“Let ’em go, Raymond!” Daniel replied. Adele could’ve checked the transmitter number, but Daniel didn’t have to. “We want them to escape. Don’t shoot! Don’t—”
A burst of shots rang from the Goldenfels’ interior, multiplied by echoes into a pitched battle. A single pellet, a drop of crimson fire, zipped from what had been the entry hatch.
“—shoot!”
There were six ladders into the ship’s belly. Barnes and Dasi waited at the bottom of the one which Daniel started climbing. Hogg followed him muttering curses, but Hogg cursed a great deal. He couldn’t have really believed that Daniel was at any real risk with fifty Sissies ahead of him.
Adele reached for the ladder. The stringers were curving lengths of vine, woody and four inches in diameter, but the rungs were splits from straight sections of trunk; some oozed sap.
“We got you, mistress!” Dasi said. He took her right hand and led it over his shoulder as he turned his back to her. “Just hold tight.”
“Woetjans told us t’ wait, ma’am,” Barnes said, gripping her under the arms and lifting her to where her legs clamped instinctively around Dasi’s waist. “Don’t ‘cha worry, they’ll hold us!”
Dasi started up the ladder at what would’ve been a dead run on the level. Barnes followed, his hands planted in the seat of Adele’s utilities to support at least half her weight. She was too shocked to be angry—not that her fulminating would’ve changed what anybody was doing.
And besides, Woetjans was right, as Adele realized when she allowed herself to think about what was happening. Signals Officer Mundy wasn’t going to be much use to her captain if she lay sprawled at the foot of the ladder like that Alliance spacer.
The two riggers deposited Adele in the hold. The auxiliary power unit still operated so the Goldenfels’ systems were live, but there’d never been many lights here in the freighter’s belly. Three spacers wearing bits of Alliance uniform, and a red-haired native woman shivering with terror, lay on the deck with their hands on the backs of their necks. Lamsoe guarded them with a sour expression.
Crude steps gave access to the hatches into the compartment on the next deck; sets of companionways led on from there. Two of the armored tubes were close enough to what was now the deck that Adele didn’t need help to follow Daniel and Hogg. Tovera brought up the rear.
They continued horizontally toward bridge level, crawling on the edges of the treads. Adele smiled faintly. She’d worked in stacks where access wasn’t a great deal better, so she didn’t have difficulty keeping up. The hatches at every deck were open. The corridors echoed with excited shouts, but there didn’t seem to be fighting. Though the air-circulation equipment was working, the air smelled of wood smoke and human waste; neither the galley nor the heads would function with the ship at this angle, but some people had decided to make their homes in the vessel anyway.
Adele scrambled out onto A Deck. The riggers’ airlock in the same compartment was open to the jungle beyond.
“Sir, we’ve got all the major spaces!” Woetjans said to Daniel. The bosun had stuck a pickup on a hatch coaming and flexed it to her helmet. That turned the ship’s steel structure, otherwise a Faraday cage blocking helmet radio, into a giant antenna. “There wasn’t any fighting, just one ‘a the boys tripping with his finger on the trigger. No harm done, just some bits of slug in his butt that the medicomp’ll get out no sweat.”
She grinned in embarrassment. “Ricochet, you know.”
“Get all the prisoners outside, Woetjans,” Daniel said as he headed down the corridor bulkhead toward the bridge. “We’ll have to build some sort of holding cage, I suppose. Dammit, I was hoping they’d all run but they just weren’t organized enough!”
Adele checked the hatch of the Signals Room. It was closed and therefore automatically locked. She punched in the twelve-letter code she’d abstracted when Lieutenant Greiner allowed her to enter the Goldenfels’ computer. The mechanism whined as hydraulic pumps lifted the armored panel open.
Adele climbed in, ducking so that her head cleared what was meant to be the left side of the hatch coaming. The air of the compartment had a lived-in smell. The now-deck was littered with things that’d flown from their proper locations when the freighter blasted itself onto its side.