“What about the dark side?” Greg asked.
“If we want to see anythin’ there, well either have to rig lights or turn the rock around,” Johnny said. “Let’s cover this side first and see what we come up with.”
He turned and leaped from the airlock, moving gracefully down toward the surface, using the bumper unit to guide himself, with short bursts of compressed C02 from the nozzle. Greg followed, pushing off harder and passing Johnny halfway down. Tom hesitated. It looked easy enough, but he remembered the violent nausea of his first few hours of free fall.
Finally he gritted his teeth and jumped off after Greg. Instantly he knew that he had jumped too hard. He shot away from the orbit ship like a bullet. The jagged asteroid surface leaped up at him. Frantically he grabbed for the bumper nozzle and pulled the trigger, trying to break his fall.
He felt the nozzle jerk in his hand, and then, abruptly, he was spinning off at a wild tangent from the asteroid, head over heels. For a moment it seemed that asteroid, orbit ship and stars were all wheeling crazily around him. Then he realized what had happened. He fired the bumper again, and went spinning twice as fast. The third time he timed the blast, aiming the nozzle carefully, and the spinning almost stopped.
He fought down nausea, trying to get his bearings. He was three hundred yards out from the asteroid, almost twice as far from the orbit ship. He stared down at the rock as he moved slowly away from it. Before, from the orbit ship, he had been able to see only the bright side of the huge rock; now he could see the sharp line of darkness across one side.
But there was something else. . . .
He fired the bumper again to steady himself, peering into the blackness beyond the light line on the rock. He snapped on his helmet lamp, aimed the spotlight beam down to the dark rock surface. Greg and Johnny were landing now on the bright side, with Greg almost out of sight over the ‘horizon’, but Tom’s attention was focused on something he could see only now as he moved away from the asteroid surface.
His spotlight caught it—something bright and metallic, completely hidden on the dark side, lying in close to the surface but not quite on the surface. Suddenly Tom knew what it was—the braking jets of a Class I Ranger, crouching beyond the reach of sunlight in the shadow of the asteroid.
Swiftly he fired the bumper again, turning back toward the orbit ship. His hand went to the speaker switch, but he caught himself in time. Any warning shouted to Greg and Johnny would certainly be picked up by the ship. But he had to give warning somehow.
He tumbled into the airlock, searching for a flare in his web belt. It was a risk—the ranger ship might pick up the flash—but he had to take it. He was unscrewing the fuse cap from the flare when he saw Greg and Johnny leap up from the asteroid surface.
Then he saw what had alarmed them. Slowly, the ranger was moving out from its hiding place behind the rock. Tom reached out to catch Greg as he came plummeting into the lock. There was a flash from the ranger’s side, and Johnny Coombs’ voice boomed in his earphones: “Get inside! Get the lock closed, fast.”
Johnny caught the lip of the lock, dragged himself inside frantically. They were spinning the airlock door closed when they heard the thundering explosion, felt the ship lurch under their feet, and all three of them went crashing to the deck.
Chapter Five
The Black Raider
For a stunned moment they were helpless as they struggled to pick themselves up. The stable airlock deck was suddenly no longer stable. It was lurching back and forth like a row- boat on a heavy sea. They grabbed the shock bars along the bulkheads to steady themselves. “What happened?” Greg yelped. “I saw a ship—”
As if in answer there was another crash below decks, and the lurching became worse. “They’re firin’ on us, that’s what happened,” Johnny Coombs growled.
“Well, they’re shaking us loose at the seams,” Greg said. “We’ve got to get this crate out of here.” He reached for his helmet and began unsnapping his pressure suit.
“Leave it on,” Johnny snapped.
“But we can’t move fast enough in these things.”
“Leave it on all the same. If they split the hull open, you’ll be dead in ten seconds without a suit.”
Somewhere below they heard the steady clang-clang-clang of the emergency stations bell. Already one of the compartments somewhere had been breached and was pouring its air out into the vacuum of space. “But what can we do?” Greg cried. “They could tear us apart!”
“First, we see what they’ve already done,” Johnny said, spinning the wheel on the inner lock. “If they plan to tear us apart, we’re done for, but they may want to try to board us.”
The lock came open, and they started down the corridor, lurching helplessly with the ship, crashing back and forth into the bulkheads as they ran. The alarm bell continued its urgent clanging. Somewhere above they heard the wrenching grate of tortured metal as a seam gave way.
Like all orbit ships, this one had been built in space, in the form of a sphere that was never intended to enter the powerful gravitational field or the thick atmosphere of any planet Orbit ships were the work horses of space; their engines were built for friction-free maneuverability, and their spherical design provided the most storage space for the least surface area. Once placed in a desired orbit, such a ship would travel like any planetoid in its own ellipse around the sun.
For passenger and freight traffic between the planets, orbit ships were reliable and cheap. As headquarters bases for asteroid mining, they were perfect. But an orbit ship was never designed for combat. Its hull was a thin layer of aluminum alloy, held in shape by the great pressure of the artificial atmosphere inside it. It had maneuverability, but no speed. And its size—huge in comparison to the scout ships that used it for a base—made it a perfect target.
An orbit ship under fire was completely vulnerable. One well-placed shell could rip it open like a balloon.
Tom and Greg followed Johnny up the corridor between the storage holds of the outer layer, and lurched down a ladder to the middle layer where the control cabin was located. In control they found alarm lights flashing in three places on the instrument panel. Another muffled crash roared through the ship, and a new row of lights sprang on along the panel.
“How are the engines?” Greg asked, staring at the flickering lights.
“Can’t tell. Looks like they’re firing at the main jets, but they’ve ripped open three storage holds, too. They’re trying to disable us.”
“What about the Scavenger?”
Johnny checked a gauge. “The airlock compartment is all right, so the scout ships haven’t been touched. They couldn’t fire on them without splittin’ the whole ship down the middle.” He leaned forward, flipped on the view screen, and an image came into focus.
It was a Class I Ranger, and there was no doubt of its origin. Like the one they had seen berthing at the Sun Lake City racks, this ship had a glossy black hull, with the golden triangle-and-J insignia standing out in sharp relief in the dim sunlight.
“It’s our friends, all right,” Johnny said.
“But what are they trying to do?” Tom said.