Stephen looked at Piet. Piet raised an eyebrow. Stephen nodded, although he felt as if the ground had opened beneath his feet.
Sal wouldn't have any use for him if he didn't treat her as a person in her own right; and he wouldn't have any use for her if she weren't a person.
'Right,' Piet said, walking to the truck. Stephen boosted his friend into the back of the vehicle, then stepped onto the middle tire and let Piet's wiry strength help lift his own armored weight.
Sal, settling herself in the cab beside Tsarev, ordered, 'Swing by the Gallant Sallie on the way to the Wrath, sailor. And step on it!'
Stephen felt his lips smile, but his mind was a thousand light-years away.
WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH
April 16, Year 27
0433 hours, Venus time
The interior of the Moll Dane was a pigsty, which neither surprised Sal nor mattered to her. There was also up to 10 millimeters' play in the controls. That was no more surprising than the other, but it could matter very much indeed.
'Ready at the attitude controls?' Sal called. A dozen men in hard suits packed the freighter's cabin. When the armored sailors moved, their suits clashed loudly together. The forty or so in the hold had cleared space for themselves by dumping the Moll Dane's stores and cargo onto the field.
'I hope to God that they work better than they look like they work,' Tom Harrigan replied. 'But yeah, we're as ready here as we can be.'
'The bastard responsible for maintaining these won't leave Earth alive if I catch him!' Brantling added.
In fact, Captain Lasky and his crew had very little chance of surviving if men of the Venerian squadron caught them. Technically, selling cannon to President Pleyal wasn't a violation of Venerian law. The men risking their lives in this attack weren't lawyers but rather patriots; and killers already, the most of them. The gunrunners knew that. They'd abandoned the Moll Dane so quickly that half-eaten rations littered the deck.
The lower two-thirds of the Moll Dane's console display was adequate. The images weren't razor sharp, but they were about as clear as those of the Gallant Sallie's screen before the recent upgrade. The top third of the screen was a murky purple sea in which shadowed objects moved like fish swimming at great depths. Thank God that for this hop, the lower portion was all Sal needed.
Sal lit the thrusters. As the vessel shuddered beneath her, she monitored the fuel flow. All eight motors were within comfortable parameters. A slight taste of burned air made her sneeze.
The Moll Dane's layout was similar to that of the Gallant Sallie, but Lasky's ship lacked a separate cabin airlock. All entry and exit was through the hold. The passage through the central water tank acted as the only lock for operations in vacuum or a hostile atmosphere.
At the moment, the outer hatch and passage were both open. The assault force breathed bottled oxygen within its hard suits, enduring the wash of exhaust. Sal and her operational crew were old hands, too hardened to be seriously inconvenienced by the amount of plasma that trailed into the cabin.
'Prepare to lift!' Sal warned. She doubted whether the armored men in the cabin could hear her, but they were veteran sailors who didn't need coddling. She slid the two linked quartets of throttle controls forward, then twisted a separate knob to shrink the nozzle irises.
The Moll Dane wobbled nervously as the skids unloaded. The stern lifted first and crawled 10° to starboard. Brantling shouted a curse. Attitude jets fired, and the ship steadied.
Stephen and Piet Ricimer were in the vessel's hold. They would be among the first men out of the Moll Dane.
The military port was more than a klick from the Moll Dane's berth near the warehouses. Sal found, somewhat to her surprise, that Lasky's vessel handled well in ground-effect mode; a meter or so above the ground, buoyed on a cushion of exhaust reflected onto the belly plates. Sal kept the Moll Dane there instead of rising to twenty meters and sailing toward the berm as she'd intended. She had to hold their forward speed to 10 kph to avoid outrunning the effect, but the loss of a minute or two in transit time was a cheap price to pay for the relative safety and control.
Sal corrected twice to avoid ships studding the big field, first a Fed craft and then the Cyprian, an armed merchantman from Betaport. Sailors on the Cyprian's loading ramps waved enthusiastically to the Moll Dane scudding past in a cloud of dust and plasma.
Sal guided their course toward a point on the berm a hundred meters to the left of the wrecked Fed freighter. She couldn't see any Feds watching from the top of the concrete-surfaced slope-gunners on grounded Venerian ships were looking for any excuse to fire their cannon-but defenders within the military port would be able to track the approaching vessel by its exhaust plume.
The Moll Dane's hatch was to starboard. Sal came to a halt ten meters from the scarred berm, then swung the Moll Dane cautiously on its vertical axis to put the berm on the port side. The skids touched twice, port side and then starboard, as the Moll Dane rocked queasily. Thanks to luck and skilled hands at the attitude-control console, the vessel didn't overset.
The guns of the Venerian squadron had fallen silent, God be praised! The bolt of a friendly gunner who misjudged Sal's intended course could do worse damage in the open hold than the Feds' fire concentrated on the solid hull.
Sal tightened the nozzle irises with the throttles on sixty percent power. The Moll Dane lifted, slightly nose-down, and slid forty meters forward, parallel to the berm. If the Feds had aimed their cannon at the center of the previous exhaust plume, they were going to get a surprise.
When she'd brought her vessel its own length beyond its previous location, Sal touched her skids to the ground again to kill her forward motion. She cocked the nozzles a hair to starboard, then slid the thruster controls up to full output. Roaring like an avalanche, the Moll Dane rose over the berm at an angle that became a catenary arc when Sal eased back on the throttles again.
At least twenty plasma cannon fired within the two seconds of the Moll Dane's rise and fall. Most of the Fed guns blasted into the berm or ripped the air just above it at the point where the Venerian ship had first paused.
Three bolts struck the vessel. Two of the impacts were sternward. They made the hull ring and may have penetrated the hold full of assault troops, but they didn't affect Sal's control of the Moll Dane.
The third round slammed the hull at midline forward. The plasma itself didn't penetrate the cabin, but it blew a high-voltage power line in the ceiling. The bang of the explosion was sharper than lightning. Molten metal gouted through the light headliner, spraying the armored assault party and the crewmen in cabin clothes at the attitude controls.
Sal heard Brantling scream. The vessel twisted as Sal lost half the power to her nozzle-alignment motors. She fought her controls. The cabin was bitterly gray with ozone and burned insulation.
The Moll Dane's roll to port slowed, then reversed. Brantling was batting bare- handed at his smoldering tunic, but Harrigan and Piet's Molt navigator were still at the attitude board despite their burns.
Using both hands on the control yoke, Sal kicked the Moll Dane's stern out to cross the bow of the purpose-built Fed warship they'd otherwise crash into. The Fed vessel-the Holy Office, according to the osmium letters inlaid onto the bow-had moved parallel to the berm and within twenty meters of it since the Gallant Sallie had viewed the military port during landing.
A collision between the Moll Dane and the Holy Office would have killed everyone aboard both vessels. No amount of damage to a ship of the North American Federation could have repaid the death of Piet Ricimer.
Because of the violent maneuver, the Moll Dane hit so hard that the left landing skid shattered. The cabin lights, normally on whenever the vessel was under way, blew out. The navigation console and apparently the attitude controls still had power.
