Nothing else to do, Ben thought, with an anguished glance at Bird drifting there so white and different, among beads of blood, and grabbed the mounting bar and went, fast as he could. Without Bird.
Eerie quiet in the core. The chute was silent. You could hear the line moving in the slot, you could hear the low static hum of the rotation interface. Couldn’t see anything for a moment but the line’s motor housing slipping past them.
He looked back, to be sure it was all real. But Sal and Dekker were reaching for the line, blocking his view of the inside of the car.
Meg was on the line behind the Shepherd, he was three spaces back. They passed the housing out into the open, out where the core spun to a dizzy vanishing point and tricked the eye and an already aching stomach. He held on—just held on, while muscles cramped in the cold.
Past the customs zone. He kept thinking—what if someone had a gun—what if they know where we are? Nothing they could do up here. Nothing but go at the pace of the line. Cold chilled his blood-soaked clothing and turned it stiff. Fingers lost all feeling, eyes teared from the cold, more bitter than he’d ever felt it, and the line moved at the same steady pace, clank, clank, clank—with his teeth chattering and the only thought in his head now just keeping his fingers closed on the hand-grip. Meg had said berth 18. 18 was hell and gone at the end of the mast. Shuttle out to a ship that was going to take Dekker and the rest of them out of here, he guessed, but the only thought that kept replaying, over and over again, was that gun going off, Bird getting hit—
He hadn’t had time to stop the bleeding, dammit. Hadn’t had time—Sal had known where she was going, Sal had known about the shuttle—hadn’t told them, God, he should have told her to go to hell, taken Bird to the Trans, taken him to the hospital—Bird shouldn’t be dead…
It was Trinidad they were passing, now, Way Out mated to her for the trip they weren’t going to take. They’d been so damn close—
Movement caught his eye, against the steady spin of the core, big supply can drifting free—hell! he thought, shocked by the sight, damned dangerous, a thing the size of a skimmer floating along like that with no pusher attached—
He thought—as clearly as he was thinking at all—that’s wrong.
That’s wrong, that is—
The line jolted and stopped.
“Shit!” Sal gasped, loud in that sudden silence, and Dekker thought—we’re not going to get there, it’s not going to work—we’re hanging up here and we can’t reach the shuttle—can’t reach the dismount lines…
“Hand off the line!” Meg yelled of a sudden, juvie lessons, old safety drill. He reached for Sal, caught her hand—saw, all of a sudden, the whole line bucking, a wave coming toward them.
Dekker yelled, “Let go!” and threw everything he had into the chain they made, hand to hand—he threw his whole body into that snap-the-whip twist, aimed as best he could and let go—
A moment of floating free, then, nothing they could do if that line hit them, if they missed the dismount-line—
The wave sang overhead and passed. The Shepherd snagged a dismount line with his foot and hauled them all toward it.
Meg called out, “Center-mast! We can’t make the shuttle, we got our own ship there. Her tanks are charged!”
“Won’t dock!” the Shepherd yelled back. “Won’t mate, dammit!”
“Take what we can fuckin’ get,” Sal yelled. “They’ve turned the line loose, there’s no way we can get there, Sammy, move your butt!”
Fire popped, somewhere, Dekker had learned that sound. “They’re shooting at something,” he called out, following Sal and Ben down the line that connected along the dockage.
Something sang past him. He thought, God, they’re fools, there’s seals where we are and they’re shooting bullets—
Another ricochet—he saw Meg kicked sideways, blood spraying—thought she was going off the line, but her left hand held the line, and Sal caught up and grabbed her jacket. He made a fast catch-up to help both of them, but Meg had caught Sal’s coat with her left hand, blood floating in great dark beads near her other arm. Sal screamed at Ben to get out of her way, get the hatch open.
Ben scrambled along the line and overtook the Shepherd at Trinidad’s entry. Sal took a swing and floated free toward them and Dekker hurled himself after, caught Meg’s arm and got his hand over the bleeding as Ben and the Shepherd grabbed their clothes and hauled them into the open hatch.
“Get it closed!” he gasped, stopping with a shove of his foot on a touch-pad. “Meg,—”
Meg’s own hand shoved his aside, clamped down on the arm. “I got it, I got it,” Meg said between her teeth. “God, just get me a patch—get us the hell out of here! Get us to the shuttle, 18, this guy’ll tell you—”
“We can’t mate with a shuttle-dock!” the Shepherd cried. “We’ve lost it, dammit, all we are is under cover. Aboujib, get com, get contact with the Hamilton, tell them our situation, see if they can talk us out of this—”
“Severely small chance, Sammy.”
Severely small, Meg told herself, couldn’t move her arm for Ben to get a wrap on it, sleeve and all—spurting blood everywhere, real close to going out.
Like Bird.
No fuss, not overmuch pain, just—going out.
“Hang on,” Ben said, and hurt her with the bandage. “Damn it, Meg, pay attention! Hold on to it!”
Grapples banged loose. She thought, Good boy, Dek…
… Bills every damn where on the table, Bird excused himself up to the bar, talked to Mike a minute, Bird about as upset as she’d ever seen him during the days when they were trying to fix that ship. Bird was working himself up to a heart attack. Meanwhile she sat there looking at her fingernails, telling herself she was a fool for staying with this whole crazy idea.
Old anger, she told herself. So the company won another round. So another kid died. A lot of them had died—
She kept hearing the gunfire behind the rattle of glassware. Watching the rab go down. Kids, with shocked looks on their faces. The company cops with no faces, just silver visors that reflected back the smoke and the frightened faces of their victims.
Lawless rab.
Property rights. Company rules.
“We got to fix this,” Bird said the day Dekker came to them. “What they’ve done isn’t fair.” And she thought, sick at her stomach, Dammit, Bird, they’ll kill you…
Trim jets kept firing. She felt the bursts.
The shuttle’s mains kicked in, in the high lonely cold above Earth’s atmosphere, the transition she loved. You knew you were going home, then, the motherwell couldn’t hold you—
Up, not down—
Black for a while. She felt the push of braking, had Sal’s arm around her, the aux boards in front of her, Sal trying to get her belted in. She reached with the arm that didn’t hurt, took the belt and snapped the clip in, solid click. Tested it for a rough ride. She told Sal: “Get yourself belted, Aboujib, I got it, all right…”
Another burst of trim jets. Dek was maneuvering, Ben was fastening his belt for him while the Shepherd—Sammy, Sal called him—was filling in at the com, saying, urgently, “They’re warning us to pull back in. That carrier’s moving in fast. The Hamilton’s powering up now—we can’t make it, there’s no time for them to pick us up—”
Trim jets fired constantly at the rate of one and two a second, this side and that—she had the camera view, a row of docked skimmers blurring in the number two monitor as they skimmed along the mast surface—damn close, there, kid—
Static burst from the general com: the Shepherd had cut B channel in. “AMC Twenty-nine Hamilton, this is FleetCom. You’re in violation of UDC directives. Stand down—”
“Cut that damn thing off!” Ben snarled. “We got enough on our minds.”
“We can’t dock,” the Shepherd yelled. Sal was belting in. Ben was. Acceleration was increasing in hammer blows from the main engines. The mast whipped past faster and faster—
/> Then nothing. Sudden long shove from the bow stabilizers and the mast swung back in view, retreating now—going for decel—another burst of Trinidad’s mains…
No, she thought—Way Out’s mains… we’re coupled. Double mass.—Are we giving up? Going back? Shuttle’s on the mast, Dek, did we miss it. Don’t get rattled, kid…
Ben said something. Dek said something, and the trim jets fired another long burst, taking the ship—God, felt like a right angle to the station.
God, he’s going after the Hamilton—
Mains again, hard push—pain, from the arm, real pain—
This is interesting, she thought, feeling the accel, figuring vectors. Hell of a ride, Dek,—you tell ‘em we’re coming?
Big shove. Dark again. She could hear the beeps from the distance indicators, the higher ready-beeps from systems on standby—she thought: that’s nice, nice sound, that, everything’s optimum config, that sumbitch interface back there worked, didn’t it?
Loud argument, and the whine of the forward bay hydraulics.
“What the fuck are you doing?” a man’s voice shouted. “They’re ready to move, dammit, we’re in their blast pattern—they got a carrier on intercept—”
Sal’s voice, clear and sane: “Shut up, Sammy!”
Thank God, Meg thought, listening for the beeps and tones, easier that than keeping her eyes open. Plenty of information there: bay was open, manipulator arm was working—Sammy was saying, “God, you fool, you damned fool…”
Worth a look. She blinked the blurry monitors clear, saw an irregular surface, slotted with dust-deflectors and bolted-onto with tether stanchions—the arm extending out in front of them, white in the spots, shadowed onto the irregular plating—
“Go for it, go for it!” Sal said, “you got it, Ben!”
Neat touch. Hardly felt it.
Attached. To a tether stanchion. The manipulator grip closed and locked.
“Nice job,” she said. She wasn’t sure anybody heard.
The Shepherd yelled, “Go!”
Acceleration started, built and built.
Better dump those tanks, Dek, better just uncouple Way Out, let her go, and just hope to hell the arm mount holds—no way we can decel off what a Shepherd can put on us, anyway…
Ought to tell the kid. But just hard to get organized—hard to get the mouth to work.
Unstable load. Lot of push on. Pressure built in her arm and deserted her brain.
Going up, guys, going up, long and hard as we can…
Quiet. Couldn’t even hear the fans. But no more g.
Taste of blood.
Explosion—
But they weren’t tumbling. Wasn’t the way it had been. He opened his eyes, got the board in focus in this peaceful drifting—neck was stiff, muscles sprained. He turned his head and saw Ben out cold—the Shepherd beside him, headset drifting loose. If there was sound he couldn’t hear it, except the fans.
Then he remembered shutting down. Remembered Meg—tried to move. There wasn’t a muscle that didn’t hurt. But he unclipped, pushed off and turned, getting to Meg’s position.
Blood made a fine mist. She was white as a ghost and cold when he touched her face. She looked dead.
But tension came back, dead one moment, then unconscious, but there, by some subtle change that wasn’t even movement until the eyelids showed stress. Ben was moving—number 2 boards and the best place, his and Ben’s, to ride out the push.
“She make it?” Ben asked fuzzily.
“Yeah,” Meg mumbled, speaking for herself. At least that was what it sounded like.
“Are we still grappled?”
“I don’t know,” Dekker said. “We seem stable.”
Ben freed himself and drifted over to see to Sal—Sal was coming to. The Shepherd was still out. Dekker reached for the headset, heard faint static and a thin voice before he held it to his ear. “… alive in there?” he heard, and: “I’m hearing voices. Their com is open…”
“Yeah,” he said, pulling the mike into line. “This is miner ship Trinidad. Is this the Hamilton?”
CHAPTER 19
HE wasn’t doing a damn thing,” Ben said—there was blood all over him and Sal, blood dried on his own hands, Dekker saw, Bird’s, Meg’s, he had no idea. There was too much of it.
“Nothing?” the officer asked.
“Cops had me, dammit, he didn’t need to be there, he wasn’t doing a damn thing, just objected to them grabbing me, and some fool—just—pulled a trigger.”
Dekker stared at the backs of his hands, seeing what he hadn’t been there to see. Seeing Meg in the lift, holding on to Bird.
Sal said, “I saw it. They were arming guys straight off leave, some of them still higher than company corruption: green kids, didn’t know shit what they were doing.”
“It was a soldier.”
“Damn right it was a soldier. Marine. Couldn’t have been twenty.”
The Hamilton’s purser clicked off the recorder. “We’ve got that. We’ll send it before we make our burn.”
Dekker said: “How is the fuel situation?”
“Not optimum,” the purser said.
“Shit.” Sal shook her head. The purser left. Ben didn’t say anything, just got a long breath and clasped his hands between his knees.
It was as much information as they’d gotten. The same information as they’d gotten since they’d come aboard. Hadn’t seen Sammy—Sammy had gone offshift, probably in his own bunk asleep or tranked out if he hadn’t gotten the news yet. Sammy—Ford was his last name—had been fairly well shaken up, hadn’t asked for the position he’d been handed—the situation at the dock had gone to hell, the shuttle crew hadn’t answered, the 8-deck group hadn’t answered, they’d suspected their com was being monitored: Mitch had gone next door to use the restaurant’s phone to get contact with his crew and hadn’t come back, arrested or worse, they still hadn’t found out. Sammy wasn’t flight ops, he was the legal affairs liaison, a Shepherd negotiator, for God’s sake, who’d come aboard R2 to deal with management, if the plan had gone right, if the soldiers hadn’t come in…
Sammy’d done all right, Dekker decided. All right, for a guy who’d probably never gotten his hands dirty. Had to tell Meg when she came to. She’d get a laugh out of it.
Another officer, this one straight past them, where they waited in the tight confines of the medstation. Right into the surgery.
Angry voice beyond the door, an answer of some kind.
“Think they’ve got a hurry-up,” Sal muttered.
More voices. Something about paralysis and another thirty minutes. Voice saying, quite clearly, “… doesn’t do her any good if she’s dead, Hank, we haven’t got your thirty minutes. Get your patient prepped, we’re moving.”
Man came back through the door then, looked at them, said, more quietly, “We’ve got your ship free, we’ve got a positional problem and we’re doing a correction burn, about as fast as the EV-team can get in and I can get up to the bridge. Best we can do. You’ve got belts there. Use them. Staff’s got take-holds.”
Bad, then. Dekker clamped his jaw and reached for the belt housed in the side of the seat as Sal and Ben did the same. The officer was out the door and gone.
“Shit-all,” Ben muttered. His hands were shaking. Sal’s were clenched in her lap.
They were in trouble. No question. Headed into the Well, nobody had to say it. “Positional problem” on a Jupiter-bound vector meant only one thing, and a hurry-up like that meant they were on their own, no beam, just the fuel they had left—which wasn’t a big argument against the Well’s gravity slope.
Way Out’s whole mass had had to go—that had been his decision: save Hamilton the fuel hauling it, keep Trinidad’s manipulator arm from shearing off at the bolts, or maybe taking the bulkhead with it: but that fuel in Trinidad’s tanks had been a big load—big load, on those bolts. He’d made a split-second judgment call, last move he’d made before he’d gone out. Maybe opening that valv
e had saved their lives. If that bulkhead had gone they’d have decompressed; but an uncalc’ed mass attached to Hamilton, three-quarters of it dumped without warning a few seconds into the burn… hadn’t helped their situation. Computers had recomped. But their center of mass had changed twice in that accel; and when the arm gearing had fractured—they’d had to lase through the tether ring—they must have swung flat against Hamilton’s frame and that would have changed it again. He’d gone out by the time that had happened. Didn’t know how long they’d pushed, but with a warship moving on them, they’d had to give it a clear choice between chasing them or dealing with R2.
Hamilton crew couldn’t be real damn happy with their passengers right now.
The lock hydraulics cycled and stopped. A siren shrieked. A recorded voice said: Take Hold Immediately.
“All hands prepare for course correction burn. Mark. Repeat—”
“The Bitch won’t give em a beam,” Sal muttered, teeth chattering as she checked her belt. “The Bitch is damn well hoping we’ll all take the deep one. Won’t lift a finger.”
“We’re going to be all right,” he said.
“’Going to be all right,’” Ben said. “’Going to be all right.’ You know if you weren’t a damn spook Bird’d be alive. Meg wouldn’t be in there. We wouldn’t be where we are. This whole damn mess is your fault.”
“Yeah,” he said, on a deep breath. “I know that.”
“His damn fault, too,” Ben muttered. “They weren’t after him, they didn’t know who the hell he was. He was clear, damn him, he was clear. I don’t know what he did it for.”
Engines fired. Hamilton threw everything she had into her try at skimming the Well.
He thought, I could just have pulled us off and out. Didn’t have to go to the Hamilton. Wasn’t thinking of anything else.
They’d have picked us up. But the shooting would have stopped by then. And we wouldn’t be in this mess. Ben’s right.