The Rhine Read online

  "You've got to get something to eat," he told Mat again.

  Mat nodded, blinked a couple of times, then pulled himself out of the seat and headed to the tube. Haydon followed, letting him do all the maneuvering himself. Dragging him down to the Crew deck would have been easier, but not many grown men appreciated that kind of treatment, and he was the boss. So, it took a little extra time.

  Haydon pulled two beef meals from the cabinet and tossed them in the cooker while Mat sat at the table, rubbing his face.

  "That was quick thinking," Mat said. "With the rock-cracker. I didn't know we had any left."

  Haydon shrugged and pulled the mealboxes from the cooker and handed one to Mat. "There's a couple left, old ones. I think they were with the ship when you bought it."

  Frankly, Haydon had forgotten about the rock-crackers until the last minute. There was an open storage cabinet under the main engineering terminal— one of the little missiles was strapped on the inside panel. He saw it from the crash couch.

  Mat pulled the top off his box and stirred the contents with a plastic fork. "Well," he said, with a weary smile. "Some divine intervention is nice."

  He was like that ... had a small religious streak. Strange universe. But maybe that was what made Mat different from all the other people Haydon knew.

  They ate in silence. Mat, too tired to hold a conversation, and Haydon himself not a conversationalist type. After they were done Mat stood and said, "I've got to get some sleep. Yuri's bound to have a stash we haven't found, watch him."

  Haydon nodded and threw the empty boxes in the disposal as Mat pulled himself out of the galley with a grunt.

  "Oh, and ..." Mat stopped at the corridor and was looking at him. "I should have listened to you, Haydon. About staying in the Belt."

  A two year old conversation that Haydon shouldn't have brought up again. It had been the heat of the moment.

  For the next hour and a half Haydon kept himself busy in the gym. He needed to be limber and loose for what was coming. Then he went to the Flight deck and took a seat at a terminal and laid back in it. Catnapping was something that he conditioned his body to, because actual sleep was not something he wanted in his life— though he admitted that the best sleep he ever had was on this ship. From the cockpit Yuri was plugging away at his screen with his eyebrows furrowed. He stopped, leaned back, still watching the screen, then he unstrapped and pulled himself up.

  "Head," he said, then pulled himself away.

  Haydon closed his eyes, ten minutes later when he opened them Yuri was dutifully sitting in the cockpit again. The Russian pilot was probably aching for a drink ... or perhaps the intensity of the course corrections was taking his mind off his inner dialogue of regrets and mistakes as a husband and a father.

  For two hours Haydon remained in his seat, napping and waking up for a few minutes. Yuri slept in the cockpit for at least an hour straight. When he woke up for the last time Yuri was talking to Mat on his screen. The boss was up and wanted an update.

  Haydon butted in on the channel from his terminal. "Boss, can you meet me on the cargo deck. There's something I need to show you before Yuri starts maneuvers."

  Mat was still in his quarters, looking up from the webbing of his rack. He didn't look refreshed, and his eyes were watery, but he nodded. "Let me some coffee first."

  Thirty minutes later he was standing in the cargo hold with Mat and a k40 Special. When Haydon said they had guns, he meant his old p18 rifle, and the pistol he put in Mat's hand now.

  There might be some legal questions regarding how he managed to hold on to his UN issued firearms after his enlistment term was up ... and how he got them on board the ship without them being tagged and cataloged by UN Customs, but Mat hadn't asked any of those questions when he learned that Haydon had them. Haydon had taken that as a sign he hired on the right ship.

  Most people that Haydon associated with in his previous life were soldiers, and could shoot a gun with a high degree of accuracy. Mat and Yuri were not cut from the same cloth, as a very old saying went. As to why he was in the cargo hold with the boss and the pistol, and not Yuri— well, he wasn't about to put a gun in Yuri's hand. Some nagging instinct told him that would be a bad idea. So Mat got the gun, and Haydon got another type of nagging feeling, the kind that said he shouldn't take an innocent man and teach him how to use a gun.

  On the opposite end of the hold, about fifteen meters away, Haydon had an old cargo crate painted with a target— the black silhouette of a man. There was already a silver mark on the target's heart from the practice round that Haydon fired.

  The k40 was heavy in one-g, but in the microgravity of the ship not so much. And that had to be accounted for, otherwise this would be a simple lesson in releasing the safety, aiming, and pulling the trigger.

  "Alright, your turn," Haydon told him. "Take aim."

  Mat eyed the target speculatively, his eyebrows furrowed. He gave a short nod and raised the gun, pointing it at the target.

  Haydon repositioned his left hand, putting the palm under the grip. "Steady," he said. "Press down lightly on the trigger for the guide."

  A red dot appeared over the target's shoulder. Mat played with aiming for a few moments, moving the red dot to the target's stomach.

  "Boss, that won't kill someone fast enough," Haydon told him. "You don't want them to shoot back. Aim for the chest or the head."

  Mat swallowed, reinforcing the feeling in Haydon's gut that something about teaching Mat to use a gun was wrong. Mat wasn't a killer, and that's the reason Haydon would be doing most of the shooting, provided it was the crew trying to survive on the dying tug and not the emergency systems reacting to its programming. However, it was necessary because Mat would be needed in the boarding action and he had to be able to defend himself, if the crew were still alive.

  Haydon suddenly hated himself for talking Mat and Yuri in to this. But this was where they were now, they had to recover something to offset the cost of the canister and the fuel they had burned. And that was probably the reason Mat agreed to chase down the tug. He had turned the ship in to a gas hauler from an ice hauler and led them out to Saturn. The cash had been good, so far, but losing a canister could set all that back— set the whole crew back financial.

  Mat squeezed the trigger harder and the small graphite practice round ejected with a hiss of propellant and smoke, hitting the target in the head. The round shattered to dust that would be sucked up by the air recyclers, leaving that little silver mark behind— dead center. Mat was a natural. Another twenty minutes of practicing proved that it wasn't necessary to continue.

  It took Haydon another hour in the gym to make the smile on Mat's face go away from the forefront of his mind. The boss was surprised at how well he did, and happy.

  There were still three hours to go. Not long at all in out-system, and as the minutes boiled down a familiar nervousness attached itself deep down in his gut ... the expectation he always felt before an operation. He wondered if he was too out of practice for a boarding action. Then he wondered if he wanted this because it was a boarding action, not because he wanted to mitigate the loss of profit. This is what happens to a man that should have stayed being a soldier, Haydon thought. But couldn't because it messed with his head.

  Mat stayed on the Flight deck for a couple of those hours while Haydon checked the wiring to one of the terminals in Engineering. It was something he was working on before this whole mess started. A tremor began in his hands, making it impossible for him to do fine work. He pushed away from the wiring panel and floated for few minutes, sweat was beading on his forehead that had nothing to do with the temperature. The vents were pumping cool air into the deck, just like they were designed to do. He went through the exercises to regulate his breathing and tried to change the stream of thoughts that poured through his mind. It would pass. He couldn't be like this when they boarded the tug, his squadmates were depending on him.

  Time ticked down, as he knew it would. Haydon left
Engineering, pushing up the access tube to the Flight deck. There, with Mat and Yuri around a terminal screen he laid out his plan for taking the tug. Yuri was on the fence about what was waiting for them over there, he felt that it was the emergency systems working to save the ship— the crew couldn't possibly be alive after the run in with the canister. Haydon knew differently, the universe didn't work that way. And Mat ... well he didn't know what to expect, his eyes said it all. This was outside of his experience. He was following Haydon's lead.

  He left and went to his quarters. From a storage trunk strapped to one bulkhead he pulled his old rifle and the pistol that Mat had returned. He double checked them, tearing his rifle completely down in the microgravity and putting it back together. Then he grabbed the live ammo from the trunk and headed back up.

  6 - Mat

  The sheet of medical gel on his right side turned hard. It was like having a carapace growing over his skin, and it made it difficult to bend or twist. That was the point. From his seat at the command station terminal Mat watched the tug through a camera. The Sadie was parallel to the tug now, and moving at just over 7,000 kpm it hovered a mere thirty meters to port. Yuri somehow managed to stay sober the whole time it had taken to match the tug's course and was still intent on his screens and nudging the control column with the tips of his fingers.

  With half of its bumpers torn loose the tug's deck sections were exposed, it wasn't much larger than the Sadie's decks. There were twisted girders and metal beams jutting out of its starboard side, but most of the leaks were sealed and its remaining navigation thrusters were keeping it level. Mat wasn't sure if that was a feat of engineering or God's Hand holding the tug in place. His aunt would have pointed out that the two did not have to be mutually exclusive.

  Mat gave a faint smile at remembering his aunt's face and watched as a blue-white light winked on and off in the midst of the wreckage of the aft section. A severed electrical conduit, or maybe a connector to the reactor.

  "I do not think anyone is alive, kep," Yuri said, interrupting his reverie. "Or they cannot see us. There is nothing coming from it, no sounds. Not even an automated distress signal."

  Mat grunted. He thought that was a good thing. For one, it meant no one would try and aim the remaining dorsal turret at them, though it seemed bent out of shape, and for two it meant that no one would be shooting at them when they boarded.

  He admitted to a sense of uncertainty when Haydon took him down to the cargo deck to practice with the pistol, but it proved easier than he suspected— that didn't mean he looked forward to actually having a gun fight with someone.

  A notification beeped on Yuri's screen and he tapped it, Haydon's newly shaved face, and recently trimmed military flattop appeared inside the helmet of a vac-suit. He was standing on the hull, where the missing canister one normally rested. When the mechanic laid out his plan for boarding the tug Mat thought he was insane. Haydon should have been afraid, but there he was, his former tightly controlled nervousness nowhere in sight, replaced with something else ... focus. He was in his element, and that in itself was a scary thought.

  In fact, everything about this was scary. But Haydon was right, they needed to recover something, even if it was just fuel.

  "Yuri, pull us in another fifteen meters," Haydon told him.

  Yuri muttered something that sounded uncharitable in Russian then pushed the control column a hair.

  "Boss, you're up," Haydon continued.

  Mat swallowed and pulled himself out of his seat, an unfamiliar bounce at his right hip— the pistol, in a blue UN holster belted around the waist of his vac-suit. With live rounds in it ... the kind that put holes in people, not little silver marks on practice targets. He grabbed his helmet, hanging by a strap on the side of the seat, and headed to the access tube. Mid way down the tube there were two airlock hatches shoved between the forward and aft sections of the ship, one to starboard and one to port, and that's where he was going.

  "Good luck," Yuri said without looking away from his screen.

  Mat grunted and pulled the hatch closed over his head, then hopped down the ladder two steps at a time in the microgravity. When he reached the T he opened the port side hatch and slipped through to set his boots on the floor of the maintenance corridor. Haydon spent part of this run to Saturn cleaning and painting panels in both this and the opposite corridor. The lighting and the beige paint he chose made it bright.

  The airlock was at the end of the corridor. Mat walked to the control pad beside it, then put his helmet on and opened a channel to Yuri and Haydon.

  "Alright," he said. "I'm in place."

  "Moment, aligning for the vestibule," Yuri said, then, "That should be good."

  On his HUD Haydon's intent eyes turned up to the camera to look at him, "Okay, boss, I'll signal when I'm ready."

  "Copy that," he replied. Lord, I hope he's using a safety line. Mat was just a distraction in Haydon's plan. And right now he could do nothing but wait while Haydon leapt across the void between the Sadie and the tug. Mat would then extend the vestibule. If anyone was alive over there they would notice it, and it might give Haydon an edge while he breached a hatch and sneaked on board. If Haydon needed help Mat would also attempt to breach the airlock hatch the vestibule would extend to.

  At the moment it was Haydon doing the death-defying antics on the hull, but Mat's heart rate was up. This was a first for him. There was no single thing that he felt. Instead it was a combination of things— fear, expectation ... an odd sense of right. Almost like he was taking back what was his, what the pirates stole from him and his crew.

  Haydon gave a brief smile, either at Mat himself or Yuri, maybe both of them. "Five meters," he said. He was using a small Driftsafe jetpack that fitted over the shoulders of his vac-suit to make the jump from the Sadie to the tug. There was a screen on the bulkhead near the control pad and he turned it on, pulling up a camera and pointing it at the tug. And there Haydon was, floating in the emptiness at the edge of the tug's mangled starboard side, his military rifle awkwardly strapped to the back of the Driftsafe. He used the jet controls to set his boots down on a flat section of the dorsal bumper. The bumper was a shell over the tug's decks, crumpled in places with a torn steel girder sticking out of it like a spear, but it otherwise miraculously survived the collision with the canister.

  "I'm down," Haydon said. "I need a few minutes to find a hatch."

  When Haydon was going over his plan there was some speculation that the crew might see him on the hull, but an examination of the tug in their scopes didn't reveal any obvious optical equipment. So they thought the collision must have blown them off.

  "No change, no sounds," Yuri said.

  Mat watched on the screen as Haydon made his way slowly aft and then to port, cresting the curve of the bumper and disappearing over it. Haydon's face was, of course, still visible in his helmet HUD, along with a readout of his vitals.

  It was almost ten minutes before Haydon said anything. "I've found a hatch ... it looks secure. Give me a minute."

  Haydon furrowed his eyebrows in the camera of his helmet, he was watching something. He frowned and said, "The decoder can't crack this lock. They've done something to it."

  The decoder was like the rifle and the pistol, something Haydon inherited from his soldiering days with in UNSEC.

  "That kind of programming takes real skill," Yuri commented.

  "I'll have to pop it. Boss, extend the vestibule. Yuri start broadcasting."

  As a backup to the decoder Haydon carried small explosive caps called busters. They were used to help pop hull plates off when you needed to replace them or get to something under them from the outside. This wasn't going to be a silent entry. Mat turned his attention to the control pad and entered the command that would extend the vestibule.

  He watched on the camera as the flexible tube of dense polyurethane and metal mesh extended out from the port airlock. The tube reminded him of a worm reaching out across the space between the
ships, its open end like a mouth.

  Yuri announced, "No response from text, trying audio. Pirate tug to our port, this is the independent mining vessel Sadie. Please respond."

  The waiting was nerve-racking. Haydon was on the hull of the tug about to blow a hatch, the vestibule was trying to align with an airlock just clear of the wreckage of the tug's starboard side, Yuri was waiting for a response to his hails. All Mat could do was stand there and watch the vestibule extend and the occasional knitting of eyebrows or frown on Haydon's face in his HUD.

  "It's popped," Haydon said, grunting. It was obvious he was pulling or pushing something. "The airlock is intact, I'm going in."

  Mat's heart rate kicked up another notch. The vestibule controls signaled that it was in contact with the tug's airlock hatch but it wasn't an airtight connection, something was obstructing it from sealing against the hull. It didn't really matter. "I'm coming across," he said and opened the airlock hatch.

  Yuri wished him luck again and continued his hails.

  As he cycled the airlock he wondered if he should draw his pistol, but no, that wouldn't make sense yet. Would it? A buzzer went off and a red light came on inside the airlock, the visual part of the warning that there was no atmosphere on the other side of the exterior hatch. He slapped the controls to open the hatch, then deactivated his boots and shoved off into the vestibule corridor.

  Haydon was breathing heavy in his mic, his eyes looking around. It got brighter all of sudden, then darker. "Power's not stable and the atmosphere is thin," he said, then grunted. "I'm through the lock, no resistance so far."

  Mat floated through vestibule toward the tug's airlock hatch, his breathing was quickening and sounded in his ears. If he kept this up he would hyperventilate. When he reached the hatch he said, "I'm at the hatch."

  "Okay, boss. Just float, if everything goes right I should be the one opening ..." Haydon's face suddenly screwed up and he cursed. "Don't ..." There was the unmistakable sound of gunfire, muffled as it was through the suit's helmet Mat knew it. It was disconcerting to just see Haydon's face in his helmet's camera. More gunfire, it was louder, then some distant yelling.