Free Vitalis Omnibus by Jason Halstead Page B

out.”
    She paused, thinking about where to begin or what to say. She looked at all of them and noticed for the first time the absence of Kevin. “Hey, where’s Kevin?”
    Jeff stiffened and looked away. “He didn’t make it,” Eric said softly.
    “Pirates picked him off the hull on their way in,” Tarn said in his usual gruff voice. “Jeff was hiding on the other side ; they never saw him.”
    “Oh. Um, I’m sorry,” Kira said. She was sorry, but in spite of having spent months on the same ship with the man she had never really gotten to know him. That and her natural compassion and empathy seemed diminished for some reason. She frowned, wondering if Emily was responsible for that dehumanizing trait. Not for the first time she wondered just what Emily had done while she was blacked out. “Okay, let’s move on. What’s next? How’s the Mule doing?”
    “Engines are good but the pushers are shot up,” Eric answered. “I can probably get some minimal thrust out of one of them. They took another shot at us after they left. A parting gift.”
    “We were just discussing that very thing,” Sharp added. “Unless you’ve got any more revelations for us?”
    Kira shook her head, and then moved over to sit down at the navigator’s station. She noted that the seat had been adjusted to give her knees more clearance. She smiled and blinked away the sudden moisture that came to her eyes. Even uncertain of their future, Eric had still been thoughtful enough to help her. She pushed the thought aside; there’d be time to thank him properly, and messily, later. She checked her rifle over, noting it still possessed three rounds in the clip. She wondered if the case it had been packed in had any more.
    She turned and saw them all still watching her. She stuck her tongue out at them and put the MAR-7 down, and then pressed her data port against that of the nav station. Moments later she was reading data on her display and mentally injecting commands back into it faster than she could ever remember doing. New commands came to mind as well, slipping in with the old ones and allowing her to bypass just the navigational systems she normally accessed and giving her free rein of the ship’s computer. She smirked, wondering how upset Sharp would be if she routed the output of the display to the main terminal instead of just her own private one.
    As she sorted through the different sections she now had available , she stumbled across the cargo load. She surveyed it, feeling something nagging at the back of her head. “Hey,” she said, drawing the attention of the others while she continued to survey it, “when we lost our sensors, what happened?”
    “Energy blast, probably a charged particle beam. Too far for plasma or a laser,” Tarn answered.
    She glanced at him, nibbling on her lip. “You said something at the time. Something about our sensors being useless even before.”
    Tarn shrugged. “Yeah, they is— was.”
    Kira scowled at him. “What did you say?”
    “That they’re junk.”
    “Don’t make me slap you!” Kira growled. “I don’t mean just now; I mean when it happened.”
    Tarn shrugged. “That was weeks ago!”
    Kira closed her eyes and thought back. She’d found the enemy ship but it was at extreme range still. Sharp was worried what kind of weapons the pirates had… She gasped. Suddenly it flashed into her head as clear as if she had just heard it. “This is a transport! No sensors worth a damn on here. Mining rig’s got better eyesight than this thing does.” She even did a poor job of imitating Tarn’s gruff and surly voice.
    “Yeah, sounds right,” Tarn agreed.
    “It is right; it’s exactly right!” Kira said, turning back to study the inventory list again. “Captain, we can float blind forever or you can break into our cargo and rig up some eyes for us out of the mining gear we’ve got. There’s some small scout craft we’re carrying that have them on them. Perhaps even hook them