Pirates of the Thunder (22 page)

“Like what?”

“Anything. The space suits. The boxes of cigars. The clothes on our backs. These chairs if we could get ‘em up. Blow ‘em out the hatch and gobble ‘em in the ram jet slow and easy. Forget it, it was just a thought.”

“Uh uh! You have something there! Besides, ditching the cigars will mean ditching it as well.”

“You nuts?” Sabatini asked seriously. “The
space suits,
for Christ’s sake!”

“What good are space suits if we’re dead anyway? Take the communications port and keep him stalled. I don’t care what you say! I’m cutting loose and seeing what can be done.”

“But what if it attacks and we got no pilot?”

“The same thing that happens if it attacks and we
have
a pilot! Now let me go—time’s wasting!”

Nagy came quickly out from the spell woven by the interface and, although a little dizzy from it, he indeed wasted no time. There were minor tools and a basic repair kit in an aft storage compartment. He was relieved that Star Eagle hadn’t removed them. He took out a laser torch and began cutting the unused chairs off at their base.

Raven and Warlock got up to help as much as they could, stacking the items as Nagy disassembled them.

“You said it took tons to do much,” Raven noted. “So what’s this all about?”

Arnold Nagy chuckled. “Maybe not enough for survival, but enough to screw that son of a bitch, that’s for sure. Figure each one of these reinforced chairs has a mass equal to, oh, forty kilograms with their supports. That’s two forty. Add another ten for the webbing and belting, minimum. Two fifty. The suits are another fifty. Add a lot more junk around here and I think maybe we can find another two fifty, three hundred. That’s more than half a ton. Here, give me a hand. We might even be able to get the damned toilet out of here. If that bastard gives us the time we might scrounge up to a ton here!”

They fell into helping, but Raven was still puzzled. “So what’s a ton mean?”

“We spent fifty percent getting here. We’re about ten percent low and that’s about a ton for a vessel this size. We might get back with this much stuff!”

“Well, we made punches without belts and chairs before, that’s for sure, but what good will it do? That thing’ll just figure it’s what we did and follow, assuming it don’t just blow us to hell as we punch. Then we’re dead meat for it. What can we do? We’re throwin’ out everything we could even heave at it.”

“Maybe nothing. Who the hell knows? I’m goin’ for broke, though, ‘cause there ain’t no other way!”

In weightlessness it was simple to move the stuff to the air-lock entry.

“How’s our Val been?” Nagy called to Sabatini.

“We’ve been debating the fine points of morality, but it hasn’t made a move. They have infinite patience, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I’m counting on that. Be ready with a glib line. We’re gonna flush what we got out here by depressurizing the air lock to maybe ten percent of normal. We got two, maybe three loads to flush. Then we still got to figure some way of maneuvering it into the ram without getting creamed.
If,
of course, we chopped that stuff up enough to get it all.”

On communications, Sabatini had his hands full.

“Why is all of that being flushed?” the Val asked. “I want it stopped. Now.”

“What do you think we’re doing—laying mines? If we were, you’d have hit one by now. We’re not going to stop.”

The Val did not reply, but fired a thin beam that struck one of the objects, fragmenting it.

“I think he just shot the damned toilet,” Raven noted.

“No matter,” Nagy assured him. “He didn’t disintegrate it, he blew it up. It’s the mass that counts. I was kinda worried about that one fitting in the ram anyway. Now I know it will. Okay, time to grab on to whatever’s left back here and hold tight. Odds are we’re all gonna get bruised and knocked around by this one, but consider the alternative.”

He went forward once more and donned the interface helmet. He no longer had a chair, but with judicious use of the torch and some muscle he had fashioned two handholds out of parts of the instrument console.

“You gonna explain this, or am I supposed to be surprised?” Sabatini asked him.

“I’m gonna back up real slow, just enough to get as much of that junk as I can in one pass, ‘cause that’s all we get,” Nagy told him. “I think we were careful enough to keep it fairly bunched, although I don’t know what effect that blast had on it.”

“You back up and that thing’ll close,” Sabatini warned.

“Fine. So long as he doesn’t fire until too late, I couldn’t care less.”

“But you need acceleration to punch! If you go forward in a pass for that stuff, it’ll have to be flank speed from a relatively standing start! The Val’ll have to shoot or be rammed!”

“Good. Let it shoot. If it figures we’re gonna suicide and try to take it with us, as I hope it does, it’s gonna lose. Only if it figures out the game are we in trouble.”

“Yeah? That thing’s a supercomputer! You figure you got an angle it doesn’t know or can’t figure out in nanoseconds?”

“Sure. I’m gonna do something that isn’t possible, so it won’t think of it.”

“What! If it’s impossible then what good is it?”

“Because I don’t know it’s impossible and my math was always lousy. All right—hang on, everybody! Here we go!”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Nagy applied the brakes, which had the effect of backing up the ship a few millimeters a second. The movement was so slow that even the Val had to check its instrumentation before issuing a challenge.

“You are moving! Halt at once or I will be forced by necessity to open fire!”

“I’m not moving—I’m experiencing drag. Hold on, I’ll see what’s what.”

“You will compensate
now.”

Nagy made no reply for more than thirty seconds, by which time he had increased the braking so that the ship cleared the mass showing on the sensors by a few meters; he kept the ship’s nose toward the Val ship to present the smallest target.

The Val fired at the port ramjet scoop, but Sabatini had expected this and set the automatics to parry.

Nagy brought the ship to a dead stop relative to the floating debris and angled the nose so that the ship would accumulate maximum mass in a forward thrust. “I just ran the calculations on this thing,” he told them.

“Yes?” Sabatini replied. “And?”

“It said ‘Don’t do it!’ or words to that effect. Hang on, everybody! Either we’re gonna be out of this mess in a couple of minutes or we’re gonna be dead. I’ve programmed it in. Stand by!”

The engines suddenly roared to life and the ship shuddered; the rattles and noises were unusually loud because of all the remnants of the destruction about the ship. This did not go unnoticed by the Val.

“Throttle down! If you have any idea of picking up that debris, I have already demonstrated that you are in range of my weapons!”

“We’re overheating the engines!” Sabatini warned. “Either throttle down or do something, but you can’t sustain this for more than twenty or thirty seconds! This is madness! He’ll blow us to hell as soon as we pick up that shit!”

There was no way Arnold Nagy could do the split-second timing involved; he simply gave the orders to the ship’s computer. The computer said it would comply but would not be responsible for the consequences. “ENGINE FAILURE PREDICTED IN FIVE SECONDS!” it warned.

“Go!”
Arnold Nagy yelled.

The amount of heat and pressure built up in the engines was massive; Raven and Warlock, although braced as best they could be, were slammed against the aft wall and pinned there. Only the extreme control of Nagy and Sabatini under the interface kept their grips on their handholds, but it was not without its own costs. The handholds on Nagy’s side began to give way.

It was so fast that there was no way to realize what had happened until it was over. In the end, it all seemed somewhat anticlimactic.

At the last possible moment, with engines thrusting full and close to protective shutdown, the dense gases, which had been building under tremendous pressure that must either be expelled or blow up the ship, were released. For a brief moment nothing seemed to happen, and the Val, for whom it was a very long time, calmly adjusted its guns, noted its regrets, and trained its full fire directly on the point just beyond the debris where it would have a clear and unobstructed full field of fire.

The Val’s target suddenly lurched forward and, as it touched the debris itself, it did the one thing neither the Val nor anyone else except Arnold Nagy anticipated.

Lightning
punched.

It was a wide field punch and it was entered at a relatively slow speed, but the focus of the punch beams was mere millimeters beyond the densest pack of debris, and so wide that its very opening sucked in some of the debris not collected by the ram in its passage.

Suddenly realizing what its enemy had done, the Val fired, but the punch was wide enough to absorb virtually all the energy, shielding
Lightning.
Realizing that it had been outmaneuvered, the Val checked the course, speed, and trajectory of its prey and quickly swung around to follow. Time was of the essence.

Nagy throttled down to minimum speed; it didn’t matter inside a punch how much power was expended, although a small amount was necessary. One arrived at one’s destination at the same time all the same. Inside, the ship moaned and groaned and sounded as if it would come apart at any moment, but the passenger cabin seemed to be holding.

“That’s
impossible!”
Sabatini said flatly. “No ship with a life-support system could sustain the pressures we just did!”

“Okay, then you’re dead,” Nagy responded, sounding more casual than he actually felt. “This thing was built as an escape ship, remember, and the theoretical problems and computer models that it was based on assumed that a whole fleet of Master System fighters would be coming in on us. We’re not home free yet, though, folks. Wait for the main event.”

Raven groaned. “Damn it, I feel like I broke every bone in my body!” he complained. He started, staring at the limp form of Warlock, and was relieved to find her still breathing, though unconscious. He looked forward at the two forms sitting on the deck in their death grips and saw blood on Nagy. “Nagy, check yourself out! You’re bleeding like a stuck pig!”

“Yeah. Broke a wrist and somehow a rib, and messed up a little in my head, but I’ll survive until I’m through this. It’s gonna be real tough to disengage this interface, though. Sabatini, you sound okay to me.”

“I suffered massive internal damage, but I am now repairing it,” the creature who was Sabatini replied. “I will be whole again in a few minutes.”

Raven groaned. He felt as if he’d been worked over with a rubber hose, but he didn’t think anything was broken. Like the others, he found some blood coming from a nostril, but it wasn’t much. “What d’ya mean, it ain’t over yet?” he asked.

“Let’s see... half a second for the Val to figure what I did, assume I survived somehow, and decide to give chase. Three minutes to apply thrust and angle in to the same trajectory, course, and speed and punch. I’m not gonna allow any fudge factor; I’ll assume it does it in the minimum, so that puts him just a hundred eighty and a half seconds behind us. Good thing he didn’t close on us. If he had, I wouldn’t have any margin at all.”

Raven gasped. “You mean he’s still behind us?”

The ship continued to moan and groan. “Sure. And I didn’t jump long. We went in real slow, so it’d take damned near forever and half our fuel for life support if I did. If I timed it right, some of the debris should have been pulled in with us by magnetic and gravitational forces. That and the remains of his ship should get us almost anywhere.”

“The remains of—what the hell?” both of the others managed at once. Warlock moaned and stirred, but nobody noticed.

“You wait. Coming out in one minute. Hold on back there! You might get flung forward this time!”

Warlock opened her eyes and frowned. “What?”

“Don’t ask,” Raven responded. “Just turn around facing the wall and hold on again or you’re gonna be splattered against the forward wall!”

“Wha—?” she managed, but turned and did as instructed, still not quite back to normal.

Lightning
punched out in a sector of space as empty and forlorn as the one it had left and, in truth, not a great distance away in astronomical terms. As soon as the ship emerged, Nagy checked for any debris that might have come with them, found some, accelerated slightly and scooped what he could, then came to a near-dead stop. Then, very slowly, he began reverse thrust until he reached a predetermined point. He used more than two and a half minutes doing so, which meant there wasn’t long to wait.

This time Sabatini, with the aid of the ship’s computers, understood exactly what was going on. “All weapons systems armed. This is gonna be real close, Nagy. I read the forward distance as a hundred and six meters.”

“Give it all you got. I don’t just want him disabled, I need him in pieces. We can’t go out there and do a salvage job on him—we jettisoned the space suits.”

“Yeah, that’s right. All right—locked on. Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

The Val was late; in fact, it was almost seventeen seconds late, which made Nagy wonder if it had somehow guessed his intention, but he was counting on its supreme self-confidence and the fact that he’d had to enter the punch at a very slow speed.

As soon as the Val’s punch closed behind it, all forward batteries of the
Lightning
opened up on the Val ship, which could only then use its sensors to see behind the punch and discover the plot.

Sixteen beams of maximum-strength fire struck the aft engines of the Val ship; it shuddered, then the Val applied full thrust and shot back, but the shots were wide and the thrust was erratic, causing the ship to go off at an angle. Defensive force fields were up now, but massive damage had already been done. As soon as the Val gave Sabatini any sort of a broadside and he could calculate the steering angle, he launched four seeker missiles, two for the tail along the line of the guns, the other two angling around to come in on either side of the main fuselage.