Gerald Skibbow was manoeuvred to an open pod just inside the hatchway. He glanced around the compartment, his head turning in fractured movements to take in the compartment. The security men holding him felt his muscles tensing.
Dont even think of it, one said.
He was propelled firmly towards the waiting pod.
No, he said.
Get in, Ralph told him impatiently.
No. Not that. Please. Ill be good, Ill behave.
Get in.
No.
One of the security men anchored himself to the decking grid with a toe clip, and tugged him down.
No! He gripped both sides of the open pod, his features stone-carved with determination. I wont! he shouted.
In!
No.
All three security men were pushing and shoving at him. Gerald Skibbow strove against them. Will tucked a leg round a nearby girder, and smacked the butt of his TIP carbine against Gerald Skibbows left hand. There was a crunch as the bones broke.
He howled, but managed to keep hold. His fingers turned purple, the skin undulating. No!
The carbine came down again. Ralph put his hands flat against the decking above, and stood on Gerald Skibbows back, knees straining, trying to thrust him down into the pod.
Gerald Skibbows broken hand slipped a couple of centimetres, leaving a red smear. Stop this, stop this. Rivulets of white light began to shiver across his torso.
Ralph felt as though his own spine was going to snap, the force his boosted muscles were exerting against his skeleton was tremendous. The soles of his feet were tingling sharply, the worms of white light coiling round his ankles. Dean, switch the pod on the second hes in.
Sir.
The hand slipped again. Gerald Skibbow started a high-pitched animal wailing. Will hammered away at his left elbow. Firefly sparks streaked back up the carbine every time it hit, as though he was striking flint.
Get in, you bastard, one of the security men shouted, nearly purple from the effort, face shrivelled like a rubber mask.
Gerald Skibbow gave way, the arm Will had hammered on finally losing hold. He crashed down into the bottom of the pod with an oof of air punched out through his open mouth. Ralph cried out at the shock of the jolt that was transmitted back up his cramped legs. The curving lid of the pod began to slide into place, and he bent his knees frantically, lifting his legs out of the way.
No! Gerald Skibbow shouted. He had begun to glow like a hologram profile, rainbow colours shining bright in the compartments gloom. His voice was cut off by the lid sliding into place, and it locked with a satisfying mechanical click . There was a muffled thud of a fist striking the composite.
Wheres the bloody zero-tau? Will said. Where is it?
The lid of the pod hadnt changed, there was no sign of the slippery black field effect. Gerald Skibbow was pounding away on the inside with the fervour of a man buried alive.
Its on, Dean shouted hoarsely from the operators control panel. Christ, its on, its drawing power.
Ralph stared at the sarcophagus in desperation. Work, he pleaded silently, come on fuck you, work! Jenny died for this.
Switch on, you shit! Will screamed at it.
Gerald Skibbow stopped punching the side of the pod. A black emptiness irised over the lid.
Will let out a sob of exhausted breath.
Ralph realized he was clinging weakly to one of the girders, the real fear had been that Gerald Skibbow would break out. Tell the captain were ready, he said in a drained voice. I want to get him to Ombey as quickly as we can.
Chapter 02
The event horizon around Villeneuves Revenge dissolved the instant the starship expanded out to its full forty-eight-metre size. Solar wind and emaciated light from New Californias distant sun fell on the dark silicon hull which its disappearance exposed. Short-range combat sensors slid out of their jump recesses with smooth animosity, metallic black tumours inset with circular gold-mirror lenses. They scoured a volume of space five hundred kilometres across, hungry for a specific shape.
Data streams from the sensors sparkled through Erick Thakrars mind, a rigid symbolic language written in monochromic light. Cursors chased through the vast constantly reconfiguring displays, closing in on an explicit set of values like circling photonic-sculpture vultures. Radiation, mass, and laser returns slotted neatly into their parameter definition.
The Krystal Moon materialized out of the fluttering binary fractals, hanging in space two hundred and sixty kilometres away. An inter-planetary cargo ship, eighty metres long; a cylindrical life-support capsule at one end, silver-foil-cloaked tanks and dull-red fusion-drive tube clustered at the other. Thermo-dump panels formed a ruff collar on the outside of the environmental-engineering deck just below the life-support capsule; communication dishes jutted out of a grid tower on the front of it. The ships midsection was a hexagonal gantry supporting five rings of standard cargo-pods, some of them plugged into the environmental deck via thick cables and hoses.
A slender twenty-five-metre flame of hazy blue plasma burnt steadily from the fusion tube, accelerating the Krystal Moon at an unvarying sixtieth of a gee. It had departed Tehama asteroid five days ago with its cargo of industrial machinery and micro-fusion generators, bound for the Ukiah asteroid settlement in the outer asteroid belt Dana, which orbited beyond the gas giant Sacramento. Of the stars three asteroid belts, Dana was the least populated; traffic this far out was thin. Krystal Moon s sole link to civilization (and navy protection) was its microwave communication beam, focused on Ukiah, three hundred and twenty million kilometres ahead.
Ericks neural nanonics reported that pattern lock was complete. He commanded the X-ray lasers to fire.
Two hundred and fifty kilometres away, the Krystal Moon s microwave dishes burst apart into a swirl of aluminium snowflakes. A long brown scar appeared on the forward hull of the life-support capsule.
God, I hope no one was in the cabin below.
Erick tried to push that thought right back to the bottom of his mind. Straying out of character, even for a second, could quite easily cost him his life. Theyd drilled that into him enough times back at the academy. There was even a behavioural consistency program loaded into his neural nanonics to catch any wildly inaccurate reactions. But flinches and sudden gasps could be equally damning.
The Villeneuves Revenge triggered its fusion drive, and accelerated in towards the stricken cargo ship at five and a half gees. Erick sent another two shots from the X-ray cannon squirting into the Krystal Moon s fusion tube. Its drive flame died. Coolant fluid vented out of a tear in the casing, hidden somewhere in the deep shadows on the side away from the sun, the fountain fluorescing grey-blue as it jetted out from behind the ship.
Nice going, Erick, Andr Duchamp commented. He had the secondary fire-control program loaded in his own neural nanonics. If the newest crew-member hadnt fired he could have taken over within milliseconds. Despite Ericks performance in the Catalina Bar, Andr had a single nagging doubt. After all, OFlaherty was one of their ownafter a fashionand eliminating him didnt require many qualms no matter who you were; but firing on an unarmed civil ship ... You have earned your place on board, Andr said silently. He cancelled his fire-control program.
Villeneuves Revenge was a hundred and twenty kilometres from the Krystal Moon when Andr turned the starship and started decelerating. The hangar doors began to slide open. He started to whistle against the push of the heavy gee force.