Starliner(101)

He took the telescoped rod the Cold Crewman handed him. It would lengthen to three meters when he slipped the joints as soon as he passed through the airlock.

With the adjustment tool in his hands again, Ran no longer thought of the sidereal universe. Star space and the Cold. Star space and Hell—

Crosse bolted from the room. Swede spat idly after him and closed the airlock hatch to the corridor.

"How many d'ye figure they've got on the hull?" Swede asked Ran.

Ran shrugged, then realized the crewmen watching him intently couldn't see the gesture beneath the hard torso of his suit. "Maybe eight," he guessed aloud. "One for each engine. I don't guess they could have more than that."

He grinned, staring into the past with wide, blank eyes. "They must've been trained specially for this hijack. I never saw a Grantholmer on a Cold Crew, did you guys?"

"There'll be eight less to see in a little bit," Lewis said. He giggled.

"Listen up!" Ran said. He wanted to rub his hands together, but he couldn't do that through the gauntlets and it wouldn't look right anyway. He was in charge . . . .

The Cold Crewmen stared at him. Some looked angry; one or two might be friendly. Most of the faces held no more expression than the swirling cold of sponge space did.

"We're going out there in about—"Ran continued. He glanced toward the console for a time check. The clock had been destroyed by the laser blast.

Ran pulled off a gauntlet. "—a minute and a half," he said, using the bio-energized watch tattooed into the dermis of his left hand.

He'd been very drunk when that happened, but he'd left it there as a reminder not to let something similar happen again. The watch kept Earth time, and Ran felt vaguely proud of himself for converting to ship's time without dropping a beat. "Nobody moves from the airlock area until we're back in the Cold. They've got guns, they'll kill us. Simple as that. In sponge space, they're our meat."

He'd caught a glimpse of his own visage in the polished bulkhead. His face was indistinguishable from those of his men: empty eyes and a mouth as cruel as the seam the laser had cut through the console.

"We don't know just where they're stationed on the hull," Ran said, "so everybody heads for his normal duty station. When we drop back into star space, move fast. Anybody who isn't wearing the right suit, he goes."

He looked around. "Any questions?"

Nobody spoke. Cold Crewmen weren't talkative, and there wasn't much to say anyhow.

"Then close your helmets," Ran said, "and follow me."

He felt a shiver as the Empress of Earth reentered the sidereal universe, bringing the interior of the starliner back into the same spacetime as the outer skin. You had to be experienced to notice it here, but out on the hull it was a difference as great as that between death and life.

Ran locked his faceshield down and reached for the switch controlling the hull airlock.

"Let's get stuck into them bastards," said Swede on the suit-to-suit radio. His voice was a growl like that of an avalanche headed for the valley despite anything in its path.

* * *

When the hullside lock opened, air banged out and the light within engineering control grew flat because there was no longer an atmosphere to scatter it. Ran waited reflexively for the buffeting to stop when the last of the air voided.

He'd known people to start for the hull too fast and be carried on out before they got their safety lines hooked. If there was a bright side to the stories, it was that the victims died in star space instead of in the Cold . . . .

The old skills were still with him. He moved fast as the windrush ended, so that Swede's hand on his shoulder was a companionable pressure rather than the shove it would become if the man at the head of the line balked.

People did balk during crew changes. Usually not on their first watch, but at the start of their second or third, when they knew the Cold and knew exactly what was waiting for them when their vessel left the sidereal universe again.

This wasn't a formal watch change, just a navigation check programmed before the hijacking. The outbound element was of twenty-one men rather than the normal eight of a Cold Crew on the Empress of Earth: the survivors of all three watches, and Ran Colville in the lead. There wasn't any time to lose if they were all to get onto the hull before the starliner inserted into sponge space again—

And anyway, Cold Crews didn't waste a lot of time on people who couldn't do their jobs. If Ran—if anybody—blocked the hatch during a watch change, he went out anyway—and maybe too fast to hook his line at the high end.

The Cold was an inhuman, dehumanizing experience. The men of the Cold Crews not only knew that, they bragged about it