Battle in the Belt (Stark Raven Voyages Book 3) Read online

  She smiled. "To say that I'm glad to meet you would be an understatement. I'm Joss."

  "Charmed." He grinned, and she grinned back. I'm charmed too. A little disturbed, but charmed.

  There was an elevator running between B and C sections. Marcus pressed the call button and they waited in a companionable silence. When the doors slid open Chan stepped out, his face going slack with relief.

  "Joss! Where have you been? We've been scouring the station. Why aren't you answering your phone?" She opened her mouth to answer, but he interrupted her. "We have to get out of here. There are some people looking for us." He glanced at Marcus and said, "People, shall we say, from our past. And they might have hired some locals, so …"

  "They did," Joss told him. "The jerks stole my phone, too." She glanced over her shoulder. "I'm not going back for it. This is Marcus. He saved me. Marcus, this is James Chan, captain of the Raven."

  Chan looked up at Marcus, then seized his hand and shook it vigorously. "Thank you, Marcus. We couldn't function without Joss."

  Joss beamed at the compliment.

  "If there's ever anything we can do," Chan added, "just let us know." He turned back to Joss. "Meanwhile—"

  "Actually," Marcus interrupted, "I need a lift to another station. I punched a man in the casino earlier, and it's attracted more attention than I really want."

  Chan stared at him. "Done," he said. "Are you packed? I'd like to leave immediately."

  Marcus gestured at the ceiling. "I can be at the docking chamber in fifteen minutes."

  "That works for me."

  Marcus hurried away, and Chan led Joss into the elevator. "I can tell you've got a story to tell, but it will have to keep. I want to prep the ship right away." He took out his phone, thumbed a button, and said, "I found her. She's safe. Right." He hung up.

  "Another passenger," Joss said. "Liz won't be happy."

  "She'll cope." He pocketed his phone. "We'll have to get you a new phone, next time we hit a decently big station. I wonder where we're going next."

  "Wherever Marcus wants to go," Joss replied promptly. "He really saved my neck, Captain."

  "That's good enough for me." Chan grinned. "All the same, I hope he's not going to Saturn."

  Liz scowled when they told her they were taking on a passenger, then smiled when she heard it was Marcus. "He's okay," she said. Marcus himself arrived soon after, with a small bag slung over one shoulder.

  By this time they were receiving radio messages from the station insisting that they stay put and answer questions about a kidnapping and several assaults. Liz cheerfully ignored all these demands, cutting power to the electromagnets in the landing struts and moving away from the asteroid as soon as Marcus stepped onto the bridge. She sent the Raven into the black, then swivelled her chair around and smiled. "Well, that's another station we can't come back to. Good thing it's a big solar system. Where to now?"

  "Well," said Marcus, "I really need to get to a habitat called Andromeda One. Do you know it?"

  "Nope," said Liz, and swivelled her chair back around to tap at her console. "Here it is. About eight degrees positive orbit." She glanced through the bridge windows. "We're even headed the right way."

  "There's a stop I'd like to make along the way," Marcus added. "An old friend of mine is prospecting near here. He's currently mining an asteroid at about 48.2 degrees."

  Liz glanced at Chan. "I think we can do that."

  "Splendid." Marcus looked around, then moved to an open console. "Do you mind if I sit down?"

  "Help yourself," Chan said. "Just don't push any buttons."

  Marcus lowered himself into a seat. "We never quite had a chance to discuss your rates."

  Chan waved a hand. "You rescued Joss from God only knows what. That's good for a ride to a station we don't mind visiting."

  "Thank you, Captain, that's very kind." He was so cheerful, so gracious, so civilized that Joss found herself blinking, trying to reconcile the man before her with the cold-blooded fighter who'd broken Gregor's arm without flinching.

  A light flashed beside Marcus's elbow, and he peered at it. "I think you have a call."

  Joss dropped into a seat by Liz and tapped the console to life. "Incoming call," she said. "Addressed to the captain and crew of the Stark Raven." She pressed the "Acknowledge" button and a speaker buzzed to life.

  "Stark Raven, this is the Solar Force cutter Golden Dawn. We require you to return to Xiao Station. Please acknowledge."

  Chan dropped into a seat. "Stall him," he said to Joss. Then, to Liz, "Do you see the ship?"

  "Aft," Liz said. "A hundred K or so. She must have been right by the station."

  That was rotten luck, but there was nothing to be done about it. Joss turned on the microphone and kept her voice cold and haughty. "Yellow Dawn, this is the Stark Raven. We do not recognize the authority of Solar Force. We're not on Earth. Why don't you return to Xiao Station and leave us alone?"

  Liz snorted, then turned her attention back to her console. "There isn't anything to hide behind for a few hundred kilometers," she reported. "You want me to try to lose them?"

  Chan nodded. "Nosy buggers. Let's see if we can give them the slip."

  Liz moved her hands on the controls in front of her and the ship surged forward. Only a slight shift of the distant stars showed that they were moving. The Raven had a force field that, in addition to providing artificial gravity, dampened inertia.

  Liz touched her controls and the stars ahead of them lurched. She was moving the ship in a corkscrew motion, taking them off their last known vector.

  "You're making a big mistake." The voice over the speaker was tight with irritation. "You can't outrun us, you know."

  Joss ignored the radio. "Is he right?" she asked Liz. "Can we outrun him?"

  Liz grunted. "If it was anything but Solar Force we would already be free and clear. Well, probably. If they've got military-grade radar they'll still have us."

  "They're in pursuit," Chan reported, peering at his console. "They just made a small course correction." He looked up. "Looks like they can still see us."

  Liz tapped at the screen in front of her. "There's a nice big lump of rock coming up," she said. "We'll duck behind it." She made a small course adjustment and turned to Chan. "How fast are they gaining?"

  "They've got about fifteen percent on us." He shook his head. "We've got at least ten minutes."

  "That'll be tight." Liz frowned into her console. "We need time to decelerate when we get there, and if they're right on top us…"

  There was nothing for Joss to do but sit and fidget as the seconds ticked by. She glanced at Rhett, standing complacent in exactly the same spot he'd occupied when they disembarked. She felt a brief pang of envy for his nerveless aplomb.

  There was nothing to see through the front windows. The asteroid belt held several million asteroids, depending on the minimum size you chose for a cut-off, but they were spread across such a vast distance that the belt was mostly empty space. Of course, there were uncountable small bits of rock scattered through the belt. Racing along at high speed like this was rash, but not too dangerous. The odds of a collision were still vanishingly small.

  They were decelerating long before Joss saw the rock that would give them a chance of escape. The light of the distant sun glittered on a pale-grey potato that might have been three or four times the size of the Raven. They swept in fast, and Joss gripped the arm rests of her chair. The asteroid whipped past the window and Liz wrenched the ship around sharply enough that Joss actually swayed in her seat. It was the first time she'd felt a maneuver aboard the Raven.

  An instant later they were travelling straight again, with the asteroid perfectly positioned between them and the pursuing cutter. The close range of the cutter was an advantage now, as it made the radar shadow of the looming asteroid huge. They had less than a minute, however, before the cutter would whip past the asteroid and the Raven would be exposed again.

  Liz accelerated hard,
then used the maneuvering thrusters to spin the ship lengthwise. Joss found herself staring at the fast-receding asteroid through the bridge windows. Then the rock, already reduced to a speck by their increasing distance, vanished as the ship lurched sideways. The bridge lights went dim and the constant hum of the engine vanished in an eerie silence as the Raven, hurtling along under her own momentum, went careening through the void.

  "That's the best I can do." Liz's voice was hushed, as if the hunting cutter might hear her through hundreds of kilometers of hard vacuum. "We're starting to turn, but we're still pretty close to nose-on." The Raven would be hardest to see from dead ahead.

  "What now?" Marcus whispered. Then he cleared his throat, looking annoyed with himself, and said in a more normal tone, "What now?"

  "Now we drift a while," Chan said, "and wait to see if they can spot us."

  "They'll know what we did," Liz said. "It's kind of an obvious trick. But they won't know which way we went, or how fast. Every second that goes by, their search area gets bigger."

  "The down side," Chan added, "is that we can't use our radar. They'd spot that right away. So we can't see them, and we can't really navigate. We'll give it another ten minutes or so. In the meantime, we just have to hope we don't hit anything."

  As if in answer, a metallic clang reverberated through the ship. Joss felt the armrests tremble under her fingers, and she clutched the chair, giving a low squeak of surprise. With the engines off there was no cushioning force field.

  "That was nothing," said Liz, sounding as if she was trying to reassure herself. "A pebble. We'll be fine." Still, her fingers hovered over the helm controls as she fought the urge to power up the ship.

  "Rhett," Chan said. "Tell me when ten minutes is up, please."

  "Very good, Captain."

  Long, silent minutes crawled past without further impacts. At last Marcus said, "There's no sign of the cutter. Do you think we've lost them?"

  Liz shrugged. "They could be right on top of us." She gestured at the dark console in front of her. "They could be broadcasting a last warning to surrender or be destroyed right now."

  "I'm not picking up any radio broadcasts," Rhett announced.

  "Well, that's something," Liz said, and lapsed into silence.

  When Rhett finally announced that ten minutes was up, Joss could hear everyone releasing a lungful of air at once. Liz powered up, scanned her console, and said, "Clear space. No big rocks in sight." She tapped the screen. "Ah, there's the Golden Dawn. Lit up like an emergency beacon. She's really looking hard for us." She looked up with a grin. "She's back there by the asteroid. We've lost her."

  "Take us to Marcus's friend," Chan said. "I'm getting something to eat."

  Chapter 3

  "A little more. More …. Don't be scared. A little – Holy Hell, not that much!"

  Joss dragged back on the throttle lever, feeling cold sweat slicking her palm. The asteroid known as "Betty" loomed in the window before her, growing larger with alarming speed. She moved her hand to a smaller thrust lever, yanked back, and heard Liz squawk in dismay as braking thrusters fired in the Raven's nose. A quick forward push on the lever killed the thrust, and Joss stared at the asteroid, blinking sweat out of her eyes.

  "That's … just about perfect," Liz said. "It was a bit more abrupt than I would strictly recommend, but it worked."

  Joss took her eyes reluctantly from the window and looked at the display screens that surrounded the helm station. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the ship was going to crash into something if she looked away from the windows, but Betty was more than a kilometer away and there was nothing else near them.

  The navigation screen showed their velocity relative to Betty. They were nearing the lump of rock at a speed just under one kilometer per hour.

  "This would be a good time to adjust your course," Liz said, the placid calmness of her voice helping Joss to control her stress.

  The ship was on a trajectory to miss the asteroid by a couple of hundred meters. That was an essential safety procedure, according to Liz, in case you pulled a bit too hard on a throttle. Now Joss took the control stick and made minute adjustments to their course, her eyes glued to the nav screen. Liz could do all this while moving at a pretty good clip through a clutter of ships and floating facilities at a busy port, but Joss had to fight the urge to reduce their speed even further as she finessed the stick. Only a fear of sending the ship backwards and needing to start all over kept her from reaching for the braking throttle.

  When the Raven was on course to miss the asteroid by a scant twenty meters, Joss let go of the stick and put a hand on the throttle. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and eased the throttle forward until the Raven was moving at a stately eleven kilometers per hour. Then she lifted her hands carefully from the controls, sagged back in the seat, and let herself go limp.

  "You're getting better," said Liz. "All the same, I'll take it from here, if that's all right."

  Joss nodded weakly and stood. Her piloting lessons were the high point and the low point of every day. Chan wanted all of them competent with every role on the bridge. Even Rhett spent time at the helm controls. He tended to be slow, deliberate, and maddeningly literal, but he was becoming a competent pilot.

  "I'll go get Marcus," Chan said. "Joss, do you want to see if you can raise this Piotr fellow on the radio?"

  He left the bridge, and Joss moved to one of the interchangeable bridge stations. She tapped a screen to life and brought up the radio program. There was a galling lack of consistency to radio protocols in the solar system, but she chose the frequency most popular in this area of the belt. "This is the Stark Raven calling Piotr Rabanovitch at the asteroid Betty. Mr. Rabanovich, do you copy?"

  It took several calls before the miner replied. The hiss and crackle of the radio transmission didn't hide the irritated suspicion in his voice. "Who are you and what do you want?"

  Joss stopped herself from asking if this was, indeed, Piotr Rabanovich. There was not another person in radio range. "Marcus wanted to come and pay you a visit," she said.

  Piotr's voice immediately warmed. "Well, it's about – I mean, that's great. Hold on a moment. Okay, I see you on my scope. Nice ship. I'm just below the asteroid. I'll unlock the hatch for you."

  "Below," in the parlance of the belt, meant "south," moving perpendicular to the plane of orbit of the planets and asteroids. "Positive orbit" was the direction of movement of the planets, and "negative orbit" was the opposite. "Sunward" and "anti-sunward" meant toward and away from the sun, respectively.

  Piotr's ship, when they reached it, proved to be a blocky grey cube about three meters on a side, connected to Betty by a long steel cable. There was a docking ring set on one side, and Joss brought the Raven in with a delicate hand. At the end she was using little cameras mounted around the docking ring on the roof of the bridge, peering at the screen in front of her, hands moving deftly on the controls. At last the ring clicked into place and she straightened up in her seat with a sigh.

  Marcus and Chan stood at the back of the bridge, waiting. "I'm cutting the gravity to ten percent," Liz announced, and touched the screen in front of her. Joss clutched the arms of her chair reflexively as the floor seemed to drop away beneath her. After a few moments her brain adjusted and she was able to pry her fingers loose.

  A quick spring sent Marcus drifting toward the ceiling. He timed his jump well, the top of the arc bringing the docking ring in reach of his stretching fingers. He hung by one hand while he spun the docking ring open with the other. A wave of stale air washed through the bridge as the hatch swung open, and Joss wrinkled her nose. It smelled as if Piotr was behind on his laundry and bathing.

  The Raven's gravity field was finely tuned, ending within a few centimeters of the skin of the ship. Marcus pulled himself through the open hatch, floating as his feet vanished from sight.

  Joss stood, holding the back of her seat to keep from rising into the air, then took a gliding step to
the center of the bridge. She stood directly under the hatch, curiosity warring with courtesy. Peering into Piotr's habitat without an invitation would be very bad form, but ….

  Curiosity won. She bent her legs, waited a moment for her feet to sink to the deck, and sprang upward. She lifted her arms over her head, grinning with satisfaction as her head, arms, and shoulders sailed through the hatch. She grabbed the open hatch cover on Piotr's side to stop herself. Her upper body was weightless, her lower body still in the Raven's minimal gravity.

  Marcus was perched on one wall of the jumbled habitat, his foot through a Velcro strap. Piotr perched near the opposite wall, floating free. He was a swarthy, heavyset man, his short-cropped hair thick and black, a dark moustache decorating his wide round face. He'd shaved his jaw and neck, but a forest of thick hair sprouted from his collarbone and spread downward across his chest and stomach. She could see the pallid expanse of a soft belly where his jumpsuit was unzipped to the waist.

  His eyes moved to her face, and for a moment she saw rage, suspicion, fear, in his dark eyes. In the blink of an eye his features smoothed, and there was bland indifference on his face as he lifted a pair of thick woolly eyebrows and said, "Yes?"

  Joss flushed. "I'm sorry. I've just been cooped up on the ship for so long, I forgot my manners."

  "It's quite all right." He was lying, though. "I know the feeling." He gestured around the little cube. "I would offer you a tour, but you can already see everything."

  The little habitat was a jumbled mess. Cloth cubes lined every wall, attached with Velcro, making the small space even smaller. She could see mining tools poking out from one cube, and a bag of ore showed through a gap beside the cloth lid of another cube. Other objects floated loose, a blanket, a water bottle, even a toothbrush. Every surface was grubby and worn, as befitted a man who wouldn't have visitors more than once every few months.

  "Sorry," Joss repeated, her face hot. "Excuse me." She drew herself down until she was hanging from the hatch, then let go to sink slowly to the floor.

  Marcus returned a minute later with a cloth-wrapped bundle under one arm. "Piotr would like to come for a visit," he said. "He's hoping to use a shower, and if he could do a bit of laundry he'd sure be grateful."