Rogue Powers (2 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
 
Outpost, Nihilist Encampment

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
 
Bary center

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
 
Aboard RKS
Eagle

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
 
Eagle,
Hangar Deck

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
 
Aboard the
Sick Moose

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
 
Outpost

CHAPTER THIRTY
 
Outpost, Refiner Camp

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
 
Aboard
Ariadne

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
 
Outpost, Refiner Camp

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Aboard
Reunion,
En Route from Outpost Orbit to Refiner Camp

Ariadne

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
 
Guardian Contact Base

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

RKS Eagle

Zeus
Orbital Command Station, Circling the Planet Capital

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Captain's Cabin, Aboard the
Eagle

Eagle

Aboard GSS
Adversary,
the Guardian Fleet Flagship

TFCC,
Eagle

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
 
Barycenter Battle Zone

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Starsight

Ariadne

Reunion

Nike Station, Orbiting Outpost

Reunion

Task Force Command Center,
Eagle

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
 
Aboard
Starsight

CHAPTER FORTY
 
Reunion,
Surface of Outpost

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Zeus
Station, Orbiting Capital

Aboard
Reunion,
En Route from Outpost to Capital

Starsight

Reunion

Starsight

Reunion

Starsight

Reunion

Starsight

Reunion

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
 
Eagle

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Back Cover

The ship stank.

The
Venera s
ventilation system had been shot up two days after the hijacking, when the Survey Service students had tried to get the ship back.
The
students had failed, of course: They were armed with only a few side arms the Guardians hadn't found, and the Guards controlled the ship, had all the heavy guns, had all the advantages. The Guards had killed a few more Survey personnel, taken the side arms, spaced the bodies, confined the survivors to their cabins, and that was that.

But the Guards were stupid enough to fire heavy ammo through life-support equipment. Now, twenty-one days after the hijacking, the air pumps wheezed and shuddered instead of humming. The scrubbers weren't working properly and the whole ship was rich with the smell of bodies and fear and burned-out machinery. Everyone had a headache, which probably meant that the carbon dioxide count was going up. And the water was starting to smell like the bottom of a pond. The few members of
Venera’
s crew who were still alive could probably have patched things up, but they were confined to quarters, two to a cabin, like everyone else. Either the Guards couldn't do the repairs or they didn't care how bad things got.

The Guardians were human and spoke English. But no one in the League had ever heard of them. Somewhere, somehow, out among the uncharted stars, the Guardians must have gone off to settle their own world and hide from the rest of humanity. At least that was one theory that made sense. The Guards themselves didn't explain anything.

Lieutenant Lucille Calder, Royal Australian Navy, was locked up in her cabin, but she was a good enough pilot to
feel
the clumsiness in the way the Guards handled the
Venera's
controls. She knew how much fuel the
Venera
had carried. She carefully timed the burns the Guards made and estimated how many gravities of thrust they used. She kept a rough running account in her head of how much fuel this thumb-fingered crowd of barbarians was wasting as they corrected and over-corrected and re-corrected their errors. Bad piloting wouldn't kill them just yet—there was still a fair amount of fuel left. On the other hand, the fouled air and water might be enough to do them in very soon. For the sake of Guardian and prisoner alike,
Venera
had to get somewhere fast.

But Lucy and the other survivors of the hijacking had no idea where
Venera
was being taken. The viewscreens were shut off, so there were no stars to look at—whatever good that would have done—and there was no real way of telling if they had remained in normal space or made one or more jumps into C
²
space, where the ship's velocity was kicked up to the square of the speed of light. Lucy knew nothing, could do nothing, could see nothing. She didn't like it.

She stared across the tiny cabin at her bunkmate, Cynthia Wu. Ensign Wu was from High Singapore's tiny Defense Force, an outfit with little more to do than track the endless stream of cargo ships that called on the huge Earth-orbiting city. She was used to waiting, to dull patches. Lucy wasn't so lucky. The deep-space fleet of the Royal Australian Navy had trained her for command, for quick decisions and independent action. She needed to be in control, to have some effect on what happened to her. She needed a viewport to see out of, an idea of where they were going, an idea of why they were being taken there. She wanted to know who these surly men were who called themselves the Guardians. She had to know what they wanted with the
Venera
—and whether or not she would live through this.

And she wanted a shower. Lucy's mother was an Australian aborigine, and her father the descendant of British stock. They had raised her on a huge range station, a sheep ranch, at the edge of the desert, where the Sun baked down and made a person sweat and smell. Both Mom and Dad had come from families where you weren't allowed to bring that odor inside. That's why there was a showerbath outside. And now Lucy had been indoors with the smell of many unwashed bodies—including her own— for the better part of a month.

Lucille Calder was a short, stocky woman, dark-complexioned with short-cropped, brownish-blond hair. With a pug nose and a hint of a double chin, she would never be called pretty, but she didn't much care about that. Pretty wasn't her job.

For the thousandth time, Lucy looked across the cabin and watched Wu calmly turn over the page of her book and continue reading. For the thousandth time, Lucy overcame the urge to grab the book out of Wu's hand and heave it at the bulkhead. But even at the moment she was ready to commit mayhem against her cabin-mate, Lucy knew Cynthia Wu was probably the best person she could have been locked up with. Wu had patience, and faith in the power of logic and the careful examination of possibilities. Those were things Lucy had to learn from somewhere.

Lucy wished the ship was under spin so she could at least pace the deck. It was hard to expend nervous energy in zero-gee without literally bouncing off the walls. She undid the restraint line that held her to her bunk and pushed herself toward the hatch. There was a peephole in it that let you see out into the corridor. Not that anything was ever out there but another gray bulkhead. Floating in mid-air, she sighed and peered out the hole. Nothing there—

Quite suddenly, she found herself pasted to the deck, a roaring noise filling the cabin. The goddamned Guards had fired the main engines without any warning again. Lucy swore to herself and got up off the deck. She hit the stopwatch function on her wrist-aid and began timing the burn. It felt like a shade under a standard gee and a half this time.

Wu didn't even look up from her book. Lucy wondered which of the two of them was being more foolish: Wu, for doing nothing at all, or she, for fussing over thrusts and burn times that wouldn't really tell her anything useful.

But
this
burn went on a long time. By Lucy's timing, the engines fired for twenty minutes and a few seconds. In the ringing silence after the roar of the engines, she worked out the resulting acceleration in her head—about eighteen kilometers a second.
That
meant something. No reasonable flight between two points in a star system would require such a big change in velocity. On the other hand, eighteen klicks a second was a fairly modest relative motion between two stars.

It had to mean that the
Venera
had indeed made a C
²
jump.
Venera
must be matching velocity in a new star system. "Cynthia," she said quietly. "We're here." Wu looked at her sharply. "How do you know?" "That was a burn to match velocity between two star systems, and if you're trying to hide where you're going, you do that after you get to the new star. Besides, that burn must have just about emptied the tanks. They wouldn't risk running out of fuel unless they were in range of their own people." Wu closed her book. "God, Luce, I think you're right." The two of them waited in silence, listening, attentive, for an hour or more. Then, suddenly, there was a series of bumps and jumps as the Guardian pilot used the trim thrusters to fine-tune his course. For a long time, there was no sound but the complaints of the overstrained ventilation system. Finally, more bumps and stutters from the trim thrusters and then, far-off and faint, a series of dull thunks and clanks.

"Docking collar," Lucy said.

There was a series of sharper clacking noises. "And there go the capture latches," Wu said.

They could hear voices now, bellowing, yelling, the sounds of every gangway crew that had ever brought a ship into port and secured her in a berth. The air changed, became cleaner, sweeter, as die ship's air mingled with the atmosphere of whatever it was they had docked to.

They heard the rattle of keys and the sound of angry, urgent voices. Finally, the hatch to their cabin slammed open, and a man in battle armor hung in the hatchway. "Get your stuff and move," he barked, his voice made deep and booming by the suit's speaker system. "Head to the main sternward hatch and through the airlock into the station. Do what any Guard tells you to do and you might not get hurt." He turned, grabbed at a handhold, and pulled himself down to the next cabin without looking to see what Lucy and Cynthia did.

Lucy had a mad impulse to race after him, to smash the faceplate on his suit, to demand an explanation, to run like hell, to do something, anything—and then she turned to see Wu calmly packing up her few belonging into her duffle bag. Lucy pulled herself to her locker and did the same. She would have to learn patience, if she wanted to live.