“But sir!” Sun said. “What if they—”
“If you vaporize them, as I’m sure you could, Sun,” Daniel said, “within ten seconds one of those mines is going to detonate and send a jet of charged particles through us. We both saw the result of that above Kostroma. Personally, I wouldn’t find our lives a fair exchange for that orbiting dustbin.”
The mines were thermonuclear weapons, each fitted with a simple magnetic lens. When the mine acquired a target, the device detonated and the lens in its last microsecond of existence directed a significant proportion of the blast toward that target. The mines were either triggered by command, or because a target had approached too close without the correct response to its interrogation code, or because the target violated some other parameter. Attacking the guardship would certainly be such a violation.
The gunner grimaced, but he immediately touched a control that made the targeting circles vanish from his display. “No sir,” he said, “I guess I wouldn’t either.”
“They’re leaving the guardship,” Adele said. The scooter was a simple cage of struts and wire woven around a tank of reaction mass with a plasma thruster at either end. Daniel saw rainbow exhaust puff from the back. The image swelled rapidly at first, then burped plasma from the bow and slowed to a crawl.
Daniel rose from his couch. He wanted to give a final pep talk to the crew over the intercom, but Adele’s concern for security stopped him. Instead he called in a voice that the score of spacers on the bridge and loitering in the corridor beyond could hear, “All right, Sissies. All we have to do is act like a gang of half-uniformed cutthroats who generally operate on their own. That shouldn’t be much of a stretch, should it?”
Because the Goldenfels’ cover was that of a freighter, her crew hadn’t worn Alliance Fleet uniforms. Besides, on-duty clothing for spacers tended to be anything loose and drab no matter who they happened to be working for. The ship’s present crew wore garments from both Alliance and RCN stores, along with a mixture of civilian garb from a score or more of planets which they’d visited in the course of their careers. In fact they looked exactly like the crew which Captain Bertram had commanded and were pretty similar to the crew of any vessel in either navy that wasn’t either an admiral’s flagship or otherwise cursed with officers who worshipped spit and polish.
Through the laughter, Daniel heard the clank of the scooter’s electromagnets clamping to the hull, then lesser clinkings as the boarding party entered the airlock. He propelled himself into the forward transfer compartment which contained the companionways and airlock, waiting for the inner hatch to open.
Adele, still strapped into her couch, shook her head at the unthinking skill with which Daniel and the other spacers moved in freefall; he grinned boyishly at her. So far as he was concerned, that wasn’t a patch on the way she navigated the thickets of information retrieval. It was all in what you were used to, he supposed.
The airlock opened. The Commonwealth officer and a spacer whose vacuum suit looked dangerously worn got out, followed by Caravaggio, the Alliance advisor Adele had warned about. He was a young fellow, no more than nineteen, with close-cropped black hair and a pugnacious expression.
Last through the lock was Woetjans, a hulking giant when her rigging suit doubled her apparent bulk. The boarding party must’ve left the remaining spacer on the hull to guard their scooter—a piece of mindless paranoia, so far as Daniel could see.
“HSK2 Atlantis, requesting permission to dock on Lorenz Base,” Daniel said to Caravaggio, ignoring the Commonwealth officer who was nominally in charge. The latter was a man in his fifties with a sad expression and a drooping gray moustache, a considerable contrast from the bold red-and-silver patterns on his vacuum suit.
“Where’s Captain Bertram?” Caravaggio said, his eyes narrowing. “And what the hell happened to you guys, anyway? You look like a wreck on the way to the scrapyard!”
“Bertram’s dead,” Daniel said, clipping his words and glaring at the Alliance lieutenant like he wanted to tear his throat out. Neither he nor Caravaggio was quite perpendicular—and they slanted in opposite directions. Daniel wasn’t sure you could really be threatening when you looked like part of a comedy act, but he was trying.