Scrapyard Ship 3 Space Vengeance (28 page)

Stalls slowly shook his head and said, “Nan, you have no need for that weapon. I could no more hurt you than I could hurt myself. I’ve gone to considerable lengths coming here. Finding you. I’m hoping my actions speak for themselves. I’m hoping that you realize I love you. That I want to make you mine.”

He took another step, and then another. Almost undetectable, dozens of small security panels opened above and below on the walls and ceiling. Stalls’ eyes flashed and focused on the multiple weapon barrels moving into position. He dove, but had moved too late. The room erupted into mayhem. Plasma bolts seemed to emanate from everywhere. Nan crouched and found Mollie several feet behind her. Together, they used their arms to cover their heads and waited.

She watched as Stalls, now unarmed and on the ground, crawled toward the kitchen and its smaller family room area. She watched as his body took repeated shots—tensing in apparent agony each time he was hit with another plasma bolt. Numerous black scorch marks peppered his back and upper legs. He had slowed but was still able to crawl, making it out of the great room.

“
Bag End, why have you stopped firing?” Nan yelled.

“
Security weapons in compartments two and three are inoperable.”

Tentatively, Nan got to her feet. She signaled for Mollie to stay put. She checked her weapon settings one more time and slowly walked toward the entrance to the family room. She stopped and listened and heard nothing. She wanted him dead, more than she had ever wanted anything. Another step and she could see his legs. Not moving. Entering the family room with her weapon pointed at Stalls’ prone outstretched body, she kicked at one of his boots. No movement. Lying on his stomach with his face turned away, Nan wanted to make sure he was truly dead. Sliding with her back against the wall and keeping as much space between herself and Stalls as possible, she moved into the room.

Stalls moved quickly for a man shot a dozen times. How he had retrieved his weapon Nan had no idea, and by the time she had brought her own weapon up to fire, she had taken a plasma bolt to the top of her forehead. Her last conscious thought was of Mollie, Oh my god, Mollie.

Chapter 41

Chapter 41

Betty led Brian and the hopper down into the bowels of the freighter and continued aft in what seemed to Brian like a corridor without end. The smell of fresh grain became even more pungent—to the point Brian nearly turned back. He noticed neither Betty or the hopper seemed to have any problem with the strong odor.

Betty stopped several times to tell the hopper to back off, not walk so close behind her. She was already annoyed at the creature, primarily, Brian thought, because it had defecated twice along the way. Brian tried to explain that the hopper’s environment did not include the use of toilets, but she’d cut him short, not wanting to discuss it.

“
We’re fortunate that the internal ship dampeners and artificial gravity wells are still online,” she said over her shoulder. “Can you imagine making this trek in zero G?”

“
No, I’m having enough trouble just walking,” Brian replied, peering beyond her to see if there was any kind of end in sight.

The hopper was clicking and hissing. Turning its head in Brian’s direction, it repeated the same sounds again.

“
Unless you can eat grain, you’re just going to have to wait a bit,” Brian responded.

Betty turned and looked at the hopper. “That thing’s not going to gouge my heart out, is it?”

“
I don’t think so, but it’s got a mind of its own. As I said before, best if you try to be nice.”

She didn’t say anything but did her best to smile in the hopper’s direction.

“
We almost there?”

“
Yeah, we’re coming to a juncture, then just up two flights of stairs.”

Brian and the hopper followed behind Betty as they approached a set of metal-rung stairs.

“
Up this way,” she said, taking the rungs two at a time.

Brian was content to take them one at a time, and watched her distance herself; she was out of sight when she turned up ahead.

Brian eyed the hopper, which seemed to know what to do. It squeezed past Brian and sprung toward the top of the stairs in one fluid motion. Now, with both out of his line of vision, Brian tried to hurry up the metal rungs, but felt another round of the continual waves of nausea take hold, eventually forcing him to stop climbing completely. Bending over, he felt bile rise up from his stomach. He retched but avoided throwing up. Looking up the stairs, Brian wondered if the hopper had indeed decided Betty’s heart would make an adequate snack.

Using his NanoCom’s translator he yelled up toward the top of the stairs, “Hey! Don’t eat her heart. Or anything else, for that matter.”

A moment later the hopper peered over the railing, but no sign of Betty. Shit, he thought, they’d need her to get off this fucking freighter. To his relief, Betty peered over the railing and looked down at him from above.

“
You all right down there?” she asked, with no semblance of concern in her voice.

“
I’m good,” he replied and continued on up after them.

By the time Brian made it to the top of the stairs, he was huffing and puffing. Betty and the hopper, sitting against the bulkhead, watched him approach with indifference. Betty got up and entered a code into a greasy, well-used panel at the side of a metal hatchway. There was a loud clanging sound that Brian figured was the mechanical latch mechanism. The hatch sprung open several inches and Betty pushed the hatch forward enough to enter into the next corridor.

The corridor was dark, with a strobe warning sign above another hatchway at the end of the hall. Brian’s NanoCom translated the words.

WARNING! HULL BREACH. DO NOT ENTER.

“
This is the entrance to Engineering. As you can see, it’s open to space. No way we’re getting in there,” Betty said.

Brian looked at the blinking sign above the hatch and then at several other hatchways closer along the corridor.

“
Where do those lead?”

“
That one leads to a maintenance area and a bathroom,” she answered, quickly glancing toward the hopper. “And the other one leads to our bin lift.”

“
What’s a bin lift?”

Betty shrugged and shook her head as if it was a stupid question. “I don’t know; it’s like a fork lift thing that moves bins of grain around. It’s huge and it makes a lot of noise.”

“
Can I see it?”

Betty stared at him for several seconds, shrugged, and said, “Be my guest.” She entered another code and the nearest of the two hatchways opened. Brian pushed the hatch open with the toe of his shoe and peered inside. As Betty had indicated, the bin lift was enormous. Parked in a garage-type compartment, the yellow vehicle was easily three stories high and as wide as five school buses parked side by side. Thick manipulator arms at the front of the vehicle held a large, rounded, blue bin. A bin, Brian assumed, used in transporting thousands of pounds of grain stores. There were both wheels and thrusters along the sides of the vehicle. Looking up, he found what he was looking for—a small, windowed cab area.

“
That where you’d pilot the thing?”

“
Yep.”

“
So this thing transports grain between ships in open space?”

“
Or at a space dock. But I know what you’re thinking. It moves pathetically slow. You can walk faster than this thing moves. Don’t even think about traveling in space with this.”

Brian continued to look at the gargantuan vehicle. “Oh, I’m not, but by the size of those thrusters I’m guessing there’s mega-horsepower here.”

Betty nodded but didn’t seem to make the connection.

“
Enough to slow or maybe even stop this freighter?”

That clicked for her and she nodded. “I guess we can give it a try.”

“
You can operate this thing?”

“
Easy. Even that thing could do it,” she said, gesturing toward the hopper.

* * *

It wasn’t as easy as Betty said it would be. She soon began to communicate with someone, perhaps with one of the T-shirted guys back on the bridge. Brian could hear only her side of the conversation. She referred to eight fifty a few times and then Brian remembered: they called each other numbers and used abbreviations of those numbers as their names.

The three of them were now huddled together within the tight quarters of the bin lift’s cab.

“
I still don’t know why the hopper couldn’t wait in the garage. There’s barely enough room for one in here, let alone two plus your hopper. And did I mention its breath is foul?”

“
I try not to tell it what to do. Why don’t we concentrate on the job at hand?” Brian asked her.

Betty sat behind the controls and was busy configuring settings on a barely-illuminated touchpad display. Holding a comms device to her ear, she again talked to eight fifty. “All right, I think we’re set. Go ahead and cycle the atmosphere.”

With the disappearance of atmosphere came a welcome silence from outside the cab. Brian hadn’t fully registered how noisy it had become in the cab until then. A series of red lights blinked on, then became a steady amber color. He felt a mechanical vibration as two massive doors started to separate. Beyond, open space. The sparkle of millions of distant stars now entirely filled his field of vision.

“
Powering on thrusters,” Betty said.

The vibration increased as the bin lift rose ten feet off the deck. She goosed the controls forward and the bin lift slowly headed out of the garage toward open space. From an intellectual level, Brian knew the bin lift was traveling at the same speed as the freighter itself, but that didn’t stop him from holding his breath as they maneuvered between the open doors and held steady at the aft end of the ship, along its outside starboard hull.

“
You know, this idea of yours may not work. In fact, we may get ourselves killed in the process.”

Brian only half listened to her, instead watching the hopper continually lick the glass on the side porthole. Betty furrowed her brow and made a disgusted grimace.

The singular drive throttled up, bringing up the sound level again in the cabin. They needed to yell to speak to each other.

“
I’m maneuvering to the aft area of the freighter. If we’re not perfectly locked on to the exact right location, this won’t work.”

The hopper began to rifle through an old cooler stowed at the back of the cabin. It came up with something that, at one time, may have been edible, but was now nothing more than a clump of mold. Not at all discouraged, the creature ate it in one bite, licked its claws, and returned to searching the cooler.

The aft section of the freighter was a mess. There would not have been any possibility of repairing the damage. Gaping, jagged holes riddled the drives and it appeared as if much of the aft section could break away at any time.

“
Shit, this won’t work.”

Brian quickly saw what she was referring to. Nothing was solid on the hull; things would flex under the stress of any resistance introduced from the bin lift.

“
You’ll just need to find an area that is solid.”

“
You think?”

The freighter was turned backward in space, with its aft section heading forward. As Betty maneuvered the bin lift around the stern end, now the forward end of the freighter, Brian couldn’t help but think about the massive amount of deadweight tonnage lying before them. Both manipulator arms were moving. Carefully, Betty articulated the clawed ends to open, and then close, around protruding sections of the mangled drives. She tried this maneuver several times, and each time sections of the drive came loose and pulled away from the freighter.

“
This is useless. Like trying to grab on to sand.”

“
Up there. Don’t try to clamp to the drive. The framework looks to be solid up there,” Brian said, pointing to a section thirty feet above.

Betty let out a controlled breath and maneuvered the bin lift higher. Again, she brought up the manipulator arms and articulated the two claws. This time they held fast.

“
We’re not dead center like I’d like to be, but this might work,” she said.