Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (8 page)

The freighter
’s captain must have had a cat’s reflexes. It lurched to starboard in the beginning of an evasive turn, but its inertia carried it through the blast anyway. It heaved as it overran the nuclear explosion at almost sixty thousand kilometers per second. Unlike a warship, the freighter had no point defenses worth speaking of, and its navigational shields and a pair of the thinnest hulls permitted by law were all that protected its contents from the depths of space. A direct hit would have instantly destroyed a vessel so fragile, but this shot had been carefully calculated, detonating far enough away for a mere nav shield to deflect most of it.

“
Acceleration dropping, Ma’am, I think we got her attention as she went through the explosion. Either that or we got a piece of her drive.”

“
Good, Guns.” Veronica toggled the intership again. “
Arrant Knave
, this is the Interstellar Navy. You are fleeing from a lawful challenge and we have fired a warning shot across your bow. Our next shot will be into your drive section. Heave to immediately and prepare for inspection.”

Ver
onica wasn’t sure if the drop of the fleeing ship’s velocity was actual compliance or simply the consequence of damage to its main warp ring, but slow it did, dropping to a mere two hundred gees, then one hundred, and then merely coasting on the momentum it had already built up. No escape pods, no last-second maneuver attempts, and the ship’s laser turrets remained silent. Veronica wondered if the owner-operator was rational enough to argue their way out of a fine or a prosecution rather than try shooting it out with a Navy corvette, or simply too badly disabled to fight back. But you never knew for sure.

“
Reverse field, give me a least-time intercept vector for boarding,” her voice sounded crisp, but tired. The warp rings reversed the direction of their spatial distortions, turning the after expansion field into a contraction field. Having already accelerated past a perfect zero-zero rendezvous course, the ship would overshoot her quarry and reach relative stationary roughly thirty thousand kilometers past her, within mutual laser range. “We’ll be close enough to throw rocks, Ma’am,” groused Natasha.

“
I know that, but we’re going to actually need to
be
even closer–we’re going to need to close to skin-touch range, in order to board.” Veronica smiled at Natasha’s image on the intercom. “You done good, kid. You done good.”

The minutes ticked agonizingly by as
Dog Two-oh-Seven
slowed. The freighter swelled on the tactical display as the two vehicles converged, until they were sitting virtually nose to nose with just a few thousand kilometers between them, Veronica deftly slowed her corvette with small touches on the vector thrusters, bringing the two on a converging course. “We’ll have converged with their main boarding airlock in about ten minutes.”

She
peeked into the small hatch leading down into the middeck. “Alyse, Bowman. Suit up, you two are coming with me. Yeboah, you and Leblanc stay on
Two-oh-Seven
and keep watch for anyone else.”

Veronica started powering up her suit as Yeboah carefully maneuvered
Dog Two-oh-Seven
to its rendezvous. The slow minutes ticking by felt maddening on her nerves. She was frustrated with waiting, and simultaneously worried by the fact that she was about to board a ship underway–it was a dangerous thing for a command officer to enter a foreign ship, but a corvette simply didn’t have the personnel to include a true marine detachment. Her only actual marine was Natasha, and she had to stay on the corvette in case of an assault past the landing party, at least for first contact–Veronica resolved to change out for a different force mix on the freighter as soon as she could.

Finally, the clang of the docking grapple engaging was heard, and the airlock cycle light went from red to green.
“Atmosphere on the other side of the lock. Everyone, stay sharp and don’t open your faceplates until we have an all-clear to do so.”

Kellie nodded to Veronica,
“Don’t need to tell me twice–or really, even once, but it’s good to hear the boss has the right idea.”

Louis
simply nodded his agreement.

The airlock door cycled and Veronica walked into the other ship
’s entrance antechamber. There was no one to be found immediately, but plenty of evidence that the crew was about. “Stay sharp, people. We could run out of room
real
fast. And make sure we’re not going to suffer any surprises from behind.”

With an increasing sense of unreality, Veronica Gray
and Kellie Alyse made their way down the companionway of the blockade runner. There had been two resentful-looking crewers tending an unconscious officer as they had entered, but there was no other sign of life in the entire ship. “This thing’s gotta be at least a century old, they haven’t made D-42s since the late-third century.”

“
The manifest just says, ‘two hundred thousand kilograms agricultural,’” said Bowman over the intersuit comm. He would shortly split off from them to reach the auxiliary control center, to program in a deceleration burn that would bring the ship to a halt relative to system primary. “That seems a little bit… bizarrely blank. And how do you need a ship this big for a measly two-hundred-ton cargo?”

Veronica shuddered.
“With a manifest that vague, plus the heat-source and cargo-dump we saw earlier, it’s drugs or slaves. There’s maybe a handful of other options, but most of ‘em are overly naïve for this part of the galaxy.”

“
We’ll certainly find out by the time we reach the hold, Ma’am,” replied Kellie. She and Veronica traded a grimly meaningful look.

“
Bowman, I want you to stay in the auxiliary control room. You can monitor us from there and let us know if there’s anything coming our way that we need to know about.” Veronica reflexively rewrapped her hands around the control sticks inside the suit’s arms; mimicking her movement the suit’s hands also flexed and clenched.

“
Aye-aye, Ma’am.” Louis seemed to be relieved enough that he wasn’t being asked to look into the darkness of a possible slave ship’s belly, and Veronica was glad to give the young Astronaut First Class a chance to do something without being there.

“
Why didn’t somebody tell me when I was that young that there were things it was ok to opt out of experiencing,” she muttered.

Neither
Kellie, nor any of her shipmates listening in over the comm channel had the answer to Veronica’s question.

Veronica shook her head
to clear it. She was
not
a neglected ten year old now, she was a Naval officer in command of a corvette, and she had a job to do.
Dammit.
“Let’s get ourselves down to the hold, so we can see exactly how hard we’re going to kick the asses of the guys who were running this damn show when we find them.”

The ship was
disturbingly quiet. With
Two-Oh-Seven
held to its back by dint of her docking clamps and both ships’ thrusters offline, there was very little sound that the two could hear in their transducers other than the slight rattles and moans of a starship in deep-space flight. The two women fanned out to different parts of the cargo deck, each quietly intoning her observations for the record as she moved. Two decks below, Louis Bowman had gotten himself comfortably ensconced in the ship’s auxiliary control center. The faded-white corridor walls were almost comforting in their blankness, despite the horrors his imagination envisioned.

“
Lieutenant Gray,” came Bowman’s voice over Veronica’s headset, “Bowman here in auxiliary control room. I’ve got the internal master display up on the screen in front of me. I’m reading movement in Holds 1, 2 and 3. Hold 4 appears to have been holed from outside and again from the inside, airtight doors are shut and holding but I’m seeing neither movement nor life signs in there.” Veronica laughed bitterly while her skin crawled; vacuum asphyxiation was one of every spacer’s worst nightmares. At least it was a brief nightmare–total oxygen starvation would render one unconscious at ten seconds and kill within minute.

Ironically, the cargo dump had probably not been intentional, just extraordinarily poor luck on the part of the
runner. If she hadn’t seen the O
2
bloom, she might not even have paid this ship any mind at all–just another cargo freighter plying the outer systems of the Alliance.

Veronica placed a seismic detector on the wall of Hold 4.
It was nothing more than an expensive canister holding a shotgun shell and a heavy metal cup for the slug to blast into. She triggered the shell and a moment later, a resounding bang reverberated through the hold’s metallic walls, measuring its contents. “Scanning, interpolating… shit. There’s five human bodies in there, all the temperature of the hull metal. Maybe a sixth if the gravity failed the way the force field did. By the cloud of debris I’d guess there were somewhere in the neighborhood of three standard shipping containers and probably eight stevedores before the hold blew and the skipper of this thing sealed it off. I think we’ll leave that intact for the Judge Advocate General’s office to look at, no need to open it.” She swallowed a foul lump in her throat anyway.

Kellie
walked over to the hatchway to hold number three. “Give me a couple minutes, Skipper, and I’ll have this door. You’ll want to back me up so whoever’s in there doesn’t get any bright ideas.”

About a minute and a half later, her suit
’s onboard combinatorics engine had found the access code for the cargo hold.

“
Hold your breath, people,” she said, “here we go.”

Chapter 7

For someone who was still officially only trying to rescue people potentially trapped in a crippled spaceship, thought Chief Kellie Alyse, she was getting a decidedly less than friendly reception from the crew of the merchant starship
Arrant Knave
was decidedly less than friendly. It confirmed that they were smugglers, and newbies to the trade at that. Professional smugglers always played nice when caught, whether angling to get the drop on you or cooperating in the hope of a plea bargain.

“
I can’t help you if you don’t help me,” she muttered, low enough that her audio pickups wouldn’t faithfully relay it to the world outside and the roustabouts and crew members eyeing her suit.

Suspicious, angry faces looked
askance at her from every angle. “I’m Chief Petty Officer Alyse of the Interstellar Navy. Can someone tell me who’s in charge?”

“
Why do you wanna know?” came the voice of a burly woman with short, spiky blonde hair. She was standing next to an equally burly man, each of them wielding pipe wrenches.

One or two people in the hold looked back at her, but the majority seemed to be ignoring her,
or even outright surly. A couple more roustabouts held prybars, looking as though they wanted an excuse to use them. If they did, it would be a mistake with drastic consequences–the Cache power suit wasn’t totally invulnerable, but she wasn’t going to lose a hand-to-hand fight against improvised melee weapons while wearing armor that could literally crush a tank. And even if they disabled the armor, Kellie was
much
stronger than she looked.

“Grey, I think you had better get your ass in here.”

Veronica carefully walked through the hatch, looking carefully around the room. She carefully kept the barrels of her forearm guns pointed toward
the floor, but the rage seemed to build, especially among the men in the room.

“
Why should we listen to you, anyway? What are we going to get if we follow your instructions, anyway?”

Another shouted,
“Cooperation doesn’t make your jail cell any more comfortable, squid-shit.” There were other men coming behind him, and things were getting more out of control.

There was the crash of a gunshot
and a strangled cry of surprise coming from behind Kellie. Veronica reached up with her glove to check the sudden carbon score on her faceplate, and a roustabout frantically worked the hammer on an old-style revolver, re-aiming. His second shot went wide as the petty chief’s power armor lunged forward with fluid grace and neatly slapped his gun aside, the trigger guard snapping his finger like a matchstick.

“
The next person who fires a gun will lose the
arm
holding the weapon, not just the weapon itself.” growled Kellie.

That
got their attention, thought Veronica, resisting the urge to massage her suddenly-aching temples. The bullet hadn’t penetrated, but the momentum had still carried through her helmet. Her head was aching, and she felt like she wanted to be sick–even the transferred shock of a frangible round hitting her helmet was enough to make her head ring. The remainder of the roustabouts were cowed, at least for the moment, by the sudden violence. Probably as much by the thunderclap of the firearm as by the actual retaliation; firing an unsuppressed firearm in an enclosed compartment without ear protection was almost as bad as setting off an actual flash-bang. Kellie was moving carefully between the crew members, looking at their visual tags. “For the biggest no-brainer in the history of the galaxy, Captain, they’re scared as hell.”