‘Yes!’ Rollo whooped, then their container lurched and tipped them all off. They just about hit the dock, rather than plummeting down the shaft, before Medvig abandoned the pallet to its fate. For a moment it was beginning the long, slow tumble towards the shaft’s distant reaches, clanging thunderously off nearby traffic. Then the city’s system caught up with it, cushioning its fall with invisible hands.
‘More bad guys! Move!’ came Olli’s voice in their ears, and they pelted past the ore freighter towards the Vulture.
‘Everyone aboard?’ Rollo demanded.
‘Full complement, aye,’ she confirmed. ‘Or will be when you get your behinds through the hatch.’
‘Ahead!’ Kris shouted.
Idris, already feeling at least three decades too old for any of this, saw that the ordeal was nowhere near over. Another four Voyenni were charging towards them, emerging from the far side of the Vulture God. It hadn’t exactly been a mystery where they’d been docked.
They had guns, and they had strength and training on their side even without those. What Idris had was . . .
A friend, apparently. Even as they ran for the Vulture, the armoured flyer dropped down, blocking the oncoming Voyennis’ path.
One of the thugs had a gun levelled now, and in response the Partheni unslung her own weapon from its holding arms. An accelerator, about as absurdly illegal in this system as anything could be. If she’d turned it downwards she could have sent a hail of gravitically accelerated pellets through the city’s dome and a score of its separate floors.
Still, there was only one of her and four Voyenni, who might also consider themselves the galaxy’s elite. Not to mention they were all twice the bulk of the woman inside the armour. They began spreading out, grim looks on their long faces, determined to do right by their chief.
Then the Vulture’s hatch opened and Olli joined the fight.
Olli couldn’t wear prosthetics or take grafts, born without any awareness of how those absent limbs might work. Instead she had embraced the unnatural. She called the workframe she wore her ‘Scorpion’ – designed by the Castigar and never intended for human use. It stomped out on four legs, half a dozen tool-arms flanking her central pod. A couple of big pincer limbs arched down from the top and a long, segmented tail lashed from side to side behind her. She’d fitted that with a grabber and cutting saw – which struck sparks from the docking platform. In her Scorpion, Olli was three metres tall.
The Voyenni looked from her to the Partheni warrior and obviously decided they were outclassed. Mulishly, they backed off as the rest of the crew hustled to board their ship.
‘Get us up!’ Rollo bellowed. ‘And fuck docking control if they try to complain.’
‘Oh, I think they’re very glad to be rid of us,’ Kris said. Idris could only nod weakly, dropping into the pilot’s seat. He set the Vulture’s drive against the gravity of the planet below, sending them leaping into the sky – if not like an eagle, then at least like an old bird that would live to see another day.
*
‘Right,’ Rollo said, when the Vulture God had broken atmosphere and was navigating the orbital debris that cluttered Roshu’s night sky. ‘My children, let us not do that again. I, for one, am too old for shit even vaguely related to that.’
Idris hunched awkwardly in the pilot’s seat. He was swinging the Vulture hand over hand, using its brachator drives, until it was in an orbit high enough for them to escape at the slightest provocation. The Vulture was nobody’s idea of a racer, but their foes no longer had an Intermediary. Idris would back himself against any pursuit. As part of what they’d made him into, he had an unmatched feel for the contours of space. He just had to open his mind to feel the texture of the gravitic foam that formed the barrier between the real and unspace, that the greedy little hands of the brachator could latch on to, to drag the ship about.
More than three hundred volunteers had been accepted onto the old wartime Intermediary Program, so he’d been told. Idris was one of just thirty who’d not only survived but left sane enough to do the job. The Liaison Board’s post-war hit rate, using convicts and debtors, was only a tenth even of that. The process was also ruinously expensive, even for successes. Doubtless the Boyarin Uskaro had paid well for a ‘fugitive’s’ whereabouts. And now he knew Idris’s provenance, he’d be even keener to take possession – legally or otherwise.
‘How do we stand with ground control?’ Rollo demanded.