Here Be Dragons (16 page)

“Resolve, target visual.”

She waited for the telescopes to punch through the interference. Hidden in the turbulence, the target continued to zap
Gabriel
with low power lasers, in the exact manner that she had tried to communicate with the outsiders. But
Gabriel’s
pulses had been regular and evenly spaced, while these followed no pattern at all that she could see. They were strangely punctuated, with long pauses followed by sudden strikes—

“Madre de dios.”

It was Morse code.

Greetings, Gabriel.

“Target visual,” Vijay said.

The ship on the holo was the perfect mirror image of
Gabriel.
She was an
Archangel.

They rendezvoused at the derelict and turned sideways in their orbits to face one another, mere kilometers apart. The two
Archangels
were so close that, if not for the shadowed bulk of Jupiter blocking the Sun, Elena could have gone outside and seen it her with her own eyes. At this distance, either ship could kill the other in between eyeblinks. And
Gabriel’s
landing party was still stranded between the two of them. The message repeated endlessly.

Greetings, Gabriel.

“Vijay, turn over the lasers to Hassoun. Keep an eye on the boarders.”

Unknown vessel, identify yourself.

This is Metatron.

Elena looked around the room and saw nothing but blank looks.

“Not in any Bible that I have read,” Demyan said.

“Could that be
Michael
?” Hassoun asked.

“She’s not due to be completed for another three months,” Elena said. “Even we couldn’t have finished her that quickly.”

We have no record of a vessel by that name.

That is what we intended.

“Black ops,” Hassoun said. “Completely off the books.”

“And built entirely in secret?”

“We did it,” Vijay said.

State your intention.

It is the same as yours.

“Why send two ships on the same mission?” Hassoun asked. Thanks to Jupiter’s bulk standing between them and Earth, the question could not be put to Control.

“That was the plan, Mr. Masri,” Vijay replied. “
Gabriel
and
Archangel
were intended to attack the outsiders together.”

“Together,” Elena said. “Not separately. And if the Agency had sent another
Archangel
in ahead of us, I would have been told.”

“All due respect, Captain, but are you quite certain?”

“Trust me.”

You are interfering with a vital Agency mission.

We mean you no harm.

“Mierda.”

“Captain, if she had wanted us dead, she would have killed us.”

Then disarm immediately.

We cannot disarm in the face of the enemy.

“Not an unreasonable position,” Vijay said.

“
You’re supposed to be on my side. How’s visibility?”

“Beg pardon, Captain, but I cannot see a bloody thing. There is absolutely nothing to stop an outsider from doing exactly what she did.”

You should depart for Union territory immediately.

We cannot do that either.

“But we can,” Elena said.

“What about the boarders, Cap’n?”

“What boarders? How would she know anything about them?” Unless a telescope focused minutely, there was no way to spot an object as small as a person through the static.

Then we shall. Good luck.

We cannot allow that.

“Now we’re getting down to business,” Elena said.

You said you mean us no harm.

And we do not. But we cannot allow you to leave. Not yet.

Elena kept the corner of her eye on her watch screen. If the other ship fired its ballista, she would have only a second to see it before she died. And if the outsiders fired, she would probably never know.

The outsiders are approaching. If we stay here, we will die.

We know.

At the helm, Demyan crossed himself slowly, right to left.

Are you willing to die here, Metatron?

If necessary.

So are we.

Hassoun was sweating profusely as he typed with his keysticks, and he frequently had to wipe his forehead with the back of his glove. There came a long pause.

If you die now, you die for nothing.

The other captain had known exactly how to twist the knife.

What do you suggest?

It will be easier to explain in person.

Where?

Neutral ground, Captain. All will be made clear there.

“I formally protest, Captain,” Hassoun said. “We’d be giving them a hostage.”

“And they’d be giving us one back. Do you have a better idea?”

“We can fight our way out,” Demyan said.

Elena smiled.

“You’re fucking right. But I’m getting a little tired of killing my own people. If there’s a way to end this peacefully, I’d like to try. Vijay?”

He glanced at Hassoun and Demyan, then shrugged.

“If I am to die today—and the longer we wait here, the more certain I am that I shall—then I would at least like to know what is inside that ship.”

Elena nodded.

“Mr. Masri, Mr. Yukovych, your protest is duly noted. Look at it this way, gentlemen. We’re boarding her, as planned. We’re just not doing it alone.”

I’m on my way.

I will see you soon.

It was the first time that
Metatron
had spoken in the first-person singular. Elena unstrapped herself, raised up from her chair, and turned to the door behind her.

“Get some relief in here. Chief Nishtha has the flight.”

“Elena.”

That stopped her cold. Vijay never used her given name in front of other officers. She turned to see her staff saluting her.

Elena left the bridge. She did not expect to ever see it again.

There were no light arms aboard
Gabriel
. A firearm inside a pressurized hull, even on an
Archangel
, was dangerously insane. There were nail guns, but for safety reasons they would not fire unless their muzzle was pressed to a surface, which made them useless as projectile weapons. The ship’s stores had hundreds of spare explosive bolts, but those would have been just as dangerous to
Gabriel
’s crew as the other party. Plasma cutters could torch a man’s arm from his shoulder, but they were useless outside a vacuum. And even if they could have disconnected one of the defensive guns its hard point on the hull, it would have proven difficult to aim. Each one was the size of a small truck, and fed by a barrel that was taller than she was. Elena would have only her knife, and her grapple.

It took her slightly longer to prepare than usual, but as her boarding party had been out for nearly half an hour, she figured it was only fair to give the other captain more time. Elena stepped into the airlock, bulky thruster pack around her shoulders, and found herself wishing that it was Pascal Arnaud and not Eduardo Suarez she would leave on the other side. The door sealed behind her, and the first of three red lights began to burn. When the outer lock had been vented and all three were lit, she climbed outside.

She was transfixed by the sight of the stars. Elena had not seen them since her last night on Earth, six months before, as the glare of the Sun washed them out in space. But with Jupiter between her and the daylight, a spectacular night had fallen. The sky was so bursting with stars that it had more color than darkness to it, and the belt of the Milky Way was as thick and lustrous as the clouds back home.

Elena turned to look behind her, and the sky disappeared. She could see only the dusty storms of Jupiter, sizzling with thunder bolts, as it stretched into the distance in every direction. The horizon was so distant that it didn’t fall away—it just disappeared, as if the surface of the planet was flat.

Elena brought her head around and pulled herself forward along the fuselage, as far as she could safely go. The fore airlock was sixty meters from
Gabriel’s
bow, and most of that length was occupied by the barrel of the ballista. She came to the furthest edge of the ship and stopped. The muzzle itself was behind her, deeply recessed into the bow, but that was for ts protection not hers. If it fired now, the vapor trail would melt her suit on her body. Her earlier thought had been correct. The entire planet appeared to boil and bubble.

Elena carefully maneuvered herself over the lip of the bow and onto
Gabriel’s
nose. The ballista was aimed straight at the derelict, and
Metatron
behind it. She allowed herself to drift down into the muzzle, and onto the thick shutter that lay over the gun port. Then she looked back up, into the universe.

The golden diamond that was the outsider ship hovered at a crooked angle in the starlight above her. There was no atmospheric diffraction in the vacuum, and her eyesight was so sharp and clear that the ship looked unreal, like a painting that was too vivid and detailed to be true to life. The glowing river of the galaxy flowed behind it, and she could see reflected on its hull the light of Jupiter’s thunder. From the bottom of her mind, Elena heard someone singing in a low voice.

Count to three, she reminded herself. Visualize it.

Elena fixed her eyes on a single point on that golden surface. She pulled her legs beneath her and bent her knees with the soles of her boots flat against the hull. In one hand she held the grappling hook. She laid the other at her side, on top of the thick metal of the gun door
.
Elena braced herself against
Gabriel.
Then she jumped.

There was no sense of speed or motion whatsoever. The stars hovered stilly to every side, and each time she blinked they remained fixed and unaltered. Her breath quickened as she imagined herself trapped and immobile in the emptiness between the two ships. But when she blinked again, the derelict had grown.

Elena knew that she had been in leap for less than a minute, and forced herself to inhale slowly. She began to close her eyes more and more, and sank down into the void for longer and longer intervals. Each time she opened them, the pyramids were a little bigger. Now she was no longer flying, but falling. The outsider ship grew steadily larger until it swallowed her vision. Without turning her head she could see nothing but the broad plane of the hull. Elena gripped the hook tightly, and plummeted.

She touched down, and swung the hook. The long, limber rod whipped out sharply to its full length and struck the hull, and the billions of tiny barbs stabbing from its surface dug into the metal. They were only a full few micrometers across, not much bigger than the needles that Rivkah used for muscular therapy, but they bit down and didn’t let go. The grappling hook could adhere to all but the smoothest materials in the universe, even glass.

Elena took the shock in her knees, and a cloud of yellow dust erupted from around her feet and nearly blinded her. The impact of the landing bounced her off the hull and back into space, but she clung to the grapple. It pulled taut and held firm, and she was jerked to a stop just a meter or two above the surface. Elena grabbed for the slack in her safety line, wrapped it around her free arm, and reeled herself in. When her boots touched the hull once more she pressed a trigger on the grapple’s handle. An electric current coursed through the shaft, and the smart fiber spikes sank beneath the smooth surface. Elena switched the safeties on and stowed the grapple in her bag.

She found the boarding party after only a minutes, huddled around a hatch. It was perfectly square, and large enough to admit three of them abreast, but there was no handle anywhere in sight. Rivkah hung to a nearby handhold with her black bag as Marco and Ikenna tied down the toolkits that they had had brought from
Gabriel.

“
Metatron
only asked for me,” Elena said. “Anyone who wants to return to
Gabriel
is free to do so.”

There was a moment of silence, then her three crew looked at each other simultaneously. Marco spoke.

“I’d like to go back.
Gabriel
may be your command, but she’s my ship. If I’m going to die, I want it to be with her.”

Elena put a gentle hand to his shoulder, as he could not see her smile within her helmet. Montessori and Gupta had been the second two members of the project team to arrive at Glenn Station, a few weeks after she and Vijay. The boatswain spent almost as much time with
Gabriel
as she had, and probably knew her insides even better.

“Take good care of her,” she said. Ikenna and Rivkah nodded. Elena double checked to see that he had his own grapple, and then they watched him kick off the derelict, back to
Gabriel.
When he was no more than a spot on her hull, they went to work.

The plasma cutter came first. Ikenna took it by the handle and double-looped its strap around his torso. Elena hooked his safety lines onto her suit and Rivkah’s. They spread out in opposite directions, grabbed handholds, and tightened the lines until they strained. Ikenna put his boots flat on the hull, and pressed the nozzle to the hatch. The plasma jets ignited and immediately sank through the door. Ikenna turned in a slow circle, careful not to set his feet near the glowing furrow. Tiny puffs of white air trailed the plasma, and sputtered quickly in the vacuum. As soon as the jets passed, the molten metal trench cooled and sealed itself. He cut a meter wide ring into the door, and killed the plasma.

The hatch had been weakened, but it still held firm. The wound was healing rapidly, and she needed to move fast. Elena took a long tungsten crowbar from the toolkit and stabbed it into the trench. The top half sank into the soft slag and buried itself. Elena looked back once to see that both Ikenna and Rivkah were secure and still hooked into her line. Then she threw her weight onto the bar.