Rimrunners, page 28
part #5 of Company Wars Series
God! Have we been hit, or was that fire?
Little ship, pinned to station, could be us doing the firing—
Could be—
The lift stopped at the top, opened on the bridge. She headed out as the siren quit, passed Goddard yelling at her, Goddard sitting at his post, a khaki blur to her as she ran. It was the topside locker she was headed for, and that was standing open, Fitch was in there already suiting up.
"What was it?" she said, jerked the zip open and started peeling, fast.
Fitch said: "Friends of yours."
"The hell!—Is it Africa?"
"They've used every ID in the book. We don't know a hundred percent who it is.—Shit!"
"Easy, back it up—you're going to strip those damn ring-seals." She grabbed after Fitch's problem, but he got it, shoved her off, and she stepped into her own armor-breeches, threw the lever that seated it solidly around her, rammed her feet down into the boots and worked her toes into those while she came up under the hanging top-section and wriggled her arms and her body up into it, helmet and all.
Solid mate. Throw the latches. Sleeves last, mating at the mid-shoulder, left and right, tension engaged, screw the rings tight and not too tight.
She beat Fitch by a second, seals and all. She heard her own breathing and Fitch's, felt a shock rock the ship and saw the audio reading jump.
She muttered: "Was that them firing or us?"
"Us." Fitch turned, flat-footed the way a neo learned to move, powered-on and lurched after balance.
Firing every time the station's rotation gave them a target. "We're assuming they want the fuel we're holding?"
"Say it's a good assumption."
"What've we got on us? Rider, carrier, or both?"
"Suppose, Yeager, you just leave the thinking to somebody else."
"What they're going to do, sir, they're going to knock hell out of this station, leave us with a major problem, like a couple thousand people with no fuckin' life-support, sir—"
"That hasn't bothered you before now, has it, Sgt. Yeager?"
She got a breath, kept her body loose, kept on the track. "They're going to chaff our fire, sir, after which they're going to punch a major hole in Thule Station, after which there's none of our guns any fuckin' use, sir."
"We understand the situation, Yeager, trust us we know our options—"
"Twenty years on Africa, tac-squad sergeant, sir, I ran these operations from the other side. You got yourself a boarding situation, sir, and my advice—"
"Twenty years on this ship, out-fighting you and your murdering friends—and you can take your advice to hell, Yeager!"
"My advice, sir, is get ready to blow the tanks they want and the pump, let 'em kmow that, and get ourselves out on that dock and get ourselves some room, sir, because they got no trouble getting into this ship, from inside or outside, I can swear to that, sir."
Just the breathing. Then finally: "Ship out there is probably India. It's using a merchanter ID. That's a rider-ship inbound. Maybe two of them."
"It's Ganges or it's Tigris, we got two AP's and two rigs and either of them's got at least thirty, at least one whole tac-squad with the weapons-sync we haven't got, and they aren't fools. They can use an insystemer dock, they'll get their squad on station, core or rim—rim, if they know Thule, they'll punch right through the section-seals, and meanwhile we may have the other rider coming up under us and a second squad coming right through our hull into Personnel with another thirty guys, that's what."
Fitch didn't like that. Didn't say a thing.
"So you give the orders, sir, whatever you want from here."
Two little blips on station-scan, other side of station, one more on long-scan, only the best-guess of position. Absolutely. Goddard didn't like having her standing behind him, Goddard probably didn't like being there himself. "We're going to dockside," Fitch told him, on outside-speaker. "You're on your own. Tanks go at your discretion."
"Yessir," Goddard said, and glanced away for a second to flip a switch. "Good luck, sir."
Hadn't heard the lock cycle. Usually you heard the hydraulics work, it even got through the pump-noise, and she hadn't heard a sound. She kept thinking, He's waiting, we're still firing, he's waiting to the last minute—
God, God, NG, get out—
"Where's crew?" she asked Fitch when they got into the lift. "Station shelter?"
"Deep as we can get them." The lift started down. "Holding Central at gunpoint. We got some faint hearts. You ought to be right at home with that situation."
"As happens," she said, calm and quiet. "Yessir." She fired a shot of her own. "You volunteer for this?"
"I got my pick of crew," Fitch said.
"Tanks are rigged?"
"Tanks are rigged. Goddard's got that business."
"Goddard going to get clear?"
Silence.
Son of a bitch, she thought. And didn't say anything. Couldn't say anything.
The lift touched bottom. She kept thinking, walking out behind Fitch, I could kill this bastard.
Take him apart.
Joint by joint.
"You going to order Goddard clear, sir?"
"Goddard's in command up there. It's his choice." Fitch opened up the weapons-stowage. "This is what we've got."
AP 200's, shells, caps, remotes. She picked up a remote and a roll of fine wire, spotted a box of Gibbs-caps and reached for it. Fitch got his hand in the way and took charge of the remote.
"We got heavy demolitions? Station's got to have, sir, miner-supplies."
Fitch didn't answer her. Fitch passed her an AP and a handful of slings of shells.
"Demolitions," she repeated. "Sir. Where?"
"We're taking care of that."
"Dammit, sir, you trying to commit suicide, or what?"
Fitch shifted around, looked her direction. Clumsy. And she wasn't. Damn right she wasn't. Maybe Fitch was thinking about that. Likely Fitch was thinking all along about that.
"Do these rigs have a direct comlink with theirs?"
Reasonable question. "Yes, sir, they can have. Riders are probably trying to pick up Loki's internal stuff. Might get a bit of it. Just keep to channel B, between us. They probably haven't got the 'ears they'd need for that, not on a rider-ship."
"Can you get into their comlink?"
Second reasonable question. "Can't mimic their ID, sir. I can talk to 'em, I can hear 'em, but I'll show up as another number on their board the second I go onto Fleet-com, and I'll show as Africa. They thought of that a long time ago."
"Don't think they'd welcome you?"
"Nossir. My codes aren't current and they'll blow me to hell on a special priority. That relieve your mind, sir?"
"No end," Fitch said, picked up his stuff, laid a hand on her shoulder and pushed. "Out."
She moved, slung her AP and her shells over her left shoulder, tucked the wire and the caps in a third shell-sling and headed for the lock, thinking right then that there was an outside chance, she could go onto India-com, she knew names, lot of old drinking-buddies on India and they knew her and they knew Teo and Bieji Hager. They might at least wait-see, damn, she could go on that band and Fitch wouldn't know—
Tell them watch out for a schiz Systems man and get him out alive—
On India. Take NG into the 'decks.
Sure, he'd thank her for that.
She followed Fitch out the lock, down the ramp, onto docks she had bad dreams about.
Section-seals-were in place, like walls at either end of the section. Personnel access to get through those was down at the coreward edge of the seals, airlock passage in the arch of the seal-doorways. Four section-seals on Thule, to separate the docks and keep a decompression from going station-wide. Up above, she could see the constant yellow flash of movement in the hoses, the pump still shoving its load into Loki's gut.
They said Mazian still had ways of supplying himself, said he had some deep base, maybe old Beta Station itself, where nobody in his right mind would go—but supply lines only went so far, and Fitch said India was that desperate. That meant India was likely being shoved, run, pushed off her regular supply points, off in the deep—and that meant Alliance ships able to keep her from moving on stations.
Little Loki could have gone on as she was, sat silent while India refueled and provisioned herself off Thule—and Loki instead put herself in the way of trouble. Chance was, Loki hadn't known India was coming in, just had the bad luck to be going into dock, leaving a heat-trail India could pick up like a beacon, and Loki couldn't run.
But chance also was that Wolfe had known India was in the game. Chance was, when they'd dodged out-system in a hurry that had killed a man, when Wolfe had been on the general com after that, saying they'd had a carrier-class bogey—Wolfe had known what he was playing tag with.
They'd talked with some Alliance ship, Wolfe had said that much. They'd traded information, after which Loki had jumped to Thule.
Old spook, her systems chancy to the point of suicide—a mostly-stripped station due for demolition—
Easy equation, the way high commands did math.
"Know something?" she said to Fitch. "We were supposed to have help here. And we sit out there waiting. But we got to have fuel, we don't get this ship out of here without it, so we decide to move on our own, we were going to go in, raid that fuckin' tank, blow the pump and get out, hell with the stationers. But it wasn't our support showed up, it was India—am I right?"
No answer from Fitch, she thought. Then:
"Half-right. We come in on inertial approach, close and quiet as we can. We could've blown that pump, could've ordered station to do it. If we could get that fuckin' carrier out of the equation our last rendezvous could have spared us enough to get us to 'Dorado, but it wasn't and they couldn't. So we come in here with a problem, Ms. Yeager, and it hasn't gotten anything but worse. Right now, we got those riders sepped off at low V. The way they're acting, the speed they used getting here, we're right and they're that low, no mass in those tanks to speak of. So we're playing dumb little merchanter—like they can move in here real fast and easy and make a little ship like us spit it up again. Only by now they've got a look at us up close, now they know they got a real problem unless they can take us, and they know it's a trap that's going to close. That what you want to know?"
Made sense. For the first time she got the feeling Fitch was on the level.
"Meaning we got help possible?"
"Meaning we've caught ourselves a Fleet carrier. Meaning that sonuvabitch Keu is dead V at this star and we're blowing every skimmer Thule's got, disabling the section-seals, we're going to take out that pump, and we're sitting here throwing missiles at those rider-ships they can't throw back, because they don't want to blow the pump or our tanks. We've been getting amnesty-offers for the last half hour."
Fitch surprised her. You got him started and the man could talk.
"Keu won't keep his word," she said. "Kreshov might, he's one captain in the Fleet that might, but not Keu —You trusting Mallory, by any chance?"
"Not by choice," Fitch said.
Funny as hell. Spook officer and an Afriker with the same opinion. She almost appreciated Fitch for that half-second
"Don't trust you, either," Fitch said then. "But you've got Ramey to think about. Ship blowing up's not the worst thing that could happen to Mr. Ramey—not with his particular problem. Boy can't take orders. How long do you think he'd last, on India?"
She didn't say anything. Didn't think it called for it.
"Just insurance," Fitch said. They got to the seal-door airlock, likeliest access with the giant seal-doors disabled from Central. Fitch waved a hand in the general direction of the lock, invited a fool to go ahead, try to open it. "You want to critique the job, Yeager, you go right ahead."
"Hell, no, sir, if Mr. Bernstein or Mr. Smith had anything to do with those airlock controls, I got every confidence. I just want to do me some basic wiring, if you don't mind, sir, a half-dozen AP rounds, just put their caps in and peel their backsides off."
Fitch hitched his shell-slings up on his shoulder. "You want to do that, I'm going to take me a little walk over there."
She halfway grinned. "Know what mof stands for—sir?"
"Yeah," he said, and walked off. The com said: "It stands for, I stand over here, and you wire it, Yeager."
CHAPTER 29
Something blew, you could feel it through the deckplates, and a nervous skut with a glove off, that being faster, doing wiring on a job like this one—really hated to hear sounds like that.
But the air stayed.
Thank God for favors.
In spite of which, she had her tether-hook fastened to the nearest metal strut, because decompression was a real likelihood, and there was an equally good chance of something like a missile coming right up through the deckplates or the blast-wall, a hello from India's number two rider that they knew was out there.
Touchy little job, Fitch was right, you called it a grape-cluster, nobody remembered why—a little group of AP shells with their back ends peeled off and bare wire stuck under their end-seals, right over the little black dot where the contact was. You twisted the tails together for good contact all the way down the bunch, finished it off with a little Gibbs-cap in the middle of the wires, then you just bent the twist-tail of the cluster and hooked it over something convenient.
Mostly you hung them head-high, on girders and such. And in this case, made extra-long twist-tails and a good solid knot in those tails to make sure they held fast.
Another explosion, off in some other section.
She kept at it, with the bare hand freezing, because Thule's power was down, and bitter cold air coming through the vents on the rig, because they had six hours, longer if they didn't ask anything out of the circulation, and longer, too, because she wasn't asking anything out of the armor while she was sitting here making fussy little wire-tails and worrying more about static charges than she was about the booms and blowups around the rim.
At least Fitch wasn't a nag, man sat down and shut up and just watched the way he said, saving it too, faceplate up, talking back and forth to Goddard, maybe clear to Central and Wolfe or Orsini, on Loki's sealed-line phone, there at the pump-station.
She took another cap, turned its tiny edge-dial, set it as number three, was wrapping it in when the dock quaked and Fitch stumbled up to his feet.
She wound the tail, laid it down, unclipped her safety and jammed her right glove on, then grabbed up her gun and the rest of the shells. "Program," she said, "Vent seal, amp 220, gyros."
Second blast as she was standing up. Readout said this one came from dead ahead. Loki's berth—either Loki or the station wall around it.
Dammit!
She ran for Fitch's position behind the main pump housing, came in heavy-footed and needing the gyros on the stop. "They're in, sir, that was the ship took that hit—Get Goddard and NG off, tell them get down here!"
"I just did," Fitch said. "Goddard's on his way out. Your damn merchanter-boy isn't answering his com, Yeager."
"Shit!"
"There's the phone. You're patched into general com up there, you tell him get his ass out here."
She grabbed the phone, unplugged the line and shoved the plug into the com-patch. "NG? NG, it's Bet. Answer your damn page!"
The deck shook. Readout said behind her. Airlock, then. She saw Fitch ducked down behind the pump-housing, figured if the tac-squad was worth anything they'd probed the airlock before they sent anybody through, and they were just going to blast through the layers, one after the other. Took a minute or so more. "NG? Never mind answering, just get suited and get the hell moving! Come on, dammit!"
Flicker of bracketing on the ramp, somebody in a hard-suit.
She hoped it was NG, she didn't think it was.
Goddard's voice said, "I can't raise the son of a bitch."
Could've ducked out before this, maybe nobody was paying attention. Maybe he was on the docks and scared to answer…
Maybe he was gone-out, ducked into some hole on the ship—not tracking on here and now—
That damn hole in back of the storage-rack—
God!
"NG, get out of the ship!"
Flutter of bracketing as Goddard got into cover with Fitch, Goddard carrying an AP and a couple of shell-slings, give him credit for that much, the son of a bitch—
She wanted to kill him.
"NG!"
Wanted her hands on NG at the moment, wanted to shake him till he rattled, damn it, damn his spook ways—
"NG! Get out here!"
More shocks in the readout, marker-dot flashing on the airlock at her back. You didn't need to face a thing in a rig. But she kept looking toward the ramp, hoping for a damned fool to show up.
Dot still flashing, sound-reading coming up, secondary dot intermittent with brackets as Goddard was trying to get his gun loaded—
No more time to spend, no more. She unplugged the line, squatted down with Fitch and Goddard, pulled her safety-clip and attached to the buffer-skirt support on the pump-housing, only thing she could see that might hold. Fitch followed suit, got Goddard clipped.
NG, dammit!
Puff of fire at the airlock, sudden vapor following that—
"God!" Fitch's voice.
Air freezing as it met hard vacuum.
As the dockside blew out the airlock.
She got a grip on the buffer herself, as dust and junk flew past, as the rig's pickups registered a whistling howl of escaping air—
"You got to get them when they show!" she said to Fitch and Goddard. "Got Loki at our backs, another damn squad coming behind us—"
Things left the ground and flew, stuff hit the seal-wall and stuck under the wind-pressure, stuff skidded and rolled across the decking, a couple of shipping cans flew like so much foil-scrap, and lights started going out, old-fashioned floods popping in the vacuum, other things started exploding, less and less audible as the air went away.
No way the tac-squad was standing in the path of that storm. They were hooked in, tucked down, never in the rigged airlock when it blew, just out there waiting for Thule to bleed to death.
