“Still thinking of taking their ship?”
I laughed bitterly.
Looking over the ragged remains of my crew, I saw that little Jerron was badly burned in the abdomen and left leg. He lay panting, wide-eyed with shock, with our medical officer bending over him.
“Magro,” I called to the comm officer. “Can you power up the transceiver?”
He was grimy and breathing hard, like all the others. But he gave me a nod and said, “I can try, sir.”
“What are you thinking?” Frede asked.
Peering down the dimly lit, smoky passageway, I could see no Skorpis. They were beyond the air-lock hatch, preparing their next attack on us.
“They want the cryo capsule in the cargo hold,” I told Frede. “Maybe we can beam it down to the planet.”
“We’d have to drag it in here,” Frede objected.
“We could cut through the bulkhead. Are there any flight packs stashed in that cargo bay? That would make it easier to move the capsule.”
Clearly, she did not think much of my idea. But she said, “I’ll get a couple of people to cut through the bulkhead.”
Nodding, I turned my attention back to the empty passageway. The Skorpis could cut through the ship’s outer hull and get into the cargo bay that way, I knew. Would they try that, or would they first try to wipe us out and walk into the cargo bay after we were done with?
Why not blow a hole in the hull right here, in the transceiver bay, and kill us all at one stroke? Blow out the hull, expose us to vacuum; none of us had space suits. Explosive decompression, we’d be dead in an instant. The thought startled me. But then I reasoned that if they had wanted to do that they would have done it by now. A blast big enough to puncture the hull would probably damage Anya’s cryosleep capsule, as well, and it seemed that they wanted Anya alive. If possible.
Waiting, wondering what would happen next, was harder than actually fighting. Behind me I heard the crackling sizzle of lasers cutting through the metal of the bulkhead separating us from the cargo bay. The passageway remained empty. Whatever the Skorpis were planning, they were taking their time about it.
I heard a crewman sing out, “Watch it, the section’s falling.”
Glancing over my shoulder I saw a whole section of the bulkhead, its edges glowing red, fall inward, scattering the crewmen who had burned it through. It thumped loudly, making me wonder if the Skorpis could hear it.
“Damn,” I heard Frede call, her voice echoing in the nearly empty cargo bay, “not a flight pack in the place. We’ll have to muscle it.”
I called Dyer and told her to watch the passageway. Then I stepped through the jagged hole in the bulkhead to join the team of sweating, grunting, cursing men and women who were tugging at the massive cryosleep capsule.
“Heavier than a sergeant’s ass,” one of the men muttered.
“Heavier than your ass, anyway.”
It was like dragging one of the stones for Khufu’s pyramid without the aid of rollers. The capsule screeched along the metal deck plates, moving grudgingly, a millimeter at a time. I called almost all the remaining members of the crew to help us, as I watched through sweat-stung eyes while Magro bent over the transceiver console, a puzzled frown on his face as he pecked tentatively at the keyboard.
At last we hauled the capsule onto the transceiver stage. I felt as if I had dragged the planet Jupiter through a light-year of mud.
Trudging slowly to Magro at the console, I asked, “You do have power, don’t you?”
“Yessir,” he said, still frowning at the readouts. “But I don’t know where we are in relation to the planet. I need a navigational fix.”
I turned to Frede, who was leaning against the side of the capsule, mopping her sweaty face. “How can we—”
“Here they come!” yelped Dyer. And a grenade went off at her feet, blowing her legs off.