“Won’t they check your tools?” Nadine asked.

  “They never have before,” Rick said.

  “When?” Riley asked.

  “No time like the present,” Nadine said. “I’ve got access to one gun they missed. It’s hidden in the tool closet. I’ll grab that. You get on board. The three of us will wait in the lounge. When you come back with the rest of the guns, we’ll shoot our way through and take off. What do you think?”

  “I think it sounds great,” Riley said. “Let’s do it. Dad?”

  Rick took a deep breath. “I want you out of here as soon as possible. You can pilot the ship without me if need be. I’ll go last, and hold them off, and you three can go.”

  “Dad,” Riley said.

  “Don’t worry, merchie, it won’t come to that. Your dad gets the guns, a bit of yelling, and we’re on our way. We’ll be fine.” Nadine stood up. “Let’s go.”

  Rick and Riley got to their feet and began to move toward the door. All three of them stopped when they realized that Jake hadn’t moved. He sat with his eyes closed and his head on his cupped hands.

  “Jake?” Rick said.

  “Rick, did they reinforce the magnetic grapples after we latched?” Jake asked.

  “Well, yes, we’re chained in now. But we can pop the chains.”

  “We’ll have to have somebody on the hull when we do that.”

  “Riley or Nadine can do it. They both understand cargo equipment,” Rick said.

  “Nadine has never used cargo gear. It will have to be Riley,” Jake said. Rick shuffled uncomfortably and looked at his daughter.

  “I’ll be in a skinsuit, Dad, no problem,” Riley said.

  “Have you ever shot a person, Rick?” Jake asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s harder than it looks. Are you a good marksman?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t have to be. I’ll just shoot a lot of bullets at them. They’ll duck.”

  “Those are six-shot revolvers. Even Mack’s people can count. After six, they’ll rush you.”

  “I’ll bring two,” Rick said.

  “Or I can shoot them,” Nadine said. “Try telling me I’m a bad shot. I’ll demonstrate on you first.”

  “Where would we go from here, Rick? What type of orbit are we in? Can you navigate a course for us?” Jake said.

  Rick looked at his daughter and coughed. “We’re pretty high. I’m not sure what’s up here. Riley does our navigation.”

  Riley looked at Jake. “Jake, we can’t just stay here forever.”

  “I’m not saying stay here forever, but I don’t see the point in firing out of here and ending up drifting, then getting picked up by Mack’s Militia buddies. He definitely has friends in the Militia. I want to collect more information.”

  “That’s our Jake. Wants more information,” Nadine said. “You know, Jake, for a while I thought you were going to man up, but it seems like you’re back to your old ways.”

  Jake ignored her. “And, Rick, what about all those workers that are here? The workers you brought out here? Are you just going to abandon them here?”

  “We’ll tell somebody when we get back,” Rick said.

  “Mack will space them before anybody gets here and claim you were raving,” Jake said.

  Rick leaned toward Jake. “I don’t care. It’s my fault my daughter is here. I want her off this rock. Are you going to help us or not?”

  All three of them looked at him. Jake shook his head and stood up. “Let’s go,” he said.

  They suited up in semi-hard suits to get some protection from gunfire. Rick left for the R&R. The three others commandeered an office near the lock. In case somebody asked what they were doing, Jake put up a diagram of the heating system on the wall, complete with red outlined failures and a parts list. They were there only half an hour before a sweating Rick returned carrying a big toolbox.

  “Well?” Nadine said.

  “Got everything. They left me alone on the bridge for few minutes, and I was able to check the fuel. Still about half—plenty to get far away.”

  “And the guns?” Riley said.

  “Three of them, one each for the rest of us. Some bad news: They cleaned most of the ammunition out of the locker, but there was enough for these guns and an extra half-dozen for each of us,” Rick said. He pulled the guns out of his tool bag and handed them around. Nadine pulled her Gauss pistol out and held it by her leg. Riley and Rick both loaded their revolvers and put them in holsters attached to their belts.

  “You’re sweating a lot, Rick,” Jake said.

  “It’s this Empire-damned semi-hard suit,” Rick said. “They’ve turned the heat up on the ship.”

  Jake looked at Rick’s suit. “Did they ask any questions about the suit?”

  “No, why would they?”

  “You’ve never worn one on board before,” Jake said.

  Rick shrugged. “They didn’t say anything. Ready?”

  “Ready,” Nadine said.

  “Ready,” Riley said.

  “Riley, stay behind me. Jake?” Rick said.

  Jake just nodded.

  Nadine took the lead. They trooped down the hall, turned the corner, and walked into the airlock to the truss.

  Nadine whipped her hand over her head and fired at the ceiling. “I’ll shoot the first person who moves,” she said. She stepped back and swung her pistol from side to side. Dust floated from where her last shot had impacted the ceiling.

  Mack was there, along with two of his guys. They were sitting at a table across the room, talking.

  “What is this?” Mack said.

  “Give us your guns, Mack,” Nadine said. “We’re getting out of here. We’ll shoot you if you stop us.”

  “Really? You can’t shoot all of us with that little pistol,” Mack said. “A pistol that small, it can have only a single shot, and you already fired that up there….”

  Mack’s group started to stand up from the table.

  “That’s an Old Empire Gauss pistol,” Rick said. He stepped up toward Mack, pointing his gun with his right hand. He used his left to push Riley behind him. “It shoots micro-needles, not shells. Her magazine will have hundreds of them.”

  “I’m not afraid of some tiny little needles, old man,” Mack said. He continued to rise.

  “You should be,” Jake said. “It’s physics. Momentum is mass times velocity squared. The needles are very, very little, true. But they are moving ten, maybe twenty kilometers a second. They’ll just leave a little hole in the front, but the energy liberated will blow your lungs out through your backbone. Plus, since it’s magnetic, the rate of fire is hundreds of needles per second if she puts it on automatic. It will look kind of like she fed you through one of those metal cutting saws.”

  “Well, thank you, professor,” said Mack. He sat down and waved off his guys.

  “Here,” Mack said. He pulled a pistol out of his belt with two fingers, and slid it across the floor to Nadine. “You guys too,” he said to his companions, and they did likewise.

  Nadine faced them and brandished the pistol. “We’re getting out of here. Mack, just let us go, otherwise I’ll fill you full of holes. Tiny holes, but thousands of them.”

  “Okay, go ahead,” Mack said, and leaned back and crossed his arms.

  “Okay?” Nadine said.

  “Sure, go,” Mack said. “You’ve got the guns. How can I stop you?” He smiled at them, and gestured to the airlock.

  Rick and Riley stepped toward the airlock and began to spin the locking wheel. It stuck. Nadine kept her gun trained on Mack and his guys.

  Mack kept smiling. His eyes drifted up and focused above Jake’s shoulder. Jake turned around. Mack had been looking at a video monitor. It showed an empty airlock. But there was a flash of motion in one corner. Somebody was in the airlock.

  “Nadine,” Jake said.

  “What, Jake?” Nadine asked.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Shut up, Jake,” Riley said. “The door is stuck. Help us with it.”

  “Riley, I don’t think—” Jake began.

  “Shut up, Jake,” Nadine said. “Now is not the time. You either help us leave, or stay here and stay with Mack.”

  Jake looked at Riley and Rick struggling with the lock. It was stuck. He looked back at Mack. Mack was smiling and winked at Jake.

  Jake sighed and flipped open his revolver. He then dumped the bullets in the cylinder into his hand, and reloaded it with green-banded bullets he’d pulled from the pouch in his backpack.

  “I have a plan, Nadine,” Jake said.

  “Of course, you do, Jake. What’s your call?”

  Jake clicked the gun shut and tried to spin the cylinder. It jammed. He pulled it out and reseated it. It spun this time.

  “I’m glad that worked. You know I’m not good with guns, Nadine,” Jake said. He pushed the revolver toward Nadine’s arm.

  She glanced at him. “Jake, I’m busy here. Just put it in your pocket or something so that you don’t hurt anybody. Chances are you’ll shoot yourself. Now, what’s your plan to get out of here?”

  “It’s complicated,” Jake said.

  He paused and rolled his hand to the side to check it. He reached down and held the pistol in both hands, and squeezed the trigger.

  Nadine screamed as the bullet broke her arm. She immediately dropped her Gauss pistol.

  Rick turned from the airlock. He was too shocked to speak, so he didn’t cringe at all when Jake turned toward him and shot him in the chest of his semi-hard suit, twice. The first shot jerked him backward, the second one knocked him down, and he collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  Riley screamed as her father fell down in front of her and looked up at Jake. Jake made a kind of ‘oops’ motion with his shoulder. Riley froze for a second, then turned to run away. Jake shot her in the leg. It took three shots. She fell, holding her leg.

  Mack blinked for a moment, but then slid out from behind the chair and reached down to grab Nadine’s dropped pistol. He had reached his fingers forward when Jake’s foot came down on his hand, trapping it on top of the pistol. Mack started to draw backward but stopped when he looked up and saw Jake pointing the revolver directly into his left eye.

  Jake stood over him and increased the pressure on the trigger. Mack saw the trigger move back very slowly. Jake held his finger pressure and spoke. “I’m not very good with guns, Mack, and I don’t want to shoot you by accident. I’m going to move my foot, and I want you to scoot backwards. You should do this quickly. I can’t hold that pressure forever, and if I have to do something with my finger, it’s going to clench it, not relax it. Understand?”

  “Got it,” Mack whispered, eyes on the trigger finger. Jake lifted his foot but kept his heel on the ground, and Mack leaned back on his haunches and began to slide backward. Jake kept the revolver pointed at his head until Mack was seated back on the chair, then Jake stooped and recovered the Gauss pistol with his left hand, and fumbled it into a pouch on his belt.

  Nadine groaned and rolled a bit. Jake stepped toward her and pointed the pistol at her chest and fired one round. Her chest banged against the ground, and there was a whoosh of her breath rolling out. Jake pulled the trigger again but only had a click. He tried a second time and got another click.

  “Right,” Jake said. It’s a six-shooter. I forgot. They always yelled at me in training. I never counted my shots right.”

  Mack nodded at Jake but didn’t move. Jake nodded at him.

  “I know. It’s kind of like your favorite house cat just grew fangs and slashed his neighbor’s throat.”

  Mack smiled. “And was eating chunks of his face.”

  Jake looked at the revolver and frowned. He pocketed it and sat down at the next table over. Then he pulled the Gauss gun out of his belt pouch with his left hand and transferred it to his right hand. He looked at the gun in his hand. “A little small for me, I think, but I can see why Nadine liked it. Now, Mack.” Jake spun the gun in his hand once, then twice. “Huh. That’s more fun than it looks. Now, Mack, earlier we talked about a job—a promotion. I’ve decided I will be your deputy. I feel you have a good operation here, but it could be a great operation with modern accounting practices. We need better inventory, logistics, allowances for wastage, and we need a system to smooth out production. I have a number of ideas, but frankly, rather than trying to explain them all, I really think you should just let me start implementing them myself. It will be my responsibility if they don’t work out, but if they do, I expect to be well compensated. Very well compensated. I think in this exploratory period, it’s best if you just give me a free hand to implement the changes I want. What do you say?”

  Mack had regained a bit of his composure, but his attention was captured by Jake’s random spinning of the Gauss pistol in his right hand. He looked up at Jake and gestured down with his chin.

  “What? Oh, sorry,” Jake said. He stopped spinning the loaded pistol and put it in his pocket. “Sorry. What do you say? Can we discuss this now?”

  Mack nodded. “Sure, Jake, why not.”

  “Good, good. Okay.” Jake turned around. “You folks in the lock can come out. Don’t shoot anybody. The emergency’s over. Mack and I are talking.”

  There was a long silence. Finally, Mack yelled, “Okay, show’s over, come out—Everything’s fine.”

  The lock’s door spun open, and three of Mack’s guys came out. They carried strange-looking weapons with a long metal box below them.

  “Are those machine guns? I’ve never seen one for real, only in pictures,” Jake said.

  “They’re called sub-machine guns,” Mack said. “Don’t shoot as rapidly as your friend’s Gauss guns, but we’ve got lots of them.” He sounded proud.

  “Where did you get them— Oh, the Militia gave them to you?”

  “Right,” Mack said.

  “Huh. What was the tip-off? The semi-hard suit?”

  Mack nodded. “He never wore that before.”

  “And you left the guns there but monitored somehow, so that you could see if we were planning something.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the ammo was fake, or blank, or something.”

  “Training.”

  “Smart. I knew it would never work. But there was no talking to them. I like to be on the winning team. I believe that this establishes my bona fides, then.”

  “Bona fides?”

  “Proof I’m on your side. Shooting my friends proved I’m with you.”

  “I guess it did,” Mack said.

  “Good. Now, the first issue is inventory and storage. We need a full inventory of what’s been produced so far, so I need to talk to whatshisname, the red-headed guy, and we need to make changes right away. Oh, and Mack, I think you need to call somebody to put those three in a medical unit. Next, the staffing of the shifts. We’re not getting the production that we could, and I have a plan.”

  Jake continued to talk, even when the medic took his friends away.

  Chapter 25

  “If we lie to these people, they might kill us,” Mack said.

  “Only if they figure it out, and they won’t,” Jake said.

  “I’m not sure about this, Mr. Professor,” Mack said.

  It was a few weeks after Jake’s surprise defection. Mack had put Jake in charge of production, telling him to ‘prove his loyalty.’ And Jake had. While his initial changes had caused an immediate rise in production, his more complex ones had caused it to soar. Now, Jake was proposing even more ambitious and complex changes.

  “If we are going to cheat, we’re going to cheat in detail,” Jake explained, sitting at his desk. “Mining returns should vary, as the quality of ore and the density of secondary metals change. By being variable, we won’t have to worry about an audit uncovering any shortages.”

  “I don’t understand why you asked for that radar equipment.”

  “This has been a poorly yielding claim. Your bosses figure that you’re siphoning off some. Everybody does.”

  “Nobody better siphon off me, or I’ll shoot ‘em,” Mack said.

  “Mack, we can’t have a sudden surge in production. If we do, they’ll get suspicious. They’ll think you’ve been holding back till now. We need a reason. That radar is the reason.”

  “We’ll just report the same amount as we do now.”

  “Then you won’t get any more money.”

  “Will a radar get us more money?”

  “It won’t. But the changes I’ve made in production will. We’re processing more than double the ore we did just two weeks ago. We’re producing twice as much aluminum and nickel, which is worth a lot of money. But only if we sell it or ship it to your bosses. How do you get your cut out of that?”

  “We ship it to them?”

  “And our numbers increase. Then they think you could have done this before, and maybe you were stealing from them. With the radar, we have a reason—we can say we found richer deposits, and that’s why they are getting more cargo.”

  “We just tell them we are processing more ore.”

  “They will expect to receive more gold and platinum, because the percentages should remain the same in the same ore field.”

  “They can’t have my gold!”

  “Exactly. We process double the ore than we admit to. That inflates our returns, so we look above-average. Getting a little bit better won’t trigger any alarms. Then, we just make sure that the amount of base and precious metals we report is within industry norms for our reported processing, rather than our actual processing, and we can pocket the difference.”

  “Won’t they suspect we are doing this?”

  “That’s why we have the radar equipment. The radar mapping equipment is used to find the direction and density of a mineral seam. Any miner looking at our reports will see a steady improvement after we started using it. The gains in efficiency will make sense to them.”

  “I’m glad it makes sense to you. It’s a little confusing for me.” Mack got up and walked around the table and stretched. They were in Jake’s office. Jake had been using it for meetings for several days. He had invited some of the indents and asked for suggestions. They discussed production changes and schedules. There were even slides and spreadsheets.