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

  The Sword of the Saviour flashed past, maneuvering thrusters firing to help her bank. A rail gun fired, the shots visible to Rhett as a blur at the tip of the gun barrel. He followed the direction of the shots and saw the Custer. The warship had no more mass than any of the converted ships, but her hull was thick with armor plating. Rhett could see little eruptions on her bow as the rail gun rounds hit.

  The Custer was turning, her mass making her unwieldy, as she labored to bring her forward gun batteries to bear on the Sword of the Saviour. Rhett could see three turrets on her forward hull. She was supposed to have four turrets, he remembered. The fourth turret likely pointed aft.

  The ship could pour out a murderous volume of fire, but only in a limited range of directions. The Golden Cross was currently abeam of the big warship, which made her safe. If the Custer began to turn, Rhett realized, the Golden Cross might make a radical course change and dislodge him. He began alternating his gaze between the cable in front of him and the warship.

  Only a few strands of steel remained when two thrusters fired at once on the Custer, one on the port side aft, the other starboard forward. The ship spun, her nose swept toward starboard, and suddenly all three turrets were blazing. The Sword of the Saviour was only in her field of fire for a moment, but the barrage of lasers and steel slugs inflicted terrible damage. A wide swath of hull plates disintegrated before Rhett's eyes, turning into a jagged mess that stretched from one side of the ship to the other. He had only an instant to take in the details before they were obscured in a cloud of vapour as the ship lost her atmosphere in a rush.

  The maneuvering thrusters were still firing, Rhett saw. Rather than fight the ship's momentum, the pilot was continuing her turn. In another two hundred and nine degrees she would be pointing more or less at the Golden Cross. The aft turret would come to bear even sooner.

  He let go of the laser cutter and grabbed the grapple cable in both hands. The cutter floated in front of him, and he wondered if he should take a moment to grab it and tuck it into his tool belt. By his calculations the aft turret would not quite come to bear on the Golden Cross. Another thruster was burning on the warship, giving a lengthwise twist to her rotation that would bring the front turrets into line, but not for another twenty-eight seconds. That was more than enough time to –

  The Golden Cross erupted into motion and Rhett felt his feet leave the hull. His body swung to the side and he trailed behind his clinging hands. The ship was using main thrusters to dodge out of the path of the rotating turrets.

  The acceleration stopped after six seconds, and Rhett, who had one hand above the cut he'd been making on the cable and one hand below, shifted his grip. If the cable parted he wanted to stay with the Raven.

  Internal sensors told him he'd received a minor impact across his lower back. He got his feet back on the hull, then turned his head to look behind him. One of the grapple cables had torn free and was trailing out to one side. It had hit him in passing, he surmised.

  He surveyed the remaining cables. The wires were stronger than he'd guessed, because two cables still held. This would be a good time to cut through some of the copper wire, but his laser cutter was lost somewhere behind the ship. He glanced in that direction and saw the round lump of a grapple drifting behind the ship. When the cable snapped the electromagnet would have lost power.

  The flexible tube connecting the hulls of the two ships was leaking atmosphere. It was flimsy compared to the grapple cables. It wouldn't be much of an impediment.

  David's Sling loomed suddenly in the space between the Golden Cross and the Custer. Her weapons blazed, rounds bounced uselessly from the Custer's armor, and then one of the Custer's forward turrets tore apart in a storm of shredded metal. Rhett watched as a jagged shard spun through the gulf toward him. A piece of aluminum the size of his torso ricocheted from the Golden Cross, bounced downward, deflected from the hull of the Raven, and flew past Rhett's shoulder to disappear in the void behind him.

  A quick analysis of the Custer's motion and the deployment of her thrusters told Rhett that her pilot was trying for a shot on David's Sling. The Golden Cross was safe for now, but Rhett waited several more seconds to give the pilot time to reach the same conclusion. Then he set out across the hull of the Raven, with nothing but the frail power of his foot magnets keeping him with his ship.

  He was six steps from the aft airlock when a nudge of the thrusters brought David's Sling close alongside the Golden Cross. That made both ships excellent targets, and Rhett abandoned caution, taking hurried steps, engaging each magnet for only an instant as he raced against the pilot's reactions. Only one foot was in contact with the deck when the inevitable rush of thrust came.

  His weight seemed to magnify as the Raven accelerated directly toward him. His legs buckled, and Rhett found himself flat on his back against the Raven's hull. He considered a number of strategies and abandoned them all as he realized he couldn't move.

  Then the pilot cut the thrust and Rhett was weightless once more. He slapped the soles of both feet to the hull, levered himself upright, and made the tricky transition around the corner of hull plating that took him from the side of the ship to the aft. Clambering into the lock should have been a careful thirty-second exercise in precise foot placement. Instead he leaned down, caught the edge of the lock in his hands, shut off both foot magnets, and vaulted into the enclosed closet of the lock.

  The ship twisted as he sailed into the lock, and he found himself bouncing from the walls, ceiling, and floor. The ship's force fields protected him from further indignities, and he rose to his feet, watching the stars whip past.

  He saw the hull of the Golden Cross rush toward him. The connecting tube between the docking rings must have torn loose. With only one or two grapple cables holding the two ships together, the Raven was swinging around like a cracking whip. Rhett grabbed a handle mounted to the bulkhead and felt a muffled jar of impact as the two hulls banged together. He slapped the red switch that brought the hatch swinging shut.

  Twice more he felt the ship twist beneath his feet as she took impacts too powerful for the force fields to completely dampen. Then the impacts stopped. Rhett waited another eight seconds, then let go of the handle.

  Silence reigned during the long walk to the bridge. He dropped into the helm station and brought up a tactical display, but the sight of the Golden Cross several hundred meters ahead of the ship told him all he needed to know. One grapple still hung askew from a cable, twitching as it retracted into the ship's hull. They had cut the Raven loose.

  He brought up a damage report. One thruster on the port side pulsed red on the display. That could mean anything from a pinched fuel line to the thruster being entirely ripped from its moorings. There were no other signs of damage, though the diagnostics wouldn't detect all the dents and scrapes that were undoubtedly there. If there were stress fractures in the hull they mostly wouldn't show until the ship started to leak air or a sudden maneuver tore her completely apart.

  Rhett calculated the odds, decided they were quite good, and removed such concerns from his calculations. The battle seemed to be winding down. It was high time he removed himself from the area. He worked out a vector that would take the Raven toward an artists' colony some six thousand kilometers due south. He accelerated hard, to remove the ship quickly from the battleground and to test the ship's ability to handle stress while she had no fragile humans aboard. Five minutes of sustained thrust brought no further symptoms on the diagnostic screen, and a radar sweep to the rear showed three ships locked in battle while the Sword of the Saviour tumbled lifeless. There was no sign of pursuit.

  The ship went silent as he cut the engines. He let the Raven plunge along for five more minutes before he touched the controls again. When he was sure he was well past the range of even military-grade radar he moved the ship in a slow, graceful curve that would eventually bring her to Andromeda One. Even then he didn't steer directly for the station. If the Custer was somehow watching him from af
ar he could still be heading for any of a dozen asteroids and stations.

  Eventually he had the ship pointed directly at Andromeda One. Rhett lifted his hands from the controls and began to calculate the odds that he would be able to find four tiny spacesuits racing through the empty void of space, and that the people inside would still be alive when he found them.

  Chapter 6

  Chan was not looking at his oxygen gauge.

  He was also not looking at his chronometer, but mostly he wasn't looking at the oxygen gauge. He was not looking at it very hard indeed. In fact, not looking at the gauge was taking up most of his attention, leaving only scraps for the task of staring at the unchanging field of stars in front of his face. Staring at stars was a difficult task to perform well under the best of conditions, and these conditions were hardly the best.

  One of those countless points of light could be Andromeda One. He could best spot it by seeing it move a bit relative to the stars around it. Spotting it early would give them their best shot at adjusting their course in time. Their lives depended on it, but staring at a vast field of unchanging stars and waiting for one to move was the kind of task you could do quite diligently for thirty seconds or so, and manage moderate diligence with for perhaps five or ten minutes more. He'd been staring straight ahead for…

  His right arm started to rise. He even caught a glimpse of his wrist and the gleaming edge of his chronometer before yanking his hand away. That way was madness. There was also a real danger that he'd be so busy watching seconds and breaths trickle away that he would miss the station completely.

  Mostly, though, it was the madness he feared.

  He was chilly. Not terribly cold, but he had the suit's thermostat turned down fairly low. The battery should last about as long as his oxygen. Maybe a bit less, since it would be stupid to keep his asphyxiated corpse warm. He was just cold enough to be uncomfortable, and it was a strangely unfamiliar feeling. He spent his life in controlled environments. He hadn't felt rain on his skin in twenty years. He hadn't seen weather, except through thick plates of glass. A storm was something you watched on Saturn from tens of thousands of kilometers away.

  A memory stole over him, surprisingly vivid considering the gulf of time involved. He was about seven, and he was in his back yard on the outskirts of Guangzhou. The glow of the kitchen window was like a golden gemstone off to his left, close enough to let him feel safe, far enough away that he felt deliciously alone in the dark cocoon of the back lawn. People were all around him, thousands of them in every direction, but the yard was small enough, the fence tall enough, that he could see only darkness on every side. He could have been an explorer in the depths of a distant wilderness. He could have been in space.

  The stars twinkled above him, and they held him enthralled. Between the restricting fences around him and the pollution of light and air the stars he could see were few in number. He could have counted them if he'd been sufficiently determined. He was not. These stars were something to dream over, not quantify or measure.

  A speck of light drifted across the face of the familiar constellations, and his eyes followed it. It would be a ship landing or taking off. In his imagination he moved with the ship, heading for impossibly exotic places with names that set his heart thumping in his chest and put a strange ache just beneath his breastbone. Sea of Tranquility. Messier Station. Port Armstrong. Coriolis Station.

  He turned his head to follow the path of the moving speck of light, and saw it vanish behind the deeper blackness that was the fence beside him. The fence itself was invisible. It was simply a place where there were no stars.

  Chan blinked, and the stars seemed to explode. They were countless now, and fiercely bright. He was a man now, not a child. He was out in space, just like he'd dreamed, with nothing between him and the glorious vastness of eternity but the flimsy faceplate of his vac suit helmet.

  He was also slightly out of his head, from cold or from anoxia. He started to lift his left arm, the one with an oxygen gauge on the wrist, then stopped himself. Looking wouldn't help.

  Looking… The thought seemed important, and he tried to tease out the elusive meaning. He was supposed to be looking at something. Stars, that was it. One star, that was moving while all the others were still.

  Chan shook his head. He'd seen one point of light moving across his field of vision, hadn't he? While cool grass tickled his cheek and his left ear. No, that couldn't be right. That lawn was thirty-plus years and uncountable kilometers away.

  The moving point of light, though. Had he really seen it? Chan blinked, shook his head, tried to make himself focus. Something changed on the edge of his field of vision, and he squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them wide and stared. Was one star moving?

  No. Not moving. Disappearing. As he watched, another star vanished. Farther to the left, a new star appeared. Something was out there, a black shape that occluded the stars ahead of him.

  "I see something." No one replied, and he remembered that he'd turned off his radio to conserve power. He fumbled at his wrist with fingers made stiff by cold and found the fat button that turned on his radio. A smooth mechanical voice filled his ears.

  "… Chan, do you copy? This is the Stark Raven calling Captain Chan, do you copy?"

  "This is Chan." He was startled by the hoarse sound of his own voice, and he cleared his throat.

  "Could you illuminate your suit, please, Captain? And activate your suit transponder?"

  Chan thumbed buttons on the wrist of his vac suit. Bands of light appeared on his chest. There were more across his back, he knew.

  Liz said, "Marcus, is that you?"

  "I'm here," said Marcus, "but I think it's the captain you're looking at. I'm below your feet and just behind you."

  A twist of his shoulders gave Chan a slow rotating movement. He saw Joss almost directly behind him, her suit already lit up. She was a good fifty meters away, and she made an arm gesture that he decided was a thumbs-up. He couldn't see Liz or Marcus, but apparently they could see him.

  His rotation continued until he was again looking straight ahead along his line of motion, though only the constellations told him as much. Then, as he watched, the running lights on the Raven came to life. The ship was directly ahead, much closer than he'd realized. In fact, he was in imminent danger of collision. He clutched the controls for the thruster belt, got his feet pointed toward the ship, and hit the thrusters. He was moving quickly and braking hard when he sailed right into the aft airlock. His feet slammed into the hatch that formed the forward bulkhead, he grunted with the impact, and then the thruster belt started to pull him back out into space. He killed the thrust just in time, muttering a curse as he grabbed the edge of the outer hatch.

  "There's a scratch on my ship," Liz growled. "A big one, too. What have you been doing, Rhett?"

  "Space battle, remember?" Joss said tartly. "It’s a miracle he made it at all. You did brilliantly, Rhett." She was drifting toward the hatch, in perfect control, using the thrusters adroitly to bring herself to a halt beside Chan.

  "Thank you, Joss," said Rhett.

  "I guess she's right," Liz grumbled. "Hang on. We're almost there."

  "Maybe we should use the ventral lock," Chan said. "Save a bit of air."

  "The ventral lock is occupied at present." Rhett offered no further explanation, and Chan decided to save his questions for later as Liz and Marcus came floating into the lock.

  "Do you think it's safe to go to Andromeda One?" Joss asked. "Those ships are probably gone right now, but it's the first place everyone is going to look for us."

  "I suppose it's safe enough for us," Chan said. "We can drop Marcus off and dash away before anyone knows we were there. It might not be so good for him, though." He turned to Marcus as the lock swung closed. "Do you still want us to drop you off at the station?"

  "Actually," said Marcus, "I just have one quick errand to run at Andromeda. It should take me no more than ten or fifteen minutes. If you could see fit to
wait for me, I'd like to stay with you until your next port of call."

  "We'll see who's docked at the station when we get there," Chan said. "I think we can do fifteen minutes, though."

  The inner hatch opened and they trouped down the corridor toward the bridge, unclipping their helmets. Rhett rose from the helm controls as they entered, but Chan waved him back down. "Stay put, Rhett, you're doing great. How far are we from Andromeda?"

  "We are ninety-eight point two kilometers from Andromeda One."

  A long way to drift in a suit that was nearly out of air. He pushed the thought away. "Great. Bring us in. I'm going to get this suit off, and refill the air. And I'll do it without looking at the air gauge, too. I don't want to know. His wrist started to rise, and he lowered it. No, I won't look. I won't bloody look!

  By the time he returned to the bridge the ship was in the grip of Andromeda One's force field manipulators. Rhett sat at the helm station, not touching the controls as the station's systems brought the Raven up against a docking ring. Marcus stood at the back of the bridge, vac suit gone, a small duffel bag slung across his back. The lingering tension of their narrow escape still showed in the stiff line of his shoulders, but he gave Chan a cheerful grin. "Don't let the engines cool, Captain. I'll be back before you know it. It's no doubt best if we leave quickly."

  Chan nodded without expression.

  "We'll have to use the ventral lock to connect to the station," Rhett said. He gestured at the ceiling. "I'm afraid there's still some detritus from the Golden Cross attached to the dorsal docking ring."

  "All right," said Chan. There was clearly a story there waiting to be told.

  "However," Rhett continued, "there is a woman currently occupying the ventral lock."

  Chan felt his eyebrows rise. "Of course," he said. "You mentioned it was occupied. A woman. What else would it be?"

  "She came aboard from the Golden Cross. I thought it would be prudent to take her prisoner."