Ships of My Fathers (32 page)

“Down-tach, reentry in thirty… mark.”

He took a deep breath and started counting it down in his head. What he was about to try was crazy, but he knew that staying was even crazier. He suddenly remembered some of his early pilot training in
Sophie
’s little flyer with Malcolm along as co-pilot. “Don’t be scared of the landing,” Malcolm had said. “Visualize your path, commit to it, and keep your stick on it.”

They had been in flight at the time, with the ocean-front runway coming up. Even with what must have been a low-angle approach, he had felt like a falling rock. “But what if I come down too hard?”

“Better too hard than too late,” Malcolm had said, looking out towards the sea beyond. “If you worry yourself into waiting too long, you’ll miss the runway, and this flyer can’t swim.”

Back aboard the
Jaguar
, he felt the transition and dropped the bags. They hit softly and slid off. He went next, landing feet first and then sliding down on his backside towards the edge of the tank. By the time the call for status reports went out, he was already on the deck with a bag slung over each shoulder.

He shuffled across the metal grates briskly, worried more about the time than about making noise. The environmental techs would not be nearly as busy as the engineers were, but they would still be checking their displays. He made his way port, then aft, then port again before turning aft once more.

He could see his goal from there, a straight shot twenty meters back, a hatch that led into the bottom of the cargo hold. It was not a proper airlock, just a pressure door. According to the ship schematic, the
Jaguar
had three pressure hatches into cargo but only one airlock. In practice, the pressure hatches were almost as safe, since they could not be pulled open with a vacuum on the other side, but he had felt safer on the
Heinrich
where no potential atmospheric boundary was crossed with anything short of double-safety airlock.

But here on the
Jaguar
, it was his salvation. They ran with a pressurized cargo hold here which meant that until they docked to unload, those pressure hatches could be opened. In fact, he had even seen one left standing open, back when he still had the run of the ship. He recalled Zane’s warning going through the core airlocks back on
Heinrich
. “If both doors are open, it signals an alarm on the bridge.” Despite the menacing Mr. Bishop guarding whatever it was up on deck one, hatch security was clearly much more lax on the
Jaguar
.

The only problem was that between him and that hatch was the environmental control station. It was not directly in the path, fortunately, but it was immediately to starboard. Three stations were arranged in a horseshoe bay, the open end facing out into the path Michael had to traverse. All three of the watch standers sat at the controls there. He could hear them, and with a careful peek over a scrubber unit, he could see the tops of their heads.

He thought about throwing something in the opposite direction to distract them, but the last thing he wanted was for one of them to get up and start investigating. This would have been so much better if they had down-tached on an off-shift. Seconds ticked away.

Fuck it. If they see me, they see me. Commit to it.

He stayed low and dashed aft crossing the gap as quickly as he could. He did not pause at the other side to see if they had reacted. He did not know what he would have done if they had, so it was wise that he did not stay near to find out. In another fifteen paces, he made it to the hatch. It was closed, but not secured. With a simple tug on the handle, it opened up.

He stepped through and closed it behind him.

Now for the easy part, he thought. All he had to do was find a container that was going to be unloaded at Arvin and climb inside. Easy, right?

The
Jaguar
did not carry nearly as much cargo as the
Heinrich
, but it carried enough. She had five cargo decks, spaced evenly across the vertical space of the four crew decks. The central spine corridor ran the length of it back towards the engineering section, but otherwise, it was simply a large array of containers on sliding tracks.

They could be emptied out to the sides, which was more efficient than
Sophie
’s smaller rear-loading cargo bay, but it was still not as efficient as
Heinrich
’s radial pattern, mostly because the radial loaders could unload as well as rotate and resort. On
Heinrich
, it meant that the cargo to be offloaded was almost always positioned out and forward. On the
Jaguar
, he had no idea how they optimized their cargo load.

So he started down the length of the deck and promptly lost his footing. Of course, like the
Heinrich
, the long cargo section of the ship was without gravity. He shifted closer to the side and floated back along the handrails, looking for labels. Most were marked with square holo-codes. They did him no good without a scanner and a copy of the manifest. A few had business names on them, but he did not recognize any of them as belonging on Arvin. They could very well be, but his only memory of Arvin station had been running wildly through the corridors and lifts, ferrying packets from one office to another.

He heard a muted announcement, but he could not tell what it was. It was not the kind of alarm he would expect if they had discovered his absence, or worse, if they were about to vent the cargo hold.

Determined, he drifted up to the second cargo deck and started working his way back forward. Again, it was mostly holo-codes. He found one labeled for Marius Mills. He could remember a Marius Mills, but he could not remember where it had been. For all he knew, it could have been all the way back on Taschin.

He was almost back to the forward end when he missed the next handrail, almost as though it had moved away from him. He reached further forward to grab it, but it was still moving.

Grasping at empty air, he realized what was happening. They were decelerating, only he was not. He started to fall. It was almost a hundred meters to the back end of the bay. Even at half a gravity, such a fall would be fatal. He panicked, but a life on ships had left him with good reflexes. As soon as you start to fall, grab at the take-holds, and in an emergency, any take-hold will do.

In this case, he had grabbed onto the hatch handle of one of the containers. He had grabbed it with his left hand, while his right flailed pointlessly at open air. He swung around to take it with both hands, but in the process, his carrying bag slipped off his right arm and fell bouncing down the long cargo deck. He knew better than to try to go after it now, so he grabbed onto that handle with both hands as gravity built up. He still had the survival bag, and that was what mattered most.

He wedged one foot against a railing as the deceleration increased past one gravity, and rapidly built up towards two. Back in the crew areas, he was sure they were not feeling this at all, but there was no acceleration compensation in cargo. If he could have spared the motion, he would have kicked himself. He should have been expecting the deceleration problem, what with
Heinrich
’s long zero-gravity core shaft, but he had not.

Deceleration held steady at almost two gravities, and while he had the strength to hold on, his palms were starting to sweat. He did what he could by bracing with his feet, but it did not help much. Hanging on for life, he flashed on his navigation math. Was he hoping for an inflection point in the second derivative or the third?

After an eternal twenty-two minutes, deceleration faded, and before long he found himself floating free. He was hesitant to let go of his safe handhold, but he knew he would need to eventually. The push had been long enough to put them on a good trajectory, but surely he still had time before the tugs started pulling them for final docking. He thought about his lost bag. He could live without the food and water, but he would much rather have them. He glanced back down the long space between the containers. It would have fallen down in that direction. He had time to look for at least a few minutes.

He launched himself on a slow drift aft again, glancing between the containers, looking for any possible ledge it might have landed on. A few minutes turned to several minutes with no sign of it. He reached the far end of that level without finding it. Might it have slipped to the next level up or perhaps down? He checked his watch. It had already been over an hour since they down-tached. He did not have time to backtrack, so he moved up to the next level, hoping for luck.

And luck he had, though he did not realize how much at the time. He spotted his bag dangling on a container about a third of the way forward, its strap hooked over a handle. He launched himself towards it, but about halfway there, he heard a deep metallic groan, and his path curved suddenly. He grabbed at the first thing he could, and within seconds, he was dangling again, this time from one of the rails.

It felt different this time, not nearly as smooth. That meant it was the tugs already, their gravitational grapples oscillating in strength as they pulled
Jaguar
into position. His bag was still four containers away, but at this point, that was of little concern. If they were already under pull by the tugs, then he was almost out of time. He could not move safely during the maneuver, and once it was over, they would be on a thruster-only path towards the final dock. That last bit was rarely more than a few minutes.

Then they would have arrived and would start unloading cargo to the docks. That meant opening the cargo bay, and that meant vacuum, and he was still dangling free from a cargo rail, unprotected.

Shit.

He looked around to see if he could possibly climb around. They were only pulling half gravity now. It would be risky, but there had to be enough handholds here and there, right? He frowned. The best handholds he saw were easily three meters apart. If he missed one, that meant six or seven meters of free fall. By then, he would be moving too fast.

No, it was too risky. He would be better off forgetting about the containers and flying out the bay doors in just the survival bag. The station crews would spot him before his oxygen ran out, right?

His weight suddenly disappeared. The tugs had gone. He had a few minutes at best. All the containers around him were marked only with holo-codes and serial numbers. But then he saw one a little different, maybe something in the font.

He jumped for it, sliding smoothly across and forward. Yes, the font was different, and he recognized it. The serial number was in a forward-slanting stencil-friendly font, and he knew where he had seen it. Everything in the Navy’s recruiting office on Tortisia had been labeled in that font. And to top it off, the label had the familiar spear and sail logo of the Navy at all four corners. This was almost certainly a Navy container, and Arvin was the biggest naval port in the sector.

He yanked open the inspection hatch and saw it was partially empty. It was filled mostly with large plasteel girders and bracers, the kind of structural materials you would expect for station construction. This was as good a bet as any. He clamored inside and closed the hatch after him.

He opened up the survival bag and pulled the first release tab. Hollow tubes around the edge of it inflated rapidly to give it shape, so within seconds he was holding onto a ribbed sphere a bit over a meter in diameter. He slipped his legs into it and heard a series of three quick alarms. He was not sure if that was the vacuum warning, but he was not going to keep his head exposed to find out.

He pulled himself entirely inside and sealed himself in, first with double zipper and then the final peel and stick seam. These bags were single use. When the time came, he was going to have to cut his way out. Fortunately, not everything had been in the lost carry bag. He still had his cash and Malcolm’s old utility knife.

The bag started expanding even before he pulled the release on the internal air tank. Pressure outside was dropping. He shook his head and activated the oxygen and scrubber units. He had been lucky indeed.

Elsa Watkins headed aft from the bridge and ran into Anders coming out of his quarters. “I’m heading in to make some arrangements. How’s our boy?”

“Sulking in his cabin,” he replied. “I was going to hit him up for a card game, but he put me off until the morning.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, he’s a moody teenager. Don’t you remember being like that?”

She smiled. She remembered others being like that. As for herself, her teen years had been a little different. “I suppose,” she said at last. “Just keep an eye on him. Call in Maya or Leo if you need help.”

“No problem, Captain. I’ve got this boy figured out.”