Here We Stand, page 67
“Hang on,” Ingram said. “This isn’t a suicide mission.”
“I never said it was. If the Jattans are playing silly buggers with us, I’ll set explosives and Fred or Sol will have to gate me out of there.”
“This has escalated somewhat,” Ingram said stiffly. “What exactly are you taking?”
Marc picked up his daypack and shook it by the straps to indicate the brick-sized charge inside. “This’ll blow a big hole in the hull. If Nir-Tenbiku’s doing a kamikaze run, I grant his wish. If it’s unmanned, I blow it before they drop it on us.”
“And how will you know? We have no idea what the ordnance might look like.”
“For a start, if the ship’s unmanned or he hasn’t come alone, it’ll be bloody obvious it’s not a friendly visit.”
“But why would they attack if they want Curtis or some favour from us?”
“Because they think we won’t hand the ship over, or they want to make sure the other side doesn’t get hold of it. Or perhaps they’ll just want us gone. I’ve seen flimsier reasons back home. Look, this is just a precaution, because we won’t get a chance to rerun this if you’re wrong about Nir-Tenbiku.”
Ingram shook her head, either in defeat or disbelief. “Don’t cut it too fine, then.”
“We’re jumping into a mission we can’t plan properly and we don’t have much intel,” Marc said. “So I’ll assume the worst until I see what I’m up against, and then I’ll improvise.”
“Fine, but you improvise on the side of caution.”
Marc had no intention of dying, but nobody really knew how these particular Jattans operated. All he could do was assume they applied the same basics of warfare as humans because they seemed to organise themselves in a similar way, from political parties to space flight and colonisation. Part of him wanted to try gating in and using the boarding as a dry run for sabotaging Kugad, if and when that became necessary. He needed to know how he handled fast insertions with the gate. But the only way to do that without revealing it was for Searle to mock up a docking, and that was getting way too complicated to be worth it. Marc had one task and that was to make sure they weren’t allowing a Trojan horse to land.
He walked over to Curtis and stood at the bottom of the ramp. “Cosqui, have you got that deck plan yet?”
Cosqui emerged from the forward port hatch and held out her screen to him. “I was waiting for you to stop fighting.”
“Yeah, we’re done now.” Marc transferred the file to his pocket screen and took a look at the blueprint. “Not a lot of room for error, is there?”
“That’s the standard Kanur layout, but they might have modified it,” Cosqui said. “The emergency hatch will always have good access around it, though, or there’s no point in having it at all. If you let me follow your helmet cam, I can identify what you see and tell you if it’s ordnance or weapons. You can also use a gas analyser to test the atmosphere for particles of explosive substances and pathogens. You have them in your workshop.”
“I’ll get one sent over right away,” Solomon said. “And I’ll copy the plan to your head-up display, Marc.”
“Let me see it first.” Marc put his helmet back on and a dim deck plan appeared in his eyeline, tilted in 3D like a route planner, complete with arrows. “Okay, that’s not too intrusive. Just keep it basic.”
“Don’t worry, the emergency suits are designed to direct personnel to escape pods and exits if visibility’s compromised,” Solomon said. “It’s minimal so that it’s easy for someone under extreme stress to follow.”
“I’m not stressed. I just don’t like the thought of sucking vacuum.” Marc took off his helmet again and held his screen so Cosqui could see what he was pointing at on the plan. “So if that’s the cockpit, and I’m inserted here behind this chart table or whatever it is, I can clear the compartments from the rear section forward.”
“That’s the galley. Not a chart table.”
“Bloody hell, that’s even more cramped than I thought. Is the cockpit likely to be locked or anything?”
“Probably not.”
“Headroom?”
“The same as Gan-Pamas’s freighter.”
“What about air? Can I take my helmet off if I need to? If Gan-Pamas could breathe our atmosphere, can I breathe theirs?”
“Yes, it should be close to what you’re used to.”
“Thanks Cosqui. Sol, can I test the translation thing now?”
“You’re connected,” Solomon said. “Just talk. Nir-Tenbiku will be able to hear the Jattan translation from your external speaker. When you talk to us on internal comms, or he replies to you, we’ll all hear English.”
“Even if I take the helmet off?”
“Yes, but you’ll hear both voices if you do.”
“Let’s try that so I know how it’ll sound. Okay, testing, testing, half a league, half a league, half a league onward...”
Hearing two voices was no more distracting than trying to monitor two different radio channels, but the stream of high-pitched Jattan delivered in his own voice threw him for a moment. He could never hit those high notes in real life. He sounded possessed. It would have been hilarious if circumstances had been different.
“Okay, I’m ready.” Marc turned to Ingram. “Give Nir-Tenbiku plenty of warning that I’m boarding so he doesn’t panic and do something daft when he hears something scraping his hull.”
“He’ll almost certainly detect Curtis coming,” Searle said. “So tell him sooner rather than later, please, Captain.”
“I’ll call him when you take off,” Ingram said.
Marc looked up at Curtis from the bottom of the ramp. He’d been on board, but he’d never flown in her, and now he wished he’d spent a bit of time re-learning how to move in microgravity. The small voice in his head that nagged him to do things while he still had the time said he also ought to start training in higher gravity right away so he’d be ready to pay an unfriendly visit to Kugad. If he asked nicely, Searle would probably jump at the excuse to take Curtis up for a few orbital flights with the artificial gravity cranked up. As soon as Nir-Tenbiku was on his way home, Marc would plan his high-G training schedule.
But first he had to make sure he didn’t meet a premature end trying to squeeze through a Jattan-sized hatch with only a few layers of aramid between him and oblivion. He boarded Curtis without looking back at Ingram and followed Searle and Cosqui through narrow passages and hatches that only just cleared his shoulders. The rescue hatch was set halfway up a bulkhead, so he’d come through the deckhead of the Jattan ship like he’d turned ninety degrees and descend to the deck. It might take time to reorient himself to return fire if this was an ambush.
“Okay, I’m as ready as I’m going to be,” he said. “Crack on.”
Searle looked uncomfortable in the pilot’s seat even with all the modifications they’d done to create more room. He was a tall bloke. He looked over his shoulder at Marc with some difficulty.
“We’ve got this,” he said. “You okay?”
“When the analyser shows up, yeah.”
They waited. Cosqui preened the feathers on her right arm, then whistled tunelessly to herself, clearly bored. Marc couldn’t tell if she’d picked up the habit from a human or if teeriks made random bird noises naturally, and he was reluctant to ask. The minutes dragged on. Eventually Solomon came on the radio.
“Marc, Fred’s on his way with an analyser.”
“Thanks.”
“He’s a little agitated. May I suggest you humour him?”
“Sol, I’ve got a job to do. Is this going to impede the mission? If so, get someone else to fetch one.”
“All you need to do is politely decline his offer of using the personal Caisin gate. Just keep him calm and I’ll take care of it.”
Cosqui rasped to herself and muttered in Kugal, but the sentiment was clear because her red crest lifted like an angry cockatoo’s. Marc could imagine what Sol meant by take care of it, too.
“He’s not back on his meds yet, is he?” Searle said. “I feel for the guy. Tough choice.”
Marc was glad he wasn’t relying solely on Fred for an accurate gate extraction today. “I don’t know what’s worse, dumbing him down with that stuff or letting him be the unstable genius.”
Rustling and muffled banging emerged from the passage behind the cockpit, the sound of a large creature with wings trying to move too fast through small metal spaces. Fred emerged from the hatch. Over the weeks, Marc had learned to read his mood, which wasn’t easy in a species that didn’t have a wide range of facial expressions. But if he’d had to guess, he’d have thought Fred was angry about something and trying not to show it, not agitated, whatever Sol meant by that.
“Here’s the analyser, Marc.” Fred handed it over. Marc examined it and realised it had been pre-set for him, with just a button to press. “But you could use the personal gate instead. Nir-Tenbiku won’t imagine for one moment that someone could open a portal inside his ship. He’ll be confused and think you have some other breaching technology.”
Humour him, Sol had said. So Marc humoured. “Thanks, Fred, but I need a lot more practice first. I’m the weak link in this. We’d have to do a fake hatch opening anyway, just to make sure Nir-Tenbiku believed it, so we might as well do it for real.”
Fred cocked his head. “Very well. But we’ll be ready to extract you via the regular gate if things go wrong.”
“Thanks. I’ll try to make sure they don’t.”
Fred clambered out of the cockpit. He hadn’t seemed aggressive, just obsessive. Everyone waited in silence until Fred was well out of earshot.
“Sol, if he’s standing by to gate me out, make sure you oversee it, please. Just in case.” Marc shouldn’t have said it in front of Cosqui, but he erred on the side of survival. Searle started the engines and ran final checks. He looked confident using the human-adapted controls that Cosqui had designed.
“Okay, ready to launch. Ready, Marc?”
“Chocks away, Ginger. Tally ho.”
“What? Okay. I get it.”
Marc secured the analyser on his tool belt and sealed his helmet. Then he shut his eyes. No, it was worse like that. He’d have to distract himself some other way. He switched to the head-up display and concentrated as hard as he could on the Kanur layout, visualising himself entering via the deckhead hatch and grabbing for the rails on the left to orientate himself.
At least Sol was the only one who could monitor his vitals. He didn’t want anyone seeing his pulse rate soaring.
Just breathe.
Come on, you’ve done harder shit than this. Much harder. Get a grip. What’s Boadicea going to think of you?
He couldn’t see what was going on outside the ship anyway. It took longer than he expected to taxi onto the short strip of runway, but he felt the drives ramp up and then Curtis lifted with almost no forward motion. It didn’t feel as chest-crushing as he remembered. If he asked Searle why, he’d get a physics lesson, so he just carried on trying to memorise the deck plan to take his mind off the void ahead. He’d have been just as dead if anything went wrong in a conventional aircraft, but it never felt that way.
How was he going to explain this to Lawson? Now that was a good way to take his mind off the flight. Dumping two different sets of aliens on the bloke complete with pics would make it much harder for him to keep it to himself. He’d have to share the information with the intelligence services at the very least. Marc was suddenly disappointed with himself. When did he start thinking it was okay for civil servants to keep secrets from the people’s representatives? Blood had been shed in the past to put an end to that, but here he was making it happen again. He had no way of knowing whether Lawson was a good guy or not. He’d had to make the decision to trust him just to ask for help with the evacuation, but the rest was based on no more than a gut feel. They seemed to understand each other. Maybe he’d have understood Tim Pham too if they’d both been trying to save the same country.
“Ingram’s speaking to Nir-Tenbiku,” Searle said. “Better listen in case he says no and we have to abort.”
Marc picked up the channel. He hadn’t said goodbye to Ingram. That bothered him. He was just being professional about it all, but it still made him wonder if he’d ever speak to her again.
“Primary, we’re sending our most experienced and senior soldier to prepare you for landing,” Ingram said. “He’ll board your vessel shortly. You don’t need to do anything except allow the ship to dock with you.”
“How are you able to do that?” Nir-Tenbiku asked.
“We have all the technical specifications for the Kanur-class and other Jattan vessels.” Ingram was back on form. It was a subtle warning. Marc hoped it wasn’t so subtle that it got lost in translation. “We have a compatible system.”
“Then I look forward to talking with you, Captain.”
The channel closed. “He seems a bit of a smooth-talker,” Marc said. “Are we quarantining the ship on landing? Haine ran tests on Gan-Pamas for pathogens, so if some Jattan lurgy was going to kill us, I suppose we’d know by now.”
“What if we contaminate them, though?” Searle asked.
“If he’s not worried about it, neither am I.”
Now things were happening, Marc felt his fears switch off. He still didn’t like space, but he was in control now and he knew every move he needed to make once that hatch was open. He could hear Searle talking to Cosqui as Curtis rolled and aligned with the Kanur’s top hatch, then the countdown.
“Cab Seven to Cab One, docking in five... four... three... two... and we have docking.”
Marc felt the slight bump. Nir-Tenbiku must have felt it too.
“Okay, Marc, you’re on,” Searle said. “I’ll see you out. Cosqui, you have the ship.”
Marc released his harness and now had a couple of minutes to adjust to weightlessness before transferring to the patrol ship. Searle went ahead of him, hand over hand like a slow-motion gibbon, obviously used to all this. Long-forgotten training flooded back and Marc was almost pleased to realise there was something he needed to master again. Every move he made was conscious effort, not muscle memory. He’d work with that.
As soon as Searle got the hatch open, it dawned on Marc that there was no airlock. Once Nir-Tenbiku’s hatch was open, there was a straight tunnel between the ships. Both vessels now depended on that connection holding. Marc tightened the straps on his daypack and held his Marquis close to his chest.
“Tight fit,” he said, looking at the Jattan-sized opening.
“You’ve done this before, though, haven’t you?”
“Not quite.”
“I’ll close both hatches once you confirm you’re clear.”
“Got it. Then bang out fast. Sol’s got a fix on me if anything goes wrong.”
“You’re a crazy bastard, Marc. Keep that upper lip stiff, okay?”
“It’s concrete, mate. See you back at base.”
There was no good way to squeeze through a hatch when you couldn’t see what was waiting for you on the other side. Marc opted for head-first — weapon-first, to be exact — with his arms forward like a diver so he had a chance of returning fire if need be. Legs-first would be a bit too exciting. Searle had to help him free the daypack when it got snagged on the coaming, but once Marc’s shoulders were through into the main section of the docking tube, he could pull himself forward. He inched out of the hatch on the other side, checking the compartment for nasty surprises as soon as his head was clear, and then eased out fully to push himself down to the deck.
He managed to right himself on two feet, caught his helmet on the deckhead, and bent over further. The helmet added a few inches to his height. He’d have been better off crawling.
“Clear,” he said. “Secure the hatch and go.”
“Copy that.”
Marc turned and waited for the helmet cam to recognise the layout in the dim light and superimpose direction arrows. When he raised his hand to feel for the deckhead, he realised he had a couple of inches of clearance after all. Above him, metal banged and scraped. The hatch was closed. Now he could move forward. He switched on the analyser and wedged it in a tool pocket on his chest where he could see the display, then raised the Marquis and looked for movement or objects that might be explosives or worse. If he hadn’t been weightless, it would have been like any one of dozens of room-clearing operations he’d done on Earth. He hoped he wouldn’t have to open fire, but at least it would only push him back to a bulkhead.
“Curtis now detached and clear,” Searle said.
“Copy that. Cosqui, are you getting my helmet feed?”
“I am,” she said. “Nothing to worry us so far.”
Marc checked the analyser. The lights were all green and still at baseline, so it looked like there were no explosives or pathogens, but he couldn’t check for unknown compounds. He wasn’t out of the woods yet.
There were only three compartments between the deck flat under the emergency hatch and the cockpit forward of him, and he found all of them were completely empty — no cargo, all the lockers dogged open, and no sign of anyone else on board. There was a deck below, a small cargo area like the one in Gan-Pamas’s freighter, but Marc couldn’t detect any heat signatures. It didn’t look like anyone was lying in wait.
Marc reached the cockpit hatch and switched to external comms. “Primary? This is Marc Gallagher. I’m on deck and I’m coming into the cockpit.”
There was always that moment when he didn’t know what would happen when he moved in. A Jattan energy weapon would ruin his day and there was no room to dodge it or find cover, even if he could move fast enough in microgravity. He couldn’t check the cockpit using the reflection on the inside of the ship’s windscreen, either. A tangle of floating symbols and lines hung in the air in front of it, exactly like the projected displays that had originally been installed in Curtis. All he could do was rely on getting his shot in first if Nir-Tenbiku wasn’t as unarmed and innocent as he’d claimed.
