Curse of the Iris (8 page)

“Missile launch detected,” Vesuvia warned.

Carlo yanked back on the control yokes and stomped on the pedals, lifting the privateer's bow, then rolling her hard to starboard. The stars spun crazily on the main screen, and a streak of light flashed across their view—a projectile fired by the enemy ship.

“Portside controls are sluggish,” Carlo grunted. “But it's nothing I can't handle.”

“Releasing chaff,” Huff growled over the comm. A moment later they heard a faint series of popping noises, and three bursts of light flowered in front of the
Comet
. The light faded, revealing expanding clouds of glittering particles—bits of metal launched into space to confuse the targeting systems of enemy missiles.

“Who do you think they are?” Carlo asked his mother.

“The ones shooting at us,” Diocletia said. “That's all that matters right now.”

Sitting at his station, Tycho found he had nothing to do but worry—there were no communications to monitor. His eyes jumped from his sister, hunched over her instruments, searching for a weakness in the jamming, to his brother and his mother, both busy at their stations with their backs straight as ramrods.

Tycho understood his mother's dilemma. Missiles were long-range weapons, and with the
Comet
's sensors blinded, there was no way to tell what kind of ship had fired them. If the
Comet
's attacker was small, the best strategy was to engage at close range, where the privateer's cannons would make short work of their opponent. But if the enemy ship was larger and better armed than the
Comet
, drawing nearer could be a fatal mistake.

“I've got it!” Yana said. “Punching through on the PKB band, oscillating within spectral harmonics . . . and sensors are coming back up. Nobody keeps Yana Hashoone blind for long!”

“You can congratulate yourself later. What do you see?” Diocletia said.

“She's a Harrier-class missile boat, maybe twenty-five meters long.”

“Not for long, she isn't,” Carlo growled. A Harrier was no match for a frigate like the
Comet
—with her sensors restored, the ship's heavier weapons would chew the enemy craft to bits.

“Mr. Grigsby, the pirate that fired on us is a Harrier,” Diocletia said into her headset. “Yana's sending the gun crews a target profile now.”

“Mom, wait—” Yana said.

“Send it!” Diocletia barked.

“Done,” Yana said, spots of color flaring in her cheeks.

“Thank you,” Diocletia said. “Now, what is it?”

“There's two more ships behind the Harrier. Still building sensor profiles, but one's about seventy-five meters long, the other maybe twice that. Probably a frigate and some kind of pocket cruiser. They've shed tanks and are on course to intercept.”

“Well, that changes things,” Diocletia said. “What's the range?”

“Still calculating,” Yana said.

Missiles lanced out from the
Comet
, white streaks in the darkness of space. A moment later, there was a flash, and the crewers belowdecks roared in triumph.

“Harrier disabled,” Vesuvia said in her flat voice. “Scan indicates ninety-three point eight percent chance enemy power linkages are severed and control systems unresponsive.”

“Mr. Grigsby, we have two more bandits out there,” Diocletia said into her headset. “Yana, what's the range? Do we need to run?”

“No . . . the frigate is probably half an hour out, the cruiser an hour or more. One more thing: I'm scanning a concentration of metals on the surface of P/2. It's an irregular pattern, but the main mass looks like it's thirty meters by ten.”

“That sounds like a ship,” Tycho said.

Diocletia nodded. “Any ion emissions or heat signature? I don't need anybody else shooting at us right now.”

“Cold as space,” Yana said.

“A wreck, then,” Carlo said.

“Maybe the
Iris
?” Yana asked.

Diocletia shook her head. “The pirates never took the
Iris
—just what she was carrying. This is something else.”

“I have an incoming transmission from the cruiser,” Tycho said.

“Put it onscreen,” Diocletia said. “Silence on deck.”

The main screen flashed, and a face glared out at them from across space. The man was bald, with tattooed tears trailing down his cheeks to his white mustache, which was stiffened with wax so it was wider than his face. Diamonds and silver hoops decorated his right ear, while his left was a blackened stub surrounded by deep white scars. His left eye was missing, replaced by a black telescoping lens.

Tycho felt his heart jump at the sight of the notorious pirate Thoadbone Mox, formerly captain of the
Hydra
. Mox had escaped capture two years ago, after Huff let him go, to the astonishment of the other Hashoones. They knew him as one of Jupiter's most infamous traitors, suspected of having sold out his fellow pirates at the Battle of 624 Hektor. Even thirteen years later, that dark day was close to a forbidden subject among the Hashoones. Huff had nearly been killed, and his injuries had forced him to surrender the captain's chair.

“Look what I've caught,” sneered Mox, his telescopic eye whining and whirring as he stared at the viewscreen on his own ship. “It's the Hashoones in that antique bucket they call a ship.”

“Well, if it isn't Thoadbone Mox,” Diocletia said. “I see someone's lent you a new ship to replace the one we took from you.”

“A bigger and better ship!” Mox crowed. “This here's the
Geryon
. I'll give you an up-close look at her in a minute. And then I'll blast that sad little scow of yours into particles.”

“You can't afford your own pocket cruiser—whose errand boy are you now, Thoadbone?”

“Errand boy? That's rich coming from a pretend pirate like you,” Mox said, then leaned close to the camera on his console, so that his face distorted hideously. “If I were you, I wouldn't be talking—I'd be running. But there's nowhere in the solar system you can hide from me, Hashoones.”

“Who's hiding? We're right here, Mox—catch us if you can. Vesuvia, end transmission.”

Diocletia drummed her fingers on her console for a moment.

“I don't like that man,” she muttered, then activated her headset. “Mavry, how's the damage look?”

“Minor,” Mavry said over his comlink from the fire room. “Some severed auxiliary power feeds and melted control linkages. We can fly with it—though if that missile had been two meters to starboard, it would have vaporized an engine.”

“Well, I guess we're not totally unlucky these days,” Diocletia said. “Though we've got company—that's Mox out there.”

“How far off?” Mavry asked.

“Not as far as I'd like,” Diocletia said, then gazed up at the main screen. Yana and Tycho exchanged a glance but kept quiet. Once their mother had all the information she needed, her decisions were her own.

“Tycho, get your father,” she said. “Take the gig down to P/2 and investigate the wreck. You're going to need to work fast, so get moving.”

She activated her headset again. “Mr. Grigsby? Blow that Harrier out of space.”

“Gladly, Captain,” Grigsby said.

It was definitely a ship—or it had been one until it plowed belly first into the surface of P/2309 K1. The impact had scattered twisted metal for hundreds of meters and buried what remained of the ship's stern in the tarry surface of the comet, with the needle-shaped nose protruding several meters above the surface, aimed at the stars it would never again reach.

Mavry flew a few hundred yards beyond the wreck and set the gig down with a stuttering of landing jets. He and Tycho were descending the gangplank when Diocletia's voice crackled in their ears.

“We're peppering the frigate with missile fire to keep her busy, but she's coming and coming hot—with Mox's cruiser behind her,” she warned.

Mavry beckoned for Tycho to hurry. “We have time, Dio. Huff and Grigsby will make them duck.”

“If I comm you to get out of there, do it.”

“Of course, Captain,” Mavry said mildly.

To Tycho's surprise, he couldn't see the wreck—there was nothing ahead of them but a bleak landscape of frozen muck, broken by rocky outcroppings and drifts of ice and snow. He looked in the other direction, thinking they'd gotten turned around somehow.

“This way,” Mavry said over his suit radio. “P/2's diameter is so small that the crash site's over the horizon.”

“Oh,” Tycho said, embarrassed.

P/2's minuscule gravity allowed him and Mavry to move across its surface in bounds, each leap carrying them a good ten meters above the comet's fractured landscape. In different circumstances, it might have been fun.

“Short, controlled jumps,” Mavry said. “Let's not achieve escape velocity and fly off into space.”

Tycho tried to remember the relevant equations and made a halfhearted attempt at the math.

“I don't think that would happen, Dad,” he said.

Mavry laughed.

“You're right, it would be more of a high parabola. Still, let's not risk it.”

Above them, a dot of light brightened, marking a missile launch from the
Comet
. A moment later, another bright dot flashed—twice, then three times—as the enemy frigate fired back. Tycho reminded himself to focus on their mission and not on those spots of light. It was hard, though—one of those spots of light had his family on it.

“Almost there,” Mavry said. “Look—there's the wreck.”

The ship's violent impact with the comet had churned the area around her stern into waves of muck, which had then refrozen into a crazy zigzag landscape. Mavry and Tycho picked their way over the scrambled ground until they stood in front of the port airlock.

“We're going to have to cut our way in,” Mavry said, unholstering a cutting torch attached to a power pack on his belt.

Tycho's faceplate automatically darkened as his father activated the torch and began to carve a circle through the airlock. Droplets of liquefied metal dripped onto the surface of the comet, melting through the frozen crust and sending up little puffs of water vapor that instantly froze into streamers of ice. They were tiny, short-lived comet tails, Tycho realized with a smile.

Mavry completed the cut and activated his headset. “We're going in. How's it look up there?”

“Hurry,” was all Diocletia said.

Mavry pressed the magnets in his gloves against the hull and kicked at the circle he'd cut in the airlock. On the third try, the chunk of hull plating gave way, rattling briefly in the darkness inside the wreck. Mavry activated his helmet lamp and squeezed through the hole. After one last look at the battle overhead, Tycho followed.

They tramped through the lower deck toward the bow, pushing off the bulkheads to stay balanced on the uneven deck. There were bodies scattered throughout the ship, little more than skeletons wrapped in shrunken gray flesh. Some had flung up their arms in a last vain effort to shield themselves from whatever had killed them. Tycho stepped gingerly over the bodies as he followed his father to the forward ladderwell.

“This isn't just crash damage—she took a beating first,” Mavry said as they climbed up to the quarterdeck. “I'm guessing the belly flop on P/2 finished the job.”

The quarterdeck was interrupted by a meter-wide gash that had opened from below and to starboard. The edges of the hole were rippled, fringed with metal droplets still hanging where they'd cooled and solidified.

“Missile impact,” Mavry said grimly, peering into the hole.

The entire bridge was a shredded, blackened ruin. There were bodies here too, except these were in pieces, surrounded by bits of machinery. Tycho spotted a twisted headset, the half-melted backrest from a chair, and a shattered keyboard, surrounded by spilled keys like loose teeth.

His father turned to look at him, his lamp dazzling Tycho's eyes.

“You all right?” Mavry asked.

“I'm fine,” Tycho managed.

“Good,” Mavry said, gesturing down at the captain's console. “The computer banks look like they survived the impact, but they're pretty beat up—I'll have to cut the memory core out.”

“Mavry,” Diocletia said in their ears, “Mox's pocket cruiser is closing faster than we first estimated. I need you two back here.”

“Can you give me five minutes?” Mavry asked.

“At most.”

“It'll be enough,” Mavry said, unholstering his cutting torch again. “Tycho, go aft and look in the hold.”

Tycho skirted that terrible hole in the deck and rushed down the aft companionway. Something glittered in the light from his headlamp, and he stopped, holding his breath. Then he scowled: the corridor was littered with gleaming foil packets that had been flung out of the open galley door.

“Coffee,” Tycho read, kicking a packet out of his way. Some treasure.

He passed the head, the cuddy, and the cabins reserved for the bridge crew. A few meters beyond the last pair of doors, the companionway vanished in a twisted ruin of crushed hull plates, shattered conduits, and dangling wires.

“I can't reach the hold, Dad,” he said over his headset. “Unless you brought mining equipment with you.”

“Afraid not,” Mavry replied above the crackle and hiss of the torch.

Tycho turned away from the tangled wreckage and poked his head into the captain's stateroom. The ship's starboard beam had been bashed inward as if by a giant fist, leaving the frame of a bunk twisted into an arrowhead shape and its mattress lying on the deck. Tycho looked through a dresser built into the wall, first carefully shifting the shirts and socks, then yanking them roughly out of the drawers and flinging them onto the deck. It wasn't like their owner would ever need them again.

There was nothing.