Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (10 page)

“
Lieutenant Gray, I think I may have found the captain of this bucket.”

“
Good work, Sub-lieutenant. I’m coming back to
Two-oh-Seven
for a power nap, can you tag off with me for about two hours?”

“
Aye-aye, Ma’am. I’m on my way to the power suit locker, see you in a few minutes.”

Veronica made her last jump to the boarding tube as
Yeboah was stuffing the last of her braided locks into her power suit’s snoopy cap. “Thanks for this. I’m not that tired
yet
, but we’ve still got about eighteen hours before
Two-oh-Four
relieves us, and we need the maximum number of us on alert.”

“
It would be really useful to have enough of us to have three rolling shifts of two. I don’t think the Alliance counted on corvettes being used for solo boarding when they sent out the RFP for a five-person crew.” Yeboah made a face.

Veronica returned it.
“Probably not. Leblanc’s going to be the only person online in
Two-oh-Seven
for the next two hours, do you think she’s good for it?”

“
I think so. She’s a kid, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders. And she’s nineteen and been through Marine training, you know, she’s not exactly a child.”

Veronica slid herself the rest of the way out of her power suit, wincing. No matter how carefully they padded those things, mechanical pieces always found some way to pull or pinch, and there were red lines all up her legs and down her arms. She rubbed them carefully, flexing her fingers as she walked into the ship
’s interior.

A Navy shower
still
consisted of wetting down with as little water as possible, then turning off the water to lather before turning it back on to sluice off–again with as little water as possible. Shower completed, she wiped down the walls of the head and turned on the heat-drier. The water vapor would be filtered in the recycler along with the greywater generated by her shower, and then it would be circulated back into the ship’s water system. Nothing that could be preserved was wasted aboard a corvette, but it took several hours for the water used in showering to filter back into the tanks.

Her shower completed,
Veronica put on a pair of soft black pants and a PROPERTY OF NAVY ATHLETICS t-shirt, and padded barefoot to the tiny galley.

She remembered part of Yeboah
’s lecture on the layout of her ship–
The food’s pretty depressing. We sneak aboard what we can from the mess, but the majority of what we have on-board is 3L ration packs that taste slightly worse than the cardboard their packages are made out of. Bread and leafy vegetables are the best thing to get aboard, and Alyse is a genius at getting both of them. After that are fruits–oranges, apples, that sort of thing
.

The
contents of a roast beef and gravy 3L pack would make a serviceable sandwich filling, if she could find that bread Yeboah had talked about, and maybe some lettuce. She found both in an insulated bag with Kellie’s name stenciled on it. The lettuce was actually
green
. God knew where she had gotten it, really, since actually
green
lettuce was not exactly usual provender aboard an ISN starship. Tinged with brown, maybe, but green lettuce could just as easily have been gold-plated, that was how rare it was.

To her plate, she added one of the oranges that had been
her
contribution to the sneaked-aboard food provisions, and she took a squeeze-bottle of juice. She finished the sandwich with a generous dollop of spicy brown mustard and took a big bite, doing some overdue paperwork as she ate. The captain of an Alliance ship–even if said captain was “merely” the command pilot of a corvette–was never
truly
off-duty.

In the back of her mind, she was starting to put together a plan.
Their next objective was to subdue the smuggler crew without violence, and
that
would take making the bad eggs identify themselves so she could remove them. A small smile creased the corners of her lips with each bite of the sandwich.

S
he finished her sandwich, pushing the last inch of it into her mouth all at once, then looped the text and audio files she’d just created and sent them to Kellie’s suit computer.

Stretching, she realized that she had definitely been spending too much of the last half-hour avoiding rack time. She stepped into her bunk and then triggered its retraction. A moment later she was inside the wall and gravity flipped on its side, shifting her from standing to lying in bed, and she barely had enough time to recognize how sleepy she really was.

Chapter 9

Veronica woke and checked her clock. Ninety minutes exactly. As soon as she felt sure her legs would support her, she toggled her wakeup cycle and felt gravity rotate back to the deckward position, then the wall of her bunk opened away from her and she stepped out, walking to the head to swipe some toothpaste across her teeth. Spitting foam into the basin, she was bringing the last details of her plan into focus as she pulled on her skinsuit and made sure to check the plumbing connections (obnoxious and painful) and then slid herself into the middle of her power suit.

“
Yeboah, this is Gray, I’m on my way in. Relieve Leblanc on the flight deck and let her get a nap.”

“
Aye-aye, Ma’am.”

“
Bowman, you online?”

Kellie
’s voice responded, “Negative, Ma’am, I sent him in for a nap about a half hour after you.”

Veronica nodded.
“Roger that. When did you sleep last?”

“
Before we hooked up, Ma’am, but I’m still good to go. I’m used to this.”

“
Belay that, Chief. After we wake Bowman up, you’re taking a nap next. We’ve got fourteen hours before
204
gets here, and we need to keep the peace until then.” Veronica ran through her sleep cycles in her head. Stimtabs and power naps over two days of work was the opposite of ideal, but at least it wasn’t going to kill their functionality. If
Two-oh-Seven
had not been as close as she was, it would have been a lot worse. “In the meantime, meet me in the auxiliary control room. I have an idea that I’ve been playing with in my head while I’ve been sleeping.”

“
By your command.” Veronica chuckled at the odd response. Making her way through the freighter, whose corridors were starting to become a little less unfamiliar, she quickly found herself next to one of the only three armored spaces in this entire ship–the auxiliary control center.

“
Captain.”

“
Alyse. You ready?”

“
Aye-aye. If it’s a meeting you’ve in mind, let’s have it in a way that we can’t be eavesdropped on.”

Veronica cocked her head.

“Seal your suit.” She closed the doors to the airlock on either side of them.

Veronica Gray and Kellie Alyse huddled together
between the companionway and the auxiliary control room. A cramped internal-access airlock, this one would maintain atmospheric pressure even if the entire rest of the ship were compromised - and was just barely large enough to accommodate two power suits. Even more cramped than the equivalent on a warship of this size, it
just
managed to fit in a captain’s repeater, a helm station and a sensor platform–the minimum required by law for a secondary bridge. Indeed, the service airlock probably had more actual space in it than the control room, once the consoles were taken out of the equation. Veronica rolled her faceplate closed after Kellie, and then the chief hit the airlock cycle button.

“
I’m pretty sure the redheaded dumbass is their skipper,” said Veronica, pressing her faceplate to Kellie’s. Her nap had done more than just given her some much-needed sleep after twenty hours of wakefulness–it had given her unconscious mind time to mull over the information that they had gathered over the last several hours.

Kellie
’s laugh reverberated through their faceplates. “I’m sure he is, too. He’s
way
too conveniently dopey whenever we ask him questions, and the other crew members are frustratingly vague on what he does. We just need to give him enough rope to start a cozy little riot.”

“
We need to frustrate him enough that he’s
reacting
to us, and not acting–and that he’s flying solo, not collaborating with his crew. Which I think I know how to get started on. The easiest and fastest way to piss off any spaceship captain.”

“
Screw with his feeling of having control over his ship.”

“
And over himself. This guy’s your typical smuggler punk–he thinks he’s a
lot
harder than he really is. Let’s do it.” Veronica re-pressurized the airlock and the two went in separate directions, prepared to do their mischief to the control systems of the mid-haul freighter
Arrant Knave
.

*

Jonah Ress smiled
most
unpleasantly. His plan was working perfectly--Mattingly had set up a ship-wide snipe hunt for the intruders as soon as there were only two of them on board, and they had abandoned the bridge and engineering in a futile attempt to chase all his people down. The stealth systems of those damned suits made them hard to directly track, but it was easy to follow the hair-raising electricity of their jump systems. And it didn’t matter exactly where they were, as long as they weren’t
here.

It had taken more than an hour of skulking through the accessways to get to his bridge without being spotted and giving it all away, and he was hot, dirty, and angry. But he was
finally
on the bridge of
his
ship, and he was going to teach that damn Navy crew a lesson in overconfidence. The fact that he hadn’t slept in a full day was irrelevant.

The helm console was a
mess
.

Ress turned to the engineering telltales to look at the damage his engine had taken. It wasn
’t good–there were cracked lenses in half of his driver coil arrays, and the inertial compensator was offline. If he tried to get up to speed right now, he’d lose the other half his engine, but not before every single human being on his ship was mashed to hamburger. At this rate he might have to take another run from Ifrit just to cover repairs.

The consequences of that could wait until after
he was safely back at FTL speed.

“
Look, Matt, I’m on the bridge, but there’s a problem. The Alliance goons stripped out the helm console and wiped the nav. I need a couple of wire strippers and some solder.”

“
Jonah, you might need to get to the engine room for that.
Shit
, they’re coming back, I gotta go.” Mattingly cut the comm link, leaving Ress alone with his frustration. At least he’d sounded about as frustrated as Ress felt, which perversely made him feel better. The anger of being boarded was pretty damn primeval - the enemy was in
his home
.

The engine room was sixty meters abaft the bridge and a deck down. Ress was
not
going to fucking crawl through air ducts that much further on his
own goddamn starship!
Not when he didn’t have to, anyway.

He flipped open a secret compartment on the bottom of his armrest. He
’d installed one of these on every ship he’d ever owned–a secret hardware override for all of the ship’s functions. It was completely undetectable if you didn’t know exactly where to push on the side of the pedestal. It was totally secure. It was redundantly backed up to multiple places in the command chair’s wiring. And it would wipe
every
system on the ship and reinstall from hard storage backups, overriding any lockout or hack the Navy might have put in place.

Ress crowed in triumph as the consoles rebooted with full access. His monitors were showing the signs of a fierce internal chase - but an inconclusive one, frustratingly enough so. The two
power suits were probably the younger pair of crewmen - on top of being naively eager to abandon their stations, they weren’t doing a very good job of following his men and women through the mazelike arrays of cargo containers. On the other hand, that also meant they might give up and start heading back. He couldn’t have that.

Ress remembered his merchant marine training. It might have been a couple decades rusty, but it was still valid enough.
The last resort of every captain in a boarding situation is to depressurize the ship
. He nodded fiercely and plugged in his personal tablet to the control systems of the ship. Everything looked green and clean, and he grunted in satisfaction as he hit the button that would open hidden stopcocks in the ship’s hull that had no purpose other than to completely drain his ship of air. Another button sealed and hard-locked the airlock doors.