Silence that rang and stretched, with her eyes locked to the honey brown of the prisoner’s. “Answer me!” Yolande touched the cutter bar to the other’s cheek. Skin and flesh parted, a long shallow cut; blood rilled out, misting across her eyes. Carefully, carefully. The other woman gasped, but did not move. “Answer me.”
“I don’t know.”
Yolande moved the cutter to the other cheek, sliced the same controlled depth. “Because being dead doesn’t hurt. It’s in livin’ that there’s pain, wench.” Another silence. “Do you understand? I’m leavin’ you here. Lots of space. Plenty of water. Air system’s good fo’ two months, easy, an’ they should be here, so’ you in, oh, minimum three weeks, maximum seven. You can even leave, if’n walkin’ buck naked in vacuum doesn’t bother you.”
“But, but, how shall I feed my children?” the other asked.
Yolande forced herself not to look at the slight drifting forms, pushed the image of Gwen’s face aside. Instead she smiled, and saw the American flinch as she had not at the touch of the knife.
“Try the meat locker!” she shouted, and leapt for the exit.
Twenty-nine days later, Colonel Frederick Lefarge was the first of the boarding party from the Ethan Allen through the airlock of the Pathfinder. His eyes met those of his wife.
They screamed.
Chapter Fourteen
BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF EARTH AND MARS
ABOARD DASCS SUBOTAI
JUNE 30, 1982
“Makin’ remarkable progress, Merarch-Professor,” Yolande said. They were teleconferencing, and the astroengineer was suited up; she could see segments of construction material behind him.
He waved a dismissive hand. “These are the heat dispersers,” he said. Composite honeycomb sandwich, laced with superconductor on the interior, the same system that pulsedrive ships used; superconductors had the additional useful property of maintaining a uniform temperature throughout. Of course, this was a pulsedrive, it just used fusion bombs instead of ten-gram pellets. “We should start assembling the thrust plate soon.”
Yolande linked through a view of Hangar B; the near-motionless forms of the prisoners were arranged in neat rows around the shrouded equipment. Skinsuited Auxiliaries were hosing the area down and hauling off the inert bodies; it had gotten quite noisome, with sixty drugged humans and a week’s worth of high-G boost.
“We got you some additional labor,” she said. “I know they don’t look like much, but most of them have trainin’ in zero-G construction an’ so forth. We’ll have to give a few to the headhunter to disassemble, of course.”
“Good, perhaps it will keep him away from me,” the scientist said, with an obscene gesture for any possible monitors.
“We’ll put controller cuffs on them, maybe minimal-dosage dociline,” Yolande continued. “You’ll have to supervise them closely, but it ought to come out positive.”
“Certainly. Hmmm, what to do with them when the project is completed?”
“Oh . . . take them back to Luna, I suppose. Maybe the political people can trade them off fo’ somethin’, or we can just sell them.” Alliance-born serfs had a substantial curiosity value, for their rarity. “Hand them out as souvenirs, whatevah.”
“Not to mention hostage value,” her executive officer said. “Too much Yankee heavy iron in the Belt, fo’ my taste.”
Yolande chuckled. “Well, there are enough of our units further out,” she said.
“Long ways off.”
“Not so far as you might think,” she said, and laid a finger along her nose. “Between you, me an’ the Strategic Planning Board, there are a few surprises fo’ the damnyanks in this. Fo’ one, we’ve got high-impulse orbital boost lasers in the Jovian system, which we’re pretty sure they don’t know ’bout. Multiple strap-ons, hey? If’n the damnyanks move, our cruisers can leave station around Himalia, boost on strap-ons with low mass.” A pulsedrive ship could make much better acceleration with less reaction mass in her tanks—while the fuel lasted. “Do a quick-and-dirty burn to Mars orbit, arrivin’ with dry tanks.”
She called up a map of orbital positions. “An’ notice, just right fo’ a quick stopover at Phobos to fill up? So unless the damnyanks is willin’ to get here empty, leavin’ them between us and the outer fleet, with nothin’ to maneuver with—in which case we’d wipe them, then proceed to mop up the Belt piece by piece—they just naturally have to keep their iron floatin’ out there by Ceres and Pallas.”
“Ah,” the exec mused. “Nice. That still leaves them with three Hero-class here in the inner system, though.”
“Update?”
“Ethan Allen still boostin’ fo’ the Pathfinder like there was no tomorrow.” He frowned. “Faster than we could, unless they’re burnin’ out their thrust plates.”
“Well, the Heros have the legs on a Great Khan, but we’ve got mo’ firepower. Anyways, that’ll put her out of the picture fo’ a whiles. The two in Earth orbit, we may have to see off. Note we’re floatin’ next to a fuel depot, though. Also, I’ve got a few ideas ’bout usin’ some of our industrial equipment. Reminds me, staff conference fo’ 1200 tomorrow, we’ll go ovah it. Three weeks to encounter, minimum. Wants you there, too, Professor.”
“Service to the State,” he said formally.
“Glory to the Race,” the two officers answered.
Yolande yawned. “Time to turn in, Number Two,” she said rising from the crashcouch.
“Just one thing, ma’am,” he murmured as she passed his station; the offwatch was handling the bridge, minimum staff.
“Yes?”
“Back there . . . when you saw those bodies come out the airlock, I was set up for a minimal-burn boost back to the flotilla. You took us on a max speed trajectory, got us here dry. That was like hangin’ up a big sign ovah the whole system pointin’ to the Pathfinder. Why do it that way, ma’am?”
Yolande glanced at her fingernails. “Oh, better tactics. Impo’tant not to leave the object unguarded.” She thought again of the sleeping faces of the two children. Yankee children, she reminded herself again, but . . . “Or call it as close as I could get to changin’ my mind.”
* * *
“Status,” Yolande said.
“Unchanged,” the Sensor Officer said. “No relative motion.”
“Good.” An odd situation to describe as static, she thought ironically. Bass-ackwards to the end of beyond.
Not too untypical of a space-warship action, though. She looked at the screens again. An exterior view would have shown nothing but bright dots moving against the fixed stars, if that . . . The battle schematic was much more accurate. A fixed dot, the asteroid; the regular five-minute pulses of its monstrous drive flaring back toward Earth. The flame was only partly shaped by the magnetic fields of the thrust plate; those forces were still too vast and wild for Earth’s children, and it hid a good deal behind it from most sensors. An excellent place for her to conceal the vulnerable transports.
Yolande grinned like a shark in the darkness of the command center. Subotai and Batu were falling back toward the flotilla, with the two Alliance cruisers in pursuit; all on free-fall trajectories, with their thrust plates presented to the enemy. That was the most heavily armored portion of a pulsedrive ship, built to withstand near-miss nuclear explosions. And the drive was the most dangerous weapon in itself; chasing a deep-space warship was a chancy proposition, since getting too close would mean self-incineration. Once you got within a certain distance, in a one-on-one there was virtually no choice but to flip end for end and coast until something changed the situation. You could disengage, of course, but that meant backing off and freeing your opponent from the menace of the nuclear sword.