Motherload: Stardrifter Book 01 Read online

  A graceless bump and an oomph at the open hatch behind me announced Bayern, who’d followed me down.

  “We need power, Sally!”

  “I know, Bayern…”

  “No, I’m not kidding around! We’ve got a hostile out there, and we need power right now!”

  “Get him out of here, Ejoq.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?! It’s a pirate!”

  “Now, Ejoq, or I’ll kill him!”

  “We need weapons! We need engines! We’re sitting ducks here!”

  Sally snatched up a chem torch and began to go around the ducts and draping cables with a scary sort of blankness on her face. I was closer though, so I brachiated my way through the intervening space, and hustled Bayern back out into the companionway.

  “If you mess up Sally’s concentration now,” I told him with a hard grip on his earlobe, “I’ll glue your hands and feet together and dump you in your cabin. Get out and stay out…or better yet, do something useful, like running vector sims: use the realtime data from Genness’ passives, and you’ll be ready for trouble.”

  He slapped away my hands, and canted backwards out of my immediate reach, anchoring himself to one of the handholds – a look of stark terror and fury written plainly on his broad face.

  “Who…who do you think you are?! I’m the captain of this boat..!”

  “Then you better bleeding act like it from now on, or there’s a field demotion by popular demand in your future!”

  “That’s mutiny, Ejoq – don’t you dare threaten me!”

  I grabbed his shirt and drew him close again, eye to eye. He must have seen something there he didn’t like, because his bulged in sudden apprehension.

  “I’m not going to die out here because of your stupid crap, Captain Bayern, sir. Stay calm. Sally knows what needs to be done; and if it can be done, she’ll do it. But, if you continue to be a liability on this cruise, I’ll load up a tube and throw you at the pirate…savvy?”

  “You…you’re crazy, Ejoq,” he whispered in horror, “absolutely crazy!”

  He turned too quickly to escape my insane clutches, and did an impressive pirouette until he got himself under control. He flailed his way forward, muttering that we (presumably Sally and I) were going to get everyone killed. I remember hanging there, musing that if he kept on thinking like that, and especially, if he’d finally developed a strong opinion as to who we were going to start with, then he might just give us the space we needed to work.

  Not that I had any idea what work there was to do at this point – with no engines, no weapons, no communications, restricted sensor systems, and what would probably have been an impossible repair job even if we didn’t have a raider on our doorstep.

  “I better not see him again,” was all Sally had to say when I came back in. She was already back at the work bench, hovering over the sphere. I came up beside her and said nothing for a long time, but my thoughts must have been loud, because she looked over at me at length, and said, simply, “What?”

  “We can’t fix it. Am I right?”

  “Yup. It’s plain impossible here – especially without the laze. Maybe even with it. I was going to try electroplating it with superconductive nanotubes: did that by hand once, back in school as part of a demo of the basic principle – works decently for magnetic propagation, too. I just don’t know what to do now…”

  “What about rearranging the order of the emitters, leaving the bad one out? We could overlap the field influences so that the entire reaction area is covered. Then we run it underpowered, maybe, and…”

  She shook her head, and pointed to the casing that held all the other emitter spheres in place.

  “That was computer designed, computer constructed, and computer installed. If we’re off by so much as a millimeter – which would be an impossibly good error factor, by hand – the magnetic bottle will fail. Besides, firing up the reactor, whether to bring it online, or just to test the work, will light us up like a spotlight to the sensors of any nearby ships.”

  She looked up with a bleak stare that convinced me at last, and that’s when I really got scared.

  “Can’t we just put this one back in, then, and run the power plant until it fails?”

  She had a sour face as she replied.

  “The flaws in the magnetic coating are direction-specific – we’d never be able to put the sphere back inside the unit in exactly the way it was installed. The scratches would be off from where they were before, which would deform the field immediately. It would fail simply because of the unbalance there. I mean, it should have failed some time ago.”

  “Okay, um…what about shielding the laze for EM leakage? I mean, we could use it if there was no detectable energy signature, right? There’s all that trash EM wrapping that the dock crew left aboard, back at Deegman – remember, I had to find a place to stow it all, and I was honked-off? We could wrap the laze with that stuff and…”

  “The laze isn’t the only problem, Ejoq. Even if you could shield it completely, the batteries emit an EM field when they’re used – the bigger the draw, the bigger the field. The wiring in the bulkheads have one too when electricity runs through them. There’s a voltage regulator, and a small junction redirect, and…”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” I hesitated to keep brainstorming, partly out of fear of exasperating Sally, and partly out of fear of where my thoughts were headed. She kept staring at me, though, knowing somehow that I wasn’t done talking. “That leaves us with only one option…we fight.”

  “We fight? How? You’d get one burst from the charpacs and then the capacitors would be drained – and you’d need more than that just to get a bead on their ship. Am I right?”

  “We’ll use missiles only,” I countered. “There must be some way to get the tubes open; if we take that bogey completely by surprise, we might not need more than a single well-placed shot. And the tubes only need a tiny bit of juice to autoprep and launch.”

  “A sneak attack? That’s iffy, at best, Ejoq. If we don’t take them out with the first salvo, we’re dead, since we can’t do much to get out of the way of any return fire. We’d have a few minutes at most, doing evasive maneuvers, before that rotten battery bank went completely ghost. And just how sure are you that this isn’t somebody in the kind of situation we’re in, with weird system failures? Maybe they can’t call out, for some reason. How would you justify firing on a ship unprovoked? I’m not comfortable with that, Ejoq.”

  I held up my hand to ward off her disapproval.

  “You shouldn’t be, Sally. I’m only listing options. The other idea is to send a team over; surveil the ship for illegal activity, or intended illegal activity. If they’re legit, we ask for help. But, if they’re raiders, we board and take possession.”

  She stared blankly for a moment, as if waiting for the punchline. But there wasn’t one. I was serious.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Ah-ah, careful, you’re sounding like Bayern.”

  “Ejoq, there are only four of us. We could all be Fleetmarines, with powered combat armor and deep-action weapons, and we’d still be out of luck. Four people can’t take a pirate vessel by force.”

  “I disagree.”

  She shook her head, rummaged through a stowbox, and came up with a biowaste bag.

  “I presume you have a plan of some kind?” She then floated off towards the fresher.

  “Actually, yes. Want to hear it?”

  “Want to give me a procreating minute here?!”

  During that minute, Genness appeared at the door. He looked around carefully, then asked me, “Is it safe to come in? I hear tell you’re a bunch of loonies.”

  “You hear right. What’s the latest?”

  “They’re using reaction thrusters to take a new heading…slowly, though: they plan to do some work in this neighborhood, for sure. I calculated their course and projected it. At present speed,
they’ll intercept that free trader, PONTE, that’s outbound from Deegman right now, in about, oh, seventy-seven hours. This raider has a stealth rig of some kind – but not a good one; I can still track it since I know where to look. If PONTE goes off on an oblique angle now – or really soon, anyway – it’ll make starjump safely. They’ll need a heads-up, though, otherwise they won’t see these guys coming until it’s way too late.”

  “Can we use a tight beam? We can’t let the bogey know we’re sitting here behind him.”

  “Truth. Lasercom it has to be. Um, I’ll need some power for that, of course.”

  That wasn’t much of a problem, I didn’t think, and, when she came out, Sally agreed that a short message wouldn’t draw too badly.

  We did a few reconnects in Engineering and up on the bridge, and started to leave Genness to it. Bayern wanted him to be sure to make the point that PONTE couldn’t rely on us for any more help than this; and, most especially, that none of this was our fault. Then he started to dictate the message itself, but I could see a growing flash in Genness’ eyes of what Sally and I had already displayed, so in the end we had to bar the Captain from his own bridge. When he was finally left on his own, Genness finished up quickly, then called us to say we could pull the plug again. He hadn’t waited for a reply from PONTE, he reported, though he had received automated acknowledgment of the message. We had done what we could, anyway.

  Everyone was pretty punchy by this point, and we’d been up for nearly three shifts straight. We’d gotten distracted from the pirate fighting question, but now I was too tired to sell the idea to anybody, so I just tethered myself to the corner of my bunk and was dead to the galaxy for several hours.

  Sally hadn’t acted like she was going to go to sleep at all, and maybe she didn’t, because she and Genness where floating at a suggestive angle and giggling like school kids when I finally drifted back down to the engine room. The dark rings were gone from under her eyes, anyway, as was the pressed look of strain. I ducked out again and went to the galleyette for a couple of cups of coffee (thank God for insulated carafes), hoping they’d take the hint. They did, and Genness passed me in the companionway with a friendly smile.

  “Any changes out there?” I asked.

  “Nothing. The bogey hasn’t made any changes. Neither has PONTE. Either they didn’t understand the message, or they didn’t believe us. I even had Sally power us up about an hour ago, so I could send it again. This time I waited for a reply, but all I got was the same automated acknowledgment of the communication. Honestly, I just don’t get it.”

  I refrained from remarking that he was the only guy on this tub who was getting it, and, instead, floated back to Engineering.

  Sally took one of the coffees gratefully, then checked systems. That took all of two minutes with nothing running, and then she turned to me.

  “So…what’s the plan? After reflection, I still think you’re crazy, but let’s have it.”

  “Well…I have a few items I didn’t put on the personal manifest when I came aboard. Shape charges, two assault rifles, and a fair amount of ship-rated ammo.” I held up my hand to stave off her commentary, though her face spoke volumes. “I just didn’t want any SecCorps johnnies finding them in a random locker check while I was out here…I never declared any of it when I first landed – they’d have impounded it all, and maybe fined me to boot.”

  “Where in purgatory did you get those things? Don’t tell me they’re from your previous job…?”

  “Actually, yeah. I…all right, I was really pissed about being laid off, so I helped myself to a few items. There was this Corporatespace Security container; the cargobot had banged it up, and the back was busted open. Don’t look at me like that! I just grabbed what I could reach. I was about to sell it all for emergency cash, anyway, but this job came through.”

  “Ejoq…! Why you little thief!”

  “I won’t deny it, and I won’t justify it. I did what I did. I was angry. I’m a child. But these things’ll come in handy now if we pursue this idea. And we have to pursue it if we can’t do the repairs. You see that, don’t you, Sally?”

  “We have life support for another couple of weeks if we stay powered down – other ships might come by in that time. We could even put in a distress call to Deegman, and have them send out a tetherboat. Might take some time, true, but…”

  “And what about PONTE?” I asked. “For some reason, they don’t believe us. I don’t know why: our codes are valid, and they know enough to expect us out here. But either way, they don’t deserve to get picked off. Some really rough characters have been playing out this way. You’ve read the reports, Sally: cargoes waylayed; crews tortured and spaced; ships blown when it’s all over. We might not be much – especially now – but we’re all that PONTE’s got.”

  She shook her head, but let me go on.

  “Okay, here it is…we strip off the armor and insulation around the feed lines to the main drive output – that’ll precool the waste exhaust enough that it probably won’t be detectable if we’re careful to face ourselves perpendicular to the bogey. We keep it below, say, forty percent power and do a short burn up to .1 G; we’ll get to within a hundred kilometers of them in ten hours if they stay on course, undetected…”

  “If they continue to lay off their active sensors,” she injected. “And this’ll kill the battery bank.”

  “Which means we just have to win fast. We can cut away one or two missile tube hatches while we’re outside working on the main drive – that’ll give us our big stick if we need it.”

  “And then what?”

  “When we’re close enough, we go over quietly and set the charges on the bogey’s drives or something, and then we talk to them.”

  Once again, she floated there waiting for a funny line I didn’t have. At length she just shook her head.

  “I’ll tell you what, Ejoq. You go explain it to the others, and if they agree – if Genness agrees to that lunatic plan – well…ahhh…”

  And she waved me away.

  three

  *

  It was an incredibly tense couple of shifts. Sally and I did a hasty EVA to rip off the housing around the feed lines to the plasma exhaust. We used hydraulic grippers and vibrosaws that the others said had made a heck of a racket inside. The job, once done, was really messy. It would be a costly repair for the consortium that owned DAME MINNIE, but I figured we weren’t going to be hired again anyway, so whatever.

  The missile tube hatches proved much easier to deal with, since they were designed to be removed for maintenance. The dorsal and ventral bow tubes seemed to be the most useful and convenient under the circumstances, and we were even able to save the hatches themselves and stow them aboard. All of that took six hours, and Sally and I were exhausted when we were done. I wanted to rest, but time was racing. We killed the coffee in the next few hours, because we still had to reconnect the drives to the battery bank and restore juice to some higher function comp systems. We powered nothing else up, least of all artificial grav and inertials (same system), so we had to strap down carefully when we gave Bayern the go-ahead to fire it up.

  He had actually been a much easier sell on the whole idea than Genness, who proved to be strangely adamant. Bayern seemed relieved to be taking any kind of action at all, and even inflated a bit when we let him give us some minor orders; but Genness called it a fool’s errand, and wouldn’t endorse it on any level. Sally had come along for the meeting, and didn’t comment at first; she grumbled heartily when Genness finally asked for her opinion pointblank, but it was plain she deeply loathed the idea of standing off and doing nothing while a pirate took a ship we were supposed to be protecting. Since our command structure had, by now, deteriorated into a democracy, Genness was outvoted. At length, he agreed to help, but made it well known we were doomed – an opinion I think we all shared.

  The run towards the bogey’s track was edgy to say the least. I dug out my goody bag from deep stowage. Bayern had almost a
s much EVA time as Sally and I, but I didn’t trust him with either firearms or explosives; and anyway, he was Secondary Gunner on this cruise, and someone had to be in a position to fire on these guys at all times. Just to keep ol’ Sureshot on a leash, though, I tied the arming controls for the defense suite into my suitcomp; and while I could theoretically do some rough targeting remotely as well, there was actually an interface problem with DAME MINNIE’s sensor software, so I’d be shooting almost blind. I figured I’d let Bayern get first crack at it anyway.

  Sally and I went over placement ideas for the charges, but a hardcore plan would have to wait until we got a visual, since we still didn’t know what we were up against. I guess that was the scariest aspect of the whole thing for me. There weren’t many really big pirates out and about, since Fleet would hunt down anybody with enough firepower and lawlessness to be a threat. And I’d never actually heard of a full-time pirate anyway, except for a few that carried letters of marque during wartime (though it was always wartime somewhere); pretty much all of them just did it on the side, when things otherwise got tight (though things were always tight somewhere). But even a small ship could drop an entire world full of hurt on us if it got the chance. Should our intruder turn out to be better armored than was, shall we say, statistically likely, then my charges wouldn’t be enough. I only had three of them. Placement was vital, and I couldn’t plan that part in advance.

  The year before, a story was all over the newsnets about how Fleet had bagged GONDOLA, a huge Hamilton class Far Trader that had been beefed up with a big externally mounted maser. They had used it to knock out starjump, comm, and main drives on nearly a dozen merchanters that had had the misfortune to cross their path. GONDOLA was a nasty customer, and was actually able to put a battle cruiser out of action that was in the hunting pack formed to go after it – just before a salvo from the other ships turned it into glowing vapor. If our bogey followed GONDOLA’s model, we were wasting our time and our lives. The mere fact that these guys were running with even a cheap-charlie stealth suite opened us up to the possibility of more surprises.