"You're the managing director," Stephen said. "And a very good business decision you've made. Go talk to Piet."
He nodded Sal forward. "I wouldn't argue with a choice you had a right to make," Stephen added softly, "any more than I'd expect one of my men to tell me who to kill next."
ABOARD THE GALLANT SALLIE
October 3, Year 27
1027 hours, Venus time
"They're clear!" Brantling announced. He was in the cutter in the Gallant Sallie's hold, speaking over the hardwired intercom rigged for the mission.
On the display, Sal could see the barge pulling away with most of the Gallant Sallie's crew and personal effects. Tom Harrigan watched tensely from the attitude-control boards. He, Sal, and Brantling were all the personnel the old vessel had on her last voyage.
Ships didn't have souls; and even if they did, there were humans dying in this war also.
"All right, we're going in," Sal said. She pushed the execute key to start the program. Even that simple movement felt awkward in a hard suit.
Harrigan wore the Gallant Sallie's general-purpose suit. He looked even more clumsy and uncomfortable than Sal felt. Stephen had offered to find armor for Brantling, but the sailor had refused. He waited at the cutter's controls in a helmet, a breathing mask, and a flexible bodysuit.
The attitude jets fired, then counterfired. The thrusters lit with a shudder, returning the vessel to an apparent 1 g of acceleration toward Heldensburg.
Words in white letters crawled across the bottom of the display. The message had been sent on the command channel, overriding the lock Sal had placed on the commo gear.
"Wrath sends, 'Our prayers go with you,'" Sal relayed to her fellows. The transmission was slugged "Piet," not "Wrath," but she would have felt awkward saying that.
Heldensburg was an ugly planet, yellow beneath the misty blue scattering of its atmosphere. Sal hadn't realized quite how ugly the place was on previous landings here. A turgid pimple, swelling on the display.
Two specks swung toward the Gallant Sallie. Sal highlighted and expanded the images.
"I see them! I see the Feds!" Brantling cried.
"Brantling, keep off the intercom!" Sal snapped.
Because the hatch remained open, Brantling had been able to glimpse either the featherboat or the armed barge trying desperately to match courses. The Feds had a number of light vessels in orbit to prevent what the Gallant Sallie was about to do.
The thrusters cut out momentarily. The AI used the attitude jets to rotate the Gallant Sallie, then fired the thrusters again at an initial 3 g's. They were coming in very hard and fast. A technical expert from the Wrath had reprogrammed the artificial intelligence to permit it to execute maneuvers well beyond safety parameters.
Sal checked their heading. The point of impact was drifting west, though for the moment it was still predicted to be within the port reservation. She adjusted the program. Execution was in the AI's electronic hands, but Sal felt the ship quiver minusculely as altitude jets burped moments after she'd entered the correction.
Heldensburg filled the display, as vapid as an ingenue's smile. The port was on the opposite side of the planet. Sal angrily hit keys preset to a series, then another set. A corner of the display-an eighth of the total-became a close-up of the port, a real-time view as relayed from another Venerian ship. On the opposite corner, a Fed featherboat with a light plasma cannon protruding from the bow port accelerated to come up with the Gallant Sallie.
The number of Federation vessels crowded even the vast Heldensburg spaceport. From a score of locations, plasma exhaust bloomed like flowers opening. To react so quickly, the Feds must have been expecting, dreading, exactly what was about to happen. The Gallant Sallie and her consorts couldn't expect to destroy a significant proportion of Pleyal's fleet, but they could very easily induce a wild panic that threw the Feds into the arms of sharks like Piet Ricimer and his Wrath. .
Sal rechecked their heading. Below them, clouds swept swiftly eastward as the Gallant Sallie cut against the grain of Heldensburg's rotation. The predicted landing-impact-site still drifted west, but less swiftly. With Sal's correction, the ship would hit close to the center of the target.
The atmosphere was beginning to buffet the ship. Even though thrust had dropped to little more than 1 g, movement was difficult.
"Let's-" Sal said as she rose from the console.
The featherboat fired its plasma cannon. A bright ionized track showed on the display because the Feds as well had dipped into the atmosphere in pursuit. The bolt missed closely enough that hair on the back of Sal's arms rose.
"— go!"
Tom Harrigan grabbed Sal and flung her bodily down the passage ahead of him. The ship staggered like a drunken sailor, but Sal had a lifetime's experience on jumping decks.
She caught the lip of the cutter's dorsal hatch and hoisted herself into the cabin. She turned to help Harrigan, but the mate had paused to throw the hatch-closing switch.
Brantling lit the thruster. Plasma smothered the hold in a brilliant fog. The cutter lurched even though the nozzle was irised wide. Sal saw Harrigan's gauntlet flail through the iridescence. She grabbed him and pulled. Harrigan came aboard just as Brantling took the cutter out of the Gallant Sallie, ticking on the way against the slowly closing hatch.
Sal pressed her helmet against the mate's and shouted, "You idiot!"
"Sal," Harrigan said, his voice a buzz through the ceramic of his helmet and hers, "I was afraid the open hatch'd throw the AI off in the lower atmosphere."
The Gallant Sallie glowed across a broad segment of sky, plunging toward Heldensburg. Brantling was trying to climb out of the atmosphere, but the featherboat now kept company with them less than a kilometer out. Another gleaming reflection, probably the armed barge, was closing as well.
One moment the Gallant Sallie was a white-hot comet trailing a cone of superheated atmosphere. In the next the ship disintegrated as a rainbow flash, hit squarely by one of Heldensburg's 30-cm guns. The bolt was powerful enough to destroy the hull's structural integrity; friction and inertia did the rest.
Sal watched transfixed. They'd removed the cutter's hatch before the mission so that nothing would slow her and Tom when they boarded at the last instant. The cutter's attitude as Brantling braked the momentum transferred during the Gallant Sallie's dive gave Sal and Harrigan a perfect view of the port.
The Gallant Sallie had broken into three large pieces, plus a score of smaller ones that were refractory enough to survive their bath in the atmosphere. Most of the smaller chunks were separated nozzles and plasma motors, each describing a slightly different trajectory toward the ground. The general effect was that of a shotgun charge, but the smallest of these missiles weighed a hundred kilos and travelled at orbital velocity.
A dozen Federation vessels were already climbing skyward, corkscrewing wildly because their officers hadn't taken the time to balance thrust. Two ships touched in a grazing collision. One continued to climb but the other, an orbital monitor with a lighter hull than the long-haul vessel, caromed out of the port reservation and dropped. The monitor came down in a swamp, only marginally under control.