‘Say nothing,’ Rollo told him. ‘Olli, isolate the God’s hatch controls. Can we . . . blow our ship-jackers out into space or something?’
‘Depends if they have their wits about them. We’re really doing this, are we?’
‘We were never going to get our ship back without lives on our conscience, my daughter. And these murderers have signed the contract for what happens to them.’ As he squinted at the displays, Rollo’s face was hard as granite.
‘Have they sent an umbilical down to the Oumaru?’ Kris asked, over Idris’s shoulder.
She was right. Apparently the hijackers hadn’t just been sitting idle after dropping from unspace. Although what they were doing with the flayed hulk was a mystery.
‘Just means they’re divided, distracted.’ Rollo’s hand was on Idris’s shoulder, painfully tight, as Idris pulled them closer. Their brachator drive pulled them across the fabric of space, each operation slinging them along a new line as they homed in on the Vulture. All smooth sailing now but if it came down to actual combat flying, they’d be rattled about like peas as Idris pushed past the dampeners’ tolerance. He felt a weird, unwelcome thrill to know that the Joan was more than capable of that kind of nonsense.
He made the next grab and the Partheni ship abruptly flipped thirty degrees from its previous course, and hurtled towards their quarry. The comms requests were becoming more and more insistent, and then a whole new set of warnings lit up the board.
‘They’re hot!’ Idris called. His memory flashed to the war, hearing the warning yelled aboard Colonial warships, or the Parsef equivalent from the lips of a Partheni officer: ‘Vu khi chaud!’
‘Those going outside – helmets on.’ Rollo followed his own advice. A few of Kittering’s small arms flicked back past his crown and dragged a clear hood forwards and all the way down until it sealed over his belly. Kit and Rollo only had standard EVA suits, although they would both be going over armed. Solace and Olli would be the vanguard.
‘You two play nice now. No time for not liking each other. I’m talking to you, my daughter. Olian Timo, to you.’
Olli looked at him rebelliously. Perhaps she’d thought her snubbing of Solace had been masterfully subtle to that point.
‘After this you can tell me what the hell your problem is anyway,’ the Partheni put in. She started back as Rollo rapped a gauntleted knuckle on her helm.
‘No lip from you, soldier. Not so long as you’re part of my crew, see right?’
‘Compret, Mother,’ she responded automatically and Rollo managed a chuckle.
‘Mother, is it? Well someone’s got to look after you rabble of children.’
Idris had been watching the Vulture’s readouts, seeing the ship’s energy reserves patched through to its ailing lasers. They hadn’t been used much, only really intended for debris and hull cutting. They’d still make a mess of the Joan if they landed a sustained hit. The scavenger’s new masters had plainly decided that no comms contact meant hostile intent.
The Vulture’s beam split the void, reaching them before he could even register the discharge. He had to rely on the instruments to tell him that the lance of energy had curved away, splaying off in a rainbow spectrum of wasted light and heat as the Dark Joan’s gravitic shielding deepened the curve of space just enough.
He’d set his next bearing now. The drives were hurling the Joan along a heading that would bring them dangerously close to the Vulture God. The ship’s laser stabbed out twice more, once piercing space where they should have been, the next just scattering away in impotent spectra. The near miss filled the space around them with colour.
‘I have the Vulture’s hatch,’ Olli reported. ‘Isolated it. They’re fighting for control . . .’ But they didn’t know the Vulture’s systems like she did.
‘Open her up,’ Rollo directed.
Idris almost missed the fine mist of frozen atmosphere that vented from the Vulture’s side. It shifted the ship slightly, beginning a tumbling roll, but one so slow that it barely affected his calculations at all. He almost missed the body, too – a human shape that pitched out into the death sentence of hard vacuum, helmetless, writhing briefly.
Murderers, he reminded himself. They were professional killers and thieves – and if their prey turned on them, it was only what they should expect.
‘They’ve established an atmosphere bubble,’ Olli noted, as the surviving hijackers adjusted the Vulture’s gravitic envelope. If they had any sense they’d be suiting up, though; nobody should be taking a congenial atmosphere for granted right now.