“Mom, we don’t have to do this job, you know,” Bili said as his mother emerged from an opening in the ceiling and did a summersault to a standing position. She wordlessly examined his arm in the healing bag. “It’s worse,” she announced tonelessly.
“We don’t need this job,” repeated Bili. “This regrow will work okay, and even if it doesn’t, I can get along with one arm. I’m left-handed, anyway.”
“Don’t worry about it, kid, we’re going to get you on full medical,” she said with false bravado. “It’s a done deal.” She ruffled his hair and used the handrails to pull herself forward to check the screens.
“Not much out there,” Bili said. “Not much on the scopes, either.”
Sarah did find one thing on the scopes however, a small ship of unknown configuration. It was coming in fast from the asteroid belts, approaching Garm from behind Gopus. She shrugged mentally; probably just another smuggler like herself, coming in to make a rendezvous with a freighter headed down to Garm. She pressed her fingers against her temples, feeling the sickness of despair gnawing at her guts. Every time she looked at Bili’s arm now, she wanted to retch.
* * *
Back in the galley, Bili poked his withered-looking new arm through the tough plastic again. It looked like a bunch of rotting sausages strung along a white plastic pipe, which was about what it was. He looked at the swirling brown liquids, circulating through the tiny pump and filter with a soft gurgling sound. He bet it stank in there. He bet it stank real bad.
Turning back to his project, he found the glue tube and began to glue the dark little pebble-shaped asteroids into place.
Six
Bili was right next to Sarah, strapped into his crash-seat and eating a bluish hork-apple. “We’re going to meet the freighter now, Bili. Time to close your visor and pressurize your suit.”
“Right, Mom.”
Bili took two more quick bites of his apple and tossed the rest into a zip-bag to keep it fresh and anchored until later. Snapping his helmet visor down, he struggled with the wrist controls for a moment, finally getting the air flowing. It was hard for him to use the wrist controls on the suit since his right arm was rammed into the suit’s tight sleeve, still in the heal-bag and still useless. Unfortunately, the controls were located on his left wrist. The only way he could work them was to push them against the edge of his belt buckle, half the time nudging the wrong button. He looked sidelong at his mother, making sure that she had not noticed that he had done things out of sequence. He was supposed to get the air pump working first, people had suffocated that way in the past, but he liked to think he was saving a little oxygen by closing the visor first. Space on a shoestring budget could be a scary place; you never knew when you might need that last little gasp of air.
Fortunately, his mother was far too preoccupied with making her rendezvous on time and without incident to notice what he was doing. “See it? The
Yeti
is right there above Garm’s crescent.”
Bili squinted and thought he could make out a tiny speck, gray-white, hanging above the curved sickle-like shape of Garm below. “Yup.”
“Hang on now, we’re coming in hot, and we’ll have to brake hard for just a few seconds when we get in too close for anyone to tell down on the dirt that it wasn’t just an attitude jet from the
Yeti
.”
To the great, and preplanned, fortune of Sarah and all the smugglers in the system, the orbital traffic radar net was regularly sabotaged and operated improperly. This created large holes in the planet’s coverage and left many regions only partially covered. Cashing huge checks weekly, the communications staff at the spaceport routinely reported major malfunctions as
calibration and adjustment
, blaming equipment damage too serious to ignore on Grunstein’s harsh weather.
All this kept operations like Sarah’s running night and day, and kept a long receiving line of greased officials fat and happy.
“What’s that Mom?” asked Bili, seeing a new contact on the sensors, closing in fast on a converging angle.
“I—” said Sarah, focusing a sensor array and setting it to track the contact. “It’s that ship that’s been following us.”
Bili sat back, his eyes wide. He didn’t like this at all. Things were supposed to go exactly as planned when you were in space. They had to otherwise you could end up dead, just as his father had.
Or armless
, his mind countered.
“What ship?”
“It must be another smuggler, from farther out. Maybe he’s running in some illegal fissionables from the asteroids,” Sarah said, stress making her voice raise up in volume and pitch.
“It’s not a Nexus patrolship, is it?” whispered Bili, fearing the worst. The new ropy muscles on his regrowing arm constricted in tension and the pain was sickening. He closed his eyes and sucked his lower lip.
“No. It’s another smuggler, he’s going to beat us, he’s coming in to steal my ride,” Sarah said with sudden conviction, putting the pieces together. “He’s planning to beat me to the
Yeti
and go down with her! Damn it!” Sarah smashed her gloved fists down on the armrests of her crash-seat and growled inarticulately.
Bili waited, relaxing a bit. As long as it wasn’t a Nexus patrol ship. He didn’t want his Mom doing time over this. He wondered, not for the first time, what they would do to him if his Mom went to prison and his Dad was dead. It was an unpleasant idea, so he pushed it from his mind.
Sarah looked at Bili, her face deadly serious behind her faceplate. “Bili, we’ve got all our money tied up in this run. We paid for this ticket down and we can’t let them steal it.”
“We can go back down, Mom. Just drop the cargo. We can sell the ship and hide in the West Annex, or Amazonia.”
“No, Mudface and Daddy would find us, they’d have us killed.” She glared back down at the ship coming in. “No, no way. Nobody is going to just steal this ticket from us.”
With a quick friendly slap of her glove on Bili’s helmet, Sarah fired up the jets and increased her speed of approach. Together, the two small ships converged on the big freighter as it began it’s arcing descent into the atmosphere.
It quickly became apparent that the intruder wasn’t going to just give up and run away. Pressing in hard with the intruder on their heels, Sarah swung underneath the looming freighter and hit the brakes hard. Multiple forward jets flared into brilliant life all around the viewports, which automatically darkened to filter the glare. Even so, Bili blinked as purple splotches stained his vision.
The intruder was braking too, expertly following her right between the huge steel ribs of the freighter and rising up toward the massive central spine that held the framework of engines and cargo pods together. Following her example, the intruder found a slot between the massive bulbous sacks of cargo and secured itself to the spine like a leech. Up close, the other craft appeared to be fractionally larger than theirs and of a strange design unknown to her.
“If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a small warship.” she said, perplexed and angry. How could this be happening? “Fortunately, its sensor profile doesn’t match any of the Nexus warship designs.”
They all descended together, a mothership coming in on grav drive with two delinquent children hiding in her skirts. Just over five miles above the surface before the ship cleared the slopes of the forested hills around the spaceport, Sarah was supposed to let her ship freefall down into a valley and then land undetected. Unfortunately, at a ridiculous altitude of seventeen miles the stowaway ship suddenly disconnected and dropped from sight into the cloud cover.
Sarah cursed volubly, something she rarely did in front of her son, heaping abuse upon the second ship. “I only wish we had a gun mount, I’d blast him.”
Bili giggled uncontrollably at his mother’s bad language. What his mother said next made him swallow his amusement.
“He’s flagged us. We have to follow him now, the traffic-control diagnostics couldn’t have missed that stunt, and they will dispatch atmospheric patrol craft to find him. We can’t stay here, either. They’re sure to go over this ship with a pipe wrench when we land after that,” said Sarah, speaking half to Bili and half to herself. Bili saw in her eyes how scared she was, and that scared him more than anything.
With a gulping breath, Sarah pulled a hand-lever and the ship was instantly freefalling into the clouds. Blind, not daring to use the active scanners to look at the terrain below, she nosed the craft directly toward the ground and applied the thrust. They screamed down through the clouds in a powered dive directly toward the surface.
The ship jerked and jinked wildly, caught like a bird in a man’s hand by the storm winds. They were thrown side to side violently against the restraints of their crash-seats. The storm screamed and howled, clawing at the ship. Bili thought he was screaming too, but it was hard to tell.
* * *
When the invasion of the colony began the spaceport commissioner had left early for the day. It was Wednesday after all, and the rayball games would begin down at the Zimmerman Colonial Stadium by 4:00 PM. It was an important match; KXUT would be netting the video live. The Jinzhou Dragons were facing off against Bauru, the surprise champions from the jungles of Amazonia. The spaceport commissioner always managed to leave by 3:30 on Wednesdays.
That left a bored Major Drick Lee in charge of the spaceport. From Drick’s point of view, he was left with most of the responsibility for the spaceport, but with little of the authority and only a niggardly share of the graft profits. If there indeed existed a clearer example of the sort of injustices that were heaped upon him daily by his superior than his Wednesday afternoon trips to the rayball stadium, he was at a loss to come up with it. While the commissioner and several of his shuttle captain cronies rode an airbus to the stadium, doubtless already half sloshed on brimming pitchers of hork-leaf wine, Drick had to content himself with the small portable holo-set which he kept stashed in the bottom drawer of his desk.
To further darken his mood, before the players had finished warming up and set their treads to the highwires, the intercom commenced beeping. He glanced at it with immense dissatisfaction. It was on the emergency channel, so he couldn’t ignore it forever. If, on the other hand, he let it beep for a time, the caller might well give up if it were not a real emergency. Content to wait, Drick poured himself a shot of swamp-reed distillate, illegally imported from Gopus. He kept the moonshine hidden in a very flat flask under his drawer along with the holo-set. Sighing as he took a mouth-numbing sip, he watched the fat-tired motorcycles of the Bauru team thunder through the entry gate and circle the arena. The cheers became deafening at their appearance, proof of their popularity with the crowds. Drick himself was a Dragons fan, but couldn’t help but admire the style of the Amazonians.
Unfortunately, the beeping continued. With heavy disappointment, he answered the call. “Who is this?”
“Harrington, sir. I—”
“This had better be good, Harrington. What is it?”
“Smugglers sir, they came down from Gopus with the
Yeti
.”
“For this you used the emergency channel?”
“Something went wrong, sir. Two ships dropped out, and at much too high an altitude. The diagnostics picked it up sir, there’s nothing we can do, it’s been recorded.”
“Oh fine! On my watch, too. Who’s responsible? Who arranged for two tickets on that freighter?”
“No sir, you don’t understand. There was only one ah, legitimate guest on that trip. Should we send the interceptors after them, sir?”
“Eh? What? Are you insane man?”
“It’s regulations, sir.”
“Fine, fine. Make an entry into the log that we scrambled the interceptors and shot them down or something. You know my password, take care of it,” said Drick, bored with the entire affair already. The game was about to start.
“Well, sir. Things have gone a bit beyond that now.”
“What are you prattling about?”
“Captain Dorman has taken up two interceptors and is chasing them now, sir.”
That got the Major into action. He stabbed the cut-off and paused only long enough to sweep his holo-set and flask out of sight, then headed for the door. Vaporous distillate dribbled from the seams of his top drawer after he left, as he had forgotten to stopper it. Smoking blue drops splattered his chair and the carpet beneath his desk.
* * *
The interceptors were Stormbringers, shipped out from the Nexus just two years ago, they were the latest in colonial-class atmospheric gunships. Built like a missile with short stubby wings and high-thrust lifters, the ship had an excellent feel in the air and was instantly responsive to the controls. Captain Dorman had loved the ships since the first time he saw them and they had always been a real pleasure to fly. Two hundred yards to his right was his wingman, a trusted flyer that he felt he could take with him on this mission without fear of treachery.
“Dorman to central, we are overhauling the slower of the two unauthorized craft now.”
“Dorman, this is Major Lee,” said a hurried voice, cutting in.
“Please get off the channel, Major, this is a combat mission and the situation is under Nexus Cluster jurisdiction now. Come in, Harrington.”