Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 40

“Well, at least we know they’re not pirates,” Captain Decker said. “Not in that.”

“During the war, the Rhodies and the fuzzheads would fuck each other up with Q-ships sometimes,” Tristan cautioned from his gravity couch next to Aden’s. “They’d arm the shit out of a freighter and weld a bunch of junk to it to make it look like some run-down cargo tug, fake a transponder ID. Patrol corvette pulls alongside for inspection, blam. Full broadside.”

“That’s no Q-ship,” Maya scoffed. “There’s a bunch of shit welded to it, all right. But it’s no decoy. That’s genuine junkyard engineering.”

She cycled through a database of hull profiles with her free hand.

“Even the AI can’t quite figure it out. But it looks like it came out of an Oceanian shipyard. A long, long time ago. Maybe one of the Delphine-class protein haulers. They built about a hundred subvariants of those.”

“Aden, contact the OMV Rickety Garbage over there. Tell them we’re here, and that we are about to come alongside for cargo transfer,” Decker said. “Low-power tight-beam.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Aden replied. He brought up the screen for the ship-to-ship comms.

“Very low power,” Maya added. “You don’t want to set that hull on fire with a few watts too many.”

The Rickety Garbage went by the name of Iron Pig, which even Maya had to admit was a pretty good moniker for a junkyard special. They came alongside twenty minutes later, flying a more cautious approach than usual. Up close, the patchwork nature of the other ship was even more apparent. Aden hadn’t known that there was such a thing as an ugly weld seam, but it was included on the long list of engineering sins Tess spotted and called out on their approach.

“I just hope they still have a standard docking ring underneath all that,” she concluded. “I’m not transferring a quarter ton of cargo via zip line at one g.”

“Speed and course matched at one-g acceleration,” Maya announced from above. “Ready to commence in-flight docking.”

Tess stopped her engineering critique and concentrated on the screen in front of her. She went through the docking sequence with practiced speed. They were all back in vacsuits now, which was standard attire for any operations that carried the risk of hull damage. In this case, the likelihood seemed a fair bit greater than normal as far as Aden could tell, which made his suit a comfort instead of a nuisance. Whenever he started to let himself forget that a spaceship was just a fragile cylinder of air traveling through a vacuum that was hostile to life in a million ways, something usually came up that reminded him of that fact in unpleasant ways. He watched Tess and the contents of her screen as she extended Zephyr’s docking collar to mate up with the attachment ring around Iron Pig’s airlock.

“Green light,” she said when the collar had connected and locked into place. “Pressurizing now. Docking collar has atmo. We are good to go, boys and girls.”

“Iron Pig, we show a hard lock on the collar,” Aden sent to the other ship. “Ready to commence transfer operations.”

“Zephyr, we confirm a hard lock as well,” the other side replied. Whoever was on Iron Pig’s comms spoke Rhodian with a nondescript inflection. Most crews ran voice traffic in their native language and let the comms AI on the receiving end translate their speech as needed, but Aden liked to listen to the original voice whenever he could. It was a good way to keep his own ear attuned to the different accents and dialects.

“Is the neighborhood clear?” Decker asked.

“Nothing but us and this death trap here for at least a million klicks,” Maya replied.

“All right. Let’s get on with this so we can be on our way. I don’t want to fly alongside that thing any longer than we must. Henry and Tess, go down to the airlock deck and receive the cargo. Aden, go with them and lend a hand if they need it. We’ll keep an eye on things from up here.”

Aden unbuckled his harness and got out of his gravity couch. When Henry climbed down from the command platform, he saw that the first officer wore his kukri on his left side, attached to the utility loops on the outside of the vacsuit.

“Maya, do a weapons scan when their people are in the collar,” Decker said. “Anyone carries any hardware, you put a hard seal on the airlock, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

“You got it.”

It hadn’t really occurred to Aden before that Zephyr, with all its speed and stealth, might be vulnerable to pirates just like any other civilian merchant. But they hadn’t done an in-flight transfer with anyone since he got on board, and it was logical that this was a calculated security risk. They could outrun any ship or hide from it, but allowing a physical connection between airlocks out here in the middle of nowhere instead of the safety of a space station constituted one half of a forced boarding process already, and it was the difficult half.

He climbed down the ladder to the airlock deck. Henry and Tess followed him, and he cleared the space underneath the ladder as soon as his feet were on the deck. When they were all through the maneuvering-deck hatch, Aden watched the hatch cover swing into place and seal off the opening.

Henry walked over to the main airlock and opened the inner hatch. The outer hatch had a small Alon porthole in it. He stepped in front of it and peeked through.

“Let’s see what they have for us,” he said.

Tess accessed the control pad next to the inner hatch and projected a screen that showed the outside of the ship just beyond the airlock. The hull of Iron Pig loomed like a dirty steel wall just ten meters away. The other ship had been painted once, but whatever was left of the original coat was so worn and