“I’m not one of your crew,” she countered. “I’m in charge of the mission—and I rank you. Especially when I’m no longer aboard your own ship.”
Harcourt said nothing. He couldn’t. Not just because she had finally hit the point at which she could legitimately give him orders—but because she was right.
There are times when you have to take the only course of action that’s open to you, no matter how much you dislike it. This was one of them.
Oh, Harcourt could have commanded them all to turn the ship around, leap through the jump point, go home, and report that the mission was impossible. He would also have been stripped of rank or, at the very least, given up hope of all promotion. But his crew would have been alive, and so would Ramona.
She, however, seemed to have a death wish—and she was in charge of the mission. He couldn’t go back without disobeying orders—technically, mutiny, even though it was his own ship.
Harry and Flip volunteered for the grisly task of moving all the bodies back to the wardroom of the John Bunyan. If Ramona’s scheme worked, if she came out alive, they would take her aboard the Johnny Greene and Harcourt would read the Service for the Dead over the derelict, then leave it as a floating coffin in the asteroid belt forever.
If it didn’t work, there wouldn’t be anything left to bury.
Ramona moved into the bridge of the John Bunyan. All her mysterious cases came open. She set up her arcane gear, replaced the dead nose camera with something that looked like the grandmother of all gadgets, then pressed Coriander into helping her install some very sophisticated cameras of her own. The Chief mounted the microwave dish for her and hooked up a little computer programmed to keep it always aimed at the jump point and therefore toward the Johnny Greene. Then they substituted a magnetic grapple for the towing hook…
And sat. And waited. And waited.
Finally, Billy called out, “Transport! Just in from the jump point!”
“Battle stations!” Harcourt snapped, and Grounder hit the klaxon.
The crew scrambled to stations, Lorraine fired up their two original engines, and they burst out of the asteroid belt as though they had the Wild Hunt right behind. They accelerated up to cruising velocity, aiming the John Bunyan exactly right, and let it go. The hulk sped away from them on a trajectory that should loop it around Vukar Tag in a hyperbolic orbit, spinning it out faster than it came in.
Harcourt triggered one short transmission: “Good luck, Commander. We’ll be waiting.”
He hoped.
“That,” said Billy, “is one gutsy lady.”
“I really feel badly now, about having been such a shrew to her,” Grounder said.
Harcourt shook his head. “You had orders to follow, Lieutenant.”
“Yes,” said Barney, “but we could have tried to warm up to her.”
“I did,” Coriander said. “She wasn’t having any.”
Harcourt nodded heavily. “I think someone must have told her about ‘the loneliness of command’ at a very impressionable age—so she decided that if she was a commander, she should always be lonely.” Then he shook himself. “Enough. We could have been warmer, we should have been, but she didn’t exactly encourage it. She’s got a job to do, we’ve got a job to do—and if we want her to have a hope in Hades of living through it, we’d better get busy with our end. Turn and aim for that transport. How long till we catch it, Number One?”
“Two hours, Captain.”
“Close enough.”
“Fighters coming up off the moon like popcorn without a lid!” Billy reported.
But a stern chase is a long chase, and the Johnny Greene was already up to cruising velocity. When it turned, leveling off toward the transport, Harcourt ordered, “All engines full.”
Now they did what Ramona had commanded at the wrong time—kicked in their two captured Kilrathi engines. On all four, they ran up to the maximum velocity for any Confederation corvette, and past it.
Way past it.
The supply ship swelled in their screen, bigger and bigger.
“They’re coming up off the gas giant’s orbital station!” Billy snapped.
On the battle display, the Johnny Green was a bright green circle at the center. Above it, near the top, was the yellow oblong of the supply ship. Below, there was an arc of red arrowheads—Kilrathi fighters.
Now more little red arrowheads came swooping in from ten o’clock.
“You wanted attention? We got it!” Harry howled. “When can I start shooting, Captain?”
“You’ve got ranging computers again,” Harcourt answered. “When they register enemy, you can start shooting.”
Jolie gave a whoop of joy.
A minute, five minutes, ten…
“Range!” Billy snapped.
Jolie howled.
Her gun was in tune now—there was no Whumpf! echoing through the hull—but dots of blue sprang up in the space between the red arrowheads and the green dot.
Even Harcourt felt the satisfaction of being back in battle, the relief now that the shooting had started. Fear hollowed him, but a terrible excitement seethed up to fill that emptiness. He knew he very well might not live through this one—but he felt more intensely alive than he ever had.
How was Ramona feeling, he wondered? His gaze strayed toward the rim of the screen at eight o’clock, where the fat yellow arc that was Vukar Tag loomed. There was no blue dot near it—she was flying a dead ship, after all. Harcourt ached to send out a scan, but knew they couldn’t spare it; ached to know how she was doing, what she was seeing…
Coriander had charged all the batteries on the John Bunyan, and Ramona had brought plenty of her own, so she could watch the screen to see what her cameras saw as they recorded the fly-by. Of course, she couldn’t activate them until they were near the planet, but the ship’s batteries were enough to show her what the passive sensors saw—not on the huge battle display, of course; it would have taken a major dry dock to repair that. Coriander had revived the lookout’s screen, though, and Ramona watched, her heart in her throat, a pool of icy fear in her stomach sending out rivulets all through her body. She saw the little red arrowheads darting up from Vukar Tag, darting toward her; they had to be leveling their guns on her…
Then they were swinging away, passing her by. She heaved a huge sigh of relief. She was only a piece of floating space junk to them, after all—an asteroid about to become a meteor, to be burned up as it flashed through the atmosphere, on its way toward becoming dust. Nothing to worry about; it certainly was nothing that was going so fast that they couldn’t come back and finish it, if they had to.
But the active blip, the “Free Trader” that was pouncing on their transport—that was something they had to eliminate. What impelled them to send what must be every ship in the system against one lone corsair, though? The logical conclusion sank within her like lead: they couldn’t let any Confederation ship get away with news of Vukar Tag.
What the hell was on there, anyway?
Well, she would find out in a few minutes. The planet loomed beyond the vision port, hovering over her, ready to fall on her…
She pressed the “record” patch, and her camera’s viewfinder lit up.
Then, suddenly, Vukar Tag was beneath her, and she was skimming over it.
There was nothing to hear from her cameras, of course—everything was recorded in solid memory with automatic backups in a redundant system. None of the archaic frustrations of a transport system, of spinning wheels and fragile tape that could snap or stretch, nor any danger of a crash from a magnetic or laser head hovering over a spinning surface. The data went straight into memory, with an anti-erase lock.