Event Horizon (Hellgate) (7 page)

Travers had been watching the
Tycho
for some time, and he had begun to worry that either the pilots were rank amateurs or they had drive ignition problems. As Rodman hailed them the sterntubes lit up at last, a dully, cherry red, and he recognized Danny Ramesh’s voice.

“Give us a chance, for godsakes. Where do you want us?”

From the
Wastrel
’s Ops room, Richard Vaurien told him, “Put her in our blind side. Use our armor.”

“You’re damaged,” Ramesh observed as his sterntubes swiftly brightened to blue-white.

“We’re still the biggest hunk of armor in the quadrant,” Jazinsky snarled. “Move it, Danny. You’re running out of time.”

The
Tycho
broke free sluggishly and climbed away slowly enough for Roark Hubler to be cursing. Travers looked back at the security data from the Oberon AI and warned, “You’ve got ten seconds, Roark, and then we lose the lot.”

“Talk to the friggin’ civvies about that!” Hubler paused long enough to stroke the triggers, and a white-gold flower seemed to blossom against the dark, stormy face of Hellgate.

Comm exploded into a chaos of static and noise for several seconds, and when he heard a trace of the loop again Travers’s ears were ringing with the high-pitched blare. Clinging to the flimsy framework of the Arago sled, he and Marin watched the eruption escalate while alarms began to clamor across Oberon. The whole platform had blown down to near-zero pressure and the AI was routing power and data around zones that had swiftly gone cold and dead. Hubler’s shot had been surgical, just eight missiles which lifted the hangars and service shops clean out of Oberon, and the Zunshu machines with them.

“
Harlequin
, track the debris,” Vaurien shouted into the audio confusion. “Make bloody-damned sure those machines don’t get back to their pods!”

“We’re on it,” Hubler reported, “but it’s a mess out here. Give me a minute, Vaurien – I’ll get back to you.”

The explosion was fading when Vidal’s voice cut like a knife across the loop. “Wreckage coming your way, Neil. Hang on.”

“Jazinsky said she wanted to test the Zunshulite,” Marin growled as he closed one fist on the sled and the other on Travers.

“Not like this,” Jazinsky said shortly. “Curtis, you’ve got one
huge
lump of debris coming at you – it’s going to be close. Dodge around it, if you can.”

“I’m seeing it.” Marin turned slightly to get at the sled’s small dashboard, and shifted his grip on Travers’s shoulder. “Perlman, you there?”

The Capricorn was hanging above the
Wastrel
, loitering there while Bravo Company watched the data and fretted. Every Arago screen the
Wastrel
possessed was at maximum and overlapped on the starboard side. The wreckage from Oberon plowed into them with white-hot ricochets and large chunks fragmenting into showers of scorching shrapnel.

“We’re safe,” Perlman told him. “We’re in under the shields. We can’t get to you, Curt, not till the blast’s gone through.”

All this, Travers already knew. His left glove was locked to the sled and his right was clenched around Marin’s left arm as Curtis fed what power they had left to the sled’s feeble jets. It was just a maintenance sled, convenient transport to take a tech out onto the hull to work with a gang of drones. It would have hauled them back to the
Wastrel
a minute before its power cells flattened, but there was no time now. Marin was asking a lot of the sled while Travers tracked the incoming boulder of Oberon debris. The sweat of healthy dread prickled along his ribs.

“Ten seconds,” Marin whispered. “Hold on.”

The flimsy little jets battered, struggling to turn the sled on an angle to the direction of its plummet away from the
Wastrel
. Travers’s breath snagged in his throat as he watched the instruments redline, watched the planetoid-sized chunk of hull plate and girder come tumbling at them with the speed of an artillery shell. His grip tightened on Marin, and as the chrono counted through two he held his breath.

The boulder of wreckage was large enough to blot out the stars, and he would have sworn he felt it – the glancing clip of a steel spar on the shoulder of his armor, picking him up, wrenching him away from the sled and tossing him away like a toy. His helmet display flared red with howling proximity warnings and he ducked involuntarily as he and Marin, still locked together, lost contact with the sled and hurtled away from the
Wastrel
. It was like being pummeled in a brawl, and Travers’s senses dimmed. He heard audio as if from a vast distance –

“Neil! Neil!” Vidal’s voice was sharp. “Travers, I’m tracking what looks like the pair of you locked into one sensor mark, but your beacons have failed. Can you transmit?
Neil
!”

He cleared his throat, blinked his vision clear and forced himself to focus on the instruments. The loudest sound was the rasp of his own breathing, and the stream of cool air wafting across his face told him life support was still functional. But the helmet display told a tale of woe, and Travers muttered a curse as he lifted his head.

Still tethered by the clamped fingers of Travers’s right gauntlet, Marin was at arm’s length. And he was not moving. “Curtis?” Travers heard the hoarseness of his own voice. “Curtis, do you hear me?”

Nothing. Marin was still not moving, and Travers clamped down tight on a tide of dread. “Mick, can you hear me?
Wastrel
Ops, do you read?”

He could still see the
Wastrel
, still hear their comm, but as he called over and over, he realized he had stopped transmitting. Vidal’s voice had dropped several notes now; he was the consummate professional as he spoke into the loop, which was rapidly settling down. Travers had nothing to do but listen, and he focused on Vidal like a lifeline.

“You’re probably hearing me, Neil,” he was saying. “I’m starting to lose you in the background interference off the Drift, but the
Harlequin
has a track on you. They’re coming to get you. Run your diagnostics – how’s the armor?”

“Already done that, Mick,” Travers muttered as he gave a solid tug on Marin’s arm to spin him around. The hardsuit was pocked and scarred across the back and left shoulder. It had been peppered with fragments of debris shot out of Oberon, pebble-sized projectiles that had hurtled at them along with the massive hunk of plate and girder. The boulder had only struck Travers a glancing blow, just enough to tear him loose from the sled and send him spiraling down and away from the
Wastrel
, on a trajectory that would eventually feed them into the gravity well of Naiobe. Of this, Travers was not immediately concerned – the
Harlequin
was no more than minutes away, at most.

But Marin’s suit was dark. The panel on the left shoulder, on the side of the breastplate, where techs could plug in and service a hardsuit while it was working, showed no enunciator lights. His power was out, Travers thought feverishly – little wonder he was not moving. Without power, normal human muscles could not move the mass of these suits. Moving in Marines armor that had lost all power was close to impossible, and the Zunshulite would have defied some hybrid between a Pakrani and a mountain gorilla.

“
Harlequin
,” he called, hoping he was transmitting some fraction, and both distance and the background noise off the Drift were blanketing him too thickly for him to reach the tug. “
Harlequin
, can you hear me? Roark, goddamn it!”

Again nothing, and this time he had not expected a response. Instead, he lifted the visor and used his own living eyeballs to scan the heavens, looking for the ship. He saw the
Wastrel
, receding into the darkness with the firefly lights of the Capricorn’s sternflares scudding around and down to the hangar level. He saw Oberon, still a glitter of lights though the human crew had left and its service bays and hangars were gone. He caught a glimpse of the
Tycho
, and forced himself to listen.

“All right, Jazinsky, you want to tell me what that was all about?” Danny Ramesh was angry, but fear and reaction had eroded the sharp edges off his fury. He knew, now, how much he did not know.

“Classified,” she said simply. “You want more than that, get over to Velcastra. Take it up with the office of the President.”

“We’re not going to Velcastra,” Ramesh protested.

“You are, if you want access to classified information,” Vaurien said with a tone of finality. “We’ve scanned you, nose to tail – you’re in good shape. You took no damage. You can light up your Weimanns and get out of here at whim, and I wish you’d do it.”

For a moment Ramesh fumed in silence. “Take it up with the office of the President of Velcastra – a rebel colony that just declared war on the Terran Confederation? You’re not shitting me?”

“Straight up,” Jazinsky swore. “Look, get lost, Danny. We’ve got a lot of trouble here – we took some heavy damage.”

“So I see. I’ve been told you Freespacers make enemies among your own ranks. You have your little wars, and if anybody gets between you, intruders from the legit side of the frontier get chewed to a pulp and spat out.”

“Is this what you’ve heard?” Jazinsky’s temper was frayed to rags. “And you think you were just jumped by rogue Freespacers, what, trying to loot Oberon?”

“Yeah, this is what I just saw.” Ramesh was gradually recovering some small part of his composure and his natural arrogance had begun to reassert.

“Then, of course you must be right,” she said dismissively. “You always were, you little ratshit, even when you were sixteen years old and dead wrong.”

And Vaurien – loudly: “If this is what you want to think, Doctor Ramesh, be my guest. Go home to Borushek and file the complaint.”

“If I do, you’ll never haul trash in the Deep Sky again,” Ramesh said nastily.

For the first time in so long, Travers had forgotten what it sounded like, Richard Vaurien laughed, and it was a genuine laugh. “Go, team, go!” And then he clicked out of the highband comm and returned to the
Wastrel
tech loop. “Tully, any joy?”

Just then a glimmer of light caught Travers’s eyes and he turned toward it, watched it grow, brighten. He was right. It was the forward cockpit armorglass of the
Harlequin
catching, reflecting, magnifying the lights from Oberon as the ship braked down and yawed over onto her side to present the docking hatch.

The lock was open; dim blue cascaded from within and Travers saw a shape outlined against the backwash of illumination. A suit of industrial armor knelt there, tethered on with two cables the thickness of a man’s thumb. Roark Hubler was fishing with an Arago remote, and a moment after a red laser spot began to dance on his breastplate, Travers felt the solid grasp and pull. Tractors had hold of his and Marin’s combined weight, and the
Harlequin
came up fast as they were reeled in like trout.

He hit the deck right inside the airlock with a heavy blow through every large bone he possessed, and did not wait for Hubler. Worklights flickered on, painfully bright, and he was up at once. The side of his glove hit the green close/lock bar, to the right of the open hatch. Marin’s armoured legs were in, and in the instant the outer door slammed, the lock began to pressurize.

At eighty percent, Travers’s hands were on Marin’s helmet seals, even before he touched his own. Hubler was on Marin’s other side, keeping out of the way as Travers broke the seals, twisted the helmet ten degrees left and lifted it away from Marin’s shoulders. The weight of it was astonishing under the
Harlequin
’s normal one gravity, and he passed it to Hubler.

Marin was pale as a wax effigy, not even his eyelids stirring, and Hubler groaned over the comm. “Christ, we got a casualty. Make it quick, Asako –
Wastrel
, fast. Get Bill Grant and a crash team.”

The
Harlequin
was moving before he finished speaking – Travers felt the faint shimmy through the deck of powerful engines, and as he broke his own helmet seals he heard Rodman calling ahead. The
Harlequin
’s air was cold, a little acid with the tang of new electronics. She had been gutted and refurbished after the Battle of Ulrand and the newness would wear off her slowly.