“They’re targeting,” Ginese said. Meaning, Shut up and fix it.
“I’m not wasting time,” Meharry said. She plucked the overlay off the top of the secondary board and prodded something underneath with delicacy. “This little beauty—I don’t want to blow anything if it’s wired that way—can just now slip . . . out.” She slipped the tiny object into her pocket.
Heris saw, before Ginese could speak, his board come live. One by one, the orange lights turned green, one column after another as the weapons ran through self-checks and warmed.
“Code Three as soon as you can, Mr. Ginese,” Heris said. Meharry’s board began to green up, far slower than Heris wanted. Guar was reassembling his console; Oblo wore an expression of limpid unconcern that Heris knew from earlier battles.
“LAST WARNING. INTRUDER SHIP CEASE MANEUVERING IN TEN SECONDS OR WE WILL FIRE ON YOU.” Nicely calculated, that. The transmission lag was down to eight seconds, but the whole—
“Here it goes—” said Ginese. On the large screen, the tracks of the other ships, the analysis of their weaponry, the first white-hot arcs as two missiles lofted toward where they would be, one from each pursuer. His board was almost completely green, the yellow dots lit now halfway across the top.
And in the corridors of the yacht, small-arms fire erupted, short and disastrous. Then silence. Meharry shifted her board’s controls to Ginese, and moved to stand by the bridge hatch.
“Lockdown, Captain?”
“No—we’ve got loyal crew out there . . .”
Oblo was up, too. “Issi, your control. I can go out—”
“No . . . there’s only one to worry about, and with any luck she’s dead.” And with enough luck there’s no hole in the hull, and no one else was hit, and Lady Cecelia and Mr. Smith are still safe for the brief length of this uneven fight. All that ran through Heris’s mind as she watched on the screen the enemy’s missiles coming nearer. On Ginese’s board, the yellow dots turned red as the weapons came operational.
“Let’s just see . . .” Ginese said. His finger stabbed at the board and the two missiles seemed to stagger in their course, then swerve aside. “Yeah. Still works fine.”
Heris let out the breath she had taken. “If they could all be that easy,” she said. That hadn’t even required their offensive weaponry. Ginese chuckled, a sound to strike any sensible person cold.
“Then I couldn’t play with my other little darlings.” His shoulders tensed, watching his displays, and he murmured, “Oh, you would . . . idiots.”
Heris didn’t interrupt with questions. The second wave of missiles had been launched before the enemy would have had time to get scan data back from the yacht’s activated weapons. Four, this time, bracketing their expected course. These Arkady dispatched with contemptuous ease. What mattered now was what else they would use . . . their scans revealed optical and ballistic possibilities.
“Response, Captain?” They could of course launch a counterattack—no one was there to remind her it was a bad idea to get into a slugfest with two larger ships.
“Let’s try to dodge their bullets and help them run low on ammunition,” Heris said. “Why change what’s working?” She kept an eye on Oblo’s scanning screens . . . if that moon had held a trap, and if the pursuers had realized they weren’t going into it, a third ship might come dashing out right about . . . there. But they had trusted too much to their trap; the third ship had low relative vee, and though boosting frantically, was caught deep in the well with little maneuverability.
“There’s a target, Mr. Ginese, if you just want something to shoot at.”
“A bit chancy,” he said. “I’d rather save what we’ve got for these two.”
“Just don’t forget that third one; if it launches something at us, it could still hurt us.”
“Right, Captain.” In the tone of teach-your-grandmother-to-suck-eggs. In that long pause, while the enemy realized they had an armed ship and not a helpless victim to subdue, while the enemy commander—Heris imagined—cursed and chose an alternate plan—she had time to wonder why it was so quiet. Someone should have reported back by now.
She called up the personnel monitor again, and saw the cluster of green dots in exactly the wrong place, down in the service corridor near the weapons locker. What if Sirkin had attacked Lady Cecelia—shot the clone—was holding Lady Cecelia hostage?
“Meharry.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Heris pointed to the layout with the little green dots. “Get down there and find out what’s going on—and break it up. First priority, secure the ship; next, Lady Cecelia; next, Mr. Smith.”
“Yes, sir!” Meharry’s sleepy green eyes were wide awake now, and eager. Oblo moved forward but Heris waved him back.
“No—we’ve got a battle up here, too, and you can do either nav or weapons. Go help Ginese for now.”
Sirkin followed Lady Cecelia’s chair out of her quarters with a mixture of reluctance and glee. It wasn’t her fault; she hadn’t made those mistakes, and she knew—she thought she knew—who had. But nobody would believe her, she was sure, and she doubted the captain would have the patience to let Lady Cecelia literally spell it out. If anyone came down here, they’d believe the worst of her . . . especially now that she was out of her quarters.
Lady Cecelia’s hoverchair made swift, silent progress along the corridor toward the main lounge. Sirkin looked over her head to see Mr. Smith and several of Lady Cecelia’s medical team clumped together there. As she watched, they came forward, and Lady Cecelia reversed the chair, nearly hitting Sirkin.
“Weapons,” said Mr. Smith. “Where are the small-arms lockers?” Sirkin knew that, but she wasn’t sure what they were doing, or if it was right. He grinned at her, that famous grin she’d seen on many a newscast, and punched her arm lightly. “Come on, we’ve got to get armed, and keep whoever it is from taking the ship away from your captain.”
“Skoterin,” she found herself saying as she led the way back into crew country. “Joined the ship just before we left Rockhouse . . . old crewmate . . .”
“One of the group that was court-martialed?”
“No—just demoted afterwards. Some enlisted were, she said.”
“What specialty?”
“Environmental systems,” Sirkin said, almost jogging to keep up with his long legs.
They came out of that corridor into another, which angled downward; Heris would have recognized it as leading to the place where Iklind had died. Sirkin did not; she only knew they should take the turn to the right. The weapons lockers, filled with all those expensive oddments (as Ginese had called them) on Sirialis, were that way, around a turn or two. Sirkin, sure of the way, went first; Mr. Smith came behind her, and then Lady Cecelia in her chair, surrounded by attendants.
Around the last corner . . . Sirkin stopped abruptly, and almost fell as Lady Cecelia’s chair bumped into the back of her legs. The weapons lockers were open, and on the deck lay Nasiru Haidar, facedown and motionless, with blood pooled under his head. Sirkin could not speak; her mind ran over the same words like a hamster in its wheel . . . I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it. Mr. Smith pushed past her, and knelt beside the fallen man; Sirkin edged forward, trying to remember to breathe. And one of the medical attendants rushed forward, opening a belt pack.
“Just stop right there,” someone said. Sirkin looked up as Skoterin stepped out of an open hatch across from the weapons lockers. Skoterin had one of the weapons—Sirkin wasn’t sure what it was, though she knew she’d seen its like in newsclips and adventure cubes. It looked deadly enough, and Skoterin handled it as if it were part of her body. “How very convenient,” Skoterin said. “Just the people I wanted to see, and now you’re all here together.” She had on a black mesh garment over her uniform; Sirkin found her mind wandering to it, wondering what it was.