Soundless Conflicts

by S. Walker

  "Right. Let's avoid that. Which heading are you taking?" Siers queued another launch, fingers hovering over execution indicators. "I have Cormorents on standby, but we can't keep using them at this rate."

  "I know! I'm going to pull us about ten degrees down, fifteen to port." She threw a countdown timer onto his display. "We need to angle away from the mining rig on that gas giant. Three, two..."

  On 'one' Jamet twitched both hands, flicking two singularities below the bow and the third to port. She tried to stagger them; two close enough for a hard downward pull with the port side at a hundred miles out for a weak turn. Siers had a brief second to smash his own command before momentum tore through local gravity and everyone flopped like rag dolls against their restraints.

  Three Cormorents blasted from their starboard launch bay, singularities blazing to life and instantly lost to visual as the Kipper's course diverged at seven hundred miles per second.

  Janson fought upright first, big arms straining. "Only got thirty five thousand miles that time. It's learnin' not to chase the flashy lights."

  "Goddammit!" Jamet felt like half her abdomen was going to be a massive bruise from getting pummeled. "Get another launch queued, we didn't turn far enough. We're going to do a flyby on the mining rig if we don't turn again!"

  "Wait!" Paul coughed, his one arm straining against the harness. "The rig! We can't lead this thing there!"

  "I know!" She screamed right back. "It's too expensive to lose!"

  "Or there might be survivors, lieutenant."

  "That's even worse. Captain, I need another launch-- same side, but upwards ten degrees!"

  "Wait! Wait, wait! Don't!" Emilia pinged everyone at once, making the entire bridge jump. "Just fake it!"

  Jamet slapped together a countdown icon, then threw it onto Captain Siers' workspace. "How exactly does one fake a Cormorent launch, technician, because I am dying to know!" She glanced at the callout. "Maybe literally. Five seconds!"

  Emilia scrambled to explain. "Use the singularities! Start them close and flick 'em out, exactly like a launch! I don't think they can see what is making the singularity, just that there are moving gravity wells!"

  She hesitated, palms smashed against both sets of manual navigation controls. "Captain?"

  "Give it a try. We have at least one more dodge after that before they'll catch us."

  Jamet cursed. "Alright. Emilia I swear to the brightest stars if this kill us-"

  "Your career file will be ruined! Whatever! Just do it!"

  Paul, that bastard, actually gave a pained laugh. Janson grinned and even Captain Siers ghosted a smile.

  "I am going to space that little shit," Jamet muttered to herself, then raised her voice to a yell. "Everyone hold on! Three! Two! One! Now."

  Kipper's oversized Krepsfield generator strained as she hauled all three artificial singularities to minimum distance from the starboard hull. In response every bolt, plate and support beam screamed as it tried to lean in that direction, pulled by impossible forces nearly into a triple event horizon. Something snapped off their superstructure, there and gone in the blink of an eye on exterior sensors as hungry gravitational forces crushed tons of metal like it was nothing.

  Janson groaned in horror. Emilia screamed like a burst pipe, high pitched and terrified, while Paul hissed in pain from Medical. Captain Siers whispered something that was lost in the cacophony. Over it all Kipper howled like the universe was ending, deafeningly loud.

  Into that mess Jamet flung her hand like it had a spider on it, hurling status indicators nearly off her workspace.

  All three singularities shot into the darkness of intra-planetary space, hitting max distance in less than a second before her console died in an explosion of sparks and the smell of burning electronics. Bridge lights flickered as power cut in and out, briefly silencing wailing alarms.

  The sudden silence on the bridge sounded like the world ended between heartbeats.

  Everyone's eyes shot to the callout, glued to the distance indicator and the red blob next to it. It was turning hard, projected course lines arcing in savage parabolas towards where Kipper's singularities had vanished. Numbers blurred upwards: A hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand, three.

  Jamet whooped. "Juked!"

  Bridge power went out, leaving them screaming laughter at each other in the dark. It was a long minute before the overheads came back, lights dim and blinking as Janson struggled to route around broken relays.

  Captain Siers slumped in the command chair, held in place by restraints tight enough to leave pressure cuts on his uniform. "Damage? Status? What's our heading?"

  "My console's out! Workspace is dead," Emilia yelled. She had one hand to the back of her head, visor tilted towards the overheads as she frowned. "I still have connection to Infrastructure systems on my 'chip, but it's in a bad way."

  "Same," Janson concurred, baritone and breathy. "Ah got local chip links to Maintenance an' part of Engineering but it's all spotty. Also I think I popped a rib or four." He wheezed twice, taking big breaths and letting them out again. "Need ta get a skinsuit an' go down, find out how bad it is."

  Paul staggered across the bridge to Janson, using console edges to help him walk. "Don't move. Get your overalls down, let me see your side."

  "Do yah want me to not move, or get mah suit down?"

  "Both." He prodded Janson's side, gently running one thin hand under the suit material. "Not good. You have at least one transverse fracture, probably two. Anyone else hurt?"

  "Yeah, you are." Emilia sounded angry. "You're down an arm!"

  "I noticed, but Medical is not responding to my chip and I need to prioritize injuries. Captain? Lieutenant?"

  Siers shook his head, then winced. "Feels like a pulled everything from the waist up."

  "Same," Jamet concurred. "Although I had my restraint harness on, so I probably missed the worst of it early on." She grinned smugly at Emilia, who scowled back in response.

  The bridge took that moment to slowly come to life, consoles beeping in tired rebooting patterns. Captain Siers waited a moment, then tapped some controls and tossed the results onto the forward screens. It was an edge-on solar map of the system with callouts denoting the drifting Kipper, their pursuer and every system feature. On screen the red dot of pursuit was currently blasting away from them at nearly a forty degree angle, chasing nothing towards the outermost asteroid belt.

  He frowned. "It hasn't slowed down, but it stopped changing direction. Flying blind, perhaps?"

  "I certainly hope so," Paul muttered, then turned to the big engineer. "Janson, help me load this autopresser, then inject yourself. It's a local, so don't move around too much or you might puncture a lung and not feel it."

  The big man eyed the injector, but complied. "Ah hate these things."

  Siers flicked an icon onto Jamet's workstation, then tapped it open. "Lieutenant, we're still moving. Do you see where that last maneuver put us on track for?"

  She awkwardly opened it, both hands framing a new window around the working half of her display. "Looks like we're on track to pass the mining rig. Or at least come within a hundred thousand miles of it sometime in the next four or five days. Until the Krepsfield comes back online I can't do much about that. Why?"

  "Can we dock, do you think?"

  She blinked. "Without using the singularities to slow down, first? I really don't feel like pancaking into them at a thousand miles per second."

  "Seconded," Emilia grumbled, barely audible. Then, louder: "Wait, we can retro-fire! Slow down with the attitude rockets, maybe."

  "You want to use the docking thrusters to decelerate?" Jamet scowled at her, then looked thoughtful. "That would take days. But we have days, so maybe...?"

  Siers nodded once. "Alright, until navigation and communications are back up that's your project. Janson, I need you on repairs; that's a priority. If you need anyone's help pull them immediately. Paul-"

  "I know, sir." He grimaced. "I have Enviro
nmental on chip but the signal is dropping in and out. Medical is a non-starter, nothing is responding."

  "I was going to order you to get that arm fixed." He indicated the improvised sling with a short nod.

  "Believe me, sir-- that is definitely on my mind. I am, however, short-handed." He smiled wanly.

  The captain laughed. "Short-handed. Unbelievable. Lieutenant Jamet?"

  "Sir?" She blinked, surprised at being addressed.

  "Would you mind assisting?"

  They locked eyes for a brief moment. Jamet looked skeptical, but Siers gave her a subtle eye flick towards the injured man, then raised both eyebrows in entreaty. She frowned, but then a recent memory surfaced of an angry Paul Noscome stalking away from her with both fists clenched and his shoulders up. Making friends, I see.

  "Sure," Jamet nodded at the surprised Medical technician. "Show me the way."

  Chapter 9

  Medical Aides

  It turned out Medical was mid-deck, which currently had a very noticeable lack of atmosphere.

  Paul Noscome, Kipper's medical technician, frowned at the console next to the sealed hatch. "That is... not ideal." He was awkwardly manipulating icons and menus with one hand while the other stayed up in an improvised sling.

  "Is there another way around?" Lieutenant Jamet crouched slightly to peer through the inset transparent panel. The other side was mostly dark with ice crystals floating through strobing emergency lights. "Or can you get into a skinsuit with your arm like that?"

  He swiped the console closed, backing out of menus and stepping away. "Getting into a sealed suit would be too much. Not to mention my chip recommends against tight bindings without some sort of analgesic to prevent swelling."

  "Alright, then where's the nearest emergency medical kit? We'll use that." She took a turn on the console, swiping her wrist ID to unlock. A moment later her query was in, the local system highlighting the nearest medical kit. She oriented, then pointed back down the corridor. "There, it's just back a bit, behind the next bulkhead."

  Paul was frowning at her from nearly two feet above Jamet's head. "Are you not worried about the cost of those, lieutenant?" If hostility was a torpedo he'd have put a hole straight through the smaller woman. Somehow the atonal way he spoke made it even worse-- throwbacks to Kipper's simulator from several hours ago recommending she never be allowed to manually navigate.

  Although to be fair Jamet had wrecked the ship into pretty much every possible obstacle. Multiple times, in most cases. If pixels were people she'd be in the running for mass murderer; it was hard to fault Kipper's assessment.

  She gritted her teeth and chose to ignore the bitterness. "This way. Try not to get your head stuck in a vent or something."

  Jamet led the way along for a bit, scanning bulkheads until the bright yellow attention markers jumped out. She reached up and grabbed the prominent handle, throwing her weight on the lever until the entire compartment popped open. A rack of equipment rolled out: Handheld lights and neatly folded skinsuits, strapped in place above an entire breach patching kit in a solid black box. But there, toward the bottom and prominently marked on both sides: The medical kit.

  She snagged the suitcase-sized packet and hauled it off the rack onto the floor. Her wrist ID popped the case open, spreading a wonderland of single use packets and handheld testing devices. Jamet frowned, then looked up. "A little help, here?"

  Paul rolled his eyes and took a knee. "The yellow box first, it is an emergency air cast. Grab those scissors as well; I cannot cut this off myself left-handed."

  She pulled the box out, then hesitated for a moment until he impatiently pointed out an impossibly small set of finger length scissors tucked into the case side. "Right. Hold still." She got to work, starting at his cuff and working upwards to the shoulder.

  He hissed when she bumped the swollen knot above the elbow. "A bit more care, lieutenant. You cannot buy me another arm if you take this one off."

  Jamet glared at her work, refusing to look up. With exaggerated care she ran the scissors upward, parting fabric until the sleeve fell off with a soft sound. Paul's revealed arm was mottled white and purple from the elbow down with a giant knot above the joint almost as big as her fists put together. It throbbed as she watched, beating in time with his straining heart. She winced just looking at it. "Okay, now the cast?"

  "Not unless you want to saw my limb off tomorrow. Get the internal scanner first, I need to see how bad it is."

  She looked at the kit, open and waiting. Looked back at Paul. "What does it look like?"

  "Are you completely serious? Did you skip every required emergency training?" He was sweating now as the earlier pain injection started wearing off. "How can a single person be so utterly useless?"

  "This doesn't come up!" She shouted right back. "Most ships have a full crew, or at least half a dozen technicians cross trained on... on everything! Of course I never paid attention because this isn't my job. I shouldn't even have to do this at all!"

  He took a deep breath and blinked a drop of sweat out of one bloodshot eye. "Clearly," he hissed, voice atonal and accusing. "A failing of the crew and not yourself for never paying attention to basic emergency procedures. I suppose there really are some things money cannot buy."

  Jamet took a hot dose of anger, tossed a dash of remorse on top and swallowed. Hard. "Fine. I shouldn't have leaned on the crew. How does that help now?"

  Her abrupt admission caught Paul by surprise. He shut his mouth on a scathing quip, then pointed with his good hand. "The long silver and white stick, as thick as your finger. That is it."

  Paul walked her through cracking the sensor in half, then awkwardly pinning half between his side and the hurt arm. He held the other half lengthwise on the outside, lining them up with the bruised knot in between. "Push the green button."

  She did, then hesitated when nothing seemed to happen. "Is it broken?"

  "Clearly."

  "I meant the sensor, you smug asshole."

  He snorted. "No, it just took a scan. Grab this half, take it to the console over there. It should swipe over the ID sensor on front; try to angle the display so I can see."

  Jamet grabbed half the stick, then came off her knees with a loud pop and waved it over the console. It instantly came to life with a recognizable picture of a thick white bone, flesh and burst blood vessels in a ghostly gray halo around it. Unfortunately the white streak was snapped near the bottom, pieces misaligned and jutting into tissue. "That looks very broken."

  "Well I am glad one of us has medical training, then." Paul was streaming tears steadily now. "It is not as bad as it looks."

  She looked from the enormously swollen lump on his arm to the display, clearly showing pieces that weren't touching any more. "Are you serious? Doesn't that hurt-" He glared. "Right. Sorry."

  "Put it on my bill. Regardless, I was worried it may have been a comminuted or oblique fracture. This is clean, just painful. I will need your help to align the pieces again."

  "Right. Okay." She took several deep breaths.

  "Try not to overcharge for your assistance."

  "Would you please stop that?" Jamet started to hit Paul's kneeling form, then held off in favor of frustrated screaming. "Are you trying to piss me off right before we're going to twist your bones around? How is that beneficial?"

  He took a deep breath, held it for a moment and blew it slowly out again with both eyes closed. "I apologize. I will give directions, please assist as best you can. If you have questions please ask before doing anything-- this is not something we can halt halfway through for a quick tutorial."