Marque and Reprisal (33 page)

“Enemy aboard,” she said. “Everyone get your suits sealed; section seals coming down.” Her implant showed who was where… scattered, since she’d given them permission to relax from the first alert. Two in the head, one in the galley, some at duty stations, some in their bunks. The icons moved now, but not quickly enough… the section seals came down, securing them wherever they were, with whatever weapons they had in hand at the moment.

“Expect decompression,” she said. It was the simplest way for the enemy to disable them; they were probably rigging a way to shut the ship up again quickly. She herself was now cut off from the bridge, from her cabin, from the other mines in cargo 3; the elegant little handgun she’d bought at Lastway, loaded now with frangibles, was the only weapon she had. Other than the one between her ears.

That one stopped her before she entered the last stretch of the passage to the air lock, still out of sight of the enemy. Her implant’s display gave her a visual of the air lock… two figures in pressure suits. What blocked the outer hatch was a suit of space armor, apparently immobile. Through the implant controls, she zoomed the image. Inside the faceplate of the armor, a ghastly image—a face blue-gray, mouth open, eyes wide with horror, dulled with death. She changed the focus of the pickup, and saw that the two pressure-suited figures were indeed working on the inner hatch, attaching the ends of a hydraulic cylinder… they did not appear to be safety-lined in yet, though she saw coils of line around the shoulders of one of them. She didn’t recognize the weapons they were carrying, but the tool set they were using on the hatch would certainly open any other hatch in the ship, in time.

If there was enough pressure—and she opened the inner hatch—then they could be blown out themselves… if that armor wasn’t stuck too tightly. It probably was; they wouldn’t have left themselves in that vulnerable position. The implant gave her a quick calculation of the amount of force needed to dislodge the armor… no, they’d wedged it in well. It would take another fifty kilograms of mass, and she didn’t have that handy, not with the mines now sequestered behind a compartment lockdown, where they could do no good. She could manually open and shut each one, but she knew that would take too long.

Well… she did have fifty kilos of mass, but if she let go the safety grabons and used her own body to blow them out the lock, then she’d be out there, accelerating away from her own ship. Not where she wanted to be… not a good tactical choice.

She found another vid pickup just inboard of the air lock and aimed it up-passage. The packing cords that had launched her mine lay in a tangle. She could tie onto them as safety anchors; they’d pull her back. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. But neither would letting Osman and his crew aboard. How many of them were there outside? She didn’t have enough external pickups; the implant couldn’t give her that information.

“There are two of them in the air lock,” she said to her own ship intercom. “They have some space armor wedged in the outer hatch. Decompression alone won’t blow them back out… it’ll take more mass.”

“How much?” Quincy asked, ever the engineer.

“Oh… fifty kilos would do it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare fifty kilos.” Quincy would have a fit if she knew what Ky was contemplating. Ky didn’t like it much herself.

“Reopen the seals to the rec room and grab something?” Rafe asked. “I’m there; I could toss you a chair.”

“Are you suited?” Ky asked.

“Yes. Upshift hatch is sealed; the galley hatch should hold for a brief decompression, and that would add additional volume—these chairs aren’t that heavy, but they might be enough with the additional volume.”

It was an idea, but she knew it wasn’t going to work. The implant confirmed that when she queried it.

“Captain—” That was Martin. “Give me the codes for manual opening and closing—let me come help—”

“Where are you?” Ky asked.

“I’m right beside that carton of EMP mines.”

“I’m closer,” Rafe said. “Only one seal away.”

“I have the skills,” Martin said. “Hand-to-hand in vacuum and zero G—”

Just what she needed, two men squabbling over who was better equipped to help her. She would like to have had them both with her, but they weren’t. “You’ll both stay where you are,” she said.

She rifled quickly through the emergency tool locker in the passage. Fire ax, zero-pressure sealant canister, long utility knife, prybar, boards, first-aid kit… she couldn’t take it all, but the fire ax and knife went on her belt.

The implant noted that while she was 92 percent likely to break the space armor loose from the outer hatch, she was 83 percent likely to break bones in the process, and 24.3 percent likely to suffer fatal injuries. But the alternative chances were worse: if Osman caught her, she’d be 100 percent dead after suffering she didn’t want to contemplate. No choice, really…

Her suit—customized, top of the line from Deere Ltd.—was supposed to have superlative impact resistance, a combination of reinforced panels and impact-inflated cushions. She fed the suit data into her implant, and the probability of fatal injury dropped to 6.2 percent, broken bones to 21 percent… that was more like it, though a bone was either broken or not…

She moved on down the passage. The boarders could see—if they chose to look—through the window in the interior hatch. But if she was quick enough, all they’d see was a blur. The tangled cords lay in front of her now; she hooked them with the end of the fire ax and pulled them slowly to her.

Best not depend on the strength of her grip; she detached one of the packing cords—purple, breaking load twelve hundred kilograms—and looped it through the reinforced loop on her pressure suit designed for tethers, then around the other cords, and secured it. The implant display showed that the intruders were still intent on their work—no, one of them was looking up and around now.

No more time. Ky backed into the loop of the packing cords, pulling them as taut as she could, then told Lee, “I’m opening the inner hatch.”

“But you’re—”

Her implant took over. She had time to think
This was a really stupid idea—
and then the combination of elastic cords and escaping air flung her down the passage. She had thought she could hold herself rigid, like a spear, until the moment of impact, but the vortex of escaping air twisted her, threatened to slam her flailing body against the hatch opening. She pulled herself into a tight ball, fists locked on the cords, and struck the boarders with her right side, slamming them into the space-armored figure wedged in the hatch. With a shriek she could feel as much as hear, the space armor broke loose in that instant, and she and the others flew out the open hatch. She could see, in the external lights, someone else splayed flat against the hull. One of the boarders was loose, floating away; the other grabbed the tether, hands alongside hers, as it reached its full extension and began to retract.

Simultaneously Ky and the boarder each took a hand off the line and tried to shove the other off. The enemy managed to grab her wrist; his grip, possibly augmented by his suit, tightened painfully. She didn’t need to hear what he was saying; she could imagine it. They rotated, struggling in the combination of forces, the lack of gravity, the pull of the retracting tether.

Ky let go the tether with her left hand, flipped it around her leg, and grabbed the clearing knife from her tool belt. Her enemy never saw it before she had slit his suit up under the right arm. Air puffed from his suit, pushing her away, yanking her arm. The suit’s repair functions oozed foam, confining the loss to that limb, but immobilizing his arm. She stabbed again, this time ripping the left arm; his hand spasmed, releasing her; they rotated away from each other.

“Five seconds to impact,” her implant warned her. Ky struggled, trying to see, to curl away from hitting the ship head-on. There—but something grabbed her leg, and pulled… she could feel the elastic cords stretching… she twisted. A hand clamped around her ankle; the suited figure trailed a thin stream that glittered in her headlamp. Powered suit. He had a powered suit—of course he did, that’s how they crossed the interval in the first place—her mind gibbered wildly. The implant threw up a screen of information about powered suits, most of which Ky had no interest in. She was trying to curl up, avoid whatever that was streaming from the other’s suit in case it was corrosive, and get that hand off her ankle. Her contortions made the other figure writhe, and their vector shifted irregularly, but he didn’t let go.

She had been told zero-g fights were chaotic, impossible to predict even inside closed spaces. Outside a ship… Just don’t get yourself in that situation, her instructors had said. Fine, but no help now. The suit resisted her attempts to bend over, get her hand and knife near the person clutching her; it had been possible in ship atmosphere, but not here. She tried another tactic, using alternating arm movements to impart a longitudinal spin… and that finally brought her arm close to the other. He had something that looked like a wrecker bar with a pointed tip in his hand, but she was inside his guard and almost behind him. She clutched him firmly to her with her right arm, and ran the knife blade up… in under the suit… up again.

The knife parted his suit from hip to shoulder; a mist clouded her faceplate briefly… he let go, and Ky managed to orient herself, finding her ship by its brilliant outside lights—its lights visibly nearing—as the elastic cords accelerated her back toward the open air lock.

If she stayed connected, she would smash into her own ship. If she didn’t, she was hanging out here with no power, no way to get back… except she was already moving back. Was it fast enough? Ky cut the tether to the cords and watched them move away from her, writhing like the tentacles of the sea creatures she had watched on the reef at Corleigh. She queried her implant… she would hit the ship, but not hard enough to damage the ship—or herself.

She looked around as best she could. That dark moving blot across the starfield was Osman’s ship, tumbling. The line of brilliant lights was her own, with its externals on, with its air lock still open, a larger area of light on the aft hull.

She cut her suit com back on. “Captain to bridge—”

“Where are you? What did you do?”

“I’m closing on the ship now,” she said.

“On
Kaleen
?” Bewilderment and near panic were clear in Lee’s tone.

“No. On us. I went out the hatch with the bad guys—two of them anyway.” She bounced up the zoom on her helmet scan, looking for the one who had been starfished to the hull beside the hatch. He wasn’t there. Where was he? “What’s your internal scan say…”

“Somebody’s inside, in the emergency passage. They won’t answer; we thought it might be you with damage, maybe… we were just thinking of shutting the external hatch and airing up so we could open the compartments.”

If she hadn’t been in a suit, in free fall, she’d have pounded her head with her hand. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Captains should never leave the ship in dangerous situations. She’d had that pounded into her time and again at the Academy. Never. Whatever the temptation, the captain stays aboard to deal with the peril… and she had flung herself out the hatch, grandstanding, as MacRobert would have said. Correctly. And one of the scumsucking bastards had made it aboard her ship.

“Lock the hatch open, Lee,” she said, even as she wondered why the boarder hadn’t closed it already to keep her out if she escaped his allies. “Don’t break compartmentalization. Scan for other powered suits between us and the
Kaleen
.”

Abruptly, startlingly,
Fair Kaleen
’s running lights came on, the beacons defining bow and stern blinking and the others holding steady patterns that outlined her shape. Either the automatic reset had worked, or someone aboard was able to get the systems up. Reset wasn’t a problem, but the other possibility…

Now that it was too late, she could think of other things that might have worked better…

“We lost vidscan in the emergency passage,” Lee said. “We’re still compartmented—”

“Good,” Ky said.

“But we don’t know where whoever that is has gone or what he or she is up to.”

She knew. She knew with the absolute certainty that had not yet failed her. He was going to blow up the ship, and her family with it, and all he needed was the time he already had. The time she had given him. A flicker of despair, the first touch of a black wave… but she had no time for that. “Patch me to Martin.”

“Right.” A pause, then Martin’s voice.

“Ky—Captain—what’s happening?”

“Martin, you’re in the same compartment with the mines, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Take one with green markings, like the one I used before. Open the side—you saw me do it; you know where. There’s a manual control, a dial. Turn it to the left, all the way. Point the forward end so it will intersect the emergency passage. Set it to a five-second delay and get as far away from it as possible.” An EMP pulse could be focused to some degree. Her implant threw up a schematic showing what ship systems would be in the way of that destructive beam. Too bad… better that than complete destruction.

“But that will—”

“Do it now!” Then she tongued shipwide, and never mind if her enemy heard it. “Disaster stations! All hands, disaster stations and hold position.”

A second passed. Another. Another. Another.

As suddenly as
Fair Kaleen
’s lights had come on,
Gary Tobai
’s vanished. Her ship—her responsibility—now lay blind, all systems knocked out by a pulse of magnetics strong enough to injure the crew in some cases.

The hypercritical part of her mind screamed at her,
Really smart, Ky—now you’ve disabled your ship and you’re barreling toward it and can’t even see when to brace for impact, and that’s if Osman doesn’t blow it anyway—
Then she hit, hard, the suit’s protective mechanisms cushioning the blow—but the jar was still enough to take her breath for an instant. Her gloved hands scrabbled for something to hold on to, as rebound took her away, tumbling, and the loop of elastic in her hand caught a protruding stud… one of the eighty-two external mounts for the new defensive suite.