Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

"He’s lost control!" Sapony shouted.

No. The helmsman had just bathed the front of the three story building with the plasma exhaust. Shots had been pinging and sparkling on the spaceship’s heavy plates. That stopped instantly and Woetjans thought she heard screams over the reflected roar.

The pinnace slanted upward as it pulled away and began to turn. Woetjans pushed the door most of the way open so that she could lean out and follow what was happening. Minutes before that would have gotten her head blown off, but now the hostile base was a three-story pyre. Fire puffed out of every window she could see.

The pinnace curved back around. Its hatch was lowering as it approached.

"Go! Go! Go!" somebody shouted behind Woetjans. She turned and saw Dimitrovic pushing up the stairs past the waiting spacers.

The midshipman came abreast of Clason and Sapony. "Move out!" he said.

"Are you nuts?" Woetjans said. "Even if he shuts down as soon as he lands, the exhaust 'll fry anybody on the roof before then!"

"It’s Mack flying her!" Dimitrovic said. "He’s going to hover over the street and we’ll jump through the open hatch!"

I’ll believe that when I see it! Woetjans thought, but she helped Sapony lift Balliol and then got out of the way when Clason took over. The three of them staggered onto the roof and the rest of the detachment followed.

The pinnace pulled into a hover alongside the building, well out in the street. Tilting slightly to starboard, the vessel slid inward until the end of the ramp crushed the low parapet like the blade of a bulldozer.

Balliol and the two spacers supporting him jumped onto the ramp, then started up into the empty bay. The rest of the detachment came by ones and twos. There was no pushing or panic; it made Woetjans proud to be RCN.

"They hijacked the pinnace," Dimitrovic said in Woetjans' ear, shouting over the thruster exhaust. "They couldn’t get clearance from Vocaine and Mack said, Screw it, let’s do it ourselves. I know I can hold her near enough the roof to get 'em all aboard. Rudolf went along with him, and by heaven they’ve done it!"

A burst of shots slanted up through the roof, coming from the back. One round clanged from the pinnace’s stern. The outriggers weren’t deployed, probably to fit better in the width of the street.

"Let’s go," Dimitrovic said, running forward as the last three spacers reached the ramp. Woetjans strode alongside him, still holding the borrowed impeller.

The roof spurted three slanting geysers of wood shreds, powdered cement, and tarpaper. Dimitrovic gave a startled yelp. His left leg kicked high overhead and he flipped onto his back. His left foot was gone.

The hostiles had an automatic in the back also. The gunner there seemed to have more on the ball than the fellow in front had.

Woetjans dropped the impeller and threw the midshipman over her shoulder. He needed something on the stump but that could wait till they were inside the boat’s steel hull.

Woetjans sprinted up the ramp. The hatch between the hold and the cockpit was open. Clason stood in it. When he saw Woetjans enter with her burden, he shouted to the helmsman. The exhaust note changed and the pinnace started to lift.

Two heavy slugs whanged into the hold while the ramp was still down. The re-echoing Clang-g-g! was deafening. Vivid pink, orange, and green flashes filled the compartment momentarily as projectiles ricocheted from the bulkheads. Clason yelped and pitched forward, but he was up almost instantly.

The pinnace staggered. Woetjans was afraid that the hostile burst had shattered one or more thruster nozzles, which would be fatal at this altitude. The thrusters continued to roar normally as the pinnace recovered and curved toward the Renown in harbor.

The boarding ramp slammed shut, making the hold quieter. From the vibration, the outriggers were deploying so that they could land.

Sapony crawled over with his kit. Woetjans clamped both hands above Dimitrovic’s shattered ankle so that Sapony could fit a proper tourniquet. Woetjans hoped that the midshipman hadn’t already lost too much blood, but you did what you can. There’d be a Medicomp in the Renown 's hold.

The thrusters roared again. The pinnace bucked. They splashed stern-low into water and skidded onward, pitching and bobbing. It wasn’t a good landing but Woetjans wasn’t going to complain. The kid had gotten them out when she hadn’t seen any way to do that.

One of the rescued spacers used the override lever in the hold to lower the ramp. The pinnace’s four small thrusters put out too little energy to create enough steam and ions in the open harbor to be dangerous or even noticeably unpleasant for veteran spacers.

Woetjans went forward toward the cockpit. She met Clason sticking a self-adhesive pad over his left forearm.

"A ricochet from that last burst?" Woetjans asked.

Clason shrugged. "Spray from the bulkhead only," he said. "The slug itself missed, and a bloody good thing too."

"Yeah," said Woetjans. "You’d need a new arm if it’d done that."

Rudolf had just risen from the starboard station. For volume reasons, instead of a console the pinnace had side by side flat-plate displays for the helmsman and helmsman’s assistant.

"Hey, you guys did a bloody fine job," Woetjans said. She was still trying to accept that she was really alive. "The Alliance don’t have a prayer with officers like you coming up in the RCN."

"Mack did it all," Rudolf said. Tears were running down his cheeks. "All I did was take over when the hard part was done."

Rudolf turned to look toward the bow. That shifted his body enough that Woetjans could see past him to Mckinnon at the port station. The ricochet which missed Clason had struck Mckinnon in the back of the skull, continuing through to smash the display beyond. His blood and brains painted the forward bulkhead.

I’m glad it was quick , Woetjans thought. He’d have made a bloody good officer.

The tall spare man walked across the wild, breathtaking landscape as though pursued, although the pursuit came mostly from within.

His name, given to him by water and the holy chrism in the rites of his father’s people, the name by which he would be called by the last rising, was Pierre de Toussaint D’Avenir. His other name, the one his long-dead mother had given him in the secret of the tent late at night, in the rites of the tribe from which she’d been stolen as a child, was Tatanka, which meant Bull. His mother had told him that meant he wouldn’t retreat from anything.

Born between worlds, sometimes he wondered if he’d ever done anything but retreat. Or advance. When you walked alone, it was difficult to know the direction you were going.

Since shortly after his father had dropped him off at school in St. Louis, at the age of six, he had cleaved to the Word of God, seeing the rites of the Catholic Church as an anchor in a madly shifting world. He had no other way to deal with the conflicting ideas and visions, a world in which the old tribal gods had come to life and manifested their chaotic ways, interfering with human existence and making people their playthings. Instead, he clung desperately to a God who had sent his only son to die for the world. That was his unshakeable truth.

And yet, in a world where the Pope—if there was still a Pope—and the rest of the Church had been broken off from the Americas in the Sundering, he was once more trapped between the worlds, a man who believed in rites and ceremonies disdained by most Protestant Christians in America.

That was why he’d become a priest of the holy mother church, Father Avenir, bringing the Word far into arcane America, beyond the Mississippi River and over the Continental Divide. He’d taken to the wild lands, carrying his faith where he need not question the wisdom of serving a Universal Church that was no longer universal.