David Gunn - Maximum Offence

‘It’s the g-force,’ I say. ‘Makes your vision blurred.’

‘Can’t see,’ she repeats.

‘Shil,’ I say. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Ajac gets Franc out. If anything, she is even worse. When I look round from unbuckling Colonel Vijay, I see Ajac still kneeling next to her. Franc’s eyes are open and she’s staring at nothing. She’s staring at it intently.

Climbing unsteadily from his seat, Colonel Vijay says, ‘You want me to look at her?’

‘You can help, sir?’

‘Probably . . .’ He hesitates, reassesses. ‘Well, I can try. And there has to be a medical bay round here somewhere.’

We need a way out of here. We need a way to kill the cruiser. We need a way to get home. Three big needs, for a group relying on a B79 bomber down to five per cent of its power. There are ten of us now. And the bomber is still only built to take three. Answer is obvious, really . . . We need a bigger ship. More weapons. A better plan.

‘Haze,’ I say. ‘Don’t care how you do it. But check the power status of every ship docked in the hub.’

A roll of his eyes and he’s gone.

‘Doesn’t it freak you out?’ says Neen, then remembers to add sir . ‘I mean, when he does that?’

‘Freak you out when I do it?’

Neen wants to say that is different, but it isn’t. So I clap him on the shoulder. ‘Be glad I’ve got Haze to do it for me.’

There are seven vessels, including our B79 bomber. Three of the oldest are near dead, reduced to whimpering their names and begging for fuel. If Haze is right, one has been doing just that for over five hundred years.

Of the other four, the B79 is down to local boosters and an ion drive that might work if we had enough dry thrust to get it up to speed. That leaves three vessels. One is ours. Well, the U/Free hopper we arrived in. Another is so old the only reason it’s not dying is it’s dead already.

The final ship is chosen by default.

A Z-class tug ancient enough to have fins and dumb enough to be proud of a ten-foot nude painted on its nose. It’s old, it’s rusting inside, it’s filthy. I don’t care, really don’t care. Not after I crawl around inside a bit, and then go tell Colonel Vijay about its cargo.

Kyble was right. Luck is a whore.

But Luck likes fighters, and I think of her as a Val: magnificent tits and a dangerous smile. Always ready to step up beside you when it comes to making a stand.

‘It’s got enough seats, you say?’

Yes, I thought that would appeal to Colonel Vijay. Looking around, the colonel spots the telltale signs of gravity flooring and that appeals to him even more. There is only so much floating vomit a well-brought-up young officer can stand.

‘What?’ he demands.

‘Glad you like it, sir.’

‘And this is what you wanted to show me?’

‘No, sir. That’s down here.’ He stares into a filthy hold revealed by the trap door I open.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Of course it is.’

A ladder leads to a crawl space below. Carrying a light from one of the rifles at my suggestion, the colonel flicks its beam across boxes, and then more boxes, piled into an area maybe ten paces by ten paces, but only half our height.

‘What’s in them?’ he demands. And then answers his own question by running his light across a long box stencilled with a skull in flames.

Danger .

Keep safe .

Do not expose to heat .

There are other warnings, but he has the message.

He’s crawling round the hold of a Z-class cargo tug packed with out-of-date and probably unstable explosives, asteroid miners, for the use of . . .

Each case is sealed in clear wrapping against damp and secured with double bands of cheap steel. Cheap enough to cut with my knife. Slicing the side from a case reveals blocks of something that looks like clay and smells like stale cake. ‘That what I assume it is?’ the colonel asks.

I nod.

‘Sven,’ he says, ‘I think it’s time you told me your plan.’

For something I make up as I go along, it’s quite convincing. That is the thing about senior officers. They’ll believe anything, provided you sound like you really, really mean it.

‘You know,’ says Colonel Vijay, ‘it might work.’

So, we have explosives, and a tug with enough power to get us to the asteroid belt. But we also have a Silver Fist mother ship, an epsilon-class cruiser hunting us down, and a force field locking us into the area around Hekati. What we don’t have are detonators.

‘Bound to be here somewhere,’ the colonel says.

Dragging cases aside, he finds a smaller box pushed against a bulkhead. The fuses are simple enough. Much like the ones the Legion use when cutting roads through mountains: one pulse to prime and another to fire.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Here’s what we do.’

My troopers are patched as best we can manage.

Mostly this involves painkillers, amphetamines and re-hydrating salts from the medical bay Colonel Vijay tracked down. Shil still stumbles occasionally and Rachel rubs at her hip. But neither one complains and that is good enough.

Emil pre-primes the detonators I give him. Colonel Vijay, Shil, Ajac, Haze, and Rachel begin carrying boxes of plastique from the tug to the B79 bomber. Franc’s off somewhere, licking her wounds in private. I only know that’s what she is doing because it’s what I would do myself. And Iona? Hanging round Neen as if they are joined by invisible wire.

But I have more pressing problems.

So far, the Silver Fist cruiser has taken itself out to the edge of the force field, to run a scan of the whole area. After this proves fruitless, it begins a more careful sweep; one that will take it over Hekati’s mirror hub in about five minutes. That is how long we have to make this plan work.

‘Four minutes, fifty-eight seconds.’

The SIG keeps with the updates until I tell it to stop.

We now have three minutes left before the cruiser passes overhead. Enough time for Neen to pack the nose of the B79 bomber with explosives. When he’s done, there is still room for more. So Shil, Haze and Rachel race back for extra boxes, and Neen stacks these inside the nose-cone as well.

The detonators go everywhere.

He could use only one, but why bother? We have a hundred, and they’re all set to the same frequency.

‘Two minutes ten,’ says the gun.

Colonel Vijay is watching. Well, half of him is. The other half focuses on Neen, who is bundling out of the B79’s hatch, looking pleased with himself.

‘Two exactly,’ the gun says.

Above us, a shadow can be seen. Our own little eclipse.

The cruiser already hangs between the sun and the mirrors. And now its shadow begins to creep down the inside wall of the mirror hub. Soon we’ll be able to look up and see the cruiser itself.

‘One fifty.’

‘Sir,’ says Neen. ‘We need to get it launched.’

‘How long do we have?’

‘Now is optimum,’ says the gun. It likes fancy words. ‘But we’ve got a four-minute window.’

The colonel is staring at the B79. He’s obviously making his mind up about something, and his decision is to stay silent. When someone like Vijay Jaxx remains silent it’s because he believes events have moved beyond what his words can change.

Marching up to him, I salute.

‘Sven?’ he says.

‘What am I missing, sir?’

Glancing at the Aux, he shakes his head. His look says, let this go . . . Only I’m not good at that.

‘Sir?’ I say.

‘Found a glitch,’ he says. ‘You’re not going to like it.’

‘No, sir. Probably not.’

The Silver Fist are going to scan our bomber for signs of life, and they won’t find any. That’s what he tells me, keeping his voice low. The moment their braid realizes there’s nothing alive on board he will either jam every channel we might use to trigger a bomb. Or he’ll spam a fire command, and blow the B79 to bits before it can get close enough to do damage.