April (45 page)

He went back to the video feed and inspected the room behind the controller. From where the sun was and the way the light played, the hatch edge he saw to the right was probably centered on the bulkhead behind the consoles, in line with the port. He thought his controller was sitting in the chair to the right in his camera view.

He adjusted the cross hairs to one side of the port and selected one laser and from its menu, a designator. He assigned control to a hot key on his board and tapped it gently. In the vid image a red dot flashed briefly on the bulkhead behind the supervisor. The man looked up at the port briefly. He might have seen some internal reflections from the port. Easy corrected what he guessed was a half meter further away from the center of the port and saved the arm position.

There was some shadow played across the edge of his external view and he zoomed back out a bit to see why. At the base of the boom, a combat suited figure was coming out of a hatch, with an assault rifle of some sort and a pack clipped over his shoulder. Easy could guess what it was. A demolition charge, to do enough damage to the tail of his ship to cripple him.

They were assuming he was blind to his outside rear. He swung the camera to the suited figure with his joystick. The controller was still droning on about nonsense and Easy interrupted him.

"Tell your man to go back inside who is approaching my ship, or I'll shoot him."

The supervisor directed a few words in Chinese to the controller before he spoke again. "We don't have anybody approaching your ship. If you see somebody out your ports they are probably maintenance workers. There is often activity outside. It's harmless."

Dr. Singh Nam-Kah called from the back, "He told the controller ships of this class carry no weapons."

"Last chance, or his blood is on your hands." He flipped up full power on all four lasers. He didn't know how much power he needed, so better safe than sorry. If the guy started moving fast, he could move in closer than he could swing the lasers under his own tail pretty fast. He aimed at the area in front of the man, which he would advance to next. When he pulled himself forward to the next take hold ring.

Easy tapped the hot key briefly. He had no idea what it would look like, having never fired it. He was gratified it blew a hole about a half meter square through into the boom and the escaping air blew a shower of molten metal droplets and debris away from the ragged hole. However, instead of retreating, the soldier tied himself down quickly with a safety line looped around his leg to secure against recoil and pulled his rifle over his shoulder, working the action to ready it. He was going to disable them from a distance if he could. A few shots into the engines at this range would probably do the job nicely.

Easy was angry at them, throwing this fellow away for nothing. A twitch of the stick brought the cross hairs right on the suited figure and before the rifle could swing up all the way, pointed at them, he held the key down hard. He just disappeared in flash of vapor and fragments.

"Stupid Asses! I told you. All the years  I haven't had to hurt anyone - and now you had to spoil it. Now ungrapple my ship, or I'll fire on
you
." He keyed the arm back to the saved  point of aim. He cut back to two lasers at half power, with designators on, guessing what would reach through the port without shattering it. He looked at the board, afraid in his adrenaline rush he might not have felt the grapples let loose. They were still held solid to the station. "Let loose of my ship damn you!"

The controller was terrified. Looking between the angry pilot, who had just killed the soldier like swatting a bug and the political handler behind him. The handler personified the system which held his family and life in its hands and he was trained to utter obedience. He was trapped.

"Look on your chest fool!" Easy called.

The controller pointed, mute, at the two red dots scintillating one above the other on his handler's chest.

The man refused to look down. His face hard. "He wouldn't dare," he growled in English, loud enough for Easy to hear through the mic.

Easy held down the key hard.

In the video feed, the supervisor simply exploded, with a dull thump of steam. The controller threw his hands up in front of himself long after it mattered and looked at the splatter all up the buckled smoking bulkhead. He felt wet and ran his hand down the side of his face and brought it around staring in horror at the gore smeared on it.

He covered his face with his hands and cried with shame, because he saw himself a beaten dog and dead no matter whom he obeyed.

Easy cut all four lasers back in at full power and was near cutting the control room open and obliterating everything in it, but hesitated. It might actually make it harder to get loose, if he destroyed the controls and cables which worked the grapples.

What about simply cutting them off directly with the lasers? He pivoted the camera around with the joy stick and looked. He could see where both grapples came out of the surface. If he cut away the sheet metal he might sever the heavy clamps. Or he might weld them solid.

There was a tap, tap, tap sound, which finally penetrated his concentration on the displays and he looked up horrified to see a suited figure tapping a screwdriver handle on the forward port not a meter away. It was the refueling guy. If he had been another soldier sneaking up on them, they would have all have been dead. He held up three fingers and tapped the side of his helmet.

"April give me feed on local channel three," he said, unwilling to look away.

"- can get it." He heard the tail of something.

"Ok I have your feed now. What are you saying?"

"I can go in and manually release the grapples. I have the key to the maintenance panel. I've been listening to your little love fest with the controllers. There's chatter on the other radio channels, saying the Chinese are barricaded in the control room and station security is breaking in. They are yelling for some other Chinese over in the service yard, to take a yard tractor and ram you. I have to go down to the next dock to go inside. You gotta move off quickly then. I'll bang on your hatch when it's loose. You won't feel it release without power."

"Thanks. Who are you? "Easy asked.

"I don't want to say on a clear channel. I don't know who'll win here. I've got a hidey hole I'm going down as soon as you're clear. Look on your hatch."

He jumped away, swinging back to the boom on the end of his safety line and scrambled up the hand holds to the next dock, where there was a one man lock. Pretty soon they heard a couple solid thumps on their hatch. Easy eased the ship away from the boom on manual and swung the tail away. He was relieved not to feel any dragging, or see any debris trailing them out.

He keyed the laser to stow back in. They still weren't sure how much acceleration the arm could take, with the added mass on the end. When the open cargo port came into view their new friend was still visible, looking out of the opening, but quickly gave a wave and scampered away, toward the main part of the station. On the far side of the boom, clear around the clutter of the scientific areas, there was a big heavy yard tractor making a braking burn to clear the station wide. A kilometer away maybe. They would be figuring to roll over pointing at the boom and come straight in and bump them hard enough to disable them. But they quickly weren't going to be here anymore.

Still, he didn't want to rush to leave, before they could find him and try to bump. Better to disable them before they had any vector towards the Happy. He deployed the laser again to aim at the tractor. He just wanted to disable it, not burn it to junk. He zoomed in until he could see enough detail to aim away from the crew cabin. He swung the cross hairs ahead of the vessel and when the engines came into the center gave a quick jab on the key. There was a splash of light and spray of tiny sparks, but the burn wasn't interrupted.

He led ahead of it again and held the key down solid as the boat slid engine first into the beam. This time one engine quit and a puff of vapor showed a leak of some kind punched in the fuel feed. The other engine still firing tumbled the boat over, before the pilot could kill the unbalanced thrust. He thought they'd have a long hard time easing it back to dock. Certainly they were no danger now to him.

"Easy how about those guys in the control room?' April asked. "They may cause us some trouble calling for help and they sure aren't going to give us a flight clearance anyway. How about shutting them up?"

"I could bust it open to vacuum easily and burn a crater on the station where it used to be, but they probably have suits on by now and if station security has busted in I'd hate to be shooting some of our friends."

"No. I don't mean the control room. Look there" - she pointed at the antenna farm on the side of the station. " That's all their long distance radio and data links and radar. How about burning all of it off the station? It'll probably take days to replace, even what they have spares."

"Excellent idea," he agreed. The invisible beams reached out and cut through the metal rods and shapes, sliced cables and dug furrows across the skin of the station underneath as it went from one to the next. He rolled the ship over a bit, so they could observe straight out the forward ports.

April saw the white circle of a radar dish tumbling away into the void with a bite cut out of its rim. Pretty soon there was so much vaporized junk and dust hanging over the site, they started to see their laser beams back scattering off the debris. The four beams together had an eerie quality. They looked like one square shaped green beam, instead of four round ones. It played a trick on the eyes.

He looked over at April. "Sorry to be ignoring you. I'm supposed to explain what I'm doing so you learn and I'm just zooming along madly without a word. I really haven't forgotten you're there."

"Oh, I've been paying attention. We've covered use of the laser weapons system pretty well today, " she said, tongue in cheek. "You didn't have to say much. It was all pretty self explanatory. I liked how you just disabled the tractor instead if vaporizing it. You were looking at the grapple points with the laser. Were you really going to cut us away from the station there, before the fuel tech got us loose?"

"I was giving it some serious consideration. Next time this goes in the shop we install grapple posts with explosive bolts. Then if they won't let loose of them we just pop them off. How about setting up alternative profiles back to M3 and I'll call and tell them we're coming? We want to get back fairly quickly, before someone can respond and send a space plane out here. They don't keep them sitting on alert. It'll take some time to launch one, if they don't have one near ready to go anyway. What you want to do? Go high orbit and let M3 catch up with us, or low and fast and chase them around to get home?"

"If we go low there are anti-sat systems which could give us trouble when we go over North America and China, right?"

"Almost anywhere now. USNA has anti-sat/antiballistic missile systems on all their aircraft carriers, even the compact submersibles and all the Aegis ships and attack submarines. I'd be surprised if the Chinese don't have a similar capability."

"And the higher we are, the harder it is for the space planes to come up to us and the less delta v they have left to engage us right?"

"Absolutely. With the plasma drives we have more legs than any of them."

"Let's go up then." April turned to working alternative solutions.

Easy changed frequency on the radio, selected a directional antennae and told the computer to point it at M3.

He remembered something. "You folks doing OK back there?" He unclipped from his seat, turned around to look and saw three faces peering at him in silent horror.

"Uh, sorry about the fuss," he indicated over his shoulder with his thumb. "They wouldn't allow us to undock and we had to get a bit assertive. I forget you can't see very well from back there. We really need to rig you a video feed too so you can tell what's going on."

"At the last we could see just fine over your shoulder, when you appeared to be firing on the station to burn off all their communications." Eddie said. "We've been listening to all of it of course. I really didn't know anyone had these kind of laser systems. Four times now you've fired. The last time sustained for quite a long time. My understanding was the lasers military space planes can fire a single pulse and then need time to charge up for another. How do you do it?"

"Oh they've had the big lasers for years. The trouble was powering them. But we have four big fusion generators back there, behind the bulkhead you're laying on, courtesy of Dr. Ajay's boy. They'll power them their full duty cycle. We could have cut the station up like an onion for soup if we'd wanted. My problem was trying to be moderate actually. I shot a yard tug which was going to ram us and it was tricky to just nip it and damage it, instead of just blowing it to junk."

"A lucky shot, Sir." Eddie laughed.

"What?" Easy frowned at him.

"I watch classic movies. In one of the Star Trek movies, the Klingon Captain tells his gunner to shoot the Federation ship's engines and disable it and he lets loose with one small shot and the whole ship disintegrates in a zillion glowing fragments. Reality has caught up with fiction. Again," he added in a serious tone.

"Who the hell are the Klingons?"

Eddie sighed, "It would take a long time to explain."

"Easy," April called with some alarm. "Three soldiers just came out of the lock there, near the control center. They must have just blown the whole air load and not pumped down, because there was a big puff of ice fog formed when it opened."

"Are they a danger to us?" Easy asked her as he scrambled to get back strapped in his seat, pointed forward.

"No - they're only wearing brown uniforms, not p-suits." She explained, horrified.

Easy looked where April pointed and fumbled with the camera. He zoomed in and tracked but the image was hard to hold and he gave up after they saw enough to be sure. He didn't really want to see too clearly. It was three men in ordinary brown uniforms, with no helmets visible, tumbling slowly apart and dead of course. He had heard jokes for years about sending people out the lock, spacing them, but never knew of it really happening. He'd never be able to joke about it again.