The City Who Fought Part 7

"Why didn't they program mobility?" "Who?" Channa asked distractedly. "Where?" "In me! In this station! I can't duck! I've no weaponry to blast it out of my way. I can't even fend off such ma.s.s. All I can do is watch. What lasers I've got can just about handle a decent-sized meteor. The best I can do is warm up his hull a little, and I have to wait till he's up my a.s.s to do it! d.a.m.n! This station is like a paraplegic s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p!"

"Whoa! Did you see that?" Channa shouted. The ma.s.s had seemed to deliberately veer aside from an ordinary asteroid miner vessel, something the miner pilot himself probably couldn't have done. "Watch," she said, "there! Did you see? It jigged just a bit to miss that incoming ferry traffic It is being guided."

"But by what?" Simeon asked. He ran calculations on the ballistics of those maneuvers. The deviations were absolutely minimal for the effect. "It's traveling so fast now, no human pilot could stop it and stay conscious. TTiey don't answer any radio messages. TTiey're ignoring the.d.a.m.n warning flares. s.h.i.+t, maybe they think we're welcoming them. Ah, goodF "But they are decelerating again, Simeon," Channa said, glancing up from her own screens to the main viewer before she went back to other ch.o.r.es which she had a.s.sumed.

"Yeah, marginally longer this time. No, cutting out - no, decelerating again. Rate of energy-release ... G.o.d, but they're still not dumping enough velocity! And still on a collision course!" His voice went slightly wild. "They mustwant to destroy me!"

"I don't see any weapons," Channa said, trying to finish her current task in time.

"Who can tell in that jumble of struts and boxes and c.r.a.p! Besides, that thing itself is a weapon." Simeon had just one card to play and at exactly the right moment for maximum effect. "You're not even suited up, partner. At least take shelter in my shaft core, Channa."

She shook her head, "Not till I'm dirough evacuating the alien quadrant 'Sides, those Letheans scare easily enough as it is without me appearing in full gear."

She had managed at last to get through to the leader of the Lethe contingent. A people so formal that emergencies required a ceremony, mercifully brief, for deferring the usual endless courtesies in favor of survival. Had Channa not performed the ceremony and explained the situation to them, they would have died rather than commit such a breach of manners as a.s.suming that something was actually wrong. She broke the connection at last and exclaimed, 'JoatT "She has a suit," Simeon said, "first thing I gave her. She's probably in it right now. Why aren't you?"

She dashed for the cabinet holding her s.p.a.ce suit and began to struggle into it "Come to me, Channa," he said, in a wildly facetious tone, "come, touch the hard, male core of my innermost being."

"Ee-yuck, is that the sort of romance you've been studying? Try another mode."

"When I've world enough and time, lovely one, but have a look at what I've managed to arrange as stop signs."

Seemingly from out of nowhere, three communications satellites came diving towards the incoming s.h.i.+p, two striking it head on and one slightly astern. Whole sections of die scaffolding and outer skin of the derelict sublimed in white flashes that expanded into circles with zero-g perfection. The alien s.h.i.+p was not slowed - there was too much kinetic energy in that ma.s.s - but its vector altered slightly.

"Comsats aren't supposed to be able to move like that!" Channa exclaimed tightly. Simeon's sensors could hear the pounding of her heart, a.n.a.lyze the ketones her sweat-damp skin was emitting. Fear under hard control. The lady has guts, he thought.

"A little something I cooked up on my own," he said smugly.

"Cooked in the wrong sort of pot, you crazy loon. Without those satellites, we'll be out of communication with half the universe for weeks."

"Channa, if I hadn't done that we'd be out of communication with the all of the universe permanently. Besides, my satellite tactic worked!"

Channa looked up at the main monitor and saw that the projected vector had skewed slightly. "Not enough," she muttered. "Please don't use any more of our comm satellites like billiard b.a.l.l.s, Simeon. If we do survive this, they'll be needed more than ever."

"Oh-oh," Simeon muttered.

"Oh-oh?" she repeatedly anxious.

It means, I screwed the pooch, Channa, Simeon thought Aloud he went on. "SS Conrad, dump your carrier modules and get out of that sector. You are now directly in the path of the incoming s.h.i.+p."

"No-can-do SSS-900-C. I've got a full load here. The company'll have my a.s.s if I desert it"

"The company'll have to hold a seance to get it, then, 'cause if you stay put, you're about to become immortaL Jump it!"

"Now!" Channa shouted. "It's less than two k-thousand kilometers from you. Now, dammit!"

"No s.h.i.+t!" the pilot shouted and disconnected the "cab," the crew quarters and control section of the s.h.i.+p, from the much larger freight storage sections.

They watched the tiny cab move with agonizing slowness across the seemingly endless bow of the strange s.h.i.+p.

"Down on station horizon," Simeon instructed, "ninety-degrees, straight down."

"Down? You want me to stop? With that b.a.s.t.a.r.d coming right for me! Are you crazy?"

"It's your only chance, buddy. She's shallow on the bottom but, by Ghu, is she wide! Show me what kind of pilot you are! Not what kind of smear you'll make."

Obediently, the little s.h.i.+p flared energy, applying thrust at right-angles to its previous vector. Its path s.h.i.+fted, slowly at first and then with growing speed like a bell-curve graph across a computer screen. Slowly, slowly, descending, a bright spot against the ever larger ma.s.s approaching them.

"Oh s.h.i.+t, oh s.h.i.+t," the captain whispered desperately. "Help?"

The intruder was less than a kilometer away, now, from the cab which looked like a white pin-point against the black hull of the stranger. At half a kilometer it cleared the leading edge of the incoming s.h.i.+p and the pilot began to laugh wildly.

"Keep going," Simeon ordered sharply, to be heard through the hysteria. "It's about to hit your freighter. Keep moving till I tell you to stop."

"It's ore," the captain gasped though he sounded more as if he was weeping, "iron ore. Nickel iron carboniferous, in ten-kilo globules,7 Atu, c.r.a.p! Simeon thought, as the intruder struck the freighter with majestic slowness. The forward third of its hull vanished in the fireball, and so did much of the freighter's cargo. The energy-release and spectrographic a.n.a.lysis would tdl him a good deal about the composition. Right now he had millions of special delivery meteors pouring down from the breached holds onto his station. Greatexample ofNewtonian physics, actionand reaction.

The collison had, serendipitously, damped much of the incoming s.h.i.+p's remaining velocity, but the fragments of s.h.i.+p and cargo had picked it up for themselves. He tracked the myriad trajectories of the s.p.a.ce flotsam and relayed the information to the s.h.i.+ps in the scatter area, directing them into still more impossible flight patterns. He a.s.signed the computer responsibility for tracking and blasting the larger chunks of ore with the station's lasers. No problems with dispersion when the stuff was in your face. On the other hand, there was one h.e.l.l of a lot of it Simeon set the computer to figuring out just how much would get through.

He realized that Channa was staring at the monitor in horrified fascination. "Hey Hap, Happy baby, get in the shaft core."

"Why?" she asked. "It's stopping."

"Slowing, yes, but if it so much as kisses me on the cheek, it'll breach the station and you're on a one-way trip to the nebula. We need you here, so shaft me baby."

"Shaft yourself," she said. "It has come to a complete cessation of forward movement"

A final flare of energy left the aft third of the intruder's hull slumping and melting, the drive cores and conduction vanes white-hot and misting t.i.taniumrutile monofiber.

"So it has," Simeon said mildly.

Channa gave a giddy whoop and slumped against die central shaft, trying to wipe at the sweat that filmed her face. Her glove dadoed against the faceplate ofher helmet "Dead, stock still," he said, feeling intense relief. "Relative to the station, that is."

With a glance at his column, Channa hit the disconnect switch and the red warning lights stopped flas.h.i.+ng. Simeon began to announce stand-down to Condition Yellow in dulcet, paternal tones. Channa took off her helmet and began to confer with the Lethe leader, reestablis.h.i.+ng the usual formal relations.

When at last they disconnected from their various crucial ch.o.r.es, Channa looked at her incoming electronic messages and laughed. "By G.o.d, but we're a resilient species. Look at these."

Simeon scanned them and laughed, too. "I haven't even finished flus.h.i.+ng the excess adrenalin from my system and they're already complaining about lost cargo and insurance. I love the human race. We're consistently more concerned with trivia than serious threats."

"And we're not even out of danger, are we?"

"Out of mortal danger. That thing could have totaled us. The ore will cause a lot of trouble and expense, so let's maintain Condition Yellow for a while."

That would keep nonessentials out of the exterior compartments, mostly industrial areas anyway, and everyone in suits with helmets in reach and within sprinting distance of the shelters. Megacredits of money were being lost, of course, most of which would be paid by Lloyds' Interstellar.

Channa was examining the strange s.h.i.+p on a dose screen.

"Next question is who, or what's, aboard.** "And if there's anything left of the pilot captain," Simeon added, "who's broken regulations I didn't know existed till now. I sent out a dozen probes to secure available information on what's left. Ah! Input!"

The main screen blanked, and then displayed a schematic of the strange craft, s.h.i.+fting to a threedimensional model as the computers extrapolated.

"So that's what it looked like before it started hitting things and melting down its drives," Simeon murmured as brain and brawn surveyed an elongated sphere amid its tangle of extensions. "And now I'D subtract what doesn't appear to be part of the original construction."

The resulting model didn't look much like the slagged ruin tumbling slowly through s.p.a.ce in the real-time image that Simeon kept up in the lower righthand corner of the screen. Channa leaned forward and frowned at such an unfamiliar design. Huge it certainly was. At least eighty kilotons ma.s.s, with extravagant s.h.i.+p-bays and airlocks, old-fas.h.i.+oned cooling vanes around the equator...

"That looks like human construction," she said thoughtfully. "Just not any model I've ever seen or heard about" Human civilization had been unified at the beginning of starflight and their s.h.i.+ps bore a family resemblance.

"It does look vaguely human-made," Simeon agreed, "but I can't even find a match in historical files of Janes'All the Galaxy's s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps for the last century. The composition is odd, too; metal-metal fiber matrix. Ferrous alloys. No comparable design for the last two centuries. Hmmm."

"Something?"

"This." He called up an image beside the reconstructed s.h.i.+p.

"Close but no cigar," Channa said.

"That's the last of a, line of heavy transports - that one was a Central Worlds s.p.a.ce-navy troop-transport Designers were Dauvigis.h.i.+pili and Sons. They used to make a lot of militaty craft, operated on stations out of the New Lieutas system. See, there is some use to being a military historian. Ah, tere."

The image changed and now there was a virtual one-to-one match.

"Colonial transport," Simeon said. "They stopped building them about three hundred years ago, so it could be up to four hundred years old. Original capacity was ten thousand colonists, in coldsleep of course, with a crew of thirty. There were a lot of odd litde colonies back then, people looking for places where they could practice as weird a religion as they wanted and not have the Central Worlds bugging them. The few that survived are still pretty flaky. Are you surprised to learn that the s.h.i.+p-cla.s.s was called the Manifest Destiny vehicle? A few of the later models had brain controllers before Central Worlds put a stop to that practice on humane grounds. Some of those minor cults were -" he made a brief pause to consult his lexicon "- aberrant! Hmm, and I'd bet this one got transmogrified into an orbital station. Look at all that stuffi"

"Your kind of 'stuff'?" asked Channa ingenuously.

"Gadgetry," he amended in a firm, this-is-serious voice, "plastered on the exterior: observation stuff, transmission stuff, the usual. And intended to be used in orbit. I mean, who would try to fly any s.h.i.+p with all that c.r.a.p sticking out? For starters, the thrust axis wouldn't be through the center of ma.s.s anymore, so for starters, it's unbalanced."

Channa scanned through more probe transmissions, induding some views taken by the perimeter sensors as the hulk barreled in, so they could see the havoc caused by collision and too-rapid deceleration.

"They may have had cause for their precipitous intrusion," she said, and froze a view of the stubs of the radar and radio antennas. "Those look like battle damage to me."

"Hmmm." Simeon did a rapid close-scan and match with the naval records in his files. "You're right, Channa-mine. Transmission antennae sheared off so they couldn't have responded to our hails. Whoever shot those darts knew his stuff, and their most vulnerable points. See the long star-shaped ripple patterns in the hull? And those long sort of fuzzy distortions cl.u.s.tered in the rear third of the hull? Those are beamers at extreme range, I'd say. Hard to tell 'cause it's so messed up." He spoke more slowly, in an almost somber tone. "h.e.l.l, Channa, beamers like that are naval ordnance weapons. The real thing." Oh, boy, this is not like a simulation at all. "Somebody was trying to destroy that s.h.i.+p."

"While the victims were desperate enough to fly dose to blind and totally deaf," Channa said. That was not a safe thing to do, even in the vastness of interstellar s.p.a.ce. "My next intelligent question is, did they escape? Or are they still being pursued?"

"Ahead of you there, partner," Simeon replied, feeling slightly smug that he had antic.i.p.ated her. "I can't detect anything coming in on the same vector." He heaved an audible sigh of relief that coincided with hers. "Or ... no, they were blind. The pursuit could have dropped off long ago, and they wouldn't have had any way to tell. But we'd better establish who and why. If, and it's a big if, there's anyone alive in there now to tell us the facts. I'm not inclined to be charitable. For all we know, they could be pirates or hijackers, and they were running from Central Worlds* naval pursuit.

Either way, they came within centimeters of smas.h.i.+ng us to a smithereen."

"Smithereens," Channa said thoughtfully, "because it's fragments they are and they have to be plural to be dangerous. I rather discount their being illegals. Something real deadly mustjjiave pushed them to run in a craft that uns.p.a.cewbrthy. Something that came to their planet suddenly. Why else wouldn't they take the time to cut away that ma.s.s dinging to the s.h.i.+p? Maybe their sun went nova. Anyway," she said briskly, "if there are people on board, they're in bad shape and what have you been doing to rescue and/or apprehend them?"

"Ahem, Channa-mine. You're the mobile half of this partners.h.i.+p. Remember? So go be brawn for me. And be careful!*1 Channa paused. "Ah, yes, so I am. Thank you for reminding me of that!" Her tone was brightly britde. "Somehow this wasn't the sort of duty I thought came along with this a.s.signment.''

"Well, it has!" he said, making his voice lilt. "Hate to have caused you to get into that clumsy suit for no reason at all."

She lifted her helmet.

"Thatta girl!" Simeon said rather patronizingly. She ignored him. "Oh, and Channa?" "What?" "Before you lock your helmet, do switch on your implant"

"Ah!" She couched the switch grounded in bone just behind her ear, the contact responding only to her individual bio-energy. "Are you receiving?"

"Check,"

"Can I go now?" she said rather patronizingly.

"Check."

"And mate, Simy baby."

"Got it," Joat muttered to herself as she rescued the computer from the shadowed ledge and turned it on, fingers clumsy in the s.p.a.ce suit gloves. Joat had become well-acquainted with the station's drills but, with survival skills as finely honed as hers were, she had put the suit on when the klaxon sounded Red Alert Besides, she'd had a chance to time just how fast she could get into the flippin' thing.

"Wow!" was her reaction to the activity the computer duly reported. "Fardling A wow!" Hie system was taking in some heavy data, converting it and feeding it to Simeon the way it transferred data from the pickups, though never in this density or complexity. "Heavy read!"

Joat did her best to follow, but the speed was too much. Then, "Got it." Now the main computer was also encoding it for her little friend. She fiddled to get a finer tuning, get rid of the drivel, giving her the visual and aural stuff. She reared back in surprise, hitting her head on the metal bulkhead but ignoring the pain as she realized what she now had.

Hey, this is from Channa. Strange, heavy strange - Tm getting what she's seeing. She must have an implant to input directly to Simeon like Mis. And what Channa was seeing made Joat feel a little more charitable towards her. Channa wasn't squishstuff, her private term for organic tissue.

"Beats hacking in to the holo system any day," Joat muttered, eyes glued to the miniature screen. She squirmed into a more comfortable position, plopped down a purloined pillow so she wouldn't slam her head again, braced her feet against the roof of the duct, plugged the earphone into the helmet outlet, and absorbed the action.

"Real-time adventure holo!" Perfect, apart from a wavering line down one side of the picture-cube that must represent breathing and life-signs and stuff "Go, Channa, go!"

CJtAFTERSIX Station-born and bred, Channa had gone s.p.a.cewalking as soon as she was old enough to fit into a juvenile suit. But there the difference between her Hawking Alpha Proxima Station days and now ended.

Theoretically, she knew that SSS-900-C was at the edge of the s.h.i.+va Nebula. Trade routes crossed here, carrying processed ores essential for drive-core manufacture. As the s.h.i.+p which had brought her had approached the dumbbell-shaped station, she'd watched the process on her cabin's screen with great interest. But theory, and that s.h.i.+pboard view in complete safety, had not prepared her for the great arc of pearly mist that filled her vision plate; mist glowing with scores of proto-suns in a score of colors.

"Spectacular, ain't it?" Patsy asked.

Channa came to herself with a start "What are^ow doing out here?"

"This tug's my emergency station," she said, grinning broadly inside her bubble helmet "The algae'U keep right on breedin' for a while without me, randy little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. An' I'm a right good tug pilot, too."

"Believe you, ma'am," Channa said, throwing a salute from her bubbled temple. What's Simeon on about1* He's got a fleet - of sorts-tocommand. "Let'sgo."

In turn, they slid down into the cramped cabin of the tug and plugged suit feeds into the s.h.i.+p system. The tugs were stripped-down little vessels, just a powerplant and drive with minimal controls; wedgeshaped, with grapnel fields and an inflatable habitat for taking survivors in their dual role as rescue vessels. The docking bay and the cabin itself were open to vacuum, but she felt a low whining as Patsy brought the drive up and lifted them out. ijiere was the usual disorienting lurch as they pa.s.sed out of station gravity. Now the only weight was acceleration, and the barbell shape of the station was a huge bulk below them instead of behind. Her senses tried to tell her she was climbing vertically in a gravity field, then yielded to training as she made herself ignore up and down for the omnidirectional outlook that was most useful in s.p.a.ce.

"Vectoring in," Patsy said into her helmet mike.

Other tugs were drifting motes of light, fireflies against the blackness. The a.n.a.logy remained in force as they circled the drifting hulk of the intruder; it was big. Forward was a frayed ma.s.s of tendrils, and the rear still glowed red-white, heat slow to radiate in vacuum.

"Readings?" Channa asked. Her nose itched; it always did when she had a helmet on.

Simeon's voice answered her. "Main power system went out when they burned their drive," he said. "Be careful about that, by the way - it's radiating gamma, real museum piece. Main internal gravity field's down. There are localized auxiliary systems still operating amids.h.i.+ps, and traces of water vapor and atmosphere. There might be a chamber in there still running lifesupport"

Channa scanned the bridge section of the s.h.i.+p again. The instruments available in the c.o.c.kpit of the tug were basically little more than sophisticated motion detectors.

"I can't get a thing," she said in frustration. "Am I missing something?"

"Not much," Simeon told her. "There's too much dirt out there, which'U confuse readings. See if you can get aboard."

'Right," she said, and looked down the hull toward the equator where the shuttle bays should be located. "Bring us in there, Patsy."

Channa flicked an indicator light on the hull. They sank gradually, until the ancient s.h.i.+p filled half the sky.