«One minute,» said the pilot. Blade pulled his hand back and rested it loosely on the arm of his couch. He began breathing deeply to fill his system with oxygen for the high-g takeoff.
«Thirty seconds,» said the pilot. Then it was twenty, after that ten, and after that:
«Nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one-FIRING!»
The roar of the solid-fuel boosters hammered in through the soundproofed hull of the shuttle. Smoke blotted out the sky beyond the pilot's canopy. The shuttle vibrated, lurched, and lifted. A giant got both arms around Blade's chest and squeezed hard. He forced himself to go on breathing and keep his head still, remembering that the rockets only burned for thirty seconds.
Then the altimeter needle passed twenty thousand feet.
The rockets burned out and fell back toward the forest below. The roar was replaced by a faint hum as the antigravity cut in. Normal weight returned, and through the canopy Blade saw the sky turn from blue to purple. Then it turned black and the stars came out as the shuttle soared up into space.
Dark Warrior loomed in the shuttle's canopy, a fat cylinder slightly pointed at each end and covered with an eye-searing mirror finish to reflect laser beams. Blade stood between the two pilots, watching the starship grow steadily larger. No, «large» wasn't an adequate word to describe Dark Warrior. Neither was any other adjective that came to Blade's mind. Loyun Chard's starship was so huge it was hard to believe she'd even been built by human beings.
Blade had spent days with the ship's plans. He knew she was a mile long and a thousand feet in diameter amidships. He still found it hard to see a speck perched on the hull near the stern like a fly on a cow's rump and realize the speck was a hundred-foot shuttle like the one he rode.
Can twenty-five people really hope to do anything against that monster? Blade couldn't keep the thought out of his mind for a moment. He suspected that everyone else had exactly the same feeling. Then another thought replaced the first one.
Can twenty-five people be found in that monster if they're determined to hide? That was much more encouraging and made just as much sense. Part of that mile of steel was engine rooms and weapons bays, but there would still be enough space to swallow up ten boarding parties. Finding them would be rather like finding nests of mice in a twenty-room mansion when you didn't know what a mouse looked like.
Ten miles out, one of the escort ships challenged them. The pilots gave the shuttle's base and identification number and did not stop or slow down. One of the escorts flew formation with them for several minutes, then rejoined its comrades. Not one word of protest came over the radio.
Dark Warrior now stretched halfway across the sky ahead, blotting out a steadily growing number of stars. Another mile or two and they actually could ram her before the enemy could react. Security up here wasn't just lax, it was practically nonexistent. The secret of Station Four was being well kept.
Four miles out, and the escort ship came back on the radio:
«Shuttle M 675, this is Green Patrol Leader. You are authorized to land and unload in Bay Two. Over.»
«Acknowledged, Green Leader, and thank you. Over and out.»
Three miles, two miles, one mile. There was no sky or stars left ahead, only the huge ship. The radio crackled again.
«Shuttle M 675, this is Dark Warrior Cargo Chief. We are illuminating Bay Two for you. Do you have your own cargohandlers? We're a bit short-handed right now.»
The pilot managed to keep a straight face as he replied, «M 675 to Cargo Chief. Yes, we've got our own people. Over and out.» He cut off the radio, then he and Blade and Riyannah all laughed.
Now they were covering the last mile, and the starship became a vast wall of metal, both ends out of sight. A constellation of red and green lights winked to life around one of the hundred-foot square hatches amidships. The pilot made slight adjustments to the shuttle's course, then cut off its drive. Operating it within range of the starship's internal gravity field could burn out the generators.
The shuttle drifted in toward the hatch. The pilot pushed a button and a metal ring popped out of the nose. A jointed arm with a hook on the end reached out from one edge of the batch and caught the ring. Blade gripped the back of the nearest couch as the cabin tilted around him. Slowly the shuttle was drawn down to the deck of Bay Two.
Chunnnnggg! The shuttle struck the deck and the arm lifted away. Jointed sections of deck folded themselves around the shuttle's belly, surrounding the hatches and sealing them off from the vacuum in the rest of Bay Two. Blade heard a rumble and a hissing as air was pumped into the newly-formed passageway. Then the radio came on again.
«Cargo Chief to M 675, you can start unloading at your convenience. Deposit cargo in Compartment 55GZ and leave the list on the door. One of my people will be around to pick it up later. Do you have any perishable cargo aboard?»
«None.»
«All right. Get to work.» The Cargo Chief's voice had the weary tones of a man who's worked long hours with little help and less pleasure. Blade had an image of the man sitting at a littered desk, red-eyed with fatigue, uniform rumpled, trying desperately to keep track of the cargoes pouring aboard Dark Warrior.
Blade pulled on a jacket over his coveralls and turned to the boarding party with a broad grin on his face. «All right, you people,» he said, forcing a growl into his voice. «You heard the man. Get to work!»
Laughing, the boarding party began gathering up their equipment and pulling on their own jackets. Blade turned back to the pilots and looked up through the canopy. It gave him a good view of Bay Two, a steel box large enough to hold a fair-sized office building. In all that vast cavern he could see only one human figure, a spacesuited welder busily at work on the railing of a catwalk two hundred feet above Blade.
If the rest of Dark Warrior was as nearly deserted, the job of hiding and staying hidden might be almost easy.
Only two men passed by while the boarding party was unloading. Both were middle-aged, wearing rumpled coveralls and harried expressions. They looked like clerks, cooks, or something else equally uninspiring. They passed by without more than a casual glance at the boarding party.
In half an hour the shuttle was unloaded. All the legitimate cargo was properly stowed away in 55GZ, and all the other cargo was divided up into man-sized loads. Each member of the boarding party took up one load. Then Riyannah led them off to find a quiet hiding place among Dark Warrior's maze of empty cabins.
Blade, two of the engineers, and the two shuttle pilots stayed behind. Wishun, the senior engineer, was a gray-haired, stooped man with a perpetually sour expression. He'd lost his wife to Chard's Security people, but he'd retained his own status in the space program by publicly repudiating her. He'd done it for the sake of the underground, but the pain still showed in his face. The other engineer, Draibo, was young, blond, bearded and with an almost childlike enthusiasm for spaceflight and all that might come from it. He had no enthusiasm whatever for Loyun Chard.
Both engineers were scheduled to be part of the ship's flight crew, so their presence would make no one suspicious. The shuttle pilots were to stay until after Station Four was blown up, then wait to see how the enemy reacted. They were as respectable as the engineers and shouldn't be suspected of anything.
Blade was the only odd man out. He was the leader of the whole effort, not to mention the eyes, ears, and messenger for the hidden boarding party. He had to stay in the open, even at some risk. They'd minimized the risk by giving him a more complete set of fake ID's than the others. He was nominally a Sergeant-Major Kumish Dron, newly-appointed aide and bodyguard to the engineers. Both of them were senior enough to be allowed to bring staff members along with them, so no one was likely to question Blade's presence. He only hoped the other engineers, officers, and VIP's wouldn't do the same. Too many passengers and hangers-on could crowd even Dark Warrior enough to smoke the boarding party out of hiding.