The Sheriff of Yrnameer (12 page)

This was absolutely not the correct panel.

It was, of course, Joshua who found the right one.

Cole had emerged from the crawl space with torn clothing and
bruises on his elbows and knees. Nora was waiting anxiously. “Well?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“It’s not there,” he said. “Nothing matches up with the diagrams. I can’t do any rewiring.”

He used his forearm to wipe the sweat off his face and sat heavily on the carpeted floor, his back against the blond HardWud paneling of the corridor. Nearby was the open doorway to one of the eight cabins. He could hear children snoring in there. Cole wished he were asleep. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

“How can it not be there?” asked Nora.

He found himself pondering the metaphysical ramifications of the question. How could it not
be
there? How could it
not
be there?
How
could it not be there? How could
it
—

“Cole!”

Her voice jolted him back awake. “Wha?”

“The thing. How can it not be there?”

“Dunno. It’s not.”

“Excuse me, ma’am.” Joshua was leaning against the door frame of the nearest cabin.

“Not now, Joshua,” said Nora. “Cole, what are we going to—Joshua, why aren’t you in bed?”

“I was just taking care of some things.”

“Go to bed.”

“Yes ma’am.” He didn’t move. Nora turned back to Cole.

“Cole, is there some other place—”

“Ma’am?”

“Joshua!” she said. “Cole, is there—”

“Could it be this panel right there?” asked Joshua.

They both turned to him. He double-tapped on one of the framed prints and it slid to the side, revealing a small control panel and keyboard. Nora looked at Cole.

“Not a chance,” said Cole.

It was.

Joshua sat patiently nearby on the floor, watching Cole work, silently handing him tools when Cole stuck his hand out. The fact that Joshua had now shown him up twice in front of Nora didn’t
exactly endear him to Cole. Worse, he was so tirelessly polite and helpful.

A grotesque tangle of wires and chipboards was spilled out of the access panel, dangling down the wall and onto the floor. Other than one short break, Cole had worked through the artificial night, methodically identifying the different control pathways and resplicing them. Philip and Bacchi had long since gone to sleep. Nora, however, hovered over them, arms crossed, following every move. She seemed like the type who would place well in an endurance-hovering competition.

“Where’d you learn to do all this?” she asked. When he opened his mouth to answer, she quickly added, “Don’t say prison.”

He shut his mouth.

“I’m going to go check on the kids,” Nora said, and went off to hover elsewhere.

Cole used a Bingham catalyst soldering iron to alter the trace patterns on one of the boards. He didn’t learn
that
trick in prison. Actually, though, now that he thought of it, it
was
one of the techniques that put him there in the first place.

Joshua was watching, studying every move.

“Space marines,” said Cole. “That’s where I learned it all.” He was focused on his work, but he could almost hear Joshua’s eyes widening.

“You were in the space marines?” he asked.

“Infantry, Whiskey Corps, Third Division,” said Cole.

“Wow,” said Joshua.

Cole regaled him with several exciting tales of manly violence and adventure. Joshua listened intently, barely blinking, mesmerized, the tools forgotten in his slack fingers. The tales were all true, every single one of them; Cole just didn’t feel the need to muddy the narrative by explaining that he was less the
protagonist
in the stories and more someone who had heard them from a third party. Why complicate things?

Nora returned to her hovering orbit just as Cole was finishing a particularly rousing description of a strafing mission. He felt, rather than saw, her arrival, sensing the powerful waves of disapproval emanating from her. Soon, he knew, a large bucket of cold water would be poured over the happy embers of story hour.

“We teach the children to practice nonviolence,” said Nora when he finished.
There
it was.

“Maybe that’s why you’re such a terrible shot,” said Cole, shooting a conspiratorial grin at Joshua. Joshua grinned back, then instantly darted a nervous glance at Nora. Cole realized he himself was doing the same and cursed inwardly. How did she do that?

“Joshua,” she said, “go to bed.”

Joshua went to bed.

After he left, Nora turned back to Cole. “Don’t,” she said, and walked off.

Birds were chirping a happy welcome to the morning when Cole finally finished. The illumination in the ship was slowly brightening, the color palette a delicate mix of golds and pinks, the tones of a perfect sunrise. A perfect sunrise somewhat marred by a glitch in the audio emulator, causing the birdsong to periodically slow and deepen to a monstrous moan, like an Eagphin sow in the midst of a breech birth.

Cole wasn’t tired anymore. He was beyond fatigue and hunger. He knew from experience that he could go like this for days. Then he’d crash hard.

He found Nora and Philip in the dining room, feeding the kids. “We’re ready,” he said.

Cole climbed into the cockpit of the escape craft and settled into one of the two seats, the bubble canopy around him affording a view of a wide swath of stars. A false view, really, altered and stabilized to compensate for the endless rotation of the spaceship.

He examined the control board, then noticed a small sliding panel. Opening it he was greeted by the sight of a flask of Rakkor whiskey, probably worth as much as his old Peerson 28 was.
Here’s to you, Teg
.

He had the whiskey to his lips when Nora emerged from the hatch in the floor. He guiltily lowered the flask. She wordlessly climbed into the seat next to him and took the whiskey from his hand. She sniffed it, glanced at him, then took a tiny sip. Then she
took a much bigger sip. Wiping her mouth, she handed the flask back to him. It was noticeably lighter.

Remember why you don’t like her, thought Cole.

“You sleep?” she said.

He shook his head. “You?”

“No,” she said. “Okay, let’s do it.”

“Kids are strapped in?”

“Thought you didn’t care about the kids.”

“I care about my new spaceship. I don’t want them bouncing around if things get rough, getting splatter marks on the nice interior.”

“Oh? Do you think the task will be beyond your capabilities?” she asked innocently.

That’s
why you don’t like her.

“Just don’t touch anything,” he said, then flicked the intercom switch.

“Bacchi? You read me? Do you read me, over.”

Bacchi’s voice came back. “Do I
read
you? Yes, Captain Cole, copy that, sir, I
read
you loud and clear. I
hear
you, too. Oh, uh,
over
.”

Nora was staring out into space, her expression blank, but Cole was sure she’d been sniggering.

“All right, Bacchi, see what happens if you cross the J-90 with the X-24.”

“Yes sir, Captain sir, copy that.”

“Shut up, Bacchi.”

“Big 10-4 on that, Captain. Reading you loud and clear. We are go for the shut-up.”

“Bacchi …”

“All right, hold on.”

Bacchi, sitting in the corridor by the access panel, typed a few commands on a keyboard connected to the tangled nest of wires and cables.

There was a powerful jolt. The Benedict suddenly lurched backward. Orphanic squeals filled the ship.

“Whoa! Bacchi, whatever you just did, undo it!”

Bacchi undid. The backward acceleration stopped.

Nora was eyeing Cole skeptically. “It’s going to take some experimentation,” he said. “Bacchi, try F-5 to R-33.”

There was a pause, and then another jolt. The stars began streaming upward on the canopy. Cole’s inner ear informed him that something very odd was happening, a suspicion confirmed by the shrieks from the orphans coming over the intercom.

“What’s going on?” said Nora.

Cole looked at the instrumentation panel. The Benedict was pitchpoling—tumbling slowly end over end.

“Bacchi!
F
-5!
F as
in
farg
!”

“Oops,” said Bacchi. “Hold on.”

There was a loud
boom
, vibrating the ship.

“Bacchi! That was the cannon!”

“Sorry!”

A second boom, even louder, and the Benedict hummed like a giant string that had been plucked.

“Bacchi, stop it!”

“I didn’t do anything,” protested Bacchi. “I didn’t even—”

The next boom was so loud Cole felt it in his chest, and the ship jerked violently to one side, a jarring, sickening motion. Cole heard Nora’s involuntary gasp, the flask hitting the floor, and then the screaming children, and then everything was blotted out by the harsh whooping of the alarm.

“Warning,” said the flight computer in its flat, emotionless voice, “you are under attack.”

A three-dimensional image of a ship popped up on the holo-display. A ship that looked like a lobster.

“Oh, farg,” said Cole.

The radio came to life. “Hi ho! Kenneth, here!”

“Bacchi!” shouted Cole. “J-12 to B-340!”

He grabbed the control yoke with one hand and began jabbing buttons with the other. The ship jumped as if it had been stung, rocketing off in a completely random direction. Cole yanked on the yoke and the ship changed course at what felt like an acute angle, completely unrelated to where Cole was steering. Nora grabbed on to the armrest of her seat, her knuckles bloodless, her jaw clenched.

“Bacchi! Undo! Control Z!”

Cole pulled the yoke back and the ship made a corkscrewing turn somewhere down and to the left, then flipped and began a tight spiral. Then they were rising straight up, if
up
had any meaning, and then the Benedict reversed course with a savage jerk and went tumbling
on an odd axis, the G forces pushing and pulling and slamming them about.

Cole had one hand on the yoke, the other scrabbling over the control panel, trying to comprehend what, if any, correlation there was between his commands and the ship’s behavior. Music blared and was cut off. Frigid air jetted from an air-con vent, blasting him in the face. His eyes watered, the pod reeking of expensive whiskey.

They snapped into another turn and a cannon round zipped past the canopy like a meteor, missing it by a few meters at best.

“Whee!” said Kenneth. “I have to say, you’re making this a lot of fun!”

“Kenneth!” said Cole. “Listen to me! There are orphans on this ship!”

“Orphans?” said Kenneth. “Yum!”

The Benedict decided to make another viciously abrupt course change, following a tangent that Cole was sure insulted several laws of physics. The stars smeared on the canopy and Cole’s vision narrowed to a small tube, and then suddenly everything resolved into Kenneth’s ship racing directly toward them on a collision course.

Cole, Nora, and Kenneth said
“Whoa
!” simultaneously.

Cole and Nora clamped their eyes shut.

Kenneth covered his with several tentacles.

The flight computer on the Benedict dutifully noted the incident in the file designated for recording unsafe flying conditions—a file that had grown significantly since they had set out from InVestCo 3. According to the report, the two ships passed at a combined speed of 7,423 kilometers per hour, coming within 3.579 centimeters of each other. The near collision happened so quickly that the two spacecraft were actually several kilometers apart again before the first
whoa
was uttered.

Cole mentally willed himself to start breathing again, a jagged, shuddering inhale. Next to him, he heard Nora do the same. He checked the instrument panel. At least they were following a straight-line course now, directly away from Kenneth’s ship. He decided not to touch anything.

“What are you going to do?” asked Nora.

“The bendbox is charged, but we don’t have bend control yet. Let’s see if we can outrun him,” said Cole.

“Warning,” said the Benedict flight computer. “Missile locked on.”

Nora looked at him. “Can we outrun that?”

“Maybe.”

“Impact in seventy-three seconds,” said the computer.

“Maybe?” said Nora.

“No,” said Cole.

“What do we do?”

“We have to bend. We have to get bend control. Bacchi? Bacchi!”

There was no response over the intercom.

“Bacchi!” Cole repeated.

“Missile impact in sixty-five seconds,” said the computer.

Nora undid her safety straps. “I’m going.”

“Wait!” said Cole, but she was already through the hatch and climbing down the ladder to the corridor. “She’ll never figure it out! That idiot!” he fumed. “Why are the pretty ones always so stupid! How could you be attracted to her? How?”

Nora raced down the hall, the emergency lights flashing. “So she’s got a great body! Big deal!” Cole was saying, his voice being broadcast over the intercom throughout the ship. “So what if her breasts are tremendous! Who cares about her a—”