The minute nods of shocked acceptance confirmed Comonec’s victory, and his body flushed with the exquisite pleasure of the win. “Right. Let’s get on with it, shall we? Andreesen family first. Please come up.”
Slowly and reluctantly, a man, his face gray with shock, barely able to control the trembling that shook his body, stood up, closely followed by a woman and two children who seemed catatonic, so slow were they to move.
“Come on. Please hurry. We won’t hurt you.”
Thirty minutes later it was Sam’s turn. No matter where she looked, she couldn’t see her mother, and she was almost frantic with worry. Oh, please God, let Mom be okay, she prayed desperately as heart-pounding panic rose in waves, threatening to overwhelm her.
“Helfort, Kerri and Samantha.”
Sam rose to her feet, and as she did, she saw her mother, way across the room, rise to her feet also. “Oh, Mom,” she sobbed, “thank God you’re all right.”
They came together at the front of the room. Sam was trembling visibly, tear-filled eyes spilling glistening wet tracks down a face ash-gray with shock and stress as she tried to avoid the blood pooled across the carpet, her head turned away from the shattered bodies of what had once been ordinary people like her. Her mother took Sam’s hand and started to embrace her, to tell her everything would be fine and not to worry, but Comonec stepped forward.
“Later, later. There’ll be time for that later,” he said, pushing them through the door with a brutal roughness completely at odds with his comforting assurances that all would be well.
As Kerri and Sam stumbled through the door and out of sight of the remaining passengers, strong hands grabbed them. Sam started to panic again, and even as that panic spurred her into a last desperate attempt to escape, a gas-powered inoculation gun was jammed into her neck, with only a brief puff of high-pressure air and a short stabbing pain that was gone almost before she could feel it to mark the injection.
“Oh, God,” she sobbed. What were they doing to her? Fear turned to terror as the terrible thought that this was the end hit her. With a horrible sense of the inevitable, she realized that it all made ghastly good sense. What good was she to the hijackers? None, none at all. Even as a creeping gray fog started to overwhelm her, she reached out to her mother, who was still struggling desperately to keep a gas gun-wielding hijacker at bay. But to no effect. Even as Kerri Helfort took Sam’s outstretched hand, the gas gun hit home.
“Mom,” Sam croaked, her voice strangled into an in-choherent croak. “Mom, help me.”
“Sam, Sam,” her mother said, her voice fast being choked off by whatever the hijackers had just pumped into her. “Sam, listen to me. This is just something to keep us quiet, so don’t worry. It’ll be okay, I promise.”
Sam nodded, and then the gray fog overwhelmed her. As her grip on reality began to slip away, the last thing she could hear was her mother muttering to herself: “I knew there was something wrong with those bastards. You should have trusted your instincts, and none of this would have happened. You old fool. You…”
And then the fog claimed her.
Three hours later, as the Zanussi family disappeared through the door, Comonec felt the last traces of tension seep out of him.
They had done it. By God, they had done it.
Over a thousand crew members and passengers brought under control by just thirty men. And no casualties. Well, none on his team, anyway. He hoped that the faceless man who’d commissioned the mission didn’t get too upset about the Mumtazers who’d gotten in his way. The man, had been rather insistent, very insistent, in fact, that the job be done without anyone getting hurt.
“Well, screw him, whoever he is,” Comonec muttered. The entire exercise had been a work of extreme professionalism, even if he said so himself, and his unknown sponsor was just going to have to see it the same way. What did a few damn Fed lives matter, anyway?
He turned and strode through the door to see the unfortunate Zanussi family moving like zombies back to their cabins. A wonderful drug that Pavulomin-V, he thought, even if being caught with it was a federal offense punishable by ten years in jail. He now had an entire mership’s worth of people who would do everything and anything they were told to do without a moment’s hesitation or argument.
Leaving instructions to have the bodies disposed of, Comonec commed his section leaders to meet him on the bridge. He had a rendezvous to make, and he intended to be there on schedule. Nothing was going to get in the way of the big fat juicy pile of anonymous cash that was now his by rights.
Saturday, September 12, 2398, UD
DLS-387, Revelation-III Nearspace
For sheer, unremitting pressure, the days since 387 had dropped into Hammer space safely behind the hulking black mass of Revelation-III, a J-Class planet orbiting 7.5 billion kilometers out from its sun, had been like nothing Michael had experienced before.
Apart from doing Ribot’s endless sims, the only real work Michael and his team had had to do was to launch the surveillance drone nicknamed Bonnie to jump a day ahead of 387 and, they hoped, if there were any nasty surprises, to let 387 know in advance. But apart from an unusually large number of Hammer ships close to Hell’s Moons, Bonnie hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, though as Michael reminded himself, Bonnie’s capabilities against stealth warships weren’t good-her sensor baselines were too short-so anything could happen. But at least the microjump was on.
Now, two and a half days outward bound from Revelation-III, 387 was running in a gentle parabola through the fabric of space-time at over 300,000 kph, and you could cut the tension with a knife. Michael, like everyone else, wanted to get on with it, and he cursed the delays as Holdorf and Mother fine-tuned and fine-tuned 387’s alignment and vector to get it ready for the 1.5-billion-kilometer microjump that would drop them safely just over 18 million kilometers from Revelation-II.
For Michael, the pressure was doubled by the knowledge that two of the people he most loved in the world would be so close, if only for a brief few hours. Because he was a rational person, it was easy for him to accept that what he was doing was giving them their best chance of coming through this nightmare alive. But at the emotional level, Michael felt like crawling off into a dark corner and howling out his fear and anxiety.
As the jump approached, the ship was at general quarters, with every system online, every station manned, and every hatch and door firmly shut. Michael and his team stood in the drone hangar fully suited up, helmets on but visors open, ready to cope with the usual aftermath of the upcoming jump. Needless to say, Bienefelt had been her usually chatty self, pointing out in suitably grave tones to Michael how much worse a microjump was than a normal pinchspace jump. It was obvious, she had said, if one thought about it. In the space of a second or so the ship first jumped into and then dropped out of pinchspace, so it was bound to be twice as bad as a normal jump. Michael tried not to think about it and just stood there, hunched over like the rest of his team, in his own private world of despair, waiting for the damn thing to happen. The idea that they might actually meet a Hammer warship almost appealed to him. At least they might get to kill a few of the fuckers.
“All stations, this is command. We are go for pinchspace microjump in one minute. Command out.”