Mutiny in Space (18 page)

“What about the EVA packs?” I said.

The techs stared at each other.

“Those are still intact,” said the tech.

“The three of us have still got our suits,” I said, pointing at Corbin and Nelson.

“These suits aren’t rated for EVA in hard vacuum,” said Nelson.

“Not for working outside,” said Corbin, his voice thoughtful. “But they’re rated for two hours. That’s long enough.” He frowned at me. “You up for this?”

“No,” I said. “I want to go lie down with a bottle of painkillers. But Ducarti’s going to blow up the ship and kill us all. If we’re going to catch him, this is our one shot.”

My uncle nodded and looked at the chief.

“Kid’s right,” said Nelson with a sigh. “If we’re going to go, we’ve got to go now.”

Hawkins said several words that the Officers’ Manual of Starways Hauling Company stated that officers were never to use under any circumstances. Then he held up his hand. “All right. God go with you, Rovio, Nelson, Nikolai.”

“Good luck,” said Murdock.

“We’ll need it,” said Corbin. “Rodriguez, fire up a cargo drone and send it to the engineering room airlock. Nelson, Nikolai, let’s get ready.”

We hastily checked our suits, donning our helmets and gauntlets once more. One of the techs wrestled out the EVA packs and we pulled them on. The heavy packs had gas thrusters, allowing movement and maneuverability outside of the ship in zero-G. Ducarti and Williams had taken a pair of the packs, so I wondered why they hadn’t just flown straight to the
Vanguard
.

“You ever used one of these before?” said Nelson, passing me a fully-loaded K7 rifle. I attached it to my suit’s magnetic harness.

“Yeah,” I said. “Once.”

That was why they hadn’t tried to fly. EVA packs were tricky to handle. Ducarti could barely handle walking on the hull.

Nelson sighed again. “Well, it beats sitting around waiting to explode, anyhow.”

“I’m sending the number three drone.” Arthur’s voice came over my helmet’s speakers. “Better get ready.”

“We’re ready,” said Corbin. “Come on!”

The chief and I followed him through the engineering room and into the airlock. The room had one airlock, designed to allow the crewers to escape in the event of a disaster that cut off the dorsal corridor. It passed closer to the sublight drive plumes than I would have liked, but we ought to be safe from the drive radiation.

Of course, if we couldn’t stop the two Socials, it didn’t really matter.

The airlock cycled, and the outer door swung open, revealing the vacuum of space, a thousand times a thousand stars blazing in all directions. As we stepped free of the ship’s artificial gravitics, I activated the magnetic gripping system in my boots, and followed Nelson and Corbin as they clambered onto the
Rusalka
’s outer hull. My inner ear wasn’t at all happy, which combined with my headache and the unending pain in my chest made for an unpleasant sensation. Spinning off the hull would have been even more unpleasant, though, so I clomped onwards, following the older men.

Walking atop the ship’s outer hull was a weird feeling. With the gentle curvature and the various protrusions of thruster vents, sensor arrays, shield generators, and docking ports, it was like walking through a really strange skateboard park. I saw the hump of the dorsal corridor running along the ship’s spine, and in the distance, the sleek, predatory mass of the
Vanguard
hovering over the ship like a hawk about to feast upon its prey. The
Vanguard
couldn’t have gotten any closer to the
Rusalka
without ripping off part of its hull, so an airlock tube extended from the ship’s nose to the side of the dorsal corridor.

That would be Ducarti’s target. All he’d have to do was sever the airlock connection to decouple the two ships and the
Vanguard
would float off into space until the tangled reactors went critical. And there would be nothing we could do to stop it; ejecting the reactor from Rusalka couldn’t be done outside of a shipyard.

I couldn’t see either Ducarti or Williams yet, but I knew they were somewhere out there ahead of us.

“We’re ready,” came Murdock’s voice over my helmet’s speakers.

“Here comes the drone,” said Arthur.

Blue light flashed as the dark bulk of the cargo drone moved overhead, swooping in low towards the hull. Unlike the drone that Arthur had used to defend himself, this drone was still intact, and it looked like a combination of a praying mantis and a big metal jellyfish. The drone slowed, its ion thruster flaring, and came to a stop a few meters from the hull. Of course, neither the
Rusalka
nor the drone had come to a complete stop, but were following identical velocities and vectors so they merely appeared to be at a stop relative to each other, but my head hurt too much to do the necessary math just now.

“Nice flying,” said Murdock’s voice.

“Thank you,” said Arthur.

It was nice to hear them getting along, but my uncle was unimpressed

“Rodriguez, how are we getting onto that thing?”

“The container manipulator arm,” said Arthur. One of the drone’s arms extended, stopping maybe a half-meter from the hull. It was a big three-pronged thing, designed to grip onto the top of heavy shipping containers. “I will lock it in place, and the drone will ferry you over to the
Vanguard
.”

“How far are Ducarti and the captain from it?” said Nelson.

“About ninety meters,” said Hawkins. “Get on your ride, gentlemen!”

“Let’s go,” said Corbin. His armored hand reached for the control arm of his EVA pack. “Short burst, and then we’ll head for the Vanguard. Go!”

I squeezed my own control arm, using the weakest possible thrust setting. The EVA pack gave me a gentle kick, and I drifted off the hull and into the manipulator arm. Even that hurt a lot, and I barely managed to grab one of the prongs of the manipulator arm.

Turns out that using an EVA pack with a cracked rib isn’t any fun.

“It is possible,” I said to myself, “that I might be an idiot.”

I’d forgotten my radio was still on.

“Once you get to a certain age, son,” said Nelson, “you feel like that most of the time.”

“Not me,” said Murdock.

“Rodriguez, we’re on board,” said Corbin with a hint of asperity. I wondered if he had put up with this level of backtalk while in the Coalition navy. “Get us to the
Vanguard
. Murdock, can you target the captain and Ducarti on our HUDs?”

“Roger,” said Murdock. The HUD in my helmet flickered, and in the distance I saw a faint red blotch. The HUDs in these suits were pretty basic, mostly devoted to oxygen levels, but they could display the locations of our two enemies.

It looked like Ducarti and Williams were almost underneath the
Vanguard
. If we were lucky, they’d only be armed with laser cutters and it would take them a few minutes to sever the reinforced metal of the airlock. At the speed the drone could move, we’d have plenty of time to stop them in the act.

Then the manipulator arm shuddered, and the drone started forward. I had half-feared that Arthur would accelerate so sharply that we’d be crushed in our unarmored suits, but he knew his business. The drone eased forward, the
Vanguard
growing larger and larger before us, the
Rusalka
’s hull scrolling away to the left. The little red blotches representing Ducarti and Williams kept moving closer to the base of the airlock tube.

“Get ready to shoot,” said Corbin. “Make it count.”

Nelson raised his K7, and I lifted my rifle from its magnetic harness. It was clumsy in the suit gauntlets, but I managed. I wasn’t at all sure of my ability to hit anything at this range, but Corbin and Nelson were better shots. We didn’t have to be that accurate. We just had to pierce their suits in a few places, and Ducarti and Williams would die of asphyxiation.

Then there was an intense flash, bright enough against the deep black of space to cause my helmet filter to darken instantly. The bright reds and greens that impressed themselves into my closed eyes suggested it was a chemical reaction.

Which was to say, a shaped charge, or in more casual terms, a bomb.

“They blew the lock!” Hawkins shouted unnecessarily. The force of the silent explosion not only severed the connection between the
Vanguard
and the
Rusalka
, but also served to throw the smaller ship away from the much larger one. The warship’s nose had been thrown back, so that it looked as if it was dismounting from Rusalka in a back handspring. It slowly tumbled away from the silver expanse of the hull in a somersault that would not stop until the ship exploded.

Now that the Vanguard was gone, we could see the troopship another 400 meters ahead. But we didn’t see Williams or Ducarti.

“Where’d they go?” I asked.

“Maybe they blew themselves up,” Nelson suggested optimistically.

“No, they’re still there,” Hawkins said. “They’re right there!”

They must have lain flat against the hull to avoid having their suits punctured by debris from the bomb, but now they had gotten back on their feet and we could see them easily, right out in the open and exposed to our fire. But we were just as exposed to them.

“Now?” said Nelson.

Hawkins’s voice crackled in my ears.

“Rovio!” he snapped. “Watch out! It looks like they’re turning to shoot at you! Ducarti has some kind of launcher.”

I couldn’t hear anything, but a vibration went through the cargo manipulator arm. Williams was shooting and at least one of his shots had hit the drone. We knew the big machine could shrug off the hits, but K7 projectiles would tear through our suits like tissue paper.

“Now!” said Corbin. “Fire!”

Nelson snapped up his rifle faster than I would have thought possible and started shooting on full auto. Corbin followed suit, his boots locking to the metal of the arm, and I raised my gun and squeezed the trigger. We were shooting in almost total silence, which made the whole thing feel unreal.

Firing a vaccuum-capable gun on full auto in zero-G is different than shooting one in a gravitized atmosphere. In gravity, the gun had both mass and weight, which helped keep it in your hands while firing. In zero-G, it had no weight, which meant it was harder to hold, and the kinetic motion of the K7 would send me shooting backwards like a booster rocket. Bracing the stock against my shoulder hurt, but I was ready for it, and my boots kept me from shooting off into the eternal void. Still, it spoiled my aim, and I doubt my shots went anywhere near Ducarti and Williams. I would have been surprised if they had come anywhere near the
Rusalka
, and the ship was a kilometer long.

At least I didn’t shoot the chief or my uncle in the back.

They didn’t have any better luck. The guns made no noise in the vacuum, and so I heard Hawkins without any trouble.

“You’re overshooting!” said Hawkins. “Just a few meters off, shorten your aim. Wait! Get off the drone. Get off the drone! Incoming!!”

There was a second, smaller chemical flare from their position. This time my faceshield didn’t darken.

“Take cover!” shouted Hawkins.

Where? We were standing on a cargo arm in vacuum. There wasn’t anywhere to take cover.

“Eject!” said Corbin, and he leaped gracefully from the arm, the jets on his EVA pack shooting out white plumes. Nelson followed him, but I wasn’t as practiced with using the EVA equipment.

I had just managed to shift my K7 to my right hand and grip the control arm with my left when the missile slammed into one of the drone’s ion jets.

I couldn’t hear the explosion, but I felt it, the vibration shooting through my boots and making my bones vibrate. The drone heaved to the side, spinning like a top, and it spun with enough force that the side of my head slammed into the drone’s cargo arm. I heard a crunching noise, a squeal of static, and then I sort of went away for a while.

When I came to, I was spinning through nothingness, red and green lights flashing across my HUD.

Confusion filled my head, and then a jolt of sheer terrified panic pushed it aside. Ducarti’s missile, the drone… I had been thrown off into space. I had a horrified instant when I thought I had fallen into a gravity well, that I would be pulled down into one of the gas giants’ atmospheres to be cooked alive by their radiation, but then I remembered we were still hundreds of millions of kilometers from any of NR8965’s planets, and at my current velocity, I would likely have a few billion years before my mummified corpse met that fate.

Well. That was that. I wouldn’t die in a hyper-nuclear reaction, I just had to wait two or three hours until my suit failed in the hard vaccuum. It could be worse. A better suit would just permit me to die a long and painful death of dehydration.

The nausea gripped me after that. I was still spinning around from the missile explosion, and my inner ear was not happy. My stomach heaved, and I was grateful there hadn’t been time to eat anything during this awful day. Of all the ways to die, choking on my own vomit in a spacesuit would be one of the worst. Still better than getting cooked by drive radiation, though.

I groped for the control arm, firing the jets in the pattern I had practiced when studying for my certification tests. At last I got my spin under control, and I came to a halt relative to the ship’s velocity. The gray cylinder of the
Rusalka
hovered ahead of me, glinting in its running lights, and I didn’t think I was more than a thousand meters from the gargantuan ship.

“Corbin?” I said. “Anyone? Is anybody there?”

Only static answered me. I wondered if Ducarti had somehow managed to kill everyone on the ship when I was out, and then I noticed the red text on my HUD. My suit’s life support system was still running, but the radio was dead. It had likely been damaged when my head bounced off the cargo arm. The drone floated a few hundred meters away, still spinning ponderously away from the
Rusalka
, and I wondered if Corbin and Nelson were still alive, and if they had found a way to stop Ducarti. I looked towards where the troopship was above the
Rusalka
.