“It’s called a cutting torch, Cutter—and you don’t have one. Find another way in.”
Which made me wonder how much use her Hack Team was if it couldn’t deal with a simple thing like hacking the security system of some big-wig’s private yacht.
“Smart ass!”
And what did she mean about me not having a cutting torch? I’d picked up a Blazer 54. Now I just had to remember if it operated in a vacuum or not.
“Don’t you dare!”
Delight? Again? Since when did she have enough spare time to get inside my head?
“Since Mack would kill me if I let you get dead on his behalf.”
Since when was I doing this for Mack? It was Delight who needed Costoganzi alive. If she’d left it to me, I would have used one of the concussion grenades I’d filched from the Star Shadow armory to….
Oh.
“Pilot of the Seliman’s Pride, this is Invading Force One. Open your hatch, please.”
It was easy to patch through the orbital’s comms systems. After all, the EVA suit was hooked into its emergency frequencies; I just had to ride the wave in reverse.
“Seliman’s Pride open your hatch.”
I waited, gave the Pride’s pilot three heartbeats to respond, and then slowly worked my way aft.
“Pretty sure you want to fly this thing, right?” I asked, not bothering to nominate who I was speaking to.
“Cutter!”
“She wouldn’t.”
“It’s your stim pack, you tell me.”
“Fuck. Cutter. Stand down. Stand down.”
I ignored them, and found the tail jets—and I was real glad Pritchard hadn’t checked the exact content of the bag of grenades he’d slung over my shoulder when he’d checked I could reach all my gear. Not all of those babies were stunners.
“Pilot, this is your last warning,” I said, using my implant to switch off the feeds Delight and Pritchard were using to try and talk me down. I really didn’t have time for joking around. Whatever Delight had hit me with was starting to wear off, and I needed to be inside sooner, rather than later, because I was going to need a nap.
Sure wish she’d thought to give me a spare one of those stim-things. Pritch was right about me not liking the after-effects. I pushed away the first wave of nausea, to pull one of the concussion grenades out of the bag, and made a show of sizing up the rear-jets.
“You wouldn’t…” My guess is that was the pilot.
I pulled a second grenade from the pack.
“Wanta find out the hard way?”
“But they’re saying… They’re telling you….”
“Are you talking to the folks who can’t get through to me on the comms?” I asked, and pulled myself into the exhaust port.
Man, I really hoped he didn’t think of firing up the engine. If he did that, I was marshmallow on a stick, but nowhere near as sweet. I made a show of checking the grenade, contemplating just how long I’d need on the timer in order to have a ghost of a chance of hauling ass out of there before it went off. I prayed he wouldn’t push me to the point where I actually had to do what I was threatening to do.
“You are suicidal!”
“Nope. Just hyped up on some combat stims, a bunch of nans, and a powerful need to sleep.”
“I’m cycling the aft airlock, now.”
The aft airlock?
“Just go… Here,” and he gave me a link into the ship’s systems.
I grabbed it and studied it. I’m thinking it was meant to be a link that showed me the way to the aft hatch, but then he obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with, because I took that sucker and I locked it wide open, and then I sent my head through it, found the mechanism for the shuttle-bay doors and locked them tight closed.
I also found the sub-system controlling the ship’s reactor and took it offline, and then shut down the life support so they had to evacuate.
And I’d thought the pilot was such a nice young man—the language he was using by the time I’d finished with that little sequence was eye-opening, even for me. I was looking for something else to screw with, when light flared about me and the comms officer on board the Wanderer used the loud-hailer over the suit’s comms.
For a minute I wondered how they’d gotten access, and then I remembered that Delight’s hacking team were on board…and had obviously run out of things to do.
“Spread ’em and freeze, Cutter. You know the drill.”
Not this drill I didn’t, but I had a fairly good idea of what the officer might want, so I inched my way out of the vent and leant into the hull, being careful to keep the grenades tucked, one in each hand as I stretched my hands over my head. I was pretty sure they weren’t activated. When it came to my feet, I hit a snag, especially when I started drifting away from the hull.
Crap.
“Don’t move, Cutter.”
Don’t move? Who was she trying to kid?
I wasn’t moving, but the motionless part of me? Yeah, she sure as shit was drifting and probably not in a good way. I wondered exactly what would happen if… Which was as far as I got before I ran into a fully armored Marine.
First thing he did was take my bag of grenades, including the two in my hands, and then he hooked a tether to my EVA suit. After that, he grabbed me by the back of the suit and dragged me up and away from the station to where the Wanderer was waiting. It was nice he let me keep my guns—I guess I wasn’t in that much trouble, then.
The energy I’d been feeling when I was in the Star Shadow’s control centre surged and fell in a wave, and I wondered where Cascade was. If I’d lost the damn dog to the Star Shadows’ system Rohan would be devastated.
“Dog’s fine, Cutter,” and Delight was in
