Adele had a 360-degree panorama at the bottom of her display. She didn’t see any Alliance spacers in it, but through the crash of plasma blanketing the RF spectrum she heard panicked squeals on the two frequencies the Goldenfels had used for short-range communication.
“Daniel, they’re running!” she said into the two-way link. Should she have used the general channel? And she should’ve called him Captain or Six or something else, but she was monitoring multiple simultaneous transmissions and that was bloody well enough to worry about! “Everybody on radio’s running for the jungle or telling other people to run.”
Valves squealed open. Steam roared from the ground beneath the Princess Cecile as Mr. Pasternak dumped reaction mass to cool the plasma-heated soil. Heavily-armed Sissies leaped from the D Deck ports, staggering blindly toward the Goldenfels until they’d gotten far enough from the corvette to open their eyes again.
Daniel rose from his console and took the sub-machine gun Hogg handed him. He was already wearing his equipment belt from which now dangled several clusters of grenades as well as the holstered pistol. “Mr. Chewning, you have the ship!” he ordered as he started for the door. “Six out.”
Adele had gotten up also. She was directly behind Daniel when he reached the companionway.
“You’ve got no business here!” Daniel shouted over his shoulder. “I need to see what condition the freighter’s control room’s in!”
“And I need to see their commo suite!” Adele replied tartly. “Which I suspect is more important to our accomplishing your intention than anything in the control room!”
Woetjans and fifty of the Sissie’s crew were dodging between the smoking craters the cannon had just blown. Daniel had brought the corvette down beside the Goldenfels’ belly rather than her dorsal spine. Her ventral turret was still retracted, but the marooned crew had removed access plates on her underside. Ladders lashed together from saplings served them. Adele supposed that initially the crew had climbed out by ropes after antimatter detonations flipped the freighter onto her starboard side.
An Alliance spacer appeared at a hatch with a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle that seemed too heavy for her to handle easily. She dropped it to the ground fifteen feet below, then noticed the oncoming Sissies as she turned to put her feet on the ladder.
“Ship, don’t shoot!” Daniel ordered. Adele had set one of the Princess Cecile’s main transmitters to rebroadcast low-powered signals from his helmet, but none of the boarding group seemed to be trigger-happy.
The Alliance spacer tried to change her mind, but she’d already committed to coming down. She lost her grip and swung out of the hatchway, hitting the ground not far from her bundle. She twitched but didn’t try to get up.
The Goldenfels had mounted twelve High Drive motors on her underside. Normally the outriggers carrying the plasma thrusters would’ve been withdrawn against the hull before the vessel shifted to matter/antimatter annihilation. Since the ship had been in landing mode this time, the tops of the outriggers were slightly pitted—but only slightly, because the High Drive had failed almost instantly, melting not only the motors but portions of the surrounding hull plates as well.
Sissies climbed the steep ladders into the Goldenfels with their legs alone, leaving their hands free to point their weapons ahead of them. Nobody appeared to give them a target before they swarmed aboard the freighter. Most of the boarding party were riggers since the hull-side crewmen were needed during landing. Rigging suits weighed more than the guns and munitions they were carrying now, and they were well-practiced in scrambling up antennas to clear balky winches and fouled cables.
Adele struggled to keep up with Daniel and Hogg as they pounded heavily across ground the Princess Cecile had burned bare the first time she landed on Tegeli. Running wasn’t a skill she’d learned in youth, nor had poverty trained her in it. She wondered about navigating the corridors of a vessel lying on its side. She didn’t suppose the spacers cared, since they were used to maneuvering in weightlessness where all directions were the same.
“Sir, there’s some gone out the dorsal hatches!” a spacer called, using the alert channel instead of the general push that was full of pointless, excited chatter. “They’re getting away! They’re getting away!”