Spin the Sky (40 page)

Penelope flies the skiff in circles around the ceiling as they lob things at her from below. She is sure each
thunk
against the hull will be the last. She uses the claws to pry a pipe from the wall and fling it at Mach.

Steam shoots out of the broken end of the pipe as Uri beats a hasty retreat out a door. Penelope scowls at his disappearing backside, wishing she could take one more shot at him. Then the walls shake and Penelope sees stars.

Literally.

The inner doors rip open with a searing explosion that burns against the glittering backdrop of stars. Penelope watches as everyone and everything left in the cargo bay gets sucked into the void. Something has blown open the doors. The skiff banks hard at the sudden pressure change, grazing against the ship next to it.

The large blue ship blocking the door goes zooming out. There is a flash. Penelope sees the back end of it go shooting off at an angle that can only mean ruin for the big ship. Two other ships go out afterwards, but Penelope doesn’t see what happens to them, other than flashes of light. Everyone else is either sitting tight in their ships or they are already dead by decompression.

Penelope watches the debris drift around for a long minute before she realizes that she can get out of the cargo bay now. Before she tries it, Penelope decides this is a good time to recheck the seals on her hazmat suit, just in case. Seeing all those decompressed corpses makes her want at least another layer of protection, however flimsy, between her and the vacuum.

As Penelope yanks the suit on, she sees a small black ship slowly nose its way into docking bay. It is bristling with missile launchers. It looks tiny but lethal, a wolf sneaking into a barn.

Penelope slowly eases the skiff into a corner of the bay, hoping to go unnoticed. The strange shiny ship sets down. The missile launchers swivel every which way, but mostly point at the doors Mach disappeared down just moments before. Penelope decides this is probably the ship attacking the Moon base, but she can’t afford to be wrong, can she?

Penelope decides to risk it. Turning on the short wave, she calls, “Who are you?”

She listens to static for a long moment before the answer comes.

“Penelope?”

Jesus. It almost sounds like…

“Ulixes?”

This time she only has to wait a few seconds before she hears a heavy sigh through the crackling static.

“You could call me that.”

“Uh.” It isn’t her most eloquent moment.

“Where are you?” he wants to know.

She waggles one of the skiff’s claws back and forth by way of a reply and hears an amused chuckle over the comm. “What are you doing here?” she asks.

“Looking for you.”

It is monumentally preposterous that he should be here, but he is here so…

“Can you give me a lift?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

Penelope sets the skiff down quickly on the floor of the destroyed docking bay. She double-checks the seals on her hazmat suit and then lopes the short distance to his gleaming little ship as fast as her grav boots will let her. It is a much longer, more harrowing experience than it should be. Sliding pieces of the bay almost hit her as she dodges floating debris. About halfway there, she trips over a corpse and slides along the floor unsteadily as she untangles the dead body that has wrapped itself around her legs. Getting up, Penelope brushes little red crystals of what she is fairly sure is frozen blood off her facemask.

Penelope never thought she could fall in love with the sound of an airlock hissing open, but she does. Sure enough, Ulixes is standing there waiting for her with a mug of something hot. She is still surprised.

As she staggers into the vehicle, Penelope notes that the man shaved off his thick white beard at some point since she saw him last. He looks about two decades younger. Really, he doesn’t look much older than she is. In fact, the man looks rather attractive, but perhaps that is because he just rescued her in a most heroic fashion. Penelope catches herself smoothing her hair as she stares at him.

“It really is you,” she says, taking the steaming cup he is holding out to her.

He grins. “In the flesh.”

It hits her all at once, that grin. It is the same cocky devil grin from a million years ago, from a cute Spacer stranger at a party when she was a girl. The same smile that shone through the dark night the first time she made love to her husband. The same grin on the face of Trevor’s father the very first time he saw the boy. This is Cesar. This is her husband standing in front of her.

Penelope slaps him so hard he almost falls over. To be fair, the look of shock on his face says he wasn’t expecting it.

“What the hell?” he sputters, rubbing his face and scrambling back. He throws up his arm to protect his face, so Penelope settles for punching his stomach as hard as she can.

“Where the hell have you been?” she shrieks. She winces at the shrewish tone in her voice, but can’t help that right now.

Cesar is no fool. He takes refuge behind his chair. “Jesus!” he cries while dodging kicks. “It took me a while to get through that laser field, alright? You know those maniacs have automated lasers mounted to moon buggies out there? That’s not easy, what I just did.”

Penelope feels hot tears sting her cheeks. Gulping, she remembers they are still in the enemy base. She cries, “Get us the hell out of here!”

Cesar is more than willing to comply. The
Surprise
spins before it shoots out of the mangled docking bay door. Cesar sets a course that will get them as far away from the Moon base as fast as possible. As the ship pulls up and away from the Moon, Penelope collapses onto the floor behind him and catches her breath as gravity falls away from her.

When she sees the ship’s direction, Penelope sits up to put a quick hand on his shoulder. “We can’t leave yet,” she says urgently.

Cesar eyes her quizzically. “Of course we can. I’m doing it right now.”

Penelope shakes her head. “No, listen. Asner built Mach some kind of focuser thing for the lasers. It sort of bundles all the little lasers together and makes one superlaser that can destroy Earth cities or entire orbitals.”

Cesar raises a skeptical eyebrow. “A laser bundler?”

“Physics isn’t my thing,” she yells. Waving her hands for emphasis, she says, “It’s a huge colony-destroying laser he built out here. We need to break it before they get it running.”

He looks slightly less skeptical so Penelope stops yelling. She says, “Asner was telling me all about it. They need the herd to make this huge laser Moon base. Something about a special lubricant you can only make out of cow fat.”

The ship’s comm starts beeping about an unidentified object just as a huge dish looms into view. Penelope points at it triumphantly. Cesar’s jaw drops as he taps through the scans of this vast piece of mostly-finished construction. The he whistles low and turns back to Penelope.

“Those guys really turned the Moon into a Death Star,” he says to her, his voice full of awe.

Penelope frowns. Cesar sounds more like a teenager ogling his first laser rifle than a man about to seriously destroy a dangerous weapon.

“I noticed that on my way in,” he muttered. “How come nobody else noticed it? It’s pretty hard to miss.”

“Asner said they were getting ready to power it up during the lunar eclipse tomorrow night so maybe it was hidden and they only uncovered it today. Who cares? Shoot some of your missiles at it and let’s go already,” Penelope commands.

Cesar rubs his chin thoughtfully. It’s still red from that slap earlier.

“I don’t know that we need to do that,” he says, looking at the huge dish. “I demolished a whole lot of those laser moon buggies. I doubt it will work now anyway.”

Penelope folds her arms and cocks a hip. “Yeah, and when they get it fixed up, who will be the first people they aim it at? They know where I live.”

“Good point,” replies Cesar. “The thing is, that dish is kind of big and this ship is pretty small. Destroying it won’t be easy.”

“I have confidence in your ability to figure it out.”

Cesar stares at the huge dish. “But if they need the herd to finish it, then maybe we don’t really need to worry,” he mutters absently, tapping at his comm. Half of his mind has wandered out of the conversation.

Penelope explains, “Asner said that they have a gang of Seven Skies men in Ithaca, hiding in the Nullball tournament crowd, even in their team. Mach gave them orders to take the herd by force and they have enough ships that they could do it. They are raiding Ithaca right now. Best not to take any chances.”

Cesar swears a violent, filthy curse and turns to stare at her with disbelief. “There is a gang of murderous thieves attacking Ithaca right now? Trevor’s back there! He got off this ship about an hour after they took you!”

Penelope grabs his arm frantically. “We’ve got to go back. Now! Screw the dish.”

Cesar turns back to the ships comm, but then his hand stops over the screen. “No. First, we need to blow this focuser up,” he says grimly.

Penelope wants to argue, but the part of her brain that isn’t totally filled with terror says he might be right. She tries to apply logic to the situation, but her thoughts are too jumbled and a small sensible voice in her head just points out that arguing will only take up more time. She settles for screaming obscenities as she straddles the only other chair in the ship’s command room and starts firing the small defensive laser cannons at the dish. The effect is much the same as one would get shooting a skyscraper with a slingshot. She doesn’t do any major damage to the evil thing, but it makes her feel like she is doing something.

Cesar taps away at the comm quietly. Over her muttered curses, he warns her, “You better hold on, this could get rocky.”

Penelope stops blasting the dish long enough to strap herself in. Cesar turns once to make sure she is secured before dropping into his seat and strapping himself in as well. He never stops working away at the comm.

The ship zooms up and away from the focuser. Then it banks hard, pulling them deep into the high-backed seat cushions as the ship turns sharply. Then the ship shoots off, aiming directly back towards the floating dish so fast that the ship whines and shudders, protesting the speed. Penelope opens her mouth to ask what the hell Cesar thinks he’s doing when the ship suddenly spins so fast her jaw would have cracked if her mouth had been open.

The thrusters roar behind her. She can feel the heat building up inside the cabin. She starts worrying they will burn up, but then Penelope suddenly understands what is going on. Cesar maneuvered so that their ship will fly right along the curve of the dish, across the widest part. Then, just before they get close enough to touch it, he quickly turns them so that the biggest weapon on this little ship, the thruster rockets, scorches the dish as they go skipping along it like a stone across water. A flaming destructive stone.

There is a nasty crunching noise. They are too close to the dish. Penelope is shoved deep into her seat cushions by the angry arms of gravity as the ship tumbles out of control.

Well, if she has to die this is a very cool way to go.

They move quickly, thanks to Cesar’s incredible control of his ship. Finally they slow down, released from the wild ride. As soon as she can lean forward easily, Penelope throws up all over the floor in front of her.

Cesar chuckles.

Penelope’s first impulse is to make a rude gesture at him for laughing at her, but then endorphins flood her brain. Joy screams from every nerve fiber in her body. Penelope starts giggling hysterically.

“We lived!” shouts Cesar, pumping his fist in the air.

Cesar passes her a rag. He turns back to the controls and scans the damage while Penelope cleans herself and the floor up.

“Oh, thanks be to the powers of physics,” Cesar breathes. He gestures with relief at the comm screen. “I thought we might have to do that again.”

“It’s finished? Definitely wiped out?”

Cesar gets up and walks around the cabin while Penelope sits in his chair, using his comm to check the scans herself. He was right. Penelope can see that a large chunk of the dish broke off and is now floating gently away. The rest of the dish crumbles as the scorch marks slowly spread. She starts to tell him he is brilliant but she sees that cocky devil grin on his face again.

Just as Penelope is searching for an appropriately snarky comment to make, something big crashes into the ship and they are both thrown to the floor. Penelope’s head smacks against the chair hard while Cesar crashes against her knees painfully. She wonders how much more head trauma she can take in one day before turning into a drooling moron. She can feel the little ship do a herky-jerky dance that can’t be good.

Cesar scrambles back to his seat, glued to the comm.

“We’ve been hit,” he tells her unnecessarily.

“By what?” asks Penelope, clutching her head. She has disjointed thoughts about a loose piece of the dish hitting them.

“A missile,” says Cesar grimly.

“A missile?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it bad?”

There is a long pause. Penelope’s brains aren’t so scrambled that she misses Cesar’s quiet cursing.

“Not too bad,” he says finally. “Not yet anyway.”

His fingers fly over the comm as the ship goes careening off, making sudden twists and rapid turns that push and pull Penelope across the tiny room to crash into just about everything. Finally, there is a brief pause. She quickly, but carefully climbs back into her chair and straps herself back in.

“The ship that hit us is sending a hail,” Cesar tells her. “It’s probably Mach. You want to listen?”

“Is he going to hit us again?”

She can only see a sliver of Cesar’s face from where she is. The protective seat cushions hide the rest of him. He looks thoughtful.

“No,” he says slowly. “Not right now, anyway. I have us hidden behind the focuser wreckage. He’d have to start taking shots at this thing and even then, probably won’t get us. There are a few of those automated lasers on the Moon’s surface firing this way, but they won’t be strong enough to burn through this big hunk of junk to get to us. If he sits there and shoots rockets at us, eventually he’ll get us, but I’m hoping he isn’t that angry.”