The Final Battle (40 page)

“I’ll make it,” Michael said. He fired again and again into Polk’s body. “Unlike you, Chief Councillor Polk.”

Michael looked down on the bloodstained wreck of what once had been the most feared man in humanspace. It was done, and now all Michael wanted to do was lie down and sleep, but he knew he could not. Polk had been right. The pilot would have watched the fight on one of the cargo bay holocams; now Michael had to make sure not to let him finish what Polk had started.

Where he found the energy, Michael would never know, but he bullied an unwilling body to lean forward as he worked the straps off his shoulders, whimpering in agony when one caught on the haft of the knife that still stuck out of his shoulder. Free of the pack, he reached in and pulled out the packet of autojects. With a silent prayer that his badly abused body would cope, he injected a second shot into his arm.

The change was immediate. Stimulants and painkillers flooded his system. They scavenged the last reserves of energy from his abused body, and it jolted back to life. He sat there for a few seconds. He wondered what to do about the knife. A tentative attempt to ease it out of his shoulder gave him the answer: Do nothing. Despite the massive dose of chemicals he had just injected into his arm, the pain was all but unbearable. Working with one hand, he did the next best thing: He slathered his entire shoulder with woundfoam before packing a crude dressing around the knife.

Reenergized, he got to his feet to make sure Polk and the crewman were dead. They were. Michael looked around the cargo bay, dismayed to see a row of body bags laid out on the deck up forward.
Now I know where the rest of the crew gotten to
, he thought; he felt sick. He counted the bags and then did it again to be sure. He’d been lucky. Judging by the number of body bags, the shuttle had lifted off from McNair with only two crew members: the command pilot and the man Michael had killed just after he and Polk had boarded.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that the command pilot was tucked away safely behind the armored door to the flight deck. He’d need a thermic lance and an hour to get at him, whereas all the pilot had to do was—

Heart racing with sudden panic, Michael bolted to his feet and launched himself at the nearest emergency equipment stowage. He ripped the door open with his good hand and pulled out an emergency oxygen pack. He clipped it onto his belt, slipped the mask over his face, and switched on the gas.

And just in time, he realized when he checked the air pressure in the cargo bay.
You are one slimy little shit
, he thought when he saw the readout. The pilot had been depressurizing the compartment, but so slowly that Michael would never have noticed. Another few minutes and he would have been breathing air with too little oxygen to maintain consciousness. A few minutes after that he would have been dead.

He patched his neuronics through to the flight deck. “Nice try, shithead,” he said when the command pilot’s face appeared. “Now do us both a favor and turn this thing around and take me back.”

“Are they dead?” the pilot asked.

“Yes, they’re both dead. And so will you be if you don’t abort.”

The pilot shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said with a self-satisfied smirk. “You’re a spacer; you know perfectly well you can’t get to me up here, so sit back and enjoy the ride.”

That was not an option. Michael knew what the pilot would do: override the airlock controls to trap him in the cargo bay while he transferred to the courier ship via the flight deck’s emergency hatch, but not before he had ordered the shuttle AI to head dirtside under full power.

Which is not going to happen
, Michael told himself.

He would have to force the shuttle to turn back. That meant some creative destruction, and he understood shuttles well enough to know what to do. Whether he and the pilot would survive the experiment was another matter, but he was out of options. There was no way he would allow himself to sit back and wait for the end. If he had to die, he would do so looking death right in the face.

Michael emptied his pack and refilled it with his supply of microgrenades. He made his way aft to the ladder that accessed the hydraulically powered locks that clamped the shuttle’s massive ramp closed. Pack around his neck, he climbed the ladder. It was an awkward, jerky process with a knife in his shoulder and a useless arm, but he made it finally. He locked his left leg around one rung to hold himself in position, removed the pack, and set to work.

Even one-handed, it was easy enough to arm the grenades and place them behind a junction box directly below the shuttle’s port reaction-mass feed line, an exotic alloy pipe 15 centimeters in diameter pressurized to 3,000 atmospheres.

Michael had just finished when the command pilot called him. The man did not look happy. “What the hell are you up to, Helfort?” he demanded.

“I’ve asked you to turn back,” Michael said, working his way down the ladder, “and you won’t, so now I’ll have to make you.”

“And how will you do that?” The pilot’s voice dripped skepticism.

“Never underestimate a desperate man,” Michael said, his voice calm even though his heart was racing. “I’ve put microgrenades under the port feed line. If you don’t turn back, I’ll set them off.”

The command pilot’s face went dirty gray. “You wouldn’t,” he said.

“Oh, but I will,” Michael said. “Unless you want me to trash your main engines and a whole lot of other stuff as well, I suggest you turn back right now.”

“You’re bluffing.” The pilot had recovered his composure and some of his color. “There’s no way you’d do it. You’d kill us both.”

Michael swore some under his breath. He’d been so sure the pilot would turn back. “I might kill us both,” he said, forcing himself to sound nonchalant, “but since I’m a dead man either way, what have I got to lose?”

“You are so full of shit, Helfort.” The pilot sounded confident.

“I’ll take that as no, shall I?” Michael asked. “Right, Captain Asswipe; watch and learn.” Michael picked up his rifle and made his way to the very front of the cargo bay, stopping just short of the passenger galley. He clipped his safety line to a ringbolt, then brought the rifle up and rested it on a seat back, an awkward business thanks to his damaged shoulder. “Last chance,” he called out.

“Fuck off!” the pilot snapped. “You won’t do it.”

“I think I will,” Michael said. He took careful aim and put a single round into the junction box packed with microgrenades.

For one heart-stopping moment, Michael thought the grenades had failed to fire. Then they did. The blast filled the cargo bay with a sheet of intense white light and a cloud of ionized gas and smoke, the shuttle bucking under his feet as the shock front ripped through the airframe. “That should do it,” he said, throwing himself behind the galley bulkhead.

Nothing happened. A few seconds later, a lot did and in a very short amount of time. A small explosion followed the first; then the shuttle shuddered as a massive blast ripped through the cargo bay.

There goes the reaction-mass feed line
, Michael thought, cringing back while the cargo bay filled with pulverized driver mass, a malevolent black cloud that tore the cargo bay apart, the overpressure rupturing both of his eardrums in a blaze of agony even as flying debris ripped the flimsy gallery bulkhead apart and debris clawed at his body.

The shuttle lurched hard to one side into a slow tumbling roll as more explosions followed. Its overtaxed artgrav gave up the unequal fight. It shut down, and Commitment’s gravity took over. Thanks to the shuttle’s extreme nose-up attitude, the deck was now so steep that Michael could not stand up. His feet shot from under him. He dropped to the deck and into the shattered remnants of the galley. Around him, the whole shuttle shuddered, a hammering so violent that he thought complete structural failure had to be only seconds away.

Michael commed the command pilot. “Having fun now?” he asked through pain-gritted teeth, head spinning and nausea rising as his overloaded brain tried to work out which way was up, a problem thanks to his ruptured ears. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and wondered if he might not have overdone the microgrenades a touch. “I certainly am.”

“You’ve killed us all,” the man screeched. His face was white and beaded with sweat. Around him, the flight deck was raucous with the cacophonous racket of multiple alarms.

“That all depends on how good a pilot you are,” Michael replied. “Now, it’s only a guess, but I’d say you’ve lost the port main engine, the starboard main engine’s tripped out, and all of your primary and backup hydraulics have gone as well. Am I right?”

“You maniac,” the pilot snarled.

“I’ll take that as a yes, shall I? Michael said. “I hope you’ve been practicing your dead stick reentries, because that’s the only way you’ll get us down alive. Just thank your lucky stars I pulled the pin before we reached orbit.”

“I going to tear your fucking heart out,” the pilot screamed.

“Since that means we’d have made it dirtside, I look forward to you trying. Now shut up, get us down, and let me know when we can bail out.”

Michael cut the comm before the man could respond. He released his line and slid down the deck until he reached a crew seat. He dragged himself into it and sat down. Jury-rigging the safety harness to avoid the knife, he armed the seat’s escape capsule and sat back to wait, doing his best to ignore the pain that consumed his entire body. There was nothing he could do now. His life was in the hands of the command pilot. Provided that his little stunt hadn’t done more damage than he’d planned, the man had a reasonable chance of getting the shuttle down low and slowly enough that they could both bail out and survive.

A thought struck him. He commed the pilot. “Hey, asswipe,” he said.

“What?” The man still looked terrified.

“Settle down. You can do this.”

“You don’t know what you’ve done, do you?”

“Tell me.”

“As well as everything else, we’ve lost hydraulics, and that means I’ll never control this thing long enough for us to slow down and bail out. There’s a limit to what the reaction control system can do, you know. We’re dead, Helfort.”

Oh, shit
, Michael thought.
This is not good
. “Patch me into the command AI.”

“Why would—”

“Because you want to live, you idiot! Now do it.”

“Okay, okay.”

It took Michael only seconds to see the damage for himself. The command pilot had not been exaggerating. The shuttle was doomed. Without hydraulics, the wings would stay fully retracted, and no wings meant no control as the air thickened. The problem was that the pilot had to do two things at once: keep the shuttle stable and slow down. If he failed, the shuttle would disintegrate and they were both dead men.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Michael swore under his breath. If only … An idea popped fully formed into his head. Michael put it to the AI, and ten seconds later he had his answer. It would be touch and go, but they might still have a chance.

“Captain,” he said. “Can you bring the starboard main engine back online?”

“I can, though it’s not in very good shape. I don’t know how long it’ll hold up.”

“We won’t need it for long. How’s the reaction control system?”

“The RCS is nominal, unlike everything else.”

“Okay; I think there’s something we can do.”

Hope brightened the man’s eyes. “There is?”

Michael forwarded the AI’s analysis. “Have a look at this,” he said. “The AI thinks it’ll work.”

“Mmm,” the pilot said. “Not sure if the RCS can keep us stable long enough, but I can use the main engine to vector the thrust, which will help. Anyway, it’s worth a try.”

Michael nodded. “Sure is,” he said. “Hey, look. I’m sorry about the Captain Asswipe thing. What’s your name?”

“Karroubi, Jakob Karroubi.”

“Good luck, Jakob.”

Michael sat back and patched his neuronics into the holocam behind Karroubi. It was if he were sitting on the pilot’s shoulder. He looked at the same screens, the same status boards, the same everything. It was unnerving, and for a moment Michael felt for the man. With the crippled shuttle now plummeting earthward, he had a huge challenge on his hands.

Karroubi fired the reaction jets to spin the shuttle around. Now the stern faced the onrushing air. A fresh set of alarms bleated in protest at a maneuver that appeared in no manual Michael had ever read. “Stand by,” the command pilot called. “This will be very rough.”

No kidding
, Michael thought as the pilot fired the starboard main engine and rammed the throttle to emergency power, provoking yet more alarms. With the artgrav off, the airframe kicked hard in protest, the seat underneath Michael bucking as the pilot fought to keep the shuttle stable.

“Throttle down, Jakob,” Michael shouted. “Throttle down. Too much and you’ll lose her.”

“Roger,” Karroubi said; a moment later the vibration wracking the shuttle’s frame eased off a touch.

“Better,” Michael said even though it was still worryingly bad. But there was some good news: Karroubi was a natural on the sidestick controller. With a confident hand, he kept control of the stern’s tendency to slide away from the oncoming air, and the shuttle was decelerating hard, riding a pillar of flame down to earth.

“Looks good,” Karroubi said, “so stand by. It won’t be long before we can go.”

“Just say the word,” Michael replied. “I’m ready to—”

In one terrible instant, everything changed. Karroubi lost control. The stern whipped up and over with frightening speed, the airframe hammered by endless cracking bangs. “Shit!” Michael screamed as the status board told him the controls had been overwhelmed. Condemned, the shuttle tumbled to destruction; it was beyond anything Karroubi could do to reverse the situation.

“Sorry about that,” Karroubi shouted, his body a blur as the shuddering thrashed him from side to side.

“Don’t be,” Michael replied through clenched teeth, marveling that the pilot still was fighting against impossible odds to regain control.

“Go when I say … best I can … do.”