My Other Car is a Spaceship (16 page)

The angry flush
on Hal’s face, visible out of the corner of Kalen’s eye, told him his pilot’s idea of honoring his fallen friends was to get back at those responsible.

After a lengthy pause,
Kalen looked up again, fixing each member of his crew in turn with a firm gaze. “Thank you, my friends. Now, then, let’s figure out what we’re going to do to keep ourselves alive.”

“Have we gotten inside the ninth ship yet?” Penrod, ever impatient, hovered in the doorway to Ishtawahl’s office.

“Not yet, Tarl. There’s a lot of debris blocking access to the ship. It takes time to move
that much material, especially when it’s embedded in the surface of an asteroid. In some places we have to cut through many layers of armored steel. In others, it’s easier to blast it loose from the rock. In still others, we can use the salvage ships to rip the debris loose. And then we will have to cut our way into the ship. We are almost done, but it will be at least an hour before we are inside.”

Penrod sighed and then nodded. “Very well. Keep me apprised.”

Ishtawahl frowned at his boss’s retreating back.
Do I not always?

“We can forget about restoring power to the ship.” Hal looked to Gort Ashredahl, who nodded his agreement. The seven had gathered in the medical bay again for a status report.

“That means no air circulation, no water purification, no electricity,
no heat, no engines, no weapons, no shields, no communications, no nothing. Even the emergency backup generators are busted up. The only power we have is via batteries and fuel cells. We have flashlights and hand tools. That’s about it.”

“On the plus side,” Ashredahl contributed, “we have thousands of
liters of water for drinking and bathing. Although, without power for the pumps it might be hard to get to.”

Kalen acknowledged
the information with a nod. “How long before the air gives out?”

Hal shrugged. “A day, maybe, unless we can crack open some air tanks without power.
But it’ll get deathly cold long before that. We’ll need our EVA suits for heat before too long, and their fuel cells won’t last forever.”

Kalen looked to
Senten Po, the Melphim armory officer, and Marsengar, the Foren tactical officer who’d acted as Po’s hands.

Po’s
right arm and left wrist were both splinted and the right one was in a sling. “We have dozens of hand weapons. Nearly all survived the crash in their cradles. There are energy weapons and slug-throwers, as well as thousands of rounds of both armor-piercing and frangible bullets. We are well equipped to fight a hand-to-hand battle. Of course, there are only six of us in shape to use them to fight off a pirate attack.” She looked embarrassed at her failure to be among the six.

“
Thank you, Senten. Fesel?”

The Blensian
galley cook stood to the full extent his meter-and-a-bit height would allow. “Much of the food and drink was destroyed or contaminated in the crash. However, there is enough left to last us for several weeks—longer, if we are frugal.”

“We
won’t starve or die of thirst anytime soon, then. That expands our options, anyway. Thank you everyone. Now, as I see it, there are two possibilities: either the pirates will come for us or they won’t. Without a functioning hyperflight drive, or even a sublight drive, we’re not going anywhere, and we have no way to call for help.

“So, it looks like our only hope for survival is the pirates.
”

This pronouncement produced the expected jumble of objections from several sets of lips.
Only Hal was silent, nodding.

Kalen raised his hands to quell the hubbub. “If you have any other ideas, I’m open to suggestion.” He paused for several seconds, but nothing was forthcoming from the others.

“I don’t know what happened to the pirate fortress that was supposed to be here—maybe it was all a ruse to lure us into this trap—but clearly the pirates have a lot of ships at their disposal. Even if the Unity were to send other ships to find out what happened to us, I don’t see how they could find us where we are, deep inside the inner shield wall of asteroids. And that’s assuming they survived attack by the pirate ships in the area. Have you forgotten the pocket battleship that picked our fleet apart?” The mixture of anger and frustration on the others’ faces told him they hadn’t.

“
So it’s either the pirates or we hide here inside
Adventurer
until we suffocate or freeze. Is that how you all want to go out?”

“But sir,” Marsengar countered, “is surrendering even an option? How do we know they won’t just kill us on sight?”

Kalen shrugged. “We don’t. We plan for the worst and hope for the best. We’ll take our cues from the pirates. We know they’re coming, from the vibrations we felt through the hull earlier. It’ll take them a while to get to us. If they enter the ship with guns blazing, we fight for all we’re worth. Maybe we can take out a few of them before they get us. On the other hand, maybe they’ll be reasonable and we can negotiate a peaceful surrender. Believe me, I’m not looking forward to a life of slavery any more than the rest of you. But that’s better than death, isn’t it? At least it gives us an opportunity to escape or win our freedom later.”

The thoughtful nods he saw told him the others agreed.

“Very well, then. Everyone put your suits back on and arm up. We have to be ready for anything. When they come, it’ll probably be at either the fore or aft access hatch—or both. We’ll split up into two groups and guard the hatches. I never thought I’d be saying these words, but let’s hope the pirates get here soon.”

“We’re almost through, Tarl,” Ishtawahl reported. “I have people cutting through all access hatches. We should be able to penetrate the interior quickly—in case anyone is alive inside and objects to our presence.”

“Excel
lent, Jern, excellent! From the holo footage I’ve seen, the ship seems to be in pretty good shape structurally. There’s no telling what we might find inside. I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl. I can’t wait to find out what’s salvageable in there. And maybe we’ll come up with some slaves after all.”

“
Perhaps so—assuming they do not fight back.”

“Yes, well, if they do, don’t waste time. Get rid of them with all haste. I want those nukes, if they’re recoverable.”

“Yes sir. That is what I expected you to say. I have already instructed the boarding parties along those lines.”

“Good, good. Let’s get going, then.”

“Here they come,”
Hal whispered. He, Marsengar, and Gort Ashredahl, wearing spacesuits, guarded the fore access hatch, where the pirates’ plasma torches had nearly cut through the airlock’s hinges. Most of the ship’s air had whistled out through the cuts during the last twenty minutes.

“Remember, no one fire unless they fire first, and then give them all you’ve got.”

Each crewmember had a weapon in each hand and a pile of others nearby. Once the shooting started, there wouldn’t be time for reloading. The crew hid behind a barrier of metal furniture and equipment, hauled and shoved into place for that purpose—not the easiest feat in zero gravity. Another jumble of debris partially blocked the hatch. If the pirates were going to get into the ship, they’d have to climb around or through it while fighting the defenders.

Hal
wished he could wipe the sweat off his palms and said a quick prayer.

“Any second now.” Kalen looked at his tiny crew, what there was of it, and resisted the urge to sigh. All he had to stave off a pirate attack through the aft door was a Chan’Yi doctor sworn to protect life, a Blensian—never the bravest of souls, and a Melphim who barely had use of the fingers on one hand and no use of the other hand at all.

If it came to a firefight, they didn’t stand a chance.

The access hatch blew in, partially dislodging the debris in front of it, followed by a flash-bang grenade. Due to the near vacuum now in
Adventurer
, the noise was barely noticeable, but the intensely bright flash had the desired effect. In a split-second, Kalen was rendered blind and disoriented. Through his tightly closed eyelids, he couldn’t tell who fired first, but the flashes from one or both directions were apparent even in his confused state. Realizing he had no choice, he shot back with both hands. Although firing blind, at least he didn’t have to worry about hitting any of his people, who were on either side of him.

Heaven help us.

“How do you think the battle’s going, sir?” Undercommissioner Spelvin Mynax
had stopped by his boss’s office to ask the question on the minds of all the senior Unity officials.

Commissioner of the Fleet
Boutan’Mourn’Froul shrugged, just as antsy as his second-in-command, and paused in his pacing. “There is no way to tell. Until the fleet returns we are completely in the dark. Whatever happened, I imagine it must be over by now.”

The main advantage the defenders had was that the access hatches were wide enough to admit only two people abreast. Even a few defenders could choke off those ingress points with a torrent of fire from energy weapons. Of course, there was an equally steady stream of fire returning from the other direction, with more pirates firing around the edges of the hatches at once than
Adventurer
had in total. Worse, the energy weapons the seven defenders had wouldn’t last forever.

Senten Po was the first to fall. Although the
big Melphim armory officer was by far the best shot of the survivors, with her injuries she couldn’t manage the same rate of fire as the others. As a result, there were longer gaps the pirates could fire through. And with such a large target to aim at, it was inevitable a shot would find its mark.

The first
energy bolt got her shoulder. A split-second later another energy burst penetrated her helmet and hit her full in the face. She was dead before she bounced off the back wall.

At the other access door,
Gort Ashredahl was the next to go. A freak deflection of a slug off the edge of a panel hit him at an angle, clipping the bridge of his nose, perforating his left eye and exiting through the side of his head at such an angle that it missed the brain entirely. It was a grave but not mortal wound—at least, not until his suit’s air bled out. However the pain caused him to rear up and roar like a giant thunderbeast from his race’s primitive past. Two more shots hit him in the chest within a quarter-second of one another. Either would have been fatal.

Dead pirates
accumulated even faster on the other side of the access hatches, but the pirates had many more bodies to throw into the fray than did the crew of
Adventurer
.

As a former fighter pilot, Hal was used to being shot at. But seeing his opponents’ faces at such close range was a new and unsettling thing for him. So was the tingle of high-energy bursts passing near enough to his head to make his hair stand on end inside his helmet. Even though firing handguns was for ground-pounders and not pilots, Hal gave a good account of himself, taking out at least three pirates that he was sure of.

Losing Gort was a real jolt to his pilot’s sense of immortality.

How much longer can we keep this up?
He glanced over at Marsengar.
We’ve lost a third of our firepower already. If either of us goes, there’s no way the other can hold them all off, and then we’re done for.

“Hold up!” Kalen ordered. “They’ve stopped firing. Catch your breath, but stay alert. There’s no telling what they’re up to.”

“Ahoy the ship!”
A gruff voice he didn’t recognize came through on the open radio channel.

“What do you want?” Kalen
queried.

“Parle
y.”

“Okay, talk. What do you want?”

“You can’t hold out forever. Sooner or later you’ll have to sleep, eat, shit. We can wait. You’re not going anywhere and you’ve no reinforcements coming. It’s just a matter of time. You’ve got two choices. Surrender now and live, or keep fighting and die.”

“If we surrender, do I have your word that you’ll let us all live?”

“You have my word.”

“Very well, then.”
Captain Kalen Jeffries took a deep breath. “We surrender.”

“You made the right choice. Look behind you.”

Kalen glanced over his shoulder and gasped. Just beyond the doorway behind him floated two pirates with guns drawn. They’d evidently cut their way through the unguarded cargo doors and slipped down the main passageway unnoticed, their approach masked by the firefight.

The wrong answer would have meant instant death
for
Adventurer’s
crew.

Kalen
gave the order through his suit’s radio. “Lay down your weapons, Hal, Marsengar, Gort. I’ve surrendered.”

There was a brief pause.
“Are you certain you want to do that, Captain? We can hold them off indefinitely from here.”

Kalen looked back at the pirates who had a bead on him and the others. “Quite certain,
Hal. Leave your weapons and join us here.”

He heard the
other man’s sigh.

“Take them,” the gruff voice ordered.

Rough hands grabbed Kalen, Nude, and Fesel and shoved them down the passageway toward the cargo holds. Hal and Marsengar arrived a minute later.

Kalen’s eyebrows went up when he saw the two arrive without Gort. Hal shook his head with another wince.

That’s two more gone. Two more crew I’ve led to their deaths.

Kalen
shook off the thought.
Stop that! You have a duty to the rest of the crew. Pull yourself together, Captain!

A skinny man with blond
hair and a scruffy beard visible through his suit’s helmet floated aboard
Adventurer
. He looked the prisoners up and down.

“Him,” he said in his gruff voice. He pointed to the Blensian. One of the guards rai
sed his weapon and shot Fesel through the helmet. Due to the virtually nonexistent gravity, he tumbled backwards from the force of the blast, thumping quietly against the far wall.

Kalen glared at the pirate as if his eyes were death rays.

“Blensians make poor slaves. Too weak.”

“But
—” Kalen protested. “You gave your word!”

The blond man grinned. “Maybe next time you should
find out whether the person you’re negotiating with is authorized to make deals. My word meant nothing.”

“But—”

“
Pirate
. Remember?”

The guards shackled the five prisoners together and “marched” them hand-over-hand at gunpoint through the cargo doors and up a temporary access tube. It was approximately 2.5 meters in diameter and extended alongside the ship, out of the ravine, and back to the salvage ship anchored to the surface of the asteroid. On the way out, the group had to pass collections of dead pirates around the two access hatches. Other pirates towed the corpses behind them one by one, through the tube to the ship.

Once inside the salvage vessel
, artificially generated gravity kicked in. The corpses were laid out on the deck in rows. As Hal passed the last row of bodies, one of the two Melphim pirates carrying a human corpse accidentally dropped his end of the load, causing the body to slip out of the grip of the other and fall onto the corpse below. The body rolled directly in front of Hal, staring up at him with blind, accusing eyes.

Hal
stumbled over the man’s hip and nearly fell.

Whoa there,
Hal. Don’t step on the poor man.
Then he corrected himself.
Make that ‘Don’t step on the dead man’s chest’.
He chuckled at his poor joke, despite the dire circumstances, drawing a confused look from Kalen, who was chained just ahead of him. “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,” Hal said.

Kalen looked no less confused after
the ‘explanation.’

Hal shrugged.
Well, I could surely use that bottle of rum right about now. It might make the next few hours, days, weeks, months, a little less unpleasant.

One of the guards secured b
oth ends of the chain linking the prisoners together to a ring on the wall. Four guards pointed unswerving weapons at the Unies. No one spoke during the twenty-minute trip to the pirate fortress, still outside the shield walls, but heading back that way. The ship docked and once again the prisoners were marched down a short passageway. This time the guards herded them into the back of an electric truck and whisked them off down a wide corridor. After several minutes, it pulled up in front of a heavy, wide metal door. Sensors in the walls and floor detected their presence, weighed the truck and its contents, sampled the energy signatures of the guards’ handguns, and sniffed for the presence of chemical weapons—even before the guard contacted someone inside. A light flashed by the door to signal admittance, and the blast door slid back.

The prisoners were ushered inside, still at gunpoint, around a
split perimeter catwalk overlooking an open “pit” area full of people sitting at command consoles. The catwalk was to prevent a large force from charging straight at the executive offices at the rear of the large chamber—the control center of the fortress. Visitors had to enter no more than three abreast, and the wide sweeping curves of the catwalk, on both the left and right, gave defenders a terrific field of fire from the gun ports hidden in the walls. Spiral staircases joined the upper and lower levels.

O
nce at the executive suites, one of the guards knocked on a clear door made of four-inch-thick armored aluminum oxynitride—transparent aluminum—reinforced with a nearly invisible mesh of boron nanotubes for additional protection against armor-piercing projectiles.

The door slid back to admit the prisoners to the outer
vestibule adjacent to the offices of Tarl Penrod, Jern Ishtawahl, and their executive assistants. A guard secured both ends of the prisoner chain to a ring bolted to the wall.

Once this was done, two people entered the room from one of the offices.
Hal examined them closely on the theory that anything he learned here might be useful later in an escape attempt
.

The o
ne on the left was human, approximately 1.9 meters in height and muscular. He looked to weigh at least a hundred kilos. His short black hair and neatly trimmed beard accentuated his piercing blue eyes. A ragged scar running down his right cheek disappeared into the beard.

His associate, an Alberian, was
well over two meters tall and in excess of 150 kilos. His bulging fiery yellow eyes set in a green pebbled face were fearsome enough, until one looked at the double rows of razor-sharp teeth. One chomp could saw through a man’s arm in seconds. His own arms were short and appeared to lack the strength of his human companion’s, but his teeth and talons more than made up for that shortfall.

The human frowned
back at the ragged, bandaged group chained before him: two humans, a Foren, and a Chan’Yi. “This is it? I lose more than a dozen pirates and all I get in return is four beat-up prisoners?” He shook his head. “Well, those nukes will make up the difference, and then some.”

“I’m afraid no
t,” Kalen replied. “We used all our nukes to force our way through the inner shield wall.”

The human
pirate made a wry face. “Really. And left none to attack our fortress with? I think not. And who might you be?”

“I am Senior
Captain Kalen Jeffries, and this is my crew—” He winced. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

The other man pursed his lips. “Well,
Captain Jeffries, I must congratulate you on managing to survive everything to get this far. That’s more than the rest of your fleet can say. You four are the first nonpirates to see the inside of our new fortress. Welcome to
Smuggler’s Cove
.”

“I can’t say I feel especially welcome. And you are?”

“Ah. My apologies. How rude. I am Tarl Penrod, and this is my second-in-command, Jern Ishtawahl. And
these
are?” He gestured to the other prisoners.

Kalen nodded toward
Hal. “This is Hal Nellis, my pilot. Behind him is Marsengar, my tactical officer, and in the back, Chalmis’Noud’Ourien, ship’s doctor.”

Hal
was surprised at his Captain’s openness.
So much for name, rank, and serial number. Perhaps he’s hoping if we’re highly regarded we’ll be treated better than if Penrod thinks we’re mere galley help.

Penrod nodded in thought.
“Well, well. It looks like our net caught some high-quality fish after all. That should make up somewhat for the lack of quantity. I suppose it would be a waste of time to ask whether any of you would care to join us voluntarily. We seem to be short a few pirates at the moment, thanks to you. After we rebuild the ships we’ve lost we’ll need crews for them. Any takers?” His only response was silence. He nodded with a wry smile. “I thought not.”

“Speaking of ships lost,” Kalen ventured, “I take it from the fact that we’re all standing here in your fortress that our attack was unsuccessful.”

“Unsuccessful? Only if you consider the complete destruction of your fleet and the deaths of everyone in it ‘unsuccessful’.”

Kalen
winced and looked at Hal.

Hal
swallowed the acid taste in his mouth. Until that moment, a small secret part of his mind had held onto the hope that some of the fleet had survived to fight another day, that they would come back in force and nail the pirate bastards to the wall, blowing the fortress to atoms in the process. But now that hope was gone.