Spin the Sky (24 page)

Swerving to avoid a utility shed, her buggy bounces over a small hill and flies into the air. Penelope braces herself for the crash for a long moment before she realizes she’s been in the air far too long. When she does land, it is far too soft. The Ag level is losing gravity.

Looking back, she can see the herd slowing down. They feel it too. They are suddenly too light.

She can see a few heifers leaping and gamboling like spring calves. The rancher in her worries more about injured cows than the utter destruction of a stampede.

The other buggies catch up. “Look, boss, I’m flying,” calls Shani, jumping high, her pigtails floating above her head.

Penelope doesn’t have to do more than shout a few orders to coordinate them. She has drilled the cowgirls well enough on emergency herding that they know how to slow the rushing animals. Of course, they’ve never had a full stampede and never dreamed that they’d have to work the whole herd at once.

After all, they keep the herd separated for this exact reason. There isn’t an orbital in the sky built to withstand two hundred tons of beef moving at the same time.

Penelope never had a good head for physics, but she is pretty sure that if the stampeding herd has stopped the colony from spinning, that’s bad. She can’t really grasp what will happen to the colony, so she thinks about all her best dishes at home, floating around and shattering everywhere. That simply will not do.

Turning a critical eye on the herd, she thinks out loud, “If the herd running this way makes the orbital stop spinning, what happens if we run them the other way?”

Shani puts a finger to her lips. “The colony speeds back up and we get normal gravity?” she guesses like it’s a game.

Penelope shrugs and frowns. “Or we mess things up worse than they already are. Maybe it would be better to split the herd and get them back in their fences?”

One of the other buggies turns too sharply, but instead of spinning out in the dirt, it spins through the air before it crashes into a cow. The confused heifer also spirals off into the air, kicking wildly. The two cowgirls inside the buggy scream their lungs out, but Penelope hears more fear than pain in their voices. The other cows shift and rumble as though the animals know something is not right.

“Boss,” says Shani in a low serious tone. “I think we better try something. If we don’t get grav back soon, we’re going to have a flying stampede on our hands and, as cool as it sounds, I don’t want to actually see that.”

“I take your point,” Penelope replies briskly. Raising her voice, she calls, “Alright, ladies, let’s turn this show around.”

Infinitely slowly, they get the cows turned and start them moving in the opposite direction. At first, it’s more like the cows are swimming through the air, but this actually helps them gain speed.

Penelope allows herself a relieved sigh when she feels the weight return to her body and watches everything gently fall back to the ground.

It worked. Gravity is returning.

Now how will she stop them before they swing to the other extreme and gravity pulls the colony apart?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

C
esar finds Trevor a moment before the crazy kid attempts to boards the intruder ship. “What are you doing?” he roars.

Julia is right behind Trevor. She turns to look at Cesar blankly, her knife in her hand. “Killing the enemy,” she replies. “Why? What did you want to do? Play poker? Have a sandwich? Take a nap?”

Cesar sputters incoherently for a minute. “Wait for me,” is what he finally comes up with.

He passes out the guns he’s collected to Trevor and Julia even though Julia rolls her eyes and puts the gun in her pocket. Then Cesar positions himself firmly in front, grumbling about getting stuck with two insane infants and repeatedly ordering them not to shoot him in the back.

Inside the massive cargo hold, their footsteps echo loudly. They don’t see anyone, but there are plenty of signs that these strangers are preparing to moving a very large number of cows. Cesar looks down as he steps up to stand on a large metal platform. He’s wondering why these pirates think cows need a large metal platform until he realizes that the platform is actually the Ithaca outer wall, dropped onto the cargo hold floor after it was cut. The thieves must have cut the hole and simply laid down the thick metal wall right here.

Cesar grimaces.

They must not have planned to put it back. How could they with a thousand cows standing on it? If they pushed it in instead of letting it fall out and into the hull like this, it could potentially be repaired and they’d have been able to fly away much faster without several extra tons of this metal in their hold. Cesar taps his foot thoughtfully and wonders why some people are such jerks.

It worries him. This is a fairly elaborate and well-funded plan to steal a bunch of cows. Why? Surely anyone with this much money and ship could just fly down to the planet if they want steak so badly?

Julia begins running lightly towards the stairway that heads up to the catwalk above the ship’s hold. There are two doors up there that must lead further into the ship. Trevor scampers after her and Cesar follows, wheezing in exasperation. He resolves to exercise more if he survives the heart attack Trevor is hell-bent on giving him today.

Cesar manages to get to the door just before Julia opens it and puts his hand out to block her.

“What are you doing?” he hisses as quietly as his anger will allow. “You want to die? Take it slow. Check it out before you go barging around an enemy base.”

“There’s no time,” she growls through clenched teeth.

Cesar grits his teeth. He is old enough to hate working with youngsters. Behind Julia, he sees Trevor peering at them. Cesar understands the eager expression on Trevor’s face, excited and reckless. It is the look of someone in the middle of their first experience with real danger, before the full weight of death and mayhem has had time to settle on them. He’s been a fool to leave his son on his own all these years.

How had the kid lived this long? Cesar clears his throat and tries to clear his head too.

“There’s plenty of time if you don’t die first,” Cesar says slowly, since his patience isn’t working too well today. “Now, let’s think a minute. What do we need to do now?”

“Find the bad guys,” Trevor volunteers while Julia glowers and fingers her blade.

Cesar shakes his head. “No, think. What we need to do right now is pry this damn ship off the side of Ithaca without blowing a hole that will kill us all. So we actually don’t want to find any bad guys. Because that would slow us down.”

Julia shrugs.

Trevor frowns as he utters an involuntary “Oh.”

“So how do we do that?” asks Cesar, scanning the hold. Julia and Trevor look around too.

“The bad guys must have had a plan for leaving,” comments Trevor.

“Most likely they planned to just detach their ship and leave this hole, venting the Ag level into space,” observes Julia. Her eyes are still on the two doors, but she obviously hasn’t missed the implications of Ithaca’s wall lying on cargo floor below them.

“Surely they wouldn’t do that,” replies Trevor, walking over to examine the control panel covered in buttons, knobs and what looks like a joystick. “Whatever they used to make the hole can unmake it. Right?”

“Aren’t you cute,” snorts Julia. “Must be nice to grow up somewhere that let you be so naïve.”

Trevor looks outraged. He turns away from the console he is prodding. Cesar sees the boy opening his mouth to protest and quickly cuts him off. “Argue later. Be quiet and solve the problem now. Julia, you got these doors covered, right?”

The girl jerks her head down once.

“Good,” Cesar says curtly. “Don’t neglect the front door.” Here he gestures to hole in the side of Ithaca. “I think we got all the guys out there, but you never know. Trevor, you’re with me. We need to close this hole.”

Trevor points to the huge machinery hanging from the ceiling. “Look. That’s a welding laser. A big one. It must have cut this hole in the side of Ithaca,” he tells the rest of them. “And that over there is a high-pressure crane. After they cut the big hole, that’s probably what they used to lower the huge metal slab to the floor of their cargo ship.”

“See there?” Trevor says, pointing. His natural enthusiasm for ships gets the better of his flight-or-fight response for the moment so Cesar breathes a little easier. “They’d have to have put plenty of force there to keep the orbital’s internal pressure from blowing the slab right through their ship once they pierced the wall.”

“So we can use it to prop the slab back into place over the hole,” replies Cesar.

“Right,” says Trevor with a kind of giddy despair. “Except the panel is locked.” He gestured to the control panel in front of him.

Cesar laughs, “Kid, Spacers are too lazy for good security. Look.”

Bending over, he reaches under the console and yanks out two wires. Twisting them together, he straightens up as the lights on the console flicker on and a fan begins to whir. “It’s the classic case of a huge padlock on a flimsy door. Can you work this thing?”

Trevor reaches out to test the joystick. The crane overhead groans and twitches in response. Looking uncertain, Trevor takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders and steps up to the console.

“Good, because I imagine we are going to attract some bad guy attention pretty soon,” Cesar says, clapping the boy on the shoulder and pulling out his gun.

The crane screeches loudly as Trevor lowers it to the slab. It scrapes against the slab once, sending deafening shudders through the hold.

Trevor looks at Julia and Cesar sheepishly, but both of them are crouched down, covering the two doors, waiting for bad guys to come pouring out. When they don’t respond, Trevor pushes up his sleeves and goes back to work.

Propping the slab up and fitting it back over the hole goes agonizingly slow, but Cesar notes with pride that his son works wonderfully under pressure. Trevor is just positioning the laser to weld the hole shut again when the ship door closest to the console opens.

Cesar doesn’t even wait for the door to fully open. He sees it edge open a crack and he fires off a few rounds. The door slams shut.

Julia giggles, “Oh, you might have let one in for us to play with. All this waiting is giving me a cramp.”

“You are one scary little girl,” Cesar replies. “You’ll get a chance with that knife later. We’ll have to go in there to move this ship.”

Just then, there is a muffled thump and the other door pops open. A man in a flak suit leaps out and starts firing. Cesar flings himself in front of Trevor and returns fire while Julia creeps catlike through the shadows.

Another gun pokes out of the open doorway and starts firing too. Cesar wings the first man so that he stops firing just long enough for Julia to reach him with her knife. Cesar hears a thick gurgling cry and sees Julia dive from the fallen body through the doorway. The second gun stops firing and Julia comes back through the door, slamming it shut behind her.

“There were just the two for now, but think I hear more of them out there,” she announces, wiping blood on her pants.

Trevor stares at her, his hands limp on the console. Cesar watches Trevor. The boy looks like he is about to throw up again.

“Son, you’re driving a laser right now. You might want to pay attention to that,” Cesar says brusquely.

Trevor looks around in a daze for a minute. “I’m not sure I have the right settings,” he mumbles at last, wiping a hand across his neck. “I don’t want to screw it up.”

“So practice on something first,” recommends Cesar. “Like that door.”

“The door?” Trevor asks with a frown.

“Yeah, that one,” Cesar replies pointed at the door with the dead man lying in front of it. “If you melt it shut, then you have the right settings, yeah? And if you don’t, you blow a hole through their hull. Either way, that’s good for our team.”

Trevor’s eyebrows shoot up, but he nods, slaps on some protective goggles, and starts moving the laser.

Cesar calls out, “Julia, get away from the door.” She obliges immediately when she sees the laser swinging her way.

With one quick hot flash, the door melts into slag. The corpse in front of the door is too close and it roasts as well. Cesar touches his face lightly. It feels sunburned.

“God, that smells awful,” complains Julia, looking at the charred dead man in front of the smoldering door. “Like you used an engine block to barbeque a squirrel.”

Cesar wants to ask her why a melted man makes her think of squirrels, but doesn’t think he’ll like the answer.

Trevor wrinkles his nose and eyes the door critically. “Yeah, that’ll work if I adjust the spectrum and crank up the power,” he decides, turning back to the console. The laser swings around and points back at the hole in Ithaca’s outer wall.

Cesar wants to hug the boy. First for calm under pressure. Second for knowing how to work a welding laser at all. He promises himself that he’ll spend the rest of his life thanking Penelope. She’s obviously raised this boy right.

For now, Cesar covers the remaining door, his mind on how they’ll find the flight deck and steer this ship away from Ithaca. He hopes everything inside the colony is going well.

The laser does its work. The hold gets very, very hot.

There is only one pair of welding goggles to protect their eyes and Trevor obviously needs them the most. Cesar and Julia keep their eyes shut, but eventually it gets to hot so they hide on the other side of the remaining door. They hear voices, but no one comes to investigate.

The laser is so loud that Cesar almost misses the telltale low rumbling of engines firing up. Someone is about to move the ship. Cesar’s blood pressure shoots through the roof. He yanks the cargo hold door open and sees the ship’s outer doors closing. The light of the laser sears his eyes even though he squints and avoids looking anywhere near it as he races to Trevor.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he shouts, tugging Trevor’s arm hard enough to get his attention but not so hard that he jostles the laser.

“I’m almost done,” Trevor yells back without turning from his work. “The doors stopped halfway so I have room to finish.”