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.