We slipped through the locks, one after another. As we broke into open space, the pilot flipped a switch to shut off the runner lights.
“Leave ’em on,” I said.
“Are you out of your …”
I swatted his soft-shell helmet with my pistol again. I did not hit him hard, nothing that would give him a concussion; but I certainly hit him with enough force to make a lasting impression.
Looking out into space, I tried to figure out our position in relationship to Warshaw’s map. “Does this bird have any more lights?”
“No, sir,” the pilot said. He sounded suitably scared.
I could see the shapes of the wrecks against the stars, but they meant nothing to me. With no other choice, I called Warshaw over the interLink, not entirely sure he would read me now that I had left the ship.
After seconds of silence, he answered. “Harris. What the hell are you doing?” he asked, his voice filled with curiosity and disdain. He did not like me, but he did not think I was running away. “If you give away our position, I will …”
“I’m not giving away your position, dipshit, I am giving away my position,” I said.
“You won’t be able to outrun those ships if they spot you,” Warshaw said.
“I don’t want to outrun them.
“Harris, you don’t have any guns.”
“But you do,” I said.
“I did not authorize …”
“Yeah, can we discuss that later?” I asked.
21:54:51
“Where do you want the damn ships?” Franks was going to return in another five minutes and nine seconds, and Warshaw wanted to talk about who did or did not authorize my flight. What an ass.
“You’re thirty-five miles out of position,” Warshaw said. Things went quiet. At first I thought he had abandoned me, then I realized he was explaining the lay of the land to my pilot.
As I waited for him to come back, the glowing figure of a battleship came around a hull and filled our windshield. Suddenly, I felt like a very small fish in a very large pond.
“Shit,” my pilot said.
I started to tell him to get us out of there, but he figured it out on his own. He swung the transport into a forty-five-degree rotation that pointed us toward a narrow passage between two wrecks and hit the boosters. Had I been floating beside the copilot’s seat, I would have been thrown back against the rear of the cockpit. I grabbed the seat in time to save myself.
“You probably should strap in, sir,” the pilot said. I heard something unexpected in his voice: concern. As I struggled to pull myself into the chair, the pilot did me another kindness—he switched on the gravity generator. That shifted the center of gravity from the rear of the ship to the bottom. Gs still pulled at my back, but I was able to sit down and buckle myself in.
For a moment, the only thing I could see through the windshield was the hulls of destroyed ships, but then a trace of golden glow appeared along the top edge of the windshield.
“Watch out,” I said, pointing toward the ship.
“There’s another one behind us,” the pilot said.
The beam of a searchlight rolled along the alley ahead of us, questing to touch us, lighting the dark hulls of the ships wrecked long ago. Fortunately for us, radar would do no good in this floating junkyard. They would need to spot us to shoot us.
“Hold on, sir.”
The nose of the transport dropped, and the entire ship seemed to somersault over itself. Suddenly, we were rocketing in a completely new direction. Had I been standing, I would have been slammed into the windshield, then rolled around the cabin.
For a moment I saw nothing but stars, but then a glowing hull slid into view. The pilot cut a sharp right and took us behind another wreck.
Not realizing anyone was listening in, I said, “What I’d give for a torpedo.”
“You wouldn’t want to do that, sir. Some of these wrecks are unstable,” the pilot answered.
“How unstable?”
“That’s why they haven’t fired at us yet, they don’t want to trigger a chain reaction.”
Fuel, uranium reactors, oxygen, unexploded torpedoes …all of a sudden, I realized my own naïveté. I had boarded these death traps with the nonchalance of a Marine in a china shop.
“Warshaw?” I called, and got no answer. Specking great. I was out here in an unarmed transport with three uber-ships hunting me down, and I lost contact with Warshaw.
“Warshaw, goddamnit, where are you?”
There was no answer.
“Where do we go, sir?” the pilot asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Warshaw set up a trap, but I have no idea where it is.”
The pilot did not answer me. Maybe he had given up, too. Seconds ticked by. Then, with an abrupt change of direction, we headed into a narrow gap between two ships. The pilot must have reached somebody.
“Are we headed toward the trap?” I asked.
“It’s the other way, but we don’t have any choice. They cut us off.”
21:55:28
If Franks came back in on time, he would arrive in less than five minutes. He might be late, that would be a reprieve. He could also arrive early, while we were still playing cat and mouse with the battleships. Maybe he would save us, or maybe he would die trying, and I would spend the rest of my life trapped in a floating graveyard orbiting the planet on which so many Marines had died.
“You better get us there quick,” I said.
“They’ve got us hemmed in on every side, sir,” the pilot said. Then, with desperation in his voice, he added, “Don’t hit me with that gun. For God’s sake, please don’t hit me again!”
“Just get us there,” I yelled.
“As long as we stay close to the big wrecks, they aren’t going to shoot,” the pilot chanted. “They aren’t going to shoot.” He made a sharp turn, then darted under the bulbous bow of a derelict battleship. I caught a glimpse of the jagged edges of a torn hull.
“They won’t shoot,” the pilot repeated. He had to make the transport twist and drop to avoid an outcropping where two of the wrecks had drifted into each other. Transports were not designed for maneuverability. Behind us, the walls of the kettle groaned with every turn.
As we snaked our way between the demolished wreckage of the Mogat Fleet, a U.A. battleship closed in beside us. For a brief moment it was no more than a thousand yards away, and it kept its distance, like a cat waiting for a mouse to leave its hole.
“We have to get across there.” The pilot pointed in the direction of the ship.
I looked at the empty stretch ahead, knowing that we would be an easy target the moment we entered it. We could not continue straight ahead, a ship blocked our way. “Cut your engines,” I said.
“What?” asked the pilot.
“Cut your engines and put up your shields.”
The wing of a dead capital ship stretched out, just at the edge of my vision.
“We’ll hit that ship,” the pilot said.
“Yeah, it’s called the element of surprise,” I said.
“Plowing into that wreck shield first could set off an explosion,” he reminded me.
“You see any other options?” I asked.
“Hold on tight.”
The transport did not slow when the pilot cut its thrusters, it slid forward at that same speed. I braced myself in my seat, helpless, as we drifted toward the wreck. We came in at an angle, skimming off the giant wing like a stone skipping water, the blue-white pane of our front shields shimmering like lightning in the darkness and once again becoming invisible.
The momentum would have bucked me out of my chair if not for the straps holding me in my seat. There were no fires or explosions inside our ship, transports were made to take worse beatings than this.
The collision did not rebound us in the direction we wanted to go, but at least the ricochet sent us in a different direction than the big battleship. Leaning into the windshield, I watched the glowing, shielded hull of the battleship as it drifted away.
Fast and large and flying in a frictionless field, the U.A. ship was unable to turn sharply and follow us. Instead, it fired its particle-beam cannons at us. One of the green beams missed us entirely. The other glanced off the shields around the cockpit.