Ad Astra by Jack Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

The old girl shook and shuddered, but she accelerated away from the containers, leaving them traveling behind us down the same course. As I turned Lady slightly again, I watched as the delayed commands I’d fed to the cargo containers activated and they started offloading drums of precursor chemicals through load points located on their tops and bottoms, the drums drifting into the areas between and among the big cargo containers. Good riddance to a cargo I never should’ve loaded.
    In the process of clearing my conscience I’d also created a huge shotgun blast aimed for the point the smaller privateer would reach in twelve minutes. I wondered how long it would take the privateer to spot what I’d done, figure out what it meant and try to alter its trajectory. It shouldn’t matter. Freighters, even freighters fitted out as privateers, weren’t designed to dodge wide debris fields aimed right at them.
    I steadied Lady just short of a collision course with the larger privateer. The longer I could leave that privateer thinking I was only planning a close firing run, the better.
    Ten minutes. “Vox, evacuate engineering now .”
    “This is Chen. Vox is dead. We took some hits back here and suffered power arcs.”
    Damn. “The rest of you get out of there and get to the lifeboat.”
    “How much longer -.”
    “Go!”
    “Aye, aye. On our way.”
    Lady’s hull twitched and rang with impacts as kinetic rounds from the privateers hit again and again. I sat there, watching compartments and systems report damage or just go dead as the solid metal chunks tore into and through Lady . I wondered what would happen if a round came through the bridge. Would I have time to realize it or would I just find myself face to face with Dingo, him demanding to know what I’d screwed up this time? Eight minutes. Close enough and maybe too close.
    I made a small course correction, finally fixing Lady onto a collision course, then I locked the docking system onto the big privateer and deleted the engine braking and maneuvering overstress limitation sequences. Lady would steer herself directly at the privateer, engines going full blast, as long as her systems still functioned. I stood up, fighting for balance as Lady jerked to maintain her lock on the big privateer, and stared at the screen where the shape of privateer loomed. Then I ran for the Captain’s cabin.
    Captain Weskind was there. Face down on her desk. She’d opened her suit. There wasn’t any time to see how long it’d been open and how badly she’d decompressed. I sealed the suit and repressurized it and sat her limp body on the edge of her desk and turned my back to her and draped both her arms forward over my shoulders and grabbed her hands and lifted her on my back and ran for the hatch.
    I staggered down passageways which swung wildly as impacts and sharp maneuvers to keep the ship aimed at the privateer altered Lady ’s motion. The lights flickered, caught, then finally died, leaving dim patches where the few working emergency lights came to life. What must have been a metal projectile from one of the privateers burst through a bulkhead three meters in front of me and went corkscrewing on, chewing another hole through Lady ’s guts.
    Ten meters from the lifeboat access the deck suddenly bent and rose on one side, then the bulkhead slapped me. I hit the other bulkhead, my vision graying out, then managed to get to my feet again, Captain Weskind still a dead weight on my back. Something inside Lady screamed as it tore under stress, the sounds transmitted through her structure and into my suit. She was dying. Saints forgive me she was dying. I stumbled down the weirdly narrowed passageway to the junction, then one more meter to where outstretched arms waited.
    Captain Weskind was pulled from my back and then I was pulled in as well, the lifeboat hatch being slammed shut almost on my feet. I felt the hard deck beneath my back and remembered the lifeboat was overcrowded.