Free Empire's End by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole Page B

was, which I don’t… Oh clot,” Sten said.
    “Aye. Th‘ main man. Duke, or Dynast, or wha’e’er he’d dubbed himself.”
    “Baron. Thoresen.” That name he’d never forget. In a final duel, Sten had taken on the murderer of his family barehanded— and killed him.
    His quarters had been just at the top of the Eye, in a palatial dome that covered Thoresen’s office, garden, and quarters.
    “That’s it. But we’ll not go in direct. Nor hang up here being big fat targets anymore.”
    Sten put full drive on his suit and, Kilgour in his wake, eye-calculated a trajectory that would intersect Vulcan just above the old ship-porting area. He would not chance that dockyard—that was too easy to booby-trap.
    To one side, as they flew “over” Vulcan, was the great rip in the planet’s skin where the laboratory that was Bravo Project had been until Kilgour’s bombs went off.
    That also meant that somewhere below Sten was the cramped apartment he had grown up in. For all he knew, the muraliv that haunted him might still be mounted on the wall, the snowy landscape on a frontier world that his mother had sold six months of his life for, a muraliv that had broken in less than a year. Sten had unconsciously duplicated that scene in reality on Smallbridge—a cluster of domes sitting in his planet’s arctic regions.
    No. He would not—could not—go there. It would be too much.
    He shut that part of his mind off. They were closing on Vulcan.
    Sten landed on a bare stretch of hull. Finger-point. Make me a door, Alex.
    Kilgour took a prepared charge from a carrying case, extended its small legs, and clipped the charge to Vulcan’s skin. He started a timer, then motioned Sten away. Alex, demolitions expert that he was, pushed off into space unhurriedly and hovered a safe few meters away.
    The timer went to zero, and the charge blew, blasting a stream of molten metal through the hull in a widening cone. It was a violent but relatively silent way to B&E. No air whooshed out. Vulcan—or at least this part of it—had lost its atmosphere.
    Kilgour the perfectionist then trimmed a few ragged edges, ripping them off with his hands. Massively strong heavy-worlder that he was, he almost certainly could have done it without the suit’s pseudomusculature cutting in. But he felt lazy.
    They winkled through the hole.
    Blackness. Both of them turned on their helmet spotlights. They were in some kind of machine shop.
    Sten pointed himself back through the hole.
    “Inside,” he broadcast back to the Victory . “No prob. Tag on. Moving.”
    He set his suit’s inertial navigation system as a guide toward the Eye, in the probable event of Vulcan’s twisting corridors getting them lost, and they started out. His “tag”—a transmitter broadcasting on an unlikely freq—would tell the Victory where, in this metal maze, they were.
    Zero air, zero gravity.
    It was quicker to use the suit’s drive and “fly” toward the Eye. Sten wondered what the seventeen-year-old Delinq that had been Sten would have thought, given a bit of clairvoyance, seeing somebody actually fly inside Vulcan.
    He would probably think it wonderful and then promptly figure out how to use the newly accessed dimension in a raid.
    It was tempting to increase their speed, particularly when their course led through some of the huge open assembly lines. Tempting—but that could be quickly fatal if there was a trap. Or if something jagged lurked at the end of an insufficiently braked swoop.
    They moved on, “up” into the docking area. Huge ship-size airlocks yawned into vacuum, and fittings had been roughly cut or blasted off. The scavengers hadn’t bothered to close the doors behind them.
    A slideway—or where a slideway had been. Someone had ripped the alloy top away, exposing the aircushion plates below. The slideway led due “north”—toward the Eye.
    Suddenly there was a great gap, a rip of metal extending through several decks directly out into space.