“Did you make that up?” Giselle asked.
“What?” Mellanie was close enough to the frigate to reach out and touch it. She held back, still awed by its raw power. The hull was so black it looked like a bubble of interstellar space. She half expected to see galaxies floating inside.
“About Nigel. Are you engaged?”
“Oh, that.” She finally pressed her hand against the frigate. It was a historic moment after all. The surface was completely frictionless, and thermal-neutral. Tactile nerves told her she was touching something, but that was all the impression she got. Her eyes couldn’t actually focus on it. “He did propose. I haven’t said yes yet.”
Giselle gave the frigate’s open airlock a twitchy look. “Take my advice, and say yes. That way he might not fling you into suspension for more than a thousand years.”
“Come on, Ozzie has to do this. How do you think he’s going to get rid of Mark? Has he…” She trailed off fast. Her inserts were telling her the docking bay airlock was opening. Dense and very powerful energy sources were emerging. “Oh, crap.”
“What?”
“Somebody’s here. Not good. Warn Ozzie.” She pushed off lightly, gliding around the frigate’s curving hull.
The entire communications spectrum was suddenly filled by a single signal: “YOU BY THE CHARYBDIS, DO NOT MOVE, DEACTIVATE ANY WEAPONS YOU ARE CARRYING.”
Mellanie slid around the ultra-black hull to find herself looking directly at a squad of armored suits flying out of the airlock like angry wasps. Active sensors locked on to her. She instinctively tried to deflect them. Her hands and cheeks began to ripple with silver lines.
“No!” Giselle shrieked.
An instant of disconnection—
—and Mellanie found herself spinning violently. She didn’t know why. Her body had gone numb, apart from the single sensation of cold sweat pricking her forehead. She thought it was the prequel to vomiting, but she couldn’t even feel her stomach. Then she smacked into the docking bay wall and rebounded. Her limbs didn’t seem to be working either. It was strange she didn’t feel any pain; that had been a nasty impact. Red dots drifted across her vision, which appeared to be dimming. Sensation came rushing back in on her consciousness in a terrifying wave of pain. She tried to wail, but liquid was blocking her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Her body was alive with agony, at its worst down her left side. She coughed, trying to clear her lungs. Streamers of blood poured out of her mouth, then wobbled crazily in front of her. Her hands scrabbled at the main source of the pain, finding only warm wet jelly. Thick webs of oscillating blood were spinning around her. On the other side of them a giant black shape slid past. Turbulence from its wake swatted the blood, splatting it against her. Her need to breathe was excruciating. She coughed again, and more blood bubbled out of her throat forming sticky ribbons in front of her. Her whole body juddered. The pain was now submerging itself below an intense cold.
A face appeared above her. Nigel. Mellanie tried to smile. He looked very angry.
“Get a fucking medical kit here. Now!”
She tried to tell him it’d be fine, she was okay, really. That just allowed more blood to escape. It was very red. Her vision was closing in.
“Mellanie!” Nigel’s voice, a long way off.
There was so much she wanted to say. She wondered if Orion had woken up yet. But now the blackness conquered everything.
Ozzie had been inside an Apollo command module once. The Smithsonian staff had removed the perspex cover from the hatchway and stood by with nervous smiles as he squirmed around the historic antique interior. He couldn’t remember how long ago that was now, at least two centuries, but he did recall marveling at how three people had survived in such a small space for the ten days it took to travel to the moon and back.
As he followed Mark through the Charybdis airlock and into the cabin he began to feel a twinge of envy for those old astronauts and the abundant room they had back then. The frigate’s cabin was small; three couches fixed to the rear bulkhead (the reason he suddenly remembered the Apollo) with a one-and-a-half-meter gap between them and the forward bulkhead that was a solid wall of arrays and portals.
“Is this it?” he asked in amazement.
“Sure is.” Mark had levered himself into the left-hand couch, and smiled knowingly at him. “You claustrophobic?”
“We’re about to find out.” Ozzie slid into the central couch. The arrays in front of his nose were covered in symbols he didn’t recognize, but they were powered up. He found an i-spot and pressed his hand against it. “Can you interface?” he asked the SIsubroutine.
“Yes.”
“Do it fast.”
“Working.”
“Hey,” he asked Mark. “Is the nova bomb on board?”
Mark seemed a little easier that Ozzie knew about such things. “Yeah. We’re still waiting for the Scylla’s bomb to be delivered. They promised it in another three hours. Not sure we’ll have the systems integration sorted by then, but we should be able to launch tomorrow.”
“So how many quantumbusters have we got?” Ozzie made it sound like a schoolkid asking questions; next it’d be how fast does it go, mister?
“All ten loaded,” Mark said.
“Man, that is a shitload of firepower.” Ozzie felt indecently happy; the Great Frigate Heist was on-line and powering up smoothly. He could probably let rumors about this one slip out into the unisphere.
“You’re telling me.” Mark peered at one of the portal displays. “Uh—” He glanced over at Ozzie’s hand on the i-spot.
“I have command of all primary functions,” the SIsubroutine said.
A plethora of frigate command icons rose up into Ozzie’s virtual vision. Compressed instruction text orbited each one like a gas-giant ring. Just reading all the introductions would have taken a couple of hours. He assumed he’d be able to do most of the piloting himself. After all, how difficult could it be? It looked like he was going to be more dependent on the SIsubroutine than he liked; despite everything that’d happened he still wasn’t sure he trusted it.
“Hey, what are you loading in?” Mark asked in growing alarm.
“Ozzie!” Giselle called. “We’ve got—ohshit.”
Ozzie’s inserts picked up the warning from the security team. “Close the airlock, and get us out of here,” he told the SIsubroutine. His virtual hand took a broad swipe at all the command icons, sweeping them away like clutter off a desk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mark putting his hand out toward an i-spot. “Stop it,” he barked. “I’ve got the kind of weapons wetwiring that can slaughter a small army. Killing you from this range is easier than breathing. Sit back and do nothing, and I’ll let you live.”
“Don’t kill me!” Mark wailed. His hand drew back as if the i-spot was wired up to a thousand volts. “Christ, man, I’ve got a family, kids.”
“Shut up.”
The airlock hatch contracted. Ozzie just heard a loud unpleasant snap from outside before it shut completely. He searched around for a button on his couch that would activate the restraint webbing. That was far too simple for this ship. He gave up. “Strap me in,” he told the SIsubroutine.
“Confirmed.”
“And give me some visuals from outside. I wanna see what’s going down.”
The couch’s plyplastic cushioning flowed over his shoulders and hips, securing him tight. Five grids in his virtual vision display came on, and he pulled the pictures out. A whole squad of armored figures was zipping out into the docking bay. Then Mellanie drifted in front of a camera. Half of her left side had been torn away; long tatters of gore hung from exposed, shattered ribs. Her face swung into view, staring directly into the lens. For some reason she possessed a Zen-like serenity, then her lips twitched and arterial blood foamed out of her mouth.
“Mellanie!” a horrified Mark cried. “Oh, God, what have you done to her? Look at her, you fucking monster.”
Ozzie didn’t have the courage to tell him to shut up again.
“Umbilicals disconnected,” the SIsubroutine said. “Engaging secondary drive units.”
The walls of the docking bay slipped past. Brief glimpse of the Scylla, embraced by the cool gray metal of maintenance platforms. Technicians turning clumsily to stare as they flew past. Then there was the purple sparkle of the pressure curtain over the hull followed by the infinite black of space. The planet formed a huge steel- gray crescent cutting across the stars. One of the spaceflowers was almost directly below them, a perfect half circle of rumpled amethyst that suddenly vanished as it crossed into the penumbra.
“Have we got enough power to make it to Dyson Alpha?” Ozzie asked the SIsubroutine.
“Yes.”
He debated whether to ask the obvious. Decided to go for it. “And get back?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, plot a course and take us there.”
“Working.”
“Are you going to kill me now?” Mark was looking at him with the kind of wild eyes that belonged to a dying animal.
“Nobody’s going to kill you,” Ozzie said. He hurriedly told the SIsubroutine to block all access to the onboard arrays apart from his own. Mark was the lead assembly technician; who knew what he’d embedded in the frigate’s systems.
“You will,” Mark said fearfully. “Your type always does.”
“Now wait up one goddamn minute here. I’m not any kind of type.”
“You just hijacked a Dynasty frigate.”
“I don’t have a lot of choice here, man.”
“You’re going to kill me, you bastard.”
“I’m not, I can’t.” Ozzie waved his arms around for emphasis, wincing as he slapped the back of his hand against the arrays. “I’m not wetwired for anything but a few bioneural chips. I swear, man; you’re perfectly safe. So just chill out.”
The silence stretched out dangerously.
