“You’re betting the Festival will finish them off.”
“Yup,” she agreed.
“Ready to arm initiator pump,” said the autopilot. It sounded like a fussy old man.
“M’ first husband,” she said. “He always nagged.”
“And here was me thinking it was your favorite pet ferret.” Martin busied himself hunting for crash webbing. “No gravity on this crate?”
“’S not a luxury yacht.”
Something bumped and clanked outside the door. “Oh shit.”
“We launch in — forty-two seconds,” said Rachel.
“Hope they give us that long.” Martin leaned over and began strapping her into the couch. “How many gees does this thing pull?”
She laughed: it ended in a cough. “Many as we can take. Fission rocket.”
“Fission?” He looked at her aghast. “But we’ll be a sitting duck! If they—”
“Shut up and let me work.” She closed her eyes again, busy with the final preparations.
Sneak was, of course, of the essence. A fission rocket was a sitting duck to a battlecruiser like the Lord Vanek; it had about four hours’ thrust, during which time it might stay ahead — if the uncompensated acceleration didn’t kill its passengers, and if the ship didn’t simply go to full military power and race past it — but then it was out of fuel, a ballistic casualty. To make matters worse, until she managed to get more than about ten thousand kilometers away from the Lord Vanek, she’d be within tertiary laser defense range — close enough that the warship could simply point its lidar grid at the lifeboat and curdle them like an egg in a microwave oven.
But there was a difference between could and would which, Rachel hoped, was big enough to fly a spaceship through. Activating the big warship’s drive would create a beacon that any defenders within half a light-minute or so might see. And torching off the big laser sensor/killer array would be like lighting up a neon sign saying invading warship — come and get me. Unless Captain Mirsky was willing to risk his Admiral’s wrath by making a spectacle of himself in front of the Festival, he wouldn’t dare try to nail Rachel so blatantly. Only if she lit off her own drive, or a distress beacon, would he feel free to shoot her down — because she would already have given his position away.
However, first she had to get off the ship. Undoubtedly, they’d be outside her cabin door within minutes, guns and cutters in their hands. The weakened bulkheads between the larval lifeboat and the outer pressure hull were all very well, but how to achieve a clean separation without warning them?
“Mech one. Broadcast primary destruct sequence.”
“Confirm. Primary destruct sequence for mech one.”
“Sword. Confirm?”
“Confirmed.”
The transponder in her luggage was broadcasting a siren song of destruction, on wavelengths only her spy mechs— those that were left — would be listening to. Mech one, wedged in a toilet’s waste valve in the brig, would hear. Using what was left of its feeble power pack, it would detonate its small destruct charge. Smaller than a hand grenade — but powerful enough to rupture the toilet’s waste pipe.
Warships can't use gravity-fed plumbing; the Lord Vanek’s sewage-handling system was under pressure, an intricate network of pipes connected by valves to prevent backflow. The Lord Vanek didn’t recycle its waste, but stored it, lest discharges freeze to shrapnel, ripping through spacecraft and satellites like a shotgun loaded with ice. But there are exceptions to every rule; holding waste in tanks to reduce the risk of ballistic debris creation was all very well, but not at the risk of shipboard disaster, electrical short circuit, or life-support contamination.
When Rachel’s makeshift bomb exploded, it ruptured a down pipe carrying waste from an entire deck to the main storage tanks. Worse, it took out a backflow valve. Waste water backed up from the tank and sprayed everywhere, hundreds of liters per second drenching the surrounding structural spaces and conduits. Damage control alarms warbled in the maintenance stations, and the rating on duty hastily opened the main dump valves, purging the waste circuit into space. The Lord Vanek had a crew of nearly twelve hundred, and had been in flight for weeks; a fire spray of sewage exploded from the scuppers, nearly two hundred tonnes of waste water purging into space just as Rachel’s lifeboat counted down to zero.
In the process of assembling her lifeboat, the robot factory in Rachel’s luggage had made extensive — not to say destructive — changes to the spaces around her cabin. Supposedly solid bulkheads fractured like glass; on the outer hull of the ship, a foam of spun diamond half a meter thick disintegrated into a talc-like powder across a circle three meters in diameter. The bottom dropped out of Rachel’s stomach as the hammock she lay in lurched sideways, then the improvised cold-gas thrusters above her head kicked in, shoving the damply newborn lifeboat clear of its ruptured womb. Weird, painful tidal stresses ripped at her; Martin grunted as if he’d been punched in the gut. The lifeboat was entering the ship’s curved-space field, a one-gee gradient dropping off across perhaps a hundred meters of space beyond the hull; the boat creaked and sloshed ominously, then began to tumble, falling end over end toward the rear of the warship.
On board the Lord Vanek, free-fall alarms were sounding. Cursing bridge officers yanked at their seat restraints, and throughout the ship, petty officers yelled at their flyers, calling them to crash stations.
Down in the drive maintenance room, Commander Krupkin was cursing up a blue streak as he hit the scram switch, then grabbed his desk with one hand and the speaking tube to the bridge with the other to demand an explanation.
Without any fuss, the warship’s drive singularity entered shutdown. The curved-space field that provided both a semblance of gravity and shielding against acceleration collapsed into a much weaker spherical field centered on the point mass in the engine room — just in time to prevent two hundred tons of bilgewater, and a twenty-tonne improvised lifeboat, from hammering into the rear of the Lord Vanek’s hull and ripping the heat exchangers to shreds.
In the Green deck accommodation block corridor, a nightmare cacophony of alarms was shrilling for attention. Lights strobed overhead, blue, red, green; blowout alarm, gravity failure alarm, everything.
Lieutenant Sauer cursed under his breath and grappled with an emergency locker door; “Help me, you idiot!” he shouted at Able Flyer Maxim Kravchuk who, whey-faced with fear, was frozen in the middle of the corridor. “Grab this handle and pull for your life!” Farther up the corridor, damage control doors were sliding shut; as they closed, struts extended from their inner surfaces and extended bright orange crash nets. Maxim grabbed the handle Sauer pointed him at and yanked. Together they managed to unseal the stiff locker door. “Get inside, idiot,” Sauer grunted.
The blowout alarm, terror of all cosmonauts, stopped strobing, but now he could feel the keening of the gravity failure siren deep in his bones — and the floor was beginning to tilt. Kravchuk tumbled inside the locker and began to belt himself to the wall, hands working on instinct alone. Sauer could see the whites of the man’s terrified eyes. He paused in the entrance, glancing up the corridor. The UN bitch’s cabin was in the next segment — he’d have to secure this one and get breathing apparatus before he could go and find out what she’d done to his ship. It’s not just the skipper who‘ll be asking questions, he thought bitterly.