Stephen snapped up his faceshield and used the rifle butt to pole himself gently into the communications alcove. The Fed officer still gripped the handset in a gauntlet as he floated with a bullet hole between his startled eyes. The panel had a flat-plate vision screen. An officer in a blue jacket watched in horror at the carnage that drifted past the pickup lens at the base of the display.
Stephen ignored the handset and switched the panel to speakerphone. "Do you recognize me?" he shouted to the Fed officer. "I'm Stephen Gregg. Put your captain on and maybe you'll live through the rest of this day. Soonest!"
A sailor fired twice. One of the bullets struck the bulkhead at the end of the passage and ricocheted back, whanging several times on the upper and lower deckplates. Another sailor shouted a curse.
An older female officer took the place of the first at the commo unit. This officer's cap and left lapel were both gold. "Colonel Gregg," she said in a taut voice. "Your ship has been driven away and your small group will inevitably be wiped out unless you surrender. I have eight hundred heavily armed soldiers aboard. Do you yield?"
"You've got a hundred less than you had when I started, missy!" Stephen snarled. "Listen! I've got a laser cutter and all the other tools you were using for repair work. Unless you surrender now I'll punch a hole in every compartment of this ship and void it to vacuum. I've already started, missy! I'm Stephen Gregg and I'd as soon kill you all as take your surrender. By God I would!"
A body with no face drifted past the alcove, trailing five meters of intestine through what had been a white uniform. The captain of the Savior Enthroned saw the corpse and stiffened. Stephen laughed savagely at her expression.
"The lives of my crew and the troops in my care," the Fed captain said, her voice three tones higher than when she first spoke. "Honorable captivity for the officers and exchange if that. . if that becomes possible. Yes?"
An explosion or a high-velocity projectile made the giant vessel's hull ring. Some other portion of the boarding party was in a vicious fight.
"Accepted," Stephen said. "But any of your people who're still fighting in three minutes had better be able to breathe vacuum. On my word as a gentleman of Venus!"
The Fed captain grimaced and nodded. She turned a rotary switch and began to speak. Loudspeakers in every corridor and compartment of the Savior Enthroned crackled out her orders to surrender the vessel.
ABOARD THE GALLANT SALLIE
October 1, Year 27
1554 hours, Venus time
"Three minutes to transit," Harrigan warned from the Gallant Sallie's navigation console. "Lighting thrusters."
Sal drew Stephen's armored form firmly down onto the deckplate so that the 1-g acceleration wouldn't slam him there. His faceshield was raised, but his eyes focused a thousand meters out.
The boarding party had made a single transit jump to get the captured vessel clear before the Feds attempted to retake her. The Federation commander's draconian threats to any captain who failed to hold the preset order had stifled the individual initiative that might have overcome the attack on the Savior Enthroned.
The huge globular form of the Savior Enthroned drifted in a cloud of debris against an alien starscape. While they waited for a ship-the Gallant Sallie, as it chanced-to arrive with navigators and additional flight crew, Stephen's men had voided the trash of battle. If Sal looked closely, she could see that many of the objects floating around the captured ship were mangled bodies, Molt and human both.
The Gallant Sallie's thrusters fired. Apparent weight returned; the deck was downward again. Objects ignored because there'd been forty extra sailors packed into the vessel now settled abruptly. The Savior Enthroned's image became a diminishing ball in the center of the display.
Sal began undoing the clamps that held Stephen's hard suit together. Half the front of the gorget was gone. The sealant repairing the crazed remnant clung to the latch until Sal scraped a knifeblade through it.
Stephen suddenly looked at her. "Lord!" he said. "Sorry, I was a long way. ."
He glanced wonderingly around the Gallant Sallie's cabin. Sal lifted his helmet off, then the gorget.
"I don't remember coming aboard," Stephen said. He started to take off his own gauntlets, so Sal unlocked the three pieces that covered each arm. "I didn't realize your ship was the one that was going to pick us up."
"We'd ferried a load of ammunition from the Ishtar City Arsenal," Sal said. "Piet thought we'd be a good choice to take your wounded off. And bring you back particularly, Stephen. Piet was concerned that you might be carried to Venus inadvertently."
Stephen laughed harshly. "At least one of Pleyal's ships is going to reach Venus," he said.
"Venus orbit," Sal said. "I don't think there's a transfer dock on the planet that could take her. I. . It's incredible that you captured her, Stephen."
The boarding party's ten wounded men were on stretchers in the hold with the Wrath's own surgeon and one of his mates. Stephen and his two loaders had come across with their wounded by the same lines that guided the additional prize crew to the Savior Enthroned. Dole had come as well. The bosun was keeping himself as inconspicuous as possible because Captain Ricimer's orders had directed him to help take the prize to Venus.
"The Fed medics did a good job with their wounded," Stephen said. He'd forgotten that he'd been removing his hard suit. Sal unlatched the leg pieces. "With guns to their heads. It wasn't necessary, but I didn't try to stop it."
"Prepare for transit," Harrigan warned. Except for the mate, all the Gallant Sallie's crewmen were watching Sal and Stephen out of the corner of their eyes. Nobody was going to say anything-probably nobody cared-but Sal didn't need others to tell her that a captain's place was at the controls during transit.
Human beings had duties also. When they conflicted with the governance of a starship, well, sometimes the starship had to wait.
Transit. Bleakness, grayness, nothingness. Back, and she was holding Stephen Gregg's hands though she didn't remember taking them in hers. Transit.
The series was of eight in-and-out jumps, a thirty-second pause to calibrate for the observed position of the straggling Venerian fleet, and a final ninth transit pair to bring the Gallant Sallie within a kilometer of the Wrath. It was a clean piece of navigation. Sal had had plenty of time to program a back-course to the fleet while the Gallant Sallie waited, its hatch open, to receive the party from the captured vessel.
She hadn't known that Stephen was still alive until Dole raised the faceshield of the figure floating beside him like an empty suit of armor.
Attitude jets puffed, rotating the Gallant Sallie so that Harrigan could brake the freighter's slight velocity relative to the deputy command vessel. The Wrath's image was the background to the mask of alphanumeric calculations filling the display. Patches of odd-colored ceramic covered battle damage. A crew was at work on the outer hull.
Stephen closed his eyes and took off the linked back-and-breast pieces of his hard suit. There was a huge bruise visible through the sweat-soaked tunic he wore beneath the armor. "Has anything happened with the fleets?" he asked without emotion.