Starliner(104)

"He's alive?" Ran said. His mind fought its way to the surface through layers of icy, flaring slush. Memory of what had sent him onto the hull was slowly reasserting itself through the smothering Cold.

"He's alive," Wanda said. Her voice was detached. "We're all alive, mostly. They killed a steward, nobody knows why. We found him in Corridor Six. And there was a passenger with her children, two little boys. They were hiding behind the counter of the Paris Bistro on Deck A and the soldiers thought they were us. . . ."

In the near distance, a Cold Crewman reset the nozzles of an engine pod manually. Delicate electronics failed quickly in sponge space, but men continued to do their jobs.

A figure shuffled across the hull toward Ran and Wanda. It carried something long and thin, but even in dim starlight the object didn't appear to be an adjustment tool.

"So they killed them, the soldiers did," Wanda continued in a voice as pale as the light of the distant galaxies. "And we killed the soldiers while they were looking the wrong way, Wade and Belgeddes killed them, and I did. And then we killed more soldiers."

The third figure joined them. "Hold on to me," an unfamiliar voice directed over the helmet radio. "I've hooked six safety lines together. No point in having a problem when we've gotten this far."

"Wade?" Wanda said.

"The same," the radio agreed. Wade slung the object he carried, the huge rifle from Calicheman, and held out his hands to the pair of officers. "I'm afraid I've shot off all your ammunition, Mr. Colville. Seems to have done the trick, though. The Grantholm freighter is gone, eh what?"

Ran looked up. He couldn't see the other vessel, but it could have been subtended by the Empress's greater bulk.

"It pulled off because you shot at it?" he asked in amazement. He supposed the 15-mm bullets could do some damage to the thin plating of a colonial-built freighter—but not enough, he was sure, to cause a picked Grantholm assault force to abandon its mission.

"Not here," Wade said with a chuckle. Ran and Wanda moved much faster now that they were tethered to the starliner's massive reality. "In sponge space. I thought I might puncture a compartment, you see, and they wouldn't be able to calculate the change in mass precisely enough to continue matching us. The mass of their own vented atmosphere, you see."

Ran looked at the other man, anonymous in a suit borrowed from the Cold Crew. "That's impossible!" he said. "You can't hit anything in sponge space."

They were nearing silvery inlaid tracks, spreading like the braces of a spider's web from the engineering hatch. The outer airlock was open.

"'Impossible' is one of those words used more often than wisely, my boy," Wade said. "I've always found that I could see in sponge space, after my—well, my mind, I suppose, not my eyes—had a chance to acclimate."

"Don't say that," Ran whispered through the sudden blazing fog he remembered swelling across his marrow and soul.

They were within twenty meters of the hatch. Wade's linked lines bellied out behind them in a great loop. Ran felt the Empress of Earth shudder through his bootsoles.

"What's that?" he demanded. He pivoted on one foot to look all around him. There was no plume of plasma glowing behind the four engine pods he could see, so the starliner wasn't accelerating.

"A lifeboat," Wanda said. "The enemy commander and his bridge crew, five of them. They agreed to evacuate the ship if they were given a lifeboat."

"The Grantholm commander failed," Wade said conversationally. "Chap named Steinwagen, knew him when he was a pup. Not bad at what he did, but too narrow for an operation like this, I would have said."

"We couldn't storm the bridge," Wanda said, "but he'd lost control of the engines and his outlying teams were—gone."

She edged Ran in the direction of the hatch. He remained with his feet planted, watching the lifeboat swell from its bay in the Empress's side like a whale broaching in a limitless ocean.

"They're abandoning ship here?" Ran said. The nearest galaxy was a milky blur. "Do they know that you . . . ?"

Wade read Ran's concealed expression in the younger man's tone. "Now, lad," he said. "Steinwagen wasn't going home a failure. Nothing I did—"

The lifeboat exploded in a flash, soundless until a chunk of plating struck the starliner and made the hull ring through Ran's boots. The ball of expanding gas had a rosy glow that disappeared as it cooled. The solid debris was invisible in the night of stars.

"Colonel Steinwagen didn't dare be identified," Wade explained. "He'd have liked to have died fighting, he was that type, but he couldn't subject his government to the embarrassment of having his body identified. That saved us a nice little problem about how to deal with him and his chaps on the bridge. Though we could have, Ms. Holly."