Starliner(100)

The hatch withdrew into its jamb. Swede lunged out with his hands open for a choke hold. The rest of the Cold Crew, all three watches, was behind him.

"Hold it," the watch chief bellowed. "It's Mr. Colville! What are you doing in that shit suit, sir?"

Cold Crewmen shoved out past Swede. As they did so, Ran noticed one of the engineering officers, Crosse, huddled well to the rear of the compartment. It can't have been a lot of fun to find yourself locked up with angry Cold Crewmen.

"I'm pretending to be a steward to get the Empress away from these Grantholm hijackers," Ran said. He spoke loudly to be heard over the scrape of boots. "It's dangerous, and it's likely to mean killing. Are you in?"

"Hell, yes," said Swede. "What do you want us to do?"

Lewis looked critically at the Grantholm team leader on the deck beside him. "Did a piss poor job on this one, Mr. Colville," he said.

He stamped his boot down on the back of the Grantholmer's neck, hard enough to snap the spine. Then he stamped again.

"We're going out on the hull to take the engines back," Ran said, speaking dispassionately. "After that, we'll worry about the troops inside."

He didn't look down at the fresh corpse at his feet. He'd worked the hull long enough to know it was Cold Crew etiquette always to kick a man when he was down. That's when it was easiest to do, after all. . . .

* * *

Ran felt the Empress of Earth thud slightly—once, again, and onward repeatedly in a set rhythm.

"Whazzat?" a Cold Crewman demanded, spinning on his toes to find a source of the noise. The sound was unfamiliar, and the Cold Crew worked too close to the edge of survival to like changes.

"They're shutting the firedoors," Ran explained. "Our new masters, I suppose, since the bridge crew didn't during the attack. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that our Grantholm friends've got fewer troops now than they did when they boarded."

"No friends of mine," Swede said. "No masters, neither."

The Grantholm commander must have noticed that some of his teams weren't reporting in. Dropping the firedoors wouldn't prevent Wanda and her companions from moving between sections since the Second Officer's ID chip gave her local control of the barriers.

Grantholmers on the bridge might think they could follow their opponents' progress by seeing which firedoors opened. Wanda knew the Empress's complex layout perfectly. All the Grantholm commander would get from this ploy was a series of false scents that drew his teams into killing grounds.

Swede picked up his suit, dumped on the floor of the engineering control room with the others when the commando herded the duty watch into the starliner's interior.

"They shot three of my people out there on the hull when we dropped into star space," Swede added in a tone of reflective calm. "Not a lot we could do about it—in star space."

He very deliberately spat toward the airlock. "In the Cold, those guns of theirs, they won't be worth shit."

Swede's men were donning the suits sprawled on the deck. The starboard watch, off duty at the time of the attack, took their own gear out of the locker covering one wall of the room.

As Lewis worked his limbs into the semi-rigid suit, he said, "I dreamed every day for a year about the time I'd get Reesler alone outside and put him right off the hull."

"Got a suit for me?" Ran asked Swede.

"Try Locker Nineteen," the watch leader said. "Albrecht's in the sick bay, laying on his butt as usual. Earache, if you can believe that."

Lewis continued emotionlessly, "I'm really going to stick it to them bastards that shot Reesler before I got him."

The engineering officer on duty during the attack stood at-ease, his hands crossed behind him, at the console ruined by a laser. His spacesuit, necessary because engineering control was often open to vacuum, lay on the deck beside him.

"You don't want a piece of this, Crosse?" Ran asked as he closed the plastron of the borrowed suit. It wasn't a great fit, but it was better than the one he'd had to use aboard the Prester John ten years before.

The engineering officer swallowed. "We're under strict company orders to do nothing that would endanger the lives and safety of the passengers, Mr. Colville," he said.

"You bet," Ran said.

He turned to the crewman who was handing equipment out of the locker. "I'll take an adjustment tool," Ran called.

"Mr. Colville, I've never been able to stand sponge space!" Crosse said. "I—whenever I have to go out, I—I can't move! I ought to be in the bridge crew."

"Best get out of engineering control, then," Ran said without great interest "We're going to void the room as soon as we drop into star space the next time."