probably have to be discarded entirely.

The Navy people had gotten even better at their running game in the brief interim of depressurization.

“They’re somewhere in Hold Country, Ress, but damn it, we can’t pin ‘em down!” Foley’s voice had been pregnant with frustrated rage.

“
Good, people. Remember, take them
alive
, we need them to get free from these guys.”

Ress hovered over the helm as he checked his course.