“I know. She’s with me now.”
“Oh, good. All right then.”
“What else?”
“Else?”
“You said for one thing.”
“Oh. Right. Well, that’s a little hard to explain.”
“Wash.”
“Sir,” said Zoë. “We might want to hold off on this.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I just caught a glimpse of something metallic out there.”
“Wash, I’ll call you back.”
He disconnected and drew his weapon; hers was already in her hand, though she had no memory of pulling it.
“You only saw one?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. One glint. Shouldn’t we get out of here?”
“Yes, unless there’s a weapon trained on the door, waiting for us to go over there and close it.”
“You want to find out?”
“Not especially.”
“Should we just stand here forever?”
“Not such a good idea either.”
“We should have closed the door when we came in, sir.”
“Good thinking.”
Zoë shrugged and knelt down by the side of the door. Mal stood behind her.
“Ready, sir? I’ll get it.”
“I’ll get it.”
“No, sir. I can—”
Mal lunged across the threshold, rolling and coming up on the other side of the door.
With a small part of her brain that wasn’t otherwise occupied, she thought, You never get used to the way bullets kick into things around you so much sooner than you hear the report.
There was no need to speak. There were at least three of them, the weapons were semi-auto, and they were firing at three different levels. No way were they going out there.
The door swung closed.
“You good, sir?”
“Didn’t even feel a breeze.”
“Good, then.”
“I’ll fire it up,” said Mal.
“Let me, sir.”
“All right.”
She slid herself into the pilot’s seat. Bullets continued striking the side of the shuttle. She disengaged the guidance lock, engaged the power, and armed the controls. It wasn’t as smooth as Wash would have done it, but it didn’t take a lot longer.
She put her hand on the throttle, kicked in the grav boot, and said, “Well, now what?”
“Uh, now we get out of here?”
“Not going to happen, sir.”
“Uh…”
Zoë got up and briefly inspected the area opposite the hatch, nodded, and sat back down. “One of those shots that came in through the hatch knocked out the g-line. We’re not going anywhere, sir.”
“Ah. Well. And just when I thought everything was perfect.”
An occasional bullet hit the hull, with a sound like a hammer hitting an anvil through a pillow.
Mal frowned. “I wonder how long we can stay in here and just let them shoot at us.”
“Until they realize that we’re just going to sit here, and go and get explosives.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Or, depending on who they are, they could just bring up artillery.”
“You’re full of good cheer.”
“Well, they aren’t asking us to surrender, so we don’t have to worry about whether they’re going to trick us.”
“Now that’s a good cheery way to look at things, Zoë.”
She squinted through the window. Was that… ? “I think they’re getting reinforced.”
“Oh, that’s good. I’d hate to think we weren’t outnumbered.”
“We wouldn’t want that, would we.”
“If we knew where they were coming from, and who they were,” said Mal, “we might be able to guess how soon they’ll be able to get explosives.”
“Yes sir. And something else bothers me.”
“You mean, who it is trying to kill us?”
“Yes, sir. If it was Sakarya, he wouldn’t have paid us.”
“Yep.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“We could use a new plan.”
“We could at that,” he said.
The conversation with the captain and his first mate ought to have given him a lot more information than it did. He stared at the comm gear.
What was it about that ship that had gotten Asher House so excited? There were no active warrants on the captain, just a string of dropped charges; so what else did they have? Or who else?
Could it be a who? There had been the instructions to meet with someone and negotiate a price for information. The captain didn’t have the information, so someone else on the ship did. Someone who would what, sell out that captain? But the same problem kept returning, in new forms: what could the House want so badly that they’d blow an eight-month operation for it, just at the point it was about to pay off? And how could he have never heard a whisper of something that big?
He turned back to his gear and pondered.
One eye on the beacon, one eye on the glide plane, he slid through the increasingly thick atmo. It was just as well that this sort of flying required almost no thought, because his mind was on everything else.
What was going on with Zoë?
He knew that tone Mal had used—that too-too-calm sign-off. There was something going on.
His hand twitched toward the comm, then back.
Gorram it, he would not break into whatever they were in the middle of, just because he was worried. He would not. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been in tight scrapes before. And it wasn’t as if there were anything he could do that he wasn’t doing—that is, getting back there as fast as he could.
As fast as he could would be a good ten minutes. A lot could happen in ten minutes.
What was going on with Zoë?
He heard a footstep behind him, and almost lost his groove. He spared a glance over his shoulder.
“River! Uh, hello there.”
“You should.”
He looked at the yoke, the I-set, the gravlock, the attitude controls, and realized suddenly how little pressure it would take on any one of how many things to send them crashing onto the world. “Maybe this isn’t the place you should be right now.”
“You should call,” said River.
He spared her another look. Her eyes were slightly wide, her hands were in fists at her sides, and she wasn’t moving at all.
“I should… you mean, I should get hold of Zoë and Mal? I’m still ten minutes away, there’s nothing I can do yet. And if I interrupt them in the middle of something—”
“You don’t fix faith; it fixes you,” she said, and turned around and left the bridge.
He let out his breath, not having been aware of holding it, and checked his glide path again. All was well.
You don’t fix faith…
Now what did that mean?
Chapter 6
My Own Kind of Flying
The comm crackled. “Mal? What’s going on down there?”
“Hi hun,” said Zoë. “Nothing much. We’re being shot at.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Pretty much.”
“Are you shooting back?”
“Haven’t quite figured out how to do that, yet.”
“Then why aren’t you out of there?”
“Can’t. The g-line got shot out.”
“Bei yachi yange de shuiniu de zinü. Can you get out of the shuttle?”
“Not just at the moment. There are at least six of them, I think, and they’re sort of shooting at the door.”
“You could turn the shuttle around.”
“Without the grav-boot?”
“Yes.”