Spin the Sky (25 page)

Cesar doesn’t look to see how close Trevor is to being finished. The laser is killing his eyes even without looking at it. It feels like another minute in this heat and his whole body will burst into flames, but just now he doesn’t care. He has to get the boy out before the ship takes off and vents this cargo hold to space.

Cesar feels the metal catwalk under his feet jerk and shudder. He knows there was no time for arguing. He grabs Trevor and throws him through the door. Then Caesar flings himself through the door too, knowing there is no time to be pretty about it. With a deafening roar, the seal between the ship and the colony snaps. Julia slams the hold door shut and bolts it as the vacuum of void space snatches at them with its icy fingers.

“Did you finish?” shrieks Julia, jittery with the adrenaline of cheating death.

“Get off me,” is Trevor’s muffled response, but he is talking to Cesar.

Cesar rolls off the boy. Trevor groans and clutches his hip. Fixing Cesar with an outraged stare, Trevor grumbles, “I might not have sealed it. I don’t think I did, you moron. And then you squashed me.”

Cesar yanks the boy off the floor and hugs Trevor before he can stop himself. Then he remembers how angry he is. He gives the boy a good shake and bellows, “I saved your life, you ungrateful brat. You had it almost done. That’ll have to be good enough. The orbital can cope with a small gap. The welding you did will keep the whole thing from blowing. So quit your yapping.”

Trevor pushes Cesar away, eyeing him uncomfortably. “The part I didn’t finish is more than a foot across. You think that will work?”

Julia breaks in to say firmly, “That’s small enough that the electromagnetic envelope will cover it. They’ll be able to seal it pretty quick with the outer wall dronebots now that this pirate ship isn’t in the way.”

Cesar takes a deep breath and thinks about what will happen next. “The bad guys will send someone down to make sure we died when they vented the hold.”

“How many of them do you think are left on this boat?” Trevor wants to know.

“Can’t be too many, but it would still be better if they thought we were dead,” replies Cesar.

Quickly and quietly, they sneak down the hallway until Julia finds an unlocked door. They duck inside a small storage locker with just enough room for the three of them to cram into. Trevor and Julia are silently shoving each other over whose elbow is jammed into whose windpipe when they hear footsteps echoing through a vent above the door. They stop moving and listen hard.

They hear the footsteps rush past their door and a voice call, “Come on, you big baby.” It is the deep voice of an older man comfortable with command.

The voice continues, “Anybody in the hold is now a corpesicle frozen to our bumper, so you can quit your whining. Nobody would waste bullets shooting at you anyway.” The brash voice chuckles like he’s just said something really witty.

Another set of footsteps follows, decidedly less hurried. “I should be monitoring our escape to make sure we remain undetected,” whines the second man. He has a much softer, more nasal voice.

Trevor shifts and Julia pokes him. Cesar knows they are dying to see the men in the hallway, but there is no way to do that without opening the door and exposing themselves. Cesar isn’t willing to do that. Not yet.

“Don’t be silly,” booms the first voice, striding to the cargo hold door. “I’ve done this a million times. After a snatch and grab, everyone is too busy scurrying around like ants to chase after us. It’s stupid, but there you are. Now come and make sure the hold is sealed so I can open the door.”

“Yes, you are the big bad pirate who raids his way across the stars year in and year out,” grumbles the second voice. “I am the nerd who makes the tools that let you do it. How lucky I am to have the brains to open doors for you.”

It is a mild voice with a hint of some sort of Eastern European accent. Whoever it is has a very precise way of speaking, totally unlike the jovial wickedness so evident in the first voice.

They both sound faintly familiar to Cesar, but he can’t think why. He looks at Trevor and Julia, arching an eyebrow, but doesn’t dare make a noise. They just stare back at him blankly. So much for nonverbal communication.

“Don’t be such a whiner, Asner,” commands the first voice. There is the sound of buttons being pushed and the sigh of a sealed door popping open. Evidently, the cargo hold is repressurized enough to open the door.

The first voice continues, “Cheer up, you sourpuss. Tell you what. If you ever manage to solve the lubrication problem and we finish the lasers, I’ll let you take a turn at the controls. You can fry whoever bothers you. Maybe then you’ll lighten up.”

Asner sputters angrily, “Solve the problem? I solved the problem! But you can’t stop being a pirate long enough to just buy the stupid cows, can you? No. You have to go charging around and almost kill everybody on Ithaca and for what? Do you see any cows in this hold?”

“Ah, you just want to get into little Penelope’s pants,” scoffs the first voice. “It’s never going to happen. We should go back and slice open that colony like an orange. It would be so much easier to scoop up the cows when everyone is dead.”

Asner snaps back, “I told you. We need the cattle alive so we can inject them with that serum to make them produce the necessary lubricants. How many times do I have to say it? You just like destroying. Any child can destroy. It takes a man with a mind to create something.”

The bickering goes on, but the three in the closet don’t hear it because the door to the cargo hold door slams shut behind the two men. Julia flings the closet door open and pulls herself out, breathing deeply.

“You two have some seriously bony elbows,” she gasps.

“Asner!” cries Cesar, his eyes on the cargo door. He claps a hand on Trevor’s shoulder and jerks his thumb in the direction of the cargo door. “That guy was at the ranch. He’s some kind of engineer?”

“I know him!” Trevor yelps as he rubs his knee. He flattens himself to the wall’s edge and cautiously looks down the hallway in the opposite direction. “He’s always trying to be nice to me because he’s got a crush on Mom. What a jerk. He could have killed us all.”

“We need to get out of here,” Julia says, straightening up, going on alert.

“The command center has got to be this way,” Cesar decides as he jogs quickly and quietly down the hall, his gun drawn and ready.

They find it quickly. They don’t even have to threaten the pilot. The little man takes one look at their weapons and their grim expressions and holds up his hands.

“I can go sit over there,” he says helpfully, pointing at a bare spot on the floor. “Or I can take this ship anywhere you want to go.”

“You got to appreciate a sensible man,” chuckles Cesar. “Trevor, you cover this guy. Make sure he takes us back to Ithaca. Shoot him if he tries anything funny. Julia, you are on lookout.”

Cesar isn’t too worried, though. The door bolts from the inside so even if there were a hundred men out there, they’d still make it back to Ithaca. He doesn’t relax his guard, but he does allow his mind to turn over other problems.

Addressing no one in particular, Cesar asks, “So, why did they want all the cows? Asner said something about lubricant? They need live cows to make some kind of lubricant?”

The pilot is busy keeping one eye at his flight controls and the other on Trevor’s gun pointed at his head. He shrugs his shoulders without looking away.

“All I do is drive this boat,” the pilot mumbles. “They wanted something big enough to hold two thousand cows so they got this boat and me to drive it. That’s all I know.”

“That’s almost the whole herd,” growls Julia. “Why do they need a whole herd? That’s a lot of lubricant. Who needs that much lubricant?”

The pilot shrugs again, saying nothing. Trevor prods him with the gun but that only makes the little man’s hands shake.

“I can’t think of anything that isn’t really perverted,” comments Trevor.

Cesar snorts.

Julia giggles, “Thanks Trevor. Now I can’t either.”

“Your mom will know,” Cesar says with conviction. “What the real use is and it won’t be, you know, pornographic. We’ll see her soon.”

The churning terror in his guts that started with the first tremor on the orbital begins to ease. He will see Penelope again soon. A man could get used to that.

Cesar idly opens and closes doors in the command room, making sure there aren’t any secret entrances. He always had one in any ship he captained. You never know when you’ll need a back entrance into the control room.

You’d be surprised how many perfectly good pilots will lock themselves out after being at the controls for a good long haul. From what that first bad guy said, this outfit was in the habit of raiding. Pirates are sure to have boltholes and back passages too.

Cesar finds it under a control panel for the air filtration system. If he crawls, he can fit in there, but it wouldn’t be a happy thing. He peers down the shaft, but doesn’t see anyone in it. He stands up to report this find to the other two and feels dizzy.

Cesar has to put a hand out to steady himself. Looking over, he sees Julia slumped against the door. Trevor is blinking as his gun arm keeps slipping down. The pilot’s head bobs as though he can barely keep his eyes open.

Looking up, Cesar sees a faint smoking gas curling out of the air vent in the ceiling. Cesar swears and immediately drops to the ground. They are pumping poison or sleeping gas into the command center so they can get in. He should have thought of that.

“Trevor! Get over here! Now!” Cesar barks as he shimmies into secret passage. The pilot takes advantage of their confusion to race for the door and undo the bolt.

The main door bursts open and he hears gunfire, but it is too tight in the shaft. Cesar can’t turn to find out what is going on. He thinks he hears Trevor behind him so he throws himself down the narrow passage, looking for a place to turn around.

The passage drops him into a small storage room. Cesar immediately spins and looks behind him down the shaft, but Trevor isn’t there. He can see that the door to the passage is shut. There are no signs of anyone following him. Panic claws at his guts again.

Where is Trevor?

Cursing, Cesar dives back into the shaft and quickly crawls up to the command room, his gun drawn. If Trevor is hurt, there will be hell to pay. He doesn’t let himself think about any other possibilities. When he gets to the little door, he hears Asner and the other voice on the other side, arguing again. Cesar pauses to listen.

“We will not kill this boy,” Asner says loudly. “We will not.”

“Why not?” the unknown voice growls. He sounds annoyed. “We can’t just drop him off at home to blab to all his friends and neighbors about us. And he’s cost me a pilot, to say nothing of the rest of this fiasco.”

“You shot the pilot,” replies Asner. “You didn’t look at what you were doing. You just fired off a few rounds into the room. It’s lucky you didn’t break something we need to get us out of here.”

“Well, you shot this girl,” the other man points out. “So don’t play like I’m the only loose cannon here. You get to clean up all this blood and haul her body over to the airlock.”

Asner snaps, “Fine, but you have to clean up the pilot. And you can’t kill the boy. We’ll put him in an escape pod and fire it back towards Ithaca. Now let me get the ship reprogrammed to the proper coordinates before we crash into something.”

Cesar’s vision blurs for a minute. Julia is dead. Poor little Julia, with her knife and her smile, is all gone.

He wonders who she was and if there is anyone to cry for her. No matter how much senseless death he sees out here in the void, it never stops getting to him. Cesar takes a silent slow breath and focuses on the important thing: his son.

Trevor is still alive. He has to stay that way.

Cesar takes stock of the situation. He has the element of surprise. However, squirming out of the cramped compartment under a control panel will put him at a severe disadvantage. Should he burst out now and start shooting before they have another moment to hurt his boy or should he wait for a better opportunity? Cesar has to make the right choice and he has to do it quickly, while Asner and the other man are still fighting.

“Uri, the boy hasn’t seen us. He doesn’t know anything,” says Asner. “We’ll just send him off in an escape pod. It will be easy and they’ll be sure to find him.”

Uri’s name is like a punch in Cesar’s stomach. Cesar listens hard. It doesn’t sound like they know he is on the ship. He hopes that will come in useful.

“Why bother?” grunts Uri as he lifts something heavy, probably the pilot’s body. Cesar tenses, preparing to fling open the door and start shooting.

“If the boy dies, all opportunities to negotiate with the mother will be gone,” replies Asner in that precise way of his. Cesar hears him tapping at the control panel.

“She won’t know he’s dead,” argues Uri. “And once we get the lasers up, we won’t need to worry about who finds out and whether they like us or not. You are always going on about how we need the goodwill of the colonies, but with a huge fuck-off laser that can fry New York right off the planet, we won’t have to care what anybody thinks. That’s the whole point.”

Cesar hears Asner give a long-suffering sigh. “We don’t have it yet, so we have to play nice. Besides, I have a plan,” says Asner. “Perhaps we can salvage something from this disaster and still stay on schedule.”

“You always have a plan,” grumbles Uri, but there is grudging admiration in his voice.

“I will go back and ‘find’ the boy and take him home,” Asner explains. “His mother will be grateful.”

Uri scoffs, “And then she’ll finally sleep with you. Sure. How does that help me?”

“I’ll explain that bad evil men who will stop at nothing are after her herd and, if she wants to keep her family alive, she’ll sell them to you,” Asner replies calmly. “It’s the truth. I know you don’t like the truth very much, but I think in this situation it will work.”

“There’s something in that,” Uri finally admits.

For the next several minutes, Cesar hears only the sounds of men mopping up blood, bickering over the best way to go while typing coordinates into a navigational system, and hauling bodies into the hall.