Vitalis Omnibus (6 page)

“I thought maybe that somebody was you. Computer disguises the voice, darkens and blurs the image, you know how it is. Looking at you now though, I see you’ve got no idea.”

“No, sir,” Kira said. “I’m about the loneliest person the universe has ever seen.”

“I see
; just you and whoever you’re shacking up with, and they’re just the flavor of the week?”

“No!” She fell silent after blurting out her answer. It pissed her off
; what she felt was real! She’d never trusted herself to have a boyfriend or more than an occasional lover. She gave up trying until Eric. Or at least she thought she gave up. Her blackouts lasted months sometimes; maybe she was shacking up with any flavor of the week.

“None of my business,” Captain Sharp said softly. “What you do on your time is your business, not mine. Long as
it don’t bring trouble to my ship or crew, you can screw whoever you want and I’ll just sit back and be envious.”

“Envious?” Kira asked, disrupted from her depressing thoughts by his choice of words.

“Yeah, you’re getting some action and I’m stuck doing Captain-y things.”

Kira smirked. The last thing she wanted to do was smile, especially with the things Captain Sharp was saying, but she couldn’t help it.

“You’re a good navigator. A little inexperienced sometimes, but you’ve also come up with some things I wouldn’t have expected. I did a little checking into you, but everything checks out fine, even if you like to move around a lot. I wasn’t supposed to — that mysterious benefactor of yours wanted me to take you on sight unseen. I can’t operate like that. I tell you what though, I’ll split this signing bonus with you fifty – fifty if you keep your head on your shoulders, you keep Eric in line, you don’t go disrupting my ship, and if you can come up with some way of keeping us from smashing the
Mule
to pieces when it comes docking time.”

Kira stared at him until her eyes started to hurt from the strain. She nodded and looked away, her eyes going to her station. “Yes
, sir,” she said softly. “But sir, if Eric leaves, I have to go with him. He’s all I’ve got.”

“I understand, Kira. Trust me, I understand.”

She looked up at him sharply. “Was there someone…”

Sharp’s eyes focused and he looked at her. He chuckled and shook his head. “A girl? Naw, they just hold a good man back. Look around you
—the
Mule
. She’s my pride and joy. She might not be much but she means I’m a free man in charge of my own life. You don’t turn your back on that sort of thing, not if you got two working grey cells between your ears.”

Kira thought his sentimentality over the transport they were on was silly, but aside from a raised eyebrow she tried to keep it off her face. Sharp chuckled. “That’s all right
. I’ve got your secrets; you can keep mine, too.”

Kira smiled. It wasn’t much, but it was something. She nodded and went to her station, sitting down and plugging herself into the data port to try and think outside of the box. No sooner had she sat down
than her stomach felt funny, as though it had moved without her body going with it. It wasn’t an emotional lurch, nor was it a reaction to a bad lunch. She frowned and started working on her station, losing herself as she input data into it.

“Sir!” Kira gasped a few minutes later. She stood up and turned to face him. “We’ve just been damaged!”

“What? By another ship? We’re under fire?”

“No…well, I don’t think so. Passive sensors aren’t picking up anything. There was an explosion aft.”

“Internal?”

“External. Our engines are fine but the pushers have readings all over the place!”

Sharp slammed his hand down on the intercom. “All hands report!” He turned back to her. “Get your boyfriend to check the damage out!”

Kira’s cheeks burned even as she felt a small thrill deep in her heart from hearing the words spoken publicly. She picked up a microphone and triggered the suit radio channel. “Eric, do you read? This is Kira on the bridge of the
Rented Mule
.”

“Hang on, Kira, something just happened. Damn near ripped my tether off and snapped my spine. I’m checking it out now,” Eric said.

Kira sucked in a breath, worried for him. “Be careful,” she whispered into the radio. “Check the pushers.”

Tarn was the last to report to the bridge, as usual. Jeff and Kevin stood by, looking uncomfortable even though Kevin was trying to overcompensate by leaning casually against a bulkhead. Sharp held up his hand and looked at Kira, waiting for Eric to report in. His timing was impeccable.

“Kira, something blew up. I don’t know if we were hit or what but all four main pushers are damaged. One and three are out completely, two is operating at about twenty percent, and four is close to eighty percent, but its orientation has been shifted. We’re drifting off course. I recommend we shut them down to fix or we’ll have to burn fuel with the thrusters to compensate.”

Kira turned
to Sharp while Jeff and Kevin both gasped. Tarn spat out something vile but offered nothing more. “Captain, the pushers maintain thrust; losing them won’t slow us down. It just prevents us from accelerating further. Our intent was to use them until we found the mining belt and then rotate to slow down and dock. Shutting them down won’t hurt us, other than making us take longer.”

“Longer? We’re already overdue!” Sharp spat out. He gripped the arm of his chair tightly
and then snapped, “Turn them off. We fix them and figure out where the hell we’re at!”

“Sir, we don’t—“

“You find a fucking way to do it! There are stars out there, right? Figure out how far they are and triangulate our position. They did it five hundred years ago, sailing on water on Earth. I think we’re a little bit more educated than they were!”

Kira paled and went to answer him, but Sharp was already up and headed out the door. “Tarn, stand ready in case this was an attack. Jeff, Kevin
—get out there and help Eric conduct repairs.”

They dispersed quickly, asking no questions and offering no problems. Even Tarn moved efficiently, something Kira had never seen before. She bit her lip, trying to figure out what was bothering her,
and then turned back to her station. The ship was dying. Every event took another chunk of it from them, leaving them more and more stranded.

A ship in the
Core systems had a chance of recovery. For them, stranded somewhere near the rim, there was little hope unless they could make it happen. Even if they could generate a distress beacon it would take weeks, months, or years for it to be heard, and then twice as long for help to come. Twice as long at best. She fought down a rising wave of panic in her, blinking back sudden tears, and focused instead on trying to figure out ways to locate the needle in the haystack that the
Rented Mule
was.

Chapter 8

“So what happened?” Sharp demanded once Eric was back on the bridge. He
was limping, Kira noticed, and seemed thoroughly exhausted.

“The pushers are ionic, slow but powerful thrust over time,”
he said. The Captain scowled at him. “Right, you know that, sorry. Well, the point is they wouldn’t explode on their own. The damage wasn’t internal.”

“So we were attacked?” Kira interrupted with a squeak in her voice.

“I can’t say for certain,” Eric said. “I mean, if we were, why haven’t they followed it up? We’re floating in space with nothing but thrusters right now and not enough fuel for them to make a difference, outside of dodging some rocks. And that’s if we could see to use them!”

“Captain, I had an idea about that,” Kira interrupted again.

“That’s why I never had a woman on my ship before; they can’t keep their damn mouths shut!”

Kira’s head jerked back in surprise at the rebuke. She recovered quickly
. Her idea had merit, damn it. She glared back at him and took the risk of sticking her tongue out. The Captain’s eyes widened and a laugh burst from his lips. “All right,” he said, “out with it.”

“Eric can reroute the nav controls to the hull. I can patch myself in from there, in a suit, and visually steer the ship when we get to the asteroid belt.”

“Manually steering a ship the size of the
Rented Mule
? You’ve got balls, Kira, I’ll give you that!” Sharp said. He leaned back and clasped his hands together, pondering the idea. “You really think you can do it? Some pretty intense calculations have to be made to dock a ship, let alone dodge the rocks floating around.”

Kira shrugged. “I have to try
. What other option do we have?”

Sharp nodded. “All right, I’ll think about it
. Now, about this damage…”

“It wasn’t just a single hit. Either we’ve been sabotaged or there’s a damn good gunner out there,” Eric said.

“Sabotage?” Sharp’s eyes narrowed. He stared hard at both of them.

“I haven’t been out of the ship yet,” Kira pointed out.

“I damn near had my spine broke when we were hit – I was outside of the inertial suppressor field,” Eric said.

Sharp grunted. His fingers tapped a cadence on the arm of his chair.

“Sir, Tarn came back early from his shift, remember?”

“You think Tarn did this?”

“Does anybody else have knowledge of how to rig an explosion and make it look like an accident or an external attack?”

Sharp opened and closed his mouth. He growled and stood up. “Weapons locker
, now. You two are with me.”

“Captain, do you really think Tarn would do this? He’s stranded with us
, too!” Eric said, following behind the Captain as he walked briskly down the passage.

“Any chance he overheard you talking about the bounty on your head?” Sharp snapped.

Kira gasped, drawing looks from the other two. She waved her hand. “It’s nothing. I just hadn’t thought of that is all.”

The
y rounded a corner and stopped at a hatch. Captain Sharp unlocked the door with a retinal scan and then stepped in and beckoned them to follow. He stopped, causing Eric and Kira to run into him. “Son of a bitch! I’m going to kill him with my bare hands!”

“Sir, if he was a FIST, he’s not going to be easy to kill,” Kira pointed out. “Even if he is old and fat.”

The weapons locker was virtually empty. All that remained were a couple of low-grade laser pistols with output ratings low enough to require several seconds for a burn-through on an unarmored human target. An alarm rang through the ship, making Eric jump. Sharp turned with a snarl and started back towards the hatch.

“Sir, wait!” Kira spotted a display and, near it, a data port. She hurried over and pushed her hand against it,
and then started commanding the computer to display the source of the alarm. “Our passive sensors picked up an active sensor hit. And there’s another; they’re coming in fast!”

“They? How many are there?”

“Looks like five, no si— nine of them, sir.”

“Nine? Why didn’t you see nine ships out there?”

“Sir, they may not be ships. Could be EVA suits. They disable us and then send in a boarding party to take control of the ship. After it’s secured, they bring in theirs and tow us off for salvage,” she suggested.

Kira saw a strange look in Eric’s eyes. “What? It makes sense! That’s what I’d do.”

“You have a history of disabling and stealing ships?”

“Well
, no. I just mean when you think about it and break it down…”

Eric went over and grabbed both of the pistols. He handed one to the Captain and the other to Kira. She looked at it with wide eyes. “I don’t— I’ve never used a gun before!”

“Me either, but I’ve got a hunch you’ll be a better shot than I would.” Eric wouldn’t look her in the eyes as he spoke.

Kira slipped it into the waist of her pants without thinking. She turned to see the Captain watching the two of them. “All right, these things will be useless against an armed and armored boarding party, but maybe if we don’t fire them they won’t know it. You think they’ll override the airlock or blow a hole in the hull?”

“If they’ve got inside help, they’ll use the airlock. Or if they want to use the ship themselves, they’ll need it pressurized,” Eric theorized. “Doesn’t make me a betting man.”

Sharp’s laugh was bitter. “You just wagered all our lives.”

Eric swore. Kira’s eyes widened but she gave him a supportive smile. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll even take off my clothes to show my support.”

“Remember when I said to make sure you don’t disrupt my crew or complicate things? That goes double when we’re repelling boarders!”

Eric chuckled. “Had that talk, did you? Just think of what it might do to the pirates!”

Kira turned, having heard it first. Her pistol was out of her pants and pointed at the open hatch before Tarn rounded the corner and pulled up short. Sharp swore and pointed his own pistol at the man. “We beat you here, Tarn?”
he asked.