The hull of the Alliance ship thunked dully under their boots, sound vibrating up her bones for lack of air.
“Let’s take a look,” she said.
“Yo.” A crewman slid a long limber rod through one of the impact holes.
She called up a miniature rectangle of vision keyed to the fiber-optic periscope, fisheye distorted but it would do. Dark, with the chilly silver look of light enhancement. A drifting corpse, legs missing at the knee where flesh and skinsuit had fought a hypervelocity missile and lost badly. Grains of freeze-dried blood still drifted brown nearby. Wrecked equipment, a very elementary-looking control system, none of the fabled Alliance high technology. Of course, they want to build these cheap and quick, she thought. The Domination had no equivalent class of vessel; the closest were unmanned freighters. The Draka economy did not produce the same set of incentives as the Alliance’s nearly laissez-faire system.
“Patch to their com,” she said. A sound of voices in some Asian-sounding language; well, everybody who could have gotten a ship command would speak English. “Y’all in there,” she said. “Surrender. Last chance.”
Silence. She shrugged, looked up at the warrior who was preparing their entranceway, made a hand signal. That one finished drawing the applicator around the shallow dome of the spacecraft’s nose.
It had left a thick trail of something that looked very much like mint toothpaste.
“Secure.” They backed off, tagged lines to protuberances on the surface. The Pathfinder was built smooth-hulled because that eased fabrication, but there were fittings aplenty. “On the three.”
“One. Two. Three.”
A flash of soundless light, and the hull flexed slightly to push her up to the limit of the line. Then the cap of steel was floating away, dark against the mirror-bright surface of the sail; it would strike it, before the film could sweep away on the breeze from the Sun. The warrior nearest the giant circular hole freed a grenade from her belt and tossed it in, a flat straight line like nothing that could be done planetside. There was another pulse of light.
“Storm!” Yolande shouted, and the Draka slid forward, throwing themselves into the hole.
Thung. Yolande twirled in midleap to land feet first on the deck. A figure in a foil-covered skinsuit was thrashing, ripped by the shards from the grenade; his blood sprayed out, and she could see the scream behind his transparent bubble helmet. Her eyes skipped, jittering. Another Alliance suit, rising from behind a spindly crashcouch, something gripped in both hands. The red dot pivoted toward him, but before she could fire the man’s torso exploded in a corona of red and pinkish white. The bullets from a reaction gun were tungsten monofilament in a glass sabot; they punched through hard targets, but underwent explosive deformation in soft.
“Shit,” she swore, seeing the rank-tabs on the man’s shoulders. “That was the captain.” Yolande batted a lump of floating something away from her faceplate with a grimace; zero-G combat was messy. Two others were zipping the wounded man into an airbag and doing what crude first aid they could.
“Labushange, Melder, stay here. Pull the compcore and see if y’ can patch through to log memory. Anderson, take the door.” That was a hatch in the middle of the floor. “Pressure-lock it.”
The warrior knelt and focused on the door, calling up a schematic to show the vulnerable spots in his faceplate. Two others peeled the covering off the base ring of a plastic tent and slapped it adhesive-down on the deck around the hatch. The lochos stepped inside, zipping it over their heads.
“Got it,” Anderson grunted. “Ready?”
“Go,” she snapped.
He locked his boots to the deck and pointed the gauntlet gun. It flashed twice, and translucent confetti drifted back to join the particles already rising out of the hole above their head, mixed with a haze of blood. The deck sparked with impact and glittered with a new plating of molten glass, and there was the blue flicker of discharge. Yolande kicked the lockbar of the door; it slammed down with blurring speed, and air roared in to bulge the tent over their heads.
“Bulala!” she shrieked, and dove through the opening into light.
* * *
“Shhh,” Cindy said again.
There had been sounds, clanging, shouts, screams, a sharp ptank-tank rapping she could not identify, even pistol shots. I wish I had taken the gun, she thought desperately. She had had the usual personal-defense training in school, though her National Service had been in the research branch; even the worn old high school submachine gun would have been something . . .
Probably just enough to get us all killed, she thought bleakly. Even worse was the knowledge that that might be the best thing.
The locking bar of the door moved a half-inch back and forth. She started, then unstrapped the children and pushed them back into the farthest corner of the cabin, bracing herself in front of them with her arms across the angle of the wall. There was silence for a second, then a bright needle of flame spat from beside the door. It swung open; she had a brief glimpse of the boot that kicked it, before a thin black stick poked in. A figure bounced through two seconds afterward and stopped itself with one expert footblow against the far wall. The fluted muzzle of a weapon fastened to the right arm pointed at her; she crowded her daughters farther behind her body.
Another head came through the doorway, then a body likewise strapped around with pieces of equipment. They were both in skinsuits and some sort of flexible armor that was a dull matte black, but a line of silver brightness showed along a scratch on one’s chest. She swallowed through a mouth the consistency of dry rice paper and tried to keep her face from twisting. Then they unlatched their helmets and pushed them back against their backpacks.
The first Draka she had ever seen in the flesh. For a moment she was surprised that they looked so much like the pictures. These two were both men, young, hair cropped close at the sides and slightly longer on top. One had a stud earring, the other a rayed sunburst painted about an eye—hard faces, scarcely affected by the usual zero-G puffiness, all slabs and angles, almost gaunt. The first one spoke, in a purring drawl hurtfully reminiscent of her mother’s . . . No, more archaic sounding, with a guttural undertone.
“All cleah.” That into the thread-and-dot microphone that curved up from the neck ring of his suit. “Yes, suh, these’re the last. We’ll get ’em secured an’ up to the lounge.”
“You,” he said. “Out of the skinsuit. The picknins, too.”
The words flowed over her mind without meaning. Can’t be, can’t be, was sounding somewhere inside her. Bad movie.
“Shit,” the man said in a tired voice; it sounded more like “shaay’t.” He reached across to do something to the weapon, and a red dot sprang out on the wall beside her head. It settled on her forehead for a moment, then shifted to the outer surface.
Bang-ptank! A hole the breadth of her thumb flashed into existence in the steel, and there was a shower of something flakey and glittering from behind his elbow. A brief whistling of air, before the self-sealing layer in the hull blocked it off. The red dot settled between her eyes again.
“To t’ count a’ three, wench: One. Two—”
Trembling slightly, her hands went to the seals of her suit, then hesitated. My god, I’m only wearing briefs under this. The Draka made a gesture of savage impatience, and she stripped out of the clinging elastomer. “Help the picknin,” he snapped.