Hammer and Crucible by Cameron Cooper (easy books to read txt) 📗

meant they didn’t care if we knew. It usually means some sort of official agent, with the authority to raid private feeds. And lo, the Rangers are here.” He waved his hand at the screen.

I carefully said nothing. No point in committing myself. I already knew where Newman was taking this. I would be thinking the exact same thing, in his shoes. I was a passenger who would draw too much official attention upon his ship. Nothing he was doing was illegal, that I knew about, except for carrying passengers, which every freighter did as a matter of course. He was like most honest civilians, though—nervous in the face of authority.

“I can’t take you on from here,” Newman said. “We part ways at Devonire.”

I nodded at the expected announcement and turned to look at the screen again. The lens was adjusting as the Queen drew closer to the station, shifting focus. The black ship looked lethal…and it was lethal. Everyone thought of the dreadnoughts and the super-maneuverable frigates as the powerhouses of the Imperial fleet. Carriers, though, were designed to protect ground troops and were damned good at it. Yet they could also use that firepower against enemy ships with an effectiveness as devastating as any dreadnought’s.

The shitty bonus for me right now was that most of the time, carriers had at least three or four cadres of infantry aboard.

My lucky fucking day.

According to Newman, this wasn’t the coincidence it looked like. I wanted to point out to him that I’d faced two major coincidences lately. This would be number three…if it was chance at all.

“You’d better go sort out your exit,” Newman said.

That was going to be tricky. If it had been an internal landing bay like those at New Phoenicia, I could have used an external hatch to climb out, move carefully around the ship and use one of the admin doors to the bay to ease out, all without raising the attention of any official parties monitoring the ship.

Only, we would be connected by a tunnel to the station itself. Any external hatch was just that, an exit to pure vacuum.

We had to use the cargo door. It was the only one which would be connected to the station.

“Thanks, Captain,” I murmured. No point getting pissed at him. None of this was his fault, and he had been as fair-handed as he could be. “I’ll settle with your purser and square things away.”

“That’d be Joy,” he called after me. “You’ll find her in the mess.”

I found my way to the mess. Joy was there, and frowning over three pads, all battered and scratched, and muttering to herself.

The thrill of administration. I shuddered, and pulled her attention away from cooking the books, to dicker over the price of our passage. I used one of the un-anchored cards to pay what I thought was an exorbitant rate, but was probably about average, then hurried back to the cabin.

“We’re about to dock and the Rangers are already waiting for us,” I told Juliyana.

“Fucking Farhan,” she muttered. “He really did drop the boom on us.”

“Looks like. Although there’s no point getting pissed at him. He’s watching out for the family in general, which is exactly what he’s supposed to do.” I picked up my sack. “Devonire is a standard first stage vertical sub-station design.”

Juliyana got to her feet. “First stage modules have external docking. We have to exit exactly where they’re going to expect us to appear. They’ll be waiting for us.”

“If they’re here for us at all, and that’s not a given,” I told her.

“Why else would they be here?”

“It’s a combat vessel. A carrier. That’s overkill for what they think is a family thief.” I frowned. “All the station’s support services and maintenance will be in the bottom tiers.”

“Run like hell and get lost down there?” Juliyana hazarded.

“There’s also a cable down to the surface…” Although the cable car itself would rise up through the station to the higher levels, where it would dock with the internal quay to offload passengers. “What I’d give for a suit right now…” Without enviro-suits, we were limited in what we could do.

“Suits would just slow us down,” Juliyana pointed out.

True.

We moved back along the main gallery to the armored door of the cargo hold. Joy stood there with the dour man who had supervised the closing of the cargo bay when we had left New Phoenicia. His name was Harry, as far as I had been able to pick up from the dinner we had taken with the crew just after take off. Both Harry and Joy were waiting with patient expressions. The cargo bay door was tightly closed, with red lights showing all over the armored exterior. It was locked and sealed to contain atmosphere.

It was standard procedure when connecting to an external docking bay. The connection of the tunnel was an inexact affair, because the docking collar had been designed to dock with the broadest number of ship models as possible. It would clank and hiss and attach and detach a number of times while it found the best purchase against the ship’s hull. Then the tunnel was filled with atmosphere, and the doors at either end could be safely opened.

Yet accidents could happen. The collar might not fit exactly and the opening of either door could create a gust which knocked the collar loose, exposing the airlock on the station and the cargo bay to explosive depressurization.

So everyone stood on the other side of the bulkhead doors until the tunnel was properly opened, tested and announced safe.

“You’re eager to leave, then?” Harry asked us. He didn’t sound at all interested in the answer. He was being polite to two passengers whom he was never going to see again.

“Yep,” I said.

Joy considered us with her downturned expression. I wondered if it was just the natural set of her mouth. Some people had downward curving mouths, and when they relaxed, they instead looked unhappy. “You know there’s Rangers out there, right?”

How