Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (12 page)

A proximity alert bit into his consciousness just as he was examining his course.

Another corvette, less than a hundred-thousand kilometers away and shedding velocity
–and energy–fast.

He bit straight through his lip. The compensators hadn
’t had the chance to spool up after he and Matt had jury-rigged them. The central core of the ship was protected already, but the holds. The damned
holds
…

Without full thrust in the next fifteen seconds, the noose would be inescapably closed.

Cracked vinyl gave under him in the auxiliary captain’s chair, blunt fingers flew along the emergency controls. Doing this would kill every person in his holds, along with those Navy assholes. Some of those people he’d been friends with for over a decade. Benson, Foley, Pritchart, they were all going to be missed. Ress comforted himself, thinking that most of his crew would
probably
still be in the acceleration-shielded central core of the ship rather than the holds.

“
You made me do this. This is
your
fault.”

T
he results of an unprotected jump to six hundred gees would be unpleasant in other ways as well. He’d probably damage most of the cargo, which would put him in deep water with Duke Ifrit. And of course, he’d have to stop at a shadowport to hose out his holds.

A burst of paranoia and nerves drove Ress to double-check his helm
’s telltales. He set in the course and acceleration. Six hundred gees for fifteen minutes would reduce any person in his holds to something vaguely resembling pâté.

His hand hovered over the COMMIT button.

“Nerves, Ress,” he told himself.
I’m sorry, but there’s just no other way.
He slapped his hand down on the button.

All of the telltales on the helm lit up bright red ERROR messages. The helm screen itself lit up with an archaic blue screen.
May not accelerate at greater than nine gees without compensation active
.

“
Override, dammit!” He punched down on the button again.

ERROR

Ress stared in disbelief at the helm as it shut down. Furiously, he flipped the panel wide… and beheld a mess of cut and redirected wires beneath it. Someone had not only been in here but torn apart his controls just like on the main bridge.

He tried to hold his temper. Of course, the Alliance women were going to be sneaky. Women always were, and Navy women worse than any other kind.

Shifting over to the navigation console, he booted up the backup helm control program he had installed over there. Every smuggler had different ways of dealing with the Navy. Ress glowed with a vicious rage as he repeated the acceleration command and pushed the COMMIT button. He was far beyond rational thought, reacting with the pure rage of an animal being trapped in its own den.

This time the blue screen came up with the message,
NOTTA CHANCE!

Ress restrained the urge to snatch the console from its roots and hurl it across the room. First, because he
’d just tear his fingernails trying and it wouldn’t actually help anything. Second, because he had one more avenue available to him. Well, two more. He could wire his tablet straight into the engine control runs, bypassing the normal control system entirely…

There was the clearing of a throat, and Ress started, leaping up, back, and spinning as much as he could in the cramped command seat of his control room.

He found himself at gunpoint. The black grooved barrel of a 10mm handgun stared him down, and his hands slowly went up, so that the tall blonde woman behind that gun barrel could see that he wasn’t about to make any sudden moves. She crossed to the conn of the tiny bridge and sat down. From the two stripes on her shoulders and matching stripes at her wrists, she was only a Lieutenant, but she sat in
his
chair like God had put her there, and he fumed quietly. “If it was this easy, all the time, anyone could do it,” she mocked in her contralto voice.

“
I’ll kill you.”

“
No, you won’t,” the new voice belonged to that strangely young-looking woman wearing the stripes of a Master Chief Petty Officer, “You’ve already tried, and done a laughably bad job of it. I’d wager that your crew would be less than amused to find out that you tried to take
them
with us. We’re not going to
tell
them, because we’d like to have untainted testimony against you at the trial, but I’d still make that bet. By the way, you just added about… twenty? Twenty-five? Counts of attempted murder to the rap sheet we’re filing on you, Ress. You’re going away for a
long
time.”

That damned, overly-youthful petty chief gave him an incongruously sunny smile
and keyed the intercom. In a syrupy-sweet voice she intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your prize crew speaking. We will be docking shortly. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright and locked position and prepare to be taken into custody. Thank you for flying Pan Alliance Galactic Airways, and we wish you better decision-making skills after you’re released from prison.”

Ress felt his mouth go dry. His crew had been sent on a damn snipe hunt after… whom, now, anyway… while these two set up their trap on his own auxiliary bridge.
Their
snipe hunt had itself been a snipe hunt set up by the Alliance crew to catch them off-guard and let them think they were calling the shots. But that also meant he still had a chance to come out on top--there were still two of their people and
a lot more
of his people in the holds. They could still turn this around.

Taking on a well-prepared spacer in light skinsuits with no helmets and only light handguns would be suicide, but it might be days before the flygirls were
relieved by their mother ship, and a lot of things could happen in a few days.

“
So you’ve managed to get me,” he said, “but you’ll never keep me.”

Veronica
’s exultant laugh cut into Ress’ fantasy of a quick escape, “Mr. Ress, if you believe that, you’ve got another think coming.
Four on the Floor
is closing in our position as we speak. She’ll be here shortly–and
Avenger
is only a day out from our rendezvous. We’ll have you and your people–there’s no way you have left to win.”

“
Perhaps we don’t need to win.”

“
Oh,
please
.”

Chapter 12

Louis Bowman watched the mood in the hold turn positively sulfurous. Men were pulling weapons, and even naval powered armor might not necessarily protect him from the sheer mass of attack.

Of course, that depended on
him being willing to let them hit him first. He
did
have a pulse rifle in each arm and a laser mounted on a pointing arm behind his shoulder. If worst came to worst, the set of explosive rocket-propelled grenades would put a hole in the skin of this measly little eggshell and kill everyone who wasn’t suited up. But
that
wouldn’t be exactly the best result, would it?

Louis
and Natasha looked at each other nervously. Their survival for the next few hours might well depend on how well this crew listened to their captain’s orders. They were close to being back to back, and they knew that they wouldn’t be able to hide once the crew sprung their ambush.

Captain Gray
’s plan had been a good one, but it had
always
carried the risk of the two of them becoming cornered. Even her misgivings about exposing the two most junior members of her crew to the greatest danger had been… well, maybe not baseless, but certainly pointless. They weren’t qualified for what she and Kellie had to do.

So they had cheerfully flown down into the cargo holds, presenting themselves as the most tempting targets they could.
Despite the fact that Ress’ crew had been ordered to force
them
to give chase, the two had come under pursuit as soon as Kellie’s mocking announcement had gone out on the intercom. When they had full attention on them, they bolted for the furthest reaches of the ship that they could. The complicated, double-sided chase had become a dangerous competition between everyone involved, and every time Louis and Natasha had heard the hull creak a little bit louder, they told themselves it was just their imagination.

It was a snipe hunt, all right, and both
young spacers’ adrenaline junkie sides reveled in it. They’d even gotten
good
at running and hiding, but sooner or later, they’d run out of places to run–this was not their ship, after all, and even having a real time schematic of the entire thing was no substitute for knowing it as one only knows one’s home.

“
There’s only one of them in their ship, Captain, I say we take it and make ‘em trade.”

A contralto voice shot back over the speaker,
“Don’t be stupid. We’ve cut every single control panel out of the ship. You can repair your control runs but you’ll never accomplish it before the
Avenger
returns to pick us up.”

“
So?”

Sub-lieutenant
Yeboah’s voice came over the speaker. “Also, we have a machine gun set up at the boarding tube. Which means trying to board our ship is going to end up with all of you very dead. Believe it or not, that’s an outcome we don’t want.”

Natasha
and Louis looked at each other. The panic in the hold was building, and they were still isolated from any way out of it. “Captain, please don’t taunt the prisoners, we’re still in danger in here.”

“
Understood, Mr. Bowman. See if you can make for the door in any way–we’ll finish locking things down in the control room and head in your direction to relieve you.”

They
both leaped up to the top of the stack of shipping containers, their hearts racing with the effort and danger they were in. Several gunshots bounced harmlessly off their armor, but Louis grunted and fell sideways. The wound barely hurt, but he felt a wave of weakness rush through him that he could only barely counter with the suit’s internal medical systems. The telltales did what their names implied–a bullet had found a joint in the suit’s torso and penetrated through the overlapping armor layers, past the inner Kevlar layer and his skinsuit, and lodged between two of his ribs. “I… ow damn…” he whimpered. The antishock meds were kicking in, making him feel loopy and cushioned, and he hid behind Natasha.

“
I don’t want to fire down into the floor,” she whispered, “we’ve got enough firepower that we might knock a hole in the hull and kill everyone in this compartment.”

Louis
glared at her. “And they’re trying to knock holes in
us
and kill
us
, Tasha. I’d rather not die on my first real combat mission, thanks.”

“
This isn’t a real combat mission. This was supposed to be a damned
traffic stop
,” she growled.

Louis
clicked the safety off of his right arm gun. He wasn’t feeling stable enough to use both at once. Firing down into the crowd, he saw his bullets strike home. Red splashed the floor and the crew replied with more gunfire. He ducked behind the edge of the container and suddenly didn’t feel very much like moving again to expose himself. He told himself it was just the meds. Just the meds and not the wound.

Natasha
ducked behind the container, muttering stream-of-consciousness
sacre
. “Shit de marde de vierge de bateme de calvaire de pisse d’ostie de
tabarnak!
”

She clicked
off the safeties of her guns and started firing.

Chapter 13

Dog Two-oh-Four
was angling in on her sister ship and its erstwhile quarry, now prisoner.
Two-oh-Seven
had been docked for twelve hours, and
Four
was finally in sight of her. Commander Saitova chewed a knuckle in thought; her three enlisted crewmen were fully dressed in battle armor, ready to drop to assist
Seven
.

“
Dog Two-oh-Seven
, this is
Two-oh-Four
, we are approaching to assist. Lieutenant Gray, please acknowledge.”

“
Dog Two-oh-Four
, this is Sub-lieutenant Yeboah. Lieutenant Gray is onboard the smuggler spacecraft. Please approach the dorsal docking point and be advised that there are hostile crew members aboard and two of our people are currently trapped.”

“
Trapped
? How did that happen? Is Lieutenant Gray available?” The disbelief in Lieutenant Commander Julie Saitova’s voice was clear over the connection, and Yeboah could imagine Saitova rubbing her forehead in disbelief. To be fair, she thought, that was her own feeling about the same thing.

Yeboah
had hidden her reservations about Veronica’s plan to distract the crew by sending them on a hunt for the two junior enlisted through their ship’s crawlways and crawlspaces–there had just been too many negatives to the plan, starting with the fact that they were depending on a plan requiring the younger members of the crew to think faster than people reacting to protect their homes. But for lack of a
better
plan…