by Daniel Gibbs
Henry nodded at that. "It's intended. But with life support not working, the atmosphere in the rest of the ship should fill it." He had to speak louder to get over the growing whistle.
Seconds passed. The whistle didn't go away.
"This seems wrong, Captain," Yanik remarked. "The vacuum should already be weakening."
Yanik's point was a good one. Could they have missed damage back on Trinidad? If the stern holds were exposed to space, they couldn't get the fusion engine going in time.
A fierce look crossed Samina's face. She set the battery down. "I'll be right back," she said before she kicked off the door and headed in another direction.
Henry nodded. As she ran off, he glanced at Yanik. "Pretty enthusiastic, isn't she?"
"I would be concerned if she were not, given our predicament," Yanik replied.
The brave face Samina used when leaving Henry and Yanik vanished quickly. Fear seeped in to replace any bravado she'd felt. It was almost like God was mocking her for leaving Trinidad Station by threatening to throw her into the clutches of the people who stole the homeworld she barely remembered. The deep shadows of the powerless ship around her reinforced this terrible feeling by the way it struck at the most primordial fears in Human instinct. Despite everything, a part of her felt like a monster was going to jump out of the dark at any moment.
"Take care of them." "Spacers look after their own." The words of Chief Khánh and her Uncle Ali inspired her to fight off that fear. Her new crew needed her to act, and act quickly.
Samina's mind dwelled on the task she had in mind. She was used to moving through spaceships, even in zero-G, and she'd been in a Holden-Nagata model ship before. Whatever changes there were between various models, and their sizes, the company tended to have a standard practice for certain things. The location of power output jackets, ladders, stairways, even down to how the hatches worked and, of course, the vacuum suit lockers.
Thanks to the tours of the ship she'd taken between repair shifts, Samina knew where the nearest locker was. It was a journey of a minute to get to it. The design made it easy to open despite no power. Inside were three softsuits and one hardsuit, all of blue coloring. Since she wasn't going EVA and wouldn't be exposed to radiation, she went for one of the soft suits. It unfolded quickly enough in the zero-G. First she inserted her legs into the suit's bottom half, one after the other. For a brief moment, her right foot caught at the end. The impulse to keep pushing until she pushed her foot through came and went, since that would only delay her. She forced herself to pull her leg back up a little, allowing her to shift her foot just enough to slip through into the magboot at the end. Afterward, she reached out and hooked her feet to the bar along the wall, effectively standing "sidewise" in the corridor. Now that her legs were in the suit, the rest was more straightforward. She removed her tool belt and pulled the suit over her arms. The last step was to move the zippers on the neck and chest to seal the softsuit.
Now that the suit was sealed, she reached down to the attached portable life support unit and turned it on. The plastic faceplate had a digital display surface built into it, bringing up the air quantity remaining to her in the corner. The suit had a full set of breathable air, enough to last her a few hours if needed.
This work done, she quickly retrieved her floating toolbelt, put it on her waist, and fitted the other tools into pockets on the softsuit. With this step completed, she unhooked her feet from the bar and placed them against the floor of the corridor. A tap of a button on the chest control module activated the magboots. There was a soft thunk as they came on and fixed her feet to the floor with a weak magnetic field.
The advantage of the soft suit, besides the ease of putting it on, was that it didn't impede her mobility in any way and enabled her magboots to let her run in a zero-G environment. She ran through the weightless ship back to the stern hold entrance, where Yanik and Henry were waiting to open the door. "I'm ready,” she said, her voice resolute and sure.
The two men pulled the door open again. Then the whistling sound came. There was a breach in the hull somewhere, and the longer the hold remained open, the more the ship’s remaining atmosphere would be lost. The moment the door was open enough, Samina squeezed through. The pull she felt through the thin, receding atmosphere of the hold told her the breach was likely along the upper sections just below the upper deck. After giving that a moment’s thought, she turned to bring the battery through. Instead, she found it already moving toward her, Yanik's tail wrapped around it. The tail uncoiled once it was partway through the door, allowing her to take hold of it and pull it through.
"Good luck!" Henry called out before he and the big Saurian shut the door again. The whistling stopped, as did the slight pull. She was alone in the vacuum of the stern hold.
The holds all had connecting passageways to each other, so the two stern holds were linked normally by a corridor. Khánh's rebuild of the ship for the fusion drive system led her to expand them, turning it into the location of the housing for the fusion drive's reactor. Each hold had one of the two fuel tanks, with the machinery to pump the reactant material into the drive to be used. This was the starboard stern hold, so it had the helium-3 tank. The port stern hold held the deuterium tank.
For a moment, Samina thought it showed brilliance on her mentor's part. This mixture of reactants didn't require the sheer heat that a pure helium-3 reactor would need, and the radiation byproduct was relatively less than other, dirtier mixtures. Radiation-resistant materials and filters would make up for what radiation was produced.
No time for geeking out about how awesome Chief Khánh is. Get this job done! Or you'll never see Uncle Ali again!
Outside of the hold, Henry waited by himself. He'd sent Yanik to retrieve softsuits for the both of them. With life support down and some of the remaining oxygen lost from opening the hold, they needed a fresh supply of air.
To his surprise, his commlink lit up. It was Tia's device, calling him. He answered, "How is this working?"
"Piper set my unit up to use its own transceiver system," Tia explained. "It'll drain the battery fast, but for now, I can reach any commlink on the ship. What's our status?"
"Samina's trying to get the fusion drive going. Have Cera on standby."
"What about the inertial compensators?"
"The drive reactor can power some of our systems. We'll give compensators top priority, along with control systems. Everything else is gravy."
"Roger that. I'm up here at manual astrogation. Nothing so far. I've sent the others to the stern astrogation module and the gun turrets. They can call me with updates."
"Keep me informed." Henry shut down the call to preserve Tia's battery. I'm down here with Samina and Yanik. Pieter's got Miri and Brigitte helping him. Tia, Cera, and Piper up front. That leaves Felix, Vidia, and Oskar to be lookouts. If they board, we'll be too scattered to fight back. He pondered what to do next. They may not even board. We've got no power, and they think we're helpless. They could just tractor us along.
He shook his head. Either way, they needed their systems back. Henry resisted the urge to call for Samina to hurry up, even as he mentally counted the seconds down to the likely intercept.
On the Hathaway Clipper, Commander Zhung noted the distance drop below a hundred thousand kilometers. Soon they'd be in range for the shuttles to burn ahead and seize the vessel. Her orders in that regard were strict and straight from Admiral Hartford: take control of the Shadow Wolf as quickly as possible, separate Miri Gaon from the crew, and only then take the ship under tow for return to Pluto Base.
"The deployment is proceeding well," her First Officer, Lieutenant Commander Deveaux, noted. "It looks good for our intended operations, doesn't it?"
"It does," she responded. "I look forward to the end of the war."
"I've put in my fifteen years for when peacetime begins," Deveaux said. "I'm looking forward to returning to Jauresbourg to see my wife and daughter."
"How are they?"
>
"Well enough," Deveaux said. "The SRDB cut the weekly ration by ten percent due to the famine on Gomulka. But they're still healthy."
"Once the war is over, the fleet can redeploy," Zhung noted. "We can demobilize soldiers and crew and deal with the resource shortfalls more easily. The ration cuts will finally end."
Deveaux nodded and remained silent.
Not that Zhung expected him to give an opinion on what would happen. Sometimes she wondered if the SRDB would follow through on the promises of the Social and Public Safety Committee in terms of the war, that after the defeat of the Coalition and their restoration to Society, the resource shortfalls would be over. There would be no more need for further sacrifices, and all would enjoy the fruits of social plenty. But there are always the other threats. The Kelltan and the Oroj are on our borders too. There are rumors about the Jalm'tar Empire to Spinward. Will victory bring us peace? As Deveaux looked to her, Zhung forced the thoughts from her mind and kept her expression straight. Such skepticism had the tinge of anti-social sentiment, and she'd come too far in her career to let any thoughts hold her back.
"Time to target?" she asked aloud, looking for work to clear her mind.
"We're entering the requested shuttle intercept range, tractor range in ten."
"Excellent." She shifted in her chair and waited to bring this operation to its proper conclusion. "Launch the Marines."
34
The empty void was the only thing Tia could see out of manual astrogation. For her, the hardest thing was to keep looking at it. Staring into pitch-black nothingness when her ship was reduced to the same was getting on her nerves. An automatic part of her brain wanted to panic at the entire experience. She fought to keep everything on an even keel down.
She wanted to be angry with Jim for this. For putting them all on the line to save Felix's suicidally-faithful brother from Caetano. But every time the sentiment started to build, she thought of the comrades she'd left behind on Hestia and their horrible fates. She thought of what she wished she could have done to save them from public degradation, the beatings, and humiliations, as well as the deaths of many of them. When she considered it, she found she couldn't blame Jim.
It helped it was easy to blame both their predicament and those memories on the same target—the League of Sol.
Her commlink beeped from an incoming message. As she hit the key to accept, she noted the battery life was down to seventy percent already. At this rate, she'd lose power in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Having the commlink run its own network was too draining. Once her finger touched the key, she spoke, "Tia here."
"Tia, I think I see something." The voice was Oskar's. He was at the stern astrogation station. "I'm using my microscope back here, and it looks like a ion drive trail."
"From what direction?"
"Front. They're heading right towards us."
Of course they are. "Okay, keep me—"
"Wait. I'm seeing something… it's not easy to make out, but I think it's smaller drive flares. Like fireflies around a lamp."
"Keep me informed." Tia cut the line and called Henry. "If Oskar's right, Jim, they've launched shuttles."
"Damn," he replied. "Spread the word."
"Right." Tia cut the line to do so and felt for her pulse pistol. She knew the League would do to her what it tried to do to Brigitte, what it'd done to Miri, and it'd be no different than what her comrades suffered after their defeat. She resolved she wasn't going to go through that. The last charge is for me, she vowed.
Samina's commlink lit up as she worked. "Kid, they're coming. Shuttles," Tia said. "How's the work going?"
"It's coming along," Samina answered. She knelt at the battery, tying the backup power cables on the helium-3 tank's pumping system into one of the four output jacks on the battery. She made sure to secure it with a wrench, tightening the connector into place.
She moved into the other hold now and found the big, boxy tank for the deuterium. It was nearly a mirror of the helium-3 tank, including the same pumping system and the same power cables. She grabbed them and ran them back to the battery, her softsuit's magboots going thunk thunk thunk on the hold's metal floor. The beam from her flashlight, still shifting around on her shoulder, gradually showed the battery ahead.
A sudden sharp yank kept her from continuing. She looked back and tried to pull harder, but nothing gave. Exasperated, she followed the cables back to their source, thunk thunk thunk—and immediately recognized her problem.
The cables were shorter than the ones on the helium-3 pump. They wouldn't be able to reach the battery.
Well aware they were running low on time, Samina rushed back to the battery and started pulling it closer to the deuterium tank. After several seconds, the cables to the helium-3 pump grew taut. They were at their limit. She retrieved the other wires and found that they were, again, half a meter short.
"Improvise," she muttered to herself, thinking of her work as a fetch tech. Dockworkers, repair engineers, they faced this all the time. There were ways to deal with it. She'd have to find a way to lengthen these cables. Replace them? No, they're built into the pumps. It'd be a major job. What about a second battery? Is there one that can run these? Or will Pieter need them to bring some of the other systems online? Think, think, what should I…
"Give me an update, kid," Tia's voice broke through.
"I'm having an issue," Samina admitted. "The backup power cabling for the deuterium tanks isn't long enough to plug it into the battery. I either need another battery or another way to get power to the deuterium."
"Make it work, Samina, because they're burning in. We'll have League Marines aboard in a few minutes."
"Right." She drew in a breath in a failed attempt to steady her pounding heart. The helium-3 could fuse by itself… no, the reactor vessel's not built to take that kind of heat. C'mon, Samina, think how would you do this back on the station. The cable's not long enough.
"So make a longer one," she said aloud.
Oskar's warning of the first shuttle approaching the port midship airlock brought Yanik running. He stood in the darkness and ignored the discomfort of the limited mobility his tail had from the limitations of the softsuit he was in. His weapon was presented to the airlock and held steady, waiting for what might come in. To keep the boarders from realizing he had a gun sighted on them, his tactical flashlight was shut off. He wouldn't need it anyway, he reasoned. He'd smell the invaders when they came, and hear their armor clink against the hull. Visual senses were a human fixation his people didn't share.
There were times Yanik thought the universe ran on divine humor. God had an affection for irony, certainly. By dodging the draft for reasons of conscious, he led a life that was far more dangerous and violent than he'd have seen had he decided not to follow his principles. It was as if God was mocking the idea of Yanik's critics back on Sauria, that only cowards refused the military service all Saurians were called to perform.
A sense of near-euphoria came over Yanik as he waited for the coming attack. It was the physiological response of a Saurian body to the stress of imminent or active combat, to help with their natural predatory instinct. Humans were exhaustion hunters by practice, meant for outlasting their prey. Saurians were built to do the exact opposite, overwhelming their victim’s at the commencement of the contest. Having the brain active and ready for the action was a boon he had over others.
A thunking sound emanated from the airlock, the same one that just a couple weeks before was used by the League inspectors at New Hathwell. Now Leaguer Marines were coming through, and not to inspect lithium.
The airlock door slid open, and Yanik fired without warning. Yellow pulses shot through the dark corridors and into the airlock. The Leaguer in the door went down immediately. Those behind cried out and sought cover. Yanik lowered his rifle and squeezed the trigger again, bringing more cries. The enemy soldiers took cover inside their shuttle.
Bullets shot back at him, precise fire from chemi
cal-propellant firearms, the preference of several militaries for ease of logistics, and use. Yanik's softsuit offered no protection from the wounds, which poked holes in it. Some struck at his body, tearing flesh and drawing blood. He ignored the pain, and the growing heat in his weapon, and kept firing. It was necessary to buy time, since without the impediment, the Leaguers in the enemy shuttle could easily overwhelm everyone.
Granted, it would be for nothing if other shuttles managed to latch to the other airlocks, or if they failed to get out of there.
"Their first shuttle's already here, Khan, and another one's getting close. Get moving!"
The warning from Tia rang in Samina's ears as her tool squeezed into place the clamp connecting the extended power cable to its connector. She immediately pulled it over enough to fit to the battery. The connector slid into place just as it was meant to.
She immediately got to work on the other cable. Her cutter severed the end of the wire just below the connector port. She took the extension she'd set aside and pressed it against the open, coiled wiring within. While one hand held the pieces in place, she fitted another clamp around it, one that would push the wiring together and complete the circuit. The clamp fitter came on next, and even with zero-G, she put a lot of elbow grease into it to ensure it was secure.
Once she was certain the connection would hold, she repeated the action to put the connector back on the now-lengthened cable. Her hands felt as if they were cramping given the effort she was forcing from them to squeeze the clamp into place. She ignored the pain. This has to work. Allah, please let this work.
The clamp would not close any tighter. Samina pushed the connector into the battery. She got to her feet and ran—thunk thunk thunk—to the nearby manual control for the fusion drive's reactor. The emergency lever she found would trigger the backup starter battery to life. If she did it right, the reactor hardware would order the fuel tank pumps to start, the battery would power them in doing so, and the helium-3 and deuterium would enter the reactor vessel and start fusing.