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to a standstill, killing our inertia. I cursed them. We were going to have a
hellish time building any land of speed again with only one engine. I waited
for the little jolt that would precede that click, the jolt of their shield
touching ours and the two ships repelling each other.
And there it was. The jolt. They caught us. They had us where we wanted them.
They would be rolled back to back with us to permit them to extrude their
coupler so that they could board us. They would have to turn off a portion of
their ventral shield to do that.
I felt another tiny jolt, and heard the metallic scrape, thud, click of the
coupler locking into place against our hull. Now they would come across the
short distance, armed with moleibond cutters to tear open our airlock. They
wouldn't worry about finding the right airlock code. When they left, the
Hope's Reward
would be left open to space; our bodies, mangled by decompression, would
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probably be sucked out into space along with anything else that wasn't
attached. The odds were good that no one would ever find us, and the only
people who would even look were the investigators from Fidelity Mutual of
Ganymede, to whom I still owed a lot of money& and perhaps Peter Crane, to
whom I still owed the return of the
Corrigan's Blood
.
If my plan didn't work, I only had a few more minutes to live. I hoped it
would work.
I heard footsteps echoing through the gravdrop. Here they came.
Now!
I switched off the shields and at the same moment turned on the gravity shear,
feeding one hundred percent of the ship's power through it, blasting the shear
straight up into the coupler and through that into the partially unshielded
enemy ship. The roar the gravity shear made was indescribable.
From the gravdrop I heard screams; sharp and terrible and bewilderingly brief,
as if I'd pressed a button
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Lisle,%20Holly%20-%20Hunting%20The%20Corrigan's%20Bl
ood%20(v1.0).html (134 of 231)8-12-2006 23:45:40
Lisle, Holly - Hunting the Corrigan's Blood to turn them on, then immediately
pressed it again to turn them off.
Our lights went out. The roar of the gravity shear shut off with a clang I was
sure indicated it had broken, and I smelled metallic smoke. The few remaining
normal shipboard sounds that indicate things functioning properly ceased. Our
ships clapped together like a pair of hands and I heard an ominous squeal of
metal from the gravdrop. The gravdrop terminated ventrally in the airlock, and
the airlock was edged with the coupler. The sudden shift of the two ships had
damaged either their coupler or our airlock, and Badger and I wouldn't know
which until we went to investigate.
"Shit," Badger said, "now they'll be through the door in a heartbeat and we're
sitting here in a totally dead ship."
The absolute darkness, the silence, the feeling of being isolated and beyond
the reach of help all scared me, but we weren't helpless yet. I unstrapped
myself from the weapons seat and launched myself backward, toward the
auxiliary weapons room. Badger and I had stun guns and a couple of laser
rifles in there. I was taking a laser rifle this time, in case the people who
were after us were as deadly as the man who'd tried to kill us on Smithbrights
World.
Badger thought the way I did. We both floated to the gravdrop and tugged
ourselves up. Weightless, we ascended through the silent darkness. I could
hear myself breathing; the sound was too raspy and too fast, loud enough that
I was sure the enemies on the other side of the airlock could hear me coming.
And I thought, maybe they found a, way to open the airlock silently. Maybe
they're already in here, in the dark, with us. Maybe they're waiting.
And I thought, don't be stupid. This is just darkness. That's all. You'll fix
the engines and you'll get their
TFN unit and you'll take them prisoner and everything will be fine. It will be
fine. Don't panic yourself because you're in the dark.
In my first year in business and after I'd wrapped up my second case, the
client, Jenfer Greeling, said she was surprised I had been able to spend so
much time in the dark without going to pieces. I'd been locked in a drop tube
in the bottom of her ex-consort's cruiser for two full days while he tried to
make the time in his busy schedule to take the cruiser out for a pleasure run
so that he could eject me into deep space. I
was lucky that his client backlog got the better of him. That time I was lucky
in a lot of ways. But Jenfer said that humans had a natural, instinctual fear
of darkness because in the beginning they were prey. She said that even now
they hide in the light, cluster in packs, make noise once the sun goes down,
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or if they are alone, they become quiet and still and watchful. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]