Adele switched live the nearest console, the one she’d used before. Rather than try to do more with a keyboard that’d now be vertical, she got out her handheld unit to synch it with the ship’s system.
Bandeng, the tech whom she’d met, rose from where he’d been hiding behind the second console. He was aiming his pistol at her.
“By God, there is some justice!” he snarled. “Now, bitch, you’re going to get me out of here or I’ll blow your head off!”
“I’ll be glad to get you out of the ship, Mr. Bandeng,” Adele said. She wanted to put her little data unit away but she was afraid that might look threatening to a man who was obviously on the edge of blind terror. “Neither you nor your fellow crewmen are at any risk from us.”
“You say!” Bandeng said. “You say! I know you can’t carry prisoners on that sliver of a corvette. You’re planning to shoot us all! In fact, maybe I’ll—”
Adele felt rather than saw Tovera behind her. Bandeng’s eyes shifted right to follow the movement. Six pellets from Tovera’s sub-machine gun blew his face apart.
Bandeng convulsed backward, voiding his bowels. His pistol clacked off the ceiling and dropped. His heels were thumping a tattoo on the deck.
Adele turned. Her ears rang with the series of lightning-sharp cracks. The muzzle of Tovera’s little sub-machine gun shimmered white. Ozone from the high-voltage discharge mingled with the stench of the dead man’s feces.
Tovera smiled. “Shall I get a couple of the spacers to clear that out of here, mistress?” she said. She nodded to where Bandeng had ceased to spasm.
“Yes,” Adele said. She seated herself on the deck with her data unit on her lap, and began to check the status of the Goldenfels’ signals and code suites. Her work was critically important if the attack on Gehenna was to succeed.
And besides, if she managed to concentrate on her task as fully as she usually did, she would forget for the time the way Bandeng’s right eye had splashed as the first pellet struck it.
* * *
“The truck’s back again,” Hogg shouted down from the dorsal hatch where he’d kept watch most of the four days they’d been on Morzanga. “Looks like Pasternak’s come back with it.”
Daniel glanced through the bridge port. The truck he’d bought in San Juan was trundling out of the jungle with the sixth and last of the High Drive motors they’d removed from the wreck of the country craft. The Chief Engineer and six of his team were aboard also, returning to their duties in the Sissie’s power room.
The timing was perfect. There must be another twenty-odd personnel still in the jungle, but the truck could ferry them back at leisure. Six techs and the chief were the minimum required to move the corvette a very short distance under her own power.
Daniel smiled, because he was thinking and a smile was the default option to which his face returned when he didn’t have conscious reason for another expression. Mr. Pasternak and six of his people in the Power Room, and Lieutenant Daniel Leary at the command console. . . .
He grinned more broadly. And Hogg, of course, because he didn’t kid himself that he’d be able to convince Hogg to disembark for safety’s sake.
The truck disappeared beneath the curve of the hull, but the remote camera Dorst had placed on their first visit still provided imagery of the burned-over meadow. The vehicle pulled up at the boarding ramp after very carefully negotiating the web of cables now linking the Princess Cecile and the Goldenfels.
The Power Room staff filed into the corvette while a rigger drove the truck to the edge of the clearing where the other motors had been off-loaded. The vehicle was stone-axe simple, although as imported machinery on Todos Santos it certainly hadn’t been cheap. It was battery-powered with an open bed and cab, a bench seat, and four all-terrain tires. Most of the Sissies could drive it well enough—in contrast to an aircar—and it could carry far greater weights without risk. High Drive motors weighed the better part of a half ton apiece.