“Five by five, Skipper. Where are you?”
“In the shuttle’s aft boarding tube. Get going.”
“I leave when the shuttle’s flight crew tells me the hatch is closed. But be careful; there’s been comchatter about shots fired in the after compartments.”
“Yeah, I heard them.”
“Then don’t waste time talking to me when—” Bannor’s voice was suddenly muffled; he’d leaned away from his audio pickup. “Dr. Lymbery, I need a green light on that cluster-munition drone. Dr. Sleeman, sensor status?”
As Caine rounded the corridor’s final bend, he heard metal groaning behind him: the rotational arm was starting to deform. It almost drowned out Sleeman’s response to Bannor: “Passive sensors are tracking back along the attacker’s firing vectors. We can—” A surge of static obscured the rest, broke the circuit.
Riordan ducked through the hatch of the shuttle’s rear airlock — and stumbled over something.
Caine threw his hands out to break his fall, discovered that whatever had tripped him was soft, warm, and wet. At the same instant, his collarcom crackled back to life on a new channel. “Captain Riordan, you are on board, yes?” Humanity’s premier crash-lander, Raskolnikov, sounded impatient.
“Yes, I’m—”
“Excellent. We are leaving. Strap in.”
But Caine, seeing what he had fallen on — or into — almost recoiled back out the autoclosing hatch as it bumped against his spine and pushed him closer to—
A tangle of bodies. And blood.
“Captain Riordan: strap in!”
“Go — go; I’ll…I’ll be there. Soon. Undock and go.” It wasn’t a prudent order, but Riordan needed five more seconds to memorize the forensic details of the murders he’d discovered:
— Rena Mizrahi, body twisted, eyes open, arrestingly pale, three bullet-holes in her torso, one center-lined on the sternum through which blood had flowed freely. A dated Steyr-Aug ten-millimeter caseless pistol lay just beyond her limp fingers.
— Gaspard’s assistant Dieter, crumpled in a heap, like a marionette with all its strings cut. He had been killed by a single round to the back of his head which had exited at the top of his left eye’s orbital ridge. A gory red and maroon hole revealed brain tissue.
— Oleg Danysh, lying his length across the deck, an Embra-Mitsu dustmix pistol still locked in his hand. He had been hit four times in a pattern stretching from the base of his neck to his right upper chest. The other entry wounds — arm, leg, hip — were equally wide, almost certainly the handiwork of ten-millimeter fast-expanding hollow points from the gun beside the late Dr. Mizrahi’s hand.
Riordan jumped up, sprinted toward the combination ship’s locker and main cabin access foyer. The drives behind the bulkheads on either side of him shrieked with sudden, deafening urgency. He yanked open the hatch to the foyer/locker, dove through—
The shuttle pulled sharply to port, away from the crippled Slaasriithi ship, and then upward, rearing like a horse and twisting as it did. Caine’s body went sideways as he entered the foyer. His gut and floating rib slammed into the coaming, bent him like a pretzel just before tossing him aside, rather than back down the passage toward the airlock. “I’m in,” he grunted into his collarcom.
The hatch behind him rammed shut as the shuttle’s next maneuver threatened to throw him across the foyer.
But having been in enough desperately maneuvering vehicles to distinguish sudden engine thrust from a hit, Riordan was able to ride the wave of motion. He rolled sideways as he neared the door into the cabin and hung there until the shuttle righted. He slammed his palm at the door release, then tumble-crawled through the opening door—
Just as the shuttle dove sharply. He bounced off the ceiling. The craft veered briskly to port. He crashed into an acceleration couch.
Riordan struggled to hold on to the couch, the world indistinct and gray as he swam up out of the successive blows and shocks. Far away, his collarcom crackled: “Captain, strap yourself in. I must resume evasive actions in three seconds.” The new voice — calm, unflappable, and deadly serious — was Qin Lijuan’s, who was now handling the shuttle as though it were a stunt plane. This was Qin’s forte, was why she’d been multiply decorated after the Second Battle of Jupiter.
Caine clambered into the couch and was just securing the straps when she resumed her corkscrewing evasive maneuvers. He looked out his passenger window — its cover had frozen in the half-closed position — and saw the rotational arm begin to flop like a limb with multiple fractures. Its crippled contortions carried Puller into view. One of the corvette’s laser-focusing blisters emerged and swiveled toward the berthing arms. Each docking clamp flared as if an invisible brace of gigantic arc welders were cutting at it. The clawlike protrusions flew back in pieces, tumbling end over end — and directly toward the shuttle. Closer. And closer—
— and missed the shuttle by five meters. The tube connecting Puller’s ventral airlock to the shift carrier exploded outward in a sharp orange flash: explosive bolts had blasted its hatch and outer coaming away from the vehicle, freeing it from the rapidly disintegrating rotational arm. Puller was dense enough that the rapid unmooring didn’t sling it off like a spinning top, but Karam was going to have his hands full correcting the significant three-axis tumble.
The chaos at the bow of the Slaasriithi ship fell away as Lijuan tumbled the shuttle and boosted back along the shift-carrier’s keel, getting distance from the tangle of flying debris and thrashing rotational arms.
Caine had just started to become aware of his immediate surroundings — the whimpering of at least two passengers, his own rank sweat, his blood-splattered duty suit — when a flurry of bright flashes speckled the shift-carrier’s aft-mounted spheres, the ones which housed both fuel tanks and power plants. Riordan knew what he had seen: impacts by a dispersing pattern of railgun sub-projectiles.
Two of the globes exploded in silent, self-shredding fury, sending a wave front of small debris racing outward.
Straight toward the shuttle.
Chapter Thirty. IN VARIOUS ORBITS BD +02 4076 TWO (“DISPARITY”)
Nezdeh stared at the holotank and the view screens and reflected how aptly the changes of the last twenty seconds illustrated the tired Progenitor axiom, Good fortune arrives in bits and pieces, but bad luck comes all at once.
Moments after the target had finally been dealt a solid blow — two of her fuel tanks destroyed and her primary rotational armature coming apart in a roiling litter of modules and debris — the last two Slaasriithi cannonballs emerged from behind the planet. As they did, the third, closer cannonball commenced a six-gee counterboost, slowing it at the same moment that Sehtrek reported it was now targeting Lurker with active sensors. Nezdeh ordered Tegrese to bring the starboard laser blisters to bear upon the enemy craft. It was not yet at optimal range, but there was nothing to be lost by trying to destroy or disable it, particularly before it initiated its own attacks.
But then Sehtrek called Nezdeh’s attention to two new drive signatures that had sprung into existence near the Slaasriithi hulclass="underline" smaller vessels, drawing rapidly away from her. One staggered through a hail of debris, and, trailing hydrogen, dove straight into the planet’s gravity well. The other seemed to emerge straight out of the debris cloud, accelerating rapidly. Two seconds later, it illuminated active sensors and acquired target lock with extraordinary speed. The engine signatures of both craft were primitive — first-generation magnetically accelerated heavy-plasma thrusters — and the radar and ladar emissions were crude. So: these were not Slaasriithi craft, clearly. Aboriginal, therefore. But the one meant to fight and the other meant to make planetfall, both of which complicated her mission.