Poor Man's Fight (48 page)

“Yeah, I think we’re set here,” said Chang. “We could hose ‘em all down right now if we had to. Hell, I’d be inclined if it wasn’t such a fucking mess.”

“Now now,” cautioned Casey, “let’s not get carried away. Anyone goes off half-cocked, I’m makin’ ‘em clean up the mess personally and by hand. Anyway, we’ve got a good object lesson set up for ‘em already. Carl, you there?”

“Yup,” replied another voice on the comms net.

“Is the captain in position?”

“Looks like it.”

“Then how ‘bout you open up the curtains?”

***

Nathan could hear the apparent leader of the group of pirates on the promenade talk to others on his holocom. He couldn’t make out every word, but the meaning and emotion were obvious enough. The Asian man and his compatriots carried guns Nathan had only seen in movies. He knew just enough to understand how dangerous their weapons were. He saw little chance for a passenger revolt.

The bulkheads at each end of the promenade began to hum, and soon the hull panels above broke open and retracted. Thick, transparent plastics so polished as to be practically invisible kept the ship’s atmosphere inside. The
Pride of Polaris
offered spectacular views from its promenade. The overhead frequently opened up to the sights of planets, comets and the like, offering visions most people never got to see with the naked eye.

Tonight, all that was in view was the shark-shaped pirate ship looming above, attached with tethers and gangway tubes. Its hull blocked the view of anything beyond. Nathan wondered if the pirates just wanted everyone to see their big, scary ship. Intimidating though it was, the ship was no more threatening than the armed men who stood right among them.

Then Captain Kennedy floated lifelessly between the two ships.

People screamed. Others whimpered. Nathan heard several of the pirates laugh. “Just a reminder, folks,” the lead pirate called out. “Anyone feels like putting up a fight or a fuss, they’re welcome to join the captain out there.”

***

He made it.

Tanner was only off on his trajectory by a few hundred meters, easily corrected with short bursts of the nitrogen capsules. He had to expend much of his remaining nitrogen to decelerate before he splattered against the ship’s hull, but altogether he got the job done. Drifting a few short meters away, he gave it a final micro-burst and then activated the magnetic relays on his boots. Nineteen minutes after abandoning
St. Jude
, Tanner stood on the hull of the
Pride of Polaris
.

Tanner kept low, hoping not to set off any sort of sensors or security equipment on the outside of the hull. He looked around to get himself oriented
. Nothing in his surroundings looked like a lifeboat bay. He’d have to walk around.

One foot came down in front of the other. Tanner tried not to overthink things, but with no one to talk to and no instructions to follow beyond whatever he made up as he went along, Tanner’s worries
provided the only available company. His plan wasn’t much of a plan. He had no idea when the pirates would release a lifeboat, assuming they released one at all. And what were the chances those inside would risk opening an airlock to let him in? What were the chances they’d be picked up before they all perished from a lack of oxygen? What if his presence was detected long before then?

Was there something more important he should be doing? He couldn’t think of anything, but the thought nagged at him.

Movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Tanner crouched low, realizing even as he did it that such a move could make little difference out here on the hull. He was completely exposed.

The object
passed through a shadow. Tanner waited, and then swallowed hard as the body floated back into the light.

***

“So first off, I’d like to apologize for this rough treatment and all the fright we’ve put you through,” Casey said loudly as he strode into the ballroom. The hundreds of crewmen and attendants before him sat in silence, just like so many other ships’ crews, colonists and other assorted prisoners before them.

“You’ve got to understand that this
ain’t personal. Hell, we can prove it ain’t personal, ‘cause you don’t know any of us, and we don’t know any of you. But I separated you working folks out from those rich sons of bitches out there on the promenade deck because I wanted to ask you all a question.

“How much debt do you people carry?”

***

The man wore a wedding band.

His bloody uniform indicated high rank, presumably the liner’s captain. The ugly hole through his belly looked as if it may have ended him well before he was cast out of the ship. But what caught Tanner’s attention the most was the wedding band. Somewhere out there was the man’s widow, and she didn’t even know.

His face seemed like it should normally be set in some kind expression, though at the moment it bore only shock. Tanner reached out to him with trembling hands to pull him down to the hull. It was a useless gesture, of course. The man floated back up.

He looked like a kind man. Respectful. Married. He was a total stranger, but at a glance, this was all Tanner could know of him, and now he was dead. If everything Tanner had seen and read were any indication, the captain wouldn’t be alone. For all Tanner knew, the captain had never done any harm to anyone, and now he was dead.

St. Jude
’s crew was all dead. In eighteen more minutes, Tanner’s oxygen would run out, and then he would be dead. Nothing in Tanner’s plan made any difference in that.

Rage began to drown out fear. Rage decided what Tanner would do with the remaining minutes of his life.

He crouched down, cut the magnetic relays on his feet, and jumped for the destroyer looming above its captured prey.

***

“Daddy,” hissed Elizabeth.

“Hush, honey,” her father whispered back. He kissed her on the head and held her tight. “It’s gonna be okay. Don’t you worry.”

Elizabeth frowned. The men with guns were frightening, sure, but she wasn’t nearly as frightened as her father. “No, Daddy, look,” she said. Elizabeth was a sensible little girl. She knew when to keep something quiet. “Look up.”

“No, honey, you shouldn’t look up at the man,” her father said. “Look at me, Elizabeth. Just look at me. Don’t look up at the poor man.”

Her frown only deepened. “Daddy, the dead man’s gone.” She kept her voice low, speaking only just over a whimper. She didn’t want the bad men to hear. “There’s someone else out there, Daddy.”

“Oh no,” her father shuddered. “God, how many people are they going to take?”

“Daddy, no, it’s not that,” hissed Elizabeth. “There’s a man walking on the outside of the other ship.”

***

Tanner made it to the destroyer in seconds. He had to correct his jump with a burst from his EVA harness, but he didn’t beat himself up over it. He barely noticed his nausea, either. For once much more important things occupied his mind. At the moment, he cared only about finding an airlock or access hatch on the stern of the ship.

His first thought had been to try to find the bridge and then some entryway close to it, but that wasn’t practical.
Much could be said for the value of a ship’s bridge, but in the end, every large ship had back-ups and redundancies for helm and control in or near engineering. The reverse was never true. Ships didn’t have a back-up engineering section.

Tanner found a likely spot not far from the port side thrusters. The hatch
spanned two meters in diameter, with warning labels and markings all around. It had no control pad, nor key slot, nor set of latches. The metal was likely about as thick as the hull around it. Military ship designers wanted a ship to survive a pounding from other ships’ weapons, and they didn’t want to create weak points a computer could target. The only way to be let in was via the controls on the inside.

That, or with the tools in the damage control bag slung and taped to Tanner’s back.

He cut the tape with the survival knife that he had once considered a hokey relic of the age of sail, then used the tape to secure the bag against the hull. Careful to prevent other tools from floating free, Tanner pulled out the electromagnetic breaching kit. He spooled out the magnetized contact cable, carefully ensuring that it covered the full circumference of the hatch. He double-checked the instructions printed on the side of the controls to make sure he didn’t blow this.

For internal use only
, it read.
Check for fire, hazardous gas or hull breaches on the other side of a hatch before use. May result in explosive decompression if placed improperly.

Tanner skipped through all that to check the directions. Whether the breaching kit was the appropriate tool to override the seals on an external hatch was irrelevant;
he had nothing else. Whether the compartment on the other side contained atmosphere or not was also irrelevant; the compartment beyond it surely would, and he only needed this hatch open long enough to pass through.

He took a deep breath. If nobody knew he was out here yet, they’d likely know soon enough.

Power surged through the control box and the cables when Tanner keyed the activator. At first, nothing happened; then the seam running down the center of the hatch split open. Atmosphere vented out. Tanner tore the bag loose from the side of the hull and heaved himself inside.

Seconds later the relays on the hatch reset automatically. The hatch slammed shut, leaving Tanner in a darkness marked only by his helmet’s optic displays and a single, tiny red light up against one bulkhead. Gravity reasserted itself instantly; his damage control bag was suddenly very heavy, with its tools now spilling out all over the deck. Tanner
’s sense of up and down returned.

He didn’t allow himself time to recover. Tanner slammed his hand down on the red light before activating the lamps on his helmet. As he had expected, his hand covered a small, recessed video camera.

Opposite his entry point was a second hatch. It, too, lacked any sort of controls or handles. That was as Tanner had feared;
Los Angeles
had been designed the same way. He had to leave the breaching kit outside. He couldn’t open this second hatch.

That said, there were more sensors on an airlock than the single camera covered by his hand. Someone had to know that something strange had happened in here. He reached for the now half-empty damage control bag and placed it over the camera, securing it with the frayed tape.

Tanner plucked the crowbar from the pile of tools, took up a spot beside the internal hatch and waited.

***

Selection for boarding parties turned out to be a popularity contest, and one that Darren Mills deliberately, gladly lost. He was perfectly happy to remain aboard
Vengeance
. The thought of capturing a luxury liner and bleeding it dry pleased him, of course, but he held little interest in doing the actual bleeding. Even if the
Pride
’s passengers and crew were dramatically less likely to put up resistance than the militia of Qal’at Khalil, Darren had already seen enough blood and gore to last a lifetime.

His approach had trade-offs, of course. Engineering on
Vengeance
was down to a skeleton crew, since every technically-inclined hand that could be spared was needed to get the
Pride
’s FTL drives up and running again as fast as possible. Combined with the need for general boarders,
Vengeance
was left with less than a score of engineers on board. Only one of them was completely sober and vigilant.

“Hey, airlock nine’s showing some funny readings,” Darren announced from his station. He brought up the internal sensor suite, finding the airlock’s atmosphere almost entirely depleted and its internal camera offline.

“Maybe someone bumped into something in there,” suggested one pirate.

“No, they aren’t using nine for boarding,” frowned Darren. He keyed a few more options on the controls. The camera showing the passageway outside the airlock revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The external hatch remained sealed per normal. No further loss of pressure, no wavering of other indicators. Everything was quiet.

“Betcha I know what happen’,” someone else slurred. “Fuggin’ piece of that ship we blew up might’ve hit us. Right inna airlock hatch. Boom.”

Darren rolled his eyes. The great thing about serving on a pirate ship was that there were few bullshit rules. The downside was that there were few rules at all. There were penalties for serving out a watch while drunk, but many pirates tried to get away with it anyway.

He looked left, then right. Minor projects preoccupied some of his comrades. A couple others were wrapped up in their own conversations. Several more had their holocoms linked in a game that they played against one another with fierce intensity.