gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap Page 5

  They both sat in the cockpit, the atmosphere so tense Derek could practically feel it crackling around them. True, Cassidy had said she was ready for anything, and the way she’d handled his presence here told him she wasn’t lying. But as he himself didn’t know precisely what to expect, he had little to say to her. They stared out into the darkness, waiting, not speaking.

  A harsh whining noise blared from the speakers, and he started. At once Cassidy reached forward and modulated the volume somewhat, although the sound still grated on his ears.

  “Proximity alert,” she told him. “That means they’re twenty minutes out at the most. Probably a little closer, judging by how quickly they got here.” Her voice was calm, controlled, as if she’d faced this sort of situation a thousand times before.

  “Got it,” he replied. Right then he wished his contacts had been able to give him more details, although he understood why they’d been hampered in doing so. At least he knew they planned to knock out the ships that posed a threat, and form some kind of escort to get the Avalon safely away. Away to where, he had no idea. The system was so heavily policed that he found it difficult to believe it would be anyplace close by. But although he wanted nothing more than to get back to Gaia, to confront the people who’d stolen the last two and a half years of his life, he understood his personal vengeance might have to wait.

  Especially if it meant doing anything that would endanger the woman who now sat only a few feet away from him.

  Her profile was to him, sent into sharp relief by the starfield behind it. Her attention remained fixed on the console, and so he guessed she didn’t realize he was looking at her now. Not for too long, just enough to remind himself that she’d been dragged into this whole mess unwillingly, and that he needed to make sure she got out in one piece, no matter what happened.

  “There,” she said, pointing at the display on the console. A cluster of pale blue sparks appeared there, representing the ships now moving toward them. “I count twelve.”

  Twelve ships, to bring back one prisoner? It seemed the GDF wasn’t taking any chances. But he only nodded. “They’ll probably wait until they’re closer before they make a move.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t wait too long, or this could get real interesting.” Cassidy paused then, slender brows pulling together as she stared at the screen. “What the hell?”

  “What is it?” he asked, something in her tone tightening the knot of worry that seemed to have balled itself up somewhere in his sternum.

  “Look!” She tapped the screen, where the group of twelve blue sparks seemed to have multiplied, the new dots smaller and moving more quickly than the main group. “The bastards just fired on us!”

  “What?” He launched himself out of his seat, then stared down at the display in consternation. “They were supposed to be firing on each other!”

  “Well, I guess someone didn’t get the memo.” Already the fingers of her right hand were dancing across the controls, while she reached out with the left and grasped the handle of what appeared to be the ship’s thrusters. At once the Avalon seemed to drop straight downward, and Derek stumbled, grabbing the arm of the copilot’s seat so he wouldn’t fall over completely.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked.

  “Taking evasive action. Not that I think this crate can do a lot to evade a group of Heron missiles, but I’m sure as shit not going to just sit here and wait for them to hit us.”

  Her jaw was set, her hand on the thruster controls white-knuckled. Derek said, “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Do you know how to pilot a starship?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Then hang on and shut up.”

  The Avalon jerked to the right, then dropped again. He guessed she was trying to keep their movements erratic enough that the missiles wouldn’t be able to get a lock on them, but he wasn’t sure how well that would work. His area of specialty was not weapons mechanics, but he knew that the Herons were guided by an A.I. that not only locked on heat signatures, but minute changes in the chemical composition of a certain region of space. In laymen’s terms, it meant they went sniffing for spent fuel, and could calculate in a millisecond where a ship might be headed based on where it had been.

  Cassidy was muttering something that sounded like shit, shit, shit under her breath, but since her words obviously weren’t directed at him, he decided the best thing to do was hold on to the lumpy chair where he sat and not say anything. The ship rocked upward, jinking to the right in a movement he wouldn’t have believed the creaky old freighter was capable of. Then again, the Avalon had clearly been Cassidy’s home for most of her life. She probably could coax more out of it than even its designers would have believed.

  Maybe it wasn’t smart to hope, but he had to believe she could get them out of this. Better to think of that, hold on to that idea, than stop to wonder why they’d been fired on at all. Something had gone horribly wrong, and that meant only one thing. The conspiracy had been discovered, and now the people he’d been counting on to help him were probably already dead.

  Then it felt as if a giant’s fist had punched the stern of the freighter. Despite himself, Derek let out a startled gasp, and Cassidy dispensed with the muttered “shit”s and growled, “Fuck!”

  “What?”

  “What do you think? They hit us!” Her eyes were scanning the controls, and by the way she scowled, he guessed that what she saw was not good news. “Not a full hit — we’d be vaped if that had happened — but they still knocked out the rear thrusters, and we’re losing air. I can’t maneuver worth a damn, and we’re going to be breathing space in about five minutes.”

  “No need to soften things — how bad is it really?”

  She shot him a look that seemed half irritated, half amused. “Pretty bad. Scratch that. Really bad. And since they’re shooting at us, I’m pretty sure they’re not going to send out a rescue party.”

  “I don’t know…maybe they’re trying to take me alive.”

  “What, so they can execute you properly later?”

  “Gaia doesn’t have capital punishment,” he reminded her.

  “Yeah, well, all that’s going to be moot in about four minutes and thirty seconds.” She paused, mouth pursed, as she appeared to think rapidly. “Okay, I think we’ve got about one shot at surviving this. Come on.”

  She pushed herself out of her seat and Derek did the same, even as he asked, “Where are we going?”

  Without looking back at him, she hurried down the corridor, then paused at a locker he’d noticed earlier but hadn’t seen her ever use. She fumbled with the latch, then opened it. Inside were two spacesuits, one slightly larger than the other. “Here,” she said, pulling the bigger of the two out of the locker and thrusting it at him. “That was my dad’s. It’ll fit well enough. Mine was my eighteenth-birthday present. Sweet, don’t you think? I suppose, if nothing else, it was a good way of making sure I stayed at fighting weight.”

  Derek undid the fasteners and began to climb into the suit. It was a little roomy, just as the borrowed clothes he wore beneath it were, but this was certainly no time for complaints. “I’m surprised you have them at all.”

  “They’re necessary,” she replied, pulling her own suit on with practiced movements, seeming to squish the coveralls she wore into it with little effort. “Ships always need minor repairs, patching, that sort of thing. Most of the time it’s stuff you’ve gotta do on the outside on the hull. So it’s just part of the equipment you need, although they’re damn expensive.” She latched her suit shut while Derek was still fumbling with the closures on his. With the slightest roll of her eyes, she reached out and expertly closed him up, then tugged on his gloves. She did the same with her own, finally reaching for the helmet that went with his suit and slapping it on his head. As soon as it was latched in place, he heard a faint hiss and realized it was the oxygen mix automatically cycling into the helmet.

  At the same time she was closing up her
own suit. She pushed a button on the small control unit on her wrist, then said, “Follow me.”

  They went to a hatch in the floor, one that opened up into the cargo bay. There was a ladder attached to the bulkhead, one she climbed down without waiting for him. Fine; she knew where she was going, and he didn’t. The ship rocked again, and this time the missile must have hit the cockpit, killing the controls, as all around him was plunged into darkness. A series of red emergency lights switched on immediately, but something about their illumination was faint and wavering, and Derek guessed they weren’t long for this world, either.

  He grabbed the ladder and let himself drop — or at least, he attempted to. His stomach seemed to swim up into his throat as he found himself floating. That last hit must have killed the artificial-gravity generators.

  “Here,” came Cassidy’s voice through the speaker embedded in his helmet, and he felt her gloved fingers touch his, yank him away from the ladder. He was glad of her touch, glad to hear her speaking, because those things helped to center him somewhat, to make him feel as if he wasn’t spinning through an unending darkness. Her grip was stronger than he’d imagined it would be, given her somewhat fragile appearance, tight and unyielding. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” he said, although he wasn’t sure how accurate that assessment actually was. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He’d been to the Moon several times, but that was the limit of his experience with space travel, save the trip to Titan, when he’d been drugged within an inch of his life to keep him from putting up any sort of a struggle. His interests had always been focused on Gaia, on making the planet beautiful and livable again.

  “Good,” Cassidy replied, although something in her tone told him she didn’t really believe his answer. “Hang on — I need to get two of the spare oxygen tanks. And after that I’m going to open the cargo bay doors.”

  The first part of that sounded sensible enough. The rest? “You’re going to what?”

  “One more direct hit, and the ship is gone. So we need to be gone, too.”

  “Where exactly do you plan to go?”

  A low chuckle came over the speaker. “You’ll see.”

  He didn’t know how to answer that, so he remained silent as they bumped along a wall, then stopped at the locker. Her gloved fingers fumbled with the latch — the process made even more difficult because she didn’t let go of him with her other hand — and then she had it open, was pulling out two long, silvery cylinders before handing one to him.

  “Hang on to that like your life depends on it,” she instructed. “Because it probably does.”

  Tucking the cylinder under one arm seemed the best solution, so he did that while she grasped the second one. They bumped along the wall, feeling the ship shudder under them once again.

  She muttered, “Dead in space, and they’re still firing on us. Bastards.” But she didn’t stop, continued to keep them moving through the cargo bay, until she paused at a control panel that had a flashing red light mounted on top of it.

  Not sure exactly what she was planning, Derek watched as she briefly slipped the cylinder she carried under one arm so she had a hand free to reach out, grasp the lever, and pull it down. Immediately, a set of large doors began to retract into the ship’s hull, showing a vast panoply of winking stars. There was no rush of air being sucked into the vacuum of space, as the cargo bay had never been pressurized in the first place.

  Cassidy paused there, staring out into the blackness, and then he saw her give a brief nod. “Got you, you fucker.”

  “Got whom?” he asked.

  “Hang on,” she answered, which wasn’t an answer at all. Taking the cylinder from under her arm, she fiddled with the valve on top. Immediately afterward, air began to stream from it, propelling them out of the protection of the ship and into open space.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted into the mic. “We need that air!”

  “All the air in the world isn’t going to do us any good if we don’t have some way of getting out of here. Look.” She couldn’t point, as one hand was occupied with the cylinder, using it as a sort of miniature propulsion unit, while the other was still clinging to him with a death grip, but she did sort of incline her head into the blackness.

  Maybe there was a faint glint of something there…or maybe he was just imagining things. “What is it?”

  “One of our friends. Usually, when a ship is disabled, they leave pickets like this, keeping an eye on things, while the others in the squadron go in for a closer look. That means he’s separated from the others, and a target.”

  “A target?” Derek repeated. His head was spinning slightly, and he didn’t think it was just because of the over-oxygenated air mixture he was currently breathing. “How can he be a target when we don’t have anything to target him with?”

  “We have ourselves,” she said calmly, still propelling them forward, heading toward that faint glint, the one that now was resolving itself into the shape of a sleek two-man fighter.

  And while he attempted to puzzle that one out, the GDF ship grew closer and closer. Now Derek could see she was coming up from behind, out of the pilot’s visual range.

  “Don’t they have sensors that could pick us up?” he asked in a murmur, worried that the GDF pilots might somehow be able to scan their communications.

  “Not likely. These fighter craft aren’t built to scan for lifeforms, just ships and objects above a certain size. We’re below that threshold.”

  That sounded encouraging. At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering how Cassidy Evans, pilot of one of the system’s more rundown freighters, was privy to this sort of information. “And you know all this how?”

  Another one of those low, grim chuckles. “About five years ago I dated a fighter pilot whose squadron was stationed at the base at Luna City. He liked to talk a big game, but since his main duty seemed to be providing escort duty to diplomats and muckety-mucks getting ferried back and forth from Gaia, I doubt he ever saw any real combat. But, as I said, he liked to talk, and I liked to listen. Yeah, he was telling me things that could’ve gotten him court-martialed if anyone ever found out, but I didn’t share any of it, and he bought my big-eyed ‘gee whiz’ act. Anyway, you never know when you might pick up something valuable that could help you later on.”

  That was for damn sure. “So what’s the plan?”

  She closed the valve on the oxygen cylinder and let it drift away, its work done. They were now still moving slowly toward the ship and would continue to do so, now that they’d been set in motion. “All these ships have an external emergency release for the cockpit canopy. You access it from a panel directly behind the gunner. I’ll pop it, and then we’ll yank those bastards out of their comfy padded seats and let them find out how fun it is to breathe space.”

  “Surely they have flight suits — ”

  “Yes, they do. Rated for exactly three minutes of exposure to vacuum. So maybe their friends will come along and rescue them before then, but I kind of doubt it.”

  This whole plan sounded like it was predicated on any number of “ifs,” and Derek didn’t find any of it very appealing. But they were committed now. It was the lives of the two men in that ship, or his and Cassidy’s. And considering that the members of that squadron hadn’t shown any compunction about firing on an unarmed vessel, he decided he’d probably better put aside his squeamishness.

  Now the ship was only a few meters away. He held his breath, thinking that surely its occupants must see them, must realize they weren’t alone out here. But he and Cassidy were approaching in what was effectively a blind spot, so maybe she’d been right. All he could do was hope the ship wouldn’t get some kind of signal from its compatriots and switch on its thrusters, or the two of them would be instantly incinerated.

  The little ship seemed to drift there in the empty space between worlds, though, not moving, doing as Cassidy had said, which was keeping watch while the others did their dirty work. From
behind him, he caught a brilliant orange flare at the very edges of his peripheral vision, and he realized the Avalon must have been fired on again, this time being utterly destroyed.

  Maybe there was the faintest of sighs coming from the helmet speaker. He realized then that Cassidy had just lost her home, the only one she’d ever known. The barest of pauses, and she said, “Let’s do this. I’ll get the emergency release, then take care of the pilot, since I need to be flying this thing. You get the gunner.”

  She made it sound so easy, as if the whole thing required no more effort than pulling on a pair of pants. No going back now, though, so he replied, “Got it.”

  “On my mark. One…two…three!”

  And her gloved fingers were on the surface of the ship, pulling herself along, while Derek did the same, moving on the opposite side of the vessel from her so she could access the emergency release and then pull herself forward unimpeded. A second, then two, and the canopy flipped backward, revealing two men wearing zero-g suits and helmets, but not the heavy spacesuits he and Cassidy had on. The helmeted heads swiveled around, trying to see what had caused the malfunction, and Derek yanked himself upward, grasped the buckle of the man’s harness and undid it, even as the gunner swung his hand at Derek’s helmet, attempting to crack the duraplast visor.

  A wave of fury went over him, and he returned the favor, only with more success, as the gunner’s helmet wasn’t latched as firmly to his suit as Derek’s own was. The black helmet went tumbling out into space, the man’s eyes widening in fear as Derek pulled him free from his harness and kicked him in the stomach, sending him hurtling into the dark.

  He looked forward, thinking he would need to assist Cassidy, but she’d had much the same thought, had torn the helmet from the pilot’s head and taken advantage of his shock to undo his harness and push him out of the cockpit.

  “Get in!” she shouted, and he managed to squeeze himself into the gunner’s seat, although the bulky spacesuit was making the procedure more difficult than he would have liked. But somehow he managed to accomplish the task, and the canopy dropped over their heads just as he was buckling the harness over his chest.