"All in a few hours," Bruno replied. "No way.”
He reached across and touched Carol's hand. His own fingers still didn't want to move, and felt old and clumsy.
"How did you get everybody out of the suspension chambers into the cargo bay?" he asked, tilting his head toward the sealed door at the rear of the tiny cabin.
Carol looked down at her console and said nothing.
"You left them," Bruno said flatly.
She nodded, still looking down. "There wasn't any choice,”
Carol replied calmly, her captain voice surfacing again. The deepening lines on her face showed what that decision had cost her. Bruno's head whirled He and Carol had known all twenty-nine of the men and women in coldsleep.
Trained with them, drunk with them, argued with them, studied with them. They all had names, hobbies, favorite drinks, games. Now they were ratcat food.
Carol whistled through her teeth tunelessly for a moment, then reached over and squeezed his shoulder. "Bruno," she said seriously, "you know perfectly well that I couldn't have saved them. And they will be avenged very soon.”
It occurred to Bruno that Carol had made decisions like this many times in the past, during her Second Wave piloting, and as a Third Wave squadron commander. Decisions that saved or took lives. "Does it ever get easier?" he asked, finally.
She knew what Bruno meant. "You remember each one of them, every waking moment of your life." He sighed. Gingerly, he forced slow and shaky fingers into a dataglove and looked carefully at the holoscreen. He had to – Suddenly, Bruno looked over at the coiled and clipped interface cable at the side of the control console.
He felt something tear in his mind and heart. What if I can't Link anymore? Bruno thought wildly. His heart seemed to hammer in his chest, and he took several deep breaths to calm himself. Give it time, he repeated over and over again to himself, like a mantra.
"What is it?" Carol asked, trying not to notice where Bruno had been looking. "Nothing," he said harshly. "Could you please bring me up to date?" Carol took the hint and walked him through the status windows. He was still mentally slow, but he could follow the events since the EMP bomb had hit the Sun-Tzu. Linked, I could – He shoved the thought out of his mind, and focused his attention on the small holoscreens above the main console. Ordered arrays of numbers marched across his line of sight, complex diagrams flowed and blinked; sterile representations of their life-and-death situation. Their lives as a column of glowing numbers. After a few moments, Bruno turned to Carol. Their situation looked grim. Bruno spoke first. "Are we going to be far enough away from Sun-Tzu when the confinement fields fail?" "I don't know," she replied, her tone just as even as Bruno's. "I think that we can cycle back some of the power from the superconductive wings into a makeshift magnetic umbrella. That'll take care of the charged particles." "What about the gamma?”
Carol smiled without humor. "We'll just have to take our chances with the prompt effects, shipmate.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rrowl-Captain equalized pressures and popped open his helmet. The rank, moist odor of monkeys too long confined thickened the darkness around him, swarming into his wide nostrils.
He controlled the urge to spit in distaste, and tried to breathe through his mouth.
Other Heroes of the boarding party were floating just inside the alien airlock, waiting respectfully for the captain of Belly-Slasher to signal them. At his hiss of permission, they opened their own helmets. Rrowl-Captain could hear the snarls of disgust at the humid jungle smells in the tunnel, like a Jotoki biome. The only light was from their helmet lamps. Sounds echoed harshly in the gloom, then faded away to a damp silence.
He shifted his grip on the fragile primate handholds and looked around the access tunnel. Blank and featureless walls, empty except for the long ladders and equipment docks he could see by helmet light. He snarled a hissing swearword at the monkeys' lack of gravity-polarizer technology. Primitives!
Alien-Technologist had used an echo-thumper to determine that atmosphere existed inside the outer hatch at the bow of the derelict monkeyship. The crewkzin then erected a sealed bubbledome around the airlock, and cut through the thick metal with heavy lasers, revealing the long dark access tunnel.
No trap-bombs, no cowardly monkey tricks.
Rrowl-Captain, as Dominant Leader, was first to set claw and fang inside the alien spacecraft. His victory, his prize.
The captain snarled orders, and crewkzin anchored powerful search lamps near the power feed that had been snaked through the airlock. Reassuring orange light blazed down the long access tunnel, banishing the darkness into small shadows. Rrowl-Captain could see the glint of another airlock far, far away in the darkness.
With a start, he tightened his grip on the monkey handhold as his perspective suddenly shifted. The tunnel pointed down, his alarmed reflexes informed him. He and his crew appeared to be hanging precariously at the top of a very long vertical tunnel. It did not matter to his brain, evolved on a planet, that the contra-matter reaction drive was providing only a tiny proportion of gravitational acceleration at present. It did not matter that the captain intellectually knew that he would not plummet like a stone down the shaft, but would drift like a bit of fluff combed from his pelt.
Kzin feared falling.
"Alien-Technologist," he rasped, mastering his fear after several deep breaths.
The kzin made an awkward microgravity leap to Rrowl-Captain's side from across the tunnel, using a reaction pistol judiciously, and snapped a suit bolt onto a nearby crossbar. The captain was impressed, but refused to show it.
"Command me," Alien-Technologist said without bravado, clearly as nervous in the tunnel as his captain.
"Lead your party to the inner airlock and secure this monkeyship.”
"At once, Dominant One!”
Rrowl-Captain watched with grudging admiration as the octal of Heroes under Alien-Technologist's command rappelled down the tunnel. The figures in space armor swiftly became smaller as they descended, using secured lines and reaction pistols.
Lifting one wrist, he clumsily punched up the shipboard commlink with gloved fingers. Static hissed and fizzed in his ears.
"Command me!" growled-and-spat the low reply from Navigator on the command bridge.
"Status.”
"The monkeyship continues to operate as before. Drone remotes have been dispatched to all major sectors of the outer hull." Navigators tone sounded confident and full of Heroic pride. "No sign of traps or trickery.”
"Open a telemetry channel to my portable thinplate.”
"At once!" came Navigator's reply.
Rrowl-Captain unfolded his personal thinplate and accessed data downloaded from Belly-Slasher. Status reports stalked one another across the thinplate under the captain's gaze. The alien spacecraft was indeed running as if derelict with only the contra-matter drive and magnetic field arrays operational. No beacons, no navigational control.
He spent some time reviewing the data, running a tongue over his sharp teeth in thought, waiting for the remote drones to complete their scans.
"Dominant One," crackled his headset in Alien Technologist's voice, "we have secured the alien ship as you commanded.”
"Did you find monkey bodies?”
"Yes," came the reply with a pleased growl. "We have found nearly four octals of the humans in artificial hibernation." There was a pause. "The maintenance subsystems appear to be both intact and functional.”
Rrowl-Captain knew what Alien-Technologist was thinking Fresh, living monkey meat. Saliva washed his fangs in anticipation. He rasped his rough tongue across thin black lips. Ship rations were not always pleasing to a Noble Hero's palate. Still, first things first.
"Do you mean that this ship was piloted by machines?”
"All hibernation couches are occupied.”
Rrowl-Captain wanted to stretch his batwing ears in confusion and not a little suspicion. The monkeys relied very heavily indeed on untrustworthy automation, true. But to leave such a fearsome reaction drive under automated control smacked of madness.