A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (12 page)

Lewis rolled her eyes. “Brilliant! So what do we do now?”

Hamilton frowned. “I’m still working on it.”

“Great!” Lewis muttered. Clutching the plasma cutter to her chest she staggered past them towards the office door.

“Where are you going?” Hamilton scowled.

“I’m going to find me one of them fancy spacesuits like you two are wearing. Then I’m going to get us out of here! Coming?”

Hamilton exchanged glances with Johnson. She shrugged and followed after the other woman. Hamilton muttered under his breath but followed as well. He had a feeling he knew what Lewis had in mind. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Great!
He thought.
Now I’m following a lunatic! What could possibly go wrong?

*****

 “Grimes?” The Captain inquired.

The exo nodded. “We’re good to go. Umbilical is still attached but it’ll tear free when we move off.”

“Good. You, on sensors. What was your name again?”

“LeGault, captain.”

“Right, LeGault. How’s our situation looking?”

LeGault shrugged. “Not good. That destroyer is holding station. If we head that way we’ll be in weapons range of it long before we can employ the Skip Drive safely. The cruiser is just undocking. From the activity, I’m guessing they’ll launch the assault craft as soon as they’re free of the dock. As for the PDC’s they are all over us like a rash. Weapons locked on us. The minute we move away from the station they’ll fire.”

“Tactical? Can we take that much heat?” Rames demanded.

Klane shrugged. “Our shields are up, but they aren’t meant to repel any kind of real military firepower. The PDC’s we might manage to blunder past. But we’ll get hurt in the process. Anything more meaty than their little lasers and we’ll be in real trouble.”

“Pilot…what was it you’re called?”

“Veltin, boss!” Veltin grinned over his shoulder.

“Veltin. Any ideas for getting us out of this?”

Klane and Jones both groaned audibly.

Veltin’s grin was huge. “You bet! I couldn’t help but notice this ship is fitted with a Gravity Drive. Is that standard nowadays?”

Rames nodded. “Pretty much. At least, on military craft. Why?”

“That will make things easier, that’s all. Just give the word and we’ll be off!” Veltin grinned happily.

“We already have a jump point located. By the time we get there, the computer will have long finished its calculations.” Puckett added.

Rames frowned. “Standard procedure is to Skip to deep space then plot a jump from there.”

Veltin and Puckett exchanged glances. “The situation appears to be anything but standard.” Veltin pointed out.

“So what’s your plan?” Rames persisted.

Veltin waved his hands about irritably. “It would take too long to explain to a non-pilot. You’ll just have to trust me.”

Rames could not fail to hear a second groan from Klane. He turned to her.

“What do you think?” It was clear he was talking about Veltin.

“He’s a good pilot.” She said. “Erratic and gung-ho. But he’s still alive. That has to count for something.”

Rames nodded with a sigh and pressed the ship comms call. “All hands, prepare for flight. Secure all compartments; it’s going to get rough!”

He looked at Veltin, who was still grinning like an eager child. “Alright! The ship is yours Mr. Veltin. God help us all!”

Veltin turned back to the piloting console, slipped his hands into the control waldos and settled himself into his seat.

“Hang on to your butts! It might get hairy!” He muttered.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The PDC’s were caught completely by surprise when the
Ulysses
suddenly lurched outwards from the station. Their single man crews had just enough time to react and thrust their vessels clear of the customs vessels path. There was no time for any thought of firing on the ship. Getting out of its way was the only concern. The
Ulysses
was not a big vessel, but it was big in comparison to the tiny PDC’s. An impact with the customs vessel would certainly be fatal for any of the little craft.

Having scattered the tiny craft, the
Ulysses
then plunged back down towards the station’s hull and sped off along it, just meters from the surface.

It was a maneuver that would have been impossible in a ship equipped with a normal reaction-mass drive. The Gravity Drive, by contrast, allowed a vessel to push and pull against any gravity source nearby. The more sources of gravity there were, such as a planetary system, the more vectors that were available to the ship to use for movement. Add in a limited ability to ‘sail’ at an angle to gravitational forces, and the ship became almost as maneuverable as if it was an atmospheric craft.

The PDC’s, startled like flies around a suddenly not-dead corpse, set off in pursuit, maintaining a healthier distance from the hull of Tantalus Station. Unfortunately, the higher ‘altitude’ meant that any firing solution ran the risk of striking the station if it missed its target. Accordingly they withheld their fire, being content to follow.

*****

In the medical center, Lewis had finally found a spacesuit.

It was better than the ones that Hamilton and Johnson had on and was intended solely for use in emergency decompression situations. It appeared that, as well as swanky offices, the senior admin staff also had a number of other perks.

Hamilton and Johnson had to help Lewis into it, however. The planetologist was physically weak from the treatment she had received.

“We need to hurry!” Hamilton pointed out. “They won’t stay locked behind the security doors for long.”

Lewis shrugged. “They are probably already reviewing the camera footage from in here. I expect we’ll have visitors in moments.”

“Especially now that we’re all terrorists.” Johnson added.

Lewis scowled. “What?”

“Long story.” Hamilton told her. “Just get the damn suit on!”

Once all the seals had been checked they hurried back to the big picture window in the admin office. Lewis tried to heft the plasma cutter but she was in no state to do much. Their ‘rescue’ had allowed all the adrenalin that had fueled her up to that point to ebb away. She was drained.

“Here, give me that!” Hamilton said, taking the cutter from her. There was a momentary flash of irritation in her eyes but she didn’t put up any protest.

Hamilton pointed the cutter at the steelglass panel. “Brace yourselves, I’ll make a hole first, to relieve the pressure difference, then cut once everything has subsided. Darken your visors!”

The two women hurried to comply. Hamilton knew the visors would darken automatically anyway, but the warning was well-intentioned and gave them something to focus on. For his part, he merely placed the cutter against the panel, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

The plasma flame burned at over nine thousand Kelvin and was hideously bright. The flame was short, less than six inches, but the effect of it on the steelglass was immediate.

Even before he’d decided it was safe to open his eyes, the plasma had cut a hole and inch in diameter right through the panel.

Air hurtled through the narrow channel, quickly cooling the sides of the hole back down. In a matter of minutes, the entire air supply in the locked down section was vented into space, along with countless pieces of paper and small items such as pens and the like. A data pane momentarily made a temporary patch over the hole, but a blast from the cutter melted a hole right through it and the evacuation of the atmosphere continued unabated after that.

Hamilton switched over to the suit’s comms channel they had selected prior to beginning his cutting.

“You two okay?”

“Yeah.” Johnson nodded. Lewis waved a hand in weary agreement.

“Right then.” Hamilton turned back to the panel and began cutting a hole big enough for them to get through.

The cutter was more manageable in a vacuum. Whilst the air had been present, the backwash of heat from the cutter was quite fearsome. Hamilton’s suit had protected him in the brief moments the cutter had taken to melt a hole through the panel, but the suit’s alarms had gone off, warning him of the danger. In actual rescue operations the cutter’s operator wore heavily protected clothing to offset the danger from the heat.

Now, though, there was no air to heat. Only radiated heat and radiation was a threat now, and the suits they wore coped with those more than adequately.

The cutter made light work of the panel and Hamilton soon had a hole four feet square in the window. As he cut through the last piece of steelglass holding the orphaned section in place, it fell outside the window, bounced on the outer sill and then slid down the hull a few inches before starting to float away.

The gravity extends a little way beyond the window panel
. Hamilton thought.
At least we’ll be able to step outside without drifting away.

He climbed out through the hole he’d made after giving it a moment for the edges to cool, still carrying the plasma cutter. It was quite heavy, but he reasoned it might come in useful later. He clipped it to his waist once he was out and then helped the other two climb out.

Johnson, of course, took his offer of help easily. Lewis did too, showing just how exhausted she was. Normally she’d have made some snarky comment about his act of chivalry. Today, however, she just grabbed his arm and used it to steady herself as she clambered out to join him.

Once outside, they stood near the panel, reluctant to leave the weak gravity field that extended beyond the pane.

“What now?” Johnson asked.

“Now,” Hamilton said. “We make our way down to the
Morebaeus
. She’s our only hope of getting out of here now.”

Lewis snorted. “That junker? I had it in mind to wander about then cut our way back in someplace else.”

“We’ll still need to get aboard a ship at some point.” Hamilton pointed out. “The
Morebaeus
is our best bet.”

“Need I remind you the hyper drive is next to useless?” Lewis added.

Hamilton shook his head, the gesture lost in his helmet. “Not really.”

“Spill it, Hamilton!” Lewis growled with a little of her usual fire.

Hamilton chuckled. “Okay. Here’s the deal. When the
Morebaeus
arrived here, she was intercepted by a customs vessel commanded by an old… friend… of mine. I told him the deal with Walsh and Vogerian, the whole story. The rest of you were still in cryo.”

“We know all this.” Johnson said.

Hamilton pointed at Lewis. “She doesn’t. They dragged her off for psi testing. She didn’t get to meet any of the
Ulysses
crew.”

“Anyhow, as I was saying,” He continued. “Rames, the captain, and I came up with a getaway plan if it all went pear-shaped, which it did. Mostly that was to use the
Ulysses
to escape, but we at least, have missed that boat, as it were. We had a fallback option to use the
Morebaeus
as a means of escape. As you pointed out, Lewis, it was pretty broken, drive-wise. We’re lucky we even made it to this system. But we were a long way out when we emerged from hyperspace. A long way. Given our damaged drive, it took quite a while for the
Morebaeus
to limp here. Quite a while indeed. Long enough for the
Ulysses
tech crew to fix up the power core on the
Morebaeus
to a useable state. It would never pass inspection, but it’ll perform a normal jump now. We just have to get to it.”

“How do we do that?” Johnson asked, looking down towards the berthing ring. The medical center was a lot closer to it than Q-section had been. The docking arms and vessels were clearly visible. Even so, they were at least three hundred meters away.

“Walk.” Lewis sighed, tiredly.

“I mean, how do we not float away?” She clarified. “Do we have magnetic boots?”

Lewis snorted again.

Hamilton shook his head. “Nah. Magnetic soles and all that nonsense went out of fashion long ago. For a start, the magnetism, weak though it is, interferes with sensors and so on. Plus, a magnetic hull is like a homing beacon for certain weaponry. These days everyone uses fibergrip.”

“What’s that?”

Hamilton fished in his outside suit pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a pair of socks. He pointed to the gray area that surrounded the window, then to the various gray pathways that seemed to lead off from it.

“Parts of the hull are coated in a special nano-fiber matting. These socks.” He waved the pair he’d gotten out. “Are made of a similar material. Put the two together and they stick.” He bent down and touched the sock to the gray mat. As he pulled it away, the grip it exerted was obvious.

“Oh. Okay.” Johnson said. “So it’s like Velcro, then.”

Now it was the other pair’s turn to look confused.

“Velcro.” Johnson explained. “It was a similar product back in my day. One part was a fluffy mat, the other a sort of nylon hook-like product. The hooks caught in the fluffy mat and held things, but enough force could pull them free.”

Lewis and Hamilton exchanged glances.

“Perhaps she’s not so useless after all.” Lewis admitted, bitchily.

“And maybe you’d prefer it back with your doctor friends?” Johnson snapped back.

For a moment the two women glared at each other.

“Enough of this!” Hamilton told them. “We’re wasting air. Get your socks on and let’s get going.”

Grumbling, the women complied, still casting irritated glances at one another.

Great
. Hamilton thought as he pulled on his own socks.
Just what I need, the two of them trying to push each other off into space.

Not that he really thought it would come to that. Johnson was far too civilized for anything like that and Lewis was too weakened by her ordeal at the hands of the medics. The planetologist might be crazy, but she was smart enough to know she needed them.

“Plant each foot carefully,” He told them. “Roll your back foot forward to release the fibergrip. It’s easier and less exhausting than trying to wrench it free.”

Slowly, they set off. Travel in this way would be slow and tiring. Johnson took a few minutes to properly get the hang of the weird gait necessary to walk, but then it was a slow, steady slog towards the berthing ring. It might only be three hundred meters away but it was clear that it was going to take them some time.

*****

The
Ulysses
reached the berthing ring and hurtled between two docking arms, executing a bizarre roll and twist as it went through so that the ship was now heading along the berthing ring, effectively circumnavigating the station at its widest point.

The PDC’s flew outward, beyond the berthing ring’s extents and then followed, now further away from the cutter and in an even worse firing position.