CLANG
More distant, but clearly another launch to those who recognized the sound—and proof that the Empress of Earth was breaking up to the passengers who didn’t. More people were screaming and tearing in vain at their restraints.
Almost anticlimactically, the hatch slid open—the seats unlocked—and the lighting within the lifeboat brightened dazzlingly to the same level as that of the corridor outside.
“There is no hurry, please, ladies and gentlemen!” cried a steward who was pummeled aside by the first rush of passengers through the hatch.
“I guess we can go now, buddy,” said Yuri Timurkanov when he noticed that his aisle-side companion wasn’t moving. After a further moment, he tapped Chekoumian on the shoulder. The importer’s hologram reader quivered, then slipped from his fingers.
“What?” Chekoumian said, wild-eyed. “Oh—I’m sorry.”
He lurched out of his seat and staggered down the aisle without looking back at Timurkanov.
Timurkanov picked up the abandoned reader. “Hey, buddy?” he called. “You dropped this.”
The projected news was a report on the wedding the previous day of Marie Djushvili to Ivan Lishke, a timber merchant of Bogomil.
* * *
The whang of Lifeboat 67’s launch echoed metallically through the boat deck.
“One away,” said Ran Colville to the six Cold Crewmen with him in the machinery room nestled between Bay 109 and Bay 111.
Swede, a watch chief with twenty-two years in sponge space, grunted. Ran didn’t have a clue as to what the fellow meant by the grunt, or if it was even a response to the statement. The remaining Cold Crewmen, all from Swede’s watch, were frozen-eyed and silent.
Ran regretted not having Mohacks and Babanguida to back him, but only because he would have liked someone to talk to. Cold Crewmen couldn’t talk on duty and didn’t talk much when they were off-watch.
Ran didn’t have the least concern about the way Swede and his crew would perform if a Nevasan hijack team suddenly rushed up the corridor from Bay 111. Two of the Cold Crewmen had been issued submachine guns. The other four men bore the equipment of their occupation: adjustment tools and, for Swede, an arc shears that weighed sixty kilos and could saw through 70-mm collapsed-steel hull plating at the rate of a centimeter/second.
Theoretically the Cold Crewmen were to back up the Third Officer and his bandolier of stun bombs, which would provide the first line of defense. Realistically—if the Nevasans broke out of Bay 111, there was going to be a bloodbath the like of which hadn’t been seen on a starliner since the Strasbourg had the incredibly bad luck to collide with an asteroid while inbound toward Earth.
Commander Kneale had looked askance when he heard who Ran wanted for support, given that the Staff Side ratings on his watch were unavailable. Kneale hadn’t objected, though.
Lifeboat 111 fired with a clang and a double shockwave. At a distance, even on the Boat Deck, the suction as the outer doors closed and the inner ones opened to refill the bay was muted. Ran and his men were next to the bay. The hatch to their hiding place was ajar to save time if they were needed. They got the full, ear-popping effect
They were used to it. The Cold Crewmen were in and out of airlocks at four-hour intervals for as long as the Empress of Earth was in transit between the stars, and their berths between watches were just off the engineering control room, where the locks were.
As for Ran—it didn’t seem like very long since he’d been in the same business. The intervals between changes had been longer, though, because tramps weren’t crewed like luxury liners.
The machinery room had a flat-screen communicator. It was live with a pattern of fluorescent static until the lifeboat fired in the next bay. Hiram Kneale’s dark face appeared, wearing a smile that could have been carved in granite. “Congratulations, Mr. Colville,” the commander said.
“Wanda’s end is all right?” Ran asked. “Ah, Ms. Holly’s?”
“Wanda’s end is just fine,” Kneale said with the smile broadening. “Go ahead and tell our Nevasan friends the score. Bridge will connect you to the talk-between-ships laser.”
“Me, sir?” Ran said in surprise. “Shouldn’t it be you—or Captain Kanawa?”