Part 7 (1/2)
”Why didn't they program mobility?” ”Who?” Channa asked distractedly. ”Where?” ”In me! In this station! I can't duck! I've no weaponry to blast it out of my way. I can't even fend off such ma.s.s. All I can do is watch. What lasers I've got can just about handle a decent-sized meteor. The best I can do is warm up his hull a little, and I have to wait till he's up my a.s.s to do it! d.a.m.n! This station is like a paraplegic s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p!”
”Whoa! Did you see that?” Channa shouted. The ma.s.s had seemed to deliberately veer aside from an ordinary asteroid miner vessel, something the miner pilot himself probably couldn't have done. ”Watch,” she said, ”there! Did you see? It jigged just a bit to miss that incoming ferry traffic It is being guided.”
”But by what?” Simeon asked. He ran calculations on the ballistics of those maneuvers. The deviations were absolutely minimal for the effect. ”It's traveling so fast now, no human pilot could stop it and stay conscious. TTiey don't answer any radio messages. TTiey're ignoring the.d.a.m.n warning flares. s.h.i.+t, maybe they think we're welcoming them. Ah, goodF ”But they are decelerating again, Simeon,” Channa said, glancing up from her own screens to the main viewer before she went back to other ch.o.r.es which she had a.s.sumed.
”Yeah, marginally longer this time. No, cutting out - no, decelerating again. Rate of energy-release ... G.o.d, but they're still not dumping enough velocity! And still on a collision course!” His voice went slightly wild. ”They mustwant to destroy me!”
”I don't see any weapons,” Channa said, trying to finish her current task in time.
”Who can tell in that jumble of struts and boxes and c.r.a.p! Besides, that thing itself is a weapon.” Simeon had just one card to play and at exactly the right moment for maximum effect. ”You're not even suited up, partner. At least take shelter in my shaft core, Channa.”
She shook her head, ”Not till I'm dirough evacuating the alien quadrant 'Sides, those Letheans scare easily enough as it is without me appearing in full gear.”
She had managed at last to get through to the leader of the Lethe contingent. A people so formal that emergencies required a ceremony, mercifully brief, for deferring the usual endless courtesies in favor of survival. Had Channa not performed the ceremony and explained the situation to them, they would have died rather than commit such a breach of manners as a.s.suming that something was actually wrong. She broke the connection at last and exclaimed, 'JoatT ”She has a suit,” Simeon said, ”first thing I gave her. She's probably in it right now. Why aren't you?”
She dashed for the cabinet holding her s.p.a.ce suit and began to struggle into it ”Come to me, Channa,” he said, in a wildly facetious tone, ”come, touch the hard, male core of my innermost being.”
”Ee-yuck, is that the sort of romance you've been studying? Try another mode.”
”When I've world enough and time, lovely one, but have a look at what I've managed to arrange as stop signs.”
Seemingly from out of nowhere, three communications satellites came diving towards the incoming s.h.i.+p, two striking it head on and one slightly astern. Whole sections of die scaffolding and outer skin of the derelict sublimed in white flashes that expanded into circles with zero-g perfection. The alien s.h.i.+p was not slowed - there was too much kinetic energy in that ma.s.s - but its vector altered slightly.
”Comsats aren't supposed to be able to move like that!” Channa exclaimed tightly. Simeon's sensors could hear the pounding of her heart, a.n.a.lyze the ketones her sweat-damp skin was emitting. Fear under hard control. The lady has guts, he thought.
”A little something I cooked up on my own,” he said smugly.
”Cooked in the wrong sort of pot, you crazy loon. Without those satellites, we'll be out of communication with half the universe for weeks.”
”Channa, if I hadn't done that we'd be out of communication with the all of the universe permanently. Besides, my satellite tactic worked!”
Channa looked up at the main monitor and saw that the projected vector had skewed slightly. ”Not enough,” she muttered. ”Please don't use any more of our comm satellites like billiard b.a.l.l.s, Simeon. If we do survive this, they'll be needed more than ever.”
”Oh-oh,” Simeon muttered.
”Oh-oh?” she repeatedly anxious.
It means, I screwed the pooch, Channa, Simeon thought Aloud he went on. ”SS Conrad, dump your carrier modules and get out of that sector. You are now directly in the path of the incoming s.h.i.+p.”
”No-can-do SSS-900-C. I've got a full load here. The company'll have my a.s.s if I desert it”
”The company'll have to hold a seance to get it, then, 'cause if you stay put, you're about to become immortaL Jump it!”
”Now!” Channa shouted. ”It's less than two k-thousand kilometers from you. Now, dammit!”
”No s.h.i.+t!” the pilot shouted and disconnected the ”cab,” the crew quarters and control section of the s.h.i.+p, from the much larger freight storage sections.
They watched the tiny cab move with agonizing slowness across the seemingly endless bow of the strange s.h.i.+p.
”Down on station horizon,” Simeon instructed, ”ninety-degrees, straight down.”
”Down? You want me to stop? With that b.a.s.t.a.r.d coming right for me! Are you crazy?”
”It's your only chance, buddy. She's shallow on the bottom but, by Ghu, is she wide! Show me what kind of pilot you are! Not what kind of smear you'll make.”
Obediently, the little s.h.i.+p flared energy, applying thrust at right-angles to its previous vector. Its path s.h.i.+fted, slowly at first and then with growing speed like a bell-curve graph across a computer screen. Slowly, slowly, descending, a bright spot against the ever larger ma.s.s approaching them.
”Oh s.h.i.+t, oh s.h.i.+t,” the captain whispered desperately. ”Help?”
The intruder was less than a kilometer away, now, from the cab which looked like a white pin-point against the black hull of the stranger. At half a kilometer it cleared the leading edge of the incoming s.h.i.+p and the pilot began to laugh wildly.
”Keep going,” Simeon ordered sharply, to be heard through the hysteria. ”It's about to hit your freighter. Keep moving till I tell you to stop.”
”It's ore,” the captain gasped though he sounded more as if he was weeping, ”iron ore. Nickel iron carboniferous, in ten-kilo globules,7 Atu, c.r.a.p! Simeon thought, as the intruder struck the freighter with majestic slowness. The forward third of its hull vanished in the fireball, and so did much of the freighter's cargo. The energy-release and spectrographic a.n.a.lysis would tdl him a good deal about the composition. Right now he had millions of special delivery meteors pouring down from the breached holds onto his station. Greatexample ofNewtonian physics, actionand reaction.
The collison had, serendipitously, damped much of the incoming s.h.i.+p's remaining velocity, but the fragments of s.h.i.+p and cargo had picked it up for themselves. He tracked the myriad trajectories of the s.p.a.ce flotsam and relayed the information to the s.h.i.+ps in the scatter area, directing them into still more impossible flight patterns. He a.s.signed the computer responsibility for tracking and blasting the larger chunks of ore with the station's lasers. No problems with dispersion when the stuff was in your face. On the other hand, there was one h.e.l.l of a lot of it Simeon set the computer to figuring out just how much would get through.
He realized that Channa was staring at the monitor in horrified fascination. ”Hey Hap, Happy baby, get in the shaft core.”
”Why?” she asked. ”It's stopping.”
”Slowing, yes, but if it so much as kisses me on the cheek, it'll breach the station and you're on a one-way trip to the nebula. We need you here, so shaft me baby.”
”Shaft yourself,” she said. ”It has come to a complete cessation of forward movement”
A final flare of energy left the aft third of the intruder's hull slumping and melting, the drive cores and conduction vanes white-hot and misting t.i.taniumrutile monofiber.
”So it has,” Simeon said mildly.
Channa gave a giddy whoop and slumped against die central shaft, trying to wipe at the sweat that filmed her face. Her glove dadoed against the faceplate ofher helmet ”Dead, stock still,” he said, feeling intense relief. ”Relative to the station, that is.”
With a glance at his column, Channa hit the disconnect switch and the red warning lights stopped flas.h.i.+ng. Simeon began to announce stand-down to Condition Yellow in dulcet, paternal tones. Channa took off her helmet and began to confer with the Lethe leader, reestablis.h.i.+ng the usual formal relations.
When at last they disconnected from their various crucial ch.o.r.es, Channa looked at her incoming electronic messages and laughed. ”By G.o.d, but we're a resilient species. Look at these.”
Simeon scanned them and laughed, too. ”I haven't even finished flus.h.i.+ng the excess adrenalin from my system and they're already complaining about lost cargo and insurance. I love the human race. We're consistently more concerned with trivia than serious threats.”
”And we're not even out of danger, are we?”
”Out of mortal danger. That thing could have totaled us. The ore will cause a lot of trouble and expense, so let's maintain Condition Yellow for a while.”
That would keep nonessentials out of the exterior compartments, mostly industrial areas anyway, and everyone in suits with helmets in reach and within sprinting distance of the shelters. Megacredits of money were being lost, of course, most of which would be paid by Lloyds' Interstellar.
Channa was examining the strange s.h.i.+p on a dose screen.
”Next question is who, or what's, aboard.** ”And if there's anything left of the pilot captain,” Simeon added, ”who's broken regulations I didn't know existed till now. I sent out a dozen probes to secure available information on what's left. Ah! Input!”
The main screen blanked, and then displayed a schematic of the strange craft, s.h.i.+fting to a threedimensional model as the computers extrapolated.
”So that's what it looked like before it started hitting things and melting down its drives,” Simeon murmured as brain and brawn surveyed an elongated sphere amid its tangle of extensions. ”And now I'D subtract what doesn't appear to be part of the original construction.”