DERELICT RUN
(Part 8 of 8)
Dalibor and the pilot were waiting. There were six boxes of gold sitting in the dimly lit regolith.
“So this where it’s at,” Mercutio said. “Ship’s come down hard, and she’s bust her lower attitude jets. We can’t push off and fire the drive and get away from this thing without plastering ourselves across the side of the crater.”
“Well,” said Dalibor. “Call home?”
“Radio’s below the crater rim,” Kuŝim said. “They can’t hear us.”
Mercutio squatted and looked at the gold. “Nice. We can die with our own private fortunes.”
“Nice,” Maltego said. “Fike nice.”
“Yah, oh.” Mercutio straightened. “Go back to the transport, I guess. Repressurize. Sit there and die. Stupid Provs. War’s over, pugfikoestros!” he yelled at the ship.
“I’m getting cold,” Kuŝim said.
“Gonna get colder.”
“Should we take any of this?” Maltego kicked it doubtfully.
“Yah, we will. Didn’t have four brothers ripped apart to leave it.”
“It’ll take us an hour to get back to the ship dragging boxes of this stuff,” Dalibor said.
“Got the pilot to help, Armsman.”
“I gotta carry one too?”
“Sure, sister,” the warrant laughed. “You want your share, eh?”
They trudged back to the Calabrono-9. As easy as it was to keep the cases off the suface, it was like pushing a cow the whole way.
The Provisional loot stowed in the cargo, they surveyed the damage again.
“Lookit that,” Dalibor said. “Bent that ’un—snapped that ’un off. That ’un too.”
They circled Cal-9. Its nose rested on loose boulders, and it tilted gently to the left. The warrant paced. “Pilot, how close to the top of the crater would we hit?”
“I don’t think we’d get that far,” she said, grim. “Her underside would catch the surface and tumble us.”
He walked to the command capsule end to study the regolith chunks. “Crowbar,” he said, “how much kinequant do you have?”
Maltego opened his thigh pouch and removed the tube of explosive caps. “Sixteen, seventeen,” he said, turning it under his helmet lamp. “Seventeen.”
“What if we put that right under the nose of the transport and fired it off, and pilot turned on the drive at the same time?”
She laughed. “Warrant, I gotta sit in the command capsule, you know. You’ll blow a hole in it, and me!”
“She’s got a point,” the demo man said. “It would prob’ly lift the transport enough degrees to clear the crater wall at acceleration... but we might not get there with a floor up front, or her with feet.”
“Yah, I got a point!”
“Use something as a shield,” Dalibor suggested. “Put the kinequant under it. If it holds together...”
“What do you think, Kuŝim?”
The pilot looked under the transport. “Dunno, Warrant. Who does this kinda thing?”
“Militia,” Mercutio said. “We get merdo done.”
“We could get something out of the ship,” Maltego said.
“Take a bit to find a good piece. It’s torn to ribbons in there.” Dalibor turned to look that way. “What if there isn’t a good piece or we can’t get it out? We don’t have anything to cut hull with.”
“Wait, wait.” Mercutio pointed across the crater. “Oi, look, it’s the door you blew off the Provs’ derelict, eh?”
It gleamed dim and remote in starlight.
“It should be tough enough to hang together in the blast!’ Maltego clapped his hands together.
“Ishara, we’re all gonna die,” Ratma Kuŝim said.
“Pilot, we get somewhere warm again, you’ll eat those words,” Mercutio said, slapping his armored hand on her shoulder. She caught herself on her ship. “You two, clear out some rubble under there so we can wedge the hatch and the kinequant under this bucket. Pilot, come help me drag the hatch.”
The stars were white and red and yellow and orange and blue. A kilometer, even over rough terrain, passed fast under their bouncing heels as they kicked pieces of the slate colored world ahead of them, tumbling and flying in slow, gentle curves.
The hatch had fallen on a broad slope of small rubble and medium-sized black stones, the edges of the plating bent by the demo explosives. As they reached it, they could see the distant, gauzy daylight of cold cloudy CO2 and N2 screening the hostile gleaming crescent of Aphrodite, grey and brown, just above the moon’s horizon.
The hatch “weighed” a few kilos, but was difficult to lift and manhandle; it massed as much or more than Mercutio and Kuŝim together. The trip back to the transport was sluggish, moving the thing between them. No bouncing holding that! It floated, but resisted motion like an ox.
“Coming, Warrant?” Dalibor called.
“Yah, you ready?”
“Ready as we can be.”
They were: the gap was shoveled out. They wedged the oblong hatch under the craft’s snub nose, exterior oriented down. Maltego packed his kinequant caps tightly wrapped in discharger film as far under the hull-side as possible, crammed into regolith.
“That gonna work, Crowbar?” the warrant said.
Maltego shone his torch in the crevice. “We’ll lose some of the blast this way,” he said. “But I think more than half will be levering the ship. Should be enough?”
“You sound certain. Whatcha think, pilot?”
“I think I’ve never had someone try to blow up my ship while I’m launching.”
“First time for everything.—Let’s board.”
Maltego hesitated, half in. “What can we do for the team, estro?”
“They’re buried with a few hundred millions in gold,” Mercutio said. “You gonna be able to say the same?”
“Nah, estro. Merdo. Got my box of sou-ve-nirs loaded,” he added.
“Rich man, if you get to keep it.”
“Yah, estro,” Dalibor said. “What’s the end of this mission?”
The pilot closed her hatch, and Mercutio stared at it as she threw the bolts into the bulkhead. He’d not spared a minute to think. It was a world away.
“Ain’t no end,” he said, “until we’re launched and clear of the moon.”
“You wanna sit in the other chair?” the woman asked, grabbing his arm as he made to take a seat by Dalibor.
“All right,” he said. “You want me to do something?”
“Be big and strong for me.”
“Eh?”
“That means, catch shrapnel for me if the blast breaks my floor.”
“Romantic,” he said.
They strapped in. The black line of the crater wall lay ahead of them, jaggedly blocking the starfield, too far above their line of sight. Kuŝim leaned forward. Her profile in her faceplate was strained.
“You good?” he asked.
“Nah,” she said, honest. “You?”
“I’ve been in bad fixes before.”
“Bad as this?”
“Bad enough.”
“Let me spin my baby up.” She worked the control panel and the almost imperceptible vibrations from the tokamak crept into their chilly suits and settled in their bones. “All right, honey,” she said, “we’re gonna knock your sandals off.”
“You talking to me?”
“Talking to Cal-9,” she said. “Ape! This is gonna be a tight maneuver. Your man blows the charge, and I gotta fire engines. And then I gotta do what I can do to get us over the crater rim.”
“What can you do?”
“Pray, mostly.” She checked systems, poised the throttle. “How’s he gonna do this?”
“Count three?” Maltego offered.
“On three?” she said.
“On three, Warrant?”
“On three,” he said.
“Who counts?” she asked.
“I count. Ready?”
“Yah,” she said.
“Yah,” Maltego said.
“Right. Everybody strapped? Yah? Good.”
He looked at the pilot. Her fingers were ready. He took a breath. “Here we go. One… two… three.”
When he was a boy, Mercutio had been working on his uncle’s farm. He’d turned his back on a mule that Uncle Joĉjo had told him never to turn his back on.
The blow knocked him five furrows, face down in the wet spring loam. The roaring in his ears, and the stars …
This was like that, a blow under his feet, but it didn’t stop; it kept lifting. It threw him back in his seat. A pummeling noise even in vacuum silence, driven through their bodies. The transport bucked, the stars swung—
What if she doesn’t—
She did.
She pushed in on the throttle. The blow hit his chest now as the gs piled on. Cold shock. He slammed hard, seeing stars within and without now. Counting. One … two … three …
We gonna clear it? Five … six … seven …
We’d a hit something already—
The cabin windows were full of stars.
Eight … nine … ten … eleven …
A gentle rotation in the starfield.
Kuŝim pulled back the throttle. The roar diminished.
“We clear?” he said.
She laughed and choked. “Yah. We’re clear. Ten seconds at three and a half g from this ice ball? Easy. Trick’s not to fly into it.” She laughed again.
Maltego whooped.
The stars rotated around the windows.
“Crappy control without a quarter of my attitude thrusters,” she said. “I’ll try to dampen that...”
The transport vibrated.
“Now what?”
“We can try to pressurize and see if we’ve split some seams,” she said. “I hope we can. I need some heat, and this suit air ain’t gonna last forever.”
“Then?”
“Then, you tell me. I’m just the pilot, Mist’ Warrant Mercutio,” she said. “But I’d point out that we’re sitting here with an admiral’s ransom in gold. Not to say anything. But my maneuverability is crap, and officially, no one knows where we are.”
“You aren’t talking about stealing a few hundred thousand drachms of Fleet transport, are you?”
“I’m not talking anything at all,” she said. “But you’ve got four dead men behind you and nothing to show for it if I get her limping into Aphrodite Station in a couple days.”
He looked thoughtfully at her. “What, a nice girl like you knows someplace to go?”
“Outsystem,” she said. “There’s places to go.”
“They like gold out there?”
“Sure they do.”
“Oi, Dalibor, Maltego, hear that?”
“Yah.”
“Yah. You make the call, estro,” Dalibor said. “But I don’t like our chances stationside.”
“You, Kuŝim?”
“I’ve ruined a transport,” she said. “What do you think they’ll do to me?”
The warrant sat back. The stars rotated more slowly now. Her hands worked the thrusters.
Shiver, shiver, shiver. Shiver. Shiver.
“You know places out there.”
“Yah, I know people.”
“Maybe... maybe we can make a deal,” Mercutio said thoughtfully.