In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (27 page)

Following close behind, I said, “I don’t recognize
this level.”

“The cross-arm the Merak Star is docked at is now
heavily guarded,” Izin said. “They’re searching for Jase and me. In any event,
the Silver Lining is not docked at an airlock.”

“How are we getting aboard?”

“We’re going to jump.”

“Izin, this thing isn’t airtight!”

“Neither suit is. Unfortunately, shooting through
the heat sink was the only way to penetrate their armor.”

“How’d you find the weak spot?”

“Superior amphibian eyesight.”

Crippling a combat suit in a darkened cargo hold
without the benefit of my bionetic encyclopedia to draw on was impressive, but leaping
a pair of leaky suits through hard vacuum was nuts.

“Do we have enough atmo for the jump?”

“I do,” he replied. “You may have to hold your
breath.”

It was tamph humor as he knew as well as me that
holding my breath was useless when cells started popping.

“That’s your plan?”

“Air supply is not the problem, Captain. Power is.
These suits are not designed for autonomous space flight and their power cells
are already somewhat depleted.”

“How far are we jumping?”

“Fifteen hundred meters, the distance between
cross-arms.”

Izin stopped at a large security door, lowered his
right arm and blasted the lock with his rapid fire suppressor, then kicked the
door in. A cool white mist billowed out as several nearby station hands looked at
us in surprise.

Izin turned and aimed his suppressor at them.
“Run!”

Their eyes widened, then they raced back to the
station’s spine to raise the alarm while Izin led the way into the
refrigeration compartment.

“How do we set the suit’s nav targeting to get us
there?” I asked.

“If we allow the suit to plot the course, Captain,
it will select the most energy efficient course. That would be a slow transit,
giving station security time to locate us.”

“We can’t doing this manually.”

“Not you, Captain. I will fly both suits at
maximum acceleration.”

He’d have to crunch two sets of numbers
simultaneously in his head, something I needed an autonav to do. “Are you sure
about this, Izin?”

“You could try flying your own suit, Captain, but
I wouldn’t recommend it.”

No tamph humor this time. Long distance space
jumps weren’t seat of your pants flying, they were complex mathematic problems
with no room for error. “OK, let’s get this over with.”

“Assuming control now.”

My suit ceased moving with me. It now mimicked
Izin’s every action, forcing me to move with it.

When he approached the bulkhead closest to the
station’s hull, he said, “Remember, Captain, any unnecessary movement inside
your suit will have an inertial effect I will have to compensate for.”

“Suppose I have to scratch?”

“Fidgeting will require offsetting thrust which
will consume power, reducing your chances of survival.”

“OK, no scratching,” I said, suddenly itchy all
over.

Our right arms came up together, firing their suppressors
as one, blasting a hole through the double lined hull. A torrent of escaping
air erupted around us, sweeping us off the deck and hurling us out into space. Inside
the station, alarms sounded and emergency pressure doors slammed shut, sealing
off the decompressing section from the rest of the habitat.

We tumbled away from the massive station cross-arm,
out of the local acceleration field into zero gravity, then Izin fired the
thrusters bringing us around to face the
Merak Star
docked one and a
half clicks away. The sound of thrusters filled my suit’s headspace – there was
no helmet – as Izin wasted no time going straight to full power. Acheron
Station had few genuine viewports, but it was well lit to give nearby ships
good visibility. Those same floodlights now lit us up, although from a distance
we’d be indistinguishable from thrusterbots.

I forced myself to relax, to make Izin’s job as easy
as possible. There was a constant hiss of escaping air behind my neck now that
we were in vacuum, while in front of my eyes, a flashing indicator warned life
support was eating through my air supply as it fought to prevent the suit’s
atmosphere from thinning. In the distance, our destination cross-arm appeared
like a band of light against the nebula’s impenetrable blackness.

When we were halfway there, Izin rolled the two OA
suits head over heels in perfect unison and began decelerating, bringing the cross-arm
we’d left behind into view. Spider-like hull crawlers were already working to
patch the rupture, which station engineers would have discovered by now had not
been caused by a mechanical failure.

“How long, Izin?”

“Three minutes, twenty seconds.”

“They know we blew a hole in their space station.”

“Captain, it would be better if you refrained from
speaking while I’m performing simultaneous sets of complex delta-vee
calculations.”

I shut up, letting him do his thing while I
watched for company. Soon I noticed a pair of bright lights moving toward us,
growing rapidly in size. It didn’t take long to realize they were thrusterbots
on an intercept course. Knowing Izin’s calculations were about to get a whole
lot more complicated, I retrieved my suit’s suppressor specifications from
bionetic memory.

“Izin, the muzzle velocity of my suppressor is twelve
thousand, one hundred and forty meters per second per forty six gram projectile.”

“If I wasn’t so busy calculating ways to save your
life, Captain, I’d wonder why you’ve memorized such an obscure number.”

“Yeah, well we’ve got company and I’m about to
start shooting.” I dialed up the suppressor’s fire controller and set the rate.
“Twenty rounds per second, three second bursts. Got that?”

“The recoil will be severe, Captain. I will lose
control of your suit.”

“That’s why I gave you the number, because they’re
not coming out here to give us a wash and a wax.”

When the two thrusterbots were only a few seconds
out, they focused their floodlights on us, ensuring anyone watching saw exactly
what we were.

“I need my suit back,” I said. “Now!”

The Shinagawa thrusterbots yawed as they slid in
behind us on a collision course. They were unarmed, but they didn’t need
weapons. With industrial strength arms able to move starship hull segments,
they could rip our arms off like butterfly wings.

“Releasing control,” Izin said.

My suit came to life around me as a proximity alert
began flashing. I rotated a quarter turn, bringing my suppressor to bear on the
machine headed for me, but held fire, knowing I had one chance before the
recoil would send me spinning away uncontrollably. When the giant bot was
almost on top of me, it reached out with both its massive arms, its finger-like
manipulators snapping open ready to crush me. I thrusted up, dodging the arms, then
fired at its body. A muted burping sound filled the suit, spewing neutronium
tipped rounds into the thrusterbot as the suppressor’s kick sent me tumbling
backwards.

My suit rang like a bell as one of the
thrusterbot’s massive arms struck me side on, sending me flailing away even
faster, then there was a flash as it exploded behind me. Spinning fast, close
to blacking out from the g-forces, the blur of the station’s lights raced
across my screen, over and over again against the nebula’s blackness, then my
suit’s stabilizers fired automatically, slowly killing my spin. When I saw the
thrusterbot again, it was adrift, wracked by secondary explosions flashing
within.

Off to my left, Izin was being pursued by the
second Shinagawa machine. He was firing a constant stream of suppressor rounds
into its hull while he manually fired his stabilizers to soak up the recoil.
The thrusterbot froze as Izin circled it, continuing to fire until it exploded,
hurling a giant arm at him. He narrowly dodged a collision, then glided quickly
to me, assuming control of my suit and turning us both toward the
Merak Star
without a word. I knew he was moving fast because of the energy we’d burned
through, so I kept quiet as we started decelerating again. To my surprise, we
didn’t fly side by side as before. Instead, Izin flew up to me and planted his
boots on my shoulders, pinning them to my suit’s head bulge.

“What are you doing?” I asked at last.

“Neither suit has sufficient power to complete the
jump,” he said without any attempt to sugarcoat the bad news.

Below my boots, the station’s cross-arm was racing
up at us, too fast and too close now for us to stop in time.

“I suppose crashing into the station is out of the
question?” I suggested.

“The suits would survive the impact, but our
bodies would not.”

Once again a helpless passenger, I watched Izin aim
for a point astern of the
Merak Star
, intending to graze the cross-arm
rather than crash into it. Another alert began flashing on my headscreen,
warning my suit’s power supply was dangerously low. Soon, the
Silver
Lining’s
crescent shaped hull came into view, hiding between the
Merak
Star’s
stern and the station’s hull.

When we were close to the freighter, Izin’s
thruster died, shut down by his suit to preserve energy for life support. His
power cell’s early depletion was the price of his fancy flying against the
thrusterbot. With only my thruster slowing us now, Izin climbed down until we
were chest to chest, locking arms as we swept past the
Merak Star’s
huge
engine exhausts. For a moment, we were almost close enough to touch the
Silver
Lining
sheltering behind the freighter’s stern, then we skimmed the
station’s hull on an oblique trajectory. A few seconds later, we cleared the
cross-arm, then my suit shut down the thruster, saving enough juice to keep life
support going until my air ran out.

Arm in arm, we drifted toward the Acheron’s inky
blackness.

“Nice try, Izin. We almost made it,” I lamented as
he locked our legs together. If it hadn’t been for the thrusterbots, he’d have
got us to the ship, but even his mighty tamph brain couldn’t calculate every
possibility. “I wonder if Jase knows where we are?” One of my metal coffin’s arms
wrapped itself around Izin’s shoulders as his arms embraced my torso. “I hadn’t
expected to die cuddling a tamph, but I guess there are worse ways to go. You
could be a snakehead, or Jase’s mother.”

“We are where we need to be, Captain. And so there
is no misunderstanding, I’m not cuddling you, I’m anchoring you. Standby.”

“For what?”

My suit’s free arm extended straight out from my
chest, past Izin’s head, then my suppressor fired a six second burst into space.
The heavy recoil stopped our forward motion and sent us drifting slowly back to
the station, rotating slightly. He’d angled my arm to minimize spin, but the
angle had been off a little. When I was facing the
Merak Star
, Izin
fired a single shot behind me, offsetting our rotation and slightly increasing
our drift toward the station.

“You planned to use the suppressors all along!” I said
incredulously. He’d got his calculations right after all!

“It was your idea, Captain. Each suit has ten
thousand rounds. That’s a lot of kinetic energy.”

“When exactly did you work this out?”

“As soon as you told me the muzzle velocity.”

No wonder he’d flown like a fighter pilot against
the thrusterbot! He knew he had energy to spare!

“You could have told me.”

“I assumed you knew.”

“Is this going to be a hard landing?”

“I’ll try not to break you, Captain.”

Now that I knew I wasn’t going to die in the
Acheron Abyss cuddling a tamph in a tin box, I began scanning apprehensively
for more thrusterbots. This close to the station with our thrusters cold, we’d
be hard to detect, but if they’d plotted our trajectory correctly, they’d know
where we were. Fortunately, nothing approached us as we drifted back past the
station, heading for the
Merak Star
.

Izin shifted his arm slowly away to the right,
turning us to the left, then my suppressor fired once, nudging us toward the
Silver
Lining.
There was very little space between her hull and the freighter on
one side and Acheron Station on the other.

“It took some sweet flying to get her in there,” I
said appreciatively.

“That’s what Jase said – repeatedly – when he did
it.”

“In that case, I’ll bawl him out for scratching
the paint work.”

“I don’t believe he did any damage to the ship’s
outer coating, Captain.”

“We’ll scratch it on the way in,” I said
mischievously. “Just a little scratch, enough to dock him a day’s pay!”

Izin fired a shot from his arm cannon and another
from mine, pushing us toward the
Silver Lining’s
starboard airlock. A
short distance away, the flimsy pressure tube snaked its way between the
Merak
Star
and Acheron Station.

“I’m tempted to put a burst into that tube,” I
said, “just for laughs.”

“That would be inadvisable, Captain. The reaction
force would push us away from the ship and alert the station to our position.”

“Yeah,” I said disappointed as we reached the
airlock, “and we still have to get out of here.”

With over a hundred Drake ships docked within weapon’s
range, that would be no easy task.

* * * *

We parked the fighting suits in the
corridor outside the airlock, then Izin went to engineering to power up the
ship while I went to the bridge.

“The station’s broadcasting an escaped prisoner
alert,” Jase said as I hurried to my acceleration couch. “Killing the jailer
has got them real mad.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said, switching my display to sensors
and searching for Acheron Station’s energy plant. One look told me the
station’s neutrino emissions were indistinguishable from all the Drake ships
alongside, forcing me to shelve any thought of putting an anti-ship drone where
it would do the most good. “We’ll blink to the gravity mines and run through
before they can catch us.” Izin already had us half way to full power, making the
Silver Lining
visible to any Drake ship bothering to look. “I assume you
can get us out of here?”