“So how many quantumbusters have we got?” Ozzie made it sound like a schoolkid asking questions; next it’d be how fast does it go, mister?
“All ten loaded,” Mark said.
“Man, that is a shitload of firepower.” Ozzie felt indecently happy; the Great Frigate Heist was on-line and powering up smoothly. He could probably let rumors about this one slip out into the unisphere.
“You’re telling me.” Mark peered at one of the portal displays. “Uh—” He glanced over at Ozzie’s hand on the i-spot.
“I have command of all primary functions,” the SIsubroutine said.
A plethora of frigate command icons rose up into Ozzie’s virtual vision. Compressed instruction text orbited each one like a gas-giant ring. Just reading all the introductions would have taken a couple of hours. He assumed he’d be able to do most of the piloting himself. After all, how difficult could it be? It looked like he was going to be more dependent on the SIsubroutine than he liked; despite everything that’d happened he still wasn’t sure he trusted it.
“Hey, what are you loading in?” Mark asked in growing alarm.
“Ozzie!” Giselle called. “We’ve got—ohshit.”
Ozzie’s inserts picked up the warning from the security team. “Close the airlock, and get us out of here,” he told the SIsubroutine. His virtual hand took a broad swipe at all the command icons, sweeping them away like clutter off a desk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mark putting his hand out toward an i-spot. “Stop it,” he barked. “I’ve got the kind of weapons wetwiring that can slaughter a small army. Killing you from this range is easier than breathing. Sit back and do nothing, and I’ll let you live.”
“Don’t kill me!” Mark wailed. His hand drew back as if the i-spot was wired up to a thousand volts. “Christ, man, I’ve got a family, kids.”
“Shut up.”
The airlock hatch contracted. Ozzie just heard a loud unpleasant snap from outside before it shut completely. He searched around for a button on his couch that would activate the restraint webbing. That was far too simple for this ship. He gave up. “Strap me in,” he told the SIsubroutine.
“Confirmed.”
“And give me some visuals from outside. I wanna see what’s going down.”
The couch’s plyplastic cushioning flowed over his shoulders and hips, securing him tight. Five grids in his virtual vision display came on, and he pulled the pictures out. A whole squad of armored figures was zipping out into the docking bay. Then Mellanie drifted in front of a camera. Half of her left side had been torn away; long tatters of gore hung from exposed, shattered ribs. Her face swung into view, staring directly into the lens. For some reason she possessed a Zen-like serenity, then her lips twitched and arterial blood foamed out of her mouth.
“Mellanie!” a horrified Mark cried. “Oh, God, what have you done to her? Look at her, you fucking monster.”
Ozzie didn’t have the courage to tell him to shut up again.
“Umbilicals disconnected,” the SIsubroutine said. “Engaging secondary drive units.”
The walls of the docking bay slipped past. Brief glimpse of the Scylla, embraced by the cool gray metal of maintenance platforms. Technicians turning clumsily to stare as they flew past. Then there was the purple sparkle of the pressure curtain over the hull followed by the infinite black of space. The planet formed a huge steel-gray crescent cutting across the stars. One of the spaceflowers was almost directly below them, a perfect half circle of rumpled amethyst that suddenly vanished as it crossed into the penumbra.
“Have we got enough power to make it to Dyson Alpha?” Ozzie asked the SIsubroutine.
“Yes.”
He debated whether to ask the obvious. Decided to go for it. “And get back?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, plot a course and take us there.”
“Working.”
“Are you going to kill me now?” Mark was looking at him with the kind of wild eyes that belonged to a dying animal.
“Nobody’s going to kill you,” Ozzie said. He hurriedly told the SIsubroutine to block all access to the onboard arrays apart from his own. Mark was the lead assembly technician; who knew what he’d embedded in the frigate’s systems.
“You will,” Mark said fearfully. “Your type always does.”
“Now wait up one goddamn minute here. I’m not any kind of type.”
“You just hijacked a Dynasty frigate.”
“I don’t have a lot of choice here, man.”
“You’re going to kill me, you bastard.”
“I’m not, I can’t.” Ozzie waved his arms around for emphasis, wincing as he slapped the back of his hand against the arrays. “I’m not wetwired for anything but a few bioneural chips. I swear, man; you’re perfectly safe. So just chill out.”
The silence stretched out dangerously.
“What?” Mark demanded.
“I, er, really needed the frigate; I probably exaggerated what I’d do. Heat of the moment, dude. I was desperate.”
“You piece of shit.”
“What can I say, I’m sorry.”
Mark glared at him, and folded his arms across his chest. It wasn’t an easy position to maintain in zero gee, but he managed it. “Will you be telling Mellanie you’re sorry?”
“We are going FTL,” the SIsubroutine announced.
Ozzie braced himself. There’d probably be a rush of acceleration, space twisting around him, stars blueshifting before they collided into a burst of light ahead and stretched out to envelop the hull. “She’ll get re-lifed,” he mumbled, trying to ignore the spike of shame.
“Well, that makes it all right then.” Mark deliberately and defiantly slapped a hand on an i-spot.
“What’s happening?” Ozzie asked the SIsubroutine.
“Please define context.”
“Why haven’t we gone FTL?”
“We have. We are currently traveling at thirteen point five light-years per hour.”
“Holy shit.” A huge smile split Ozzie’s face. “Really?” If he was designing the ship he’d build in a little flicker of the cabin lights, a deep throbbing sound, just something to emphasize the tremendous forces at work within the drive.
“Confirmed.”
“Wow.”
“You’ve blocked me out of the arrays,” Mark said.
“Sure have. Hey, do you know how fast we’re traveling? Thirteen light-years per hour. Jeez, that’s like just three days to Dyson Alpha. Man, me and Nige should have tried to build something like this back at the start, and to hell with wormholes. This is like totally money, straight and neat.”
“A straight quick trip to our death, more like.”
“Oh, lighten up, man, you’re about to make history in this ship.”
“You mean like the Titanic?”
“Nigel Sheldon is calling you,” the SIsubroutine said.
Ozzie twitched inside his protective webbing. A huge rush of guilt overtook his relief at pulling off the hijack. Then alarm kicked in. “How is he doing that?”
“The frigate uses a method of communications called a transdimensional channel. It is a subfunction of the main drive.”
“Man, I am like really going to have to read the instruction book. He can’t track us with that, can he?”
“The TD channel can be made directional in order to facilitate tracking.”
“Christ! Make sure it’s not doing that right now.”
“Confirmed.”
“Okay. Cool. Put Nigel on.”
“Turn around, Ozzie.” Nigel’s eerily calm voice filled the cabin. “Bring the frigate back, please.”
Mark smiled in satisfaction and gave Ozzie a challenging look.
“Can’t do that, man,” Ozzie said. “And you know it. I worked out a way to reactivate the barrier. I’m going to use a quantumbuster against the Starflyer gadget that’s messing with the generator’s quantum state.”
“There is a Trojan program in the TD signal,” the SIsubroutine reported. “I believe they are trying to take command of the ship by remote.”
“Can you counter it?”
“I believe so. It is not a type I have in my catalogue.”