by M. D. Cooper
In the end, I selected four crates filled with salvaged parts that Kallie had been hoarding for reasons unknown. I wrapped the cores in EM-dampening fabric and then carefully set a few in the middle of each crate, surrounding them as best I could with parts that would block a handscanner from realizing what was inside.
It wasn’t my best smuggling job, but our better hideaways on the ship took too long to access. I’d worry about a better hideaway if we survived the encounter with Captain Reeve.
Seventeen minutes later, the Restaff closed within weapons range, further heightening the tension. From there, it took another nine minutes to finesse delta-v down to zero, the final maneuvers managed entirely by the navigation comps on the two ships using small pulses from the grav drives to carefully align them.
I’d taken time to check on Kallie and have a light snack before arriving on the bridge to see Finn watching the forward display while sucking on his bottom lip.
He glanced at me and gave a wan smile. “OK, when I proposed this plan, I didn’t fully appreciate how fucking terrifying it is to be this close to another ship moving this fast with no shields.”
“We have shields,” I gestured at the status readout on my console. “Just not on our port side.”
“Yeah…where the other ship is sitting with all those beam optics pointed at us.”
I chuckled while settling into my seat. “I keep forgetting that you’ve never seen ship-to-ship action. Things feel a lot different out here in the black, don’t they?”
Finn nodded, and I could tell that he was putting on a brave face. “I mean, I’ve been in some small dust-ups on stations, but this is…vulnerable. One mistake, and our ships rip each other apart like tin cans.”
“Then we don’t make any mistakes,” Tammy grunted. “Don’t worry. They think I’ve slaved the autopilot to their ship’s Non-Sentient AI, but that was just a sandboxed instance of it. Our nav comp is still running standalone. Not going to let some foreign NSAI pilot the Kerrigan. No way, no how.”
“As it should be,” I replied. “And definitely not Skip’s brother. Shocker he doesn’t accidentally ram that thing into stations half the time.”
I drew in a deep breath, forcing myself to relax. The only thing I had to do was talk to Reeve and make sure he didn’t suspect anything. Kallie would deliver the cargo, and Tammy would boost out as soon as the bomb was inside the enemy ship.
“Captain Reeve,” I said after reactivating the connection. “We’re ready to send the crates over. A drone will take them down the umbilical, you can keep it as a tip.”
The man shook his head and snorted. “Like I want your bot on my ship. Probably filled with rogue nano. You’ll send over one of your crew with it.”
“No deal,” I replied. “I’m not putting one of my people within your grasp.”
The man barked a cold laugh. “Either someone from your crew comes over with the crates, or I send a boarding party and we take them from you.”
“You do that, and we’ll destroy them,” I warned. “Why the need to have a crewmember bring them? Just send your own bot over, if you don’t trust ours.”
Reeve’s lips twisted into a cruel smile. “I want a hostage while we check over the cargo.”
I flashed him an annoyed look—which didn’t require an ounce of acting—and paused the feed.
Kallie’s groan filled my mind.
I nodded slowly.
I nodded emphatically.
Kallie’s presence disappeared from my mind, and I unpaused the feed, fixing Captain Reeve with a dark glower.
“OK. Have it your way. I’m sending over one of my crew.”
“Good.” The Restaff’s captain laughed, and not pleasantly. “We’ll be sure to give them a warm welcome. And if we pick up even a trickle of EM from your weapons, we’ll waste you. Our weapons are hot and locked on.”
Yeah. I’ve noticed, you asshole.
I tapped the feeds and saw that she’d donned one of the tight, EV-capable shipsuits that didn’t hide any aspect of her well-toned figure. A quick-fit helmet hung off the back of the neck, drifting behind her as she passed into the connecting passage’s zero-g environment, pushing the three crates in front of her.
Normally I’d take a moment to appreciate how good Kallie looked, but this time, my gaze shifted and focused entirely on the two men with pulse rifles standing in the other ship’s open airlock.
Both were armored, with helmets latched on and faceshields sealed. I wished Kallie had done the same, but she must have decided it would be better to appear less threatening.
A timer appeared on the feed, a two-minute countdown for the limpet mine that was in the bottom crate.
Kallie took her time crossing the thirty-meter umbilical that stretched between the ships, moving languidly in the low gravity, while I couldn’t help but mutter that she should get a move on.
“She knows what she’s doing, boss. She’ll be OK.” Tammy’s tone belied the confidence in her words.
“I’ll remain tense and anxious, thank you very much,” I replied. “I don’t know how she’s going to get in and out of there in time.”
Tammy nodded. “It’ll be tight. We’re going to bring the shields up as close to their hull as possible. She only needs to get a few meters into the umbilical.”
“How many is a few?”
“Ten?” Finn ventured. “The further the better, since the tube isn’t going to last long.”
I nodded silently, hating the fact that it was Kallie and not me delivering the crates. There was no one in the ‘verse I cared for more than her. We’d tried out a romantic fling at one point, but it hadn’t worked. Thankfully, the attempt hadn’t messed with our working relationship, and she’d stayed on.
A part of me wondered if she remained as much for the action as my company. She seemed to enjoy the rush that came from our line of work.
The countdown read 1:21 when Kallie reached the other side, stopping just outside the airlock and grabbing a handhold. I flipped a control to pipe her suit’s audio pickups into the bridge.
“Here you go.” She pushed the crates into the other ship. “Enjoy your notoriety.”
“Wait,” one of the guards said as he caught the crates and lowered them to the deck. “We’re going to check them before you go.”
Kallie pantomimed a yawn. “Sure, whatever. I’m getting paid by the hour.”
The guard grunted something I couldn’t quite make out and proceeded to pull off the straps that had bundled the three crates together.
“Fuck…what’s this shit smeared on these?” one of the goons asked, and Kallie only laughed.
“Beats me. They were on Barras, could be anything.”
The man only grunted and took a moment to run a handscanner over the top one before opening the lid. Ins
ide rested five NSAI cores that looked as close to the DSA ones as we could manage.
I prayed to whatever stars were listening that these two grunts wouldn’t know what the military cores really looked like.
Still standing at the mouth of the airlock, Kallie shifted, peering in at the cores. “Oh, wow, what are those for?”
“Nunya damn business,” the second guard said as they closed up the crate and set it aside, moving on to the second one.
“Gee…so huffy.” She leaned over further, placing a hand on the control panel inside—or I assumed that was what she was doing.
“You got it,” Finn whispered. “Just hold…yes!”
I got the distinct impression my crew was up to something I wasn’t aware of.
“What’s she doing?”
Finn looked both excited and terrified as he worked frantically at his console. “Well, we didn’t want most of the blast to come out the airlock. So we’re gonna hack their controls and flash cycle the lock. Send that boom inside the ship.”
“You had her drop nano on the controls!”
The breacher gave me a worried look. “Well, to be fair, it was her idea.”
I knew there was nothing for it now. I was far less worried about the two goons inspecting the crates catching sight of Kallie touching the panel than whoever might be watching the feeds. Namely Reeve. He struck me as a suspicious type, and—
“Hey!” One of the guards snapped their head up. “Get your hand off that control.”
“What?” Kallie asked innocently, then glanced at her left hand as though it had moved of its own volition. “Oh, sorry!”
“Shit!” Finn hissed. “They’re running a diag on the airlock control systems….”
I glanced at the time and saw that it was down to twenty seconds.
The exchange chewed two seconds off the clock, and I tasted blood from gnawing the inside of my cheek.
“Allllmost there,” Finn intoned from his station. “Alllllmost….”
“Finn—” I prompted.
The countdown was at five seconds when she shifted, planted her feet on the edge of the airlock, and pushed off, flying backward down the umbilical.
“What the—” one of the guards rose, swinging his rifle toward Kallie.
A concussive blast came from his weapon, the focused pulse rippling through the air to hit Kallie center mass. She slammed into the side of the tube and tried to grab one of the ribs, her hands scrabbling for purchase.
Then a second blast hit her, and the umbilical ripped. Explosive decompression tore a gaping hole, and a second later, Kallie was gone, sucked out into the black.
Everything slowed down. I watched the airlock on the enemy ship close—whether in response to the decompression or Finn’s actions, I didn’t know. Then, less than a second after the Restaff’s hull sealed, the skin of the other ship seemed to bulge, straining as it desperately tried to keep what was inside from getting out.
The airlock failed first. The door tore free, followed by a burst of red flame and shrapnel, all of which splashed against the Kerrigan’s shields.
I barely noticed any of it as I shifted my focus to the ship’s external optics, desperately searching for Kallie, begging the stars for her to be within the Kerrigan’s shield bubble.
A few seconds later, I spotted Kallie’s body a dozen meters from the hull, drifting back toward the engines. She was twisting around, struggling to get her quick-fit helmet on. Rather than have Oln traverse the dangling umbilical, I triggered its release, using small jets around the airlock to push it away from the ship and give him room to get past.
Shifting my attention back to my engineer, I could see that she’d gotten her helmet on. It occurred to me, eleven seconds after she’d been sucked out the hole, that I could reach out to her on the Link.
I pulled up a view of the Restaff, giving an appreciative whistle at the large hole that had been blown in the enemy ship’s hull. They hadn’t fired yet, but I knew it would just be a matter of time before Reeve decided to get revenge.
With Kallie out in the black, we couldn’t move away from the other craft without moving away from her as well.
Activating the targeting systems for the main gun, I swiveled it around to aim at the other ship, while ordering Finn to bring our point defense systems online.
You never need shit like that till you really need it.
Attitude jets on the Restaff fired, and the ship rotated, turning its gaping wound away from us. Moments later, the enemy’s beams lanced out, their relativistic particles harmlessly bending around the Kerrigan by our shields’ graviton fields.
“Our super conductor batteries are down to eighty-percent,” Finn announced.
“Bring the fusion plant back online,” I ordered. “I want enough juice to pound those bastards to dust.”
“You got it,” he replied, then gave a worried cough. “Oh shit.”
I saw it too. The Restaff sported a railgun and two fifteen-centimeter beams that were now in position to fire on the Kerrigan.
Next time, we send over two limpets.
Our own weapons were still twenty seconds from a full charge. I had enough juice to fire one now, but I wanted to give it to Reeve with both barrels.
I sent a non-verbal acknowledgement, wincing as the Restaff fired all three of their main weapons, further draining our shield batteries.
“Their shields are still down, boss,” Tammy exclaimed. “What are you waiting for?”
“A finishing blow,” I replied, my voice deadly serious.
I selected multiple targets on the enemy ship, and let loose with four point defense beams and our railgun.
The beams struck the enemy’s own directed energy weapons while our main gun pulverized their rail. Secondary explosions rippled along Restaff’s hull, and a call lit up on my board.
I activated an audio-only connection, and Reeve’s voice echoed through our bridge. “We yield. Don’t fire again. Please!”
Dozens of snarky responses flowed through my mind, but I managed to keep them all in check. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Chal’s patrol boats will be here in about half an hour. They’ll give you a ride back to Barras.”
“Fuck you, Bremen,” Reeve swore. “You’re a piece of shit, leaving me to get caught by the lo—”
“You’ll wanna save your air, buddy, you’re leaking a bit here and there. Also, this is still a hell of a lot nicer than what you were going to do to me. Maybe a little bit of jail time will help you become a better person.”
“I’ll break out,” Reeve growled. “I’ll break out and I’ll find you and—”
“Sure, whatever. By then, I’ll have tracked down and killed Skip, so if you come to me, that’ll save me the troubl
e of hunting you down too. The only reason I’m not blowing you out of the black right now is because I imagine you might have one or two half-decent people on your ship, and I figure it’s worth giving them a fighting chance.”
With a nod, Tammy was out of her chair and sprinting off the bridge.
It was a pain that our medic was also our pilot, but I hadn’t found anyone else better at either job—who was also willing to serve on the Kerrigan—so Tammy did double duty.
Often at the most inconvenient times.
The fusion plant was fully warmed up, and I activated the engines, deuterium fusing into heavier elements, thrusting high-velocity reaction mass out the back of the ship and easing us away from the Restaff.
We were a kilometer away from the other vessel when Finn let out a shriek and screamed, “Brace!”
A star had erupted just aft of the ship. Brilliant blue-white light eclipsed even Chal’s bright orange glow. The shockwave was only a few milliseconds behind the photons, a torrential blast of energy bowling the Kerrigan over, and sending the ship spinning through the black.
5
RECOVERY
Alarms blared while the inertial compensators struggled to keep everyone in the ship from being tossed around like so much flotsam and jetsam.
After what felt like an eternity, the shockwave passed, and the attitude systems stabilized the ship, the groans of the strained hull fading into an eerie silence.
“Shit, Finn,” I muttered after drawing a shaky breath. “Was that what I think it was?”
“Antimatter,” he said with a nod. “Had to be. Energy is off the charts. Their bottle must have ruptured.”
I didn’t say what I suspected really happened—that Reeve had somehow breached his bottle on purpose in an attempt to take our ship out along with his. It seemed crazy, but perhaps he feared prison more than death.