Текст книги "Rimrunners "
Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh
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Lower body. She flat had to sit down in a minute and take a break. Her hands were shaking so her fingers couldn't keep the driver in the damn little invisible slots.
And of a sudden Fitch moved, knocked the fragile driver out of her fingers, hurt, dammit, so she sat down hard on her backside, not sure for a second he wasn't coming past her.
But you couldn't walk fast in that weight. Fitch activated his com, said, "No answer,"
to whoever was listening, and repeated it, louder: "No answer, dammit, do what I saidc"
She picked herself up, rapped on the armor-leg to get his attention, started to work again—flex here, turn there, sir, holdit there, sirc
Pushit, sir, or it'll stop you therec
Damn, she'd like to set it about one tick looser.
But give Fitch one thing, Fitch had his mind on business and you told him to hold and he held, no twitches, no complaints. Fitchwasn't real rested either, eyes looked like hell.
"Think this thing's going to work," she confided in him, what little voice she had left.
"Ran a systems-check, it didn't blowc" And jumped to the question she was after. "We prepping for fire, hard vacuum—what?"
"Anything," Fitch said. "Anything it has to."
"You ever stood up in one of these, sir?"
Dead silence.
"Power goes on, you got to relax. That's the main knack to it. Minute you tense up, you got the rig taking orders, you twitch, like you're going to fall, rig's going to over-react and you'll lose it. Some like it set real loose, some want a hair-trigger react-time, you got your choice, sir—this one's set fast, I can take it down half."
"I'll take your judgment on it," Fitch said, downright civil.
"How much time you got to try this?"
"I don't know," Fitch said. He never looked at her while she was working, she never took liberties with the situation. "Maybe none." Fitch took a breath and let it go, said, into the com, "I got that."
"We got a weapons interface," she said. "We can patch right into the rig's systems, if you got a gun with an I/O plug, ranging, tracking, auto-fire, anything you got."
Pure smartass arrogance. Lucky if the ship carriedside-arms that good.
Hell if Fitch was going to let her near anything of the kind if they did.
"We got plain sidearms," Fitch said after a moment, "be lucky if we get a target."
Different Fitch than she'd ever heardc tired man, mostly civil man, with a muscle tic in his right arm and skin cold as a corpse right now.
Hell of a pair they made, Fitch complaining, finally, hoarsely, "What the fuck you doing, Yeager?" when she was shaking so bad she couldn't get the screwdriver seated.
"Sorry, sir," she said. She was shaking, he was shivering, the thing kept slipping, Fitch being turned at a godawful angle at the time, while she was trying to get the main body joints to max-set.
Somehow, she was mostly on auto by then, she got the plastron put together, got the right sleeve and gauntlet on, and she bit her lip and did little screws until Fitch himself made a com-call to Goddard for hot coca and sandwiches.
Breakfast or supper, she didn't even remember. Mike Parker brought it up, didn't say anything. She remembered dimly that Parker and NG were down there committing an act of mutiny, that all Fitch had to do was discover that somebody'd screwed with the lock downsidec
Five quick guesses who'd go up on charges.
She didn't have any appetite left. She just chewed and swallowed big lumps, washed them down with coca and wished it was beer.
Wished it was a good stiff drink of the vodka down in their makeshift quarters, most of all. But if alcohol hit her system right now she'd just be gone, out, zee'd in ten seconds.
Something came in that Fitch didn't like. She watched him listening to Goddard or whoever-it-was, frowning, shaking his head a little.
"I got that," he said to Goddard, which was as much as he had ever said.
"What's going on, sir?" she finally asked, just to have tried.
Fitch gave her a cold look, said, finally, "Just an on-going problem.—Let's get the rest of it. Promise you, if this thing runs, you get a sleep break."
If this thing doesn't run, she thought, thinking about pumps and servos blowing, filters going, all over the rig, I'd rather shoot myself.
"Let's get it then," she said, and picked up the right sleeve, to mate it up.
All those little joints, all those little screws, right down the elbow and wrist and finger-joints.
She was half-blind when she finished. She really thought about powering Fitch on without a warning, because Fitch was shaky-wobbly himself, and she had this vision what Fitch could do when the wobbles hit the body sensors.
But she didn't—didn't want to start a war where one wasn't, right now, didn't want to take a halfway civil Fitch and make a fool out of him.
"Tell you, sir," she said, in the croak of a voice she had, "you been standing long enough, if we got time, you better get some rest. If you power on when you got the shakes it'll throw you, don't want it to pitch you on your ass."
"Where's the switch?"
She showed him. He threw it, threw it back off damn quick, because it rattled.
"It runs," she said. "Wobbles is you." And being diplomatic, as Teo would say: "Most take a fall, straight off. Rather you didn't, sir. Better you get some sleep."
"When it runs," Fitch said. "Runs means when it works, Yeager. Worksmeans when it works for me, so you show me the switches, you show me the technicalities, you show me the systems, so we both know it works, then we'll both talk about getting some sleep.
Hear me?"
Damn you, I do, sir. "Yessir. I hear you."
First thing you did, if you were instructing somebody, you put your own rig on. Fitch objected. "No need," he said; and she said, "There is, sir. Or I can call out the instructions from outside this locker till you got that rig under control. Sir."
Do him credit, Fitch did get the idea what she was talking about. And Fitch listened when she said Relax, and stood there watching while she stripped down and got into her own rig the right way.
She rattled and chattered too, when she powered on. She damped it down. "That's your adjustment, number three switch, sensitivity on the pickups. If you get the chatters you just screw it tighter till it stops. If you rattle loud enough you can draw fire."
Fitch didn't think that was funny.
"You got gyros that keep your balance," she said, no missed beat. Fitch was a helmeted, faceless form, bracketed in green-glowing readouts from her faceplate display, 360‹ vision compressed and projected in a green shadow band on the top and bottom of her faceplate—Fitch's slight movement getting his hand and alternately his body bracketed in a stutter of yellow, his sounds amped up with a decibel readout ticking and flashing in her lower left. She took his hand and guided it to the first of the controls under the collar.
"You can see your hand, bottom 360 display, you got to get used to the distortion.
This is lock, this is gyros, this is free-movement, three position switch, first over, see the blinking display, right corner of your screen, tells you that's switch two, position B, that's stabilizing on, A is lock, C is free. Got that?"
"A is lock, B is gyros, C is free."
"Rig tends to feel like it's out of balance. Different center of gravity, but don't forget those big boots under you. Put it on B, the gyros keep your balance and you got to really fight it to kneel or fall down. I'd advise you keep it on B a while. Switch three's your sensitivity. I'd put it 85%. It's going to wear on you some, but better that than falling down. I keep mine at 150, amp to the rig's max at 300, but I been using these things twenty years. You don't need switch four, we got no base station, so that's no good.—Feel steadier at 85?"
"Cumbersome," Fitch said. "Stiff."
"You can designate sections for different amps, but it's overall sloppy. Put three up to 90, just up a point or two as you feel like it, but be careful when you start passing the hundred mark. Higher you set that amp-switch, that's the way the rig reads all your muscle twitches. At a hundred it'll move that much faster, hit that much harder, grip that much tighter. It's incremental. At 150, a guy can break a gunstock with a squeeze, and most guys never set the total rig over 250. You move gentle, handle everything like it was blown glass, don't jerk. Everything you do is amplified. Mass is more. When you get moving, you got to allow more to stop. Running stride's a float, light as you can, max-set walk's a lot the same. You got to be light on your feet. If you fall, don't fight it, don't jerk, fall won't hurt you, just take it and get back up.
–Going to take the gyros off, now. Relax. Just stand. Lift the arm. Gently."
"Damn!" Fitch said, when the rig hummed and flexed. A little jerk. Her arm and his crashed together and he broke a locker handle stumbling backward and forward.
She caught him, steadied him. She could hear the breathing, heavy gasps over the helmet-com.
Man not used to not being in control.
Man exhausted, mad as hell, and maybe a little scared.
He jerked, a rattle and stutter all up and down the joints, he lurched free and swung the arm further than he wanted, but he caught himself.
"That's pretty good," she said. "If you swing like that, you got to brace back harder than you would. Mass again. —Who're we supposed to use these on, you mind to say, sir?"
He didn't say anything for a minute. But she could hear the breathing.
"Suppose you just do your job," Fitch said, "explain the rest of these switches and stick to business."
"I got no problem with that, sir, except we got hundreds of switches, I take it our time is limited, and if I knew precisely what we got to deal with, I could figure out what functions you better know. Sir."
Silence. Then: "Suppose you don't be a smartass, Yeager, and you got a notion to stay alive. Let's just learn to move this thing."
"Yessir," she said hoarsely, with the wobbles in her joints and the readouts blurring and a real tight grip on her temper. "You got a good initial balance on your switches.
Let's try walking."
He managed it fine at 95 and a hundred, upped it to 110 and did tolerably well—
managed to stand the first time at 110 with the gyros when she hit him in the gut; didn't fare so well on the second try without—hit the lockers, but he didn't hit her hands hard when he bounced forward on the recovery.
"You got a real aptitude, sir." She adjusted her amp, shoved him at 130. He hit the lockers, bounced forward, she bounced him back, he got better at staying on his feet.
"You want to find out about the targeting, sir? Question of weapons?"
She kept after him, put her suit on lock finally and just rested, drilled him on the basics, droned through the standard new-skut lecture, sometimes with her eyes closed, but he couldn't know that.
"You got four settings, one's for right-handers, one's for left, some don't care, number one's autofire, skip that, we ain't got it, set it to 2, see the yellow bracket pop up on your foot there, sir, that's a fiber-optics in your right glove, gives you a fair idea what you got your gun generally pointed at. You can adjust the focus, rig understands spoken commands, you say Program On, Target, Manual, you say Cancel to stop it—" Flutter of grid and markers across her own rig's faceplate, that stopped with Cancel. "You can tell it left/right, up/ down, tell it Set when you're happy—"
"Got it," Fitch said. Fitch wasn't sounding real focused himself.
"Think we got the basics," she said. She hoped. "Give you the verbals next try if I got time. Toggles are more reliable, some voices the pickup just doesn't get a hundred percent, don't know why somebody can't make a programmable that can tell sit from shit.—You want to get out of that thing, now, sir?" She didn't wait for a confirmation, she didn't want to hear no, she just came up and guided his hand to the master release.
"There's your tension-straps. Left is on, right is off, you let 'em up and you unlatch, ever'thing just exactly like a hard-suit, once she's built and mated, same direction on the latches—sleeves first, top, boots and breeches—hold on, there, let me get the hanging-hooks, sir."
She unscrewed the sleeve-rings, helped him unmate the right one, he got the left, got his own top-section off, helmet and all, once she had it hooked, and he ducked out of it, sweat and grease to the waist, while she got her own joints unscrewed and unmated, and her own hooks on the shoulder-rings.
Fitch looked like he was going to fall on his face, white and sweating and wobbly as he wiped off and started to get his clothes on.
No sympathy, you sum-bitch. Her back reminded her of old debts, and oh, God, she wanted a beer.
Fitch was mopping his face, standing there with his clothes half together while she was putting hers on. "All right, Yeager, you're off. You got maybe six hours."
She blinked, too stupid to find the catch in that.
"Get!" he said.
She zipped up. "Can I draw a beer, sir?"
"Screw any skuz you want, drink, get some sleep, any way you can, long as you can get your ass up here cold sober when I want you. Hear me?"
"Yessir! Thank you, sir."
"Get!"
She shoved her feet into her boots, wobbled her way out onto the bridge where Goddard was still on watch, got into the lift, propped herself against the wall and leaned there with her head pounding and her knees trying to melt under her.
She didn't even go to the locker where their quarters was set up, she went staggering on up the curve, into Engineering, up to where NG was working, and startled hell out of him.
"Got a six-hour," she said. "We got Fitch's sweet goodnight. How you doing?"
CHAPTER 27
SHE WASN'T navigating well, was just about fit to lie there in the seat at number three boards, breaking a half-dozen regs– Bernie'd die, she thought, sipping a cold beer NG
had gotten her out of Services, beer and not the vodka, because beer seemed more like food and there was more of it. Her hands would hurt if she weren't halfway numb, her back did hurt, she was afraid to take one of Fletcher's pills, as tired as she was, and she had the feeling a lot of things were going to hurt, if she sat still any time at all.
But NG was there. That was what she wanted most. NG was still speaking to her, he was standing there against the counter-edge with this desperate look, like he'd earnestly like things to make sense more than they did.
There was that lock downside, that wasan option, one he'd risked his neck on.—
"We've got a way out," he'd whispered to her, before he went down to Services for the beer. "It'll work."
And she'd said, not sure she wasn't wrong: "Not yet."
"When? When you're stuck topside?"
"Don't do it," she'd said. " Don't do it. It's not that simple. Something's wrong out there. Something iswrong, I got it listening to com up there."
NG didn't look happy. But he listened to her. He leaned against the counter now and said, "Better?"
"Lot," she said, and he just stood there. Waiting.
Because she said so.
Man, you never asked, did you, what ship I come from, what I've done, where I been?
You never said about yourself, either.
So what're you thinking? That you can throw all that away? But past is never past, man, pastis, that's all; all you can ever get at is now and will-be.
You find that so, out there, where you been?
I damn sure have.
She found the beer hard to hold onto: it took concentration to keep her fingers closed on the cup, she was that close to going out.
Crew was going to find out what she was, and there had to be a few with old grudges—on a spook ship, probably a lot of them. Terribly dirty trick, bringing NG out of his hole, getting him halfway acceptable, and then having it turn out she'd lied to everybody—
Where's that leave him? God—
But NG waited, he sat there on this ship that saner crew like Parker and Merrill were complaining about and ready to duck out on, the whole crew ready to mutiny if they hadn't done it already out there—and they were sitting still on her say-so, too, she didn't know why. Theymight be worried about the consequences of guessing wrong, but if NG
decided to go eetee he didn't always think five minutes down the line, damn sure he didn't play team with anybody—
–didn't used to, at least.
Cup slipped. She clamped down numb fingers, got it to her mouth, drank off the last couple of mouthfuls of it and let her arm rest then, just staring at him.
Didn't ask me what I'm going to do.
Can't tell me anything either—what's going on out there, where crew isc
" Merrill and Parker," Goddard's voice said over general com. " Report to dockside."
She jerked awake, running that through her hearing again. Merrill and Parker were hauling themselves up from their pile of blankets over in the corner, scared-looking.
"What in hell?" Mike Parker asked, looking in her direction as if she might be holding some secret.
"Dunno," she said, trying to get the chair tilted forward, trying to get up, with NG's help.
But Parker went to the com over at the entry station and tried to ask Goddard why and what-for and just what in hell was going on, anyway.
Goddard just repeated the order, told them get their stuff, get, go.
"What about Yeager and NG?" Parker asked, God save him, mad and keeping after it.
"Do they get a relief, sir?—Have we got some kind of problem on this ship?"
" They keep to stations," the answer came back.
Parker kept trying. Goddard just shut him down. Parker looked at both of them, said,
"Son of a bitch!"
She held onto NG's shoulder, feet and hands so numb she couldn't stand up, except NG was providing the balance sense.
"I'm going to ask questions when I get out there," Mike Parker said.
But she stood there thinking, Questions don't matter, then, what crew thinks doesn't matter, or they wouldn't turn Merrill and Parker out, now that they're through with them, they know too much—what's going on in here—
She thought, We're the last, aren't we? Fitch's personal favoritesc
As Parker and Merrill got themselves out the door before somebody changed the orders. Footsteps outside got lost in the noise of the pumps. In a minute or less the lock cycled, and they were alone in Loki'sdownside.
"We can still get out of here," NG said, holding onto her.
"They'd kill us," she said. That was the only sense she knew. "We got no defense for running. I don't know what the hell's going on out there, but something is, something is dead wrong—"
Bad choice of words. NG got her to a chair arm, got her to sit down. She put her arms around his neck, he put his arms around her and she hung there with her head spinning.
"I tell you," she said, "they're all crazy."
But she wasn't as scared as she ought to be for a second or two, wasn't half as scared as made sense, maybe because she'd seen more than made sense, topside, and it was all still rattling around—
Fitch, being civil—
Fitch, saying to Goddard, one supposed, No answer—
Goddard, sending one of their two Systems engineers and their only bona fide on-duty machinist out onto the docks to whatever trouble was supposedly going on out there, and leaving the ship their two gold-plated problemsc
Three, counting Fitch—
Four, if you threw in that sonuvabitch Goddard. A Systems man, a scan operator, an ex-Marine tac-squad sergeant and the mainday first officer—
"Goddard's longscan," she mumbled against NG's shoulder. "Goddard's a longscanoperator, for God's sake—"
NG looked her in the face.
Understood her, she thought.
Scared. He ought to be.
"If we get a warning," she said, "you get the hell off this ship. You hear me? We got two armor-rigs up there, working just fine. You got those hard-suits in that locker out there. Get one in here. If we get an alert you get it on and if we get a strike warning you get the hell off this ship, off the dockside, period, you don't stop to think. At that point, nobody's going to care. Fitchwon't care. Things'll be too busy."
Black of space, gaping behind a seal-window. Whirling paper, whirling debris, trail of dust and freezing air going out a hole so fast you didn't even see most of it, just—
–felt the explosion, felt it in the dark, felt it when you shut your eyes at night, when you got too tired and you were by yourself and you started remembering—
"You think it isa ship?" NG said.
"I damn well think it's a ship. They want that armor fixed, that's why I'm here, and they don't trust me worth shit. There never was any problem with station. That's why Fitch can talk about six hours, twenty-four hours, they know it's out there, they know how fast it's coming. Fitch was talking to somebody, saying Don't answer. We sit at this dock like a merchanter with a problem, not saying a thing. Spook tactic long as I've known anything."
"Till they get a clear look at us. And that's damn far out. We're a sitting target and they won't care about the fact there's a thousand-odd innocent people out there—"
"You don't think we can run. You think the ship absolutely can't do it."
"Fifty/fifty," NG said. There was this look in his eyes, man remembering, maybe, what human beings tranked down to forget in jump. "Don't know. I've worked on it till I'm blind and I don't know. You get a deformation when you drop out, we've tried to write a program that goes back to the boards to tell the difference, but fifty/fifty the sensors are just screwed up—We told Wolfe, no guarantees, run low mass, minimal stress—"
Detail just muddled up in her skull, the whole room kept turning around, she only knew he was scared, and she was, and beyond her not knowing any answer, there might not beany answer.
Couldn't bluff, NG was right, couldn't depend on any Fleet ship not firing on them only because they were sitting at a station dock—because they weren't dealing with anybody on either side who had an overwhelming lot to lose. The Fleet didn't: couldn't hold a place like Thule, just didn't have the ships. Even the Alliance didn't care about Thule except as metal that had to be junked; and the people were all Q-zone refugees Alliance wished it didn't have. Only some Pell lawyer was likely to complain if Thule got blown, but it didn't help them after the fact.
Antique station. Nothing to hold onto.
"One damn pump," she remembered suddenly. Thule dock. Cheese puffs. Ritterman.
Herself and Nan Jodree standing in the Registry watching the screen. "One pump at this station that can handle a starship. We're sitting at it. More than that—our tank can drain this station dry and it takes the skimmers weeks to refill it. If that's what's going on out there, if there is a ship, if its tanks are low as ours and they blow us—they've blown the pump, they've blown what we've drunk down, they're stuck here—it's more than forcing us out, they've got to takethis ship."
That bastard Wolfe knew our chances when he brought us in here. Tanks nearly dry.
Major mechanical with the drive. No way to run.
So you pull into station, you drink down all the available fuel and you defy the sonuvabitch on your track to come after you and take it back.
We're supposed to stop a station boarding with two armor-rigs andLoki's guns, dead broadside?
Fuckin'hell!
CHAPTER 28
SHE SLEPT awhile, she didn't even remember lying down. She just woke up in a back-tilted chair with a blanket over her, staring at the lights.
Remembered too much, then, twisted over to see where NG was, and found him folded over at the next station counter, taking a nap of his own, probably with the auto-alarm set. He'd put her kit and a change of clothes on the counter by her: she got up carefully, stiff and sore as hell—and made her trip to the head. Not easy to do a thorough scrub in that cubby, from a recessed tap, but it helped.
NG had set her stuff up for her, took care of her, NG, who never took two thoughts beyond his own necessities—
Maybe, she thought, maybe he was more upset than he showed, and he was putting everybody off their guard so he could do something stupid like go after Fitch—
But a man with his thinking in a muddle didn't steady down the way he had, didn't suddenly start tracking on his job the way he'd been doing, now, she added it up, ever since he'd found out he couldn't shake her or Musa or Bernie off his tail.
Like he'd been drifting in his private space until he got this beacon– Somebody else out here, man, somebody solid—pay attention, now– I got information for you—
Maybe it'd been like that for her, she thought, the last several years. Maybe that was what made him impossible for her to let alone: he was the voice in her dark too, saying I know what you've seen. You don't have to make sense. You don't have to explain a thing.
It's not a requirement herec
Hell of a time to figure things out, Yeager.
She came back into Engineering with that thought, she came and bent over his chair with the intention of waking him up, telling him that, telling him at least how she felt—
But it was too embarrassing, and she went muddle-headed when she thought about talking to him like that. Maybe he didn't feel like that, maybe what he felt was something crazier, or saner, and it wasn't fair to push personal stuff on him. People opened their mouths and put personal loads on each other, and embarrassed each other beyond anything they could ever patch, was all they were likely to do, when everything was already all right and it could go along forever as long as people didn't say stupid things to each other.
So keep your mouth shut, Yeager, just wake him up and be nice, you got to leave pretty soon. Last thing you can do is duck out on him without a goodbye.
She bent down, blew on the hair at his temple, moved back when he woke up, to save her jaw.
"Was going to give you a nice wake-up," she said, "but you move too quick."
He rubbed a stubbled face. He looked like hell. He muttered something, dragged himself up, patted her on the shoulder, and went to gather up his own kit by the door, headed for a wash-up.
So she sat by herself, she watched the little numbers on the screens until he came back, which wasn't long. He hadn't shaved, just washed up a bit, and he got them a couple of soft drinks and a couple sandwiches out of the locker at station one.
She drank. She couldn't face eating. She tucked the sandwich in her pocket.
"I'll keep it for later," she said, and deliberately didn't look at the time.
Take care of yourself, she wanted to say. But that sounded too much like goodbye.
She wanted to go over things with him, to make sure he was agreeing with her, but that was her nerves it was for, no good for his.
" Yeager," com said. " Report topside. Five minutes."
"Damn," she said.
NG reached out and grabbed her hand. Held on a second.
"Got to answer that," she said, and stood up and pulled away before she did something, said something, they didn't have the time to deal with. "I got to get Fitch settled—"
"Don't trust him. Don'ttrust him."
" Yeager! Battle ready! No fuckin'time, Yeager"!
"Oh, shee-it!" Her heart jumped, the body did, she left the chair-arm and turned around and grabbed him, hard, said: "That's it, that's all of it– get off this ship" !
The siren started. She tore away and ran, banged the edge of the doorway, jumped for the corridor deck and sprinted for the lift.
Didn't tell him goodbye, didn't even look back until it was too late and she was headed around the curve, and only a fool would ignore that siren and delay for a backward glance.
She wanted to tell him to suit up, wanted to stand over him and be sure he did. He could be a fool, damn him, she'd told him too much—
God, the clock by ops showed less than six hours, there could be something loose scan hadn't counted, hadn't spotted, hadn't anticipated—
Damn Goddard! Damn Fitch! You dealt with the Fleet, you dealt with carriers and rider-ships, too many pieces loose in any situation to take chances with—
She hit the lift, she hit the button and after that it moved at its own rate, nothing you could dobut stand there while it climbed and lurched past the corec
Thump, thump, thump of the fueling pump, louder than the siren for a few seconds, whole floor of the lift shaking—
If that bastard Fitch is conning me, if he just wants me to move—
The ship rang and shook as if a hammer had hit it. She grabbed for the safety-rail and white-knuckled it, taste of blood in her mouth where she had bitten her lip—
God! Have we been hit, or was that fire?
Little ship, pinned to station, could beus doing the firing—
Could be—
The lift stopped at the top, opened on the bridge. She headed out as the siren quit, passed Goddard yelling at her, Goddard sitting at his post, a khaki blur to her as she ran.
It was the topside locker she was headed for, and that was standing open, Fitch was in there already suiting up.
"What was it?" she said, jerked the zip open and started peeling, fast.
Fitch said: "Friends of yours."
"The hell!—Is it Africa?"
"They've used every ID in the book. We don't know a hundred percent who it is.—
Shit!"
"Easy, back it up—you're going to strip those damn ring-seals." She grabbed after Fitch's problem, but he got it, shoved her off, and she stepped into her own armor-breeches, threw the lever that seated it solidly around her, rammed her feet down into the boots and worked her toes into those while she came up under the hanging top-section and wriggled her arms and her body up into it, helmet and all.
Solid mate. Throw the latches. Sleeves last, mating at the mid-shoulder, left and right, tension engaged, screw the rings tight and not too tight.
She beat Fitch by a second, seals and all. She heard her own breathing and Fitch's, felt a shock rock the ship and saw the audio reading jump.
She muttered: "Was that them firing or us?"
"Us." Fitch turned, flat-footed the way a neo learned to move, powered-on and lurched after balance.
Firing every time the station's rotation gave them a target. "We're assuming they wantthe fuel we're holding?"
"Say it's a good assumption."
"What've we got on us? Rider, carrier, or both?"
"Suppose, Yeager, you just leave the thinking to somebody else."
"What they're going to do, sir, they're going to knock hell out of this station, leave us with a major problem, like a couple thousand people with no fuckin' life-support, sir—"
