ACES

By Craig Alanson

Text copyright © 2016 Craig Alanson

All Rights Reserved

Table Of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Prologue

London, Great Britain, Earth   

“That’s it?” The man peered skeptically at the object, and gently poked at it with a pen. “All this old alien junk looks the same. This thing actually works, after all this time?”

“Yes.” Replied the scientist with a weary sigh, as he nudged the pen away. “Please don’t touch it, the instruments are very sensitive.”

The object of such intense interest sat on a laboratory workbench, a plain, black, rubber-coated workbench, with the object itself resting gently in a foam cradle. The object was covered with sensors which had been glued or taped to it, and multicolored wires ran from the sensors, so many wires that the object looked like it had fallen into a bowl of spaghetti.

Lighting in the lab was dim, except for a spotlight which shone a harsh cone of light down on the workbench. There were two people in the room, the only two people allowed access through the many layers of security that surrounded the company laboratory. One person was a scientist, wearing a white lab coat, peering intently at a display screen, nodding his head, murmuring softly to himself while he fiddled with his instruments. The scientist was exhausted, and it showed in the dark circles under his eyes, the wrinkled lab coat, the sagging shoulders. The other man was younger, wearing an expensive suit, his collar still buttoned, his tie still straight, his white shirt still crisp and unwrinkled, his brown hair still combed just so, despite the fact that it was past 3 o’clock in the morning of a long, long day.

The two men absolutely despised each other.

“Yes,” the scientist repeated, straightening up, “I'm sure. This is it. It works, but I can’t control it without the other piece.”

The younger man’s lips tightened in a grimace he might have intended as a smile. “The missing piece, you’re certain about that also?”

The scientist closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He had been working almost continuously for two days, ever since the object came to his attention. He pulled a bottle from his coat pocket, tilted his head back, and squeezed a few drops into each eye. “Now that I know what this is, I know the piece that’s missing, it fits perfectly. I saw it listed in the survey catalog.”

The younger man, the scientist’s boss, Senior Vice President Todd Martin, frowned. He looked down at his left sleeve, and picked a tiny piece of lint off the fabric. Cleaning his suit absorbed his attention, the scientist forgotten for the moment, which only emphasized the other man’s total lack of importance, in the grand scheme of things. Back to the present. “Pity you didn’t ask to have it included in the original shipment.”

The scientist shrugged defensively. He resented having to report to this non-scientist, this ignorant, money-grubbing jerk. The only mathematics Martin was interested in was about money. “If I’d known, I would have. Three days ago, this was just another useless old alien trinket. Until I saw its potential. Now that second piece is in government quarantine.”

As a scientist, Dr. Nigel Watson was adequate, perhaps mediocre, no more than that. He had worked in the labs at JST Research Corporation for over twenty years; there had been only a few minor discoveries from his work, even fewer useful patents granted during his career. Solid, dependable, unimaginative. The only award he was likely to win in his life was for perfect attendance. The only reason Watson was assigned to this project is that it had been Watson, by pure luck, who discovered what the alien device was.

Todd Martin’s first thought, after Watson told him what the device was, which piece was missing, and where that missing piece was located, was that now, had been that now he didn’t need Watson. Martin could arrange for Watson to have a tragic accident. So sad, and so fortunate.

But, Martin didn’t get to be a Senior Vice President by making hasty decisions. His second thought was that, even if he got the missing piece, he still needed a scientist to make it work. And if he needed a scientist, Watson was actually the perfect person for the job. Watson was weak, and Todd Martin knew how to manipulate him, how to use Watson’s fragile ego to make the scientist do whatever Todd wanted. “If we need that missing piece, then,” Martin said, “we need to acquire it.”

Watson looked down at the workbench, where the object rested in the spotlight. It did look like so many other pieces of ancient alien junk. “Acquire it? You mean steal it. Arcadia Scientific,” he mentioned the name of JST’s chief competitor, “owns it, they’d never give it up. Especially if they figure what it is. And if we try to buy it from them now, that will only make them look more closely at it.”

It was Martin’s turn to shrug. “Arcadia may technically own it now, but they don’t have possession of it yet. Acquire, steal, it’s all the same in the end. Need I remind you, Nigel, this is a guaranteed Nobel prize for you. You would prefer they award it to someone else? Say, doesn’t your old friend Patel work for Arcadia now?”

Watson twitched reflexively, as Martin knew he would. Patel did work as a consultant for Arcadia, and he had already been awarded one Nobel prize. Patel, who had been a student when Watson was teaching astrophysics at MIT. Smug, arrogant Patel. Martin knew just how to push Watson’s buttons. “You understand, this could be a great leap for humanity.” Watson said, as if that were his primary motivation. He pictured himself accepting the Nobel prize in Oslo, meeting Patel at the party afterward. Patel, who had shared his Nobel with three others. A prize awarded for their work on stellar formation theory. Meaningless drivel. Who cares about how stars formed, billions of years ago? Watson’s work on the alien device would change the world. The technology would be named after him. His name would live forever. He was committed now. “M-“ he started to say ‘Mister Martin’, but couldn’t bring himself to address the young suit that way, “M-mind you, we have to... acquire it without anyone finding out what we took. If anyone figures out which item we’re interested in, they will investigate, and eventually everyone will know what it is. There are no patents for rediscovering existing technology, you know. Without a patent, there won’t be any money.”

Martin smiled, genuinely this time. He noted that Watson had said ‘we’ this time. Martin liked to win. “And no Nobel prizes, either. Don’t worry about that. I know a man who does this kind of... work. Clean, and discrete.” He patted the scientist on the shoulder, reassuringly. "Another Nobel would be good for the company, eh?"

Despite his exhaustion, Watson's eyes burned bright with desire for a Nobel prize of his own. "Yes. Of course."

CHAPTER 1

     Spacedock, Highpoint Station, Aurora orbit

The spacedock supervisor watched the small ship back slowly out of his dock, attended by two dockyard tugs. He bit his lip, and shook his head. It was a nice ship, if a bit old and in need of maintenance. What concerned him was that the ship’s hyperdrive engines were past due for a major overhaul when the ship had arrived at Aurora four months ago. The only place the ship should be going was straight to Earth, because only Earth had the civilian spacedock facilities for such heavy overhaul work. The people who had bought the ship last week had been evasive about where they were taking their new ship, which they had purchased in a hurry, skipping the usual safety inspections. And the supervisor had not liked their captain at all. The man, and his pilot, held all the proper certificates for flying such a spacecraft. But the man was too slick, his smile too thin, his answers too rehearsed. The supervisor didn’t trust him.

Well, there was nothing the supervisor could do about it now. He’d filed the official notices with the Registry. As the nose of the small ship disappeared from view, he waved it goodbye. “Good luck, Isaac Newton.”

Los Angeles, USA, Earth

“Kaylee, Manny, get your stuff together. Let’s go.” Joy Sanchez threw one of her daughter’s sweaters over her right shoulder and bent down to push the suitcase closed. As she straightened up, her blonde hair swept across her face, she pulled it aside. “Come on, we’re already late for the spaceport. The shuttle isn’t going to wait for us.”

“Mo - om,” Kaylee Sanchez drew the word out into two syllables, as teenagers do when exasperated by their totally uncool parents, only Kaylee was barely fourteen, albeit going on twenty two, and so much more sophisticated than her mother gave her credit for. “I can’t find my blue duffel bag. I packed it this morning.”

“You mean this one?” Rick Sanchez poked his head in the door, his arms full of various small luggage.

“Yes!” Kaylee leapt across the room and snatched it from her father, hugging it to her chest. “Where did you find it?” She asked suspiciously.

Her father was taken aback. “It was in the hallway, near the front door. Why?”

“I didn’t put it th-“ Kaylee started to scold her father in indignation.

”I put it there, Kaylee.” Her mother interjected. “It was under your bed, and I knew you wanted to bring it. Give it here.”

Kaylee reluctantly let her mother take it, and add it to the pile at her feet.

“Honey,” Rick looked in dismay at how much luggage still remained to be loaded into the van for the ride to the spaceport, “I hope we don’t have much more than this.” Their major items had been packed up by movers weeks before, to make the slow trip up the space elevator.

Joy winked. “This is just the childrens’ items, dear. Our suitcases are still in our bedroom.”

While the parents were talking, their twelve year old son Manuel had snuck in behind his mother and opened his sister’s duffel bag. “Ha! This is why Stinkly wanted this bag so bad. It’s got her precious Us4U holos!”

Kaylee shrieked, enraged, and lunged at her brother, who danced away triumphantly across the bedroom, holo projector in hand. “Give it to me!” She shouted, as Manny activated the unit and tossed it on the floor. Instantly, the room had three additional occupants, the pretty boys of Us4U, the hot boy band of the moment. There were three of them, with spiked and frosted hair, tight pants, shirts open to the waist. They were singing some mindless love song, or so Rick thought, until one of them ran his hands down his torso and gyrated his hips. Manny imitated the movement. “Look at me, I’m Zak! Ooooh, I need you sooo bad, bay-BEE!” He sang along, mockingly.

Rick, appalled, dropped all the luggage, strode over and picked up the holo unit, snapping it off. “This is awful! Kaylee, you shouldn’t be watching this stuff!”

“Stinkly looooves Zak.” Manny taunted, safely on the other side of the bed from his sister.

“I hate you!!” Kaylee screamed.

“That’s it!” Rick clapped his hands. “Manny, you do not touch your sister’s things without her permission, and you stop taunting her. And don’t call her Stinkly again. Kaylee, I don’t want you telling your brother you hate him. And this thing,” he held up the holo projector, “I’m keeping for now, until I can delete that program. That is inappropriate.”

“Mom?!” Kaylee turned to appeal to her mother.

“Don’t look at me, young lady, I agree with your father.” Joy said, in order to support her husband, even though she had owned worse holograms at the same age.

“This is so unfair!” Kaylee was on the verge of tears. “Why do I have to leave all my friends, and everything I like, to go to Val-hell-hole? You can’t make me!”

“Kaylee,” Joy spoke in a sympathetic tone, “Valhalla is a very nice planet.”

“And you are going, young lady.” Rick said flatly, running out of patience, as they ran out of time. “We all are. Finish packing.” He picked up as many suitcases as he could hold under his arms, and turned toward the hallway, when Kaylee burst into tears, ran into her bathroom, and slammed the door behind her with enough force that pictures hung on the wall swayed on their hooks. Rick dropped the suitcases again, and looked to his wife.

Joy nodded. “Honey, I’ll talk to her. Why don’t you and Manny get the car loaded?”

Rick silently mouthed ‘I love you’, and picked up the suitcases one more time. “Tiger, can you give me a hand here? That suitcase is probably too big for you-“

“No, I got it, Dad.” Rick watched his son struggle to drag the heavy suitcase behind him, grateful Manny was still young enough to like being called ‘Tiger’, and also young enough to fall for the old ‘too heavy for you’ trick. Rick wanted to savor this time before the children grew up.

More time with family had been a major factor to consider when Rick had applied for a grant to explore the alien ruins on Valhalla, a planet only recently cleared for initial human habitation. He had been awarded the grant, with enough funding for five years, the opportunity of a lifetime for a young xenoarcheologist. When Joy arranged a job as a staff exobiologist with New Ventures LLC, the company that held the colony prep contract for Valhalla, the decision was made; the family was moving to Valhalla. Now they had to get across the lightyears from Earth to Valhalla, which meant meeting up in Earth orbit with the massive transport ship Atlas Challenger, which meant getting to the Vandenberg spaceport with plenty of time to go through security to board the spaceplane, which meant getting the van on the road, which meant getting the van loaded, which meant getting their alarmingly large amount of luggage packed.  And getting Kaylee out of the bathroom. Even with the automated traffic control systems, it might take as long to drive from LA to the Vandenberg spaceport as it would take to climb into orbit and rendezvous with the transport in orbit. Rick was about to ping a traffic report request from his bComm, the tiny computer chip in his brain, when he remembered his manners. Kaylee and Manny didn't have bComms, and wouldn't be getting them until they were at least eighteen, probably twenty. This in spite of the fact that some sixteen-year-olds at Kaylee's school had them already, which was foolish as far as Rick and Joy were concerned. A sixteen year old brain was too young, too much actively still growing, to be messing around with learning to work with implanted computers like a brain communicator. Which was another source of arguments with their daughter. At home, the parents used their bComms rarely, to avoid reminding Kaylee of what she didn't have. “House,” Rick called out, “traffic report.”

“No major incidents along your route, Mister Sanchez. Traffic is moving at 96% of optimal level.”            The house AI responded.

“Yeah, optimal for LA.” Rick muttered under his breath as he walked sideways down the narrow hallway with his arms full of luggage. He was tired already. Once they got on the freeway he could take a nap. The only driving he would have to do was out of their street, once they reached the freeway onramp, the computer would take over, and deliver their rented van right to the spaceport. Then there would be a ride on a spaceplane, which would be a first for the children, and, Rick hoped, exciting enough to keep them from being bored. Once they reached the commercial space station, they had a two hour layover before catching an orbital transfer vehicle for the ride up to the Atlas Challenger, which, like most freighters, was parked near the top of the equatorial space elevator. Low-value items like cargo took the long, slow trip up the elevator, people paid extra to ride the spaceplanes.

Atlas Challenger was a bulky freighter, not a sleek cruise ship. Passenger ships didn’t go out the 1,600 lightyears to Valhalla, and wouldn’t, until that planet was fully approved for colonization, and the planet’s population grew large enough to make fast cruise ships economical to operate. The freighter was under contract to New Ventures LLC to haul equipment and personnel to Valhalla, in this case it was Rick who was tagging along with Joy. He had seen holos of the cargo ship’s small passenger section, and while it was better than he had feared, it did not look like it had been built for any kind of luxury. Keeping the children occupied during the more than three month journey would be an adventure in itself.

In her bathroom, Kaylee took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, to calm herself. It was what her yoga instructor said to do, restoring her inner balance, or something like that. Kaylee didn’t yet pay any attention to the mumbo-jumbo spiritual aspects of yoga, she liked how the exercises kept her flexible. She blotted her tears away with a towel, and looked in the mirror. She was pretty, and she knew it. Kaylee didn’t have the permanent eyeliner or sparkle implants in her retina like some of the girls in her school; her parents wouldn’t allow that. She smoothed her top, appraising herself. Unlike many girls her age, Kaylee mostly liked the way she looked. Mostly. Not that there weren’t things she wouldn’t change about herself, if she could. Soccer and basketball kept her fit. Supposedly there were people her age on Valhalla, supposedly there were even sports teams. She didn’t want to go to Valhalla, didn’t want to leave L.A., didn’t want to leave her friends. Her mother had tried to persuade Kaylee what a great opportunity this was, after all, how many of her friends ever went offworld? Except, of course, for the rich kids, who always looked down on everyone else, anyway. Valhalla was an opportunity? Yeah, an opportunity to live in primitive conditions, on a world that wasn’t even ready for colonists, only science teams and their families. No matter what her parents said, Valhalla would be uncomfortable, crude, primitive, possibly dangerous. And maybe, just maybe, exciting. Even when the coolest kids at school had teased her about having to move to a hick planet in the middle of nowhere, there had been a little, a tiny bit of envy on their faces; that Kaylee would be going where few people had gone, while they stayed in L.A. Where so many crowded together.

Kaylee splashed water on her face, checked her fingernails, and paused, her hand on the door handle, taking a deep breath. Her mother was no doubt waiting outside, preparing some lame speech that Kaylee would have to listen to. No, she thought to herself. If I have to go to Valhalla, I’m doing it my way.

She opened the door, and as her mother was about to speak, Kaylee interjected “Whew! I feel better now, I needed that. Manny knows how to push my buttons, that little creep.” She clapped her hands, and looked around the room. “Do you want me to pack this stuff?”

Joy was surprised, having been ready for another argument. “Sure, I’ll take this out to the car. Thank you.”

“Sure, Mom.” Kaylee said with a toss of her hair, as she knelt on the floor to load clothing into a suitcase.

Rick got his heavy load of luggage loaded into the van, and waited while Manny dragged his sister’s biggest suitcase out the door, bumping it on every step down the front walk. Manny was doing his best, the suitcase was tough anyway, and a few scratches wouldn’t hurt.

It was amazing how much Manny looked like pictures of his father at the same age. Same dark hair, brown eyes, an arc of freckles across his nose and under his eyes. Not so amazing really, considering that, when Manny’s DNA had been tweaked to eliminate both Rick’s family tendency for diabetes and Joy’s family tendency for heart disease, Rick and Joy had agreed to select dark hair and brown eyes also. That wasn’t anything unusual, or illegal, since both traits were in Rick’s baseline DNA. And, truthfully, Rick liked seeing a strong family resemblance in his son. Kaylee looked like Joy, Scandinavian heritage, Kaylee’s hair was just a shade darker blonde than her mother’s, and slightly curly. He glanced at himself in the van’s window, seeing the dwindling effects of the minor sunburn he had acquired by working on an archeological dig in the Libyan desert. The dig had been nothing important, and he had made no significant discoveries, barely enough to get a paper published. The dig, had, however, let him add one more line to the ‘field work experience’ writeup on the grant application form. True xenoarcheologists, those who specialized in alien ruins, got their hands dirty, they didn’t work in labs back on Earth. During Rick’s one offworld trip to the planet Sahara, in graduate school, he had been an observer only. In truth, he had been a gofer for the real archeologists, and he had spent much of his time keeping the balky life support system of their encampment going.  The alien ruins on Valhalla, while less extensive than those on Avalon, or Sahara, appeared to be older, and to have been occupied longer. Rick could hardly wait to get there, explore alien ruins that no human had ever seen. That no sentient being had seen in uncounted years.

“Here, Dad.” Manny dragged the suitcase behind the van. “Think it will fit? I don’t know what Kaylee has in here, it weighs a ton.”

“Manny,” Rick answered as he hefted the suitcase and made room for it in the back of the van, “I don’t know what’s in here, and I don’t want to know. It’s women’s things. Probably full of shoes. Do you have all your stuff packed?”

“Yup, Mom helped me. I’ll go get it.”

“We’ll both get it.” Rick reached down and tousled his son’s hair. “Thanks for helping me, that suitcase was really heavy.”

“Somebody has to help,” Manny said smugly, “we can’t all hide in the bathroom.”

Rick saw an opening for a father-son talk. “Manny, Kaylee is upset because we’re leaving Earth, leaving everything she’s ever known. I think Valhalla will be a great adventure-“

”Me too, Dad!” Manny exclaimed with boyish enthusiasm.

“-but it will take some getting used to. Including the trips out and back, we will be away from Earth almost six years. That can be tough. I don’t know how I would feel at her age, at your age. I’m glad that you want to go to Valhalla, and I need you to help me with something.”

“What?”

“I need you to not pick on your sister. It’s going to take her a while to get adjusted to this, and I’m depending on you to not make it worse. Deal?”

Manny shrugged. Kaylee was a pain, two years older, she acted like she was an adult and Manny was still a baby crawling on the floor. “Okay, Dad. Unless she picks on me first.”

Rick sighed. This could be a long trip. As they walked up the steps, Joy came out, suitcase in each hand. Manny rushed forward to take one from her, she swung the lighter one out for him to grab. Rick raised an eyebrow, Joy answered him. “Kaylee’s fine, she’s packing the rest of her things.”

“Good. And Manny and I had a talk, right, Tiger?”

“I guess so.” Manny said reluctantly, trying to commit to as little as he could get away with.

Somehow, they got everything into the van. The children were inside, seat belts buckled, listening to music or playing video games, on their best behavior for the moment. Rick looked at all the junk crammed inside the rear of the van, as he reached for the hatch to close it. “That’s it. I hope we don’t exceed our weight limit for the shuttle.” He closed the hatch.

“Honey, relax. All this doesn’t weigh much, I checked.” Joy responded.

“You ready?” Rick caressed her upper arm.

“I suppose. Yes. Yes, I’m ready.” Their house had already been sold, Joy’s parents were coming over in a few days to make sure the moving and cleaning crews had done their jobs, and to hand over the keys to the new owners. The last of their furniture, including the beds, was going into storage. Joy had been tempted to sell everything, but knew that would signal to both sets of grandparents that the Sanchez family did not intend to ever return to Earth. The monthly cost for the storage place in the Nevada desert was well worth the money, if it kept peace in the family a while longer.

Joy blinked a sudden tear out of her eye. “I’m going to miss this place.” It wasn’t much, a cramped, uninspiring three bedroom house, attached on one side to another house. Still, it had been home, and they owned it. Theirs. Rick had repainted it, and added a small porch on the front. Joy had added flowerboxes under the windows, and landscaped the small front yard. “Our first home, as a family.”

“Me too.” Rick said softly. He pulled his wife close and kissed her. “Do you know how lucky I am, to have found a woman who shares my dreams?”

“We are both lucky that we share the same dreams. I want this as much as you do. Remember, I’m an exobiologist. As in, biology on places other than Earth.” Joy, like Rick, had some minor offworld field experience in her profession, she had made a trip to Avalon while in grad school. She realized now, while standing in the driveway of their house in L.A., that trip to Avalon had made her decide she was moving off Earth at some point. It had been in the back of her mind all these years, now it was really happening. Rick shared her desire to be a pioneer, and Manny thought of Valhalla as way cool, in part because it was one place none of his friends or classmates had been to yet. Kaylee? Kaylee would adjust. She had adjusted to the move from Chicago, where Joy and Rick had met while finishing their graduate work.

Rick glanced at his watch. “We need to get going, or we really will be late.”

“Honey, we have plenty of time.”

“Not late for the shuttle, late to meet your parents. And mine.” Both sets of grandparents were going to be at the spaceport to have lunch and see them off.

They got into the van, Rick programmed in their destination, and they were halfway down the driveway, when he slammed on the brakes. “Damn! I almost forgot Professor Radke’s package.” He flung the van’s door open, and ran into the house, returning less than a minute later with a black metal box the size of a toaster, which he sat on his wife’s lap.

“Honey, what is this? I’ve never seen it before.” She asked skeptically.

“It’s been in the attic, over our bedroom closet. I really don’t know what it is, probably some sort of alien artifact. When Radke heard last month that I was going to Valhalla, he got all excited, and said he wanted me to deliver this to some woman named Chaudry on Valhalla. He didn’t say why, but I got the impression he wanted this Chaudry’s opinion or something.”

“Isn’t that odd? Why didn’t he just transmit a holo image? The message would get there in a couple weeks.”

Rick shrugged and backed the van out into the street. “You know Radke, he’s an odd duck. And he’s sure not going to confide in me.” Professor Radke was one of the leaders in the small world of xenoarcheology, with an ego to match.

Joy held the box up, and ran her finger along the seal. “Honey, this is weird. I’m not comfortable taking this box with us, if we don’t know what’s in it. Why the mystery?”

“I don’t think it’s a mystery. Radke didn’t tell me what it is, and I didn’t ask.” Radke’s support had been critical to Rick getting a grant to dig in the ruins on Valhalla; Rick wasn’t going to irritate his sponsor by asking questions. Most young exoarcheologists would be thrilled to have the famous professor Radke ask them for a favor! “I assume it’s an alien artifact of some kind; Radke’s most recent work was on Ellios, so it’s probably something from there.”

“Okaaaaay-“

            Which, Rick knew, meant it was definitely not OK with Joy. “Uh, then, uh, how about when we get to Vandenberg, I can turn it over to the transport company, they’ll be responsible for it. That shouldn’t cost much.”

            Joy considered for a moment, then set the box down next to her feet. “All right. I’m not happy about this, but it’s too late now.”

Rick took the opportunity to back the van out of the driveway, before his wife could change her mind. “This is it, kids, wave goodbye to the old house!”

CHAPTER 2

The asteroid field was a dangerous place, cluttered with spinning rocks, rocks which were all swirling around the star in slightly different orbits. The big rocks affected the orbits of the other rocks, rocks collided and went flying off in new, unpredictable directions, often to collide with another rock. It was a bad neighborhood.

Into the outskirts of the neighborhood, moving cautiously, came a new object, a small ship. The ship had dropped out of hyperspace far away from the asteroid field, and fallen silent,  waiting. Waiting, and listening for other ships, specifically, listening for Navy patrol ships. When the ship’s crew was certain their little ship was alone, the ship moved in toward the asteroids, looking for an area that was relatively stable. Twice, it backed off rapidly when radar indicated rocks would come uncomfortably close. On the third try, it moved in close, and remained. On its side, a cargo bay door slid open, a square of light standing out in the darkness. A pair of figures wearing environmental suits could be seen inside, working with a bulky object, moving quickly, efficiently. They attached something to the bulky object, carried it to the doorway, and launched it away with a gentle push.

The door then closed, the ship backed away slowly, using only thrusters, leaving the object hanging in space, spinning ever so slowly against the background of stars and floating rocks. At a signal from the ship, a light activated aboard the thing attached to the bulky object. The thing puffed twice, and stopped the object’s spin. The thing was a remote-controlled thruster unit, the bulky object it attached to was a hyperwave antenna with built-in powerpack. The thruster unit then went into sleep mode, it would awake only if its radar detected a rock approaching, if that happened, the thruster would move the antenna assembly out of the way.

The antenna was also sleeping, its timer ticking down to when it would come to life, and send a single brief message. After completing its useful life, the antenna would instruct the thruster to find a nearby rock, and smash the antenna into it as hard as it could.

Satisfied, the crew turned their small ship around and fired its main engines, leaving the asteroid field behind as rapidly as possible. It would be several hours before space around the ship was clear enough for a hyperspace Jump, and they were on a tight schedule, a very tight schedule. The mission had been thrown together on short notice. Putting all the pieces together, including acquiring the ship, had been a mad scramble for the people aboard. There was still much work to do, and lightyears to travel, before their plan could be put into action.

Transport starship Atlas Challenger

The parents' plan worked, for a while.  What Rick and Joy most wanted out of the long voyage was for Kaylee and Manny to avoid being bored, and driving themselves, and their parents, crazy.  The spaceplane ride up from Earth, the massive freighter starship boosting out of Earth orbit and jumping into hyperspace, and the trip to their first stop at the planet Avalon, were all new and interesting enough that the children were not bored at all. It helped that there were two things aboard the ship which occupied much of the children's time and attention. The first was other young people; the passenger cabins, on the way to Avalon, were full.  Mostly families, with children, of which more than a dozen were roughly the same age as the Sanchez children. Kaylee noted, to her father's dismay, that there were several cute boys aboard the ship.

The second thing which kept the children occupied, and also was a good place to meet cute boys, was the Beach. The Beach was a large swimming pool, located just aft of the passenger cabins, which contained part of the ship’s water supply, used for drinking, bathing, and reaction mass for the normal-space engines. The ship’s designers had enhanced the water tank into an inviting environment that passengers and crew enjoyed. There was a beach area, with real sand and fake palm trees, a bright blue holographic sky overhead, a gentle slope down into the water, and waves pumped out at the far end of the water tank. After a while, you could almost forget it was all fake.

Kaylee and Manny quickly found companions for non-schooltime activities. Their favorite activity was hanging out at the Beach, every chance they could. That compartment was kept warmer than the rest of the ship, a fact which caused considerable dispute between Kaylee and her parents. The boring one-piece bathing suit Rick wanted his daughter to wear at the Beach was totally unacceptable, unless her parents wanted her to be a complete social outcast. It was a little girl’s bathing suit, didn’t they understand that she was a teenager now? The bikini she wanted to wear was unacceptable to Rick, which only confirmed to his daughter that he was so old, and so out of touch, that he couldn’t possibly have ever been her age. Rick was shocked to see that his daughter even owned such a bikini, he remembered what seemed like a very short time ago when she was so self-conscious, that she always wrapped herself in a robe, or a towel, at the beaches in California. A compromise was reached. Joy and Kaylee picked out an alternate two-piece bathing suit from the ship’s limited stores, a swimsuit that was pretty enough for daughter to wear, and contained enough material for father to grudgingly agree to.

The Beach provided Kaylee with an education, an experience she didn’t enjoy. Kaylee had assumed, that, being from Earth, from California, from Los Angeles, she was automatically lightyears more cool and sophisticated that the others, who were all offworld hicks on their way to an offworld planet. She was wrong. Out in the colony worlds, Earth was viewed as a source of boring government regulations and taxes, certainly not the source of anything remotely cool. In fact, Earth was considered somewhat of a cultural backwater. Kaylee was confronted with this fact when she realized that the popular singing and video stars she knew of in L.A. were mostly unknown to the others, whereas she’d heard of most of the stars the offworlders were talking about. To her shock, Kaylee realized that, to the others, she was the unsophisticated hick. One girl, whom Kaylee had thought of as a potential friend, but who quickly turned out to be snooty, and a rival for the attentions of the cuter boys, told Kaylee one day, in a condescending tone “Oh, Kaylee, dear, everybody knows that Earth is lame.”

Kaylee, miserable, started to avoid the Beach after that.

At Avalon, since the ship was going to be in orbit there for eight days, the Sanchez parents dipped into their savings, and splurged on a six day excursion to the surface. It was a whirlwind tour which left Rick and Joy exhausted. Sister and brother thoroughly enjoyed themselves. After Avalon, where most passengers had left the ship, all the other children were gone. The only other passengers were an elderly couple, headed for retirement on Oceania, the ship’s second stop.

“But why? Why can’t we go? We won’t cause any trouble, I swear!” Manny protested, for the umpteenth time.

“Manny-“ His father started to say, before Captain Schroeder interrupted.

Schroeder was gruff, no-nonsense, had been in command of the Atlas Challenger for nine years now, and the only thing he disliked more than passengers, was children passengers. He liked order, and discipline, and for things to be predictable and dependable. Universal Transport Corporation trusted him with their giant, expensive space freighter because he embodied those characteristics himself; and children were the opposite. With his short black hair, steely light-blue eyes and goatee, he looked stern and uncompromising, and his outer appearance was a true picture of the man inside, at least, the part of himself he let the world see. “No passengers on the shuttle. Our insurance doesn’t allow it.” He said, in a tone which implied the matter was closed.

Rick quickly added “Manny, the ship’s shuttle isn’t even going to the surface. It’s just going across to the space station over there. Local spaceplanes bring the cargo up and down from there. We’re only stopping here for a day, at the most. Right, Captain Schroeder?”

“Quite so. Now, you will excuse me, I have much work to do.” The captain strode off down the corridor.

“I don’t like him.” Manny said with a frown. “He’s mean.”

Rick shook his head. “No, Captain Schroeder is simply very, very busy. He is responsible for this whole ship, and all the cargo, and all the people. Starships are expensive, Manny, the people who own this ship would be unhappy if anything went wrong. They trust Captain Schroeder to make sure nothing bad happens. And to keep us on schedule.”

Manny wasn’t entirely mollified. “We went down to the surface on Avalon.”

“Avalon was different, that trip down was on a scheduled commercial spaceplane, and this ship stopped at Avalon for over a week. Here, by the time we get over to the station, transfer to a plane, and fly down, the ship will have left.”

“Still, I wish we could go down to the surface.” Manny said with a sigh as he slumped against the viewport. “It looks soooooo cool, Dad.”

“You’re right, it does.” Both of the male Sanchezes leaned forward, pressing their foreheads into the large viewport, leaning forward to look down at the world slowly rolling by beneath their feet. Oceania, true to its name, was mostly ocean, no continents to speak of. It was almost entirely blue, the kind of brilliant, Caribbean blue that looks like something faked up for a picture, until you see it in person. Chains of large and small islands dotted the globe, the planet was a beach lover’s paradise, which is exactly what the planetary development company was counting on. The scattered islands did not make the planet practical for supporting industry, or a large population, so the company had been promoting the world as a vacation and retirement destination. Look at all the beautiful beachfront property, the ads extolled! Only 325 lightyears from Earth! Pre-construction pricing still available! Truth to tell, both Rick and Joy were tempted to plop down a deposit on a beachfront lot, supposedly as an investment. Too bad their limited funds didn’t allow such indulgences.

Rick had seen the pictures, and now he saw it with his own eyes. There was one island directly below the ship, it had a lush green interior, and was surrounded by a strip of white that had to be perfect, sandy beaches. Beyond the beach was a ring just below the surface, Rick assumed it was a sort of coral reef. He sighed without realizing it. Manny was entirely correct for whining about not going to down to that paradise. Rick stared and stared at the island, imagining he could feel a warm, tropical breeze on his skin, imagining his family was there, rather than stuck aboard a transport, in the coldness of space.

While father and son watched, feeling the icy cold of hard vacuum bleeding through the viewport and cooling their foreheads, a sleek spaceplane detached from the space station, flipped gracefully end over end, and fired its main engines in a deorbit burn maneuver. When the freighter had left Earth, all twenty passenger cabins had been full, now the Sanchezes were the only passengers. Most people had left the ship at the first stop, the planet Avalon, and only one elderly couple had gotten aboard there for the trip to Oceania, Rick supposed they were aboard the spaceplane he was watching. The other one of Oceania’s two passenger-carrying spaceplanes had come and gone that morning, all that kept Atlas Challenger from breaking orbit was one last load of cargo, which would soon be aboard. Rick and his son watched the spaceplane, standing side by side, in silence. Rick thought it was great. All too soon, he figured, his son would be a sullen teenager, and silence would be the response to anything Rick said or asked. He wanted to drink in the moment, so he could remember it later, remember it always. Manny had often talked about being a space pilot. At least, he had recently. Before that, there had been potential career paths as a pro football player, a fireman, and, early on, an archeologist, just like his father.

Eventually the spaceplane disappeared out of view, falling around the horizon on its long curving path down to the surface. “Going, going... gone!” Manny said as the last, bright glint of light from the spaceplane went out of sight.

 “Hey, I wonder what sort of cargo we’re taking aboard here. You think Ms. Tanner will let us see?” Rick suggested as another distraction. The children had been remarkably good to date, he was anxious to avoid a meltdown. Once they departed Oceania, there were no stops until they reached Valhalla, another month and a half cooped up in the freighter. Six weeks, inside a box in the bleak coldness of hyperspace.

“Yeah!” Manny answered enthusiastically. Specialist Second Class Jennifer Tanner had taken a liking to the Sanchez children, and Manny openly had a crush on the pretty young woman. Rick thought he could appeal to Jen to let them observe the cargo loading from the windows overlooking the shuttle bay.

“Okay! Let’s get your mother and your sister, and see if we can contact Jen.”

Jen was reluctant at first, there were regulations against passengers being in the cargo sections of the ship, although she had brought the children along before. That had been during the uneventful cruise in hyperspace, when the Captain was unlikely to be roaming the cavernous cargo holds. Now, as usual during a loading exercise, Schroeder was supervising directly. Kaylee pouted, until Jen relented, and agreed they could watch the cargo go by, in one of the wide access corridors between the shuttle bay and the cargo hold, while Schroeder was busy elsewhere. The deal Jen made with Rick was that the children needed to keep out of the way, and out of sight if possible. Joy had elected not to join them, figuring this would be quality father-children bonding time.

Kaylee and Manny were very excited, and on their best behavior, without even being reminded. Jen had enlisted a co-conspirator, a man who was normally the ship’s navigator-pilot, Sethandra Putri. Everyone called him ‘Seth’. He liked the children, mostly in small doses. Since Seth’s duty station was on the bridge, they didn’t see him often, and that appeared to be just fine with Seth.

The cargo came in from the shuttle landing bay on robotic pallets, all Jen and Seth needed to do was guide the pallets to their destination in the various cargo bays. There were three pallets, two of them held one large cryostorage tank each, which contained live animals in deep sleep storage. It was not unusual for alien animals to be purchased for zoos on Earth, the crew had dealt with them many times.

“Watch this, kids.” Seth pulled a rag out of his back pocket and started wiping the thin layer of condensation off the clear cover of the cryosleep tank.

“Seth, I don’t think this is a good-“ Jen started to say.

“Aw, it’s fine. What could it hurt? Besides, aren’t you curious?” The pilot asked.

Jen, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded. “Yeah, kinda.” She waved the children forward, and they all crowded around the tank’s cover.

Seth wiped away the water vapor, and shone a light inside the tank. It was a frightening sight. The animal was roughly the size of a tiger, clearly a predator, based on the claws on the ends of its four paws, and the large, sharp teeth visible in its half-open mouth. Unlike a tiger, it had no fur, instead it was covered in plates of thick, tough, leathery armor. The plates were especially large and thick on its chest, and around its front shoulders. The skin was a mottled grey-green, with dark grey stripes. Rick shuddered, reminding himself that field archeology sometimes meant facing animals like this, and worse. “What’s it called?”

Seth checked the cargo manifest. “I dunno. It’s got some long darned Latin scientific name I can’t pronounce. This thing looks like a cross between a rhino and a tiger to me.”

“A Tino. That’s what I would call it.” Kaylee suggested.

“Yeah. Tino. I like it.” Seth made a notation on the manifest. “Tell you what, kiddo, you just named the beast. When this container gets opened on Earth, the label’s gonna read ‘Tino’.”

“Really? Cool!” Kaylee beamed with delight.

“Can I name one?” Manny asked excitedly.

“Well, there’s other animals, but they’re already in storage. Another day, OK?” Jen made a mental note to take the children down to see the cryosleep compartment.

Kaylee put her face up close to the clear cover. “Tino, huh? Sure is mean looking.”

Manny crowded in with her to get a better look. A thin, clear tube ran into a patch on the tino’s neck, in between armor plates. Through the tube dripped drugs and nutrients which kept the animal alive, asleep, and safely in suspended hibernation. “Kaylee, that is really cool that you named it.”

Kaylee shot a glance silence at her brother out of the corner of her eye. Was he teasing her? No. The little creep was serious this time. He was OK sometimes. “Thanks, Manny.” She whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Manny asked.

Kaylee looked at the curving, yellowish teeth of the tino, and turned toward her brother. “I don’t want to wake it up, so you?”

Just then, Seth jostled the tank and roared at the same time, making it look like the animal was awake and moving. The two children, along with Jen and Rick, jumped back.

“Very funny, Seth!” Jen said, annoyed. “Show’s over, let’s get this stowed away. What else we got?”

Seth grinned, pulled the next pallet forward and scanned the label. “Hey, professor, you’ll be interested in this one,“ Seth said as he read the label, “some kind of alien artifacts. Funny, though, they weren’t originally labeled that way at first. Must have caught it at the space station Customs office.”

Rick frowned. “Probably somebody trying to get around the export restrictions. Where’s it going to?”

“Earth. Some company called Concordia Planetary. Looks like they’re acting as a forwarding agent for somebody else.”

“Never heard of Concordia.” Which was odd, there weren’t many non-governmental organizations that were allowed to handle alien artifacts. Officially, at least. Rick knew there was a substantial black market; the paper he wrote for his doctoral thesis had been helped, in part, by a private collector letting him examine an artifact, with the agreement that Rick keep his mouth shut about where he saw the items. What really didn’t make sense was shipping such valuable items on a slow freighter like Atlas Challenger. The ship had several stops to make on the way back to Earth... unless cargo aboard a faster ship would attract more attention? Or the buyer didn’t think the items were important? That was the problem with most alien artifacts, other than the fact that they were alien and ancient, they were worthless junk, of no practical value. Rick mentally shrugged. Oceania’s few, small sites of alien ruins had been studied pretty thoroughly, the current theory was that Oceania never had more than a short-term alien science station, never a permanent settlement. The aliens hadn’t liked sitting on a beautiful beach, sipping pina coladas, he guessed? Whatever was in the boxes, it couldn’t be very important.

Rick realized Seth was looking at him and waiting for him to say something. “There’s one, two, three, uh, seven boxes here, you want to report this as contraband? The space station has a government Customs officer aboard.” Seth suggested.       

“Nah, it can’t be anything important. I don’t want to hold up our departure time, make the Captain mad at me.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Captain don’t like contraband. Universal Transport don’t like problems, Captain keeps them out of trouble.” Seth concluded.

“Seth, seriously, I’m sure it’s junk destined for some collector’s library back home. If it was anything significant, it would have been impounded at the station.”

“Dad, it’s real alien stuff, though? Can’t we look at it?” Kaylee asked.

“Yeah, Dad, you’re the expert,” Manny added, “you should look at it.”

“Kids, those boxes are sealed for transport, we can’t open them. Sorry.” Rick concluded. “Trust me, we’ll see much cooler alien stuff on Valhalla, stuff that no human has ever seen before.” He added hopefully, and waved a hand at the pallet dismissively. “Not this leftover junk.”

CHAPTER 3

After Oceania, all the pleasant distractions were gone. No other passengers. The Beach was empty. Star travel was endless  and dull and boring. Schoolwork sucked. There was nothing to do aboard the ship. Mother and father tried to find something, anything, to occupy Kaylee and Manny.

After a particularly trying morning, when Kaylee had been grumpy at breakfast, and then stomped off to mope in her room, Joy brought her husband a cup of coffee, and announced "Our daughter is going to drive me crazy. She's bored out of her mind, and she hates everything."

"Honey, it's not just this boring trip." Rick said gently. "Manny is just as bored, but he's dealing with it, because he's excited that we're going to a new planet. Kaylee hates the idea of going to Valhalla even more now than she did when we left Earth. Valhalla is still a primitive place. The aliens modified the climate when they occupied it, then the planet partially reverted to its natural state, now we're terraforming it and that process isn't complete." After the aliens mysteriously disappeared and stopped maintaining the biosphere they had artificially created on Valhalla, the planet's climate had radically swung from one extreme to another over thousands of years, with the current state being widespread deserts. The human terraforming project had raised oxygen levels to eighteen percent, which was lower than Earth normal but breathable. Dropping ice-filled comets into the atmosphere had helped refill the ocean basins and bring much-needed rains to the continents, and the project was on time and on target to eventually make the planet into the paradise the development company promised. Until the project was complete, people living there had to endure unpredictable weather, occasional supersonic shockwave winds from strings of comets slamming into the atmosphere, and isolation from most of the human community. Valhalla held a population of only three thousand people, scattered across an entire planet. The settlement where the Sanchez family would be living had three hundred fifty people, with only thirty of them being children. Rick would be away working on excavating alien ruins part of the time, and while Joy's job allowed her to be near home most of the time, she would have to travel several times a year. The parents planned to coordinate their schedules so at least one of then was always with the children, rather than rely on the company-provided child care. And both parents hoped to take the children with them on field trips on school breaks. Manny was dying to explore alien ruins, and Rick was sure Kaylee would also be interested, when she actually saw the ruins of an ancient alien city. "Valhalla is great for us, for our professional passions. I get to investigate alien ruins that no one has seen before instead of stuff sent to Earth in a box. You get to do exobiology where all the biology is 'exo', even the modified organisms we planted there. For Manny, it will all be a grand adventure, playing pioneer in a frontier settlement. For Kaylee, it will mean living in a prefabricated box instead of a nice house, going to a new school, not knowing whether she'll make any friends."

"So what do we do?"

"You're asking me?" Rick shrugged. "I have cabin fever too, being cooped up on this ship. The crew spends most of their year in this tin can, I'll ask them for suggestions on how to cope with it."

The starship crew, after pleading from Joy and Rick, helped rescue the children from their hopeless boredom. It started with Jen offering to let first Kaylee, then both children, accompany her on her maintenance inspection rounds, into areas of the ship that were officially off-limits to passengers. Jen told them that the crew didn’t refer to their ship as Atlas Challenger, but by its nickname “A.C.”, pronounced “Ace”. Also, Jen told them that all cargo ships owned by Universal Transport were named Atlas C-something, like Atlas Champion, Atlas Charger, Atlas Capital and fifteen other names. The crews referred to themselves as ‘Aces’, that was why the crew uniforms had logos in the form of a playing card: an Ace of diamonds. It made Manny feel cool to call the ship Ace in front of his parents, one night at dinner. Initially, the excursions around the ship with Jen were no big deal, staying within the aft part of the oval-shaped command section that was attached to the front of the ship, forward of the four long, boxy cargo pods. Just getting out of the passenger section, which took up the front of one cargo pod, and into the command section, was exciting enough. Jen could not actually take them onto the ship’s bridge, of course. The best she could do was to allow them to peek their heads in the doorway, late one afternoon, when she was sure only Seth was on duty.

Seeing the ship’s bridge was a big build-up to a huge disappointment. The starship’s control center was nothing special, lots of computer display screens, although everything seemed to be well-worn, and about a generation behind current technology. Seth had been sitting in a chair, sipping tea, looking thoroughly bored. All in all, Atlas Challenger’s bridge was nothing like the fictional starship control centers shown on popular video programs. The children realized the command section’s crew quarters were no different, and generally more cramped, than the cabin their family had been assigned.

Things got more interesting when Jen took Kaylee and Manny along on trips into the cavernous cargo sections, each of which was over a kilometer long. Walking the considerable length of the ship did impress the two young people, and every time they went, they saw something different, so large was the ship. They saw the compartment where the cryosleep boxes held the tinos, that became a favorite place to visit. After the first two days, Jen let the sister and brother navigate their way through the cargo compartments, she would tell them where she needed to go, and either Kaylee or Manny would go first, figuring out which lefts and rights to take, when to climb up or down. The process was not fast, as Jen had to use her access card to open many airtight doors along the way. Unlike during cargo loading operations, when all the doors in a cargo section would be open to facilitate movement of the robotic cargo-handling pallets, the doors remained closed while the ship was in flight. Jen explained that using doors to separate the cargo sections into airtight compartments was a precaution against loss of air during an accident. There was no repeat of what the Sanchezes had briefly seen during cargo loading at Oceania: the entire length of a cargo section, with all the doors open, stretching over a kilometer back toward the fusion engines and hyperdrive.

The days crawled along slowly, with schoolwork, family dinners, reading, watching videos, going to the Beach, playing games, and spending time with Jen. Only another two weeks, and the ship would finally arrive at Valhalla, where the bulk of its cargo would be unloaded, the Sanchez family would say goodbye to the crew, and begin their new life. And everyone aboard could not wait for those two weeks to be gone.

Captain Schroeder was in his office adjacent to the bridge, playing chess against the ship’s Artificial Intellgence computer. There was, of course, no possibility that he could win, what Hans wanted was to see at what dumbed-down setting of the AI he had a chance. He was contemplating his next move, trying to determine not only what to do, but how the AI would respond. A mug of tea sat next to the chessboard, he picked it up and sipped it. Tea was a habit he had picked up while serving under a British captain, early in his career. Such a civilized habit, Hans thought. In the midafternoon, a hot cup of tea, a light snack. Same time every afternoon. It was orderly, predictable. Hans liked predictable, it made his job so much easier. Then the intercom beeped. “Captain, we’re picking up a distress call.”

Schroeder didn’t look up from the chess board. “Yes, Ms. Olivetti. From where?” There were no registered starships in the area, he had checked the navigation logs only an hour ago. Military vessels, of course, didn’t show on the registry. Could it be a warship in trouble? That would be interesting.

“Mining colony, Sir. On Ares.”

“I’ll be right there.” Schroeder paused the chess game, and walked through the door to the bridge. Seth was at the navigation station, with Gina Olivetti monitoring communications. “Ares?”

Gina nodded. “Beta Leonis III, it’s about the size of Earth, but the atmosphere is thin like Mars, and it’s covered with red oxide dust. No indigenous life.”

“I’m familiar with that world, Ms. Olivetti, I didn’t realize there was a colony there.” Schroeder vaguely remembered swinging by that world, years ago when he had been a mere ensign in the Navy. “What are they mining?”

Gina checked the data screen. “It doesn’t say, Captain. Should I ask them?”

Schroeder shook his head curtly. “No. I don’t actually care what they’re digging out of the ground. Play the message.”

“The signal is weak, Sir, here it is.” It came across the hyperwave faint and distorted, with bursts of static. “This is the mining concession on Ares, calling all ships in the area. We have suffered an accident, we’ve lost primary life support. The remaining oxygen will last us only another two days, uh, fifty hours maximum. Please help us. Repeat, this is-“ Gina cut off the speaker.

“Fifty hours is their entire oxygen supply, including reserves? That is inexcusably bad planning.” Schroeder scratched his beard. “Have any ships responded yet?” Diverting a big, lumbering freighter like the Ace was impractical. Surely the military had ships somewhere close by. Or not? This area of the Orion Arm of the galaxy was the boondocks.

“Not yet, Sir.”

“Mister Putri?” He asked the ship’s navigator.

“They’re in luck, because we’re close, Captain, our present course takes us within a lightyear.” Seth consulted his navigation computer. “If we diverted, we could be there in, let’s see… add time to swing into a low orbit, say another four hours for the shuttle to line up an approach and drop to the surface… uh, we could have a rescue team on the surface in thirty two hours. That’s cutting it close.”

“We don’t have a rescue team, Mister Putri.” Schroeder chided gently. “This is a freighter. And someone will have to pay for the fuel the shuttle uses, and the discounts the company will have to pay to our customers if our deliveries are delayed. Diverting this ship is no small matter.” Despite his bluster, Schroeder knew that interstellar law, and his moral responsibility as a ship captain, would require him to respond to the miners’ need, if the Ace was the only ship that could get there in time.

“Ms. Olivetti, open a channel to Ares, I want to speak to-“

But Gina held up her right hand, and pressed the earpiece to her left ear with her other hand. “One moment, Captain, priority message coming in for us.” After a few seconds, she explained. “It’s military.”

Schroeder straightened his uniform jacket and stood to face the communications station. “Let’s see it.”

The screen in front of Gina displayed first the symbol of the Colonial Protective Forces, otherwise known as the Navy, gold on a blue background, then the symbol was replaced by a woman wearing the white uniform of the Navy, with four gold stripes, and a silver eagle designating her rank as a Captain in the service. She had short, dark hair and piercing dark eyes, and spoke with a lilting accent from the Indian subcontinent. “This is Captain Gante of the Colonial frigate Tigershark, calling the Universal Transport vessel Atlas Challenger. Respond, please.”

“What’s the time lag for the transmission?” Schroeder asked.

Gina checked the time code embedded in the message. “Seven minutes, Sir. They’re nowhere near Ares.”

Schroeder nodded curtly. He had been hoping Tigershark’s message would be that the frigate was responding to the distress call, and Atlas Challenger could continue on its way. Now it seemed possible the Ace would have to rescue the miners. He pressed the transmit button. “Tigershark, this is Captain Schroeder of the Atlas Challenger, we are standing by to render assistance as needed.” He sighed. “Mister Putri, there's no sense waiting for official word from the Navy; plot a course to put us in a parking orbit around Ares with all possible speed, and engage when you are ready.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Having a conversation with a seven minute time lag was awkward, but Captains Gante and Schroeder managed to communicate that Tigershark was busy with its own rescue mission, and so the Navy would greatly appreciate it if Ace would help the miners on Ares, until a real rescue ship could arrive. ‘Greatly appreciate’ was a polite way of the Navy giving a direct order to a commercial vessel, an order Schroeder was bound by law to obey. By the time Gante signed off, the Ace had altered course for Ares, and increased speed as much as the awkward, lumbering ship could.

With that settled, Schroeder turned to the next issue. “Open a channel to Ares, let’s put their minds at ease. Ready? This is the Universal Transport ship Atlas Challenger, we are responding to your distress call, estimated time of arrival for our shuttle on the surface is thirty two hours. Do you have people injured? Over.”

Although Ares was much closer than the Navy frigate, there was still an annoying time lag for the hyperwave signal.  The reply came back audio only, and the sound quality was poor. “Atlas Challenger, thank God you are here! We were afraid we were all alone out here. No injuries, just a lot of people needing oxygen.”

Schroeder shook his head. He clicked the mute button and said aloud to himself and the bridge crew “Who is in charge of this mining outfit? They sound like complete amateurs.” He toggled the switch back from mute to transmit and replied “How many people do you have there, Ares?” Schroeder was thinking of the limited passenger capacity of his single shuttle. While the landing vehicle was large for carrying cargo, it didn’t have many seats.

“Twen-“ There was a burst of static. “-even people. All gathered here at our primary site.”

“Did you say twenty seven, Ares, we missed part of your transmission.”

“Twenty seven, correct, repeat, two seven. We’re run-“ there was another burst of static “limited backup power. The hyperwave takes a lot of power.”

 “Understood, Ares, you can shut down your hyperwave to conserve power. We will contact you every six hours on the hour. Over.”

“Every six hours, acknowledged. Thank you. Ares out.”

“Good luck to you until we arrive. Atlas Challenger out.”

Schroeder rubbed his temples. There were extra people on the bridge, more than needed to cover the duty stations, people had filed in when the ship had changed course. Everyone aboard was excited and wondering what was going on. A rescue mission? It was the first in the almost thirty year history of the ship, and the first for anyone aboard, possibly the first in the history of the company. Schroeder cleared his throat. Anything out of the ordinary aboard the freighter was an occasion for excitement. The whole point of Universal Transport’s service was not that their ships were fast, but that they were as regular as clockwork, as dependable as a sunrise. The Ace-series ships lumbered slowly from star to star, regularly, predictably Now Atlas Challenger was probably going to be delayed arriving at Valhalla, which would cause a cascade effect of making subsequent stops late. The crew knew this was a very big deal. In addition, of course, to being majorly cool. A rescue? A freighter on a rescue mission? This was sure to make the news.  For many of the crew, it was the first even vaguely exciting thing to happen in their entire careers. Captain Schoeder grimaced at the thought that, if anything went wrong, it would be his responsibility. “Mister Putri, you have the conn, I will be in my office. I will address the crew shortly, in the meantime, I need to compose a message for company headquarters. I’m certain they will be just absolutely thrilled about this little adventure.” The company lawyers could fight with the mining company lawyers, to be compensated for Universal Transport’s expenses on the rescue mission. Schroeder expected he would be long retired, possibly dead, before the case was settled in court. “Carry on.”

CHAPTER 4

The Colonial Protective Forces frigate Tigershark dropped out of hyperspace well above the ecliptic, the plane where planets of the star system orbited. And well distant from the source of the distress call. If there was a navigational hazard, Captain Gante didn’t want her ship popping into normal space right in the middle of it. Better to stand off a bit, and scan the area with the ship’s sensors.

Navy records on this particular star system were thin; it was a nothing special red dwarf star, the most common type of star system in the Milky Way. Incapable, in every case humanity knew about, of supporting planetary life, dim red dwarf stars were a dime a dozen in the Milky Way galaxy, and survey ships had stopped visiting them years ago. The only records about this system were nearly seventy years old, and that was just a quick flyby, all that such a common and uninteresting star system warranted. One small, rocky planet orbiting close to the wimpy dull red star. One cold gas giant, orbiting far enough away, that the star’s light was a dim bulb in the sky. And in between, a rather extensive asteroid field.

As a frigate, Tigershark was not heavily armed, and she did not have powerful shields like the big cruisers of the Fleet. Frigates, however, made up fifty percent of the fleet’s ships. They were much less expensive to build and operate. They did not require a large crew. They could patrol vast areas with minimal support, and keep track of everything that went on in their patrol area. As the eyes and ears of the fleet, the strength of frigates was their sensors, not their weapons. As soon as Gante’s crew completed checking that every system on the ship came through the transition from hyperspace in good condition, she ordered the ship to minimal power, and extended the antennas of the passive sensor array. The array was eight ultrathin wires that could be pushed out to form a circle two kilometers in diameter. When the wires were energized, they formed a single massive, sensitive antenna. And, this time, they heard nothing. Gante ordered the antennas retracted, and moved her ship in closer.

Four hours later, Tigershark had reached the outer limits of the asteroid field that had been the source of the distress call the frigate was responding to, a private survey ship that had suffered an explosion related to the ship’s fusion reactor. The hypercomm message had been very brief, several dead and injured on the ship, situation desperate, then the message cut off. The registration code attached to the message said the ship was the Isaac Newton, and Registry records confirmed that ship had been in the area.

Captain Gante stood behind her executive officer, who was running the scanner. “Captain, we can’t pinpoint the ship’s location from that brief message. There’s so much junk floating around in this asteroid field, it might take us months to find the ship, unless they signal us.”

“There’s no radiation at all?”

“No, ma’am, we’ve got nothing. Normal background radiation from the star. Some EMR from the gas giant, magnetic storms there. No transponder, no running lights, no radiation from the reactor, I looked in infrared for a heat signature, nothing.”

Gante paused and looked at the large viewscreen at the forward bulkhead of her bridge. It was filled with spinning rocks of the asteroid field. Big rocks, gigantic rocks, small rocks, pebbles, dust. All dangerous, if the frigate ran into any of them.  “What were they doing out here? It’s suicide to take a ship into that asteroid field. Even with our shields, we would get squashed like a bug.”

“Captain, I can’t even imagine why they were in this star system in the first place. There is absolutely nothing here worth looking at. If they wanted a red dwarf, there’s plenty of them, a lot closer to Earth.”

Gante also couldn’t think of a good reason why a commercial ship would be here. Any ship. “Still, they were here, so we need to find them.” She looked at the radar map of merely a nearby slice of the asteroid field. Millions of rocks. A ship could be anywhere in there. “I’m open to suggestions, if you have any, XO.”

“I could try scanning for residual radiation on the asteroids themselves, Ma’am. If the ship exploded, the asteroids nearby would have been bathed in radiation.”

“That sounds like a one in a million shot, XO. I think we’d have better luck looking for disturbances in the asteroids’ orbits. An explosion would have thrown them out of their previous orbit. Start scanning with radar, and you can look for your residual radiation, also, those are two different setiing on the antenna.”

The XO looked at the map of the nearby section of the asteroid field. “Whew!" He let out a long breath. "It’s going to take days just to scan the local section of the field, Ma’am.”

“I don’t see that we have any choice.”

Tigershark maneuvered into position, then shut down her engines, extended the antennas again, and activated her powerful and sensitive radar. The antennas projected outward far to either side of the ship, making it look like the frigate had grown a cluster of whiskers. Appropriate for a cat, maybe, but not for a shark. One of Gante’s first actions, when she had taken over from the previous captain, was to have the spacedock workers paint a gaping shark’s mouth and eyes on the nose of the ship. It made the frigate look mean. And the crew liked it. Now, for all her military power and authority, Tigershark at the moment was nothing more than a listening device, hoping to find a missing, silent ship in the incredible clutter of an asteriod field, circling a lonely red dwarf star. 

It was dinnertime. Rick figured he would find Schroeder in the main galley. The Captain appeared to have a lot on his mind, the man picked up a sandwich and a mug of coffee, and was about to walk back out, when Rick stopped him. “Do you have a minute, Captain?”

“Actually, Mister...” Rick’s name escaped him momentarily, “Sanchez, I am rather busy.” He moved to walk past, not before Rick positioned himself in the doorway.

“With the rescue, yes, you must be very busy. Did the miners say what type of life support system they have?”

“I don’t... they didn’t say.” Schroeder, beginning to grow annoyed at Rick’s rude behavior, gestured the passenger to clear the doorway.

Rick spoke quickly, knowing his time was short. “I ask, because I have some experience maintaining and repairing life support systems. And if the miners’ system can be fixed, then we can be on our way.”

And potentially keep to Ace’s schedule, without paying penalties. That got Schroeder’s attention. “You are an engineer?” Schroeder asked, surprised. When they had dined at the Captain’s table during the first week of the voyage from Earth, Schroeder had received the impression that Ricardo Sanchez was an academic, devoting his life to digging up the long-abandoned ruins of an alien civilization.

“No, I’m not, not by profession. One of my fieldwork experiences was on Sahara, the planet Sahara, and, to tell you the truth, I was a very junior exoarcheologist back then. Instead of assisting with the excavation, I spent a lot of the time running errands, and keeping our balky life support system running. It was a standard Culcorp Tradewinds 11A model, and I know that type of unit was purchased by a lot of these mining concessions.”

“The unit broke down frequently?”

“It was a second or third hand system, we were on a real tight budget, so everything was patched together. I don’t know about Ares, but Sahara for sure is a harsh place for machinery.” Sahara, a long time ago, was a moderately populated alien colony world, until the star it orbited had a violent hiccup that blew away part of Sahara’s atmosphere, and left the surface a scorched, gritty desert. Some people speculated that the stellar incident was an alien experiment that had caused the star to go haywire, that the aliens had killed their own planet. Rick didn’t see any hard evidence for that theory, what he had seen on Sahara was a harsh environment, and a planet rich in ruins that had not been fully explored.

“So I have heard.” Schroeder acknowledged. He had once orbited Sahara, a decade or so in the past. What he remembered was looking down on a forbidding landscape of exposed rock, blowing sand, and a thin little atmosphere. “You really think you could fix their system?”

“Captain, I don’t know. I don’t know if they have a Tradewinds model, or what’s wrong with it. But I think I am more familiar with that type of system than your crew is. Sam handles life support here, right?”

“Specialist First Class Sam Winters, yes.” Schroeder had already planned to send Sam down in the first shuttle run, hoping that the life support systems specialist could fix the miners’ equipment quickly, and get Ace back on her way with minimal delay. “All right then, Mr. Sanchez, I would like you to speak with Sam. If he is satisfied that you may be of assistance to him, then you need to be on our next call to Ares, which is in,” he checked his watch, “two hours, twenty three minutes. You can ask the miners whatever questions you need then.” In the meantime, Schroeder would be contacting company HQ to see about the propriety of including a passenger on a rescue mission. Rick, and Schroeder, would probably need to sign a waiver of some sort. Paperwork. It was the bane of his existence.

“Honey, I need to discuss something with you.” Rick said as the family sat down to dinner in the ship’s galley. The compartment was empty, except for the Sanchezes and the ship’s first officer Vassily Yurchenko, who was sitting alone in a corner, reading a report and picking at something on his plate. Rick figured having the children and a stranger present would moderate his wife’s reaction, if she was going to get upset.

Joy put down her fork. She knew this tactic, Rick used it often enough. One day, she was going to throw caution and good manners to wind and throw a big scene, regardless of the audience. That would teach him.

But not today.

She placed her hands on her lap, sat up straight, as prim and proper as she could, gave her husband an overly sweet smile, and responded. “Yes, Ricardo, what is it?”

Kaylee and Manny caught the look exchanged by their parents, and huddled over their plates, suddenly intent on their food. Kaylee couldn’t manage to hide a quick smile. She perked her ears up. This was going to be good, she knew, it usually was. Mommy never referred to Daddy as ‘Ricardo’ unless she was mad about something. Sometimes her parents talked privately by calling each other through their bComms, but it was easy to see when they were doing that, as their eyes took on a faraway, glassy look.

“Captain Schroeder invited me to the bridge a few hours ago, I listened to their call with the miners on Ares.”

“Oh.” Joy said in surprise, a tiny bit deflated. Perhaps Rick simply wanted to brag in front of the children that he had been on the starship’s bridge. “That was nice of the captain. What did the miners have to say?”

“Oh, just, nothing new.” Rick’s throat was dry, he took a sip of iced tea.

That put Joy on alert again. Her husband was nervous. She had been right the first time, he was up to something, something he thought she wouldn’t like. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Rick continued. “They’re stretching their oxygen supply, some of the miners are living in the crawler tractors, which have their own oxygen supplies. The crawlers can only reprocess air, though, not truly recycle it, they need to be resupplied every so often. And there isn’t much space in their crawlers for more than a few people.”

“Interesting. Anything else?” She continued their verbal chess game.

“Uh, yes, in fact. Their life support system is a Culcorp Tradewinds model 11A.”

“Fascinating. Imagine that!” Joy had no idea where Rick was going with this. Unless- “Wait. Are you going to tell me that’s the same type you kept working on Sahara?”

“Er, ah, yeah. Yeah, now that you mention it, yes, it is. Quite a coincidence, huh?”

“Indeed. That’s a real stroke of luck for them, that this ship just happens to be carrying a man who knows how to keep a secondhand, junker life support system running.”

“You know, I was thinking the same thing.” Rick said innocently.

Joy picked up her fork, stabbed a piece of chicken, and popped it in her mouth. “Honey, you are going to help, aren’t you? To fix their system?”

It was Rick’s turn to be surprised. “I hadn’t, um-“

”I can’t imagine the man I fell in love with to not volunteer to help, in a case like this.”

“Well, I, I did. It’s uh, Captain Schroeder isn’t sure the company will allow a passenger to drop down to the surface on a rescue mission. Their insurance people won’t like it. But I did volunteer to help, if I can. Sam and I talked, he told the captain he thinks I would be a help to him. If the company lawyers say it’s OK, that is.”

“You’re going on the rescue shuttle, Dad?” Manny asked.

“Cool!” Kaylee chipped in.

“Kids, we don’t know yet if I’m going or not. Like I said, the company may not allow it. Although, Sam told the captain the repair work would go a lot faster if I was with him.”

“Still, that would be most cool, Dad! Promise me you’ll take holos, so we can send them back to Earth?” Manny thought that would be something to send to his old school, to show all the boneheads he left behind all the great adventures his family was having out among the stars. He had already recorded several hours of holos recording their spaceplane ride up from Earth, the giant freighter, and their side excursion down to Avalon. Manny had a need to show his old classmates that where he was going was better than where they were. He bet none of their fathers had ever dropped down from orbit to rescue people.

“I will take holos, if I have time. And if I go. I may just be on the bridge, giving Sam advice over the radio.” Rick doubted that, Sam had already scornfully vetoes that idea. Sam had made it clear he needed someone on the ground who could handle a wrench, not a disembodied voice offering advice over the radio. He took another sip of iced tea, stood up, and walked over to his wife. “Do you know that I have the best wife in the whole galaxy?”

Joy smiled. “Yes, I do know that. But no more than you deserve.”

Manny made a face. “Are you two going to get mushy again?” His parents had the habit of frequent displays of affection, and often did so at mortifyingly inappropriate times. Like in front of other people.

Rick grinned. “Oh, yes we are.” He said, and kissed his wife passionately.

When Captain Schroeder requested permission to include Rick Sanchez on the rescue shuttle, he initially received the reply he expected from company headquarters: have you lost your mind? The company lawyers quite rightly wanted to avoid any company liability, in case Rick was injured. Our insurance prohibits it, they said, find another way.

Then the company operations people got involved, and did some research on the background of one Ricardo Sanchez. They contacted a couple of people who had worked with Rick on Sahara, who verified that it was indeed Rick who had kept their creaky life support system running. Finally, a technician from the life support system manufacturer, who had made a routine servicing visit while Rick was on Sahara, stated that Rick had done wonders with the old unit, and he would hire Rick as a repair technician, if the archeologist was interested.

So it became a matter of finances: what was the dollar value of the liability risk, compared to the money the company could save, if Rick helped fix the miners’ life support system, and Ace only had to make a short detour?

A compromise was reached. Rick would sign a form, and he would temporarily be a Universal Transport employee, for the expected short duration of the rescue mission. He would even get hazardous duty pay. Forms were signed, Rick shook hands with Schroeder, and then was put under the care of Sam, for e-suit refresher training. Manny thought was was super cool that his father now owned a company jacket designating Rick Sanchez as an ‘Ace’, like the rest of the crew.

Rick tucked his gloves into the e-suit helmet, like he’d seen Sam do, and held the helmet in the crook of his left arm. Sam nodded approvingly as he put his card into the slot, and pressed the button to open the door to the shuttle bay.

Rick took a few hesitant steps forward, and stopped, his eyes wide. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“Huh?” Sam asked.

“This piece of junk flies?” Rick exclaimed in surprise. To say that Ace’s shuttle showed its age would be an understatement. It was battered, weathered, and dented. The leading edges were coated with multiple layers of soot from countless passages through planetary atmospheres. Panels on the skin were different colors, depending on how long ago they were replaced, cleaned, or repainted. Only the cockpit windows looked they they’d had any attention recently.

“Sure, man, it’s safe. Don’t go by looks.” Sam reached up and patted the underside of the craft affectionately.

Rick looked askance. He’d seen the shuttle only from a distance, watching it through a viewport as it left, or came back to the ship. From a distance, it looked uniformly light grey. Up close, Rick could see that the shuttle’s skin was originally white, and there were faded company logos and other markings on the wings and tail. He felt tempted to wet his finger and write ‘WASH ME’ in the soot. “Sam, you’re going on this flight too, so I’ll trust you, but do not let my wife and kids see this thing. Joy is already worried about the whole idea of me dropping down to Ares.”

Nelson poked his head out the shuttle’s airlock. He was tall and thin, with dark skin and close-cropped hair. Rick had been told where Nelson was from; Kenya, Liberia, something like that, he couldn’t remember. What he did remember was that Nelson hadn’t exactly been warm to the idea of taking a passenger along on a rescue mission. “Hey, what are you two doing, sightseeing? I haven’t got all day.” The pilot said gruffly. “Let’s get a move on.”

Sam and Rick exchanged a glance. Sam had warned Rick about Nelson, the shuttle pilot was, according to Sam, really a nice guy, once you got to know him. Nelson didn’t seem interested in giving Rick time to develop anything beyond a pilot/passenger relationship. Rick gave Sam a thumb’s up sign, to show that he wouldn’t cause any problems. His job aboard the shuttle would be to sit down, strap in, shut up, and hang on. That, he could do.

Rick’s shuttle passenger training, which covered not much beyond how to use the emergency oxygen supply, was over in an hour, so he joined his family at the now-deserted Beach. He and Joy were on their way back from the Beach when they caught up with Schroeder on his way to the command section. Joy gave Rick a reminder in the form of a nudge in his ribs. “Captain, can I speak with you for a moment?” Rick called out.

Schroeder turned, and paused for Rick to catch up with him. “Ms. Sanchez, good afternoon. Mr. Sanchez, how is your training?”

“Fine, sir.” Rick figured that, since we was a company employee, Schroeder was, albeit temporarily, his boss. “Sam says I’m coming along well. The e-suits you have are much less complicated that the old units I am used to. And I went over emergency procedures for the shuttle with Nelson.” Nelson had made it clear that Rick’s only job was to sit in his seat, be quiet during the descent, and not even think about touching anything.

“Good.” Schroeder nodded curtly. He would get an independent evaluation from Sam and Nelson later.  “What did you wish to discuss?”

Rick had considered how to bring up the delicate subject. He felt caught between an unstoppable force, his wife, and a likely immovable object, Captain Schroeder. “Joy would like to be on the bridge during the shuttle’s descent, to watch what is going on.”

“I see. Ms. Sanchez, company regulations prohibit me from having visitors on the bridge, I am sorry. You don’t wish to be with your children, during that time? We can transmit all the images to the screen in your cabin.”

Joy was not accepting the brush-off. “Regulations do not prohibit visitors, Rick and I toured the bridge when we first came aboard-“

“Which was when this ship was in a parking orbit, with the engines shut down.” Schroeder interjected.

“It is my understanding that, when the shuttle is descending, this ship will be in orbit, with the engines shut down.” Joy pressed ahead.

Schroeder blinked, caught off guard. “Quite so. But the ship will then be engaging in a landing operation, during which time the bridge crew will be occupied with their jobs. Ms. Sanchez, I understand your concern, but I can assure you-“

“No. You can not assure me.” Joy put her hands on her hips, and Rick bit his lip. He knew what that gesture meant, it was something Joy had inherited from her mother. “You can say nice things, but none of it will actually assure me that my husband will be safe, that if anything goes wrong, my husband’s safety will be your highest priority.”

Schroeder tried a new tack. “This is a routine shuttle drop, Ms. Sanchez.”

“Excuse me, no, but it is not.” Joy’s eyes gleamed. The battle was joined.  “I was speaking to Nelson, your shuttle pilot.” Rick looked sideways at his wife in surprise. When had she spoken to Nelson? Joy ticked off her objections on her fingertips. “First, Nelson has never brought a shuttle down through this planet’s atmosphere. Second, there is no guidance system on the ground, so he has to fly the approach manually. Third, this ship only has one shuttle, and the miners don’t have one. So if your shuttle gets into trouble, they are on their own. Fourth, the miners can’t refuel the shuttle on the ground, so Nelson tells us he will have to fly a minimum power flight profile on his way back up here, to conserve fuel for the return flight into orbit. None of which is, as you say, routine. Are my facts wrong?”

“Er, no.” Schroeder was forced to admit. “I can tell, you, however, that Nelson is a very experienced shuttle pilot. Before he joined Universal Transport, he flew for the Navy, and then for a survey company. He has, many times, dropped into an unfamiliar atmosphere, with no guidance system or ground support.”

Rick moved close to his wife, and put his arm around her shoulders, in a gesture of solidarity.  It was time to choose sides, and the choice was easy. His voice took on a firmer tone. “Captain, I believe that I have been more than cooperative. I volunteered to help out on rescue mission, a mission that is your problem, not mine. I do not think it is at all unreasonable that my wife be on the bridge during the descent.”

Schroeder pursed his lips. His next command, he fervently hoped, would be of a ship without passenger cabins. “That is your final word, then?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Rick saw Joy looking at him. “Yes. Either Joy can be on the bridge, or we will both be in our cabin, and Sam can fix the life support system by himself.”

“Mmm.” Schroeder then did something unexpected, his face crinkled into a smile. “Very well, then, Ms. Sanchez, I would be happy to have one of my crew show you to the bridge, and we will find you a place on the bridge, during the drop. You are correct, Mr. Sanchez, it is not an unreasonable request. My crew needs to have backbone, I am glad to see you do. Do not, however, make this a habit, eh?”

CHAPTER 5

Slightly ahead of Seth’s schedule, the big freighter ship arrived at Ares and dropped out of hyperspace. Her excited crew had been able to coax a bit more power out of the old, reliable engines, making Schroeder inordinately proud of both crew and ship. Arriving at Ares was not the same as being in position to establish a stable, low orbit, from which the shuttle could drop. Hours went by as the ship fired her normal space engines, first to catch up to the planet in its orbit around the star, then to slow down enough not to fly right by the planet, and finally to swing into orbit. After that, it took what seemed to Rick like forever, maneuvering here and there, getting the ship’s orbit lined up just right for the shuttle drop. Why they couldn’t just hop in the shuttle and fly down right away, Rick didn’t understand, until Sam explained that safety regulations required the ship to be in the sky over the landing site while the shuttle dropped, in order to provide radar guidance.

By the time Sam called Rick to get suited up for the shuttle ride, it was almost anticlimactic, he and his family had been sitting around in their cabin so long, they’d all gotten bored. Rick was getting hungry, unfortunately Sam had advised Rick not to eat much before the shuttle drop, so Rick satisfied his hunger with an apple, trying to set a good example for his children, when what he really wanted was junk food. Kaylee and Manny had put their swimsuits on, and were about to go to the Beach with their mother. The call from Sam produced a family scramble to change clothes again, until Sam mentioned that Rick would not actually be stepping into the shuttle for another two hours, at least. Plenty of time for a swim. We’ll call you when he’s ready, Sam said, have fun in the meantime.

Rick went down to the shuttle bay, got his e-suit on, had it checked out and tested by Sam, then he sat around with the helmet off, waiting. He waited long enough that he decided to take the e-suit off to use the bathroom, so he had to put it on and have it checked out all over again. Sam didn’t seem to mind.

Finally, Nelson showed up, and began his pre-flight inspection of the shuttle, which he said would take an hour or so, their window for launch was in 90 minutes. When Rick mentioned his family wanted to see him off, Nelson frowned, and gruffly relied that was fine, as long as they stayed in the airlock doorway alcove, and didn’t touch anything.

So as not to bore his family again, Rick waited until they were ready to actually board the shuttle before calling his family; they stood dutifully in the hallway, their view of the well-worn shuttle obscured by the windows in the two airlock doors. They waved, and blew kisses to him, Manny recorded the whole thing on camera. Then, Rick was aboard, Sam helped him strap into his seat, and the inner blast door closed over the airlock, cutting off his view of his family. Again he sat, and waited. And waited.

Almost half an hour later, Nelson turned halfway around in his pilot’s seat and addressed Rick. “You ready, professor?” Sam had vouched for the archeologist, but Nelson wasn’t sure about him. A passenger, stumbling around in an e-suit? Nelson would have to watch out for the archeologist’s safety, make sure he didn’t do anything stupid and get hurt. It all sounded like a pain in the ass. His ass, as the pilot in command.

Rick gave the pilot a thumb’s up sign. “I’m ready.”

“This ain’t no luxury spaceplane, you hear? We don’t have artificial gravity, and the ride is likely to be rougher than you’re used to, so if you’re gonna puke, use the bag.”

Rick responded with another thumb’s up. “Nelson, on Sahara, our shuttle was held together with duct tape and string. The university didn’t spring for luxury. And I took a dose of space sickness meds, I’ll be OK.”

Nelson looked skeptical. He turned back around to his console. “I hope so.”

Sam spoke up from the copilot seat. “Hey, Nelson, if Rick says he’ll be OK, he’ll be OK. He’s a good guy.”

“If you say so.” The pilot responded. He was edgy, anxious. This rescue drop was the first non-routine thing he’d done since he signed up with Universal Transport. He didn’t want to screw it up, get a black mark on his record. A passenger was just a complication. “Ace control, this is the shuttle, requesting clearance to exit.”

Vassily’s voice came back. “Roger that, shuttle. Standby, doors opening.”

In the airless shuttle hangar, the only sound was transmitted faintly through the support arms which held the shuttle in place. A vibration, a whirring of gears, then the shuttle bay was flooded with brilliant sunlight as the doors cracked open. Rick strained in his seat to see through the tiny window. Rusty red. The planet was directly below his window.

“Doors open and locked.” Vassily reported. You are cleared to power up.”

“Open and locked, roger that.” Nelson said. “Bringing internal power on line now.” There was a high-pitched whine, then a steady humming sound. Eventually, Nelson was satisfied the power generators were functioning normally. “Internal power is active and nominal. Releasing umbilical cables.” A series of sharp, metallic sounds announced the cables unplugging and retracting into the shuttle bay.

Rick let out a long breath, louder than he intended.

“We boring you, professor?” Nelson asked, without turning in his seat.

“No, no. This is all really interesting.” And all very, very time consuming. How could it take so long to prepare a shuttle to drop? Either everything took incredibly long, or Nelson was dragging things out. Rick supposed that when he flew on commercial spaceplanes, which wasn’t often, the crew had all the checks completed before he settled into his seat, so didn’t see all the complicated, tedious work the pilots went through before the glamorous part of their job started.

“Shuttle, you have a twenty minute drop window, starting... now. You have control.”

“I have control, roger that.” Nelson began flipping switches, and ran down a checklist with Sam, who was in the copilot seat. APUs started and running, internal power on and steady, umbilical lines retracted, docking clamps unlocked, blah, blah, blah. Rick reflected that these were the sort of mundane things that went on in the cockpit of commercial spaceplanes while passengers checked their pockets for snacks, read books, and decided what drinks to order.

Joy brought her children back to the cabin, clicked the viewscreen controls so that the big screen in the parent’s bedroom displayed a track of the shuttle’s flight path, which had just cleared the landing bay doors. With daughter and son settled in, she went to the bridge, and took a seat next to Gina, the ship’s communications specialist.

Joy didn’t expect anything to go wrong. She was on the bridge to make sure that if anything did go wrong, the crew put her husband’s safety first.

The excitement level for Rick kicked up a notch once they exited the shuttle bay and got clear of the ship, when Nelson flipped the shuttle around and fired the main engines, a maneuver intended to slow them down enough so that the shuttle would begin falling out of orbit. And fall they did. Rick was able to see a slice of the planet below out a side window, it kept getting closer, and closer, until the red planet filled the window, and he could see the horizon, or the blackness of space. Sam came over the intercom, and told Rick that they were about half an orbit away from contact with the top of the planet’s thin atmosphere, and there was nothing to worry about.

Gina spun around in her chair. “Captain, a ship just dropped out of hyperspace, I’m picking up a burst of gamma rays.”

“A ship?” There weren’t supposed to be any ships in the area. “Navy?”

“I don’t-  wait, we’re getting a radio message, I’ll put it through. There’s a two second time lag, Captain.”

The screen on Gina’s console flickered, then displayed the image of a pleasant if bland looking man, short brown hair, wearing an ordinary shirt, not a uniform. Not Navy. He smiled. “This is the BioPharma research vessel Nightengale, I’m Ted Miller, captain here. We picked up the distress call, is there anything we can do to help?”

Schroeder looked at the newcomer suspiciously. “This is Captain Schroeder of the Universal Transport vessel Atlas Challenger. Why didn’t you respond to the distress call? The Registry doesn’t show any ships in this area.” He clicked the button to mute and said to Seth “See if you can find a registration for this ship.”

Miller looked sheepish when he sent his reply. “Our hypercomm transmitter isn’t working, we can receive messages, but not send, ditto for our transponder. We weren’t supposed to be in this area, we cut our survey trip short to get the transmitter repaired. This ship's complement is mostly doctors and medical research people, can we assist? Our shuttle only holds four people.”

Schroeder kept the radio on mute as he looked impatiently at Gina, until she replied. “Ah, Captain, Nightengale is registered, and the ship out there meets the configuration. It’s a survey ship, they search for alien plants and animals that could yield useful drugs. That’s what the Registry says, anyway.”

Schroeder nodded, satisfied he had all the information he was going to get. His ship wasn’t a Navy warship, Ace’s sensors were for navigation and that’s about all. He sent a reply. “Be advised that we have a shuttle dropping now, it should be on the surface shortly. Could you rendezvous with us, in case any of the miners need medical attention? All we have aboard is a medical bot.”

“Sure, the doctors here would like a change of scenery anyway, and this will be good public relations for BioPharma. Always good to keep your employer happy.” Miller said with a friendly smile. “I see your shuttle on radar, we can rendezvous with you in…” he checked something off screen, “about fifty minutes.”

Schroeder raised an eyebrow, and turned toward Seth. Fifty minutes, from dropping out of hyperspace, to matching orbit with Ace? That was fast, such maneuvers often took a day or more, depending on the relative positions of the two ships. Seth queried his navigation console, and gave a thumb’s up sign. “They came out of hyper right in the sweet spot, Captain, they’re just about lined up for orbit already. Their navigator is either very good, or very lucky.”

Captain Gante came back onto the bridge, with a thought nagging at the back of her mind. Tigershark had been patrolling this sector for fourteen months with no incidents, now there were two distress calls at the same time. It never rains unless it’s pouring, her mother used to say. She came up behind her first officer’s chair, and drummed her fingers on the seatback. “XO, any luck?”

Lt. Commander Ross blinked, and rubbed his eyes. He’d been staring at the screen for too long. “Ma’am, if I was fishing for our dinner, we’d be eating crackers tonight. I’ve got nothing. No sign of the Isaac Newton, and no sign of an explosion.” He turned halfway around in the seat to face his captain. “If anyone survived, they must be using battery power to run whatever life support they have left.”

“Keep looking, XO.” She frowned, and crossed to the communications technician. When Atlas Challenger had arrived at Ares and gone into stable orbit, that transport ship had sent a message to Tigershark that the rescue operation was on schedule and going well. No communication since then. That was not unusual, because if the freighter had sent a message directed back toward Earth, Tigershark could not have picked up the narrowband transmission. She instructed the communications technician to signal the freighter to send a status report, then Gante went back to her cabin to complete some crew evaluations.

For Rick, the flight got boring again, until the shuttle encountered the planet’s atmosphere, and he experienced the familiar roaring sound, and turbulence, of a spacecraft slowing down by burning a hole in the air. In Ace’s no-luxuries cargo-hauling shuttle, the descent was much louder and rougher than the commercial spaceplane flights Rick was used to. At some point, Sam came over the intercom to announce that, because the shuttle was now surrounded by super-heated plasma, they would soon temporarily lose contact with the ship. It was nothing to worry about, Sam said, everything was going as planned.

“You’re in the pipe, five by five, shuttle.” Vassily’s voice declared. “We’re losing you now, see you on the other side.”

“Tssshhk-uttle, acknowle-sssssss Nelso-“ The radio cut off, drowned out by static.

Kaylee glanced over at Manny, to see if he was scared that they had lost contact with their father, as his shuttle dropped through the atmosphere. If anything, he looked excited. The video image on the screen now showed the shuttle’s planned flight path, with a blinking light indicating the spacecraft itself. Brother and sister had elected to sit on their parent’s bed to watch the video feed, rather than on the sofa in the main compartment. Kaylee was sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed, Manny slumped back nonchalantly against the pillows, both had an array of snacks to munch on. Manny pointed to his watch, and was about to say something, when their mother’s voice came over the speaker.

“Kaylee, Manny, this is nothing to worry about,” Joy said in a soft voice that had a worried catch to it, “the shuttle can’t use its radio when they are coming down through the atmosphere.”

“I know, Mom,” Manny said, “they will be out of contact for seven minutes. It’s because the super-heated plasma surrounding the shuttle drowns out radio signals.”

“Of course you knew that.” Joy replied, with a hint of a laugh.

“I knew that, too.” Kaylee added defensively, and stuck her tongue out at her brother.

“Good. We will talk to your father in a few minutes. The crew here tells me everything is going smoothly.”

“We can see that here, Mom, the shuttle is right in the flight path. Don’t worry about us.” Manny said.

“All right. And don’t eat too much junk, we’re having dinner in a few hours.”

Kaylee rolled her eyes at the speaker, and popped a chocolate into her mouth. “Yes, Mother.”

Captain Schroeder couldn’t be blamed for what happened to his ship. The Ace was a transport, essentially a long frame with four large cargo boxes and a hyperdrive, designed to haul cargo between the stars at minimal expense; she had no defenses, and only limited sensors. The attention of everyone on the bridge was focused on their shuttle’s descent through the atmosphere, which was now approaching the period of maximum stress on that craft’s heat shielding. No one was paying any attention to the innocent medical research ship that was approaching.

Gina had been chatting with Joy, to take the other woman’s mind off the fact that they’d temporarily lost contact with her husband, when a light on Gina’s console flashed. Gina activated the display. That was odd. They had just lost the signal from the hypercomm navigational beacon in Earth orbit. She figured there were two possibilities; either the beacon had stopped transmitting, which had never happened before, or something was wrong with Ace’s hypercomm gear. She didn’t consider a third possibility. “Just a minute, Joy, I’ve got a-“ she hesitated, searching for a word that would not be alarming to the passenger seated next to her, “glitch in my comm gear. I need to adjust something.” Her console, like the rest of the ship, was old, and equipment sometimes malfunctioned. The comm gear, however, had been through routine scheduled maintenance while the ship had been in Earth orbit, and the hyperwave antenna had been replaced. Gina frowned, and started tracing the problem through the system. She started with the hyperwave antenna. It appeared to be functioning normally.

While Gina was trying to figure out why she’d lost the nav beacon, and the others on the bridge were watching the shuttle’s passage through the atmosphere, Nightengale fired her thrusters, and rolled slowly around her long axis. That in itself was not noteworthy, ships in normal space routinely rotated, so that radiation from the star didn’t cook one side of the ship. If anyone on Ace’s bridge had been looking, they would have seen that a bay door on the medical ship’s port side was open. Now, that was odd, if any of Nightengale’s crew were going outside, they should have notified any nearby ships. The open door rotated toward Ace, and, for the briefest moment, a pair of red-colored tubes were visible inside the airlock, then something shot out of one tube.

The missile was launched by a magnetic pulse, invisible to any human observer. Once the missile reached a safe 500 meters from Nightengale, its solid rocket motor ignited, and the missile altered course. The launch was undetected, and the missile itself was unseen, until it had crossed half the distance to the freighter. On Ace’s bridge, the collision alarm sounded, triggered by the low-powered radar which constantly swept the space around the ship.

Seth barely had time to check the radar, and see with shock that the source of the alarm was an object traveling at high speed from the medical ship, when the missile struck the freighter, right at the junction tube which connected the saucer-shaped command section to the rest of the ship. The missile penetrated the thin outer skin of the tube, then the low-power warhead exploded.

The blast ripped through the junction tube, tearing it completely apart, and also cut through the three structural frames which connected the command section to the rest of the ship. The command section was wrenched free with the shrieking, groaning sound of tearing metal and composites and separated from the rest of the ship, spinning end over end, out of control.

On the bridge there was pandemonium. Seth was the only person strapped into a seat, everyone else was flung around from the force of the explosion. The artificial gravity cut off immediately, along with the lights.  Joy was fortunate to be knocked first against the flat bridge doors, then fall forward into Schroeder, who was rebounding off the back off Seth’s chair. Gina and Vassily hit the ceiling. Everyone was shouting, no one was listening.

CHAPTER 6

The dim emergency lighting snapped on, then a few consoles came back to life, navigation first, followed by communications. Captain Schroeder, bleeding from a cut on his head, managed to get a grasp on a handhold. “Is everyone all right?” He shouted out.

Seth’s brain felt like it had been on a rollercoaster ride. He blinked, his vision was functional. “I’m OK, Hans.” He responded, for the moment forgetting shipboard formality. Seth unbuckled from his seat, and pushed off to grab Vasilly around the waist, then pull the engineer down to his duty station and strap him loosely into his own seat. Vasilly had a deep scar across his right temple, blood was welling up. His eyes were barely open, and glassy, staring without seeing. He moaned in pain. “Vasilly’s alive, he took a knock on the head, I think he’s unconscious.”

Gina cried out from the far corner of the bridge, she was still floating in the air. “I think I broke my arm.” Her voice was shaky from the pain. Her left forearm was at an odd angle, she cradled it with her right hand.

 Joy coughed, and spit blood from a cut on her lip. She had also bashed her nose at some point, and it too was bleeding. Fingers and toes were moving. “I’m fine here. What happened? My bComm isn't connecting to the ship computer.”

“I don’t know what happened yet, my bComm is down also. Ms. Sanchez, can you help Gina? Seth, make sure Vasilly won’t float around, then get back to your station, we need to figure out what our status is.” Schroeder pulled himself along the handholds, trying to get to a viewport which looked aft. He stopped to speak over the intercom.

Joy, moving on adrenaline, held onto a railing with one hand, and reached up to get hold of Gina’s pantsleg with the other. Gently, she pulled the other woman down toward the deck, until Gina got her legs wrapped around the railing. “You can hang on now?”

Gina nodded without speaking, her eyes streaming in tears from the pain. Her tears floated away, forming salty droplets in the zero gravity.

“I have to check on my children.” Joy said with determination, and was about to push herself toward the bridge doors, when Schroeder spoke.

“Ms. Sanchez! Don’t. We are no longer attached to the rest of the ship.” He said, with a tone of alarm in his voice.

“What? What do you mean?” Joy, for the first time, felt panic well up inside her.

Schroeder pointed out the viewport. “I can see behind us, and the cargo section isn’t there. It’s drifting away from us. The blast must have knocked us loose.”

“We have to get there! My children are on that ship!” Joy awkwardly flung herself toward Schroeder, nearly bashing her head on a console, but he caught her and guided her away. He held tightly onto her shoulders and looked her right in the eye.

“Ms. Sanchez! Listen to me! We have no way to get from here to the other part of the ship. We only have one shuttle, and it’s on Ares right now. Your children, listen to me, listen to me-“ he said gently as Joy tried to wrench herself away, “are you listening? I’m trying to help you. Your children are most likely in better shape than we are. The rest of the ship has much more mass, the explosion would not have knocked it around nearly as much. All the power and life support systems are in their part of the ship, and Jen is there with them. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Joy whispered.

“What we need to do now is restore power to the radio, and contact Nightengale, or the shuttle. They will-“

Seth interrupted. “Captain, Nightengale isn’t going to help. I think they fired a missile at us.”

It was Schroeder’s turn to be incredulous. “What?” He released Joy and made his way quickly over to Seth’s console. Until then, Schroeder had assumed the explosion was an accident, a mechanical failure, or a high-speed meteor impact. Surely his navigator was wrong. Joy turned around to look out the viewport, and caught a glimpse at the cargo section, it looked far away already. Her heart sank.

Seth pulled up the brief radar track he’d seen before the explosion, and played it back for Schroeder. “Mein Gott.” Schroeder whispered, lapsing into his native German. “You are right. They attacked us.” He pointed to a second image on the screen, in the opposite direction. “What is this?”

“Hmm. I didn’t see that. I’ll play it back.” Seth ran the brief recording back and forth, then looked up in horror. “They fired a second missile-“

Schroeder finished the thought. “Down at our shuttle. We need to warn them right away.”

“How?” Gina said, her voice a dry croak. “Power’s out,  radio’s down.” She clasped her right hand to her face in sudden shock. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Schroeder inquired.

Gina was stricken with guilt. “Captain, before, just before the missile hit, we lost our hypercomm, I couldn’t pick up the hypercomm beacon. I thought it was a problem with our gear, but...”

Schroeder nodded grimly. “They were silently jamming our hypercomm. Which means we can’t call the Navy for help. Gina, this is absolutely not your fault. Even if you’d warned me, there was no time to do anything about it.” Schroeder looked over to the communications console, which only had a few lights glowing. “Hopefully they don’t feel any need to jam ordinary radio signals, we need to warn the shuttle quickly. We need to find a way to restore power to the radio, and fast.”

“How much longer?” Kaylee asked, bored with staring at a blinking dot on the video screen.

“Less than a minute.” Manny answered without checking his watch. “See the counter at the top left of the screen? It says ROS 0:54? That means fifty four seconds to Reacquisition Of Signal, until the shuttle can use its radio again. It’s an estimate, really.”

“Oh.” When did her little brother learn technical details like that?

Manny pointed out other items displayed on the screen. “See the numbers down the left side? The top one is the shuttle’s true airspeed, the one below that is-“

The cabin heaved beneath them and the lights went out, accompanied by loud booming and shrieking noises. Kaylee was flung onto her back, she sprawled across the mattress, frantically grabbing onto the comforter and a pillow, anything she could get her hands on. Manny was knocked onto his right side, one of his sister’s feet hit him in the face. Someone screamed, Manny realized it was both of them. The cabin stopped moving as Kaylee slid off the side of the bed to land on her butt with a thump. There was a brief wave of nausea as the artificial gravity system fluctuated, then steadied. The cabin stopped moving, and red emergency lights snapped on.

“What-“ Kaylee started to say, when the cabin moved again. She clung to the bed as best she could as she felt the floor vibrate in a series of pulses. This time, there was no booming or shrieking, instead the sound was fainter popping and creaking.

“That’s the ship’s thrusters!” Manny shouted. The thrusters were a familiar sound then the ship was in normal space, though never so loud or so sustained. What Manny was used to hearing was a bare whisper, this was almost a roar. The cabin moved several times, back and forth over the course of about twenty seconds while the children hung onto the bed as tightly as they could. Then the motion stopped, and the popping sound was gone, but the creaking continued, intermittently.

“Kaylee, what’s going on?” Manny asked, hanging onto the headboard of the bed in case the cabin moved again. Suddenly, he was again the little brother, looking up to his big sister in a crisis.

“I don’t know.” Her own voice was shaky. “Computer, what happened?”

There was no answer. The ship’s artificial intelligence computer always responded immediately, no matter what time of the day or night. Not now. The regular lighting flickered on and off, then came back on steadily. The video screen remained dark. Kaylee stood up shakily, picked up the phone from the night stand, and held it to her ear. “The phone’s dead. Hello? Hello? Anyone?”

“Kaylee, if the phone is dead-“

“I can’t hear anything, that doesn’t mean no one can hear us.” She insisted. “I’ll keep trying.”

The second missile, guided by Nightengale’s radar at first, quickly acquired its target after launch, the shuttle was hard to miss, as it was glowing hot from its passage through the atmosphere. The shuttle was almost directly below, the landing had been planned so that Ace would be above, to provide radar tracking and advice if anything went wrong. The missile’s small computer brain performed a quick calculation, determining it actually needed to slow down first, in order to avoid overshooting the target. It swung around, and ignited the solid rocket motor, pointing backwards to slow down enough to drop out of orbit, then it turned again, to point nearly straight down, accelerating at four hundred times the force of Earth’s gravity. It bored heedlessly into the thin atmosphere, not caring that tremendous heat was building up on the nose. The nose was covered in a ceramic material that was designed to ablate away, to flake off as the air heated it. The ceramic began to peel off in layers, and the missile had to adjust its course as each piece broke away. Inside the nose, the warhead and electronics were growing hot. It didn’t matter. Before the heat fried the computers, the missile would reach the target. Nothing could stop it.

            The shuttle had come out of the communications blackout a few minutes before, and was lining up for final approach to a landing at the mining settlement. The expected call from above had never come. “Atlas Challenger, respond, please! What, are they deaf? I must have called them ten times.” Nelson turned to Sam. “How sure are you that the radio antenna made it through the entry intact?”

Before Sam could answer, there was a burst of static from the radio, then Seth’s voice, weak and distorted. “Shuttle, this is Ace! You have a missile on your tail! Repeat: you have a missile on your tail. Set down now-now-now!”

            A disgusted look flashed across Nelson’s face. “Seth, if this is a practical joke, I’m coming back up there to kick your-“

            “No joke! No joke! The ship has been attacked, the command section split from the ship, and they fired a missile down after-“ Seth’s voice was drowned out by static, as Nightengale jammed the transmission.

            “Seth! Seth, come in! Seth! Dammit!”

            Rick called out, forgetting Nelson’s rule that passengers never speak, his voice slightly squeaky. “Can we look for a missile? We have radar, right?”

            “We have navigational radar, which points down and forward, not up. But you have a good point, professor. Hang on tight.” Nelson hauled back on the stick, and the shuttle grabbed the thin air, standing on its tail. He fed power to the engines, continuing the climb, until the shuttle had completed the turn, and was now upside down and flying in the opposite direction. If you couldn’t steer the radar, then steer the ship it’s attached to. “Sam, you see anything?”

            “Hold on, the radar is still set on close-range mode. Huh. I don’t see any- Oh, God! There it is! Nelson, set us down now! I mean NOW!” Sam’s face had gone pale.

            Nelson didn’t hesitate, he had glanced the incoming blip on the scope. It was still far away, but moving extremely fast. This had to be the real deal, military issue, not some probe modified to carry a warhead. Nelson didn’t stop to think, or wonder why, he simply reacted, and hauled back on the stick again, pointing the shuttle’s nose straight down, slamming the throttle full open.  As the acceleration kicked him back in the seat and the rusty red surface of the planet rushed at him, he shouted “Sam, Rick, as soon as we touch down, grab your spare O2 bottle and run like hell! Shuttle, once everyone is clear, lift off and circle this area at twenty clicks! And I don’t care if you are damaged, you get out of here, no excuses!”

            “Lift off and wait for your signal, acknowledged.”

            The ground was coming up scarily fast, and they were still accelerating. Rick’s view between the pilot seats out the windshield was terrifying, it seemed like there was no way the shuttle could avoid boring a deep hole in the red surface of the planet below. Nelson pulled the stick back once again to flatten out their vertical dive, and felt the whole craft shudder violently with the strain, it was vibrating so badly he could barely see the instruments in front of him. Warning lights flashed on, he ignored them. He was doing everything you were NOT supposed to do with a big, fat, clunky cargo hauling shuttle owned by Universal Transport. The company could deduct it from his pay for all he cared, as long as he survived. For a gut-wrenching moment he was afraid that he had misjudged the dive, not sure they could pull out before they smacked into the surface hard, but the shuttle’s belly cleared a ridge with a meter to spare, and he banked to the left, where there was a flat area to land. He chopped the throttle, kicked in the belly jets, and fired the nose retro rockets in a blur of motion. The retros came on full power, jerking him forward in his seat against the webbing of the harness, the straps digging into his waist and shoulders. Once their forward motion had halted, he lowered the shuttle fast, too fast, on the belly jets. “Sam! Pop both the doors, don’t wait for it to depressurize, override the safeties!”

            The shuttle doors were an airlock, designed to have the inner door, or the outer door, open at any time, but never both doors at the same time. Sam engaged the emergency override system to force the doors open while the shuttle’s cabin was still full of air, and while the shuttle was still flying. The shuttle jerked to the left as the air rushed out to starboard door, and there was an instant mist of red dust swirling crazily in the cabin. Without being prompted, Sam lowered the landing skids and locked them in position. “Hang on!” Nelson shouted as he gave the belly jets one last burst, then cut them off. The shuttle hit hard, bounced, almost rolled over on its starboard side, then settled on the landing skids. “Get out!”

            Rick didn’t wait for an engraved invitation, all he could think of was whether his family was safe, yet somehow he had the presence of mind to reach under the seat, grab the spare oxygen bottle, unbuckle the seat harness, reach under the seat next to him and grab that oxygen bottle also. Then he leapt out of his seat and was the first out the door. Sam was right behind him, followed by Nelson, they were so close together that the three collided, and sprawled face down in the red dust. With the wind knocked out of his lungs, Nelson managed to gasp “Shuttle! Go!”

            There was another intense cloud of red dust as the shuttle’s belly jets roared back to life, the craft wobbled toward the sky, unsteady due to damage from the hard landing. The three men were pelted with pebbles, and would have been blinded, except for the dust-repellant magnetic field which coated the faceplates of their helmets. Nelson turned to lie on his back, watching the shuttle climb, trailing smoke from the damaged starboard wing. The right rear landing skid had partly collapsed when the shuttle hit, Nelson figured he wouldn’t be able to fly the shuttle back into orbit even if the missile somehow missed the shuttle. As he watched, the shuttle’s main engines fired, and the craft began to move forward and pitch the nose up. He was about to say something to Sam and Rick, when his peripheral vision caught a bright streak of light coming in from the north, and the shuttle exploded in a fireball. His helmet’s faceplate automatically darkened, but not soon enough to prevent him from seeing spots in his vision. A piece of high-speed debris from the explosion hit the top of Sam’s helmet and punctured a hole in the hard material, Sam felt a searing pain as the hot chunk of metal came to rest inside the helmet at the back of his neck.

“Nelson! I’m hit! Ahhh!” The inside of his faceplate fogged up quickly as the air vented out, in just a few seconds, Sam couldn’t see anything.

Nelson, with spots still swimming in his vision and his faceplate still darkened, crawled over to Sam. “Where are you hit? Are you losing air?”

“Top of my helmet!” Sam gasped, his lungs struggling to take in enough of the remaining air to breathe. “Quick!”

Nelson fumbled with the suit controls, trying to get the faceplate to become completely opaque again so he could see. “Hold on a sec, buddy, I’m-“

Rick slapped a patch from his suit repair kit onto the hole in Sam’s helmet, and held it firmly in place. “I got it! I got it! Try to breathe normally, Sam. Are you bleeding?”
            Sam took a deep breath, and opened his eyes a crack, now that the helmet was filling up with sweet air again. “I don’t know.” Now that the chunk of metal had cooled, he couldn’t feel anything. “Give me a minute here.”

Nelson held out his hand to Rick. “That was fast, professor, you’re a handy guy to have around.”

Rick shook Nelson’s hand and said “I was looking in the other direction when the missile hit, so my vision is fine. Nelson, what the hell is going on?” He made no attempt to disguise the fear her felt, for himself and his family in orbit.

“I think I’m OK.” Sam said, and pushed himself to his feet with a helping hand from Rick. “Thanks, professor. I owe you one.”

“Great, call me Rick. Nelson, can we contact the ship? My family is up there.”

Nelson toggled his suit radio on. “Ace, this is Nelson, we got out of the shuttle in time, thanks for the warning. What the hell is going on up there, over?” He turned to Rick. “Their radio sounded busted up, I don’t know if they can pick up a signal from our low-powered suit radios. Ace, do you read? This is Nelson, respond, please. I’ll set the message to repeat until we get an answer. We may have to wait a while for a response, if they’re dealing with their own problems up there.”

“What is going on?” Rick asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but I’ll bet that medical research ship has something to do with it.” Nelson said angrily. “When I get back up there. I’m-“

Sam interrupted. “Hey, man, I don’t want to spoil the party, but nobody’s going back up there. Our shuttle is gone, it blew into a million pieces. So, unless you figure out how to fly shuttle pieces, we’re stuck here. And we’re gonna run out of air some time.”

“All right, all right.” What to do now, Nelson asked himself? Rely on his training, in this case, his Navy training was more useful for this type of situation.  “How much air do we have? I’ve got a full tank in the suit, and I grabbed a spare O2 bottle.” Nelson held up a bottle that was already coated with red dust.

“Me too.” Sam added.

Rick held up the two bottles he had carried out of the shuttle. “I got two spare bottles.”

“Hey, you’re the man!” Sam shouted, and pointed at Rick.

“How much time does that buy us?” Rick asked grimly.

Nelson held up his hand while he thought. “Uh, the suits partially recycle the air, so each bottle lasts six hours. A spare gives us another twelve hours, and if we share your extra bottle, that’s another, uh, two, maybe? So, fourteen hours total. Battery power-“ Nelson checked the indicator on his right wrist. “Fully charged, so we’ve got more power than we’ve got air.”

Sam looked around at the desolate, unforgiving, empty landscape that surrounded them. “Hey, Rick, man, I’m sorry I got you into this mess.” He said in apology.

“Huh? Why? This isn’t your fault, Sam.”

“Yeah, but if I hadn’t told the captain I needed your help down here-“

Rick cut him off. “Then I would be in trouble up there, instead of in trouble down here. I volunteered, remember? Let’s keep focused on getting ourselves out of this mess. Nelson, how far is the mining camp?” Rick asked.

Nelson thought for a moment. “Let’s see, we were on final approach, real close, less than twenty klicks, before we had to dodge that missile, we went in the opposite direction. Maybe thirty klicks? We can walk that.”

“Yeah, except, remember, the reason we’re down here is their life support is running out.” Sam reminded them.

“No it’s not.” Rick snorted derisively into his suit microphone. “I’ll bet that whoever fired the missile at us faked the whole emergency at the mining camp. The distress call was a ploy to get the ship here.” Rick said emphatically.

“I think he’s right, Sam.” Nelson agreed, after a minute of thinking about it.

“Why? What for? We’ve got a ship full of junk upstairs! None of it is worth stealing!” Sam protested.

“The only thing I care about on that ship is my family. No response yet, Nelson?” Rick asked anxiously.

Nelson answered. “No, not yet. That might not mean anything, on their last transmission, the signal was weak. You guys ready? We should get going, the mining camp is in, oh, hell.” He looked around. The land was pretty much the same in all directions. Red, jumbled rocks. Red sand. His skills as a navigator applied to orbital mechanics and hyperspace flight, not to walking across arid, dried-out, lifeless, sun-blasted red oxide dust. He pulled out a compass, let it settle down to find the local north magnetic pole. Ares had neither the population, nor the money, nor the need for global positioning satellites, so the miners found their way around by radio beacons scattered across the surface. Radio beacons that were now shut down, leaving Nelson to make his best guess. He pointed to the southwest, “This direction.”

“Nelson?” Rick asked. “You got any lights? It looks like it will be dark soon.” He shaded his eyes with a hand and tried to gauge how close the star was to the horizon.

“Oh, darn. No. The lights attach to the side of the helmet, or the wrist, I didn’t bring any out of the shuttle. Sam?”

“No, man, I got out as fast as I could.”

Rick opened the bag he was using as a toolkit. “Wait, I got a light in here. Just one, and it’s small. Let’s see what else I got.” He rummaged around, and found, among other things, Kaylee’s holo projector. He remembered putting it in the bag, intending to review the programs on it, and delete the Us4U holo, then he’d forgotten about it. Seeing it now, with his daughter possibly in danger above him, caused a lump in his throat.  “Uh, I’ve got, um, a power cell, fully charged, and a bunch of tools. Nothing much useful right now.”

“At least one of us was using his head, Rick, you hold onto that bag, never can tell what we might need.” Nelson said admiringly, increasingly impressed by the archeologist's coolness under pressure. “Now, the big question is, do we try to contact the mining camp by radio? They could come out here in a crawler, and pick us up.”

Sam shook his head no. “Nuh-uh! Or they could come out here and shoot us. If they faked a distress call and attacked the ship, I’m thinking they ain’t exactly friendly.”

“I don’t see we have much choice, do we?” Rick asked impatiently. “For all we know, whoever attacked the ship took over the mining camp first, maybe the miners are just caught up in this like we are. You’re right, Sam, at least one person in that mining camp isn’t friendly. Maybe there’s an outlying building with nobody in it, a place we can rest for the night. Some place with oxygen would be nice.” He slung his bag over his shoulder and looked off to the southwest. Everything, the ground, the sky, even his companions, had a reddish tint. The color of the sky was unnerving, pink toward the horizon, almost black straight overhead. It was daytime, and stars could be seen directly above. The dull light from the red giant star didn’t help things look comforting. “That way, you say? Let’s get going, huh?”

Nelson and Sam exchanged a glance, then followed the archeologist, their boots leaving sharply outlined prints in the bone dry red soil. The chill wind in the thin air barely disturbed the clouds of dust kicked up by their boots. Looking at the lazily swirling dust clouds behind the archeologist, Sam thought he had never seen such a desolate place.

CHAPTER 7

Kaylee had not been able to contact anyone over the ship’s phone system, and no one had come to check on them. The phone didn't even respond.

“The lights are on, and the gravity, that means we have power.” Manny’s eyes narrowed, he looked thoughtful. “Jen says the gravity takes lots of power, it can’t run off batteries the way the emergency lights do, remember, Kaylee?”

Jen! “Jen will know what to do.” Kaylee tucked the phone into her waistband. “Let’s find her.”

“Kaylee,” Manny responded, uncertainty in his voice, “in an emergency, passengers are supposed to stay in their cabins, until the crew comes to get us, or they tell us where to go over the intercom.” Emergency drills had been conducted every Thursday morning. Sometimes the passengers were instructed to stay where they were, sometimes they were escorted to the shuttle bay, sometimes they were escorted to the lifeboat pods. Always, they were escorted, and instructed to stay in the cabins until the crew came to get them. “Mom will come looking for us here.”

Kaylee pointed to the phone on her hip. “The phone isn’t working, Mom can't call us. We’ll just go out into the hallway, if anyone is looking for us, they can find us there, right?”

Manny considered that for a moment. “Okay.” If they heard someone coming, they could step back into the cabin. Gingerly, keeping close to the walls so they had something to hang onto in case the ship moved again, they walked out of their parent’s bedroom, across the main compartment, and to the door leading into the hallway. The door didn’t slide open when Kaylee pressed the button. “Try the handle?” Manny asked uncertainly.

Kaylee pressed the button again repeatedly, then gave up. She flipped aside the access door, grasped the manual handle, and pulled down on it. The door cracked open a couple centimeters, enough to get a grip on. She looked out into the hallway, it looked like the hallway always did, bland, pastel colored, and empty. Brother and sister held onto the edges of the door and pushed it aside. “Hello?” Kaylee called out. Her voice echoed off the walls. No one answered.

Manny stepped into the hallway. “I don’t hear anybody. Hello!” He shouted.

Kaylee stepped cautiously into the hallway to join her brother. It was quiet in the ship, except for the faint creaking sounds that seemed to be coming from the walls. “Hold my hand.”

Manny frowned. He was over the initial wave of fear. Whatever had happened, the huge ship wasn’t going to fall apart. He put his hands down by his side. “I’m not a baby, Kaylee, you don’t need to hold my hand.” He protested. “I’m going to the observation porthole.”

“No! We need to stay here, in case someone comes looking for us.”

“Kaylee, it’s right down the hall.” Manny pointed down the corridor toward the opening which lead to the observation room. “Maybe I can see what happened. I promise I’ll be right back, okay? You stay here in case someone come by.”

Kaylee had clasped her hands in front of her and was rubbing them together the way she did when she was anxious. “All right, but you come right back here.”

“I will.” Manny was still at the age when he seldom walked anywhere if he could run. Why adults were so incredibly slow, he couldn’t understand. He ran full speed down the corridor, turned to the right, and ran down the short hallway ending at a clear bubble that stuck out from the side of the ship. From the bubble, he could see to starboard, and a bit forward. At first he saw nothing unusual, then he craned his neck to see forward.

He gasped in shock. The familiar rear of the command section's curving saucer no longer blocked his view forward. Instead, there was empty space. He could see torn struts, pipes and wires from the access tube that previously connected the command section to the rest of the ship. Now that he was looking for it, he saw many pieces of debris floating around the ship, and-

The command section itself, rotating slowly end over end. It was already far enough away that we could no longer read the symbols painted on the surface. “Kaylee!” He shouted, his voice strained. “Kaylee! Come quick!”

His sister came running. “What is it?” She asked breathlessly. Manny silently pointed out the porthole, unable to speak. She looked out, and a sudden intake of air almost made her choke. “Mommy!” She screamed.

The walking was slow going for the three men stranded on the surface, over the rough terrain. The surface was dotted with rocks and craters, big and small. The big rocks they had to detour around, the small rocks they had to avoid tripping over. Nelson warned the others not to walk down into the bigger craters, because loose sand and dust had collected there, and made for treacherous footing. Walking down hills was the worst, they slid and skidded on pebbles, until they called a halt, and began using safety lines. It was taking too long. The sun was edging toward the horizon, and their oxygen supply was limited. Sam looked up, as the bulging disk of the star touched the horizon. It was going to be a long night.

“Kaylee,” Manny said with a sniff as he wiped away tears with the sleeve of his shirt. He was coming to his senses again, after he and his sister spent a minute holding onto each other, screaming and crying. This is not what his parents would do in a crisis. “I can see lights coming from the command section. See? There’s lights coming through those portholes. They have power, maybe they can call us on the radio. We should go back to the cabin, maybe?”

Kaylee avoided looking out the porthole, knowing it would make her cry again. “No. We need to find Jen. She’ll know what to do. Maybe we can help.”

“Help do what? We’re kids.” Manny pointed out.

“Do, do anything Jen needs us to do! All the other crew are with Mom. Or Dad. Jen’s the only one here with us.

“Okay.” Manny agreed. “Where do we look?”

Kaylee pursed her lips and thought. She wiped away her own tears with the back of her hand. “Jen’s office is on the deck below us, where she keep her tools and fixes the robots. We’ll look there.”

“Wait, let’s leave a note for her, in case she comes looking for us.”

They went back to the cabin, found a marker, and wrote a note on the corridor wall next to the door. Manny then went to stuff the marker in his pocket, when he had a better idea, and they both got their backpacks and slung them over their shoulders, in case they needed to carry anything. The elevator between decks wasn’t working, so they had to crank open a door, climb down a ladder, and open another door at the bottom. It seemed like an awfully long way, in the empty, silent ship.

Captain Gante returned to check on her executive officer’s search progress, but the communications technician waved to her first. “I was just about to call you, Captain, I can’t contact the Atlas Challenger. I’ve hailed them repeatedly. No response, Ma’am.”

If Gante was startled by the freighter’s silence, she didn’t show it. She turned to the first officer. “XO?”

Ross shook his head, and suppressed a yawn caused by the insufferable boredom of watching the scanner. “Nothing yet. Still scanning.”

She pursed her lips, and walked over to stand behind her XO so they could speak quietly. “No sign there was ever a ship in distress here?” She asked.

“No sign there was ever a ship here at all, Ma’am.” Something in his captain’s tone of voice caught his attention. “What are you thinking?”

“It’s not-“ her voice trailed off.

He lowered his own voice to a whisper. “Kim, we’ve worked together for almost a year now, I know when there’s something going on in that head of yours.”

Gante allowed herself a tight smile. “They say there’s no sound in space, XO. There’s not supposed to be any smells, either, but I smell a rat.”

“Diversion?”

“Exactly. The Isaac Newton was never here, somebody wanted to lure us away from Ares. Somebody who knows we are the only Navy ship patrolling this sector.”

“And lure us away from the freighter?”

Gante raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t considered that, I thought maybe there is something on Ares that the mining company doesn’t want the Navy to see. But you may be right, the freighter could be the target, although I can’t imagine why. It’s just a transport ship.”

“What do you want to do? Abandon the search? Captain, if we abandon the search, and we’re wrong, and there are survivors aboard the Isaac Newton…”

“I know. I also know for a fact that there are people aboard that freighter, and people on Ares. No, I’m not wasting any more time here.” She straightened up, and raised her voice. “XO, retract the antennas, charge the Jump engines, and plot a course to Ares, maximum speed.”

The communications technician looked at her quizzically. “Shall I inform Fleet HQ, Ma’am?”

Gante and her XO exchanged a glance. “No, we will not inform the Fleet at this time. Keep sending that message to Atlas Challenger, but I want you to modify the message a bit-“

On Ace’s bridge, they had opened a medical kit, splinted Gina’s arm, and given her painkillers. For Vassily, there wasn’t as much they could do. The ship’s second in command had lapsed into unconsciousness from a blow to the head. Seth and Joy brought him to his cabin, strapped him to his bed, made him comfortable, then hurried back to the bridge. As Schroeder had pointed out, their priority had to be to get control of their own situation first.

Joy’s face was looking pale, her eyes were slightly crossed. “I think I’m going to be sick.” She wasn’t dealing well with the zero gravity, on top of the emotional shock.

Schroeder himself took a dose of anti-nausea medicine from the medical kit, brought it over to Joy, and told her to rub it into the skin on the inside of her wrist. “This acts fast. And don’t be embarrassed, I’ve been on spaceships for over thirty years, and I still get queasy in zero Gee sometimes. That’s why we invented artificial gravity.”

Joy held onto the back of a chair, and concentrated on breathing, in and out, in and out, until the nausea passed. “I’m better now, thank you.” The ache in her heart remained.

“Why?” Gina turned to Schroeder and asked the simple question that had been on all their minds. “Captain? Why attack us?”

Seth spoke first. “Maybe there’s something on Ares they don’t want anyone to see.”

Schroeder shook his head with a frown. “No. If they had something to hide, they wouldn’t have sent a distress call, no matter how bad their situation was. The Tigershark said they were responding to another distress call, I think that was also a fake, to draw the Navy away from here. And to make sure we were the only ship that could respond in time. No, for some reason, they wanted this ship here, and they set this whole thing up to get us here.”

“But, why didn’t… why didn’t they just intercept us in hyperspace, when we were in the middle of nowhere?” Seth sputtered.

Schroeder’s brow furrowed as he thought back to his own Navy service days, years ago. “I suspect it is because, while rocket-powered missiles can be purchased on the black market, hyperspeed-capable missiles are much harder to get. They needed to get us out of hyperspace, so they faked a distress call. Now, thanks to us saying we could handle this rescue on our own, the only Navy ship in the sector is lightyears away, and we have no way to contact them. Somebody put a lot of effort into planning this operation.” He said in disgust, as if he should have anticipated the attack on his defenseless ship. He added, in a low tone that may have been intended only for himself. “What I can’t answer is, what we have onboard that could possibly be worth that effort, worth the risk, and the expense, to steal it?”

The bridge speakers crackled, and Gina exchanged a look with Schroeder. He nodded.

“Audio only.” Gina said, and gave her captain an OK sign when the channel was open.

It was the now-familiar voice of ‘Ted Miller’, the innocuous looking captain of the supposed medical research ship he had insultingly called Nightengale. “Atlas Challenger, or should I say Ace, like you do?” Miller began, showing off how well he knew his prey. “You have something I want, and I have-“

Schroeder interrupted indignantly. “You have attacked a civilian vessel, and tried to kill my crew! I will-“

”You will shut your mouth and listen, Captain! I do the talking, you listen.” The voice of ‘Ted Miller’ was not so sweet this time. “I hold all the cards here, in case you haven’t figured that out yet, mein kapitan. Do not insult me, or I will fire another missile at your command section, and blow you all into dust. Are you listening now? A simple yes or no, please. You can do that, right? You open your mouth, and you say ‘Yes’, like a good little boy.”

Schroeder fumed inside. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw the people whose lives he was responsible for. He swallowed his pride and growled “Yes.”

“Very good! That wasn’t so hard, was it? Aboard your ship, or in one of the cargo bays in what is left of your ship, there is something I want very much. Enough to kill for it. My crew and I are coming aboard, we are going to take what we want, and then we will depart, and leave you alone. The Navy will be here eventually, and I do not intend to be in this star system when the Navy arrives. In case you are thinking the Tigershark is on its way soon, it’s not. That ship is busily engaged in searching for a ghost, and they will be there for quite some time. This is what I want: you instruct whatever crew you have aboard your ship not to interfere with us when we come aboard. I could simply shoot them, but I would prefer not to make a mess in your fine ship.” The pirate laughed. “You will have a short time to consider, and then I want your answer. Nightengale out.”

There was silence on Ace’s bridge as everyone came to terms with the situation. Finally, Seth spoke. “Captain, you were right. They wanted us here, and they decoyed that frigate. I wish we knew what the hell they wanted.”

Schroeder had been wracking his brain, trying to think what cargo could be worth killing over. More important, what cargo could be worth what had to be a very considerable expense on the part of the pirates. “I wish I did, too. Nothing aboard this ship is worth anyone’s life!”

“I have some good news.” Gina said hopefully. “While the Nightengale was talking, they had to drop their radio jamming. I picked up a faint signal from the surface.” She played the recording, and Nelson’s voice boomed out. “Ace, this is Nelson, we got out of the shuttle in time, thanks for the warning. What the hell is going on, over? Ace, do you read? This is Nelson, respond, please.”

“They’re alive!” Joy shouted, and would have fallen to her knees if the artificial gravity had been on. “Call them back!”

“I can't, the message is a recording, Nelson must have set it to repeat until we responded. Next time they drop the jamming, I’ll try to get through.” Gina said, not taking her eyes off the instruments.

 Not for the first time, Schroeder was extraordinarily proud of his crew. There were Navy warships that didn’t have people as resourceful or experienced as his lowly freighter. “You do that. Were you able to locate the signal?”

Seth answered. “Checking now. It’s hard to say, because the signal is weak, and we’re no longer line of sight to the source, but they’re real close to the mining camp.”

Schroeder turned to Joy. “Your husband has a very good chance, Ms. Sanchez. Nelson and Sam will get him to safety,” he said soothingly, not knowing that it was Rick who was leading the surface party, “and they should have plenty of oxygen, enough to get to the mining camp.” He didn’t express his own fears about the mining camp being hostile.

Joy nodded, letting out a long breath. She was over her initial shock, and was now able to think clearly again. “Call me Joy, please, I don’t think this is the time for be formal. Is there any way we can contact the cargo section, find out what is going on there?”

Schroeder turned to Gina, who held up her hands. “Ms.-, Joy, with the radio jamming, we can’t talk to anyone aboard the cargo section, or establish a link with the computer there. Ms. Olivetti, did you pick up any radio signals from the cargo sec- let’s just call it the ship, shall we?”

“No, nothing from the ship.” She added, “Sorry, Joy.”

Schroeder floated over to look out the viewport. They were drifting further away from the ship. “We do know the rest of the ship is intact, I can see her running lights are on, and she stabilized her spin. That means she has power, and thrusters, and at least enough computer function to control the thrusters. I didn’t see any signs of air venting, so while your children may be frightened, they have air, heat, and light. And Jen will be taking care of them. Our own situation hereis far more serious.”

“How serious?” Joy asked.

Schroeder saw that, whereas before she had hugged her arms tightly around her and looked scared, now she looked focused and determined. Tough lady, he thought. He glided over to his console and pointed to the display. “The command section we’re in has no independent power generator, no propulsion, and only emergency life support. We received main power, propulsion and life support from the ship we were attached to,” he said without a trace of irony in his voice, “and now we’re on our own. What we do have is four powercells, one of them isn’t online, but that could simply be a loose connection. Some of the aft compartments have lost air, they are sealed off. We have an emergency oxygen supply, and filters to remove carbon dioxide, I estimate we have enough breathable air for eight days.” Schroeder paused, when he continued he seemed to be summarizing the situation to himself. “What else? Let’s see. It will start getting cold, as our heat slowly radiates out into space. The heaters drain a lot of power, so we will be running them at a low level. No artificial gravity. No weapons. No radar, and no other external sensors, other than looking out a window with our own eyes.” Schroeder paused a minute to scratch his head and think. “We can stabilize the spin with thrusters, eventually, that will help.”

Joy looked at Schroeder in surprise. “The command section has its own attitude control thrusters? Why? And, yes, I know what an attitude control system is.”

“I," the captain raised and eyebrow in surprise, "yes. The original operational scheme for this ship, the original company plan, was for the Ace-class ships to travel from one planet to another, and once there, swap an entire cargo section, for a cargo section that had been pre-loaded for us.” The conversation was irrelevant to their situation, Schroeder spoke because it gave him time to think. “The forward command section, and the aft propulsion section, can detach from the main frame of the ship. The design was for the ship to get into orbit, detach the cargo section, and tugs would attach them to a pre-loaded cargo section. Starships are wasting money if they’re not moving, so the idea was to spend minimal time out of hyperspace. The attitude control system is merely to assist the tugs in keeping us stable during the transfer.”

Joy still looked puzzled. “So what happened?”

Schroeder held up his hands. “Like everything else, plans changed. It was cheaper for the ship to stay in orbit a few days than it was to build and maintain all that infrastructure at every planet on our route. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean it makes economic sense to do it.”

“So, the command section is designed to be self-contained. Then why can’t-“

Schroeder cut her off. “I know what you’re saying, but remember, the command section was only supposed to be self-supporting during the few hours while the tugs were moving it around. This,” he gestured around the bridge with one hand, “isn’t actually a spaceship. The thrusters are only cold gas, nowhere near powerful enough to bring us back to the Ace. We do not have any environment suits, and even if we did, we don’t have a way to get from here to the ship.”

“Could the ship, or the propulsion section, come get us?”

“Unfortunately, no. The navigation system is here in the command section. Jen would have no way to run the reactor, the engines, or to navigate. The fusion reactor should have shut down when the connection to the main computer was lost, I suspect the ship’s auxiliary power units kicked in automatically, as they are supposed to when main power is lost.”

“Are there space suits aboard the ship? Could Jen reach us?” Joy suggested.

“Yes, there are space suits, and maneuvering units, what are called jet packs. If Jen had reacted immediately, she might have been able to reach us. We’re too far away now.”

“So that’s it? We just wait for rescue?” Joy asked, disappointed.

“Uh, not exactly.” Seth spoke up. “Captain, we’ve got another problem.”

Schroeder turned to his navigator. “What is it, Mr Putri?”

“The inertial navigation system is  functioning again.” He hesitated a moment before delivering the bad news. “We’re going to fall out of orbit in six, maybe seven hours.”

“What?” Schroeder exclaimed.

“We were in a low orbit to start, and the explosion caused us to slow down, and knocked us toward the planet. The low point of each orbit will have us kissing the top of the atmosphere.” Seth shook his head. “ Eventually, the drag will pull us down.”

CHAPTER 8

They found Jen laying right in the doorway of her workshop. Kaylee screamed and ran when she saw Jen’s slumped form, Manny followed right behind her. When they got to the crew specialist, she was barely conscious, bleeding from a deep gash on her right temple, and she had blood on her right side, soaking through her blouse.

“Kaylee, what do we do?” Manny asked his big sister.

Kaylee stood locked in place for a moment, unable to move, her hand over her mouth. Then she dropped to her knees and touched Jen’s cheek hesitantly, with tears running down her face. “Jen? Jen, can you hear me?”

Jen groaned, whether in response to Kaylee or not, the teenager couldn’t tell.

“We need to get her to sickbay.” Manny declared. “I’m going to get one of those stretcher things.”

“Yes, yes. Good idea.” Kaylee nodded her head vigorously, and Manny ran off down the corridor. What should she do in the meantime? The gash on Jen’s forehead looked nasty, but had clotted up, and wasn’t bleeding much anymore. What looked worse was Jen’s right side. Moving gingerly, Kaylee got Jen’s lower blouse buttons unfastened, and peeled the material back from her skin.

It was ugly. The woman must have broken ribs, in addition to the head wound. There was a long cut running along one rib. Kaylee looked up into Jen’s workshop, the normally neat and tidy place was a bit of a shambles now. Ordinarily, Jen had a place for everything, every tool, every piece of equipment she was working on. There was a heavy-looking smashed something on the middle of the floor, a big cabinet, is what it looked like. Jen must have had it on her bench, and it fell on her during the accident, because the cabinet had blood in several places along one edge.

Now what to do? She didn’t know.

Stop the bleeding. Jen had a first-aid kit in one of the drawers, could Kaylee remember which one?

Yes. She scrambled to her feet, found the kit, and tore open a large bandage. The package said t was supposed to seal itself to a wound, stop the bleeding, and it contained a medical salve to prevent infections. The wound along Jen’s ribs was long enough that Kaylee needed to use two bandages, side by side. Kaylee used another bandage on Jen’s forehead, after gingerly pulling matted hair away from the cut. She was daubing away sticky blood when Manny came back.

He was pushing a stretcher, it hovered over the deck, suspended in the air by isolating itself from the ship’s artificial gravity field. Manny pushed it next to Jen as Kaylee instinctively pulled the woman’s blouse closed. “Can you lower it to the ground?” She asked her brother.

“I’m trying. I think this is it.” He said, and, with the press of a button, the stretcher sank slowly to the deck beside the injured woman. “Can she move? Kaylee, we have to roll her onto the stretcher.”

“I don’t think she can move by herself. Jen? Jen, can you hear me?” The woman didn’t respond. “Help me, we’ll move her feet onto the stretcher first.”

They got Jen’s feet and lower legs onto the stretcher, and strapped her feet in securely. Then, they knelt on the deck and, holding her under her shoulders, struggled to slide her gently sideways, until she was off the deck and supported by the stretcher. While she was being moved, Jen’s eyes briefly fluttered open, unfocused and unseeing. Then she passed out with an anguished grunt, her head slumped to the side.

Manny now was confident he knew how to control the stretcher, he set it to one meter above the deck, and it rose smoothly. Brother and sister pushed it along the corridor and around several corners, taking care not to bump it into any walls along the way to sickbay.

Manny had left the sickbay door open. Both children had been to sickbay on their tour of the ship in Earth orbit, and had not been back since. It was normally an over-eagerly cheery place, with brightly colored walls and soothing landscape pictures. Now, the picture screens were blank. There were two rooms off the main sickbay reception chamber, they pushed Jen into one of the rooms, and the stretcher slid right into place along rails jutting out from the wall, and became a bed.

“Doctor! Doctor, hello?” Kaylee waved her hand in front of the robot doctor, the only on aboard.

“It’s not working, Kaylee, the ship’s computer is down.” Manny stated disgustedly. “Remember, Jen told us all the robots are controlled by the ship’s AI.”

“Then what good is it?” Kaylee asked angrily, and kicked the inert robot with her foot.

“Is Jen going to be OK, Kaylee?” Manny seemed hesitant to get close to the unconscious woman.

Kaylee stood beside the bed, hands on her hips, in an imitation of her mother. “I think she has broken ribs, I put a bandage on that. And she got hit in the head. We could clean that up, and put a bandage on that, too. Yeah, we should do that.” She looked around the sickbay, at the myriad cabinets and drawers. All the computer screens were dead, useless. “Manny, look around and see what supplies are in here, don’t touch anything.”

“I won’t. What are we looking for?”

Kaylee looked at Jen. The woman’s mouth had drooped open, she was breathing evenly. If she had a concussion, which was likely, Kaylee knew not to do anything to make it worse. She had seen girls get knocks on the head while playing soccer, and the coaches always only kept the injured girls calm until the medics arrived. Head wounds were serious. First, do no harm. She had heard that somewhere. “I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

Gina shouted from her position, floating in the air above her communications console. “Radio jamming’s down again!”

The once again smooth voice of the pirate came over the speakers. “Time’s up, kapitan Schroeder. What is your answer?”

Schroeder knew what his answer had to be, he hadn’t needed the extra time. Safeguarding the lives of passengers and crew was a lot more important than cargo. While he didn’t trust the pirates to keep up their end of the bargain, he didn’t have any choice. “You can take whatever cargo you want, the crew won’t interfere.”

“Excellent!” The pirate laughed. “I knew you were a reasonable fellow, Hans, a business man, like me. If I allow you to talk to, well, to the other piece of your ship, you will order your crew there to not interfere?”

Schroeder gritted his teeth. “Yes, you damned pirate.”

“A pirate I am, now? Ha! I like that. Aaargh, shiver me timbers, avast yee scurvy dogs!” He laughed again, enjoying himself. “Good. You may speak to your crew.”

“Wait! This... part of the ship, the command section, is in an unstable orbit. I have a passenger and crew aboard-“

”One thing at a time!” The pirate interrupted. “You keep your end of this bargain, and I am willing to discuss a rescue later. I am going to open a channel for you to record a message, and you instruct your crew to keep out of our way. Be brief, and to the point. Is that understood?”

Schroeder found all of this very difficult to swallow. He forced himself to say a simple “Yes.”

“Channel is open for recording, now.” The pirate’s voice was taunting.

Schroeder cleared his throat, and tried to speak quickly, to keep his voice firm and calm. “This is Captain Schroeder, calling Atlas,” he caught himself, “calling the cargo section. Our shuttle has been destroyed by a missile, the crew is alive, and on the surface. The command section is in a decaying orbit, we have people injured here, but everyone is alive. Listen to me. These, these pirates, want to extract an item from our cargo. They are going to board the ship, take what they want, and leave. Do not interfere with them in any way. Repeat, do not interfere with them. Stay out of their way, and out of sight. That is an order.”

The pirate spoke again to cut him off. “That was a very moving speech, Hans, seriously, I got a tear in my eye.” He sniffed mockingly. “That is enough for now, we will relay your message to the, what did you call it, the cargo section? Pray that your crew there knows how to follow orders. Nightengale out.”

“Wait! What about-“ Schroeder started to protest, but Gina interjected.

“Jamming’s back on, they can’t hear you.”

“Bastards. They never had any intention of rescuing us.” Seth said in disgust.

“No.” Joy added, in a voice drained of emotion. “They expected us to be dead by now.”

“I don’t think so.” Schroeder responded, in a voice so low he might have been talking to himself. “If they wanted to kill us, they would have used a bigger warhead on that missile. As it is, they used just enough to separate us from the cargo section. No, they wanted us right where we are, in trouble. When the Navy shows up, they will have to rescue us first, and that will delay their pursuit of the pirate ship. Whoever these people are, they have thought about this very, very carefully. But they made one mistake so far; Nelson and the others survived the attack on the shuttle. I think they did mean to destroy our shuttle, that would be one less thing for the pirates to worry about.”

In Ace’s sickbay, Jen had awakened long enough to ask that Kaylee find a medical stabilizer unit and attach it to Jen's left arm. Kaylee had been skeptical that she could do anything to help the injured woman, but Jen had explained that the stabilizer was a first-aid device, for use when the sickbay's AI was offline. Kaylee found the bulky orange box, followed the instructions on the top, and clamped it around Jen's arm. The device inserted lines into the woman's blood vessels, and flooded her with artificial blood, drugs, and nano probes to prevent further damage from her head injury. Unfortunately, the stabilizer's tiny but powerful computer insisted that the best thing for its patient was sleep, and tried to inject her with sedatives. Jen kept having to press an override button every five minutes, to prevent the device from sending her into a dreamless slumber. At Jen's request, Manny  had run back to her workshop and retrieved her remote control console, since Jen's bComm wasn't able to connect to the ship's computer. Her bComm was working fine, which meant the higher level functions of the ship's computer were down.

With her console, Jen had accessed the ship’s backup systems, and determined the cargo section of the ship was in no immediate danger. Their shuttle, she told the children, would be able to come back up, and rescue people from the command section. Except she couldn’t contact the shuttle's pilot Nelson, or anyone else, on the radio. And the radio was working fine. What was going on?

"Can you try a different frequency?" Manny suggested unhelpfully.

"The radio automatically cycles through the range of frequencies the shuttle's radio uses," Jen snapped, more harshly than she intended. She liked the children, but she was tired, and ached all over, and had a splitting headache. "Maybe the antenna isn't-"

The wall-mounted speakers of the ship’s intercom crackled, followed by captain Schroeder’s amplified voice “This is Captain Schroeder, calling Atlas, calling the cargo section. Our shuttle has been destroyed by a missile, the shuttle crew is alive, and on the surface. The command section is in a decaying orbit, we have people injured here, but everyone is alive, for now. Listen to me. These, these pirates, want to extract an item from our cargo. They are going to board the ship, take what they want, and leave. Do not interfere with them in any way. Repeat, do not interfere with them. Stay out of their way, and out of sight. That is an order.”

The message began to repeat, a shocked and groggy Jen used her console to cut it off. Jen wished the children had not heard the message. They shouted for their parents, until Jen told them their radio was only receiving, not transmitting.

Jen's head was spinning. She'd assumed whatever happened to the ship had been an accident. Nelson, Sam, and Rick Sanchez had been shot down by a missile? Schroeder had said the people in the command section were alive “for now”? What did that mean? Jen figured it meant until they ran out of oxygen. And the command section was going to fall out of orbit? When? Schroeder hadn’t had time to say.

At least she knew she didn't need to waste time trying to fix the radio. There was nothing wrong with the radio, it was being jammed. "Kids, kids, Kaylee, Manny, quiet, please. I need to think."

Nightengale briefly fired her engines, to match Ace’s altered orbit. The pirate ship then approached, quickly at first, then slowly, warily. As it got closer, the radar which constantly swept the area around the freighter began to burn through the electromagnetic jamming, and the radar receiver was able pick up a fuzzy, intermittent echo.

Jen kept trying to contact the command section on the radio, using frequency hopping, and boosting power to the antennas, but the jamming was too strong. Running checks of the ship’s systems revealed the damage wasn't as bad as she feared, until a collision alert popped up on her console. The pirate ship was approaching. “The, uh,” Jen blinked to clear her vision, “the pirate ship is getting close to us.”

“We have to do something!” Kaylee shouted through tears.

“I’m sorry, Kaylee,” Jen said through teeth gritted from pain, “until your parents can get back here, I need to keep you out of trouble somewhere.” She twisted in the bed, trying to find a position that was comfortable for her ribs. She was still very groggy, experiencing double vision, and waves of feeling like she was on the verge of passing out again.

“They’re not coming back! They can’t! You said so!” Kaylee balled up her fists and hit the side of the bed in frustration. "The shuttle is destroyed."

Jen reminded herself once again that she was dealing with children. “They can’t get back right now, I didn’t say never. There is always hope, Kaylee. Don’t give up. Your Mom and Dad aren’t giving up, wherever they are, I’m sure of that. Your father can walk to the mining camp and wait there. The command section I know has plenty of air. The Navy will be here, we just need to wait until then.”

Kaylee asked “What is a decaying orbit?”

“Oh, that’s just, uh,” Jen averted her eyes, “it’s a navigation term. It means their section of the ship is in a different orbit now than we are. So, uh, the two pieces of the ship are moving further apart.”

Manny blinked away his own tears, and shot her a look. He knew she was lying. “What are we going to do?”

Jen gave up trying to make her ribs comfortable. If she didn’t breathe too deeply, it was manageable. She coughed again, spitting up blood. One of her lungs must be punctured. “We do what the captain said. When the pirates come aboard, we get out of their way. They take what they want, go away, and we wait for the Navy.”

“No.” Kaylee looked up, her mouth set in a hard line. “Don’t talk to us like we’re children, Jen. When the pirates have what they want, they’re going to kill everybody. They can’t leave witnesses.”

“I, um-” Jen was taken aback.

“You know it’s true,” Kaylee said, standing up and placing her hands on her hips, “they tried to kill our Dad.”

Manny nodded. “We need to slow them down, give the Navy time to get here, right?”

“Kids, I-” Jen realized the ‘kids’ wasn’t the best thing to say at that time. Still, what did it matter what she said? Kaylee was absolutely right. She was responsible for the children’s live now, and the best way to keep them safe was to make sure the pirates never got aboard. “Kaylee, Manny, I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know what will happen. I do know that if the two of you try to fight the pirates, they will hurt you. Besides, I can’t stop them, I don’t have any weapons.” Jen said regretfully.

“Jen, what if-" an idea was forming in Manny's head, "what if we did have a weapon? A big one?”

“Then I’d blast them, Manny.” Jen answered weakly.

He put his arms across his chest and stared her straight in the eye. “I’m serious.” It would have been comical, the twelve year old boy lecturing the veteran starship crewman, if the situation had not been so serious. “Why can’t we ram them? With this part of the ship? We have the engines.”

Jen was taken aback. “Because, Manny, that would be very dangerous. Even if I had the codes to control the engines, they’re shut down. The nav computer is in the command section, and secondary systems like-“ She stopped, her jaw dropped open, and she stared off into space for a moment. Her brain wasn’t working very well. “Manny, you may have a good idea," she said very slowly, thinking it through. "I can’t fire the main engines, but I can control the thrusters from here. We could push ourselves sideways, and knock their little ship around like a ping pong ball. Before we do that, we would need to be somewhere deep inside the ship, someplace safe.”

Kaylee sniffed, and dabbed tears off her cheeks. “What place is safer than here? You told us before, the sickbay has its own power and air.”

Jen looked around. “I guess you’re right.” She bit her lip. “This is going to be dangerous, and I don’t have any authority to put passengers into danger.” The bad guys will likely kill us all anyway, once they’re aboard, she said to herself. “So I’m going to have to deputize you both as starship crew.” Jen had intended the gesture as a way to make sure they did exactly what she told them to, but the two children both got such serious looks on their faces that Jen almost laughed. Her eyes unfocused briefly, and she experienced a fit of dizziness. It would not be long, she knew, before she would not be able to keep her eyes open. “Hold up your right hands. Do you swear to follow my orders to the letter, no fooling, and to perform your duties to the best of your abilities, as crew members of the Universal Transport starship Atlas Challenger?” She used the ship’s full name to lend weight to her words.

“I do.” Kaylee said.

“Me too.” Manny whispered. Starship crewman. He was twelve years old. Wait until the boneheads at school back on Earth heard about this. For a moment, he forgot about their predicament and the danger his parents were in. “What do we do?”

“You know how adults talk down to you sometimes, because you’re children?” Jen saw Kaylee knowingly roll her eyes. “I’m not going to do that, I’m going to tell you the truth, straight out. I don’t know how much longer I can stay awake. Whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it fast. Here’s the plan.”

Kaylee and Manny watched the pirate ship approach through the viewport. With the ship's proximity radar buring only intermittently through the jamming, the children’s eyes were the only accurate way Jen could tell where, and how close, the pirate ship was. Unable to leave sickbay herself, she had sent them to one of the two observation decks, which aboard the transport ship was nothing more than a small compartment with several portholes which provided views in multiple directions. Kaylee reported back that they couldn’t see anything, so Jen had sent them running to the other observation deck. From there, they could see the bottom of the pirate ship, it was approaching slowly, intending to latch onto on cargo pod 4, and Manny saw what he recognized as magnetic grapples. The fact that he recognized the grapples from watching video programs didn’t make his opinion any less valid to Jen. Kaylee pointed the portable laser rangefinder through the porthole at the pirate ship. Jen had shown her how to use it, it was easy. “Jen, it says the range is 178 meters, closing at two meters per second.”

The other ship was already quite close, almost too close. “Good work! Kaylee, Manny, there is going to be a hard bump when we ram the pirates. I want you to go back out into the corridor, run quickly.”

“OK,” Kaylee reported, slightly out of breath, “we’re there. What do we do?”

“Just to your left there are three closets, tall, thin doors that are numbered. Closet number 1 has bins of clothing in it. I need you to drag the bins out to make room, take the clothing out of the bins, then the two of you get into the closet and pack as many clothes around you as you can before you shut the door. You need the clothing as cushions, to protect you when we hit.” Jen’s head was spinning as she spoke. “Can you do that, and hurry?”

“Affirmative!” Manny replied.

They moved as quickly as they could. The bins were heavy, and wedged in tight, it was a struggle to get them out. Kaylee climbed up and grasped the topmost bin, yanking on it. She fell backward, and the bin fell on top of her, bursting open. It was filled with crew uniform work clothes, shirts and pants. She moved to yank on the second bin, when Manny held her arm. “We can get on top there, Kaylee.”

Kaylee studied the closet. With the top bin out, there was just enough room for the two of them. Less room meant less space for them to get banged around. And tracks kept the bins from moving up and down, so they wouldn’t be crushed. “Good idea, up you go.”

Manny climbed up and backed in, then reached down as Kaylee handed a pile of shirts to him. “Hurry, Kaylee!”

She climbed up next to him, wriggling backwards, and bunching up the shirts next to her. Then she reached down and slid the door- “Jen, won’t we be locked in here if I close the door?”

Good thinking, girl, Jen thought to herself. “No, there is an emergency release on the inside, a big orange handle, at the top and bottom, do you see it?”

“Yes, I see it!”

“Good. It will be dark once you close the door, OK?”

“We’ll be OK. The door is closed.”

Jen checked her wristwatch. The pirate ship would have slowed down its approach as it got closer, so that it would be barely moving once it made contact. She wanted to make sure the pirates were close enough so they didn’t have a chance to get out of the way, but far enough so the Ace could build up speed before the collision. She verified that the portable console had positive control of the thrusters, and that the thruster units were still operational. A few more seconds.

The pirate Rene Valjean, AKA ‘Ted Miller’, a criminal wanted by law enforcement authorities on all human-occupied planets, had considered a plan to get aboard the transport by posing as doctors, then take over the ship. He had discarded that idea early on, because he couldn’t be sure the crew wouldn’t be able to regain control remotely, and because he figured the ‘doctors’ would be scanned for weapons in the shuttle bay. His current plan was perfect. Knock out the command section with a low-yield warhead, and then easily deal with one or two remaining crewmen in the cargo section. Just to be sure, destroy the transport’s shuttle, so they couldn’t interfere. Then, dock with the crippled ship, get aboard, find the object, and get away before the Navy figured out something was wrong. Finally, restart freighter’s fusion reactor and set explosive charges there, to make sure there were no witnesses left behind. and not way for anyone to know what the pirates had taken. Easy. So far, the only glitch in the plan was the shuttle crew was alive, which irritated Valjean, but three people stranded on a barren planet in suits that were running out of air was not actually any sort of problem. When their oxygen bottles began running low, the three men might wish they'd died aboard the shuttle. Quickly and painlessly.

Valjean pulled off the collar that had projected the holographic image of ‘Ted Miller’ over his face and altered his voice. Without the holoprojector, Valjean was not at all bland and friendly looking. His longish dark hair matched his dark eyes, although it wasn't his hair that made people frightened of him. There was something feral, predatory, about his eyes, that made even his fellow partners in crime wary of crossing him.

“Aaah.” Valjean made a choking sound as he rubbed his throat. The collar always irritated him. “I hate wearing that damned thing, What are you looking at?”

Taney, the group’s muscular weapons and explosives expert, grinned wide, his white teeth gleaming against his dark skin. “Glad to have you back, Boss. That Ted Miller guy looks like a chump.”

“He’s supposed to be a chump, he makes the other chumps,” Valjean gestured toward the freighter’s cargo section on the Nightengale’s view screen, “feel all warm and fuzzy, puts them off their guard.” Not that it had mattered much, since Nightengale was armed and the freighter was not.

“Dooley, that rust bucket of yours goes first,” Valjean pointed to Dooley’s combat robot, which was resting in a corner, “in case there are any surprises when we force the airlock.” Dooley had bought the combat unit third-hand on the black market, and Valjean didn’t trust it. Combat bots were twitchy, and Dooley wasn’t the best programmer in the Orion Arm. The thing had come close to freezing up in simulations, and it still had a nagging personality disorder left over from whoever the previous owner was. Some idiot had programmed it with a rudimentary, and unhelpful, sense of humor that bordered on disobedience. Dooley couldn’t fix that problem, despite wiping the memory twice.

“Rocko will get the job done, Boss,” Dooley assured Valjean, “I’ll see to it.”

Valjean’s eyes narrowed. Without the robot, he didn’t need Dooley for much. Dooley irritated Valjean, Dooley had been hired for his expertise with computers, but beyond that, Valjean considered him sort of a dim bulb in the brain department, and Dooley looked it, with his boyish, curly red hair, and easy smile. Valjean didn’t trust him. In fact, Valjean figured Dooley would not be alive long, just long enough to be useful. One less to share the money. For right now, Valjean might need ‘Rocko’, which was the idiotic name Dooley called his toy. “You do that. If that thing freezes up, I’ll shoot you both.”

“Thirty meters, Boss.” Becker called out from the pilot’s station. “Slowing to one meter per second.”

Valjean nodded silently. Becker was ex-Navy, a skilled pilot, and good in a fight. He still kept his blonde hair short, in a military style crew cut. Otherwise, he was vain, greedy, untrustworthy. Just the sort Valjean needed. A man with simple motivations is a predictable man. Valjean liked predictable people, they could be manipulated and controlled. Until he didn’t need them any more.

Rocko, who had been motionless but alert, turned toward Dooley, as the pirate mechanic activated it with the remote control. “Rocko, you’re going in first. You see anyone, you blast them, you got that?”

“I go in first, in case someone is shooting at us.”

“That’s right, you’re our combat ready, killing machine, Rocko.” Dooley said, pleased.

“Twenty meters, Boss.” Becker said.

“One question,” Rocko asked, looking Dooley right in the eye. “What’s in it for me?”

“What?! Why, you piece of junk, I should-“ Dooley never finished his thought, because he was drowned out by a shout from Becker.

In Ace’s sickbay, Jen blinked to make her eyes focus again. She was feeling nauseous and having trouble concentrating. The pain in her ribs was so sharp at times that tears flooded her eyes. It was time, now or never. She took extra pleasure in holding up her middle finger, and pressing the Activate key with it.

Ace’s portside thrusters fired, all of them, full on. Such maneuvers were reserved for dire emergencies, to avoid a collision. If the ship’s AI had been online, Jen would not have been able to order the thrusters into such a long full power burn. Thank goodness for small favors, she told herself, as the giant, bulky freighter lurched to starboard. She held onto the remote console with one hand and the bed with her other hand, and braced for impact.

Becker saw the enormous transport ship suddenly looming closer. For a split second, he froze. A collision seemed inevitable. Now THIS, he thought, was the type of thing that damned simulator training really should cover! He shouted for people to hang on, or something like that, and kicked his ship to starboard. No time for whimpy thrusters, he knew, their only chance was to get the ship pointed away and fire the main engines, get out of Dodge pronto. The ship slewed around violently, and he just got the main engine fuel pumps up to full pressure, when everything went black.

Ace smacked the little pirate ship hard, like a bus hitting a bicycle. The impact made both ships shudder, and stove in a hundred meters of cargo pod 4, venting air and cargo into space. Nightengale’s stern was crushed, her main engines destroyed, fuel tanks punctured. The fuel exploded in a brief fireball which enveloped and scorched the rear of the ship, then the fuel ran out of oxygen in the vacuum of space, and the fire went out. The two damaged combatants drifted apart, with Ace’s thrusters popping wildly to steady the ship, and Nightengale spinning, lifeless, looking dead and out of the fight.

CHAPTER 9

“Whoo-hoo!” Schroeder whooped, and punched his fist in the air. He had been watching the pirate ship approach his ship, watching with binoculars through the viewport, feeling helpless. “Ja!”

Gina and Seth exchanged a glance, surprised. ‘Whoo-hoo’? They had never heard Schroeder even come close to a whoop before. “Captain, what’s going on?”

Schroeder kept the binos pressed to the viewport and held up one hand for silence, until the rotation of the command section caused the two ships to fall out of view. He turned to Joy and his crew.  “We have an answer; Jen is alive. And I believe that means your children are being taken care of, Ms. San-, Joy.  Ace just rammed the Nightengale, stove in her whole aft propulsion section!”

Schroeder thought Joy would recognize his announcement as good news, but she had the opposite reaction. “Jen rammed the pirate ship? With my children aboard?

Schroeder moved quickly to reassure her. “Joy, I am certain that Jen made sure they were somewhere safe first. The Ace is so much larger than the pirate ship that it wasn’t a dangerous maneuver for our ship.  Keep in mind that Jen is making the best of a bad situation, she realizes that your children are in much greater danger if the pirates get aboard.”

Gina added “Captain’s right, Joy. Jen’s doing the best she can over there.”

The best Jen could was not very good at all, right then. Jen was unconscious. The collision was not very violent, she hadn’t been flung across the room again, or knocked out. The strain of keeping awake and alert, the loss of blood, her difficulty breathing, being on duty rather than resting, had caught up to her. She slumped in the bed, her arms went slack, and the remote console fell to the deck.

 What saved Valjean and his crew was their being securely strapped into seats for the docking maneuver. The initial shock had been violent, more than the inertial dampening system could compensate for. Power then snapped briefly off, and they lost artificial gravity and all control over the ship, which was spinning wildly. The power came back on after three terrifying seconds. Becker fought to get the ship stabilized, in addition to the spin induced by the collision, they were venting air, fuel and other substances, all of which knocked the ship about.

Once the ship was no longer spinning like a top, a queasy Valjean ordered his crew to assess the damage, quickly, with priority given to making sure the hypercomm jammer was still working. The last thing he needed was for someone aboard the transport to have the opportunity to signal the Navy for help. Valjean checked on that system himself, it had been offline only briefly, while the power was out. Not enough time for a distress call to have been sent out.

“We ain’t going nowhere, least, not in normal space. The main jets are gone, crushed or torn clean off. We lost almost all the fuel, too.” Becker said disgustedly as he wiped his hands on a rag and sat down heavily in the pilot seat. He and Dooley had just returned from checking on the reactor. “Fusion reactor’s still putting out power, and the Jump engines will hold a charge, so we can get out of here.”

“We’re not going anywhere!” Valjean snarled. “Not till we get what we came for.”

“Hey, Boss, in case it slipped your attention, this ship is beat up and out of this fight.” Becker protested.

“So we use our shuttle!” Valjean shouted.

“Uh, bad news on that, boss,” Dooley said reluctantly. It was never a good idea to bring bad news to Valjean. Especially not when the boss was angry. There was, however, no way around it. Nightengale/Isaac Newton was not big enough for an internal shuttle bay, instead, the shuttle attached to the side of the ship. Being outside, it had been vulnerable to flying debris, and it got hit. “The shuttle’s main fuel tank was punctured, it’s out of fuel. And there’s some engine damage.” Seeing the outraged expression on Valjean’s face, Dooley stammered to add “No-no-nothing we can’t fix, b-boss. It’ll take time. And f-fuel.”

“The shuttle uses the same fuel as our thrusters, right?” Valjean snapped.

Becker answered. “Yeah, yeah it does. We can drain thruster fuel, we’ve got plenty. And it’s not like we need it here.”

“How long to fix the shuttle, and refuel?” Valjean demanded of Dooley.

“Uh, I, uh, well, there’s say, three or four hours to fix the shuttle engine, the damaged part is hard to get at, I’ll have to work outside, and remove the engine cowling. Then I patch the fuel tank, and start transferring fuel.” Dooley looked like he’d just volunteered to kiss a cobra. Transfer highly volatile thruster fuel? With what? He would think of something. While he fixed the engine.

Valjean shook his head. “No, you’ll patch the fuel tank first, and transfer fuel while you work on the engine.”

Dooley’s face went white. Becker spoke up for him. “Whoa, whoa, hold it, boss. Dooley’s right on this one. This fuel is nasty stuff. You do not want to be working on the engines while you’re transferring fuel. One spark, and we could lose the shuttle, and this ship.”

Valjean was a realist. He scowled at Becker, then nodded. “All right, damn it. How long until the shuttle is ready?”

Dooley swallowed hard. He was, right at that moment, truly regretting his chosen line of work. “Six hours, maybe more? Boss, I know! I can’t go any faster without making it worse.”

“Then you’d better get your ass moving! Becker, we still have functioning thrusters on this ship, right? And plenty of fuel for them, right?”

“Yeah.” Becker admitted. “Even if we fill the shuttle’s tank, we’ve got plenty.” What was the boss getting at?

“Then burn the thrusters, and keep us from drifting further away!” Valjean ordered. Did no one else among his crew have an ounce of imagination or initiative? “I don’t want that damned freighter getting out of our sight.”

Becker opened his mouth to argue, then thought better about it. Man wants to waste thruster fuel, that’s his business. The retro thrusters in the nose were undamaged, Becker got the ship pointed in the right direction, then fired the thrusters. “That’ll take time. I’ll have to fire them in bursts, let them cool down. They’re not designed for continuous use. And Dooley, I’ll let you know when I’m firing thrusters, so as you can hang on tight. What next?”

“What next is I’m thinking about it!” Valjean knew that indecision was not a useful leadership trait, especially not in the leader of a criminal gang. Indecision was weakness. Weakness could be fatal. “Bring us to within a kilometer, and hold us there.”

“What if they try to ram us again, Boss?” Dooley asked. The idea of being outside, working on the engines, while Becker flew the ship backwards by nose thrusters, had him just about wetting his pants.

“They won’t! Use your head for a change. If they could fire their main engines, they would have already. One klick is a safe distance, if they try to move that big tub again with thrusters, we’ll have plenty of time to get out of the way.” Valjean pulled out his gun, extracted the powercell, checked the energy charge, and slapped it back together. “We’ll use our shuttle to get aboard, it’s faster and more agile, so if they fire their thrusters again, we’ll be ready.”

That made sense to Becker. Nightengale’s shuttle was a spaceplane-type shuttle, small, light and highly maneuverable. “We can do that. I can clamp on with the shuttle easier than I could flying this thing. Ten klicks is a short flight for the shuttle.” He suggested.

“Bring us within one kilometer anyway, I want to be close, in case of trouble.”

“Jen, Jen, wake up!” Manny whispered, while gently tugging on the woman’s hand. He turned to his older sister for comfort, something he would never have done before the pirates attacked. “Kaylee, is she going to be all right?”

Kaylee frowned. After the collision, Jen had not responded to Kaylee’s calls on the radio. The children had hurried back to sickbay, where they found Jen unresponsive. They figured she had just been asleep. That was hours ago. Kaylee lifted the woman’s right arm and let it flop back on the bed. Jen groaned and her eyelids fluttered, as if she were dreaming. “She’s just asleep, see. This stabilizer thingy may have drugged her.”

“What do we do now?”

Kaylee wasn’t sure she liked being in charge, liked her normally annoying little brother looking up to her. “Jen will wake up soon. We can wait here, if we’re quiet.”

“But Kaylee, what if the pirates come back?”

Kaylee had no idea what to do if that happened. “Jen will know what to do. You’ll see. She’ll wake up, and she’ll know what to do.”

It was pitch black, dark as the inside of a barrel. Ares didn’t have a moon to reflect starlight, as soon as the red sun dropped below the horizon, they were on their own, with only Rick’s small light to guide them. The thin atmosphere didn’t have many clouds, so they did have starlight above them, it made for nice night scenery, but was useless for determining where to put their feet. Night time also brought rapidly dropping temperatures, which created dust storms, requiring the three men to huddle in the shelter of a large rock for over an hour, until the atmosphere settled down for the night.

When they resumed walking, Rick led the way, with Nelson to his left and Sam to the right. Rick held the light high above his head, pointing it down to illuminate as wide an area as possible. The beam of light made for interesting shadows, they carefully stepped over rocks that didn’t exist, and stumbled over real rocks they didn’t see. Nelson reported hopefully that, at their northern latitude, and time of Ares’ year, the night was less than six hours long.

What the little light did not do was allow them to see far enough ahead to avoid serious obstacles. They came to the lip of a crater or canyon, and had no idea whether they should go down, or go around. Twice they walked down into a canyon, only to find it deep and steep enough that they turned around, walked back up, and made their way around. After four hours of night walking, they gave up. They had reached a canyon that was too steep to walk down, and apparently, too wide, with too many connecting canyons, to walk around. Nelson called a halt for the remainder of the night. They lay down in the dust as best they could, got comfortable, and tried to rest. Nobody slept. Other than the brief message blip they’d received hours ago, there had been no word from Ace. Nelson pointed out that they weren’t picking up any radio transmissions at all, not even from the bad guys, which he took to mean that the bad guys were still jamming all signals. Which meant Ace was still up there, with people aboard, and still posed somewhat of a threat to the bad guys.

Rick was feeling pessimistic, sitting there in the dark, breathing many-times recycled air. No radio signals could also mean, he didn’t say aloud, that Ace was in shattered pieces, and the bad guys had gotten what they wanted and were lightyears away by now. Why the hell had he dragged his family all the way out here? His own selfish reasons? His need to poke around in the ruins of ancient alien cities? Kaylee hadn’t wanted to go, Manny was too young to understand what he was giving up, what the risks were. Now the risk-

No. That kind of thinking wasn’t useful to anyone. Going to Valhalla would have been great for the family, great for the children, even Kaylee. It wasn’t supposed to be risky! The Atlas Challenger had been operating for thirty years with no incidents. There had not been a fatality on a civilian starship in decades. If anything, travel between the stars was boring, not risky. Driving in L.A. was more dangerous.

“That last pass slowed us down another 287 kph, Captain. The nav system says the next orbit, and we’re going on in.” Seth reported gloomily.

 “Ninety minutes, then.” Schroeder said impassively. How could he act as Captain for an unpowered ship?

“Captain?” Gina inquired, her voice uncertain.

“I wish there were something we could do.” Schroeder said, shaking his head.

“What about the thrusters? Can’t we use them?” Joy asked.

Schroeder opened his mouth, then quickly shut it. Clearly, he was surprised by such an ignorant question. Also clearly, he refrained from saying so. His lone passenger looked mildly ridiculous, hanging from the wall with her feet tucked under a handhold, her blonde hair in the zero gravity floating all around her face. Trying not to let a condescending tone creep into his voice, he responded “No. These thrusters we have are just canisters of compressed gas, with a very limited supply. Seth used up most of that supply in stabilizing our spin. We simply don’t have any propulsion in the command section, nothing strong enough to lift our orbit.”

Joy nodded, looked down at the deck, then abruptly raised her head said “Wait, sure we do. You just said it. Compressed gas.”

Schroeder was torn between being irritated at the conversation, and realizing he didn’t have anything important to be doing at the moment. He was the captain, he had gotten his passengers into this situation. He could at least lend Joy a sympathetic ear for her questions. “How so?” He asked curtly, with one eye looking out the porthole.

“You said we have plenty of air, over a week’s supply, right? We can vent some of that air overboard.” Before Schroeder could protest, Joy took out a black marker and drew a diagram on the blank bulkhead wall. “We drill a hole through the hull of the command section, someplace along our center of gravity, and we cement a pipe into that hole, a pipe with a cap on the inner end. Then we pump up the air pressure in that compartment, and release the cap. The air will vent out the pipe, then we cap it again, pump up the air, and do it again, and again, until we boost our orbit.” She stared at her diagram. “That should work. But- will it be enough?” She asked, to herself.

“I’m not sure-“ Schroeder started to say, before Seth interrupted.

“Captain, that might work!” Seth said excitedly. “We don’t need a huge delta Vee to stop us from falling out of orbit, the right push, at the right time, may be just enough. At least it will buy us some time before we fall. I’ll need to figure in the diameter of the pipe, the volume of the compartment, the max pressure we can get the compartment up to, let’s see, the thrust will decrease as the air vents out…” Seth pulled himself down into his chair and buckled his seat belt in order to get to work.

“Captain Schroeder?” Joy said, waiting expectantly.

It was a good idea. The only one they had, and Schroeder knew it as soon as he saw Joy’s diagram. He turned abruptly to his crew. “Seth, modify your navigation program for this, we can input the variables later. I will determine where to install the pipe, and calculate how much air we can afford to lose. Gina, help Joy find the supplies we need, a pipe, something to drill a hole with, and something we can use as a sealant, all that. Well? Let’s get moving, mach schnell! We are supposed to be a starship crew, we can’t have our passengers do all the thinking for us, eh?”

CHAPTER 10

Jen did wake up, after five hours. The children helped her walk unsteadily over to the bathroom, then got her a glass of orange juice when she managed to stumble back into the bed. Manny found several boxes of candy bars in a cabinet, Jen tried to eat one, but didn’t have the energy to eat. She fell back asleep. Although she was once again unconscious, Manny now had confidence the woman would be all right eventually. Having smacked the pirate ship aside, Jen was now his hero twice over.

Manny kept his vigil while sitting on the floor next to Jen’s bed. Kaylee was laying atop blankets on the floor, trying to rest, and not sleeping a wink. “Kaylee, are you awake?” He whispered.

“Yeah.” She answered quietly.

“I put a box of candy bars in your back pack.”

“Thanks, Manny.” She rolled over on her front and turned to face her brother.

“Do you wish we never left Earth?” Kaylee asked, after a long pause.

“Kinda.”

“Me too.”

“Mom and Dad really wanted to go. I guess I, I’m glad we went with them. That they didn’t stay on Earth just because of us.”

“I guess.”

“Kaylee, I’m sorry I was mean to you. About your music, and stuff.”

“It’s OK. It’s just music. I’m sorry I treated you like, you know, a little kid sometimes.”

Manny shrugged. “It’s OK. I know sometimes I’m a bonehead.”

That brought a laugh from Kaylee. “I wish we knew where the pirate ship is. Or, I wish we could talk to Mom or Dad.” During the brief time Jen had been awake, she had checked the radio, it was still being jammed. So the pirate ship was still out there, somewhere.

“We’re down to one oxygen bottle left, captain.” Seth reported. “Specifically, 58% of one canister.”

“The orbit?” Schroeder inquired.

Seth looked at his navigation board. “A lot better than it was. We have over four hours, now. That’s an estimate.”

“Of course. In that case, that’s enough. Excellent work, everyone. And Ms. Sanchez, we are in your debt.” He tried, and failed, to stifle a yawn. Everyone was exhausted from the hours of intense work..

Joy’s basic idea to boost their orbit had worked, with modifications by the crew. They drilled a hole through a compartment, and stuck a pipe through the hull. Instead of pressurizing the entire compartment, the crew had connected the pipe to the oxygen supply directly. Seth had argued that change in plans would allow them to control the flow of ‘propellant’, making it work like a real rocket.

Using their new ‘rocket engine’ had been slow and cumbersome, and Seth had been forced to use up almost all of their thruster fuel supply to keep the command section from spinning out of control.

There was no celebration in the command section after they’d boosted their orbit. Everyone inside knew that, unless the Navy came to rescue them, soon, they would still fall into the atmosphere soon.

Sam shook Rick’s shoulder. “Hey, Rick, sun’s coming up. Time to go, man.”

“Great,” Rick responded as he rode to his feet, “what’s for breakfast?” It was still mostly dark, with a pink line on the horizon, just enough to see by.

“Lukewarm water and glucose solution, if you’ve got any left in your helmet tube, professor.” Nelson said. The sky was completely clear, no clouds at all. As the three men stood and stretched cramped muscles, the dull red disk of Ares’ star rose quickly above the horizon. “Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” Nelson exploded. “Will you look at that?”

The canyon, which they had struggled for so long to walk around during the night, ended less than a half kilometer to the south. And, on the other rim, there was a man-made structure, a small, white and silver hut.

“The promised land!” Sam shouted.

“The promised land?” Rick asked. “You’ve got small dreams there, Sam.”

“Hey, having low standards is what gets me through life. Right now, any place that has sweet Oh Two to breathe is paradise for me.” Sam had the binos. “Looks like a standalone structure, maybe a shelter where survey teams can take a break?”

Nelson looked skeptical. “I don’t know, Sam, that looks too small to be a shelter, and the miners usually take R&R inside their crawlers. We’ll check it out. Ready, Rick?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be. We pick up any radio signals last night?”

“Negative, nothing. Must be still jamming us.” Nelson looked to the sky for an answer. “Where the hell is the damned Navy, anyhow?”

 “What was that?” Kaylee asked as she scrambled to her feet. She hadn’t realized that she’d fallen asleep.

“I don’t know.” Manny answered, rubbing sleep from his eyes. They had both heard a faint, far-away, clanging sound. A sound transmitted through the hull. There it was again. Then, silence.

“Jen?” Kaylee said, as the woman stirred in her sickbay bed.

“I heard it too.” Jen said in a slurred voice. “I’m sorry, kids, I think the pirates may be back.” She picked up her remote console and activated it. There was nothing on the radar. Radio signals were still being jammed. She couldn’t see any-

There it was. Someone had accessed an airlock, gotten into the ship. And they were now plugged into Ace’s computer, searching the cargo manifest database, searching for something.

“They’re aboard the ship.” Jen said quietly. “I can see they’re accessing the computer, the cargo manifest records. Huh...” Her head nodded, and her eyes became unfocused.

“Jen, Jen, wake up.” Kaylee said gently, shaking the woman’s shoulder.

“Oh, I’m so tired. Where was I? Oh, the manifest.” Briefly, Jen was able to concentrate, the medical monitor was still pumping drugs into her blood, having decided on its own that resting was best for her. What computer records were the pirates accessing? “Hey, kids, I know that the pirates are looking for. It’s one of those boxes of alien stuff we took aboard at Oceania. Cargo pod 1, deck 3, section D, bin number 14F.” She read the data off automatically, mentally picturing where that was in the cavernous cargo pod. “The pirates have a long way to walk, they docked on almost the opposite side of the ship, cargo pod 3.”

“Can we stop them?” Manny asked. “Cut the gravity, or let the air out?”

Jen shook her head just the tiniest bit. “Not with the ship’s AI down, everything like that has reverted to local controls, and the pirates are bypassing those.” She could see the pirates had already opened one of the bulkhead doors which led into cargo pod 3. “I’m sorry.” Her eyes rolled back and her head flopped on the pillow.

“Jen, Jen.” Kayle prodded again, this time it took much longer to get Jen’s attention.

“Sorry, kids, I’m fading again.”

Kaylee thought fast. The pirates were aboard the ship. Any plan they came up with had to start with the fact that they could no longer stop the pirates from getting into the cargo bays. The pirates were going to take what they wanted- “Jen, you need to give us your codes, the ones that make this card work.” She held up the access card, which she had removed from the chain around Jen’s neck.

“What are you doing with that? Give it to me.” Jen said weakly, and tried to lift her hand, but she didn’t have the strength.

“You want us to hide, right? We need your card to unlock doors, find places to hide. We don’t know where the pirates will be.” Kaylee said, with a serious look on her face.

“Hide? Yes, I need to hide you somewhere.”

“Jen, you can’t hide us. You’re sick, you need to rest. Give me the code, please.”

Her brother caught on. “Please, Jen, I’m scared.” He said, his lower lip quivering. “I want to hide somewhere the pirates will never find me.”

Only one of Jen’s eyes was working, through a blur she turned toward Manny, who looked like he was about to cry. “All right, don’t hide in any of the passenger cabins, that’s the first place they will look. Go to cargo pod 2, and find someplace quiet, then turn off the lights. Stay there until somebody comes for you.”

“The code?” Kaylee prompted once more.

“Oh, the code. It’s Cozumel43, only the ‘O’ in Cozumel is a zero, and the “L” is a one. C-zero-z-u-m-e-one-four-three, got it? My favorite place to vacation, when I was your age.”

“That’s it?” Manny said, sounding disappointed. “I thought the code would be more complicated.”

“This isn’t a warship, Manny, it’s just a … a transport.”

“Jen, we’re going to go now, is there anything we can do for you?” Kaylee asked., while looking around the sickbay.

“Just let me rest. I’m so tired. And hide, hide someplace safe. Hurry.” Her voice was just a whisper.

“We will. There’s a big bottle of orange juice on the table next to the bed, if you get thirsty. Come on Manny, let’s go.” Kaylee tucked the access card in her pocket.

Manny blinked away a tear. “Thank you, Jen, we’ll be back. I promise.”

“I know you will.” Jen said, and let her head fall into the pillow. In a moment, she was asleep again.

Kaylee led her brother into the main sickbay compartment, then closed and locked the door to the compartment Jen was in. She rummaged through a cabinet, looking for anything useful. Another drawer held hyposyringes, plus bottles labeled as sedatives. Kaylee knew what a sedative was, these had all kinds of warning labels stating how strong the particular substance was. She added several hyposyringes and sedative bottles to her backpack. Before they left, she turned off all the lights. Anyone poking their head in would, she hoped, think the sickbay was unoccupied.

“We got the card!” Manny said excitedly, when they were in the corridor.

Kaylee stared at her brother, who didn’t look at all like he had just been on the verge of crying. “You big faker!” She said accusingly.

Manny winked. “It works with Mom.” He said. “Where are we going?”

Kaylee held up the card and studied it. It was obviously well-used, the logo was scuffed and only partially readable, the electrical contacts on one end were worn and shiny. It didn’t matter, as long as it worked. “We're going to cargo pod 1, deck 3, section D, bin number 14F,” she recited from memory, she wasn't ever going to forget that address. “That’s where the alien thing is, the thing the pirates want. We’re going to get it first, and then we’re going to make the pirates rescue Mom and Dad, or we’ll smash it.”

“Yeah!" Manny shouted. "But, I thought we were going to hide?”

Kaylee shook her head angrily. “Forget that. I’m not hiding in a closet while Mom and Dad need us. Are you with me?”

Manny tugged the straps of his backpack tight, and held up both thumbs, shaking only slightly. “Let’s go.”

“Okay, we’re here. How do we get in?” Nelson asked, staring at the door of the hut. Like everything else on the surface of the planet, it had a fine coating of red dust.

Sam pounded on the door, leaving pink smudges on the surface. They had walked all this way, and couldn’t get inside. “Who puts a lock on a door way out here? And what kind of moron actually locks it?”

Rick studied the door and the lock. “I’ll bet the lock is automatic, and the door is intended to keep the local wildlife out. We happen to be on a planet with no indigenous life, but this structure is probably a standard model that comes with a lock.” He bent down and looked more closely at the door. “The hinges are recessed here, if we can get the cover off, we can maybe pop the hinges, get the door open.”

“Yeah. Yeah, good idea, Rick.” Sam looked at the plate covering the hinge. “Let’s see what kind of tools you have in that bag, huh?”

Sam had to improvise with Rick’s small kit of tools, so the task took him fifteen minutes to get the door open far enough that they could look inside. Sam shone Rick’s light around. “Nada. Damn! It’s just a cover protecting the top of a survey well they drilled. No life support at all.”

“At least we know what direction the main camp is.” Nelson said as he helped Sam stand up and brush the dirt off his suit. “Look at all those crawler tracks, they all go in one direction.”

“The Yellow Brick Road.” Rick said quietly.

“Huh?”

“It’s a story, a video, a real old one, that my daughter used to like. There was a road lined with bricks made out of gold, it led to, well, kind of your promised land, Sam.”

“Then let’s get walking, man, we don’t have all day. This here is more like the Red Dust Road.”

“This says it’s section D.” Manny pointed to the large orange letter painted on the bulkhead door in front of them. The paint was discolored and scratched, it probably had not been repainted in the thirty years since the ship was put into service.

Kaylee opened her mouth to make a smart remark to her brother, something along the lines of what a genius he was, that he could read a two-meter high letter painted on a door. She looked at him instead. Two years younger than her, shorter, smaller. A pain in the neck. They had little in common, other than having the same parents and living in the same house. She remembered back when he was cute, toddling around the house, happy to play tea party with his big sister. Then he developed his own personality, and became a general pain in the neck. Now she was responsible for him. “Section D.” She said simply. “Let’s get this door open.” She inserted the card, then glanced up at the status panel to make sure the other side of the door was pressurized, remembering Jen’s safety lecture. With Jen’s code entered, the door cracked open and slid aside.

Jen had only once taken them to this particular area of the ship, it looked like any other cargo compartment, a tall, dimly lighted space lined with grey cabinets on both sides, with a wide center aisle. Cargo that wasn’t in its own storage container was held in compartments like this.

“No pirates.” Manny whispered.

“What?” Kaylee whispered back nervously.

“We got here first, the pirates aren’t here.”

“Oh, right. Let’s find the thing.” Kaylee walked down the right side, Manny took the left, until they realized the even numbered cabinets were on the right. Manny ran ahead, and pointed to 14D. “Here, Kaylee!” he shouted excitedly.

“Shhh! Don’t shout. The pirates could be right behind us.” The small cabinet wasn’t locked, she pulled it open. Inside was an unimpressive, dull metallic silver box. Kaylee pulled it out, and set it down on the deck. She was about to close the cabinet, when Manny stopped her. “No, Kaylee! Take a box out of another cabinet, and put it in there. The pirates will think they found what they want, and give us time to hide somewhere.”

Kaylee’s mouth dropped open. A smart idea from her little brother? “Good idea, Manny.” She looked through three other cabinets, until she found a similar box, put that box into cabinet 14D, then closed all the cabinet doors. “Let’s go.”

Manny looked at her, puzzled. “You don’t want to open the box, see what it is?”

“No, let’s find someplace to hide, then we can open it.” She added it to her backpack, it made a square bulge. Moving quickly, they walked back through the bulkhead door, and Kaylee closed it behind them. Where to next? The pirate shuttle was, Jen said, docked on pod 3. They would go to pod 2. They had been there before with Jen. “I know where to go, follow me.”

The three men tramped along the road, trying to stay in the crawler tracks, where the soil was compressed, and kicked up less dust when they stepped on it. Their legs were all red, above the knees, their e-suits were pink.

Sam brushed dust off the face of the clock on his left wrist. It smeared, obscuring the numbers. “Damn this soil!”

“Regolith.” Rick said.

“Huh?”

“Regolith. Soil has organisms living in it, this doesn’t, so it’s called regolith. Like the surface of the moon.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.” Sam shrugged.

“It’s completely useless trivia.” Rick sighed. “I’ve got a million of them. Still, I wonder why this planet doesn’t have any life? It’s almost the same size as Earth, and this star isn’t that much hotter than the sun.”

“I actually know the answer to that one.” Nelson answered, without enthusiasm. One foot in front of the other, left foot, right foot, all the way to the mining camp, unseen somewhere ahead of them. How far? “I read somewhere, another star passed through this system, something like two billion years ago. Boiled off the water here before oceans could form, stripped off most of the atmosphere, disrupted the orbits, left this red, dusty rock.” He checked his oxygen supply and frowned. “That’s my useless fact for the day. What I really want to know is, how far to the mining camp?”

“Section D!” Dooley shouted, gesturing with his gun.

“Keep your voice down.” Valjean barked. “D, really? You must be a genius. Did you figure that out all on your own, or did your tinman help you? Get the door open.”

Dooley stifled a reply. He walked up to the access panel, flipped it up, inserted his card, and plugged a cable from his notepad over the protruding end of the card. “Just a minute, Boss.” The notepad cracked the simple security code quickly, and the bulkhead door slid open. “Transport ship,” Dooley said disapprovingly, “their security sucks.” He ducked his head in, then gestured for Rocko to enter first. The compartment was empty. “There’s 14D.” He pointed, and hurried ahead.

“Wait!” Valjean shouted. “Nobody touches it.” Holstering his gun, he pulled the cabinet open, and extracted the box. He turned it over, checking that the Customs seal attached at Oceania was still intact. It was. He tore the seal, opened the box, and extracted the object.

It didn’t look like much, encased in a plastic bag, it was a dark green, corroded piece of what looked like a circuit board with a small, metallic cylinder attached to one end. Valjean held it up to the light, smiled, and let it drop to the deck. He crushed it under his foot.

“Boss!” Taney exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

“This isn’t it, you idiot!” Valjean snarled. “Somebody got here first, and switched containers. Look at the serial number on the box, this isn’t the one we want!”

The three pirates frantically tore open cabinets, looking for the right box, scattering boxes on the deck. When half the cabinets had been searched, Dooley paused, his right hand on the handle of a cabinet.

“What are doing, sleeping? Keep looking!” Valjean ordered angrily.

“I will, Boss, there’s a better way to do this. This ship is mostly automated, right? She’s only got a crew of seven. To load and unload the cargo, they use robot pallets. Those pallets can only work if each box has a radio ID tag, so the pallets know where everything is supposed to go.”

“Your point?” Valjean asked impatiently.

“As long as the thing we want is still in the box, I can find it, track the box’s radio ID tag through the ship’s computer.”

Valjean rolled his eyes, and snapped “Why didn’t you say that before? Get on it!”

“Yes, Boss.” Dooley grinned, and walked over to plug his handheld notepad computer into the wall panel. Valjean occupied himself by kicking boxes open and stomping on the contents, until Dooley shouted “Got it! It’s in cargo pod 2, deck 1, section A. No, now it’s in section B. Must be moving.”

“How much control do you have over ship functions with that gizmo? Can you turn off power and gravity to that section, let the air out?” Valjean suggested. They were already way behind schedule. Eventually, that Navy frigate would get suspicious and come to investigate.

“No, I don’t have the codes for higher-level functions like that, this tub does have some security. If I had enough time, I could probably crack the codes, but we’re talking days, not minutes.”

The trek to the hut, and the effort to open the door, had been, the three shuttle survivors thought, useless for them, but that’s all. They were wrong. It had been useful to someone. Forcing the door open had set off an alarm at the main settlement, an alarm being monitored by the one man the pirates had left behind after they took over the mining camp. His name was Seamus MacGonagal. Nobody called him Seamus anymore, not if they wanted to keep all their teeth. They called him Mac. Tall, broad-shouldered, with crew-cut red hair and pale grey eyes, he was hard man and looked it. Nobody messed with Mac, was his own personal motto. In truth, he was a small time criminal, a punk, mostly burglary, sometimes he worked as muscle for shakedowns and extortion, but he preferred to work on his own. Valjean and he went back aways, had done time in the same prison, later Mac had worked with his current boss on an electronics theft that turned out to be just as profitable as Valjean said it was. So when Valjean called on short notice for this job, a big score, Mac had said yes. They had arrived at the mining camp, claiming to be company inspectors, and had quickly seized control and shut down communications. It was Mac’s voice that was heard on the distress call, that is, a digitally altered version of Mac’s voice. Then the other pirates had got back into their shuttle and flown away, leaving Mac behind to mind the store, was the way Valjean had said it.

Now Mac was worried. Things had not gone according to plan. That was not how working with Valjean was supposed to be. The Nightengale had been damaged. The freighter’s shuttle had been shot down, but the crew apparently survived. That crew must have walked through the night, because they had just broken into a hut only a few kilometers from the mining base.

Mac’s problem was that the base was scattered all over the plateau they were on, with dozens of buildings. The miners were held prisoner in three of the buildings, although the only thing keeping the miners locked up was that the pirates had taken away their environment suits, so they had no way to go outside. And the pirates had used laser cutters to slice through the walkway tubes which connected the buildings, letting the air out. The shuttle crew could still cause trouble, they could get into any of the buildings, arm themselves with equipment like laser cutters, they could commandeer a crawler, they might even manage to free some of the miners, and then all hell would break loose. Mac needed to prevent that from happening. He knew that if the miners were free, Valjean would not be dropping down in a shuttle to pick up Mac before the Nightengale departed.

When Mac got the warning signal from the hut, he knew Valjean would expect him to handle the situation by himself; Mac would go outside, find the shuttle crew, and finish the job the missile had started. Mac checked the map, there was a route, almost a road, between the dome and the camp, it was frequently traveled by crawlers. The shuttle crew would, logically, be walking down that road. Mac debated, in his slow way, whether to go out in a crawler himself, until he decided that would just raise a cloud of red dust, and alert the shuttle crew that he was coming. He would go out on foot. Go out hunting.

CHAPTER 11

“Here.” Kaylee announced as they entered a cavernous cargo bay, lined on both sides twenty meters high with large boxes and crates, and stretching back, Kaylee didn’t know how far. Longer than a soccer field, she thought. Much longer. “This where we will hide, there’s plenty of places to hide in here.”

“Yeah, but, Kaylee, there’s only two ways in or out, the two big doors at the ends.” Manny protested. “We could be trapped here.”

Kaylee’s lips curled up in a sly smile. “No, there are other ways to escape from here if we need to. Remember when we came here with Jen, and she had a problem with a sensor-“

Manny nodded. “An oxygen sensor, I remember! She had to go into a maintenance tube, and she said they go sideways between sections. Yeah, Kaylee.” He looked admiringly at his big sister.

Kaylee was pretty proud of herself. She had this all thought through, the whole plan. “Lock that big door behind us, then run ahead and lock the other one. I’ll find the hatches that lead to the maintenance tubes.”

By the time Manny came back to report that he had locked both doors as best he could, Kaylee had located both access tube hatches. She decided not to open either hatch, in case that would set off some sort of alarm, she remembered Jen saying something like that. So that they could find the hatches quickly if they needed to, she borrowed Manny’s black marker and drew an 'X' on the crates near the hatches. She was quite proud of herself for thinking ahead like that. The pirates wouldn’t know what the 'X' was for.

“Now what do we do”? Manny asked as he tucked the marker away in his backpack.

“Now, we negotiate.” She had seen this in a video. That story had worked out well for the hero. Except for all the shooting.

“Isn’t there a faster way to get there?” Valjean asked angrily, as Dooley stopped to plug his keycard into an access panel to force yet another door open. It was slow, too slow. Every door they came to was locked with a code, Dooley had to crack the encryption before he could control the door.

“Boss, I told you, we only have rough schematics of this ship, a lot of the time I have to guess how to get from one section to another. These cargo pods get modified all the time, those plans you bought are really old,” he added accusingly.

 Valjean didn’t like excuses, even if Dooley was right. The schematics of Atlas Challenger that Valjean had bought were public documents, there was nothing underhanded about it. To get a more recent plan of the ship would have required breaking into Universal Transport’s computers, or, more likely, bribing someone in the company to do it for him. There hadn’t been time before they left Earth, and Valjean had not wanted to risk drawing any attention to the little-noticed transport ship. It was a risk, he knew, and that fact that he was unhappy with his decision didn’t mean he couldn’t make Dooley pay for it anyway. Before Valjean could insult Dooley again, the pirate computer expert shouted triumphantly as the door cracked open and slid aside. Dooley took a quick glance into the next compartment, grinned, and said “Looks clear, boss.”

Valjean shot a look of annoyance at Dooley’s back as the pirate company jogged the length of the compartment, where they again stopped for Dooley to work on opening yet another door. Without Dooley, they wouldn’t even have gotten the ship’s airlock open. He needed Dooley.

For now.

At the end of that compartment, the pirates halted again for Dooley to work his magic and open the door. “Hey, boss, I think we’re in luck.” Dooley called out while his notepad worked to override the door controls. “They’ve stopped moving, whoever has the box. It’s been in the same place now for ten minutes.”

“How far?” Valjean asked.

“Another three doors after this one, they’re on this deck.”

“You’re sure you know which compartment they’re in?” Valjean’s question included a veiled threat of bad consequences for Dooley if he was wrong.

Dooley hesitated. “I know which compartment the box is in. Somebody brought the box there. I can’t tell if people are still with the box, or how many people, boss.” He answered defensively. He didn’t add or if the thing we want is still in the box. With Valjean, Dooley had learned not to push his luck.

“We’re going to hit that compartment from both ends, at the same time.” Valjean decided. “I don’t want them running out the other door as we come in.” He looked at the door controls. “Can you unlock the door, but not open it? And without people inside knowing?”

Dooley considered that for a moment. “Unlock, sure, once it’s unlocked anybody can open the door by pressing this button.” He pointed to a large button on the door panel. “When it’s unlocked, though, the status light changes from red to green, on both sides of the door, I can't change that. If anyone’s watching, they’ll know I unlocked it.”

That response didn’t please Valjean.

“I know what you’re thinking, boss. I unlock one door, you wait there while I unlock the door at the other end, then we both go in at the same time? The problem is, to get to the other door, I’ll need to go through the compartment next to the one we want, and that means I’ll need to unlock both of those doors. That takes time.” Dooley’s voice took on a pleading tone. “I’m doing the best I can, boss, I don’t think anybody else could do this faster.” As he spoke, his notepad unlocked the door they were standing in front of. Perfect timing.

“Wait!” Valjean hissed. The pirates took up positions on either side of the door; Dooley and Rocko to the left, Valjean and Taney to the right, weapons ready, in a maneuver they’d done at each door. At a silent signal from Valjean, Dooley pressed the button to open the door. As it slid open, Rocko walked stiffly forward, into the next compartment. He wasn’t met with a hail of weapons fire. The robot scanned the compartment with infrared sensors. “The compartment is clear.” It announced.

The pirates moved forward warily, Rocko could only see line-of-sight, if a person were hiding behind a crate, the robot couldn’t see them. They made their way slowly down the long, gloomy and silent compartment, until the reached the large door at the opposite end, where Dooley silently went back to work on unlocking it.

Valjean had used the time to think up a plan. “Here’s what we’re going to do. When we get to the compartment, we go through the compartment next to it, then Taney will wait there with me. You and your tinman go back and unlock the door on this end, and you send your robot in. Whoever has the box will come out the other door, where I’ll be waiting for them.”

“That’s a good plan.” Dooley said, without needing to add any flattery. That, he thought, is why Valjean is the Boss.

“Damn right.” Valjean said, a smirk of satisfaction on his face. He checked his watch. Way behind the original schedule, still plenty of time. The Navy wasn’t showing up any time soon. “Don’t just stand there, get that door open!”

There was an odd metallic, crackling sound, loud, followed by a screech. The three humans crouched down, backs to the bulkhead or a crate, with the combat robot standing tall and sweeping the compartment with its sensors. “What the hell was that?” Dooley whispered.

Valjean made a chopping motion with his free hand, for Dooley to keep his mouth shut. They waited.

The sound repeated, and all four of them looked up at the speaker, high on the bulkhead. “-this thing on?” They heard. It sounded like a girl’s voice.

There were scratching sounds, like something bumping into and dragging across a microphone, then more confusing voices. “-me that, Kaylee. I can fix-“ This voice sounded like a child, a young boy or girl.

Dooley looked at Valjean and saw the same total astonishment on his boss’s face. Valjean angrily motioned for silence again.

“SCREEEECH- OK, OK, I’ve got it. Here.” The boy’s voice boomed out of the speaker, echoing in the compartment.

Someone cleared their throat over the intercom, then, “Attention, pirates! This is-“ there was whispering, then, “none of your business who this is. You listen to me. We’ve got the thing, the thing you want. We got it first! If you don’t do what I say, we’ll smash it, I swear I will!”

Taney, not normally a talkative man, couldn’t control his reaction. “What the hell?” He blurted out.

“Children?” Dooley added.

“Shut up!” Valjean snarled, although he sounded as surprised as his two minions. A passenger manifest! He should have made the effort to get the ship’s passenger manifest! Valjean mentally kicked himself for being uncharacteristically sloppy. The beauty of his plan, to board the freighter between Oceania and Valhalla, was that Oceania was the last scheduled stop for passengers! Who the hell was still aboard the ship? He didn’t know. Valjean swallowed hard. For all he knew, the ship was bringing a company security team to Valhalla, former Colonial Marines. Unlikely, but possible, and if so, he was screwed. No way was his team going to tangle with Marines.

The voice, the voice that Valjean had figured to belong to a young girl, continued. “You need to bring my, the crew people, you need to bring the people in the shuttle, the people that were in the shuttle, and the people in the-“ there was more unintelligible whispering in the background, “the command section, them also, you need to bring all those people here, safely. If you do that, we’ll give you this thing. I don’t care about the thing, you can have it.” There was a pause, at the end of the message, the speaker had appeared to run out of breath. “I’ll give you, two hours, two hours, to bring all those people on board this ship, safe, or I smash the thing. And don’t try to fool us! Use the intercom, and tell me yes, or no.”

Kaylee pressed the microphone to her stomach to muffle it, her heart was racing so fast she could feel it pounding in her ears. “Is it off?” She whispered.

Manny showed her the switch, in the Off position. “Yes. That was good, Kaylee.”

Kaylee set the microphone down on top of a crate. “I hope so.” To herself, she’d sounded like an idiot. But she’d gotten her message across. She would smash the thing, whatever it was.

“You think they’ll call us back?” Manny asked.

Kaylee slumped down until she was sitting on the floor, she pulled her knees up to her chest. Right then, she felt a lot closer to being a scared little girl than a confident young woman. “I don’t know. Manny.”

Valjean held up his hand for silence, his mind racing. Was it a trap? If there were only a few, one or two, adults aboard, they would need some sort of advantage, if they intended to capture of kill his pirate crew. Making Valjean think he was dealing only with a pair of frightened children would be an effective lure. There might not even be any children, it could be an adult speaking through a filter, to make the voice sound like a young girl. If it was a trap, he had to admire whoever was planning it. It was something he would do, were he in that situation.

It didn’t sound like that. If adults were planning a trap, they would have given the girl a better script to read. She had sounded genuinely like a scared adolescent, and genuinely fighting with the boy. The boy was younger? A brother, perhaps? It sounded like a squabble between siblings. Hard to fake something like that. Children. It was children. What they were doing aboard, and how they’d gotten the item he wanted, he couldn’t imagine, yet, they were here, and probably had the item. Were they children of the crew? Captain Hans Schroeder had a daughter, but she was 25 years old. The rest of the crew he didn’t know about. The voice had insisted on rescuing people from both the command section, and the surface. That made Valjean think her parents were ship’s crew, one in the command section, the other parent had been in the shuttle. But crew records hadn't listed any married couples.

Dooley broke the silence. “Two hours is not enough time, boss.” It would probably take more than two hours just to rendezvous with the command section, assuming it hadn’t already fallen out of orbit during that time.

“I know that, you idiot!” Valjean snapped. “We’re not rescuing anyone, damn it. We stick to the plan. We know where the box is, and now we know at least two people have it.” he stood up, and holstered his weapon. “Dooley, get that door open, and keep going, while I have a little chat with our new friends.”

Sister and brother looked up at the speaker. “This is the leader of the, uh, the pirates, as you call us. Who am I speaking to, please?”

Kaylee saw Manny vigorously shaking his head up and down in a ‘No’ gesture. She didn’t need her little brother’s advice on this subject. She keyed the mic on. “None of your business. We are the people who have the thing you want. That’s all you need to know.”

A soft laugh came over the speaker. “Fair enough. You seem to have the advantage. Very well, I agree to your terms. All I want is the item I came here to get, I never intended for anyone to get hurt.”

Kaylee toggled the mic on again, and opened her mouth to shout out what a liar the pirate was. She stared at the microphone, then clicked it off. While shouting would make her feel better, it wouldn’t bring her parents back.

The voice from the speaker continued. It was a man’s voice, smooth and oily. Kaylee thought she wouldn’t want to meet the man, under any circumstance. Even at her young age, she knew the type. “There is one problem, however. Two hours is not enough time, we will need eight to ten hours. Let me explain, please, so you will know I am not stalling for time. In order to bring those people in the command section here, it will take two trips in my shuttle, my shuttle only has four seats. As I’m sure you know, my ship is damaged, so I can only use my shuttle. Two round trips will take four hours, at minimum. I will then need to go back to my ship, and refuel the shuttle, before dropping down to the surface. Depending where we are in orbit at the time, relative to the position of the people on the surface, it could take another three to five hours to bring your people off the surface. So, I propose a good faith gesture. I will send my pilot to bring three people back from the command section, no more than three hours from now. When they arrive, I will hold them here with me, and let you talk to them. Your part of the bargain is that you will not damage the item, in the meantime, agreed?”

Kaylee looked to Manny. He gave her an exaggerated shrug. “He’s probably telling the truth, Kaylee. It does take a long time to fly around in orbit, and down to the surface and back.”

She hesitated before toggling open the mic. Her advice on orbital mechanics was coming from a twelve year old boy. “Ok. Agreed.” She blurted out, then snapped the mic off.

Dooley gave Valjean a thumb’s up sign, and the door began to slide open. Valjean turned the microphone off. It was attached to the wall panel with a cord. “Can you make this wireless, so I can move while I talk?”

Dooley shook his head. “Sorry, boss,” he said as he sent his robot into the compartment ahead of him, in case there were people, unfriendly people, waiting for him. “That’s part of the ship’s emergency system, it’s designed to work when the regular wireless systems are down.”

To Dooley’s surprise, Valjean didn’t blame him for it. “Then, you go ahead, get those doors open, take Taney and your robot with you. I’ll keep them talking.” Valjean sat on top of a crate, to get comfortable, as his crew hustled down the compartment. He toggled the microphone on. “I’m glad we can agree. We both have damaged ships, and it is dangerous enough out here in the coldness of space without us being in conflict. Let’s see what else we can agree on, shall we? Avoid miscommunication, any potentially dangerous mistakes?”

Brother and sister exchanged a knowing look. “He’s trying to keep us talking.” Kaylee said in disgust. She'd seen that in a video somewhere.

“Yeah.” A thought just occurred to Manny. “Uh oh. Kaylee, they might be able to track where we’re talking from.”

“What?”

“I don’t know they can do that, I’m just saying, you know, maybe they can? Somehow?”

“I wish you said that before.” Kaylee said, and added an eye roll.

“You didn’t even know how to use the intercom!” Manny shot back. “You’re so stupid!”

“Shut up!”

“You shut-“ Manny stopped, mouth open in mid-insult, when he saw tears well up in his sister’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Kaylee. I didn’t mean it.”

“I want Mom and Dad back.” Kaylee said through a sniffle, wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

“Me, too.” Manny felt his eyes start to water. He snatched the microphone out of his sister’s hand, toggled it open, and spoke into it, trying to make his voice as deep as he could. “When you get the crew off the command section, call us. Until then, shut your pie hole!” He slammed the microphone back in its slot in the wall.

Kaylee was so startled that she covered her mouth with her hand, and giggled. "Shut your pie hole?" She giggled. Manny snickered, and soon the two were laughing through their tears, laughing together.

Valjean wasn’t laughing. He looked at the speaker in surprise. “Shut my pie hole?” He mouthed silently. That comment hadn’t come from a girl, perhaps a teenage boy? So, there were three children? He wasn’t insulted, he’d been called far worse, and by people he grudgingly respected. Insults from children? Meaningless. He sighed, and slid down off the crate. Valjean actually didn’t enjoy killing. It wasn’t that he was morally opposed to it, killing was just so messy and complicated. And unnecessary, if a plan was properly thought out. The freighter’s shuttle crew, of course, he had tried to kill. That was a consequence of his having very little time to develop a plan and implement it. Given more time, he could have snatched the item without anyone getting hurt, without anyone even noticing. It wasn’t his fault, that the freighter crew, and passengers, had not cooperated with his plan. If they had, he would already be in hyperspace, and far away from here, by now. Atlas Challenger would, of course, be blown to dust by the explosives Valjean planned to set off near the ship’s fusion reactor, once he had the item he wanted. The explosives were in the pack Taney carried slung over his back. Witnesses he didn’t particularly care about, they knew nothing useful, but his contract was specific: no one could know which item he had stolen. Which meant, according to Valjean’s plan, that he needed to destroy all the cargo, leaving no trace of what was missing. It would all be missing.

"Boss," Taney said as he once again checked the charge on his rifle, "I know we're gonna blow this whole ship, but if we get the chance, I want to kill those brats myself."

"You got it, Taney. Let's move."

“That was funny, Manny.”

“Uh-huh. What do we do now?” Manny asked.

Kaylee bit her lower lip. She had no idea what to do next, she hadn’t thought the plan through that far. If the pirates failed to bring her parents aboard, what then? And if the pirates did bring their parents aboard, how could she assure the pirates didn’t kill everyone, after she gave them the thing they wanted? She looked at her backpack, leaning against the crate at her feet. “Let’s see what this thing is.” Whatever it was, she felt like smashing it right now.

“Wait,” Manny said, as his sister couched down and unzipped her backpack, “not here.” He looked nervously around the vast compartment, back and forth between the large doors at either end.  Had the pirates been able to figure out the location where Kaylee had used the intercom? He didn’t know if that was possible, but then, he was a kid. The possibility that he had given away their location by turning on the intercom for his sister scared him. “Let’s go over near one of the access hatches, in case we have to get out of here fast.”

“Good thinking.” Kaylee picked up her pack, and led the way toward the closest access hatch. It was a close squeeze in between some of the crates, it was darker, and the area was dusty. She had a sneezing fit as they sat down. “Get out your light.” She told Manny, as she pulled the box out of her pack.

Manny turned the light on and shone it on the box.

Kaylee was about to run her fingernail along the plastic Customs seal and break it, when she stopped, and looked at Manny. “There’s not some kind of alarm, is there, if one of these boxes is opened?”

Manny frowned, puzzled. They had never seen a cargo box being opened, they were supposed to stay sealed the entire journey. There was no reason for the crew to open a sealed cargo box. “I don’t know. The boxes aren’t supposed to be opened in flight. There might be an alarm.” He thought back over their trips with Jen, when that woman had been on her maintenance rounds. Had she ever checked any sort of alarm system? Not that he could remember. “I don’t think we need to worry,” Manny said haltingly, “the main computer is down, right? Any alarm like that would be connected to the main computer. I think.”

Kaylee looked at the box. She turned it over. There wasn’t any sort of alarm attached to it, that she could see. Maybe there was an alarm built into the box, an alarm which would go off if she broke the seal.

What would her mother do? First, her mother wouldn’t think like a child. Kaylee realized she was worried about getting in trouble, if an alarm went off. An adult wouldn’t worry about setting off a stupid anti-theft alarm, not in this situation! “Let’s open it. If an alarm goes off, we take the thing out, leave the box here, and go someplace else.” She still could not help closing her eyes and bracing herself as she slit the seal with her fingernail. No alarm sounded. The box had a latch, she turned it, then swung the cover open. “Huh.” She was disappointed. She had been expecting something that looked like it was worth stealing. This was a piece of junk. Alien junk. Old alien junk. She lifted it out of the box, peeled away the protective layers of plastic, and looked at it closely. ”Ow!” She said, as she got a mild shock from the thing, and dropped it on the deck.

“What is it?” Manny asked.

Kaylee’s eyelids fluttered, and she slumped to the deck. She didn’t seem to have control over her arms and legs, and wild, random images flashed thru her brain, like all of her memories were popping to the surface at once. And there was another voice in her head, a voice like someone screaming from far, far away. The voice faded, faded, and then it was gone.

“Kaylee, are you OK?” Manny asked, alarmed.

“Uh, wow, that was weird.” Her feet and hands tingled, but she could control her body again. She rose to her feet, unsteadily, flexing her fingers to make the tingling go away. “That thing zapped me.”

“Zapped you? I thought all these alien things were dead, no power.” Manny nudged it warily with his shoe. “Kaylee, you were lying there spaced out for like a minute. What is this thing?”

Kaylee shrugged. “A minute? It felt like only a couple seconds. Dad would know what this thing is.” It was about the size of a softball, roughly spherical, with protrusions where it used to attach to something else, and a fragile-looking tangle of wires spilling out of a hole in the bottom. Someone would kill her parents, to get this stupid piece of old junk? She sat down, her back against the wall, grateful for the darkness, so Manny wouldn’t see her tears.

CHAPTER 12

“Come on, come on!” Dooley urged his notepad to move faster cracking the code for unlocking the last door. He had opened both doors in the adjoining compartment, Valjean and Taney were waiting at the other end of this compartment. Five minutes, Dooley had told the pirate leader, it would take only five minutes for him to open this door, and then he and Rocko would go in and, according to Valjean’s plan, force whoever was in the compartment out the other end, right into Valjean’s hands. If, in the meantime, Dooley got killed, Dooley knew Valjean wouldn’t care. In fact, that would be one less person to take a cut of the loot. So Dooley wasn’t planning to take any risks, he would send Rocko in by himself, and let the combat robot do its job. “Yes! Got it!” Dooley exclaimed, as the door was unlocked. He unplugged his notepad, set it aside, and drew his weapon. “Rocko, get ready.” The robot raised its arms, weapons ready, and walked to stand directly in front of the door.

What Dooley didn’t know was that, in addition to a red light glowing on the panel when the door was unlocked, there was  an audible, metallic click when the locking pins retracted. “What was that?” Manny whispered, startled, as he spun around. After he and his sister had given up trying to figure out what the alien thing was, they’d put it back in the box, stuffed it in Kaylee’s backpack, and sat down to wait. Manny had gotten bored, so he had crept out in between the crates, to where he could see down the center of the compartment. He had been playing a game on his notepad, with the sound turned off, when he heard the click. He looked aft, and didn’t see anything. Forward, also nothing- no, there was a red light on the door panel! In the gloom of the emergency lighting, it stood out. Someone had unlocked the door! Manny flung his notepad over his shoulder into his backpack, crouched down, and ran as fast as he could to his sister, banging his shoulder painfully on a crate along the way.

“What’s going on?” She asked.

“Somebody’s coming. The door is unlocked!” Manny explained. “Give me the card, I need to open the hatch!”

They both heard the big door begin to slide open. Kaylee’s eyes were as big as saucers as she handed the card to her brother. “You’re bleeding!” She whispered, pointing to the ripped shirt.

“I bumped into a crate.” Manny put the card into the slot, and the light on the hatch turned red. He yanked the card out, gave it back to his sister, and turned the handle to swing the hatch open. “I’ll go first,” he said, retrieving the light from his backpack, and turning it on. They crawled into the access tube, it was a tight fit. Kaylee had the presence of mind to contort herself enough to turn around and close the hatch behind them. Then they crawled into the darkness, illuminated only by Manny’s light.

“What do you see?” Dooley asked, from his position safely out of the line of fire, next to the door.

The combat robot swiveled its head side to side, searching in the visible, infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. “Nothing. No targets.”

That didn’t convince Dooley. “Go on in. See what you can find.” He checked his watch. Valjean would be growing impatient, beyond the door at the far end. Dooley had been surprised not to be greeted by a hail of gunfire coming at him when the door opened. Blasters, or at least stun pistols. Instead, nothing, and it didn’t sound like there was anyone in there. Just before opening the door, he had verified that the box they wanted was still inside that particular compartment!

For five long, anxious minutes, Dooley waited for Rocko to return. Periodically, he peeked his head around the opening, but he couldn’t see anything. Finally, he ducked his head around the corner, and saw the robot coming back toward him. “What? Nothing?”

“No sign of any people.” Rocko reported, and swung his hands up, to point his weapons at the ceiling.

“What the hell?” Dooley’s blood ran cold. If he had screwed this up, Valjean would not be pleased. So much had gone wrong already. He hurriedly plugged his notepad back into the wall socket and searched for the box. Its last reported location was in the compartment! In fact, near Structural Frame 43. Where was the box now? He’d lost its signal. Had whoever possessed the box smashed the radio ID tag? He unplugged the notepad and ran into the compartment, searching for Frame 43. There it was, a big girder, with ‘43’ painted in blue block letters, high above his head, halfway down the length of the compartment. “Follow me.” He told the robot.

“What is keeping that idiot?” Valjean fumed. Dooley should have gotten into the compartment five minutes ago. He’d heard no weapons fire, and both he and Taney had their ears pressed to the door. They should have heard something by now. “Stay here.” He told Taney, and ran off to go all the way through the adjacent compartment, to see what was going on with Dooley and his temperamental robot.

“Try it again!” Kaylee whispered. She and her brother were stuck, trapped in the access tube. She wasn’t claustrophobic, she also didn’t like being in the dark, confined space.

They had crawled the short length of the tube, bumping their heads, elbows and knees on obstructions along the way. In the middle, the tube opened up, and was tall enough that they could stand up, but now they were at the other end, trying to get the hatch open. Jen’s card didn’t seem to work, the handle wouldn’t turn.

“I am trying it!” Manny shouted in frustration.

“Be quiet! They might hear us.”

Manny didn’t respond, as much as he wanted to shout back at his sister, he needed to concentrate on getting the hatch open. If the pirates could open the doors between compartments, they could open the hatches, including the hatch behind them. He put Jen’s card back in the slot, and keyed in her access code. There was no response, the handle still wouldn’t move. He felt so stupid. What was he doing wrong?

“This is it.” Dooley muttered to himself. Frame 43. One of the electronics boxes mounted on the frame was no doubt the radio sensor that had tracked the box to this spot. “Rocko, can you see anything?” There was a gap in the crates on both sides, leading back to the walls. It was just room enough for a person to squeeze through. The hair stood up on the back of Dooley’s neck. Also, just room enough for anyone hiding back there to have a clear shot at Dooley. He jumped back.

The robot looked down the narrow gap between crates. “I see something.”

“What?”

“Possibly blood. It shows on my ultraviolet sensors.”

“No people?”

“Negative, no heat signatures.”

Dooley screwed up his courage and squeezed in between the crates. He wished he’d thought to bring a light with him. At the end, he saw two things; a few drops of blood on the deck, and a hatch. A hatch to a maintenance access tube!

Dooley hurriedly scrambled back out into the center corridor. He knew where the box had gone, why the ship’s sensor couldn’t locate it. “Come on!” He shouted to the robot, and took off running back through the door they’d come in through.

Manny pulled Jen’s access card out of the slot and shone his light on it. The card wasn’t damaged. Had he put it into the slot the wrong way-

No. He grasped the handle, and yanked it counterclockwise. It was sticky at first, then turned easily. The hatch popped open. Now he really felt stupid. The hatches weren’t locked at all from the inside! The handles on inside and outside were connected, so they appeared to turn one way from the outside, and the other way from inside. Duh!

He crawled out of the tube, and stood up, grateful to stretch his legs. Kaylee followed. “How did you get it open?” She asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Manny said, embarrassed. This compartment looked like all the others, dimly lit, packed with crates, and a narrow space to squeeze through, leading away from the hatch. That open area looked inviting.

Three things happened at once. Brother and sister stepped out from between the crates, Valjean came through the door at one end, Dooley and his robot came running through the other door. For a split second, no one moved. Dooley skidded to a stop, and was almost bowled over by Rocko. Valjean’s mouth dropped open in surprise. Manny froze in place.

Kaylee saved her brother’s life. She grabbed hold of his shirt collar and yanked him back between the crates, at the same moment both pirates raised their weapons and fired. Shards and melted globs of plastic flew through the air as the energy beams hit the crates next to where Manny had stood, a moment before. The children didn’t waste any time talking, they ran back to the access hatch, which was still ajar. Kaylee had hit it with her foot on her way out, intending to close it, but it hadn’t latched. She got there first, pulled it aside, and dove in. Manny followed, hooking his foot around the inner handle, and pulling it firmly closed behind him. Since Manny had the light with him, Kaylee crawled ahead in the dark as fast as she could, ignoring the painful bumps and scrapes along the way.

“Kaylee, just turn the handle counterclockwise, it isn’t locked!” Manny said as he huffed and puffed his way along on hands and knees. His sister reached the end, and gave a mighty heave on the handle, which wasn’t necessary, because it turned smoothly. They tumbled out of the tube, just as there were loud booming sounds from behind them. The pirates were shooting at the locking mechanism on the other hatch!

Manny slammed the hatch closed behind them, squeezed around his sister, and ran as fast as he could. “The other tube!” He said, almost out of breath. Their only chance, he thought, was to use the tube to crawl through to the adjacent compartment, and hope the pirates weren’t in there also.

“Boss! Stop shooting! You busted the lock!” Dooley protested. Valjean spun around, and Dooley feared Valjean would shoot him, then the lead pirate lowered his weapon.

“Get it open!”

Dooley was about to retort that he couldn’t open it, now that Valjean had shot holes in it. Instead, he gestured with his gun. “I know where they’re going, we can cut them off!”

The pirates ran full-speed down the compartment, joined by Taney, who had come when he’d heard the commotion.

Manny hesitated only a second when he came out from between the crates, checking that no pirates were in sight, then the two of them shot across the open area, and in between the crates on the other side. Kaylee snagged her shirt on the corner of a crate, and tore a piece off, she kept going. There was a moment of panic when Manny couldn’t find Jen’s card, until he remembered he’d stuffed it into his back pocket. Manny entered the passcode wrong the first time. He took a deep breath, and forced himself to move slowly the second time, even as he heard shoes pounding on the deck plates behind him. They got the hatch open, and Manny handed the light to Kaylee, letting her go first. His heart was in his throat as he crawled in behind her, the sound of people running was loud now, and he heard shouting.  He reached behind him, grasped the handle, and pulled the hatch closed. As he heard the latch click shut, a sharp, burning pain flared in his hand. “Ow! Ow ow ow!” His hand felt like he’d stuck it in a power socket.

Valjean fired again in anger at the door handle. It had been turning as he came around the corner, now it was latched shut! He had been so close! “Get in there and open that hatch!” He shouted at Dooley.

“Right away, Boss.” Dooley squeezed in between the crates, dropped to his knees, and plugged his notepad in. The flaw in Valjean’s plan was obvious now, they should have opened the doors in both adjacent compartments first, not just on one side. Pointing out that flaw to his boss, Dooley figured, would not be a good career move. Especially not right now.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me about these access tubes?!” Valjean fumed.

“I didn’t know, they weren’t in the ship plans you got!” Dooley answered defensively. Valjean was always saying how smart he was, how he would do all the planning. Great plan so far, Dooley thought to himself! The shuttle crew down on Ares were still alive, our ship is busted up, and now we’re chasing after a couple of bratty children in a damaged cargo ship. With the Navy surely on its way, soon, if not right now. Great plan. Maybe, Dooley considered, he should shoot Valjean, before Valjean got rid of him. Except, only Valjean knew who had hired them for this job, only Valjean knew how to get the money. Dooley figured it would be best if he made up a good lie. “When I came into the other compartment, I saw them, but they ducked between the crates before I could get a good shot. I winged one of them, there’s blood on the deck, that’s how I tracked them to the hatch. I only saw the two of them. A girl and a boy.”

“Two kids? No adults?”

“Not that I saw, boss.”

So, Valjean considered that he was only dealing with children, two scared children. That could be good, or bad. Children were unpredictable. They were certainly frightened, and alone. He had double-crossed them, they would be angry. Would they follow through on their threat to smash the item he wanted?

Kaylee crawled out of the hatch at the other end, offering a hand to her brother. Manny had crawled on his elbows, holding his left hand with his right, wincing in pain. His left hand still burned and tingled. That was good, he guessed, it meant the nerves in his hand were still alive. Kaylee held a finger to her lips. “Shhh. Wait here, I’ll check if anyone’s in here.”

Manny did what he was told, and tried to flex the fingers of his left hand. They moved, barely. Kaylee gestured to him, waving him into the open area. “I don’t think the pirates are in here yet. Are you OK?” Her brother’s shoulder was still bleeding, and he had bruises on his face, from bumping into things in the tube. She hurt too, for the same reasons.

Manny nodded. He kicked the hatch closed with his foot, making sure it was latched. “Where do we go now?”

Kaylee looked around. They could run across to the hatch on the opposite wall, and keep going. “Watch the doors, make sure they’re locked.”

“Yup, they are.” Green lights shone on both panels.

Kaylee’s eyes stopped on a discolored deck plate, in the center of the corridor, aft of where they stood. “We need to get out of this cargo pod.” She decided. Jen had told them that access tubes connected one pod to another, in addition to connecting compartments within a pod. “Manny, can you use your hand to climb?”

“Uh-huh, I think so. It's numb, but it's starting to tingle, I think the feeling is coming back.” Gradually, his fingers were able to flex, he could almost touch his index finger to his thumb. The tingling hurt like crazy, like ants crawling under his skin.

They ran over to the deck plate. Next to it was a small door, set into the floor. Kaylee got her fingers under one end and flipped it open, exposing a control panel. Manny stuck Jen’s card into the slot, keyed in her access code, and hit the button. The deck plate slid aside, and they looked in. It was a tube, going straight down. A long way down, with handholds along two sides. Kaylee took a deep breath and lowered herself in. “How do we close this door behind us?”

Manny looked at the control panel. “There’s a button to close it.” He looked at the door. “I don’t know if I can hit the button, and jump in, before the door slides closed.”

“We need to flip that little door closed, too, or the pirates will know where we are.” She had an idea. From her pack, she pulled out chewing gum, and a pen. She put the gum in her mouth and chewed, to make it soft and sticky. “Here,” she handed the wad of gum to her brother, “stick this on the inside of the control panel door, then stick the pen into it, so the other end of the pen will hit the close button, when the door swings closed.”

Many took the gum and the pen. He looked admiringly at his sister. “Wow, that’s really smart, Kaylee.” He crouched down, positioned the pen, then stuck the gum in place. Then, he lowered himself into the tube, leaning far over, to hold the control panel door open with his fingers. “Ready?”

“I’m-“ There was a clanging sound, like a hatch opening. “They’re coming!”

Manny let go of the control panel door, it swung down, and the pen, slightly off-center, hit the button. The deckplate door began to slide closed, and Manny ducked his head and arms inside just in time. “That was close!”

Kaylee only nodded, her mouth was too dry to speak. The tube was very dark, with only small emergency lights every ten meters. They couldn’t see the bottom, as they began climbing downward. It looked like the bottom was a very long way down.

Dooley squeezed his way out of the hatch, following the children. Valjean had sent him in by himself. Rocko couldn’t fit, the robot was too big and inflexible to get into the tube between compartments. He froze, listening. There was a sound, like gears spinning, or a door sliding closed. He jumped to his feet and raced to the open area, looking both ways. The doors at both ends were closed. Which way had they gone? Picking a door at random, he ran to his right, and checked the door control panel. Had it been used recently? He couldn’t tell. The door was locked, and he’d left his notepad behind. Dooley ran to the other door, and checked it. Nothing. Next, he squeezed through crates to the opposite hatch. The children hadn’t been there, the dust on the deck was undisturbed. So, they’d gone through one of the doors. Which one? Dooley’s shoulders slumped. What else could go wrong?

Dooley never looked down to notice the discolored section of deck plating beneath his feet, or the short blue fiber sticking out of a gap between plates, where the edge of the sliding door had snagged the top of Manny’s backpack.

“They’re gone, boss.” Dooley shouted down the tube ahead of him, looking forward to Valjean’s cruel face, framed in the open hatch. “They went out one of the doors, I couldn’t tell which one.” Dooley added as he crawled out, stood up, and brushed the dust off his knees. Before his boss could say what an idiot he was, Dooley added “They have an access card, boss, they can unlock a door in seconds.”

Valjean frowned. For once, he didn’t reprimand Dooley. The technician was right, and without Dooley, they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in the ship. He handed Dooley’s notepad to him, and gestured toward one of the doors. “See if you can locate that box again. We’ll get another shot at them, next time, we’ll come at them from all sides.” The smile Valjean gave Dooley made that man swallow hard. Valjean, Dooley concluded, shouldn’t smile too often. It was creepy.

While Dooley plugged in his notepad, Valjean walked over to the intercom and plucked the microphone out of its cradle. “Attention, children. This is the pirates. Sorry about that, we didn’t mean to shoot at you. We stumbled across you, and were startled, that’s all it was. We were afraid you’d shoot at us first. And, we didn’t know you were children.”

The pirate’s words rang out, reverberating in the confines of the access tube. Kaylee and Manny halted in their climb down the tube. Only ‘down’ wasn’t the correct word anymore. Since they were moving between cargo pods, they were also moving between artificial gravity fields. The place where they were now, almost halfway down the tube, was in almost zero Gee. Manny warned they needed to turn around soon, and start climbing ‘up’, not ‘down’.

The pirate continued. “I have sent my shuttle to rescue the people from the command section. When the shuttle returns, I will contact you. In the meantime, I suggest you find a safe place, and stay there. This ship is damaged, and moving around is not a good idea.”

“Shut up, you big liar.” Manny said under his breath. His left hand still tingled. “He wasn’t startled when he shot the hatch handle while I had hold of it.”

“Come on, Manny, let’s go.” Kaylee sighed. “I want to get out of this tube.”

Dooley’s brow was furrowed as he worked on his notepad. Valjean walked over almost casually, checking the energy charge in his pistol. “Did you find the box?”

Dooley gave a careful answer. “The last place it was located was in that compartment, but it’s not there now. I’m getting a signal, but it’s weak, and the signal is being picked up by more than one sensor.”

“What does that mean?” Valjean asked impatiently.

“I don’t-“ Dooley fiddled with the controls, trying to determine which sensor was picking up the strongest reading. “Damn! Got it! They’re moving between cargo pods. There’s no sensors in those access tubes. Boss, they’re beneath our feet.”

“How did they get there?” Valjean demanded.

“An access tube? Boss, I don’t know. But I know how to get there, two compartments from here, there’s a junction, it connects all the cargo pods.”

Valjean frowned. “All right, move out. No more slip-ups. You hear me? No more slip-ups.”

Manny climbed out of the tube, rolling onto the deck. This cargo pod looked exactly like the one they’d left. His arms were shaking, and his fingers cramped, from holding onto the railings, all the way down, then up. He reached over to open the control panel door, and pressed the button to close the deckplate door behind them. They’d seen no sign that pirates were behind them in the tube.

“We’ll stop-“ Kaylee paused to catch her breath, “here, for a minute.” The combination of fear and frantic running had her panting, and shaking slightly. She hoped it wasn’t obvious to her brother.

Kaylee felt like a fool, a gullible, foolhardy child. She felt every month of her fourteen years, and no older. What had she been thinking, she asked herself as she stared at her feet? I’m just a kid, she thought, a teenager. She had no business trying to deal with pirates, hardened criminals. What she felt like doing was find a dark, safe place and hide. Not with her brother around to watch, not while her brother needed her. Maybe that was what being an adult was all about, she considered sourly. Doing things you don’t want to do, because you have to. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because other people are counting on you, need you.

She stole a glance at her brother. He had also been out of breath, and was now sitting slumped on the deck, next to a cargo-moving robot pallet. Manny, at only 12, was not crying. He appeared anxious, but not scared anymore. Maybe he’d gotten numb from being scared.

“I feel like smashing this thing.” She said angrily, pointing to the box in her backpack.

“Don’t, Kaylee. That’s the only way we’re getting Mom and Dad back.” Manny said wearily. “Maybe he’s lying about sending the shuttle away, but if we smash it, we have nothing to bargain with.”

Kaylee nodded. Her brother sounded wise beyond his years. Getting shot at seemed to have changed him. She was tired. She wanted this over, wanted her life back. But mostly, she was angry. Angry at being chased, angry at being shot at. She could see it in Manny’s face, too. Something had changed, something inside them. “I’m tired of running.” She said, surprised by the words coming out of her mouth. “I don’t want to run anymore. I want to hit back at them.”

“Me too.” Manny got a determined look on his face. Her brother could be immensely stubborn. He had that familiar look now.

“Can you let the air out of a compartment?”

“Kill the pirates?” Manny asked, startled by his sister’s sudden bloodthirstiness. “I don’t know how to let the air out. Kaylee, I hate them too, but if we kill them, how do we get Mom and Dad back?”

Kaylee’s eyes flashed anger. “He’s lying. He didn’t send his shuttle! I’ll bet their shuttle never left. That’s why he’s chasing us, because he knows he won’t have anything to trade for the thing.” An inspiration came to her. “Can you fly their shuttle?”

Manny was taken aback. “Kaylee, I’m just a kid. I’ve never flown anything.”

“You fly spaceships in your sims all the time!”

“Those are sims. This is real. I don’t even know what kind of shuttle they have. And I’ve probably never flown that type of shuttle in a sim. The controls are all different.” He protested.

Kaylee considered. “If you got into their shuttle, you could call Seth, and he could tell you what to do.”

“I don’t know.”

“Manny, we have to try! At least, if you got there, you could, I don’t know, lock the doors, or smash the controls, or something. Make sure the pirates can’t leave this ship, so they’ll still be aboard when the Navy gets here.”

That seemed doable. “I guess. Yeah, I could do that. Kaylee, we need a plan. Like, what do we do if the shuttle really did leave, to rescue Mom? And how do we get there? What if we run into the pirates?”

“If the shuttle has left, then we don’t do anything. You know what we need? A diversion, something to keep the pirates busy, so we can sneak over to their shuttle.”

“A diversion? Yeah.” Manny frowned in disgust, and kicked the robotic cargo pallet that sat inert on the deck next to him. “I wish we had robots, combat robots, like the Army has.”

“Could we turn these robots on, the ship’s robots?”

“No, they need the ship’s AI to control them.” Manny said, in a ‘doesn’t everybody know that’ tone of voice.  “That would cool, though, huh? We could send the robots chasing after-“ Manny didn't finish that thought, because another, much better thought was forming in his head.

“What?” Kaylee tugged on her little brother’s arm. “What are you thinking?”

Manny jumped to his feet. “We don’t need robots. We’ve got Tinos!”

Kaylee couldn’t help rolling her eyes. For an all-to-brief moment, she’d hoped her brother had come up with a good idea, an idea to get them out of this mess. The mess she’d helped get them into. “Manny, that’s a stupid idea. The Tinos are all asleep.”

“Not if we wake them up!” Manny walked in a circle, gesturing with his arms, as he thought through his idea. “They’re just drugged, to make them sleep, right? We did that with a mouse in my biology class.”

Kaylee paused. Her biology class had done the same thing, at Manny’s age. They had kept the mouse in hypersleep over a long weekend, then the teacher revived the rodent, and it had scampered around as if nothing had happened. Remove the drugs, increase the temperature, and the animal would wake up. “Ohhhkaay, so what happens if we wake up the Tinos? Won’t the pirates just shoot them?”

Once again Manny looked at his sister, disbelieving that anyone could not know this stuff. He faced her, hands on his hips. “Kaylee, nobody brings high-powered weapons onto a spaceship.” He had seen that fact mentioned on many Star Patrol episodes. “You can’t risk shooting a hole in the ship, the air would suck you right out into space.” The pirates had directed-energy weapons, like stunners, or blasters. Probably it was a blaster that had hit the hatch handle while he’d had hold of the other end, his hand still hurt. While a blaster could be powerful, the beam was just charged particles. “A blaster bolt would bounce right off a tino’s armor.” He speculated aloud. “Yeah, yeah, this will work! Kaylee, think about it, the ship is mostly dark, with the emergency lights on. The pirates are going to come around a corner, and, bam! Right in front of them, there’s a Tino! The pirates will forget all about us, and we can get to their shuttle.”

Kaylee looked elated for a moment, then her face fell. “Manny, that would only work if the pirates came into the compartment where the Tinos are. Tinos can’t open doors, the pirates could just lock them into a compartment, and not have to worry about them.”

Manny’s eyes narrowed, and he stared off into space, remembering something. There was a time when he had been able to see almost the whole length of a cargo pod, stretching on for what seemed like forever. He could picture it in his mind’s eye, section after section, stretching into the distance toward the aft of the ship, with the tall bulkhead doors open. “We can open all the doors in this pod, and pod 3, where the pirate’s shuttle is.” He said quietly. “Remember, Kaylee, when we were with Dad, and Jen and Seth let us watch the cargo loading at Oceania? Jen said she had all the doors locked open, so they didn’t have to stop at each section when they were moving cargo.”

“Do you know how to do that?” Kaylee asked skeptically. Her little brother was full of surprises.

“No.”

“And all I know how to do is open one door at a time.” Kaylee held up Jen’s access card.

“I don’t know now, but I’ll bet I can figure it out, Kaylee.” Manny walked over to the computer terminal on the wall. “Jen didn’t open them one at a time.” He said, trying to remember that day, when he had been excited about the animals, not boring details of cargo loading procedures. “She used one of these terminals. I could try it, Kaylee. It can’t be that hard, remember, Seth said the controls on this ship are made simple, so they are easy to use in an emergency.” He said hopefully.

“I don’t know.” She was so uncertain. How did adults know what to do?

“We have to.” Manny pleaded, then folded his arms across his chest.

“If all the doors are open, what if we run into the pirates again?”

Manny held up Jen’s card. “I can still close and lock the doors, one at a time, lock the pirates out of anywhere we are. I don’t know how the pirates got the doors unlocked, but I’ll bet it takes a long time.”

“OK, we try it.” she agreed without enthusiasm. What else could they do? Wherever they ran, the pirates somehow found them.

“I’ll figure out the doors, but then we need to find the Tinos first, and start waking them up. Then we open all the doors.”

“Because, without the Tinos, having all the doors open just makes it easier for the pirates to catch us?” It felt odd to Kaylee to be thinking behind her brother.

Manny nodded vigorously.

“Manny, you’re in charge of this.”

“For real?”

“Really. If you can get all the doors open. I don’t know how to do it.”

Valjean accessed Nightengale’s computer through his notepad. The connection was poor, with the signal having to travel through the walls of the cargo pod. Tigershark had called Atlas Challenger over and over, asking for status of the rescue mission, demanding an answer. From the tone of the messages, the frigate was growing impatient and concerned. From the timecode on the messages, Valjean could tell the frigate was still far away, searching for the phantom ship Isaac Newton. The Navy was no threat to him, no threat, unless, that is, he wasted too much time finding the damned alien artifact. Which he certainly wasn’t going to do.

“What’s up, Boss?” Dooley asked, as Valjean put his datapad back in his pocket.

Valjean shocked Dooley not with a rebuke, but with an icy smile. “Everything’s going well, Dooley, everything’s going well. That frigate is screaming bloody murder, but they’re still wasting their time looking for our ghost ship. We’ll get what we came for, Jump, and be long gone before the Navy decides to investigate. By the time the Navy gets all this sorted out, we’ll be on a beach, drinking rum punch and deciding how to spend our money, huh?”

Dooley shot a look at Valjean’s back as the pirate leader strode away down the cargo bay. Valjean was never friendly, he would never be sitting on a beach with any of them. Which meant he was up to something. Something Dooley wouldn’t like.

CHAPTER 13

When Mac first saw the three shuttle survivors, they were walking down the hard-packed red dirt road like he expected, walking in the tracks the crawlers had made. It was not, he saw immediately, a great place for an ambush. The whole area around the mining camp was flat, with only a few craters here and there. Off to the north there was a boulder field, too far away for Mac to get a good shot with his rifle. He needed to be closer to the road. Where? He could try to hide in a crater by the roadside, let the three targets get close, then pop up and let them have it before they could scatter. No, a crater wouldn’t work. Without sticking his head up, he couldn’t see how close they were, and in an environment suit, he sure couldn’t hear them. The craters by the road were shallow anyway, the men may see his legs before he could see them.

There. To the south of the road, there was a structure, kind of a tall, skinny hut. Mac didn’t know what it was, he didn’t care. It was a bit far for a certain good shot; Mac fancied himself as an excellent marksman and looked at it as a challenge. He crawled backwards into a crater, ducked down, and ran toward the hut.

Sam was in the lead by a few meters, not by plan, he simply tended to walk faster. He was the first to see the top of the domes which made up the mining camp. The camp itself sat on a plateau. “Hey guys, I see the camp, we’re almost there.”

“All right.” Nelson said, and added “Let’s be careful.” They hadn’t yet decided what do to once they reached the camp. Ahead of them to the south there was a hut, a tall skinny structure, the purpose of which Nelson couldn’t guess. Equipment storage, probably, certainly the hut didn’t look airtight. “Sam, Rick, hold up here. I don’t think we should stay on this road.”

“I agree.” Rick said. This close to the camp, the ‘road’ they were on was now one of many, for the whole area, except for a boulder field to the north, was crisscrossed with crawler tracks. All the tracks seemed to converge up ahead, leading toward a large structure with two big doors, Rick assumed that was the garage for the crawlers. There weren’t any crawlers out today, none in sight, and no dust plumes in the area. There was a light breeze blowing, the sunrise had warmed the thin air, and occasionally they saw a weak, short-lived dust devil whirling close to the ground. Rick thought he’d seen a dust cloud near the tall, skinny hut, stirring up the surface dust. “There are no crawler tracks in that boulder field, and those boulders come right up close to the outer buildings,” Rick suggested, “we’d have cover until we were almost there.”

“I like your thinking, Rick.” Sam said.

Nelson looked at the boulder field and nodded approval. The mining camp hadn't been set up for security, a military camp would have cleared the boulders to provide a field of fire. The mining company only cared that the boulders didn't interfere with crawlers. “Yeah, let’s get off this road. I got a feeling like we’re being watched. The camp must have some sort of surveillance cameras around here.” Nelson said, and led the way off the road, looking for poles with cameras on top. In fact, there were no active cameras in their direction, only amongst the buildings ahead.

What the hell were the three men doing, Mac ground his teeth in anger?! The three men had walked off the road, and were now headed toward the damned boulder field. If they reached the boulders, Mac knew he was in trouble, he would have a hell of a time finding them in around the boulders, and the boulders came within a hundred meters of the outermost camp buildings. He couldn’t get much closer now, one of the men kept glancing behind them, and between Mac and the boulder field the ground was totally open. If the men saw him coming, they would scatter and run. Damn. He needed to take a shot from here, if he hit one of the men, then one or both of the others would hesitate, try to help the wounded man, giving Mac a chance to take out at least one more. Yeah, that was a good idea. He’d seen that in an old war video. He lifted the gun to his shoulder and selected single shot mode. Lightly squeezing the trigger activated the laser rangefinder, and the display in the scope showed distance to the target, and the wind velocity. Mac smiled, adjusted the scope to compensate, centered the crosshairs on the back of the nearest man, and squeezed the trigger until the gun bucked slightly.

He missed! In the thin atmosphere of Ares, he hadn’t needed to compensate for the wind at all! The shot, a magnetically propelled explosive-tipped dart, passed between Nelson’s torso and his right arm, and impacted a boulder ahead of the shuttle pilot, exploding and flinging chips of rock into the air. Seeing that, the three men turned as one, to see a figure in an environment suit rise up from next to the hut, holding a rifle, looking agitated. The figure put the rifle to his shoulder, and the three shuttle survivors didn’t need to see any more. “Run!” Nelson shouted.

Running in an environment suit, on a planet with almost Earth-normal gravity, was not easy. The additional experience Sam and Nelson had in suits did not matter, like Rick, they clumsily tripped over small rocks, stumbled across shallow depressions in the soil, and waved their arms to keep their balance, keep upright, keep moving. Running awkwardly saved their lives. Behind them, Mac, instead of staying prone to steady his aim, tried to shoot on the run at the weaving, stumbling targets, and missed every time. In front of the men, boulders exploded as the darts hit, showering the men with rock chips, which bounced off their helmets with a clanging sound. Then they were in the boulder field, and ran to the left and the right, until they couldn’t see anything but boulders all around them. They stopped, breathing heavily. Nelson gestured the three to put their helmets together, in direct contact. Through the helmet, Rick heard Nelson’s muffled, hollow-sounding voice, say  “They may have equipment to track radio signals, we need to stay off the radio.”

“I only saw one guy.” Rick shouted, not sure how loud he had to talk to be heard thru the helmet.

“Me too, just one guy. I think there is only one guy out here.” Sam said, thinking back to his days in the Marines. “If there was more than one, they would have had a second guy here in the boulder field, to cut us off. That’s what I would do.”

“He doesn’t need to track us by radio, look at our footprints.” Rick pointed to the ground. In the area where they stood, they were the first humans, the first creatures of any kind, to ever trod that soil. The miners apparently had avoided the boulder field. Their footprints coming into the boulder field were sharply outlined, impossible to miss. “All he has to do is follow our footprints.”

“You’re right, man.” Sam agreed. “What do we do?”

“You’re the Marine, Sam, you tell us.” Nelson protested.

“Hey, I was in the Corps for only four years, and that was a long time ago, amigo! Give me a weapon and I’ll think of something. Right now, all we can do is try to hit him with a rock. I don’t like those odds, man. Can’t throw a rock as far as he can shoot.”

Rick thought of the toolkit bag still slung over his shoulder. “I think I know a way to even those odds.”

Mac hesitated at the edge of the boulder field. Some of the boulders were less than waist-high, not useful for cover, but most of the boulders were big, taller than he was, and some were bigger than a crawler. It was, he had to admit, a great place for the three shuttle survivors to even the odds. Damn. He couldn’t go back now, he couldn’t call Valjean and tell the Boss he’d let the three get away because he was afraid to pursue unarmed men into the boulder field. He notched the rifle’s selector from single shot to semi-auto, so it would fire three-round bursts. Lay down enough explosive darts, he figured, and he wouldn’t need careful aim. Pray and spray.

It didn’t work out quite the way Mac figured. He followed the trail of footprints, hugging close to boulders, then sprinting ahead. He fancied himself a warrior on a battlefield. Really, he was a punk, hunting unarmed prey. He came around a rock, and there, in front of him, was one of the men he was hunting, running away from him. Mac took the extra split second to stand still and aim, then he fired a burst into the man’s back. And missed. The darts went right through, exploding against boulders. A hologram. They had a holoprojector! As he stood, open-mouthed in surprise, a rock clanged off the back of his helmet, almost knocking him down, almost making his drop the rifle. He staggered, knocking his shoulder on a rock, spun around and fired wildly. Nobody there. He spun back around, and running toward him was a man, rock held above his head in one fist. Mac fired a burst.

Damn! Hologram again! The image flickered and blinked out. He ground his teeth in anger. They had to be close in order to project the image. With a roar of frustration, he charged ahead, but found only tracks leading in three directions.

For ten wild minutes, the three men led Mac on a confusing chase, going back over their own tracks, holograms popping up here and there. Inevitably, Mac would fire a burst into what turned out to be a hologram, and then it would vanish, and he would often get smashed in the back, or in the helmet, by a rock thrown from behind him. There were now so many tracks covering the area, his and theirs, that he couldn’t use the tracks to follow them with any degree of certainty. Also, he was lost, he had no idea where the mining camp was. His head hurt from the helmet getting bashed by rocks, and he was breathing so hard that his hands were shaking. He needed to slow down, calm his breathing, calm his racing pulse, and think.

Mac walked ahead, slowly, warily, stalking his prey, his labored breathing loud inside the helmet. His throat was dry, the helmet’s drinking water tanks was empty, he hadn’t thought he would need water for what he had expected would be a short time outside. He had the rifle on his side, they had the numbers on their side, he didn’t know who had the advantage. Whoever they were, they were smart, doubling back over their tracks so he couldn’t trust their footprints to track them. With that hologram they had, he couldn’t completely trust his eyes, either. Then he smiled slyly. One thing he had learned was to recognize the hologram, there was a red stripe on the helmet of that one. Next time, as soon as he saw the hologram, he would spin around and blast whatever smart guy thought he was going to hit Mac with a rock from behind. Mac was no dummy. That’s what Mac always said. And Mac was always right, according to Mac.

The trail led between two large boulders. A likely place for an ambush, Mac knew to avoid it. If he could have gone around, he would have. That would mean climbing over and around a pile of smaller boulders on each side, which would mean slinging his rifle over his shoulder. Not happening. He would go straight through and let his gun clear the way. He waited just before the twin boulders, looking for telltale dust clouds from footsteps. Nothing. This was all taking way too damned long. He should have been back inside the mining camp, quenching his thirst with the miners’ surprisingly large supply of liquor, not out on the surface of this dust-filled rock. With a shout no one else could hear, Mac leaped through the opening between the twin boulders, firing shots to the left and right. Rock chips and dust obscured his vision momentarily, then he stood still, breathing heavily. Nothing. No one was there, no one had been there. Damn. He’d just wasted ammo. He glanced down at the readout on top of the rifle, seven rounds left out of thirty. There was a spare clip on his belt-

Mac experienced a moment of panic. Was the spare ammo clip on his belt inside the suit? He dropped his left hand from the rifle and groped the environment suit’s toolbelt. Ah, there it was, right where he now remembered putting it on the toolbelt. Should he switch the clip now? It would leave him with only one shot for a brief time, he-

A man stepped out from behind a boulder in front of him, holding a large rock over his head in one hand. Mac raised the rifle, finger ready on the trigger, seeing the red stripe on the helmet, and the man... flickered. Their hologram must be running out of power, it couldn’t hold the image! Mac half-smiled and spun around, trigger pulled halfway.

Rick, who had been standing behind the hologram this time, leaped forward, a rock held over his head tightly with both hands, and smashed it into Mac right where the helmet met the man's right shoulder. Mac dropped the rifle and went down, Rick fell on top of him, joined by Sam. The three rolled around in the dust, struggling, until they felt the ground shake. Nelson had picked up the rifle and fired a single shot into the soil next to the pirate’s head. Nelson pointed the rifle at Mac's face, who let go of Rick and held his hands in the air.

“Rick, good job! Sam, he’s got a spare clip of ammo on his belt, get it. And grab that spool of line, tie his arms behind his back.” Sam did both quickly, then turned Mac on his back, and stood over him.

Nelson bent over to look Mac in the eyes. “Are there any more bad guys in the mining camp, or is it just you?”

Mac, sullen, glared back at Nelson. He kept his radio off and mouthed a curse.

“Oh, wise guy, huh? Radio broken? Well, if you can’t provide any information, you’re not any use to us. And I’m not wasting my time dragging you back.” Nelson pressed the rifle into Mac’s chest and thumbed the safety off. “Stand back, guys, these are explosive darts. We don't want to get splattered.”

“I can talk! I can talk!” Mac shouted into the suit radio.

Nelson kept the rifle jammed into Mac’s chest, bearing down so the man on the ground could feel the barrel poking into the suit. “Then talk. How many more of you here on the ground?”

“Five. There’s five others, two are out hunting you, in another direction. But I called them, and they’re on their way.” Mac said, taunting. These were freighter crewmen, not tough outlaws like himself. His best chance was to keep them scared, keep them off balance.

“Five, huh? I believe you,” Nelson said with a smile, “you are proving to be useful. Tell you what, though, I’ll make you a deal. You be straight with us, I’ll let you live. If I find out you’re lying to me, I’ll blow your brains all over this rock.”

“You? You guys won’t kill me, you haven’t got the guts. You’re cargo handlers.” Mac spat out with a sneer.

Nelson shrugged, lifted the rifle, and turned to Rick. “Your turn, professor.”

Rick had never been more angry in his life. He stomped his left foot down on Mac’s neck, hard. “Listen to me, you piece of crap.” He said quietly through clenched teeth. “My family is up there, and I don’t know if they’re alive or not. The only witnesses down here are three people you already tried to kill twice. I am through playing games with you.” Rick reached into his toolkit bag, pulled out a knife, and quickly sliced through the fabric of Mac’s suit, making a hole just below where the helmet connected. Air rushed out, and Mac shouted and thrashed around, his face barely visible in the fogging helmet visor. Rick could barely see Mac’s eyes bulging and his skin turning blue, the man's lips purple.

“Damn, man.” Sam exclaimed, looking at Rick in surprise, then Sam knelt down and held onto Mac’s legs to keep him still. Nelson just looked grim and kept the rifle pointed at the pirate.

“I’ll tell you-“ Mac coughed and gasped, “I’ll telllll...” he couldn’t fill his lungs with enough air to speak.

“More lies? I’m not listening.” Rick said loudly.

The pirate gave one last feeble heave to break himself free, then he flopped down on the dusty ground, unconscious. Rick took his boot off Mac’s neck, pulled out a patch, and slapped it on the hole he had cut. The patch bubbled and sealed, just to be sure, Rick slapped a second patch on top of it. Mac’s helmet visor began to clear, and his suit ballooned outward as it refilled with air.

Sam stood up, wiping his hands on the legs of his suit to remove the red dust. “Professor, man, remind me not to mess with you, like, ever.”

“He’ll be all right, I wanted to put a good scare into him, that’s all. He’ll wake up in a minute.” Rick explained. It scared him to think of whether he would have really killed the pirate. If Rick learned his family was dead, would he kill? He didn’t know. The rules of civilization didn’t seem to apply anymore. Not out here, so far from Earth. Not on Ares. Not now.

“Sam, before sleeping beauty here wakes up, check his suit, see if he’s got any weapons, or anything useful.” Nelson said, as he replaced the nearly depleted ammo clip with the fresh one.

Sam made a thorough search of the pirate’s suit, finding nothing useful. By the time he was done, Mac was awake, and breathing in dry, hacking gasps.

Rick tapped Mac’s visor with the blade of his knife. “Hey, wake up! You listening to me? Good. That was to give you a little taste of what’s coming to you, if we decide you’re no longer useful. Next time, I’m going to take you out of that suit, and push you out an airlock. Sam, what do you think, he’d suffocate first, as his lungs burst and filled up with blood?” Rick asked.

Sam waved his hand scoffingly, playing along. “Nah, man, the atmosphere on this rock is so thin, that first his eyeballs will freeze and pop like an overripe tomato, then all the blood vessels under his skin will boil and explode. After that, his lungs, yeah, they’ll freeze and burst. Nasty, man, bad way to go. Tell you what, though, I wanna watch if you do it.” Sam grinned fiercely at the pirate.

“You wouldn’t... you wouldn’t-“ Mac gasped.

Rick knelt down, pressed his helmet visor against Mac’s, and stared at the other man. “Look at me. Look at me! Look in my eyes. Look in my eyes." Rick said, very slowly, through clenched teeth. "My wife and my children are up there. You think I won’t kill you right here?”

Mac’s eyes weren’t yet focusing properly, but he could see the man the others called the ‘professor’ well enough. Mac knew that look he saw on Rick’s face, he had seen it before. And it terrified him. The professor was desperate. Determined. Out of control. Not a man to be messed with. Mac realized he was lucky to be alive.  The professor would not kill in cold blood, he was not like Mac, but he was more dangerous than a man like Mac. He was unpredictable. Mac knew he was in extreme danger. “I didn’t know your family was on that ship.” Mac said, with what sounded like genuine regret. "We didn't know there were any passengers."

“You didn’t ask because you didn’t care." Rick continued staring straight into Mac's eyes. "I’m going to ask you one last time; are you alone down here? You lie, you die.”

Mac nodded vigorously. “Yes, just me. We took over the camp, locked the miners in three of the buildings, then the others flew back up to the ship. My job here was to make sure the miners stayed locked up, and to man the radio. That was me on the distress call. Hey, professor, for what it’s worth, last I heard, your kids are okay, their part of the ship wasn’t damaged. I heard your daughter on the radio.” Mac didn’t add that he had heard Kaylee through a relay from the Nightengale, and that the children were being chased by the other pirates.

Hearing that his family, his children at least, were alive caused Rick to slump slightly with relief. He stood up, realized he still had the knife in his hand, and sheathed it. “Why? Why attack the ship? Why all this?”

Mac shrugged. “All I know is we’re being paid to steal something off the ship, I don’t know what it is, only our boss knows. The plan was to disable the ship, steal the whatsis, and get out of here before the Navy figures out we hoodwinked them. Quick, easy, nobody has to get hurt, huh? That Navy frigate is searching for a ship that doesn’t exist, a long way from here. I wouldn’t count on them for help any time soon.”

“Disable the ship, and kill anybody who gets in the way?” Nelson said.

Mac shrugged again. “It’s just business.” He said, as if that explained everything. Now that he could breathe again, he was getting his confidence back, thinking ahead. Valjean wouldn’t want to leave Mac behind to be captured by the Navy, because Mac would talk, and Valjean would be a hunted man on any human-occupied planet. Theft was one thing, but messing with the Navy? The Navy never forgot something like that. Mac’s best hope was that if Valjean had either of the professor’s children, he could use the child as a hostage to get Mac released. After that, Mac didn’t care what Valjean did with the children, the three men here on the planet with him, or anyone else. Look out for Number One, was Mac’s motto, and Mac himself was always Numero Uno. “Hey, I gotta know. How’d you do that? With the hologram. You fooled me, and that ain't easy.”

Rick almost didn’t answer, not caring what the criminal at his feet thought of him. “I had the holoprojector attached to my belt. We figured after shooting at holograms for a while, you’d be looking for a hologram, so that’s what we gave you. Only this time, I was hiding behind the hologram, and you were stupid enough to fall for it.” Rick couldn’t resist gloating. “Tell me, what’s your boss going to think, you get captured by a group of unarmed guys? He won’t be real happy with you.”

Mac silently glared at Rick, then looked away.

“All right,” Nelson said, standing back and keeping the rifle pointed at Mac. “Sam, help dumb-ass here to his feet. You, you’re going to help us get the miners free, then we’re going to talk to your boss upstairs. And you better pray nobody up there got hurt. Like you said, the Navy won’t be here for a while. A lot of things can happen to you before the Navy shows up.” Nelson’s eyes narrowed, and he looked from Mac to the rifle and back. “Bad things.”

CHAPTER 14

Opening all the doors in a cargo section turned out to be easy, once Manny found the command listed on a menu, available from all of the door control panels. It was Jen’s card and access code that made it possible. Once he figured out how to open multiple doors, Manny had opened certain doors, all the way to the compartment where the Tinos were stored, allowing brother and sister to run the whole way there without stopping. While Kaylee was studying the hypersleep boxes, trying to figure out how to wake the tinos, Manny commanded all the doors behind them to slide close and lock again. It was, he decided, a neat trick.

“Got it.” Dooley said, as his notepad got the door unlocked. It was still taking the same amount of time for his notepad to override each door’s locking code, but he was getting faster at running through each compartment, plugging his notepad into the control panel, and getting the code-cracking software running. Also, since they were no longer much worried about being ambushed by people with weapons, they now ducked through the doors as soon as they opened, rather than waiting to make sure the compartment ahead was clear. Dooley knew where the box was located, it hadn’t moved for ten minutes.

As the door slid open, Dooley was the first through, and he almost dropped his notepad in surprise. The opposite door was open! “Boss!”

“I see it, move!” The three pirates, and their robot, hurried down the compartment, guns drawn. They were only halfway through the cargo hold, when the door at the far end began to slide closed. Valjean, unencumbered by the gear Dooley and Taney were carrying, put on a frantic burst of speed, and shot through the closing door sideways, tearing buttons off his shirt on the way. As he fell to the deck, he saw the door on the opposite end was also, sliding closed. His effort was all for nothing.

Valjean was alone. He could faintly hear pounding on the door behind him. Dooley would be working to open the door behind him, there was nothing for Valjean to do but wait. It did not improve his mood.

“This one’s waking up!” Kaylee warned excitedly. She had activated the process for waking up the tinos, the instructions, helpfully, had been printed right on the outside of the hypersleep box. She and Manny had gotten the covers open, when the tinos woke up, all the creatures would need to do is step out onto the deck. The instructions said it would take fifteen minutes for the animal to become fully awake, and the process had been running for five minutes now. “We better get out of here now.”

“Huh? Oh, great.” Manny said, distracted. He was sitting on the deck, where he had pulled the alien thing out of the box to look at it. Only now, he was looking at the box itself. “Kaylee, I think I know how the pirates found us.”

“The intercom?”

“No, not the intercom,” he said, relieved that he hadn’t been the cause of their current predicament. “This box has a radio ID tag.” He pointed to a small, shiny plate on the bottom of the box. “That’s how the crew knows where everything is, and I think it’s how the robots know where to store the cargo.”

“So?” She was concentrating on the tino. It was smacking its lips, and its feet were twitching, like it was dreaming. Dreams were impossible in hypersleep, this animal was waking up.

“So, the tag is still active. Kaylee, this is how they’ve been tracking us!”

“Oh, no!” Kaylee put her hands to her mouth in horror. If she’d only taken the thing out of the box, and left the box behind- “Wait, can’t we just throw away the box now? The tag is on the box, not on the alien thing, right?”

Manny didn’t look horrified. In fact, he had a sly look on his face. “We could leave the box here,” he paused as one of the awakening tinos gave a low, rumbling growl, “but we don’t want to. If the pirates want to track this box, I say we should let them.”

There was a metallic clicking sound as the locking pins retracted, then the door began to slide open. When Dooley came through, he couldn’t decide whether he was relieved or disappointed, to find Valjean leaning casually against a crate, waiting for him.  “They weren’t in here?” Dooley asked, surprised.

“No,” Valjean explained, “the other door closed at the same time this door closed.”

That puzzled Dooley. “Huh. So, they’re operating the doors remotely. I mean, I checked the radio tag five minutes ago, the box is still five compartments in front of us, so they weren’t here when the doors closed. I wonder if I can do that?”

Based on the expression on Valjean’s face, that last question wasn’t something Dooley should have said out loud. “You moron!” Valjean smacked Dooley on the side of his head. “You could have opened all these doors, instead of one at a time?”

“I don’t know, boss! I don’t think so. They have an access card, they can do anything they want.” Dooley looked back at the door control panel, hoping for answers. “I’m not interfacing with the computer, I’m just overriding the locking mechanism on one particular door. Sorry, boss.”

“Try it!” Valjean insisted. In the back of Valjean’s mind was the thought that, if all the doors were open, he wouldn’t need Dooley much longer.

That thought occurred to Dooley also. Not having a real choice, he plugged his notepad in, and started working. And thinking. Thinking of a way to survive.

Kaylee ran through one darkened compartment after another, headed toward the back of the ship. It was a long way, on legs that were already tired. Manny was supposed to give her a five minute head start, he had opened all of the doors from where the tinos were, to the very aft end of the cargo section. The box with its radio tag was in her backpack, bouncing as she ran. If the pirates wanted to chase the box, let them, had been Manny's idea, and it was a good idea.

She skidded to a stop, startled. There was a noise behind her. It didn’t sound mechanical. The noise repeated, a low grumble. It made her hair stand up. Were the tinos walking around already? She leaped forward and ran furiously, pumping her arms and legs faster, running into the darkness.

The first tino had rolled over, and flopped out of its hypersleep box onto the deck. The tinos had awakened much faster than expected, as they had not been in hypersleep as long as they were supposed to have been. The first tino was groggy, though less so than its handlers probably expected. Tinos were tough, not only on the outside. It shook its head, rapidly awakening, and sniffed the air. Its sensitive nose detected three other tinos, and it spun around with a snarl. The other three were also stirring, and tinos were territorial, they usually killed other tinos on sight. Now, however, the first tino had a more important priority: it was hungry. Hungry like it had never been before. The hypersleep box had kept the tino’s body alive by dripping nutrients into its bloodstream, but its belly was empty, completely empty. Hunger was all it could think about. Hunger was everything.

It smelled food, close by. The tino, keeping a wary eye on its three awakening companions, snuffled its way across the deck, to where Manny had discarded a candy bar wrapper. The scent of the candy was driving the tino insane with hunger, a fact that also would have surprised its handlers back on Oceania, as candy bars were not known to be a food favorite of tinos in the wild. Unable to see close up, the tino snuffled, trying to find the wrapper, and only succeeded in pushing it under a pallet. It roared in frustration, and clawed at the pallet, to no avail.

Then it stood up, and sniffed the air. The scent of candy was strong. With a leap, it was off, bounding out of the compartment, and after the candy.

Manny paused and checked his watch. Almost five minutes had gone by. Like his sister, he was out of breath, but his path had been across the cargo pod, rather than towards the rear. He was almost at his destination, an elevator which connected the pods. It would be much easier to ride the elevator, than to climb down, and then up, an access tube.

He stopped at a door, and plugged Jen’s card into the control panel, quickly pulling up a menu that showed him all the doors in that cargo pod. He frowned. Many doors he had not opened, were open. The pirates had opened those doors? It had to be. If that was true, then he knew where they were, at the end of the trail of open doors. They were getting close to the tinos, he saw with a wmile.

Manny selected a command to open, and lock open, most of the doors in the cargo pod, then blocked off the area behind the pirates, and selected a command to close and lock those doors. This, he decided, was cool. He checked his watch. Four minutes, forty seconds. Close enough. He pressed the button, and was rewarded by the sight of multiple doors sliding open.

There was one last thing to do; he selected a series of specific doors, and commanded them to close and lock. Then, he pulled the access card out of the slot, tucked it in his pocket, and ran for the elevator.

Dooley was stalling for time. Sure, there had to be a command menu, somewhere, that would open multiple doors. Without an access card, and the proper password, he couldn’t get to the menu. So, he was randomly pressing buttons, waiting for Valjean to get disgusted and tell Dooley to stop.

There was a click, then a familiar whirring sound, as doors began to open in front of them. Dooley looked up in surprise, to see an approving Valjean actually smiling, and patting him on the shoulder. “I knew you could do-“

“Hey!” Taney called out, “The doors behind us are closing.”

Valjean’s eyes narrowed. Dooley thought up a lie fast. “I, uh, figured we wouldn’t want them getting behind us, right, boss?” He said nervously.

“Good thinking.” Valjean said, surprised at both Dooley’s brain power, and his own reaction. Was he getting soft? Then there was a faint roaring sound, echoing in the darkness, and the three pirates spun around. “What was that?”

Taney took a couple steps forward, trying to peer into the gloom. The sound repeated, louder. It was echoing. “Sounds far away, whatever it is.”

“Forget about it.” Valjean ordered. “Where’s the box now?”

Locating the box was something Dooley knew how to do. “It’s moving, boss, toward the back of the ship. Straight ahead of us, the doors are open all the way.”

Valjean nodded. Now that all the doors were open, the children must have realized they had no advantage over the pirates, no advantage other than a head start, no choice but to run as fast as their young legs could carry them.

“No more screwing around. Dooley, you and your tin man go to the right, Taney and I will take the left. We’ll head straight for the back of the ship, Dooley, you hang back a bit, keep checking where that box is, we’ll catch them between us. I want that damned box, and I’m tired of being played with by those brats. Does everyone understand?”

Taney indicated his agreement by flicking his pistol’s safety off, and spitting on the deck. Dooley simply nodded.

“Move out!”

The plan, which sister and brother had hurriedly cooked up, called for Kaylee to bring the box to the aft end of the ship, luring the pirates far away from their shuttle, while Manny went to find out if their shuttle was still docked to the ship. The plan was working, up until the point when Kaylee realized the tinos were awake already, and they were coming after her! She wasn’t sure at first, there were roaring sounds behind her, but the sound echoed so much in the cargo pod that she couldn’t tell if the sound was getting louder or not. Until suddenly she was sure. She’d paused to catch her breath, and saw something in the distance, just a glimpse, a darker shadow in the shadows. Something moving. Coming toward her. Fast.

She experienced a moment of shear panic. How fast could a tino move? There was the shadow again, closer. Too close!

Their plan was for Kaylee to dump the box, then crawl through a particular access tube, a tube for which Manny had remotely unlocked the hatch. That tube led into a series of compartments that Manny had blocked off from the pirates, a series of compartments where Kaylee could safely circle back past the pirates, and make her way to another tube, where she would have to climb down, then up, into the other pod.

Only now, she wasn’t going to make it to the hatch before the tinos caught her! Manny said the hatch was between Structural Frames 91 and 92, she was only at number 85. There was no time. The tino roared as it spotted its prey. Kaylee reacted, whipping her backpack off, spilling the box out onto the deck. She kicked the box spinning away with her foot, slung her pack over one shoulder, and hopped on top of a crate, then another, then another, climbing higher, until she reached the wall. A ladder was there, attached to the wall, leading up into the unseen shadows of the ceiling. She grabbed hold of the ladder and climbed as fast as she could. Along the way, one of her feet slipped, and she fell forward into the wall, hitting a ladder rung and bashing her lip. Though her eyes teared up from the pain, Kaylee didn’t hesitate, she got her foot back on the ladder and kept going.

The ladder ended near the ceiling, just below a hatch. The hatch Kaylee couldn’t open, it was locked, and Manny had the access card. There was a light near the hatch, she couldn’t hide there. Tinos couldn’t climb ladders, could they?

She heard the tino coming, heavy thumping on the deck. It came into view, and tried to stop, its paws and claws skidding on the smooth deck plates. The scene would have been comical, watching a fierce predator with its feet slipping, legs spread out, trying not to fall. It thudded into a crate, and came to an awkward stop.

The tino sniffed the air, and Kaylee held her breath, fearful it would hear her. But it didn’t look up at all, its nose was to the deck, following a scent trail, a trail which led to-

The box. The box the alien thing had been in.

Why would a tino want an empty box? Kaylee had taken the alien thing out of the box. Only-  the box wasn’t empty! Kaylee remembered, as a joke, she and Manny had filled it with candy bars, along with a note to the pirates. Tinos liked candy? Human candy; chocolate, caramel and nuts?

Apparently, tinos loved candy! This tino was trying to get the box open, but it was too stupid to know how to unlatch the lid. It tried to crush the box with its jaws, the square shape of the box was hard to get a good grip on. It laid down on the deck, put the box between its front paws, and tried to pop it open with its massive teeth.

The tino stopped and raised its head, its ears swiveled around. Something was coming. Another tino. Coming to steal its food! The tino got the box between its jaws, and bounded off toward the aft end of the ship.

Kaylee was about to climb down, when she heard more noises, echoing in the empty compartment. She climbed back to the top of the ladder just in time, as two tinos, one right behind the other, came racing down the compartment, chasing the first tino.

Three. That was three tinos. There had been four tinos in the hypersleep boxes, all four had been waking when Kaylee last saw them. Where was the fourth one? She couldn’t climb down, if the fourth tino was still coming.

Clinging to the ladder, she waited fearfully.

Rick, Nelson and Sam had marched Mac to the mining camp, and released the miners from the dining hall, where most of them had been confined by the pirates. The miners, while desperately in need of showers, were otherwise in good condition. In the dining hall, they’d had access to plenty of food and drink, and the pirates had hooked up the emergency oxygen supply, although the air flow was turned down to keep the miners lethargic. It was a good plan from the pirates’ viewpoint: most of the miners were confined in one area, with no ability to go anywhere else. All the walkway tubes connecting the dining hall to other parts of the camp had been cut, and drained of air. Without e-suits, the miners had only been able to look out the windows and make idle threats about what they would do to the pirates, someday. When the three men from the freighter arrived, they brought with them several of the miners’ e-suits, so a few miners could move about the camp and bring back more e-suits. An hour later, they were gathered in the main administration building, where Mac had apparently had lived, slept, ate, drank, and amused himself by smashing things. The office of the mining manager, a tall Japanese man named Yomuri, had been thoroughly trashed, with graffiti scrawled on the walls, and his private liquor cabinet ransacked. Five very angry miners held Mac, who had bruises and cut on his face from rough treatment at their hands.

Yomuri glared at Mac, and explained what had happened. “He and his buddies arrived a couple hours before the distress call was sent to your ship. Their ship was in orbit, we got a call saying it was a company surprise inspection, and we should make sure all our people were gathered here at the camp. It was near a shift change anyway, so most people were already here. I guess they knew that.” He added, as if that thought had just occurred to him. “They had legit recognition codes, we scoped out their ship as best we could, it looked like the kind of yacht our company bigshots fly around in. Surprise inspections are nothing special, I’ve been through plenty in my time. They landed, the leader sure looked like a typical corporate suit, real slick, you know the type. Looks right through me like I was nothing. Nothing! I run this whole mining concession, hell, I run the whole planet!” Yomuri bit his lips, and continued. “Anyways, one of them says he’s here to check on our life support system, there was a manufacturer’s recall, or something bogus like that. I sent two of my guys with that guy, and I broke out the good whiskey to sit down with their leader. We’re sitting in my office, he’s asking me a lot of questions, nothing suspicious, wants to see my drilling records, crew log books, all that. Pretty standard for an inspection. I tell you what, these guys really knew what they were doing. We’re talking, and I start feeling funny, sleepy like. Or like I was drunk. Head spinning, that sort of thing. Turns out, that little jerk who wanted to check out our life support, knocked out my two guys with a stun gun, and put a sleeping gas in our air filtration system. The pirates had taken an antidote, I guess.”

The mining concession manager paused to collect his thoughts. Ultimately, he was responsible. All the people on the planet relied on him not only for jobs and income, but also to watch out for them, keep them safe, keep them alive. He had been outsmarted, made a fool of, and they were all paying the price now. “Next thing I know, I wake up, we’re all in the dining hall, no e-suits, doors locked, access walkways sliced open, radios and computers disabled. Their shuttle lifted off, and they left this jerk here. Real sweetheart, this one. We ask him for anything, medicine, you name it, he tells us to shut up, says we’ll all be dead soon, so what’s the difference?” Yomuri’s fists clenched at his side. He would love to punch the pirate right in his face. He turned toward Nelson before his anger got the better of him. “Did he tell you what this is all about?”

“Only that they were hired, by who he doesn’t know, to steal something off our ship. He says he doesn’t know what it is, and I believe him.” Nelson said, looking Mac straight in the eye. “This one’s too stupid to be told anything important, he’s just muscle. And disposable. My guess is, that pirate ship is going to leave him here.”

“No they’re not! They’re coming down here to pick me up, and they’ve got missiles-“ Mac’s shouting was interrupted by a hard backhand across the face from one of the miners.

“You,” Yomuri said menacingly, “keep your mouth shut, unless we ask you a question. You’re right, Nelson, this one looks like he’s got the brainpower of a rock. Listen up, smart guy, I’ll give you something to think about, if you can wrap your brain around something simple. You’re alive only as long as we think you might be useful. If any pirate shuttle comes down here to pick you up, all they’re going to find is your body outside, that’s a promise from me. Now, do you have anything more to say? Like who you’re working for, or what’s going on up there?”

Mac worked his lips side to side, and blood trickled down his chin. He opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it, and shook his head no, staring defiantly at Yomuri.

One of the miners stepped forward. “If he’s got nothing more to say, can we throw him out the airlock now?” He snarled in Mac’s direction.

Nelson stepped forward, then waited for Yomuri to speak. This was Yomuri's mining camp, Nelson was a visitor. Yomuri looked torn, trying to decide. Then he straightened up and shook his head. “No. Not yet. I think it’s better if he stays right here until the Navy arrives. They’ll find out who he’s working for, I’m certain of that. Then he can spend the next fifty years staring at the walls of a prison cell.” Yomuri walked over to Mac and put his hand around the pirate’s throat. “Every time I’m sipping a nice twenty year old scotch, or relaxing on a beach somewhere, or every time I’m enjoying the company of a woman, I’ll be thinking of you, alone in your cold little cell. You think about that.” Yomuri released the pirate with a disgusted look. “Take him away. Lock him in a storage closet for now, until I figure out a better place to put him. But nobody touches him, you hear me?”

The miners grumbled but obeyed, leading Mac away none to gently. Now Nelson did speak up. “Mr. Yomuri,” he figured addressing the mining manager with respect would help the man’s bruised ego, and make things go more smoothly, “sir, I think we need to check out your life support equipment as soon as possible. My men are experts.” He neglected to mention that Rick was an expert at xenoarcheology.

“Yes, that is a priority. You, Tilden,” he gestured to a miner, “show these men to the life support center.” Yomuri pointed out the window. “It’s the tall orange building over there, next to the crawler garage. Thanks for your help, by the way, we were too busy earlier to properly thank you. I’d offer you a drink, but that jerk either drank, or smashed, all my good liquor bottles.” It looked like the manager considered that almost to be Mac’s greatest sin. “When this is all over, I promise you a rain check on that drink, for sure.”

Nelson thought of something. “Hey, you said you scoped out the pirates’ ship when it arrived? Can we use your equipment to see what’s going on above us?”

“Ah, I wish we could, all we had was a simple telescope at I kept in my office. They smashed it, I’m sorry. Did you have any luck with the radio?”

Nelson frowned. “No. Your radio is working fine, they left that alone. It’s still being jammed. Your hyperwave, they did smash that.”

“Huh. I’ll have one of my guys monitor the radio, in case they drop the jamming.” Yomuri offered sympathetically. Nelson was not comforted.

CHAPTER 15

Valjean stopped, his senses alert to danger. The door at the end of this compartment was closed. All the other doors were open, why was this one closed? Probably something stupid Dooley had done, or forgotten to do. The sooner Valjean was done with Dooley’s services, the sooner he could ditch him and his robot. Dooley had been useful so far, but Valjean didn’t plan on splitting the money with Dooley. Or with anyone. He looked over at Taney, who was waiting, his back to Valjean, covering his boss. Taney was a good man to have in a fight. And Taney carried the explosives, and knew how to use them. That didn’t mean Valjean needed Taney much longer, either. Valjean jerked his head to the side. “Detour,” he said, out of breath. Valjean wanted to reach the aft end of the cargo compartment before the children could get there, he and Taney had been running full speed. Or, running at Valjean’s full speed, as Taney wasn’t even breathing hard. They had halted several times, to listen when they heard roaring sounds. Valjean had decided it was most likely something the children were sending over the intercom, intended to frighten the pirates. He had news for them; he wasn’t scared.

“What is that noise?” Dooley whispered, waving his gun around. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. The sound was unnerving, like a wild animal. Dooley couldn’t figure what, aboard a starship, could make a noise like that. Maybe the children were playing a recording intended to scare him. He had news for them; the sound was scaring him. Dooley slowed to a stop. They had been trotting, rather than running, following Valjean’s plan for him and Taney to get ahead, and then flush the children back toward Dooley and his robot. “Rocko?”

The robot turned its armored head toward him. “My database cannot identify the sound. The closest equivalent is a wild animal of some type, a predator.”

“Oh.” Dooley had already figured that’s what the sound was. “Artificial, or natural?”

“I cannot determine what is generating the sound.”

A natural source was improbable, Dooley knew, being as they were on a ship in orbit. Knowing a fact, however, and feeling it in your gut, believing it, were two very different things, Dooley reflected. “We’ll move, a little slower, from now on.” If there were anything dangerous ahead, let Valjean and Taney find it first.

Kaylee’s forearms were cramping from hanging onto the ladder, the bottom of her feet hurt, where the narrow rungs dug into her soles. Tino or not, she needed to climb down. Their plan was in tatters. A tino now had the box, it could be anywhere by now. She had no idea where the pirates were. And there was no way she was going aft, where the tinos had gone, towards the hatch she was supposed to use for her escape. She dithered, trying to make up her mind.

She would climb down, at least. Then, at the bottom, she could decide. When she got to the bottom, she waited, straining to hear in the semi-darkness. There were sounds, probably tinos, off to the right, toward the back of the ship, where the tinos had gone. Maybe she would just go to the forward end of the compartment.

Once there, she was still undecided, so she walked slowly forward, creeping along to one side, until she got halfway, then she burst into a run and raced out the door at the other end. She skidded to a stop, holding onto the door frame. There was a sound again, this time, not behind her? She couldn’t tell, exactly, sounds echoed so much in the cargo pod. There was no choice now, she had to go forward. Her brother was waiting, one way or another. She tightened the straps of her backpack, which was now considerably less bulky. A roar spurred her into action, and she ran in the only direction she was sure the roaring sound hadn’t come from: forward, and to the left.

Dooley skidded to a stop, frozen in place by a roar that made his blood run cold. It was close, whatever it was. He leaped to the side, and put his back to the wall next to the door, holding his pistol up in front of him, his heart racing. With his other hand, he gestured for Rocko to take the other side. Dooley took a deep breath to get his courage up, crouched, and spun around the door frame-

And collided with Kaylee, who was running as fast as she could. Both humans crashed to the ground, and Dooley’s gun went flying off into the darkness, lost among the crates. Pirate and girl were both so startled that for a split second both they sat, sprawled on the deck, and gaped at each other uncomprehendingly. Dooley recovered first, holding onto the door frame as he scrambled to his feet. Shouting his own cry of anger, he launched himself at the girl.

With a display of lithe athleticism that would have made her school gymnastics teacher proud, Kaylee leapt to her feet in one smooth motion. The pirate was coming toward her, arms outstretched, so she reacted as she was taught in self-defense class at Cesar Chavez Junior High School. She pointed her right toes forward, and kicked the pirate in the crotch with all her might.

Dooley went down like a sack of potatoes. Not a sound came out of his mouth, he was unable to speak, even to breathe. His eyes and mouth wide open in shock, he curled up in a ball on the deck, immobile.

The kick had thrown Kaylee off balance, she staggered sideways, windmilling her arms until her feet were solidly planted beneath her. She felt her back bump up against something, and then something seized her arms.

Kaylee looked up in surprise at the combat robot that had taken hold of her. Its eyes, glowing faintly orange, bored into her. She opened her mouth to scream, but only a whimper came out. Twisting her body in an attempt to get free was futile, the robot was immensely strong.

As suddenly as she was seized, it let go of her. “Are you injured, young Miss?” It asked.

“N-no.” Kaylee answered warily, rubbing her left arm, which was bruised from the robot's crushing grip.

“Be careful, young Miss.” It advised in a gentle tone.

“You’re not going to hurt me?” She stole a glance at the downed pirate, who was now rocking back and forth on the deck, his breath coming in great, choking sobs.

“No, but these men will. I suggest you leave this area immediately.”

With one last look at her surprise benefactor, Kaylee spun on her heels and ran away. The robot watched her with its infrared vision until she turned a corner, and was out of sight.

Dooley managed to stagger onto hands and knees, where he made a retching sound, deep in his throat, and then barfed up his last meal onto the deck. He spat to clear his mouth, and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. Rocko strode over and helped him to his feet. “What the, what the hell is wrong with you?” Dooley gasped. “You let her get away!” Had the robot not acted because Dooley hadn’t specifically ordered it to hold onto the girl? Stupid machine! “Go after her, I’ll follow you.”

“No.”

Dooley didn’t know what to say, or do. Machines didn’t say ‘no’! There were things they couldn’t do, but not things they wouldn’t do. Dooley was already in a very bad mood. “Command override-“ he started to say.

“Command refused.” The robot interrupted him, stepping closer to loom over the human. “I will not harm children. And I will not allow you to harm children.”

There was another roaring sound, closer, Dooley turned to peer into the darkness. The robot would surely protect him from, whatever was coming toward him. He looked up into the glowing eyes, his mind racing. If he could shut the robot down, and run through the restart sequence, maybe he could fix it. “Something’s coming.” He pleaded. "Do something."

"Do something? I will provide advice." The robot was unmoved. It leaned forward, so that its armored face was close, and looked Dooley directly in the eye. “Running would probably be your best course of action at the present time.”

Dooley was so thrown off balance by Rocko’s betrayal that he didn’t wait to see if the robot was joking. With a sob, he turned to limp away as fast as he could, bent over and shuffling his feet. Another roaring sound, this one very close, spurred him onward.

Rocko watched the tino approach, the animal was vividly visible in the infrared spectrum. It moved in great, bounding strides across the deck, coming straight at the robot. Tinos, too, could see in the infrared spectrum, it was how they hunted at night. And, beyond Rocko, it saw Dooley. This prey was moving slowly, staggering, injured. An easy kill. First, though, there was this other strange creature. The tino halted, ten meters from Rocko. It sniffed the air. It did not recognize this scent. What was this thing, which looked so much like its prey?

Its belly almost touching the deck, the tino padded quietly forward. There was something wet and fragrant on the deck, smelling vaguely like its prey. With one eye on the robot, the tino licked the puddle of vomit Dooley had left on the deck. Things did not taste good or bad to tinos, they tasted edible, or inedible. This was at least sort of edible, and it lapped it up, smacking its tough lips in a disgusting display. The robot did not move, even when the tino pressed its nose directly at it and sniffed the robot’s leg.

Dooley saw the tino. He didn’t know what it was, other than that it was massive. And fast. In the dim lighting it looked like an oversize tiger. Even if he weren’t half doubled over in pain, he wouldn’t be able to outrun the beast. Dooley thought fast. Could he get through the door at the end of the compartment, use his notepad to close and lock-

His notepad. He’d dropped it, back there, along with his gun. Hide. He needed to hide. Dooley turned toward the first crate he could reach, turned the latch, and popped it open. The crate was full of what looked like clothing, in vacuum-packed bags. He put both hands on the side of the crate, and with a desperate heave, he tipped it over, spilling the contents onto the deck. Frantically, with one eye on the tino, he pulled the remaining clothing out.

The tino finished sniffing the robot. Whatever this thing was, the tino decided, it wasn’t edible, dangerous, or a rival. The robot moved, and the tino jumped backwards with a menacing growl.

Rocko put its arms across its chest, fingers pointed in both directions. “He went that way,” the robot said.

The tino didn’t understand pointing gestures. Its nose was not confused, and it had Dooley’s scent. It claws skittered and scraped on the deck as it bounded off toward the pirate.

Dooley got the crate emptied, and pushed it back upright, just as the tino sprang at him. The pirate hopped into the box, and swung the lid closed a second before the tino hit the crate, bowling it over. The lid cracked open, and Dooley experienced a flash of panic, grasping in the dark at the inside of the lid, trying to pull it closed, then the crate was upside down, and the lid slammed closed, as Dooley tumbled to land on his head and shoulders.

The tino roared in frustration, swatting at the crate, raking it with its claws, biting at the corners. It was no use. The material the crate was made of was tough, very tough, designed to last for half a century of less than gentle handling. And even a tino’s incredibly powerful jaws could not penetrate the box, its teeth slipped, finding no purchase on the smooth surface. Its teeth slipped one last time, and the jaws snapped closed, nipping the tino’s tongue. The animal backed away, flicking its tongue in its mouth, annoyed by the sharp pain, studying the cargo box.

Rocko watched the tino, not with amusement, or any sense of satisfaction, since Rocko was a machine. Perhaps there were subroutines that were fulfilled, parameters which were exactly within specifications, and there is a sort of satisfaction in that, for machines.

The tino stopped licking its lips, and sniffed the air, then the deck. The prey in the crate was forgotten, now that it was inaccessible. The scent of the prey it was originally tracking was still strong. It sniffed the air again, then took off at a loping run.

Rocko watched the tino run away. Running in the same direction Kaylee had gone. The tino stopped, sniffed the deck, and took the same turn Kaylee had taken, tracking the girl.

Kaylee pressed her right hand into her side, where she was getting a cramp. Her collision with the pirate had thrown off her stride, her breathing was labored, and her legs felt like she was running through shallow water. Never in her life had she run so far without a break. Soccer games didn’t count, she had always been able to get at least a bit of rest during a game. Soccer games didn’t involve being chased by a tino.

The tino had fallen silent, which unnerved her more than hearing it roar. Her neck hurt from constantly glancing behind her in fear.

What was that? A shadow, moving behind her. Tino! She caught a glimpse of light reflecting off wet teeth. Kaylee half turned to get a better look, and stumbled, falling against a crate. She pushed herself off the crate to run, and the tino was right there, charging down the compartment, its mouth open, fangs exposed. It gathered itself and sprang through the air at her. Kaylee heard herself scream.

Another shape, a blur, came out of the darkness and hit the tino with a loud thud. The tino roared, the sound echoing so loud that it hurt Kaylee’s ears. She ducked behind a crate and crouched down terror, watching the fight. Another tino?

No, it was the robot! The tino roared, bit, scratched, heaved itself off the deck, with the weight of the robot on its back. The robot was not affected by the tino’s efforts, it had both arms around the tino’s neck, both legs wrapped firmly around the tino’s waist. The tino rolled over, smashing Rocko into the deck plates, the robot’s weapons went flying out of their holsters, one of the weapons skidded across the deck to stop at Kaylee’s feet.

The tino bounced Rocko off the deck, crushing the robot with its full weight, slamming Rocko’s head section into the hard deck plates. The combat robot simply hung on, squeezing the predator’s neck, as the tino’s struggles weakened, until the creature slumped onto the deck, limp. The robot let go of the tino, and stood up. "Bad kitty." The robot admonished the tino. "Bad, bad kitty."

Kaylee was pointing Rocko’s gun at the robot, the weight of the weapon making her arms shake. The robot took a step toward her. “Don’t come closer, or I’ll shoot you!”

Rocko stepped toward her, Kaylee pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. The gun was plucked out of her hands. Rocko held it up in front of her face, the barrel pointed to the side. “The weapon will not fire when the safety is on, you must set this selector switch to red, see?” The robot activated the gun, turned it around, and handed it back to her. “It is not safe for children to handle weapons like this. Are you sure you want it, young Miss?”

Kaylee’s hands, which were closing around the gun, let go. “No. No, I don’t. It’s too heavy.” She didn’t know why, but she trusted the robot.

Rocko didn’t nod, he wasn’t programmed to do that. He flicked the safety back on, put the gun in its holster, retrieved his other weapon, and holstered that also. The tino was beginning to stir. The robot looked at Kaylee. “I do not wish to harm this creature, if I do not need to.”

The tino, which only a minute before had been about to tear her apart, now looked pathetic. It was coughing, trying to struggle to its feet. “It’s just an animal.” She said. “Can you put it somewhere?”

“I am waiting instructions.” The robot responded.

“Uh,” Kaylee looked around, “can you put it in a crate? One of the big ones?”

Following Kaylee’s directions, the robot quickly opened a large crate, took out the contents, and picked up the massive tino as if it were a kitten, while the tino struggled weakly against Rocko. “Bad kitty,” the robot said again, as it lowered the tino inside. It then shot two air holes in the side of the lid, before closing the lid, picking up another crate, and stacking it on top. It slid the two crates in between other crates, so the tino couldn’t knock over its crate by rocking it. Inside the crate, the tino was stirring, a low, rumbling growl came out of the air holes.

“What are your instructions, young miss?”

Kaylee didn’t know what to make of her new servant. This was not like any domestic robot she’d seen, this machine was itself a weapon, the kind used by the military. “My name is Kaylee. What do I call you?

Kaylee expected the machine to reply with a number, or some other military designation, but it said “You may call me Rocko, if you wish.” It paused, then added, “I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Kaylee.”

“Hello?” Dooley called out. He could hear something, too faint to tell what the sound was. The tino hasn’t come back, and he was grateful for that. “Hello, anybody!” He shouted. With the crate upside down, he couldn’t open it enough to get himself out. He had managed to get himself right side up, and, by standing and pushing with his legs, he got the lid beneath him open a crack, into which he jammed the end of a flashlight. He had air to breathe, but no way out. The crate was apparently wedged against other crates. He was stuck, until somebody came by and got him out. Valjean would likely leave him there, or possibly shoot him. Dooley’s best hope was for the freighter’s crew to find him. How long would that take? Then, he had a chilling thought. Valjean planned to blow up the freighter once he’d found the item he wanted, blow it up by exploding the ship’s fusion engines. That was what Taney had in his backpack; explosives. Dooley needed to get out of the crate, get off the ship. “Hello! Anyone! Help! Hello!”

CHAPTER 16

Manny counted the corridor sections, counting down as he approached the airlock where Jen had said the pirate shuttle was docked. He tried to move silently, walking very softly. Manny had considered taking his shoes off, but socks were slippery, and his feet were so sweaty that they made more noise than his sneakers. How come the good guys in video programs always were able to walk so quietly? Up ahead of him, there was a thumping sound. Thump. A long pause. Thump again.

The corridor ahead jogged to the left around a major structural frame. Manny slid along the wall until he was next to the frame. He held his breath and slowly peaked his head around the frame.

There was a pirate, further down the corridor. A man, leaning back against the wall, looking bored, throwing a knife into the opposite wall, where the wall was made of a material softer than the hard substance Manny was standing next to. The pirate threw the knife, hard. It hit with thump sound. Nonchalantly, the pirate pushed himself off the wall, retrieved his knife, leaned back against the wall, checked the point of the blade, and threw the knife again. Thump.

Manny ducked back behind the frame. What to do now? A few meters beyond the pirate was the airlock, the inner door was open. So, the pirates’ shuttle was still docked! Kaylee had been right, they never tried to rescue his mother! Manny seethed with anger. He needed to do something. He needed a plan.

Manny unlocked the hatch, and turned the handle slowly, as quietly as he could. Jen had done a good job with maintenance, the hatch opened without a squeak from the hinges. He set his backpack down, and took out the one item he needed, the rest would only slow him down. This time, he did take his shoes off and left them behind. He crawled on hands and knees into the access tube, moving slowly, carefully, trying not to bump into anything that would make a sound. At the other end, Manny grasped the handle with one hand, and held the items he’d brought along with his other hand. The handle would make a click, Manny knew, when the lock disengaged. He waited for the pirate to throw the knife again.

Thump. Becker was getting good at this. His knife wasn’t even especially made for throwing. He was aiming for a dot on the wall, an inspection plate, or something like that. With Valjean and his team away, Becker had gotten bored with his job of guarding the shuttle. He strode over to the knife, pulled it out of the wall, and nodded with satisfaction that it had hit in almost exactly the same spot as his previous throw.

Click.

He held the knife up, and put his other hand on his holstered gun. What was that sound? Becker walked one way down the corridor, then the other way. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Then, he shrugged, leaned back against the wall, and checked the point of this knife. The sound was probably the ship’s hull popping, as it expanded and contracted. He was used to ship’s hulls making all sorts of noises, and he knew which sounds could be safely ignored. Becker threw the knife again. Thump.

Manny had been holding his breath, since he’d turned the handle, and the opening lock had made a click. Now the hatch was ready to be pushed open. He waited for the thump.

Thump.

Manny pushed the hatch open with his left hand, holding onto the handle to keep from falling on the deck. His head and shoulders were protruding into the hallway, with his right hand, he swung the hypodermic needle, with its load of tranqulizer, into the pirate’s leg. The dispenser fired automatically, and Manny let go, the needle still stuck in the surprised pirate’s leg, as Manny jerked back inside the tube and slammed the hatch closed with a loud, ringing clang.

Becker dropped his knife, reached with one hand for his gun and the other hand to pull the needle out. He was too slow to jam his foot into the hatch and prevent it from closing, his foot bounced off the handle, throwing him off balance. The needle was yanked out and sent flying down the corridor. He got the gun out and fired several times at the hatch, the shots seemed to have no effect. Becker didn’t expect the gun to have much effect, the whole point of the weapons they’d brought along was that they weren’t powerful enough to shoot holes in a spaceship. The guns were for killing people.

He was feeling dizzy. What was in that needle? Keeping the gun pointed at the hatch, Becker walked unsteadily backwards, and picked up the hypodermic. A sedative, it said. Full strength. Do not use unless blah, blah, blah. He couldn’t read the rest of the label, his eyes weren’t focusing. The gun fell out of this hand. What was that in front of him? The deck? It looked close. Becker toppled over, full-length, to crash on the deck, out cold.

Manny slid along the wall, back to the bend in the corridor. He peered around the frame. Becker was face lying down, his gun a meter away. Was the pirate faking? He wasn’t moving at all. Manny edged around the corner, ready to run at the slightest sign of movement from the pirate. He moved closer, close enough that he could see something shiny, wet, on the deck, under the pirate’s mouth. Blood?

No.

The pirate was completely unconscious, face-down in a puddle of spit drooling from his mouth. Manny almost laughed out loud. He reached forward with his foot and nudged the side of the pirate’s face, the man’s head rolled, then flopped back.

Manny looked at the gun, bent down, and picked it up. The safety was off, he flicked the selector to safe the weapon. He had only ever handled a weapon a couple of times, in the Boy Scouts, and those were target pistols, at summer camp. This thing was heavy, awkward, he wasn’t sure he would be able to aim it properly if he needed to use it. Still, it would be a handy thing to have. He shrugged off his backpack, and took off his belt, which he used to tie the pirate’s hands securely behind his back. The pirate was too big and heavy for Manny to move. If he started to wake up, Manny could give him another dose of sedative, although he didn’t know if that much sedative might kill. Even the dose he’d already injected into the pirate might be too much.

Fortunately, the holster the pirate wore buckled on the side, Manny unfastened it and pulled it off. Even on the last notch, it almost fell down past Manny's hips, he had to put it through one of his belt loops to keep it from dropping to the deck. With the gun in the holster, the belt actually fit better, with all the weight on one side.

Manny picked up his backpack, and stepped carefully into the airlock. The outer door was closed, although the shuttle’s door was open on the other side. The light on the outer door was green, indicating a good, airtight seal. Manny took a deep breath and pressed the button to open the door. It slid aside, he hadn’t expected it to. It seemed too easy.

With two steps, he was inside the shuttle. It was small, the pirate on the intercom hadn’t been lying about only it having four seats; two pilot seats, and two cramped passenger seats. The ceiling sloped down sharply in the cockpit, even Manny would not be able to fully stand up there. Aft, between the two passenger seats, there was a narrow door. Manny, one hand on the butt of the gun, opened the door. It was storage, empty except for one e-suit without a helmet, hanging from the wall. He went back into the cabin, and stared in bewilderment at the controls, display screens covered every surface within reach of both pilot seats. The cockpit looked vaguely familiar, perhaps he had flown this type of shuttle in a simulator, once or twice. How could-

Manny was amazed to see a control card in its slot, between the two seats! The pilot, probably the man unconscious in the corridor, had left his card active. For a faster getaway, perhaps? Manny reached between the seats and touched one of the screens. All the screens blinked once, then came on, with numbers and symbols, geometric shapes, instrument readouts. He took his backpack off and set it in the copilot seat. Perhaps he could fly this shuttle, really fly it? At least, undock it, and drift it away from the freighter, so the pirates would be trapped there, until the Navy arrived? He couldn't try that until Kaylee was also aboard the shuttle.

First, though, he remembered, he needed to do something else. He pulled the pilot’s control card out of its slot, and all the displays went dark again. Manny took a single hypo out of his pack, just in case, and ran out of the shuttle, tucking the control card into his pocket, next to Jen’s access card.

He didn’t have to go far to find what he was looking for, an intercom. He plucked the microphone out of its slot, turned the system on, and spoke into the microphone. “Code red. Code red. Repeat, code red.” He and Kaylee had decided Red would mean the pirates had betrayed their word, and the shuttle was still attached to Ace. Code Blue would have meant the shuttle was gone, and it was possible the pirates really did intend to rescue people from the command section, and trade them for the alien thing.

Valjean and Taney had reached the aft end of the cargo pod, where there were no more doors, only solid bulkheads. Also, no sign of the children, the box, or whatever was making the roaring sound. The two pirates worked their way back forward, clearing one compartment after another, working quickly, efficiently. They met up in the center, Valjean having cleared the right side, Taney the left.

The intercom crackled. “Code red. Code red. Repeat, code red.”

Taney looked to Valjean for guidance. Valjean shook his head, annoyed. The brats were playing games again. He waved his gun, indicating they should keep going.

Taney glanced into the center compartment, and pulled his head back quickly. The compartment looked like a battle had been fought there; crates were knocked around, one of them had burst open after it fell to the deck. Valjean and Taney exchanged hand signals, crept up to the sides of the doorway, then swung around the corner, guns sweeping the area. It was empty. Taney walked forward, and kicked some debris with his feet. He bent down, and picked up a piece of debris, along with a scrap of paper. “Oh, damn.” He said.

“What?”

“Boss, I think this is what’s left of the box we’re looking for.” He held the piece up to the light. “Uh-huh, yup, there’s part of a serial number here, ends in 6-D614, the rest of the number must be on another piece around here somewhere. Hey, there’s a note here, boss.”

Valjean snatched the piece of paper from Taney’s hands. It was in block letters, written with a black marker.

WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE CANDY. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANTED?

He didn’t understand, until he saw scraps of candy wrapper on the deck. The box. The box he’d been chasing, for hours now. The box that was their only way to find the item they wanted, in the vastness of the space freighter. Valjean crouched down to examine the remains. The box looked like it had teeth marks on it. Big teeth marks! What the hell?

A low growling sound made him look up. At the far end of the next compartment, there were two dark shapes, moving shapes. “Taney?”

“On it, boss.” Taney raised his pistol, set the scope to infrared, and magnified the image. “We’re in trouble!” he shouted, rotated the gun’s selector to full power, and fired, as the animals ran forward.

Taney’s shot were accurate, he knew he’d hit both of the creatures. It did not have the expected effect. Both animals flinched, but only flinched, and slowed down. They were wary now, aware their prey could sting. “Uh, boss?” Taney fired again, and again. “It ain’t working!”

Valjean didn’t recognize these animals, and had no idea why they were roaming the cargo pods of a starship! Those brats had something to do with it. What the hell else could go wrong? He raised his gun and fired, stalling for time. If Taney’s more powerful weapon didn’t work, Valjean’s pistol would be worthless. The creatures kept coming, almost side by side, they were now into the compartment, low to the ground, stalking. They were massive, he could see, covered in what looked like armor plating, all muscles, armor, teeth and claws.

“We can’t outrun them!” Taney shouted in desperation.

Valjean’s lip curled up in a sneer. “I don’t have to outrun them,” he said as he casually shot Taney in the leg, and knocked the gun out of the other pirate’s hand, “I only have to outrun you.” Valjean turned, ran, and was gone.

Taney shouted in pain, his left leg unusable. He fell to his knees, and the tinos hesitated, unsure what this new development meant. Taney pulled out his backup weapon from a holster strapped to his lower right leg. He fired it at the tinos, and kept firing, as he shucked out of the heavy pack, got to one leg, and hopped over to the wall. Grasping the ladder, he squeezed off four more shots, before the little gun's energy pack was depleted. Taney threw it at the tinos, who roared and charged.

They almost got him on his way up, one claw dug painfully into the boot on his left foot. He climbed frantically, pulling himself up rung over rung with his powerful arms, until he reached the top, near the ceiling. There was nowhere to go, the hatch there was locked. Below him, one of the tinos had climbed onto the crates, and was leaping up, trying to get the human. If the creatures could jump another two meters, Taney would be dragged down and torn apart.

Taney had survived worse situations that this. The loss of blood from his leg was making him lightheaded, and the scent of blood dripping down was making the tinos go crazy. He wedged his good leg between the ladder and the wall, took his shirt off, and cut it into strips with his knife. He cut away his left pants leg and examined the wound. It looked clean, the blood was dripping, not spurting, Valjean hadn’t hit an artery. Taney bound up the wound as best he could, and used the rest of the cloth to bind himself, around the waist and chest, securely to the ladder. If he became tired, or unconscious, he would not fall to the waiting jaws below.

Manny pouted, disappointed. The control card was plugged back into the slot, all the screens were active. But without the control card's password, the shuttle wasn’t going anywhere. He had tried everything he could think of, to the point of randomly pressing buttons. Not even the radio worked.

His one success had been to get the shuttle’s door closed and locked. That gave him a small measure of security. The gun was currently sitting on the seat to his right, because he couldn’t fit in the pilot seat with it in the holster. He had no confidence in his ability to use the heavy gun anyway.

There was a whirring sound, and the shuttle’s door began to slide open! Manny struggled to unfasten the pilot seat straps. Idiot! Why had he strapped himself into the seat of a shuttle that was firmly attached to a ship? He barely got the straps off and lurched for the gun, when he saw a thing come through the door. A robot, holding a gun. Manny dove into the copilot seat, rolled so that he was wedged behind the seatback, and held onto the gun with both hands. He swung the gun around shakily. It was so heavy he couldn’t control it, the weapon’s barrel hit the shuttle’s throttle control, and almost fell out of his hands.

The robot had its gun pointed straight at Manny. Manny closed his eyes, waiting for-

“Manny!” His sister’s voice scolded. “Put that gun down! It’s dangerous.”

“Kaylee?” He shouted, astonished.

His sister nodded. “This is Rocko. He saved my life.”

“Twice.” The robot said simply, stowing its weapon in a holster. “You are Manuel?”

“M-Manny.” He let the robot take the gun away from his numb and shaking hands.

Kaylee jerked her thumb toward the airlock. “Who’s the guy sleeping in a puddle of spit outside?”

“I think he’s the pilot, I- how did you get here? Where did- Rocko come from?” Manny wanted answers.

“Later.” Kaylee responded with a dismissive wave of her hand. The big sister was back, and she was in charge. She tilted her head inquisitively at the display screens. “Can you fly this thing?”

“No,” Manny said sarcastically, using his tone of voice to imply how dumb the question was, “even if I knew how, I have the pilot’s control card, but not his password.” He plopped down, sullenly, in the pilot seat.

“I know the password.” Rocko offered.

Brother and sister looked at the robot in surprise. “Really?” Manny asked. “Can you fly it?”

“No, I am not programmed as a pilot.” Rocko took a step forward, and typed the password into the pilot’s console. An icon in the lower left of the main display stopped blinking, and switched from ‘Standby’ to ‘Active’.

“Cool.” Kaylee announced. “Get it started, Manny.”

“It’s not that simple! This is a real spacecraft!” Manny protested, hands in the air. “Do we even have to leave?”

“Uh, huh.” Kaylee said as she pulled Manny’s backpack from the copilot seat and sat down. “There are four pirates, plus Rocko the robot here. One of the pirates is stuck in a crate, we don’t have to worry about him. The one in the corridor, what happened to him?”

“I injected him with tranqulizer.” Manny said with a shrug, as if it had been nothing special, something he did every day.

“Really?” Kaylee looked at Manny as if she didn’t recognize her brother. In fact, she didn’t. How did her annoying little creep brother get replaced by a young man who knocked out an armed adult, by himself? “That was pretty smart, bro. That makes two down. There’s two more, and one of them, Rocko says, is the leader, the guy on the intercom.” She looked at the displays in front of her, and reached toward one of them, “So we need to make sure they can’t get off this ship-“

“Don’t touch anything!” Manny said angrily. “It’s not a toy.”

He expected a sharp-tongued retort, and had one of his own ready. But Kaylee had changed, as much as Manny had. “Sorry.” She said, putting her hands in the air. “You’re the pilot, Manny.”

The pilot wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “Kaylee, I can’t fly this shuttle. We’ll blow up, or crash into something, and get killed.”

“Could you call Seth? He’s a real pilot.”

Manny looked at the radio controls. “I’ll try. Hello? This is the pirate’s shuttle, this is Manny, in the pirate’s shuttle, calling Seth. Or Mom. Or the captain. Anyone. Come in. Please.”

Gina, having nothing else to do while they waited to fall out of orbit, was sitting strapped into her chair, idly fiddling with the radio. She didn’t expect to accomplish anything, since the radio jamming was still active. The instant the jamming stopped, she would know, because she was monitoring the radio beacon signal of the mining camp’s landing pad. When the message came through, it was on a different frequency, so she missed the first part before she switched over. “-is Manny, in the pirate’s shuttle, calling Seth. Or Mom. Or the captain. Anyone. Come in. Please.”

After the initial soaring elation at realizing the children were not only alive, but had control of the pirate’s shuttle, there ensued an argument about what to do next. Joy insisted her children stay right where they were, lock the shuttle’s door, and wait for the Navy. Her children wanted to fly off to rescue her, immediately. Schroeder and his crew were in the middle, mostly because Schroeder considered the odds of a twelve year old boy rescuing them were nil, at best.

Seth broke the deadlock. “We can do this.” He said urgently. “Listen, most of flying a shuttle in orbit is programming the flight computer and pushing a button. I’ll tell Manny exactly what to do, and then he’ll sit back, and let the computer fly the shuttle.” Seth was exaggerating slightly, a forgivable evasion, considering the circumstances.

“It’s not that easy.” Joy retorted hotly. “Computers can’t fly the shuttle if anything goes wrong. You’d be risking my childrens’ lives. No way.”

“Joy,” Seth said quietly, “we need to get them away from there, anyway. If the shuttle stays attached to the ship, the pirates will find a way to get inside, and your children will be in danger again. The pirates have the access codes, it’s their shuttle. And, if the shuttle does undock, we need Manny to fly it away somewhere, so it doesn’t drift and collide with the ship. We also want that shuttle as far away from Nightengale as possible. The pirates may still have missiles, if they still have someone inside their ship, they could fire on the shuttle.” Seth was guessing. It was a good guess, it was what he would do, if he were a pirate, in that situation. 

Schroeder cleared his throat. “Seth is correct, Ms. Sanchez. The fact that your children are in the shuttle does not mean they are safe.”

Joy’s resolve weakened. “I don’t see how asking Manny to fly makes them safer. He’s never flown anything before.”

The children had been listening to the exchange. Kaylee spoke up. “Mom, you're not here. We’re doing this. You can ground us if you want, later, but we’re coming to get you.”

“You listen to me, young lady-“

“Not listening! We are not listening to you. Not this time. Seth, we need instructions. Or Manny is going to do the best he can, by himself.”

Manny, intending to give his mother a boost of confidence, instead had the opposite effect. “Yeah, I can fly this. It’s just like a sim. It doesn’t look hard.”

Joy clasped her hands in front of her face, as she floated in Ace’s bridge. A sim! Manny thought this was all a game. Without Seth to guide them, her children would not survive. “Seth,” she said, looking meaningfully at the ship’s navigator, “you get my children away from there safely. Safely. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Manny, you need to listen to me very carefully, and repeat back to me exactly what I say-“

Following Seth’s instructions, Manny and Kaylee, working together and cross-checking everything they did, got the flight computer programmed with a course to intercept the command section. They undocked, popped the thrusters to move clear of the freighter, and fired the main engine.

“If we can use the radio, can we call my husband?” Joy asked anxiously.

Gina shook her head. “I tried that. The radio is still being jammed, the shuttle’s signal I think is being relayed through their ship. They can talk to us, and we can reply, but that’s all.”

“So we wait.” Joy said with disappointment. Now, they weren’t only waiting to die.

CHAPTER 17

With the loss of the box, and now the danger of wild animals roaming the ship, Valjean decided to cut his losses. Wild alien predator animals, running loose on a starship! There was no way, in the vast ship, he could find the alien thing his employers wanted. He would get back to the shuttle, and he and Becker and Dooley would get the hell away from Ares as fast as they could. He had one missile left, intended to be used for destroying the mining camp, eliminating witnesses. Now, he would instead have to use it to destroy the freighter, make sure no one ever discovered what item he had been looking for. And get rid of those two brats. He wanted to kill them so badly he could taste it.

The one missile he had left could not destroy the entire ship, the freighter was too big. He regretted the loss of the explosives Taney had carried, those charges, if placed carefully, and set off while the ship’s fusion reactor was active, would have vaporized the ship. There was nothing Valjean could do about that now, he certainly wasn’t going back for Taney. That thug was probably in the belly of those beasts.

How best to get back to the shuttle? Valjean shuddered when he thought of how far a walk it would be, through all those dimly-lit compartments, with an unknown number of vicious beasts. No, he would go where he knew there were no animals: outside. Running as fast as he could, Valjean headed aft, toward a maintenance station he’d seen before.

Valjean was sweating like a pig in the e-suit, the cooling system wasn’t working properly. He trudged across the outside of the cargo pod, making sure one foot was magnetically locked down, before lifting the other foot. It was a slow process and he was in a great big hurry. Becker wasn’t answering his calls on the suit’s radio. The shuttle wasn’t far now, around the corner of the pod.

Except it wasn’t!

Valjean rose over the corner, expecting to see the sleek shape of his shuttle, instead, there was an empty docking station. “Becker!” He shouted. “I’ll get you, Becker!” He raged into his radio, which was equipped to bypass the jamming.

Wait. Valjean looked around to get his bearings. His ship should be nearby, parked stationary in relation to the freighter. Yes, there it was, a bright dot. He thumbed the control to magnify the view out the suit’s visor. His ship leaped into view, large as life. No shuttle. There was no shuttle attached to the Nightengale. Maybe Becker had not abandoned him? Valjean sighed with relief. No, Becker wouldn’t bailout like that, that pilot was still expecting a big payday from Valjean, he didn’t know Valjean didn’t have the alien thing. Maybe Becker had simply moved the shuttle to another docking port, for some reason.

But where? Valjean considered walking over to where the shuttle had been docked, in case Becker had left a note. That was stupid. There had to be a way to contact Becker. As Valjean looked up at his ship, and something bright in the distance caught his eye.

His shuttle! It had to be. And the engines were firing, taking it away! “Nooooooo!”

Manny kept his finger poised above the main engine cut-off button, ready to act. He watched the chronometer, counting down. Seth said this engine burn needed to be eighty seven seconds, no more, no less. Manny was pressed back in the seat, the rocket thrust of two Gees making it feel like someone was sitting on his chest. He hardly noticed. He was flying, flying a spaceship! In the left-hand seat, too. Pilot in command.

Eighty seven seconds was a long burn, apparently. Seth had explained they didn’t have time for a normal rendezvous maneuver; slow down a bit, and let the command section catch up to them. On the next low spot in its orbit, what Seth called apogee, the command section was going in, and going down. There wasn’t much time. In fact, Seth was guessing somewhat, it couldn’t be helped.

One minute to go. ”Sixty seconds, Kaylee.” Manny reported. Kaylee nodded from the copilot seat, and gave him a thumb’s up. Manny unexpectedly found himself admiring his sister. She was kind of cool, he had to admit. More than kind of, she was cool. How had that happened?

Valjean seethed with anger. The shuttle was headed away from Nightengale, using what looked to him to be an insanely long engine burn. The light blinked out, the shuttle was coasting toward, what? Where could Becker be going? Not far, without a hyperdrive.

Unless Becker had another ship hidden somewhere? The thought of being double-crossed chilled Valjean, a career double-crosser.

Valjean checked his e-suit’s oxygen supply. Plenty remaining. He couldn’t stand outside the ship forever, what to do now? Get back inside, and see if he could come up with a plan to salvage his plan, or at least, escape before the Navy arrived.

He trudged over toward the airlock where his shuttle had been docked, and stopped close by to peer inside a porthole. What was that? A body, lying on the floor? Valjean cupped his hands to block out the star’s glare, and pressed his helmet to the porthole. He gasped in shock. Becker! He recognized the ridiculous alligator-skin cowboy boots Becker always wore. What the hell was going on? If Becker was inside the freighter, then who was flying the shuttle?

“Dooley!” Valjean spat the name out. Dooley was not, so far as Valjean knew, a pilot. Nor was Dooley bright enough to have planned to double-cross anyone. He found it hard to believe that Dooley had stolen the shuttle. Perhaps there had been at least one adult crewman aboard the cargo section, an adult crewman who had used the children as a decoy? Valjean switched his suit radio to the shuttle’s frequency, and growled “Dooley! If that’s you in the shuttle, I’ll kill you! You hear me? I will find you, and I will kill you!”

In the shuttle, Kaylee noticed a light on the radio console blinking. She looked at Manny, who held up his hands in a ‘who knows’ gesture. Kaylee pressed the button, and said “Hello?”

Valjean hadn’t expected a reply, through the jamming. It sounded like–

No. It couldn’t be. A girl’s voice? “Who the hell is this?” He demanded.

“Who the hell are you?” Kaylee shot back. She thought she recognized the oily voice.

Valjean’s anger boiled over. This was too much to bear. Who were these brats? They stole his shuttle? He cut off the radio, and shouted out his anger inside the helmet, pounding his fist against the freighter’s hull. When he had control of himself again, he opened the radio. “I am what you call the pirate. What are you doing in my shuttle?”

Kaylee thought for a moment, then decided to tell the truth. “Right now, we’re sitting with our feet up, eating some snacks.” She taunted.

“You stole my shuttle, you brats!”

“You stole my shuttle. Boo hoo.” Kaylee repeated in a mocking tone. “Shut up, loser.”

“Los-“ Valjean bit his lip. He tried a new tactic. “I can self-destruct that shuttle, any time I want.”

Kaylee looked at Manny, who looked to Rocko for advice. The robot pointed silently to the control card, plugged into the pilot’s console.

“As if!” Kaylee shot back. “If you could do that, you would have done it already, bonehead.”

“Yeah,” Manny added with bravado, “you must be the dumbest pirate who ever lived. What pirate school did you flunk out of?” Manny looked back at Rocko, whose massive form was squeezed into one of the passenger seats. “We got your robot, too.”

“Uh huh, and hey, that dum-dum guy with the robot? I think he’s locked in a shipping crate.” Kaylee said with a barely suppressed giggle.

“I’ll blow up this damned ship!” Valjean screamed.

That made sister and brother pause. Jen was aboard the ship. Kaylee turned off the radio. “Manny, you think he’ll really do it?”

Many thought for a minute. They were risking Jen’s life. If she were still alive. “No way. He still wants the alien thing. And he’s on the ship.”

Kaylee turned the radio back on. “And blow yourself up with the ship? Duh? I don’t think so. But if you want to blow up the ship, go ahead, we don’t care.” She said, with her fingers crossed.

“You kids bring that shuttle back here right-“

Kaylee interrupted. “Mister pirate?”

“Yes?”

“Bite me.” Kaylee turned the radio off, leaving Valjean to sputter and rage to himself.

“Should we tell Mom, and the captain, about him?” Manny asked.

“No. Maybe later. It’ll just make Mom more worried.” Kaylee herself wasn’t entirely sure her brother was right about the self-destruct.

“OK. Thanks, Rocko.” Manny said.

“You are welcome.” The robot replied.

“Rocko,” Kaylee asked, “why are you helping us? That pirate guy owns you, right?”

“Correct. My current owner is Colin Dooley, the man you met, who is now in a shipping crate. Before Dooley owned me, I was owned by an Army major, who purchased me as Army surplus, after my model became obsolete.” The robot said, without a trace of emotion. “Major Thompson and his family were stationed on Brekka, which is an outpost world, and can be dangerous. He purchased me to be a guardian for his two children. My processor and base code were modified by Major Thompson. When he was transferred to Earth, he couldn’t take me with him, so Major Thompson sold me to a dealer, where Dooley found me. Dooley did not know I had been modified.”

“So, you’re programmed to protect kids?” Manny asked.

“Correct. I cannot, by action or inaction, allow a child to be harmed.”

“Huh.” Kaylee observed. “That’s cool. What were the kids like? Major Thompson’s kids, I mean?”

“A girl, Carla, and her brother, Eric. They were twins, both were 15 the last time I saw them.”

“Rocko? Do you miss them?” Manny asked.

“Yes.” The robot admitted. “I do not experience emotions, but my functioning has been incomplete, without them.”

Valjean was breathing hard, filled with rage. He pulled out his gun, screamed, and shot at the freighter’s hull, leaving dark scorch marks. The blaster fire had little effect, other than making him feel better. He jammed the gun back into the holster he wore on the outside of the e-suit, and forced himself to calm down. To think.

It was time to get out. By himself, apparently. He’d shot Taney, who had probably been eaten by now. Becker was either dead or unconscious. Dooley, the moron, was locked in a crate? And that stupid robot! Valjean had never trusted the damned thing. He looked up at his ship, hanging motionless a kilometer away. He had no shuttle. Nightengale, in her current condition, could not be remotely piloted, even if Valjean knew how to do that.

A kilometer. He needed to cross a kilometer of space.

How?

Clearly not by walking, so?

Valjean trudged over to the airlock, only to find it locked. Just before departure, Manny had dashed back inside Ace, closed and locked all the cargo doors, and manually locked this airlock door. Keeping a firm grip on his emotions, Valjean walked the hundred meters forward to the next airlock.That one opened. He stepped inside, cycled the airlock, and stepped back inside the ship, gun drawn, wary of wild beasts. He opened his helmet faceplate, and sniffed the air, there was nothing out of the ordinary. The doors at both end of the corridor were securely locked. In between, he found three small storage compartments that were unlocked, none of them had anything useful.

He went back into the corridor, looking around for inspiration. And found it.

Nelson decided it was time to check on Sam’s progress, in person. Not that he didn’t like the miners, they were nice enough. They also let him know, gently, that he was now mostly in the way now, as they moved around, assessing the damage, and cleaning things up. In this tightly-knit community of people who had served together on unfriendly Ares, he was an outsider.

What he found was not what he expected. Sam and Rick were sitting on the floor of the large chamber which contained the life support core, their tools scattered around. Somewhere, one of them, probably Sam, had found a bottle of something, and they were sipping an orange-colored fluid from tiny paper cups. Nelson was astonished. “Sam, what the-“ He looked around for signs the two men had been doing anything but drinking.  Access covers had been removed, and stacked in a corner. Various pipes, coils, wires, and boxes had been pulled out of the core. So they had at least started working, before they started drinking. In fact, it looked like the two men had almost completely disassembled the unit, and had tried to jury-rig something together. There were pipes attached to other pipes, which clearly weren’t designed to fit together. Tape and sealant connected them, and somebody had gotten overzealous with the sealant, the pipe joints were coated in big globs of the stuff. It looked like a half-assed job, and that made Nelson even more angry. “What the hell is wrong with you two? Drinking booze on the job? Get your asses to work!”

“I wish it was real booze, man, it’s homemade fermented papaya juice, or something like that.” Sam didn’t rise from the floor, instead, he hoisted the bottle toward the pilot. “Might as well relax and have a drink, Nelson. We’re in deep doo-doo. The oxygen recycler core is shot, I mean, really shot. The pirates went at it with a rifle or something, one of them must have gotten his jollies shooting it up. It’s busted, man, scrap, no way to fix it.”

Nelson’s anger deflated. He should have known Sam wouldn’t be so irresponsible. Now he saw what Sam meant, there were holes shot right through the core, jagged edges around the impacts. “Why?”

Rick drained his cup, crushed it in his fist, and threw it across the room. “The pirates know the Navy is eventually going to show up here. When they do, instead of hunting down the pirate ship, the Navy will have to waste time staying here to rescue the miners. And us. That gives the pirates plenty of time to get out of sensor range. Once they do that, they’ll probably transfer to another ship, and be long gone. Sam’s right, there’s no way to fix this piece of junk.” Rick said disgustedly. When he first saw the life support unit, he was encouraged to see that, unlike most mining outfits, this one had good equipment, and maintained it well. Then he and Sam went around to the backside and saw the bullet holes. Explosive-tipped slugs, Sam said, surplus military issue. He seemed to know what he was talking about.

“So, how long do we have?” Nelson asked.

“The good news is that butthole Mac wasn’t lying about one thing; they did have fifty hours of oxygen, back when they first called us. We can stretch it out some.” Sam shrugged.

“What about putting some people into crawlers, they have a temporary air supply?” Nelson suggested.

“You been to the crawler garage yet? No?” Rick answered. “Same idiot that shot this up, shot the crawlers up real good too. Only one of the crawlers is operational, that one only holds two people. We are all going to have to put on e-suits in a few hours, when the oxygen in here runs out. After that, well, we have to hope somebody rescues us, pretty soon.”

“Ace’s only shuttle is history, man, so we gotta hope the Navy figures out something ain’t right, and gets here pronto.” Sam added glumly.

“Damn.” Nelson’s shoulders slumped. “Then, I guess, uh, sure, give me the bottle. I need a drink.”

CHAPTER 18

Seth used the very last dregs of thruster fuel to stop the command section from spinning. He turned to Schroeder, and said quietly “That’s it, Captain. We’re rotating at one revolution every fifty minutes, that’s the best I can do.”

“Very well. Seth, talk them in.”

“Captain, this kid’s never flown before. He’s low on fuel, and we’re running out of time, so he can’t take too many tries to lock onto us. And, pretty soon, we’ll be into the top of the atmosphere, so we’ll be picking up turbulence.”

“Understood. If it looks like the shuttle is in danger, I want you to wave him off, get the shuttle away from here, and into a safe orbit. I’m not risking the lives of those children.” Schroeder said, with one eye on the childrens’ mother, who would expect him to save her children first.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Excellent. Carry on, Mr. Putri.” Schroeder said in a loud voice, slapping the back of Seth’s chair for emphasis. He wanted Joy to hear how well everything was going. “Gina, Joy, help me bring Vassily to the airlock, please.” Schroeder ordered. He wanted to get Joy Sanchez far away from the bridge.

Seth guided Manny to within a hundred meters of the command section, and made sure the shuttle’s course and speed matched that of the command section. After that, it would all be up to Manny. A twelve year old boy, who had never flown anything before. “Manny, this is as far as I can go with you. If I try to guide you in the rest of the way, I’ll only get you confused. You need to fly over to mate your door with the docking port. It’s a universal docking port, your door will automatically clamp on and form a seal, but you need to be on target within twenty centimeters, left or right, up or down. Any more than twenty centimeters off center, and the door won’t clamp on, OK?”

“OK.” Manny replied, in a voice that did not sound confident at all.

“Manny, you can do this. You flew halfway around the planet, and you arrived exactly where we needed you to be. That’s excellent piloting, you can’t ask for better than that. Here’s what you need to do-”

Manny’s first couple of tries weren’t great. Seth had said to fly by eyeball, looking out the shuttle’s front windows, judging the distance, moving in slowly. Some shuttles had systems which would automatically fly the craft in to dock; this shuttle, and the command section, lacked those conveniences. There were radar systems which provided information like location and how fast the shuttle was approaching the command section, but their usefulness was limited, and less useful the closer the shuttle got. Pilots relied on their experience, which Manny lacked completely. The first time, the shuttle came in too fast, and Manny had to back off quickly, which threw the shuttle into a spin. That took twenty minutes to sort out.

The second, third and fourth tries were all too far off center. Manny got the shuttle lined up correctly to start, and moved in at a moderate speed to within ten meters, but then he had to stop looking out the window, and guide the shuttle in by looking at a view from the door camera. It was confusing, and he took so long to get lined up, that the docking port rotated out of range, and Manny had to back off and start over.

“You ready, Manny?” Kaylee asked.

“Yes.” Manny said shakily, wiping his sweaty hands on his shirt. He was nervous, and he felt like he really needed to pee. The shuttle lacked a bathroom. “One more time. You watch the door camera. This time, I’m going to come in a little low, so the docking port will rotate towards us as we move in.”

Manny twisted in his seat, so he had a better view to the left side. He held the thruster control stick lightly in this right hand, and gently nudged it to the left.

“Closing at two meters per second.” Kaylee said softly.

Manny watched the command section’s docking port approach. Something was wrong, it was tilted. No, the shuttle’s nose was tilted, and tilting further. “We’re spinning again!”

Seth broke in. “Manny, we’re in the very top of the atmosphere now, it’s going to affect the shuttle, and your controls. Use the thrusters to bring the nose back down.”

They were in the atmosphere?! Manny, already a bundle of nerves, didn’t need to hear that. In his inexperience, he overcorrected, and soon the nose was too far down. Then, he made a mistake, and suddenly they were moving too fast, headed toward the command section!

“Manny!” Kaylee warned.

“I’m trying!” Manny slewed the shuttle around, and tried to move away, but he was too late. The left side of the shuttle’s nose hit the command section at an angle, and the shuttle’s cabin was filled with a horrible screeching, as the shuttle's nose scraped along the skin of the command section, snapping off two antennas along the way. The shuttle’s nose crumpled inward, damaging the radar antenna inside.

“What is that?” Joy shouted, in fear not for herself, but for her children.

“I will ask Seth,” Schroeder said calmly, although he knew what that sound had to be.

The shuttle slid past the edge of the command section, and out into space, spinning nose over tail. Now without radar, Manny had to rely on the seat of his inexperienced pants. This was so much harder than a sim! “Seth!” He pleaded.

“Manny, you’re safely away from us now. Get the shuttle stable again, then we’ll talk.” Seth looked at the displays in front of him, fed by the datalink. The shuttle wasn’t losing air, thank God for that. On the other hand, they were now too late. Skin temperature of the command section’s leading edge had climbed fifty degrees in the past three minutes. They were going down.

Schroeder called. “Seth, status report.”

“Captain, I- they can’t do this.” Seth concluded reluctantly. “We shouldn’t have asked them. It’s too late. We’re in the atmosphere now, and the shuttle will be harder to control. Plus, we’ll start to spin faster now. There’s no way, sir. There’s just no way. I’m sorry.”

Schroeder’s knuckles grew white as he clutched the phone. “I understand.” He turned toward Joy. “Ms. Sanchez, I’m terribly sorry. We’ve run out of time. We need to get your children safely away from here, now, before it is too late for them.”

Joy nodded, tears in her eyes. She wiped away her tears, and erached for the phone. “I’d like to talk to my children, please.”

“Certainly.” Schroeder handed her the phone, and pushed himself away, to give her a small measure of privacy.

“Manny, Kaylee, babies, listen to me.” Their mother’s voice came over the speaker in the shuttle’s cabin. “I know you tried, we all do, we know you tried really hard.”

“Thanks, Mom.” Manny answered warily.

“I am so proud of you. I want you to listen to Seth, and do what he tells you to do. You need to get away from here, now, or-“

“What? Mom! No, we’re not leaving you!” Kaylee shouted.

“Kaylee, Manny, you need to do this.” Joy’s said sternly. “Your father needs you. Think about him.”

Manny broke in. “Mommy, that’s crap! We don’t have the fuel to fly down to get Dad! We’re coming to get you!”

“Manny, no. This is not a sim, it’s not a game, you tried real hard, but it’s too-“

Kaylee angrily stabbed her finger into the button to cut off the radio. She looked her brother in the eye. “We are not running away. You need to do this, for real. Right now.”

“You got that right, sis.” Manny blinked away tears, extended his arms in front of him, and cracked his knuckles. He tugged his seat straps tight. “Enough screwing around, let’s do this.”

Kaylee stared at Manny for a moment, wondering who this strange creature was, who had taken over the body of her annoying little brother. “Sure. Yes. Ready.”

“Standby one.” Manny announced, and grasped the control stick. “Radar’s down, we’ll have to eyeball it all the way in.” He puffed the thrusters. “Closure rate?” Forget about the shuttle, Manny told himself, this is a sim. He had done this a million times in sims, when the fate of the entire galaxy was at stake! He wasn’t Manuel Sanchez, twelve year old kid, flying a shuttle, instead he was his sim avatar, Commander Raul ‘Razor’ Salvio, at the controls of his FA-45 Dragon starfighter. And this time, the fate of the whole universe was at stake.

“Three point five meters per second. That’s fast, Manny.”

“I’m coming in fast, because the command section is starting to rotate faster. The docking port will move out of range soon.” He puffed the thrusters once again to speed up, then once again to stabilize the shuttle in the mild turbulence. “Come on, come on, come, on,come on, fly straight!” He said through clenched teeth. That was something Razor would say.

Kaylee didn’t know what to make of that comment, so she stuck to the facts. “Closure rate four meters per second. I can see the docking port in the camera.”

“Switching to camera view.” It was close, too close. “Slowing now.”

“Two point three meters per second. Manny, we’re drift-“

“Shut up. I see it.” Manny puffed the thrusters. “On center. Slowing.”

Kaylee sat back in her seat, silently reciting a prayer. Talking would only distract her brother.

“On center, drifting, come on, come on, come on, come on! On center, got it!” Manny shouted triumphantly, as the shuttle was jolted when it touched the command section. There was a series of banging sounds, as the door adjusted to match the docking port, when a whooshing noise. A green light came on, above the door. Manny popped his harness buckles open. “Kaylee, get that door open now now now!”

The first face they saw, once the door, and the airlock beyond, opened, was their mother. “You are in big trouble, young lady.” Joy sobbed, before flying forward to hug and kiss her two children.

“Move the robot out.” Schroeder ordered, as people began to crowd into the little shuttle.

“No!” Both children shouted at once.

“Manny, Kaylee, we don’t have room for your robot. It’s heavy, and we’re already packing seven people in here. We barely have enough fuel to establish a stable orbit.” Seth explained.

“No! Rocko saved my life!” Kaylee protested.

“He saved everybody, you too!” Manny added. “If he didn’t give me the code for the shuttle, we wouldn’t be here!”

Schroeder looked to Joy for support. Before Joy could say anything, the robot ended the argument. “I must leave. You are in danger, and you must climb into orbit immediately.” In the zero Gee, it began to pull itself along toward the door, squeezing past Schroeder on the way.

“No!” Manny held onto the robot’s foot. “Rocko, no!”

The robot stopped, and turned around to look at Manny and Kaylee. “I am programmed to protect children. You must not stop me.” With its right hand, it popped open a door on the side of its armored head, and pulled out a shiny cylinder. It held the cylinder out to Manny. “This processor unit contains my personality program, and my memories. You may install it into another chassis, if you wish.”

The robot reached down to its foot, and gently peeled Manny’s fingers away. Manny took the processor and held it tightly as he watched the robot float out the door. It halted in the airlock, letting Gina come into the shuttle.

Captain Schroeder waved her in. “Gina, you’re injured, take the last seat, please. Ms. Sanchez, I’m sorry, could you squeeze into the storage closet, with your children? It will only be for a short time.” Schroeder explained. Seth was in the pilot seat, Schroeder himself would take the copilot chair. They had the unconscious Vassily strapped to the seat behind Schroeder.

“Kaylee, Manny, come here, please.” Joy said quietly.

“Wait, Mom.” Kaylee held up her finger for one second. She turned to face the airlock. “Goodbye, Rocko.” She said, choking on tears.

“Bye, Rocko.” Manny added, his eyes stinging with tears.

The robot swung itself around, so that it appeared to be standing on the floor, in normal gravity. It raised its right hand to its forehead in solemn salute. “Kaylee, Manuel, it has been an honor serving with you.” It held the salute, as Schroeder pressed the button to slide the door closed.

Schroeder pulled himself around, wiping away a tear of his own. “Ach, he is a good soldier. We will not let his sacrifice be in vain, aye?” He floated past the Sanchezes and into the copilot seat.

Manny wiped his tears away on his shirt sleeve. “No, we won’t,” he said as he tucked the processor away in his pocket. The shuttle’s former pilot gave the order to the current pilot. “Seth, get us out of here.”

Valjean approached Nightengale, holding his last fire extinguisher at waist level. He had jumped off the freighter, headed toward his ship, using three fire extinguishers as thrusters. Two had been discarded along the way. The first one had been used to propel him forward, the second one to get him aimed toward his ship, and now he needed the last one to keep on course, and slow down enough that the impact wouldn’t kill him, or cause him to bounce off, and become a permanent fixture in Ares orbit.

The ship was looming large in front of him. He placed the nozzle right at his belly button, curled his legs up, and squeezed the trigger. Fire suppression fluid squirted out under pressure, away from him, forming a string of frozen droplets. The droplets impacted his ship, too hard. He was coming in too fast. He squeezed the trigger again, and liquid shot out in front of him, slowing him down. He was off center, moving off course. He swung his arms to turn, and squeezed the trigger again. The stream was weaker this time. He kept the trigger pressed down, until the canister was exhausted, then he pushed it away from him.

It was going to be close. He was headed toward the ship’s nose, and beyond that was empty space. Valjean pulled a cable out of the toolkit on his belt, and made a lasso. He was, he estimated, going to bump into the ship harder than he wanted.

At the last minute, he extended his feet, and used his legs to absorb the impact. His knees were driven up almost past his chin from the shock, and he toppled forward, hit the ship with the top of his helmet, and rebounded back out into space. But not before he got his lasso looped around an antenna. He floated out to the end of the cable, which then violently jerked him around, the belt digging into his waist so tightly that his eyes bulged out, and he bashed his nose on the inside of the helmet. The nose bleed was a concern, the droplets were floating around, sticking to the faceplate, blocking his vision. He began the process of pulling himself, hand over hand, down the cable, until he was able to clutch a handhold on the ship.

Now he need to get inside, charge the hyperdrive engines, and get away, as fast as he could.

Nelson, Sam, and Rick were sitting on the floor of the small office that was attached to the miner’s crawler garage. Legs sprawled out, backs slouched against the wall, they sat quietly, napping, or looking through the large windows at the dead, rust-red terrain outside. All three men were back in their e-suits, helmets on, faceplates buttoned up, breathing the remaining oxygen in their suit bottles. The air in the office had gotten too foul to breathe several hours before, Nelson had been the one to decide it was time to button up and go back on internal oxygen.

The miners had either put on their own e-suits, or congregated in larger buildings, hoping to delay the time when they would put on an e-suit and watch their oxygen supply gauge steadily drop toward zero. The three men from Ace decided they wanted to be together, and didn’t really feel entirely at home around the miners, so they had settled down in the garage office. Mac, still securely tied up, was strapped to a seat in one of the shot-up crawlers, breathing the last two hours of his own oxygen supply. The miners had wanted to throw him out an airlock and take his oxygen for themselves, Nelson, brandishing Mac’s rifle, had put a stop to that. Rick was glad Nelson had stepped forward, Rick couldn’t be sure he could control himself around the pirate. Sitting on the floor, trying to be calm, and to avoid moving around in order to stretch his oxygen supply wasn’t easy. Rick still seethed with frustrated anger and grief. They still didn’t know what was going on upstairs. The radio jamming prevented communication with the ship, the command section, or the pirates. The pirate ship must still be in orbit, Nelson said, because the radio jamming was active.

“Hey!” Sam said quietly, pushing himself slowly to his feet, and looking out the window toward the south. “Look at that.”

Nelson and Rick scrambled to their feet and walked over to the window. “What do- oh.” Nelson said.

Rick then saw what Sam was pointing at. Low on the horizon, an orange fireball was streaking across the sky, it left a long contrail behind it, stretching back across the horizon. “What is that? A meteor? It’s not a missile, is it?” His two companions didn’t answer. “Guys? What is that?”

Nelson sighed through the suit radio. He exchanged a knowing look with Sam, then looked back up at the fireball. Nelson didn’t want Rick to look into his helmet, didn’t want Rick to see the tear running down his cheek. To Rick he said quietly “Rick, that’s something coming down from orbit. It’s burning up in the atmosphere.”

“The ship?” Rick exclaimed in horror.

“No, no, no way, it’s not big enough. Not even close.” Nelson declared. “It could be anything, a piece of the ship that got knocked away, probably. Some cargo, maybe. Ah, so what? The company has insurance.” It was a lame joke. He didn’t say that he thought it was most likely the command section. He quickly continued, so as not to give Rick time to dwell on it. “Damn! I wish we knew what was going on up there! If all the pirates want is to steal some junk off  the ship, they should have grabbed it and been long gone by now.”

“Yeah.” Sam concurred. “Unless somebody is giving them trouble.”

“Like who?” Rick asked.

“Uh, well, whatever it is the pirates want, it’s got to be in one of the cargo bays. When we left, everyone was on the bridge, except for your kids, and Jen.” Sam speculated. “So that leaves Jen.”

Rick exploded in frustration. “I don’t give a damn what the pirates want, they can take the whole ship, for all I care! Jen’s responsibility is to make sure the passengers are safe, that means my children.”

“And I’m sure that’s what she did, Rick.” Nelson said soothingly, trying to keep the anguish out of his voice. He was staring at the fireball, certain he was seeing the death of the crew he had served with for years, and trying to stick to what he could do, to do his job, whatever was left of it. “I’m sure the first thing Jen did was find a secure place for your children to hide. It’s a big ship, no way the pirates could search it all. Jen probably made it difficult for the pirates, like lock all the doors, turn the gravity off and on, things like that. Slow them down, buy time for the Navy to get here.”

“And what if she just makes them mad?” Rick insisted.

“They’re not going to risk firing a missile at a cargo bay, risk hitting whatever they’re looking for. But I can tell you this,” Nelson added, struggling to control his own emotions, “as soon as they get what they’re looking for, and leave the ship, they may blow it up, and that has nothing to do with whether Jen made them mad or not. They probably don’t want to leave any witnesses behind. So the best thing Jen can do, is stall for time, you hear me?”

All Rick could think about was a vivid mental image of his two young children, scared senseless, hiding in some dark place Jen had put them, holding onto each other, and trying not to cry so the pirates wouldn’t hear them. “Yeah, I hear you, Nelson. Jen has always been good to my kids, I’m sure you’re right. She has them someplace safe, and she’s doing all she can to keep them safe.”

Sam stared at the wreckage of the command section, which had now broken apart into many individual fireballs, all headed down toward the red dust and rock. He clenched his fists. “Nelson, man, I’m glad you have that rifle, instead of me.”

“Why?” Nelson asked.

Sam said a silent prayer for his crewmates, above them. “Because if I had that rifle right now, I’d blow Mac’s head off.”

CHAPTER 19

The shuttle was in a stable orbit, although so low that Seth held his breath whenever he looked down at the planet. If Ares’ atmosphere wasn’t so thin, they would have crashed by now. Seth’s pilot console beeped. Another message from the pirates? It was something else entirely, something unexpected. “Captain! I’ve got a gamma ray burst, ship dropping out of hyperspace.”

“Where? What ship?” Schroeder asked from the copilot’s seat, trying to figure which button to press. He vowed that from now on, he would take regular refresher training in piloting shuttlecraft.

Seth could only hold up his hands. The console in front of him had no wisdom to offer. It was just a shuttle. “Without sensors, I can’t tell anything. I’ll try to get a location on the burst, maybe I can-“

The shuttle’s cabin speakers crackled, and they heard a familiar voice, distorted, the Navy ship’s powerful radio transmitter cutting through the pirate's jamming. “This is the Navy frigate Tigershark, calling the vessel claiming to be the Nightengale. Cease your radio jamming, stand down your hyperdrive, and prepare to be boarded.”

The cheering in the shuttle’s packed cabin was so loud Seth couldn’t hear himself think.

Lt. Commander Ross looked up from his scope. “That’s one mystery solved, Captain. I think we just found the Isaac Newton.” He pointed to the small ship in front of them.

Captain Gante tilted her head. “How so?”

Ross explained. “Same configuration. Her transponder says she’s the Nightengale, registered to a company called Biopharma, but otherwise, she’s an exact match for the Isaac Newton. I think somebody bought, stole, or leased the Newton, created a fake registration, and changed her name and transponder code to Nightengale. And I’ll bet they sent that fake distress call we were chasing.”

Gante nodded. It made sense. She glanced at the console beside her chair, which displayed status of the ship’s major systems. Tigershark’s hyperdrive engines were critically hot from the sustained high-speed run to Ares, temperatures edging into the red zone. On her own authority, Gante had pushed her ship at full military power for the entire run to Ares. Now that the ship was back in normal space, her radiators were dumping excess heat like the surface of a star, but the hyperdrive coils were still way over temperature. She would have to watch them carefully before they Jumped again. “We can check your theory in person, soon, XO.”

As soon as he heard the radio message, Valjean knew he’d been fooled, fooled by a trick so simple he couldn’t believe he’d fallen for it. It was glaringly obvious what had happened: the frigate crew had tinkered with the timecode embedded in their hyperwave messages, to make him think the Navy ship was transmitting the messages from far away, still looking for the ghost ship Isaac Newton. He felt like an idiot, and it made him even more angry. His hand closed around the control stick, then he let go, picked up a datapad, and flung it to smash against the rear bulkhead. Only for a split second, he lost control. Then, with a deep, calming breath, he took stock of his situation. It was not hopeless. In fact, he still had the advantage.

In order to reply, he needed to turn off the radio jamming, so he complied with that part of the Navy’s demands. “Navy, hello,” he said, “nice to see you. Did you get bored looking for the Isaac Newton, or were you just feeling lonely out there?”

The reply came back, simple, direct. “Nightengale, shut down your hyperdrive immediately.”

Valjean looked at the readout. His hyperdrive coils were 82% charged, he needed to stall the Navy ship only a few more minutes before he could Jump away. “No, I don’t think so. Tigershark,” he said in a smooth, oily voice, feeling confident once again, “you and I both know it will take you almost half an hour to recharge your Jump engines. I will be long gone by the time you Jump again, if you haven't melted your drive coils already, and this is a big galaxy. You’ll never find me.” He was speaking truthfully, a small ship like Nightengale, with a thirty minute head start, would be very difficult for a single frigate to search for. The odds were that Valjean would get away cleanly. “It’s been real fun, though, we should do this again sometime.”

“Nightengale, we will find you. The Navy will find you. You won’t have any place to hide in this galaxy.”

“That’s what you think.” Valjean said under his breath. He noted with satisfaction that the Navy ship had been reduced to idle threats. Let the Navy sputter angrily all they wanted. Now, to buy some more time for himself. Valjean checked the controls. Could he still fire his one remaining missile remotely? He didn’t have time to walk over to the airlock and get it connected. Yes, the missile was responding and powered up. This missile had a much larger, more powerful warhead, he had brought it along in order to destroy the mining camp, Mac and the miners, eliminating witnesses. Mac and the miners would now survive. No matter. He gave the missile a new target, programming the missile to explode at reduced power near Nightengale’s hijacked shuttle. He wanted to damage, not destroy, the shuttle. A destroyed shuttle would only make the Navy angry. A damaged shuttle would delay the Navy ship, while they diverted to rescue the passengers. “Navy, while you’re charging your Jump engines, I’m sure you’ll be bored. So, I’m going to give you something useful to do. Like a rescue operation. Farewell, Navy.”

Valjean removed the safeties, and pressed the button to fire the missile. He felt a slight lurch as it left his ship. It had launched from the side of Nightengale pointed away from the target, and would need to acquire the Nightengale’s shuttle with its own radar before homing in. Valjean turned to his radar console to watch the missile’s progress, a smile curling up the sides of his mouth. If he couldn’t get the object he’d been paid to steal, he would at least get revenge. 87% charge on the Jump engine coils. He kept on eye on the radar screen while he locked in a course for the hyperspace Jump.

The collision alarm sounded, blaring in his ear. “What?” His eyes grew wide as he saw the radar display, there were now six objects on the scope; Atlas Challenger, the shuttle, Tigershark, the missile he’d just fired, which had now made its turn and was homing in on the shuttle, and two unidentified objects, approaching his ship at high speed. Very high speed! As he watched, one of the objects changed course and intercepted his missile, blowing it into dust, far away from the shuttle. The second object had flipped around and was decelerating, the readout said the object was slowing down with the force of over three thousand Gees. It was headed straight for him. He turned his attention to the Jump engines, which were now 90% charged. He needed a 96% charge for a successful Jump.

“Nightengale, this is Tigershark. Our second missile has matched your course, and is now in position ten meters off your starboard bow. Disengage your hyperdrive now, or I will order the missile to destroy your ship. Repeat, disengage your hyperdrive now.”

Valjean realized, in a belated flash of insight, that the Navy ship must have fired two missiles as soon as they came out of hyperspace, letting them run onward toward his ship without the missiles using their own radar seekers. The Navy missile alongside his ship was likely programmed to explode if it detected a hyperdrive field forming. He looked at the Jump engine readout. 94%. So close.

"Nightengale, this is Captain Gante. Give me a reason to blow you to dust. Any reason. Please."

That had been the story with this whole screwed up job. How could he have failed so badly? Two children, children, had gotten the better of him! He didn’t get more angry. Instead, Valjean sighed. In order to live to fight another day, you needed to stay alive. Valjean reached over and flipped the switch to start draining power from the hyperdrive coils. In a low voice, he said over the radio “Navy, this is... Nightengale. Jump engines disengaged.” He swallowed hard. “Standing by over here, as ordered.”

In the shuttle, the people aboard heard Valjean’s radio surrender, and a cheer went up, ringing around the cramped cabin.

CHAPTER 20

“Shuttle, Tigershark. We’re sending a lander down to the surface first, with an emergency oxygen supply for the miners. Hold your position, we are computing a rendezvous.”

“Tigershark, shuttle. Acknowle-“ Schroeder started to say.

“No!” Manny interrupted. “They need to help Jen first!”

“Ach!” Schroeder winced. The boy was right. Vassily’s condition was stable, Jen’s was unknown. “Tigershark, I have a wounded crewman, in the ship’s sickbay. She needs medical attention immediately. We’ll be fine here, for a short time.”

“Roger that, shuttle,” Gante replied. “We will rendezvous with your ship while our shuttle drops to the surface. The oxygen situation at the mining camp is critical.”

“Can you bring our Dad up?” Kaylee shouted, to be sure she was heard.

“Your three crewmen, and the pirate, on the surface, yes, our lander can bring them back up, when it returns.” Gante’s voice had a touch of amusement.

“Kaylee?” Manny prodded.

“Uh-huh?”

“We need to warn Tigershark about the tinos.”

“Oh, shoot. Um, yeah. Hey, Tigershark, uh, listen, there's a, um, kind of a funny thing to tell you about the ship- ”

Rick watched the frigate’s lander approach, it was hovering around a hundred meters altitude, and flying sideways. The lander was not a sleek craft like most shuttles were, it was military, designed for combat. Doors in the nose contained cannons, and along each side were spars for missiles, those racks were empty now. The pilot turned the lander in a full circle, clearing his landing zone, then dropped it onto the pad.

Rick, Sam and Nelson were staring out the window of the mining camp’s mess hall, where everyone had gathered. The lander was bringing a temporary oxygen supply, but only one unit. Enough to supply oxygen to one room, until other ships arrived with a replacement recycler system.

“Hey, Mac, your ride’s here.” Nelson taunted the pirate. “Jailbird express. One way trip to Hell, for you.”

Mac didn’t reply. Sam had gotten tired of listening to the pirate mouthing off, so Sam had disconnected his suit radio’s microphone. Mac was sitting on the floor, arms and legs tied, avoiding the homicidal looks of the miners.

“Perfect timing.” Rick remarked. He glanced down at his suit’s oxygen meter. Twenty seven minutes remaining. And he had more than some others.

The frigate docked with the freighter, and remained there for almost an hour. Gante next flew her ship over to Nightengale, took Valjean under arrest, then scooted off to pick up Nightengale’s overloaded shuttle. Tigershark’s lander came up from the surface soon after, and docked with its mothership.

“Jen is going to be fine,” Capain Gante announced, as she came into Tigershark’s wardroom, “and we’ll take her to Aurora for treatment. Our doctor says she has a concussion, and she lost a lot of blood. Vassily’s condition is more serious, our doctor has put him into a temporary coma, to avoid brain damage. But his prognosis is excellent.”

“Can we talk to Jen?” Kaylee asked anxiously, twisting a strand of hair with her fingers.

“No,” Gante said gently, “not right now. In a few hours, perhaps. I'm sure she would like to see you.”

“And that pirate, Haney?” Captain Schroeder inquired.

“Taney. The one who was shot by their leader. He’ll be fine, he had strapped himself to the top of an access ladder, there were two tinos below him, and they'd broken off several ladder rungs trying to get to him. Surprisingly strong creatures, these tinos. I’ll have Taney out of sickbay and locked up in our brig, soon. The others, Dooley, he’s the one Kaylee, uh,” Gante nodded in the girl’s direction with a slight smile, “disabled, we found him trapped in a shipping crate.” Gante couldn’t suppress a snicker of laughter. “And their pilot, his name is Becker, the Navy has been looking for him for a while. Manny, you injected him with enough sedative to knock out one of those tinos.” She shook her head. “Our doctor administered an antidote, Becker is awake, and feeling very foolish. And very angry. I’ll have to keep their leader and the other pirates separated, because the other pirates all want to kill him. He shot Taney, and was going to abandon or kill all four of them. There is apparently no honor among thieves.”

“And the tinos?” Manny asked hopefully. He didn't want to hear that the Navy crew had killed the tinos.

Kaylee made a sour face. She had mixed feelings about the tinos. She had named them, and they were, after all, only animals. Her brother thought Tinos were cool. Her brother had not been chased down a dark corridor by the terrifying beasts.

Gante smiled. “All the tinos are back in hypersleep containers. We flooded the ship with anesthetic gas after we got Jen out of sickbay. Three of the tinos were injured, from gunfire, and apparently from fighting with each other. It’s nothing serious, they are very tough animals. Would you like to meet the pirate leader, I think you know him as ‘Ted Miller’? XO, bring him in.”

Tigershark’s Executive Officer escorted a very subdued looking pirate. Joy took a step forward, and raised her hand as if to slap him across the face, then dropped her hand, and went back to stand between her children.

“This is Valjean D’Amonte. Among many other names he goes by.” Gante explained. “A career criminal, he’s been on the Most Wanted list for a decade.”

Valjean lifted his head in a perverse pride at hearing Gante’s description of him. A criminal, a man to be feared. He met Rick’s eyes, glaring at him. “I’ll bet you’d like to kill me now, Mr. Sanchez? You’re too late, Captain Gante has to follow the law.”

To his own surprise, Rick shook his head. “No, I don’t want to kill you. You’re too pathetic to bother with. You came here with a ship full of missiles and guns and killers, and your master criminal plan was beaten by two children.” Rick’s face broke into a broad smile of parental pride. He stepped behind his wife, and put his arms around his family. “Two children!” He laughed, and everyone joined in, everyone except Valjean. “Every criminal in the Milky Way galaxy will be laughing at you for the rest of your life. Good luck in prison, loser.”

Valjean’s face twisted in anger, his gaze dropping to the deck. He knew Rick was telling the truth. The only way to retain any scrap of his dignity was to remain silent while he fumed with anger, so that is what he did.

“Do you know who he was working for?” Schroeder inquired.

Gante shook her head. “No, not yet. And he’s not telling what he was looking for.”

“Oh, we know that.” Manny spoke up.

“Yeah,” Kaylee added, “it’s some old alien thingy.”

Manny took off his pack, and astonished all the adults, including Valjean. “I have it right here.” He reached in his pack, and pulled out the item Valjean had been looking for. It hadn’t zapped anyone since Kaylee got shocked the first time she touched it.

Rick shook his head in amazement. "Kids, just when I thought you couldn't get any more incredible, you surprise me again."

All the adults, especially Valjean, craned their necks forward to see better. “Here, Dad," Manny handed the object to his father carefully, "you’ll probably know what it is.”

Rick took the item, and turned it over in his hands. He studied it, held it up to the light, then pronounced “I have no idea what this is. From the markings, it’s Kutoru, Second Expansion, probably over a hundred thousand years old, but I don’t know what it is.”

All eyes turned to Valjean. He shrugged. “I was paid to get it. I wasn’t told what it is.”

"Be careful touching it, Dad," Kaylee said, "the first time I touched it, it zapped me."

"Zapped you?" Rick asked skeptically. Whatever the thing was, it was ancient, the surface was tarnished with a layer of corrosion. "What do you mean, zapped?"

"Like an electric shock, but it was more, uh, I don't know. It was weird."

"Kaylee, was it weird like, sort of hearing a voice in your head?" Captain Gante asked.

"Yes! How did you know?"

Gante exchanged a glance with her XO. There had been a Navy secret Special Bulletin a year ago, about people getting shocked by alien artifacts, and hearing voices, with some briefly seeming to sense an alien presence in their minds. Whatever was going on, people in the Admiralty were worried about it. Gante held out her hand, took the alien thing, and handed it to Ross. “XO, secure this in our weapons locker. And take him away.” She indicated Valjean with distaste. The pirate was led away, without protest. "Kaylee, our doctor will need to check you later, to make sure you weren't injured by being zapped by this thing, as you said."

“What now?” Joy asked, directing her question to Gante.

“Tigershark will stay here, until other ships arrive. The Navy is sending a cruiser to take charge here, it should arrive the day after tomorrow. Then, we’ll transport Jen, Vassily, and the prisoners, to Aurora.”

Schroeder cleared his throat, and spoke. “My ship, unfortunately, will not be leaving here for a long time.” If ever. “The company is sending another freighter, Atlas Champion, to detach the cargo pods, and finish our original journey.” Schroeder knew that what the company would likely do is salvage the engine section, then scrap the rest of the ship. He needed to find a new ship to command. He turned toward the children. “I understand that Specialist Jennifer Tanner deputized the two of you as starship crew?”

Kaylee and Manny nodded, their smiles turning to serious expressions as they remembered that moment. “Yes, sir.” Kaylee replied.

“Ah. Unfortunately, Ms. Tanner did not truly have authority to make you, as we say, ‘Aces.’”

Kaylee and Manny’s faces took on such a crestfallen look that Schroeder hurried to add “Howver, as Captain, I do have such authority.” He reached in his pocket, and pulled out two ‘Ace of Diamonds’ patches, and fixed them to the right sleeves of sister and brother. “Now, you are officially Aces.”

“Cool!” Manny blurted out.

Schroeder held up a finger for silence. “I am not finished, please.” He dipped into his other pocket, and pulled out two shiny, gold-plated objects. “Manuel Sanchez, this pin designates you as Pilot First Class. You have certainly earned your wings.” He attached the pin to the left front pocket of Manny’s shirt. “Nelson tells me that, in his opinion, you did a first class job of docking the shuttle to the command section. You do realize that, at the time, we were technically in the atmosphere? No? Well, I can assure you, that was excellent flying.”

He turned to Kaylee, who let Schroeder pin to her collar a blue bar with two gold stars. “Kaylee Sanchez, after Jen was disabled, you were in command of the ship. You kept the ship, passengers and crew safe, in the best traditions of our profession. These stars designate your rank as Commander.”

It was not clear who was more bursting with pride, Kaylee or Manny, as Schroeder clicked his heels together and saluted. They returned the salute, as solemnly as they could, considering their ear to ear grins.

“Now, to answer your question, Ms. Sanchez, my company is sending the company yacht, to take you and your family back to Earth. The company, and all of us, are very grateful to you, all of you.”

“A yacht? That’ll be fun, huh, kids?” Rick said with feigned enthusiasm.

Kaylee and Manny looked at each other. “Aw, Dad, do we have to go back to Earth?” Manny protested.

Rick was surprised. “You don’t want to return to L.A.?”

Kaylee tilted her head. “Dad. Please. Earth is lame. Everybody knows that. We’ve been there, done that. We want to go to Valhalla.”

“Yeah, Dad, you promised to show us alien stuff nobody has seen before.” Manny reminded his father.

Rick looked to Joy for guidance. She smiled. “Hans, do you think your company yacht will bring us to Valhalla?”

Schroeder nodded, and coughed behind his hand. “I think the company will bring you anywhere you want, frankly.” The company would probably give all four of them lifetime passes on its passenger ships, Starlight Lines. At least.

“In that case,” Joy said, “next stop, Valhalla!”

Epilogue

London, Great Britain, Earth   

Dr. Nigel Watson had been hiding in his lab all day, and now the sun was setting outside, and he didn’t know where to go, what to do. He was perched on a stool in the corner of the lab, wringing his trembling hands, as he had been doing for hours.

The story was all over the newsnets for the past month, the faces of the children everywhere Nigel looked. When he’d first heard, he had panicked and called in sick to work, then decided that would make him look guilty.

The door to the lab slid open, and Nigel heard footsteps approaching, a steady, confident stride, click-clicking across the floor toward him. It had to be the police, Nigel knew.

He would tell them everything. It wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t known. He was innocent.

“Ah, the good Doctor Watson. How are you, Nigel?”

Nigel spun on his stool in fright. Not the police! It was his boss, the oily Todd Martin. Martin carried a white container under his arm, he carefully set it down on a workbench. Nigel rose unsteadily to his feet, and pointed a shaky finger at the other man. “You,” he croaked, his voice breaking, “you did this.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic, old man. Dash it all, Nigel, you look like hell. Bad image for the company, and all. Clean up, and get some sleep.” The other man said, while adjusting his necktie in a mirror.

“You’ll pay for this. I’ll tell them-“

“What?” Martin snapped. “You’ll tell them what? A nice fairy tale? The police have no idea who hired the thieves, and the thieves don’t know either.” He smiled disarmingly. “Now, down to business. The Navy took the device the thieves were trying to steal, but the Navy can’t figure out what it is. JST Research has generously offered to take a look at it for them.” He pointed to the white container in triumph. “Nigel, I wonder if you would be interested in examining the object?”

THE END