“We’re getting power drop-outs all over the ship!” Madeleine called.
Erick pushed off from the ladder, and grasped the floor hatch’s handle to steady himself. Very gingerly he edged his face over the fifteen centimetre diameter window and directly into the beam of light. A second later he was airborne, arms and legs cycling madly as a twisted shout burst from his lips. He hit the ceiling. Bounced. Grabbed at the ladder as his body spasmed in reaction.
Erick had looked into hell. It was occupied by goblinesque figures with hideous bone faces, long, reedy limbs, large arthritis-knobbed hands. They dressed in leather harnesses sewn together with gold rings. A dozen at least, boiling out of the airlock tube. Grinning with tiny pointed teeth.
Three of them had clung to Bev, yellow talon fingers slashing rents in his ship-suit. His head had been flung back, mouth open in black horror as the abdominal gashes spewed entrail strands of translucent turquoise jelly. And suicide-terror shone in his eyes.
“Did you see that?” Erick wailed.
“See what? Merde ! The net is screwed, our databuses are glitched. I’m losing all control.”
“Dear God, they’re xenocs. They’re fucking xenocs!”
“Erick, enfant , dear child, calm down.”
“They’re killing him! They love it!”
“Calm! You are an officer on my ship. Now calm. Report!”
“There’s twelve—fifteen of them. Humanoid. They’ve got Bev. Oh, God, they’re chopping him to pieces.” Erick shifted a stored sedative program into primary mode, and immediately felt his breathing regularize. It seemed heartless, callous even, wrapping Bev’s suffering away behind an artificial cliff of binary digits. But he needed to be calm. Bev would understand.
“Are they heavily armed?” André asked.
“No. No visible weapons. But they must have something in the spaceplane, that light I saw—”
All six electronically operated bolts on the floor hatch thudded back together. The metallic bang rang clear across the lounge.
“God . . . André, they just cracked the hatch’s codelock.” He stared at it, expecting the manual bolts to slide open.
“But none of the systems processors are working in that capsule!”
“I know that! But they cracked it!”
“Can you get out of the lounge?”
Erick turned to the ceiling hatch and datavised the code at it. The bolts remained stubbornly in place. “The hatch won’t respond.”
“Yet they can open it,” André said.
“We can cut through it,” Desmond Lafoe suggested.
“Our hatches and the capsule decking have a monobonded carbon layer sandwiched in,” Erick replied. “You’d never get a fission blade through that stuff.”
“I can use a laser.”
“That will allow them into the other capsules, and the bridge,” André said. “I cannot permit that.”
“Erick’s trapped in there.”
“They will not take my ship.”
“André—” Madeleine said.
“Non. Madeleine, Desmond, both of you into the lifeboats. I will stay. Erick, I am so sorry. But you understand. This is my ship.”
Erick thumped the ladder, grazing his knuckles. This life-support capsule’s lifeboats were accessed from the lower deck. “Sure.” You murdering pirate bastard. What the fuck do you know about honour?
Someone started hammering on the floor hatch.
They’ll be through soon, Erick thought, monobonded carbon or not. Count on it.
“Call Smith for help,” Desmond said. “Hell, he’s got five thousand troops on the Gemal , armed and itching to kill.”
“It will take time.”
“You got an alternative?”
Erick looked round the lounge, inventorying everything in sight—cabins, lockers filled with food and clothes, emergency equipment cubicles. All he had was a laser pistol.
Think!
Open the floor hatch and pick them off one at a time as they come through?
He aimed the laser at a cabin door, and pressed the trigger stud. A weak pink beam stabbed out, then flickered and died. Several small blisters popped and crackled where it had struck the composite.
“Bloody typical,” he said out loud.
Look round again. Come on, there must be something. Those dreary months spent on CNIS initiative courses. Adapt, improvise. Do something.
Erick dived across the intervening space to a wall of lockers, catching a grab loop expertly. There wasn’t much in the emergency cubicle: medical nanonics, pressure patches, tools, oxygen bottles and masks, torch, processor blocks with ship’s systems repair instructions, fire extinguishers, hand-held thermal sensor. No spacesuit.
“Nobody said it was going to be easy.”
“Erick?” André asked. “What is happening?”
“Got an idea.”
“Erick, I have spoken with Smith. Several other ships have been hijacked. He is taking some of his troops out of zero-tau, but it will be at least another thirty minutes before anyone can rendezvous with us.”
The lounge was getting lighter. When Erick looked over his shoulder he saw a ring of small hemispherical blue flames chewing at a patch of the hard grey-green foam on the floor decking. Little twisters of smoke writhed out from the edge. When a circle of titanium roughly a metre in diameter had been exposed it began to glow a dull orange. “No good, Captain. They’re coming through the decking, some sort of thermal field. We haven’t got five minutes.”
“Bastards.”
Erick opened the tool-box, and took out a fission-blade knife. Please, he prayed. The blade shone a cool lemon when he thumbed the actuator. “Sweet Jesus, thank you.”
He flew cleanly through the air. A stikpad anchored him near the middle of the ceiling. He pushed the fission blade into the reinforced composite conditioning duct, and started to saw a circle about thirty centimetres wide.
“Madeleine? Desmond?” he datavised. “Are you in spacesuits yet?”
“Yes,” Desmond replied.
“You want to do me a real big favour?”
“Erick, they cannot stay on board,” André warned.
“What do you want, Erick?” Desmond asked.
“Hauling out of here. Soon.”
“I forbid it,” André said.
“Stuff you,” Desmond retorted. “I’m coming down, Erick. You may count on me, you know you can.”
“Desmond, if they break into the lounge I will scuttle the ship,” André datavised. “I must do it before they glitch the flight computer.”
“I know. My risk,” Desmond replied.
“Wait to see if they break out of the lounge first,” Erick said. “That’ll give Desmond a chance to get clear if this doesn’t work.”
There was no answer.
“You owe me that! I’m trying to save your ship, damn you.”
“Oui, d’accord. If they get out of the lounge.”
The yellow patch on the floor had turned white. It started to hiss, bulging up in the centre, rising into a metre-high spike of light. A ball of fire dripped off the end, gliding up to hit the ceiling where it broke into a cluster of smaller globes that darted outwards.
Erick ducked as several rushed past. He finished cutting a second circle out of the duct and moved along.
Another ball of fire dripped off the spike. Then another. The patch was spreading out over the floor decking, scorching away more of the foam.
“I’m by the hatch, Erick,” Desmond datavised.
The empty lounge was awhirl with small beads of white fire. They had stung Erick several times now, vicious skewers of pain that charred out a centimetre-wide crater of skin. He glanced at the ceiling hatch’s inspection window to see the sensor-studded collar of an SII spacesuit pressed against it, and waved.
Erick had cut eight holes in the duct when he heard a shrill creaking sound rise above the hiss. When he glanced down he saw the floor decking itself had started to distend. The metal was cherry red, swelling and distorting like a cancerous volcano.