"A feedline broke!" Tuching, an engine crewman, shouted.
Lightbody steered toward the captured freighter again. He had to struggle with the shredded tire and Piet squirming to sit up on Stephen's lap beside him.
The wreckage of the cutter fell back from the Yellowknife. The warship's bow was dished in and blackened; smoky flames shot from an open gunport.
A green-white flash lifted the Yellowknife's stern centimeters off the ground. The CRACK! of the explosion was lightning-sharp and as loud as the end of the world. The van spun a three-sixty, either from the shock wave or because Lightbody twitched convulsively in surprise.
We straightened and wobbled the last hundred meters to the freighter waiting for us with the main hatch open. "Not a feedline," Piet said in rich satisfaction. "An injector came adrift and they tried to run their auxiliary power plant without cooling. They'll play hell getting that ship in shape to chase us!"
I suppose Guillermo was at the controls of the captured vessel, for she started to lift while Piet and the rest of us were still in the entry hold.
If the three remaining laser batteries had human crews, they might have shot us out of the sky. Molts didn't assume in a crisis that anything moving was an enemy.
Therefore we survived.
ST. LAWRENCE
Day 319
We watched the double line of prisoners dragging the thruster nozzle on a sledge from the captured freighter, the 17 Abraxis, to the gully where Salomon had landed the Oriflamme. The Molts-there were thirty-one of them-chanted a tuneless, rhythmic phrase.
Two of the freighter's human crew had been wounded during the capture. The remaining ten were silent, but they at least gave the impression of putting their weight against the ropes. Lightbody and Loomis, watching with shotguns, wouldn't have killed a captured Fed for slacking; but at least in Lightbody's case, that's because Piet had given strict orders about how to treat the prisoners.
Lightbody's perfect universe would contain no living idolaters; Jeude's death had made him even less tolerant than he was at the start of the voyage. The Fed captives were wise not to try his forbearance.
"Rakoscy says the communications officer is going to pull through," Piet remarked. "I was worried about that."
"That Fed worried me about other things than him taking a bullet through the chest," I said. I wasn't angry-or frightened, now. Neither had I forgotten driving across the spaceport under fire because the commo officer of 17 Abraxis had gotten off an alarm message before Dole shot him out of his console.
The gully contained vegetation and a little standing water, and the defilade location saved the Oriflamme from exhaust battering when Piet brought our prize in close by. Though the air was only warm, the sun was a huge red curtain on the eastern sky. That sight wouldn't change until the stellar corona engulfed St. Lawrence: the planet had stopped rotating on its axis millions of years before.
"He was doing his job," Stephen said mildly. "Pretty good at it, too. There aren't so many men like that around that I'd want to lose one more."
"Fortunately," Piet added with a smile, "the staff of the Yellowknife hadn't plotted the vessels on the ground at Corpus Christi, so they didn't have any idea which ship was under attack."
We were in the permanent shade of four stone pillars, the fossilized thighbones of a creature that must in life have weighed twenty tonnes if not twice that. The bones had weathered out of the softer matrix rock, but they too were beginning to crumble away from the top.
I turned my head to gaze at the tower of black stone. "Hard to imagine anything so big roaming this place," I said. Vegetation now grew only in low points like the arroyo, and we hadn't found any animal larger than a fingernail.
"A long time ago," Stephen said with emphasis. "Who knows? Maybe they developed space travel and emigrated ten million years back."
"Put your backs in it, you cocksucking whoresons," came the faint fury of Winger's voice from the underside of 17 Abraxis, "or as Christ is my witness, you'll still be here when your fucking beards are down to your knees!"
Piet frowned at the blasphemy (obscenity didn't bother him), but the men were far enough away that he must have decided he could overlook it. The job of removing thruster nozzles-without dockyard tools-after they'd been torqued into place by use was just as difficult as Winger had grumbled it would be when we were on Clapperton.
"They've got seven," Stephen said quietly. "This last one and we're out of here."
"If we don't take spares," I said, deliberately turning my head toward the Oriflamme to avoid Piet's eyes.
He glared at me anyway. "The prisoners can get back to Riel on four out of twelve thrusters," he said. "They can't get back on two. We aren't going to leave forty-three men here on the chance that somebody will come by before they all starve."
Twelve humans and thirty-one Molts. All of them "men" to Piet, and you'd best remember it when you spoke in his hearing.
"You could manage on two, Piet," Stephen said with a grin. "I'll bet you could take her home on one, though I guess we'd have to gut the hull to get her out of the gravity well to begin with."
I knew Stephen was joking to take the sting out of Piet's rebuke to me. I'd promised Winger that I'd try to get him a spare nozzle, though.
Piet chuckled and squeezed my hand. "All things are possible with the Lord, Stephen," he said, "but I wouldn't care to put him to that test. And, Jeremy-"
He sobered.
"— I appreciate what you've tried to do. I know the motor crew is concerned about the wear we'll get from tungsten, and they have a right to be. But if these nozzles don't last us, we'll find further replacements along the way. We won't leave men to die."
I nodded. I looked up at the femur of a creature more ancient than mankind and just possibly more ancient than Earth. Black stone, waiting for the sun to devour it.
A tiny, intense spark shone in the sky where the thigh pointed. I jumped to my feet.
"There's a-"
"Incoming vessel!" Piet bellowed as he rose from a seated position to a dead run in a single fluid motion. "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! If she crashes, it could be anywhere!"
Stephen and I followed at our best speed, but Piet was aboard the Oriflamme while we were still meters from the cockpit steps.
"This is close enough," Stephen ordered, dropping into a squat a hundred meters from the strange vessel's starboard side. "This swale doesn't look like much, but it'll deflect their exhaust if they try to fry us. Can't imagine anything else we need to worry about, but don't get cocky."
Piet and the rest of us knelt beside him. Stephen, commander of his county's militia before he ever set foot on a starship, was giving the orders for the moment.
Dole's ten men were still jogging to where they'd have an angle on the stranger's bow. Fifty-tonne freighters built like this one on the Back Worlds weren't likely to have hatches both port and starboard, but we weren't taking the risk.
Stampfer was half a kilometer behind us, aligning the 4-cm plasma weapon 17 Abraxis carried for use against Chay raiders. The Oriflamme's guns were useless while she was in the gully. Salomon, Winger, and the bulk of the crew weren't going to be ready her to lift for an hour or more despite desperate measures.
"You'd think," I said, "that they'd have signaled they were coming in."