We don’t have shit for room to maneuver.
“Fire!” I yell out. But before I even speak, Katzen had engaged his terminal. All six of our torpedoes dart out and spread.
Two hammer into a pair of freighters just down the spoke from us. One pitches right into the spoke itself. Atmosphere and flames erupt, and debris cascades everywhere.
The last three are a thing of beauty. All strike the bulk of the center. Three holes are all that mark where they entered.
“Sauce up! Course, uh, shit, down, down, get us below the station, fuck, move!”
My heart slams in my chest. Slowly we push ahead and move just beneath the plane of the station.
“Duds? Katzen, why aren’t our torpedoes deto—”
And then they explode.
The station itself erupts like a trashcan filled with firecrackers. One side peels off and tumbles into space while a rich blue flame ripples through zero gravity. A second later, two of the spokes explode and shred the freighters attached to them.
Alarms blare on our panels. Vidas acknowledges each, and just as quick another one blasts on. He keeps opening his mouth to report, but with every second more come.
The main console tells me all I need to know. Two kinetic charges have penetrated through the hull aft. A half-dozen high-energy strikes, likely lasers, have punched into the hull. Our sauce is losing integrity fast with all the debris flying through space.
And of course, a dozen hunters are burning down right at the station.
There’s a moment you realize you fucked up.
This is that moment.
“Twenty minutes till bounce!” Raj calls.
As if I need a reminder.
“Keep the cloak up! Those hunters don’t have drones. Get under this spoke and stay there!”
Katzen turns, his eyes wide. “We need to get away from the station before it blows!”
“Shut up!” I yell back at him and shake my gloved finger.
Our velocity drops down to nothing. Fifty meters above us, a freighter is struggling to undock. Flames rage through the viewports in what is left of that spoke. It still has atmosphere. At least enough to burn.
Vidas calls out critical damage in a dozen different places. But only two matter right now. The reactor and the bounce drive. I give two shits about the secondary plumbing system. Nor does the torpedo autoloader bother me.
All we have to do is escape.
I call up Comms and patch in to Engineering. “Henna? How’s it looking?”
Static crackles back. Voices yell, followed by the sound of hammering and hissing. “Jager, we’re holding, but take it easy!”
“Colby?” I call next.
“I’m busy.” Her voice snaps back like a steel trap.
A line of six hunters blasts past where we were cloaked. My stomach tightens until I watch them do that familiar dance. They can’t see us.
A smile cracks on my face. A cocky smile. To watch your enemy flail about while you strike him a blow…I might even enjoy that more than boxing.
The clock ticks. Behind us, the crews fight to seal up leaks and repair those critical systems. Henna checks in once with an error in the reactor but has it fixed a minute later. Colby is silent, and I know better than to bother her.
As we wait, I feel relief run through my veins like icy water. We’ve done it. Those hunters all looked where they thought we’d be. I think our little ruse a few days back made them think we could move faster than we did. The rook bounces in a few minutes later and takes up station about twenty kilometers away.
I don’t want to dance with that bastard.
“Get ready to go, Raj.”
Raj nods quickly. She plots in a course; at this point, it doesn’t matter to where. All we need to do is get away. “Uh, sir, I’m getting errors. We’ve got bounce drive damage.”
My cocky smile drifts off. Colby. “Colby? Status on the drive.”
“Working on it.”
Above us, that spoke is through burning, and two freighters have crawled away. One is stuck, on what I don’t know, but suddenly it starts its engines.
“Woah!” Katzen yells. “It’s trying to break loose!”
“Colby! We need that drive!” I yell into my comms.
Raj looks up at me with frantic eyes. She shakes her head quickly.
Then it all happens in a quick moment.
The freighter tears free from the vacuum seals, and the sheer force of it drives one edge of the ship right toward us. That isn’t a problem.
A jet of superheated air, the last in the entire spoke, blasts down at us, and in a fraction of a second we are naked on the battlefield.
Every single bit of cloaking gas around is scattered into the void.
“Katzen, fire on those hunters and send one to the rook!” I call out. “Colby, we need to go, now!”
Raj hunches over her console with one hand right over the bounce activation. Three more torpedoes flare out and slam into the nearest hunters, vaporizing each of them. A fourth torpedo thuds out a moment later and cracks a hole in the ass of the rook.
It isn’t enough. Already the hunters are gaining. The rook fires, and the first strike hammers into the freighter above us. It is still a slave to inertia and drifting past. Or at least it was; now it is on fire.
Two more rounds punch into our hull. An electrical panel on the bridge explodes open, and a spaghetti mess of molten wires pours onto the floor. Kuang sprays it with sealant. A thick, acrid smoke fills the bridge. All of our visors snap down, and cool oxygen flows into my mask.
“Colby! We go now or we all die!”
“Jager,” Colby calls. She sounds so close, like she’s right next to me. Then I see she’s keyed on a private channel. “I love you.”
The Orca takes one more strike on the nose, and then we bounce.
The bridge crew cheers. Even through the smoke, I see Raj and Katzen hug. Vidas does a little dance in his seat.
I jump out of the chair and engage the emergency access on the bridge hatch. The hall leading through the center of the ship is shredded debris and personal effects mixed in with deep space rations. Fire control teams and a maintenance group struggle to patch a massive hole.
Colby.
I push past them and sprint as fast as I can in the suit. Winkelman’s suit. A dead man’s suit.
At the next hatch, I can’t open it. Debris blocks it on the back side. I push my face up against the tiny window and stare through. One entire side of the Orca is ripped wide open, like a great animal took out a bite.
The bounce drive hangs precariously from the main structural beam. And there, at its side, is the corpse of Martina Colby. In one hand, she holds a massive energy cable and in the other the socket. A heap of debris pins the cable down. She’d used her own suit, her own body, as a conduit so we could escape.
I hold a hand onto the glass and stare at her corpse for a long minute. And, for the first time since I was a child, I sob.
She saved us all.
Now I’m a true member of the Orca. I’ve lost someone I loved.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
What do you call a starship with a cracked reactor, shattered spine, and enough holes to make a sponge jealous?
The Orca.
If this were the end of a proper boxing match, it’d be like having a broken nose, cracked ribs, a heart murmur, missing teeth, and a few broken knuckles. Yeah, you could box again, but it won’t be pretty.
We need time to heal. We need a full refit yard with naval engineers and enough pipefitters to empty a brewery. Unfortunately, there is precious little of either.
I tour the ship with Henna. Normally it would have been Colby’s job to lay out this level of repair, but…well, she’s dead.
Henna leads the way on the outside of the hull. We pull ourselves along on what was once the starboard cloaking gas chamber. Now it is just a shredded mass of metal.
“We can’t patch it,” Henna says with a wave. “There’s not enoug
h patch material left. I’ve got a few ideas, but I need to crunch the numbers.”
“Can we cloak?”
“Sauce is on hold, Jager,” she says sadly.
Farther along, we come to the big hole where Colby lost her life. It’s odd to look inside the ship from outside. It just doesn’t feel proper. Like someone has one of those old-school dollhouses.
A burnt-up package of rations drifts by. I bat at it and watch as it spins off into the darkness. Farther down the hull, the torpedomen dig out the usable supplies and pitch the rest. I see the lights from their suits as they heave more stuff away.
“Well?” I say to her. One of my hands clasps tight onto a chunk of armor that’s peeled back like a black banana. “Prognosis?”
Henna snorts over the comms. “Jager, to be honest, none of this matters. The reactor core is cracked from that last jump. The Orca can’t do shit until I fix that.”
“How long?”
Henna turns to face me. I can’t see her expression through the faceplate, but I can guess. A frown large enough to make old Captain Lahtinen, my frog faced first CO, smile. “I don’t know.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Goddam it, Henna, you’re the best we’ve got for this job. Engineer me a solution.”
“Jager, I’m the only thing you got, and I don’t know—”
I cut her off. “Find a way.”
We stare at each other for a few moments through the tinted face shields. I’m being a dick. I feel like a dick. All I want to do is take a big ol’ drink and get drunk. Totally shitfaced. But not now. This is my ship. My problem. My failure.
“Henna, listen. You guided me through steering that missile cruiser while you were arc blind. You can do this.” I try to give her the most sincere voice I can manage.
“I’ll try,” she says in a hint of a whisper.
Back inside, I keep the suit on and inspect more of the hull with Sebic and Hauptmann. They work as automatons, pointing out details and critical systems, and answer in monosyllables.
How do you give a pep talk when the quarterback is dead? To them, Colby was everything.
Sebic peels away a section of inner hull. On the other side are burnt wires and charred hose. “We need to reroute all of this. Colby would know a trick.”
“She’s dead,” I say flatly. She’s dead.
Sebic shakes his head and wipes away a tear with the back of his glove. A deep frown creases his face, and he just nods quickly.
“You two can do this. Take anyone that can help and put them to work. And I mean anyone. The only person off limits is Henna; she’s gotta fix the reactor.” The two men stare back at me. “I know it’s a lot, but you guys have been doing this for over five years.”
Hauptmann looks around him, and the frown disappears. One arm comes up, and he rests it on the hull of the Orca. “All right. Let’s get to work.”
I leave those two and pass through hastily erected airlocks. All of our fire control teams are still on watch. The ship is unstable. We could just as easily suffer a hull breach as another fire. I try to give words of encouragement and a quick update to them as I pass, but how many ways can you avoid saying we’re fucked?
I find Yao on the bridge, staring up at the tactical display. It is, thankfully, blank. Totally devoid of anything. Our bounce took us a good long way from anything, but we are still in system, and that means that they could, with enough time, ping us with radar.
“Mr. Yao, status?”
Yao turns to me with a pained smile and beckons to the screen. “Silent, Mr. Jager, beautifully silent.”
“I hope it stays that way,” I mumble. We lean over the maintenance console and stare as more repair orders come in. The list is never ending. It seems like every second one more comes in.
The galley is down. Food storage is compromised. Torpedo autoloader is dead. Aft tubes shredded. Auxiliary water bladder punctured.
I nod and stand up straight. “Well, it could be worse.”
The spine of the ship groans. I raise my eyes to the ceiling and watch as the lights blink once, twice, and finally go black.
Now, there’s dark. And there’s stuck in a room with zero light in the darkest part of space. It’s actually one thing they train you for. Total lights out. Sensory deprivation. Some people go batshit.
Yao goes batshit. He latches on to me, drags me down to the floor, and howls out. It isn’t even a scream but something primal, something deep inside of him letting loose.
I manage to key on my suit light. We are face-to-face. Yao’s lip quivers, his eyes are locked on to my suit lights, and he just sobs an animal sob.
To make matters more interesting, the artificial gravity slowly drifts away, and we rise up off the floor.
It takes a few minutes to get Yao calmed down. Eventually, we strap him into the astrogation chair and leave him gibbering at a flashlight. There’s no other way to say it; he’s tight like a piano string and has finally snapped.
“Henna?” I call on the open comms. Nothing. Then I hear other voices, the bow fire control team. “Bow team, can you hear amidships?”
“Yes, sir,” comes the quick reply.
“Listen up! Pass the word: open comms are dead, but use the suit radios. We’re doing relays. Now go!”
And phrase by phrase, we send information down the length of the hull. Each compartment can speak to the next. It’s like that game you played as a kid, whispering in the ear of the person next to you. Luckily, the navy is a bit better about keeping things straight.
Basically Henna tried to engage a backup circuit and that blew. When it blew, it took out the main circuit. When that went, we were left with nothing. But on the plus side, it let Engineering spool down the reactor and gave us a chance to stitch up the crack in the casing.
As I stand in the dark in a room that grows steadily warmer, I become even more aware of our situation. The fact that I’ve driven us into a shit storm. We had our clock cleaned. I lost my lover and maybe all of our lives.
But I completed the mission.
A few hours later, I’m crammed into a crack of the reactor core and holding a set of welding torches, waiting. Henna is almost motionless in a much heavier spacesuit, mainly due to all of the exotic alloys to shield the radiation. The only things that move are her hands.
Before her is the reactor core itself: that ball of density and antidensity that somehow generates enough energy to propel us through the stars. I don’t even pretend to know what’s going on inside that thing.
My mind is on the op, the mission, and whether or not it’s a success. I guess if we get out of this alive, it’s a success. Now all I have to do is wait for Henna to complete, and then I can stitch up the crack.
“Jager.” Henna’s voice is tight. I can hear the concentration.
“Yes?”
“The two cores are seating. I, uh, have to hold it until the bond is complete. So, can you get us out of here? Back to ConFed space, I mean.”
Ah, isn’t that the question?
“In my junior year of university I decided to take a…hmm, sabbatical. Well, who am I kidding? I decided I didn’t want to be a starship captain.”
“Really?” I can hear a smirk.
“Yeah, really.”
“What’d you do?”
“I boxed.”
Henna laughs. “Like, people?”
“Yeah, people. I was a cruiserweight in a second-tier traveling group. For two months, I boxed up and down the Salem divide and gave salary rats and wage slaves a hell of a weekend show.”
“Where you any good?”
“Eh, well, I made my way up the ranks. Slow. On one planet, I’d fight some ranked cruiser, then on an orbital I’d hit it with another ranked fighter, usually Turks. Those guys could box. Man, I had some fights, eighth round, wham, bam. We’d both stagger like drunks until one of us landed a punch and boom. Done.”
I stop talking and drift into the memory of thos
e fights.
“And?”
“And what?”
“Well,” Henna says, “you can’t just stop a story like that. What happened?”
“The Persian Panther.”
“The what?” Henna calls out loudly. I can picture her smiling, the dimples on her cheeks.
“Bahadur Rumani, the Persian Panther. Cruiserweight, right on the line of a heavy. By the time I met him in the ring, he’d already crested, a rising star that had hit his peak in the big rings in Vegas twenty years before, the real Vegas, and now was fighting on two-bit stations and orbitals.”
“And he beat you?”
I chuckle. “Yeah. He beat me. The moment I stepped into the ring on Salem Sunset IV, I knew it was gonna be bad. He moved like an animal, like a panther, like no one I’d ever fought. We weren’t even on the same skill level. His feet didn’t dance, or fly. They glided. His fists moved precisely where he wanted them.”
I think back to the fight and feel that sting in my jaw where they set the bone. “Two rounds. The first, I tried to stay clear, but everywhere I went, he was there. Boom. Boom. By the second round, he didn’t just beat me, he thrashed me. Not to humiliate me, but he was so damned good, and he was twice my age.”
“Well, you can’t win them all.”
“No. No, you can’t, but that moment you realize that you can’t win them all…it’s a tough pill to swallow.”
We both wait in silence for a few minutes. And I think back to Bahadur. “It’s funny, Henna. After the match, Bahadur told me the same thing. ‘Comrade,’ he says, ‘one day, we all lose.’”
“Well,” Henna says slowly. She pushes the core into the containment vessel and seals it up. “Hopefully that day isn’t today.”
I help her out of the crack and lay out the welding rig before me. The alloy is a mix of nickel, cobalt, and a touch of magnesium. Tricky to weld.
Henna stops at the edge of the hatch. “So were you any good?”
“At boxing?”
“Yeah, boxing.”
I fire up the welder and start laying out an edge bead. “Yeah, yeah, I was pretty good. Just not good enough.”
As I lay each strip of weld, I tack on another piece of shielding. Each one buckles as it heats unevenly before finally settling down. I tap down one weld, move ten centimeters, then tap down another. It helps to spread the heat. Then when it’s out like an eggshell, I seal it up in a constant stream of molten metal and sizzling arc. I can’t hear it, but I know it will sound perfect.
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