Listening over the interLink, Freeman heard every word we said but did not comment. He lived in a world of absolutes. Either the spy ship was coming, or she was not. He saw no value in second-guessing the situation.
I looked back at the video screen and saw nothing but empty space. The satellite was so small that it did not even appear on my screen. A little bubble of light represented the area around it.
“Mars, are your men ready?” I asked on a different frequency. Mars, Lieutenant Scott Mars, ran my corps of Navy engineers. I would have preferred using a demolitions team on this mission, but Mars’s men were handy with explosives.
“Yes, sir. You stop the ship, sir, and we’ll kick her doors in,” he said.
“Minimal damage,” I reminded him for what might have been the hundredth time.
“You said you wanted a hole,” he reminded me.
“Right,” I said.
“If you know a way to put a hole in a ship without doing damage …”
“I take your point.”
“We’ll keep the damage to a minimum, sir,” said Mars.
Cutter interrupted us. “It’s a go!”
Nothing had changed on my screen. The ash-choked atmosphere of Terraneau still showed in one corner of the screen. Our transports still hid at the edge of the debris.
I did not see the spy ship. Of course I didn’t see her, not yet at least. But the spy ship must have been in place beside the satellite, and her crew must have lowered her shields or Cutter would not have sent that message. His sensors detected energy fluctuations.
Cutter detonated the bombs in the three open transports, firing a barrage of bearings and shrapnel at the invisible target. In the silence of space, the detonations made no noise; but the explosions flashed and vanished on my video screen.
Had it been a civilian ship caught in that storm, the debris would have broken her to pieces. The spy ship took the beating and survived. Her stealth generators failed, and she came into view. Air and flames leaked from small holes in her hull, and a large outer panel had been ripped from her bow, all cosmetic damage that would nonetheless prove fatal for her crew.
The ship was shaped like the head of a gigantic spear, fifty feet wide at her stern and two hundred feet long. Tiny electrical eruptions burst across her cylindrical hull. That bird would need repairs before she flew again. No problem. Mars’s engineers could repair her.
Our ambush nearly sheared off one of her three aft engines. It hung limp at an odd angle, like an arm in a cast. Liquid fuel escaped from the back of the engine, flying into space in bubbles. If the pilot of the spy ship tried to light the other engines, he’d ignite a fire that would consume the entire ship; but judging by the damage to the bridge, I did not worry about survivors among the flight crew. The bridge had gone dark, and the spy ship wasn’t going anywhere.
CHAPTER THREE
“We’re up,” I told Freeman, though he was already moving toward the sled. A flatbed hauling device used for spacewalks, the sled looked like a scale for weighing cattle. It had a ten-foot-long base lined with tiny booster rockets. It did not have walls or rails or even a dashboard, only a column with handles for steering.
We climbed onto the sled, Freeman driving. Freeman always drove. A moment later, he had the boosters fired, and we hovered down the ramp at the rear of the transport, traveling at the sled’s top speed of ten miles per hour.
And there was the spy ship, long and gray and sleek, little bursts of air emanating from her many wounds. Parts of the ship had gone dark, but light showed from some of her viewports.
Ahead of us, the team of engineers assigned to open the ship approached the hull on a sled as well. They drifted along the fuselage, finally stopping behind the darkened maw of the bridge. They worked quickly, using a laser saw to slice a five-foot hole into the side of the ship.
Had the debris we fired at the spy ship not already lacerated her hull, that door would have exploded from the ship in a pressure-blasted burst of oxygen; but any atmospheric pressure had already leaked out.
“Now we know how we’re going to get in,” I told Freeman.
He puttered our sled toward the hole. As we drew nearer, the spy ship no longer looked so remarkably small. She was three stories tall. I reached out an armor-covered hand and ran my fingers along an undamaged stretch of hull as we pulled up to the opening.
For his purposes, Freeman only needed to salvage a specific communications computer; but I wanted the entire ship. My goals were more military-minded. I would not throw away a ship that was both invisible and self- broadcasting no matter how damaged.
Under normal circumstances, Freeman and I would have used particle-beam weapons when entering a disabled ship. This time we brought flechette-firing S9 stealth pistols. He was concerned about a communications computer; I worried about everything else. Lieutenant Mars would need to fix everything we broke if we ever planned to fly this ship. Hit a computer or a circuit panel with a flechette, and you may get lucky. The dart could pass through without hitting vital organs. Anything hit with a particle beam would end up a pile of molten metal.
Using a magnetic clamp, Freeman anchored our sled to the hull of the ship, and I launched myself in through the door. Emergency lights flashed along the ceiling of the mostly darkened main corridor. This was the spine of the ship, a hall that led from the bridge to the galley.
When the hull of a capital ship is punctured, emergency bulkheads slide into place to prevent the depressurization from shooting sailors into space. In theory, the bulkheads created pressurized safety compartments in which sailors could wait for the atmospheric pressure to stabilize. In practice, the bulkheads created death chambers. Sometimes, sailors got lucky, and the bulkheads sealed them into compartments with armor or rebreathers. Usually, they didn’t. The bulkheads opened once the atmosphere equalized, which meant that someone had patched the holes or that the atmosphere had bled out completely.
If the emergency bulkheads were still in place, we might find crew members trapped in the various compartments. If they had already retracted, we might run into armed sailors hoping for a little revenge.
Using night-for-day vision, I looked toward the bridge. Cruisers don’t really have bridges; they have oversized cockpits. I saw no signs of life. I looked toward the aft of the ship.
“The emergency doors have retracted,” I told Freeman, Mars, and Cutter on an open frequency. The ship would need extensive repairs. We’d miscalculated the damage when we set the trap, and we did not have a working shipyard for making repairs. I began to have doubts about Lieutenant Mars’s ability to resurrect this spy ship.
Freeman drew his pistol as he entered the ship. His desire to save lives en masse would not prevent him from killing anyone who got in his way. He floated through the hole like a ghost passing through a wall. “Any signs of life?” he asked.
“Not on this deck,” I said.
There were a couple of bodies, men iced up like statues. The smaller debris must have flushed out through the holes. Looking down the hall, I saw empty floors and battered walls.
“Do you have any idea where they stowed your computer?” I asked.
Not much of a conversationalist, even in the best of times, Freeman said, “Second deck.” I should have guessed as much. The Unifieds usually housed the spy gear and communications equipment on that deck.
“Are we looking for anything in particular?” Ships like that one might have a thousand different computers on board.
“It might be attached to a broadcast apparatus,” he said.
“A broadcast computer? You’re looking for a specking broadcast computer?” I asked. In my experience, broadcast computers were strictly navigational tools, and they were big.
“Not the main broadcast engine. This will be attached to a small, secondary broadcast engine.”
