Free Trang by Mary Sisson Page B

none too gently, into a cargo area in the
back. The seats were considerably narrower and had a bare-bones quality to
them—they had thin padding and didn’t recline. A quick inquiry revealed that
they could fold into the floor so that the ship could be converted into a cargo
hauler.
    Philippe buckled in and looked
forward out the window to see the orange Titan fog again. Shanti sat next to
him. “That was a good presentation,” she said. “Food for thought.”
    “Thank you,” he replied.
    “OK!” Cheep said, his voice
amplified by the ship’s speakers. “We’re ready to take off.”
    “Strap the fuck in, dog-fuckers!”
shouted Shanti, her voice requiring no amplification.
    Half a minute later the ship
slammed back—none of the gradual tilting that had so unnerved Philippe in
Beijing. Half a minute after that, they had taken off. Things went almost too
quickly for Philippe to get nervous, but he managed to hit his sick patch the
minute the fog cleared out into the blackness of space.
    “Do we use an alpha drive?” he
asked Shanti.
    She shook her head as Pinky, who
had obviously overheard the question, snorted with laughter. “We no got no
alpha drive. Is no big enough for,” he said.
    “We’re not going that far,” Shanti
said. “Plus, we gotta get through the mines and hit the portal, and you can’t
be going fast and do that.”
    “Mines?” Philippe asked.
    “Yeah, you know, the portal
defenses,” she said.
    “Hey, did you hear?” said Cheep.
“Some of those university types who just showed up were asking if the SF would
clear out all the mines so that they could do a study.”
    “Oh, you shit me,” said Pinky.
    “No shit, no shit whatsoever,”
Cheep replied, warming to the topic. “Like, sure, we’ll just clear out all
those pesky mines for you, so you can be right there when the invasion comes.”
    “University fuckers. Supposed to be
smart. They no got no brains,” said Pinky.
    Chip was grinning “Sure, sure,
we’ll just drop all our defenses, so you can get your studying done. No
problem!”
    “They can look, say, ‘We still no
know what that!’”
    The pilots had a good laugh, while
Philippe squirmed, thinking of Yoli. He was about to say something in defense
of the researchers when a beeping began.
    “Here we go!” said Cheep.
    The two pilots’ fingers began
flying, and they began uttering codes into their coms. As near as Philippe
could tell from their chattering, they were asking someone on Titan station to
send clearance codes to the mines, while also transmitting codes
themselves—and, Philippe assumed, not flying too close to any of them.
    He leaned forward to look out the
window and see the mines—a sprawl of small satellites, their lights glinting in
the darkness. The ship was soon surrounded by them.
    “Are those nuclear?” he asked
Shanti.
    “Yup,” she replied, also leaning
forward to look at the satellites, filled with the terror of a bygone age. She
suddenly snapped up. “How did you know about that?”
    “Oh, it was a huge headache for the
DiploCorps, changing all those non-proliferation agreements. I mean, that
technology’s been completely banned for over 20 years,” Philippe replied.
    “Yeah,” Pinky chipped in, his
fingers moving without interruption. “I remember, when they went up, they no
was legal.”
    Philippe blinked, and then decided
that he must have misheard what Pinky said—the man’s English was hardly Union
standard, after all. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.
    “That’s right—32 clear, 32 clear.
It was a big relief when those laws got changed, thanks for that.” Cheep, still
looking ahead, waved back in Philippe’s general direction.
    “Could you two focus on flying, please? ”
said Shanti, her voice suddenly strained. She turned to Philippe, who was
trying to digest what had just been said. “I didn’t have anything to do with
that.”
    A pfft escaped from Pinky,
while Cheep let out a brief bark of laughter.
    “I