Rogue Powers (21 page)

At least laser wounds didn't bleed much, though this one hurt like hell. It really didn't look too bad, a slash of angry red along her wrist and her pinky. There were already signs of some nasty blistering, though.

There wasn't time for painkillers or first aid. She had to get this tub out of here, below the radar horizon. And this was the second time she had ridden a Guard ship without knowing the vehicle's name. If Hero-Class boats even rated names. Might just be a number.

She had kicked free of
Ariadne
with maximum thrust of her maneuvering jets. Now she spun ship and set up for retro-fire. Get down, get away, then worry about fancy stuff.

She punched some buttons and brought up the inertial tracker in a set of ground coordinates. It had taken hours with C'astille to figure out the coordinates of Lucy's landing site. The Outposter had some trouble with human mapping conventions, but nothing compared to the trouble Lucy had with the native's charts. C'astille wanted her several hundred kilometers north of the Guardian contact site.

Lucy knew that if she missed that landing site by too much, she was a dead woman.

With any luck, the landing site would be on the far side of planet from her current position, with the bulk of a whole world to hide her movements. There hadn't been any way to time it out. She swore a blue streak when the navigation computer showed her that the landing site was, at the moment, almost directly beneath her lander. The Guards would have perfect line-of-sight on her all the way in if she made a direct approach. So much for luck.

Okay, it was bloody well time to work with what she had. A minimum power reentry would land her about one hundred eighty degrees away from where she was now. She checked the map display in the inertial guidance computer. There was open ocean on the opposite side of the globe. That was a start. Two minutes later the nameless lander fired its engines in retro-fire.

Twenty minutes. Cynthia Wu felt the sweat coming out of every pore in her body. Twenty lousy minutes was all she and Sam had been able to buy for Lucy. Now all hell was indeed breaking loose. One dead, one badly injured in Bay Three. Fighter Command, up on
Nike
Station, had jumped with both feet four minutes ago and would have their fighters scrambled in another two. They had patched into the radar feed from
Ariadne,
and Cynthia had no way of cutting the feed. They were running her radars by remote now, combining her radar returns with their own. All Cynthia could do was watch the radar screens and pray that Lucy could get herself lost. And fast. If she could hit atmosphere, get behind the planet, out of line-of-sight, she might pull it off.

First the
Ariadne's
beacon slid behind the planet and winked out, then
Nike's.
Loss of signal. Over the radar horizon. Thank God. If she couldn't see them anymore, then they couldn't see her. Lucy rode her lander down, and finally the damn thing hit air. A plume of superheated air grew around her, became ionized, glowed fiercely in the darkness as she slid into the night side of the world below. She had to assume some ship or station overhead would spot so bright a thing as a night reentry. But without good radar and careful tracking, things that only
Ariadne
and
Nike
were equipped for, the Guards wouldn't t have enough to find her, especially if she were maneuvering in the atmosphere—something she very much intended to do.

She wanted to try an old idea, dreamed up in the very beginning of space flight, or perhaps even earlier. Rock skipping. Instead of plowing straight down into the atmosphere, she would use the lander's energy of velocity to bounce in and out of the upper atmosphere several times. It would play hob with her heat shield, but she only wanted to use the thing this once. She pitched the lander around until her conical shape produced more lift than drag and started gaining altitude once more, until she was flung clear of the sensible atmosphere. Back in vacuum, her lander again became a purely ballistic vehicle, her velocity still very high, in the thousands of kilometers an hour, but just barely sub-orbital. The little craft soon began to fell again, this time half way around the world from her first entry. Lucy swung the nose around again, the conical lander in effect becoming a large, crude airfoil. Again she was flung clear of the air, but this time not so high, not so far.

She checked the situation in the guidance display. Outpost was spinning on its axis, and the Guardian orbital stations were moving in their orbits. Her planned landing site was now well out of their line-of-sight. And her oddball entry was probably enough to lose any fighters they might have scrambled.

The landing site was barely in range for a gliding reentry. Her lander started to fall in toward the planet again, for the last time. She was going to make it. Then all she had to do was sit tight and wait for C'astille's people to find her. She hoped they took their time. Lucy felt about due for a breather.

Fighter command never tracked her second and third entries, just the first. The computers tracked that one as terminating in open ocean, and a human couldn't survive long on Outpost anyway. The Guards listed Calder as died trying to escape.

Cynthia and Sam were afraid they were right.

Commander Joslyn Marie Cooper Larson, Royal Britannic Navy, couldn't help liking the poor old dear. Oh, there was no doubt that he had a strong fondness for the bottle, and there was probably truth to the rumor that he had been posted to Britannica thirty years ago to keep his slightly drunken self as far as possible from London society and politics. But none of that mattered. Great Uncle George—or Captain Sir George Wilfred Thomas, when they were in uniform—was a most courteous, thoughtful, and hospitable man.

If the mark of a true, blue, gentleman was the ability to behave well under trying circumstances, then Sir George had proved himself to be among the truest and bluest. He was master of the HMS
Impervious,
one of the carrier ships Joslyn's husband Mac had campaigned against. Sir George had been the reserve captain, charged with maintaining her in storage, for the last ten Earth years. And yet Sir George hadn't held Mac's words against Joslyn, though she couldn't have blamed him if he had. Instead, he had most gallantly asked her to serve as official hostess at tonight's reception. A visiting delegation of flag-rank officers from half the members of the League was there in celebration of the Imp's recommissioning. If anything, Sir George seemed delighted at the chance to twit the stuffier officers with his choice of a hostess.

Sir George himself was splendidly turned out in an elegantly tailored formal dress uniform, a chestful of ribbons for who-knows-what glittering against the sleek black of his jacket, all his braid and insignia brushed and polished and perfect. He smiled and joked with everyone as the reception line moved past, the picture of a hale and hearty old man, his tall, thin figure the natural focus of attention. There was not the slightest hint of a hair left on his smooth-polished scalp, and his snow-white eyebrows bounded up and down as he talked. The only wrinkles on his face were crow's-feet and laugh lines. Fondness for the bottle or no, his complexion was fresh-scrubbed, pink and healthy, with no trace of the mottled skin or liver patches one might expect, and the grip of his handshake was still firm and strong.

It was a festive night. Hangar One, decorated with bunting and flags, with thick carpeting rolled out, a walnut dance floor laid over the steel decks, and a Navy band playing an elegant old refrain, looked as if it had been designed to double as a ballroom—as indeed it had.

Joslyn looked lovely that night, and knew it, and enjoyed the feat. The Royal Britannic Navy didn't have a uniform for officers, female, formal evening, but instead expected its female officers to "select a gown of color, cut, and style suitable to the occasion." It was one of the few regulations Joslyn actually enjoyed obeying. She had literally let her hair down, out of the usual tight braid, and it fell in long, full, golden-brown waves to lie on her bare shoulders. She wore a flowing, strapless evening gown of midnight black, woven of a sheer, glistening fabric that caught the light as she moved. She was tall and slender, and the gown suited her exactly, adding a special grace to her every move. She wore a single strand of pearls around her throat, and matching pearl stud earrings. Her blue eyes and peaches-and-cream complexion completed the picture of a charming and lovely young upper-class woman. She was that, but she was also a skilled pilot, and perhaps the most experienced combat veteran aboard the
Impervious.
She had killed her share of Guardians, a hard fact to keep in mind as she greeted the guests with a charmingly shy and youthful smile.

Joslyn was glad, now, that Uncle George had asked her to play the part of hostess. She didn't know or care if it was some complicated political ploy of his, or if he simply thought it would be fun. Joslyn herself could have held a few grudges against a few people, but she had concluded it wasn't worth the effort. The Office of Personnel for one, but then they had only cut the orders the Britannic High Command had told them to cut, if the scuttlebutt was to be believed. She greeted Admiral Samuel Whitmore of the High Command with a smile, and thought daggers at the bugger, just in case he had been the one with the gallows sense of humor, posting her to a ship her husband said was a deathtrap.

She didn't so much mind being posted away from Mac. Oh, she missed him terribly, of course. And she was furious at Whitmore and anyone else in the Royal Britannic Navy who might have been behind the order that had yanked her home and away from the Survey Service. But she was Navy, from a Navy family, and one had to expect to be separated from a husband in wartime. That came with the territory of military life. If Mac had been a civilian, they'd probably be just as far from each other right now, for all practical purposes.

And she had the comforting knowledge that Mac was
safe.
For far too long in those dreadful months in the New Finnish system, she had been alone in the
I.M.
, waiting, never knowing from moment to moment if he was dead or alive, knowing only that he was in constant danger.

At least now she knew he lived. And they could write each other, send recordings. That should have been enough. But she loved him very much.

Yet it
was
good to be home, or at least in orbit around home. And she could catch a shuttle down to Kings Town Field and be home with Mummy and Dad in twelve hours whenever she could wangle a pass. She felt more
British
than she had in a long time. She had travelled widely, seen many ways of doing many things, but it was good to be
home,
and be surrounded by the ways she had learned as a child. It was good to be where everyone knew the importance of warming the teapot properly, and trivets and elaborate gardens and digestive biscuits and driving on the left side of the road were quite normal, the done things, rather than quaint, charming old customs, survivals of an earlier age.

And there was work, a therapy that had always helped Joslyn. There was a lot to do aboard
Impervious.
The ship was a huge cylinder, a thousand feet long and three hundred fifty feet in diameter. Fifteen huge fusion engines were clustered on the aft end, and the circumference of the hull was a forest of detection gear, antennae, gunnery, hatches, and inspection ports. The bow of the ship was a flat disk. In its center was a large circular hole, a launch and recovery port. Even if the ship was under spin
and
under thrust, it was just about possible to bring in a fighter or other smaller vehicles there, and a system of elevators could then move the ships to the
Imp's
circumference. Every ninety degrees along the circumference of the bow end were launch tubes for the fighters, the Wombats and SuperWombats. The bow holes of the launch tubes led into tunnels that ran half the length of the ship. The launch tunnels were normally in vacuum, but the One and Three tubes were being worked on at the moment, and were sealed and under pressure. Inside the launch tunnels were great electric catapults—linear accelerators—that could take a fighter and fling it clear of the
Imp
without either ship firing its engines and damaging something. The launch tunnels could also be used to move ships much more slowly between the bow centerpoint launch and recovery port and the hangar decks.

There were four hangar decks, one for each launch tunnel. These took up the entire circumference of the
Imp
amidships. Since the One launch tunnel was out of action, Hangar One had been done over for the reception. The ship was under spin at the moment, of course, and the hangars was under about three-quarters of an Earth gravity. The hangar was high-ceilinged and went through ninety degrees of the ship's circumference. It was disconcerting to see handsomely dressed ladies and gentlemen calmly strolling or sitting on a deck that was curved about halfway toward the vertical.

The other side of the steel deck beneath the dance floor was the outer hull of the ship. There were great hangar doors, large enough to move a SuperWombat through, and Joslyn couldn’t help imagining some practical joker opening the doors beneath the wooden dance floor, and all those old stuffed shirts dropping straight through into space. . . . But even the most ghastly bore didn't deserve that fate. However, if the hangar decks were in vacuum, and the ship were under spin, the fighters could be simply dropped through the hangar doors. When so dropped, they would move away from the ship at the speed the ship had been spinning. If the ship weren't spinning, the fighters would use their own maneuvering jets to get on or off the ship.