Kill Station (30 page)

"Well, we're a
little
better armed than with peashooters," Joss said, patting
Nosey's
console apologetically. "But the situation is still pretty . . . uh, unbalanced."

Evan laughed softly, then sighed and turned to Mell. "We're going to have to get started," he said.

She just looked at him for a moment, then said, "I'll get my suit on."

Joss busied himself with other things for a while, purposely keeping his attention away from the other end of the ship. After a while Mell came out, in her suit, and Evan with her.

"Does your maneuvering pack need a recharge?" Joss said.

"No, I'm in good shape."

"Then go home safely," Joss said, "and for God's sake don't drink all that wine! We'll want some when we get back."

She nodded vigorously. Without another word she grabbed Evan by the head and planted a kiss on him that would have curled up a bulkhead. Evan dealt with it the best he could, and came up smiling.

"Nine point four," Joss said.

Mell chuckled. "Later for you. Evan—keep him out of trouble."

"I Ve been trying," Evan said. "It seems a life's work."

Mell smiled at that, locked her helmet down, and got into the airlock.

Evan closed it for her, and waved out the little porthole. A few moments later she was gone, and he closed the outer lock door as well.

Joss reached over to the command console and began hitting the controls to wake up the iondrivers.

"We'll see her safely inside," he said, "and then get the hell out of
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there. We need to take a different course home, and still beat those people into Earth orbit."

Evan said, "Can we do it?"

"We'll find out," Joss said, and busied himself at the console.

SEVEN

"FINESSE,"
JOSS SAID, AND SNORTED.

"Stop complaining," said the voice in his ear. "Gosh, it feels great to tell you that! It's been days."

"Has been a little quiet," Joss said to Talya. They were in Earth orbit again, and once more she, and Lucretia, and all the rest of the SP, were just a half-second away.

Unfortunately, they weren't being any help.

"Look," he said. "I gave you no less than five possible locations for the damn bomb on the L5. What's keeping them, up there? We can't start our operation until that's handled."

"Last I heard," Talya said, from safe in the data center under the Moon, "they had found bombs in every one of those places. They're combing the rest of the station now, as best they can. No one's supposed to notice, you see."

Joss drummed his fingers. Behind him, in his stateroom, Evan was climbing into his suit. "When will we know?"

"Twenty minutes, they say."

Joss groaned. "The ceremony starts in twenty minutes!"

"So I hear."

"Joss," Evan said, "stop complaining. IVe got your dinky toys right here, and they'll never have a chance against them.''

' 'Always assuming you can get the contraptions up against them in the first place," Joss said gloomily. It was a plan of

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his that he had never tried before, and as usual, when trying something for the first time, he was twitching.

Evan came out with the little front pack of black boxes, eleven of them, each with its own magnet. He strapped the front pack on. "Look," he said. "I told you I can do twenty mps or so when I get going."

"I just hope it's enough." The black boxes had two things inside them: a powerful comm link, that should be able to break into a ship's comms network from outside the skin; and a derivative of the virus that killed the computer on the clandestine base. Comms on any small ship had to live in the master computer, otherwise, nothing got done. The virus would get into the ship's computer via comms, and freeze everything it touched, including the guidance and navigation computers, and the weapons systems, and the non-remote guidance systems of any bomb the computer was managing. A passing patrol vessel could then shoot out the ship's engines at its leisure. But there were complications. "I mean," Joss said,

"What if one of those sons of bitches has fired a missile or something, and it's on remote? It'll just keep going."

"Don't let them fire, then," Evan said. "Finesse it."

"I keep hearing this."

"You shouldn't worry so much," Evan said. "I'll blow anything that I can locally. Just keep those bloody braided lasers off me."

Joss looked unhappy. The best way to do that was by drawing their fire himself. A ship with one of his black boxes on it wouldn't be able to fire; the laser wouldn't braid without computer control. It was getting the boxes on that was going to be interesting.

"You're talking about pulling a lot of gee out there," Joss said to Evan, as he headed for the airlock. He was looking at the holograph, which had shown some of the enemy ships already in position, seemingly lounging through the area at low speeds, on other business. "Are you sure you're going to be all right?"

"I'll be fine."

SPACE COPS

Evan climbed into the airlock. "You know the course we want?" he said.

Joss nodded. "I'm swinging past the first two boys now. You should be able to hit them one after another. Just stay away from the fronts of them, if you can. Don't want you microwaved by their radars."

"I'll try to avoid it." And the door closed behind nun.

"You do that," Joss said.

He kicked in the iondrivers, on low. His business at the moment was to seem to be a Patrol vessel ambling about its business. He had gone to some trouble, on the way out here, to change his registration numbers and to tinker with his own ID broadcast; he didn't want any of these raiders suddenly recognizing the sop vessel that had been hanging around Willans Station. These people were not dumb.

One of the panels on his console was monitoring the process and positioning of the little black boxes.

There were eleven little lists of data, all quiescent at the moment.

Mostly what Joss wanted was to see Evan get them quietly placed. He would then activate them all at once, and every ship would find its comms jammed, its engines no longer under its control; but most specifically, those horrible braided lasers wouldn't be working.

That would be if everything worked.

"We have our course," Joss said to Evan. "This is where you get off, buddy."

"Right," Evan said, and he was gone.

"Tee, anything more from the bomb squad?"

"Nothing new," Talya said. "I'll call you. By the way, how were the restaurants out there?"

Joss started to laugh. "I'll tell you later. Michelin has some surprises in store."

Very suddenly, the data readout from one of the black boxes came alive.
Oh good,
Joss thought. And,
What kind of gee is he taking out there?

He waited, silent. Out the plex, if he cared to look at it, HighLands glittered in the sunlight. It was an extremely beautiful station, one of the new designs with extended

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pods; it looked like an elegant, silvery glass water-strider, balancing (at the moment) on the blue water of the curvature of the Earth. And if things went well, it would not shortly be a mass of fragments of glass and metal and frozen air.

Another of the little blocks of data on his console woke up.
Two out of eleven. Better than nothing.

Evan, what are you doing to yourself that you can move so fast?
For Evan had refused to take a remote pusher, saying that it would attract too much attention, whereas a suit was usually too small to show well on radar, or to be noticed visually. The only precaution he had taken was to spray himself with the dead-black lampblack spray that suited people used for stealth work in space. Joss looked at the smudges on the walls, and smiled slightly.

A third block of data came up, wobbled a little, settled.
Good solid contact,
Joss thought.
Nice clear
data. But the next ones won't be so easy. They 're further away
—

"There's some scrambled communication going on out there." Tee said, "on the marked frequency."

"Hope they're not getting suspicious," Joss said softly.

One more block of data came up on the board. Wavered a little, steadied down.

"Four," Joss said. "Tee, I don't know how he does that. He really must not have been kidding about the twenty mips."

And another block came up, settled. And then, suddenly, there was concerted movement in the holograph.

"Oh no," Joss said. "Evan? This is it."

"Do it,"
Evan said.

Joss slapped his hand down on the comms console and woke up the five black boxes that were settled in place. Under each set of readouts, a wild little storm of hexadec-imals began to stream by as the boxes both jammed external communications and started subverting the internal ones in the raiders' ships. Five of the ships in the display coasted on, began to lose speed.

The others began to pick it up.

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"Trouble, Evan," Joss said. "They know. Number eleven, the kingpin ship, is dropping back. The others are swinging in. Two kilometers now."

"So I see," Evan said.

He hung there is space with his little bag of goodies only half distributed. It was most annoying. Not far away from HighLands, he could see the glint of metal from the little mining ships, swinging in; more to the point, he could see their course predictions on the inside of his helm. All orbits were designed to swoop low around High-Lands—or to crash into it if necessary.

One of them was barely a kilometer from him, and would pass him by at about three hundred meters if he held still. He didn't hold still. It was passing him left to right and above; he turned his leg jets on, and left them on, not minding the feel of blood piling away from his head. He was in a hurry, and besides, the neural foam in the suit had squeeze pads in the legs for such an eventuality.

He drew close to the ship from the underside. It was one of the VW Boxes again, mostly box and only a little pilot compartment; its iondriver dish was the perfect target, and a mile wide from this angle. Evan scooted up behind it, at a slight angle, to miss the ion spillover, and from one of the suit's leg fairings, pulled out a grenade.

It was a charming combination of high and low tech: it had an ionchaser chip in it, and a little attitude jet of its very own, and it was filled with concentrated plastique. It flew into the iondriver like a baby bird to its nest, and blew up in a way that baby birds usually don't.

Half the back of the ship simply fell off; the rest explosively decompressed. One of the pieces of one of the corpses missed Evan by about twenty meters, its arm waving a rather forlorn hello, or in this case, goodbye. Evan ignored it, being more concerned with the way the ship had fallen apart.
No wonder they
needed Mell,
he thought. /
wonder
...

Some distance away, another of the ships changed

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course, toward him. It seemed unlikely that he had been seen, but he made himself small for the moment, curling up into a fetal position and watching. It coasted quickly closer.

Evan held quite still. His previous course was carrying him along at about fifteen mips, and it occurred to him that if he restrained himself from looking manlike for as long as possible, he might be able to fool these people into thinking he was a piece of debris. He stayed tucked up, and thought beautiful thoughts, as much as possible.

Mell
was one of them.

"This was kind of dumb, on both our parts, wasn't it? she said. Still is, on yours."

"Yes," he had said.

"What do we do now?"

"I'm none too sure. Neither of us wants to marry. Neither of us wants to live the way the other does, particularly. But neither of us wants to lose the other, either."

"That would seem to about.sum it up."

"So what do we do?"

"For the moment, our work. Later ..."

"Later."

THE SECOND SHIP WAS GETTING QUITE CLOSE.

Five are paralyzed,
Evan thought,
one is gone, that's six not to worry about. Five more to go. Like this one.

The second ship was no more than two hundred meters away now, slowing, nosing through the debris of the first one.

Evan could see the gunport in the front as it passed over him, and was determined not to have that pointed at him on any account. He straightened, gave himself a hard push with the jets, and reached out to see what he could catch.

It took almost ten seconds, but he finally managed to grab hold of a strut and haul himself onto the chassis of
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the ship. This was a Lada, a box in front and a sphere in back, with a sort of wasp waist in between. He clambered carefully forward, not particularly caring how it sounded to anyone inside, and braced himself against the front cabin, grabbing hold of the cargo pod so hard his gauntlet's fingers sank into the steel.

He began to push.

And pushed harder.

And one more time.

The ship came apart at the center seam. Not even Evan's suit could hang on in the face of an explosive decompression a foot and a half away. He was blown off the surface of the ship like a cork out of a bottle of champagne, and he tumbled for a good thirty seconds before he could get enough control over his motion to start slowing himself down. But when he managed to see where he was again, the pieces of the enemy ship were going happily in two different directions, and he was pleased.
Saves ammo,
he thought.

And a bolt of blue fire went by him so close that it almost caught his outflung arm. Impossibly, in vacuum, he could actually feel the heat.

The bolt came from over his shoulder. He curled himself up and used the leg jets to kick himself sideways. The ship passed a hundred meters away, still firing, but it was useless; as Joss had said, the weapon was fixed. It might actually have to be mounted down the center of the craft, Evan thought, which would account for it. He went after the ship, praying he could get at it before it turned.