The Aftermath

Then he saw three glittering puffs of gas from the maneuvering thrusters on one side of Hunter’s broken hull.

“They’re moving her!”

“Towards Syracuse]” Nicco bellowed, pointing at the distant wheel shape of the battered cargo ship.

“And Vogeltod!” Kirk snarled. “The bastards’re going to ram us!”

“Power up, boys,” Valker commanded. “We’ve got to stop Hunter before it hits our ship!”

“Look! They’re leavin’ Hunter!”

“Headin’ for Pleiades!”

“Let’s get them!”

“First things first, boys,” Valker said, his voice high with excitement. “We’ve gotta stop Hunter from plowing into our ship.”

“But they’ll get away on Pleiades!”

“Let ’em,” Valker insisted. “We’ve got to save our own ship first. Nicco, take Ross and Turk and get back to Vogeltod. Disconnect her from Syracuse and get her the hell out of the way. The rest of you come with me.”

We’ll take Hunter before she rams our ship, but we’ll lose our best prize, Valker admitted silently: Pleiades, an intact, first-rate ship. And the two women. He saw Pauline in his mind’s eye: beautiful and strong. With her I could become anything I want to be. But I’d have to get rid of these apes first. And even before that I’d have to take care of the people with her.

That includes her daughter, Valker realized. Or maybe I could take them both. He grinned, inside the bubble of his nanosuit hood. Both of them. Mother and daughter. Maybe I could…

He shook his head. Forget that. If you don’t move fast you’re going to lose your own ship and die like a chump out here.

* * *

Jetting between Angela and Victor, Pauline saw Pleiades looming larger as they approached.

“It’s working.” She heard Dorn’s heavy voice in her helmet earphones. “Some of them are racing back to their own ship.”

Victor said, “But the rest of them are reboarding Hunter.”

“Theo’s still on Hunter!” Pauline cried out. “Alone!”

SMELTER SHIP HUNTER: BRIDGE

Sitting awkwardly in his hard suit on the bridge’s command chair, Theo heard the scavengers’ suit-to-suit radio chatter as he worked frantically to dismantle the navigation program and controls.

I’ve got maybe five minutes, he told himself as he feverishly pecked at the navigation keyboard.

“Navigation program cannot be erased,” said the computer’s maddeningly calm voice, “without authorization from the ship’s captain.”

“Erase it!” Theo shouted. “Emergency override!”

Coolly, the computer replied, “Voiceprint identification does not match the captain’s. Emergency command not valid.”

Theo was already out of the command chair before the computer’s stubborn refusal was finished. He rummaged through the tool bin built into the end of the control console. The best he could come up with was a hand-sized laser welder, similar to the one his father had brandished earlier, good for spot welds on electronics equipment and not much else.

“It’ll have to do,” Theo muttered to himself. On the main screen, above the control console, he saw Syracuse slowly, slowly growing larger as Hunter inched toward it. The scavenger’s ship was still attached to it. Good! Theo said to himself. Maybe I’ll get them both, after all. But he wished he could push Hunter faster.

Then, on one of the auxiliary screens that displayed views of the ship’s interior, he saw Valker and a half- dozen of his men pushing through the open airlock and sprinting up the passageway toward the bridge.

Knowing he had only moments, Theo used the butt end of the hand laser to smash the transparent covers on the navigation controls and then fired pulses of infrared energy to slag the circuitry.

“It’s not much,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do.”

He snapped his visor shut and clumped off the bridge toward the emergency airlock. He could hear the pounding footsteps of Valker and his crew approaching. Theo ducked into the airlock, fidgeted impatiently while it cycled down to vacuum, then stepped off the outer hatch’s rim into the nothingness of empty space.

* * *

Valker was the first of the scavengers to bolt into the bridge. He immediately saw that the key controls on the main console had been smashed, their circuits melted.

“Sonofabitch!” he snapped. “The little bastard’s screwed us, but good.”

Kirk came up beside him. “I can fix this. Rewire—”

“How long?” Valker asked.

“Huh?”

“How long would it take you?”

“Half an hour,” said Kirk. “Maybe a little longer.”

Valker sneered at him. “And just how long do you think it’s gonna take this clunker to smash into Syracuse?”

Kirk scowled back at him.

“I’d say it’d be a lot less than half an hour,” Valker answered his own question.

“Yeah. Guess so.”

Valker bent over the communications console and tapped on its keys. “Nicco! You uncouple the ship yet?”

A moment’s hesitation, then, “Got the access tunnel disconnected. Powering up the maneuvering jets right now.”

“Good. Get our ship the hell out of the way. This bucket’s going to ram right into Syracuse in another ten-fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll be outta the way, Skip.”

Nodding with satisfaction, Valker turned back to Kirk and the rest of his men.

“So whattawe do now?” Kirk asked.

“Get to Pleiades as fast as we can,” Valker replied. “She’s our prize. Her, and those women aboard her.”

* * *

Standing in Pleiades’s open main airlock in their nanofabric space suits, Victor and Dorn could see the lone figure of Theo in his hard-shell suit floating across the gulf that separated the ship from Hunter.

And behind him, seven nanosuited scavengers erupted from Hunter’s airlock.

“They’re not returning to their own ship,” Dorn said calmly.