The Rock Rats

WALTZING MATILDA

The emergency lights came on, dim but better than utter darkness. George groped through the shadows along the narrow passageway from the galley to the closed hatch of the bridge. He tapped the code on the bulkhead keypad and the hatch popped open slightly.

At least there’s proper air pressure in the bridge, George thought as he pushed the hatch all the way open. Hatch wouldn’t have opened otherwise.

Nodon was sitting in the command pilot’s chair, eyes wide with shock or fright, hands racing along the console keyboard. The regular lights came back on, but they seemed weaker than usual.

“What th’ fook happened, mate?” George asked, sliding into the copilot’s chair.

“I got an electric shock,” said Nodon. “A spark jumped from the panel and the lights went out.”

George could see the kid was checking out all the ship’s systems. The control panel’s displays flickered almost too quickly for the eye to register as Nodon raced through one system diagnostic after another.

The kid’s good, George thought. I made the right decision when I hired him.

Nodon was a skinny youngster who’d claimed to be twenty-five, but George figured the kid was barely out of his teens. No real experience, outside of working on computers back on Ceres, but he had an intensity, a bright eager desire to succeed, that made George pick him as his crewman for this mining job. George called him “Turk” but Nodon was actually a Mongol, with the decorative spiral tattoos on both his cheeks to prove it. He claimed he’d been born on the Moon, of miners who’d fled Earth when the Gobi Desert engulfed the grasslands of their ancestral homeland. He was all bone and sinew, skin the color of old parchment, head shaved bald, big expressive deep brown eyes. He’d look damned handsome if it weren’t for those bloody scars, George thought. He was trying to grow a moustache; so far it was nothing more than a few wisps that made his upper lip look dirty.

Sitting tensely in the command chair, flicking through diagnostics almost faster than George could follow, Nodon wore only a comfortable sleeveless mesh shirt over a pair of ragged shorts.

“The power generator is off-line,” he said. “That’s why the lights went out.”

“We’re on batteries now?” George asked.

“Yes, and—”

The alarms hooted again and George felt his ears pop. The airtight hatch slammed shut once more.

“Jeezus God!” George shouted. “The bugger’s shootin’ at us!”

Dorik Harbin scowled at his display screens. His first shot should have taken out the ship’s habitat module, but they’d increased their spin just a split second before he’d fired. He’d hit something, he was certain of that, but it wasn’t a fatal hit.

It had taken a few minutes for the big laser to recharge; this had given Harbin enough time to choose his target carefully. He had the full schematics of Waltzing Matilda on one of the screens, courtesy of Humphries Space Systems. Their intelligence data was well-nigh perfect. Harbin knew where to find the ships he went after, and what each ship’s layout was.

Not much of a challenge to a soldier, he thought. But then, what soldier wants challenges? When you put your life on the line, the easier the job the better. For just the flicker of a moment he thought about the fact that he was shooting at unarmed civilians. Perhaps there was a woman aboard that ship, although the HSS intelligence data didn’t indicate that. What of it? he told himself. That’s the target and you’re being paid to destroy it. It’s a lot easier than killing people face to face, the way you had to in Delhi.

That had been a mess, a fiasco. One battalion of mercenary troops trying to protect a food warehouse against a whole city. That idiot commander! Stupid Frenchman. Harbin still saw the maddened faces of the ragged, half-starved Indians, bare hands against automatic rifles and machine guns. Still, they nearly swarmed us down. Only when he was foolish enough to let one of the women get close enough to knife him did his blood-rage surge and save him. He shot her point-blank and led a howling murderous charge that sent the mob running. He stopped firing into their backs only when his automatic rifle finally jammed from overheating.

He pushed the nightmare images out of his mind and concentrated on the job at hand. By the time he was ready to fire again, Matilda’s spin had moved the hab module enough so that it was partially shielded by the big slabs of ores the miners had hung on their central propulsion module. But their main comm antenna was in his sights. He squeezed off a shot. The laser’s capacitors cracked loudly and he saw a flash of light glance off the rim of the antenna. A hit.

Now to get the auxiliary antennas, he said to himself. I’ll have to move in closer.

“Shooting at us?” Nodon’s voice went high with sudden fright.

“Fookin’ bastard,” George growled. “Get into your suit. Quick!”

Nodon bolted from his chair and went to the hatch. He tapped out the keyboard code swiftly and the hatch swung open all the way.

“The air pressure is falling,” he called over his shoulder as George followed him down the passageway toward the airlock.

George was thinking, If we had the bloody laser on board we could give the bastard a taste of his own medicine. But the laser was sitting on the asteroid and its power pack was recharging; at least, it had been until the generator had been hit.

As they scrambled into their suits, George said, “We’d better power down the ship. Save the batteries.”

Nodon was already pulling his bubble helmet over his head. “I’ll go to the bridge and do it,” he said, his voice muffled by the helmet.

“Turn off everything!” George yelled after his retreating back. “Let ’em think we’re dead!”

He added silently, It won’t be far from wrong, either.

Nodon returned from the bridge as George was closing the neck seal of his helmet. Leaning toward the kid so their helmets touched, he said, “Don’t even use the suit radio. Play dead.”

The kid looked worried, but he forced a sickly grin as he nodded back to George.

They got to the airlock and went out together. George grasped Nodon’s suited arm and, without using his jetpack, pushed off toward the big slabs of ores attached to Matildas fusion engine. Get into the shadow of those chunks, he thought. Huddle up close to ’em and maybe this fookin’ killer won’t see us.

Perspective is tricky in microgravity. Once George and his young crewman got to the nearest of the slabs, it seemed as if they were lying on a huge hard bed, side by side, looking up at the slowly-revolving shape of their habitation module as it swung on its long tether.

The other ship glided into George’s view. It was small, little more than a hab unit set atop a fusion engine and a set of bulbous propellant tanks. It looked almost like a cluster of mismatched grapes. Then he recognized the bulky shape of a high-power laser hanging just below the hab module. This ship was meant to be a destroyer, nothing else.

The guide beam from the ship’s auxiliary laser played over Matilda’s habitation module. George watched as the smaller ship maneuvered leisurely, the evil red spot of the guide beam sliding away from the hab unit. For a moment it was lost in the depth of space, but then George’s heart clutched in his chest. The red spot was moving across the slab to which he and Nodon were clinging.

He knows we’re here! George thought, sweat breaking out on his face. He’s gonna slice us!

But the red spot slid across the slab more than ten meters below their boots. It stopped on the bell-shaped nozzle of their fusion engine, then walked slowly up to the throat of the nozzle. A light flashed there. George blinked against the sudden, unexpected glare.

Nodon bumped his helmet against George’s. “The engine!” he whimpered.

Another flash. This time George saw shards of metal fly off the rocket nozzle, glinting briefly in the pale sunlight as they spun out of sight, into the endless darkness.

Again the laser fired. This time it hit the piping that fed cryogenic hydrogen into the nozzle’s cooling capillaries. Fookin’ bastard knows his business, George thought grimly. He’s disabled the engine with three bloody shots.

The attacking ship maneuvered leisurely, drifting out of George’s sight, beyond the edge of the slab on which he and Nodon hid. For moments that seemed like hours, the two men lay there unmoving. What are we gonna do? George wondered. How can we get home without the main engine?

In the darkness, George felt Nodon’s helmet touch his again. “Do you think he’s gone?” the young man asked.

Before George could answer, he caught another glint in the corner of his eye. Pushing slightly away from the slab, he saw that their attacker was punching holes in their propellant tanks. Thin cold jets of cryogenic hydrogen and helium-three hissed noiselessly into the vacuum, brief whitish wisps of gas that dissipated into the emptiness of space in an eyeblink.

“We’re movin’,” George muttered, even though Nodon could not hear him. Like a child’s balloon when he lets the air out of it, the gases escaping from the punctured tanks were pushing Matilda slowly away from the asteroid.

“We’re gonna get a fookin’ tour of the solar system,” George said aloud. “Shame we’ll be too dead to enjoy the sights.”