by M. D. Cooper
In Cal’s holodisplay, the icon that had indicated the Mortal Chance flickered and disappeared, replaced by a spreading red cloud indicating a hot debris field. The cloud continued to move toward Britney Sykes, as well as her two attack drones. The drones were already at the edge of the debris swarm and wouldn’t be able to avoid it.
He turned his attention back to the Worry’s End. The ship had completed a braking burn that must have wasted half their fuel, and was now inbound toward Cal and the drone patrol. If the ship continued its trajectory, it would ultimately pass close to Clinic 46. That made it a legitimate threat, in addition to harboring stolen property.
Cal shook his head.
Cal said.
Cal frowned. He didn’t understand what Sandra was getting at.
Cal shook his head. <8221. The gift that keeps on giving.>
Cal looked down at his armor. It would have to.
The AI acknowledged the command and Cal called Gibbs over the Link to explain his plan. After swearing about the beating the deceleration would deliver, she agreed though suggested they separate the squad into two teams. One would land aft and enter through the cargo bay airlock, or breach the hull if Sykes shut them out, while the other went straight to the habitat ring.
They discussed a few more actions on breach, and then their plan once inside the ship. Cal wanted the engines shut down so Brit Sykes could catch them and dock, that way they wouldn’t have to continue chasing her around local space to recover the Seeds she’d stolen—if she survived the expanding cloud of debris that was the Mortal Chance.
Gibbs grumbled.
Cal locked eyes with her from the pilot’s seat.
The edge of her mouth pulled up in the slightest smirk but Gibbs’ eyes were hard.
Gibbs nodded.
Sandra cut in,
“All right,” she shouted, standing to grab at a handhold above her head. “We’re about to jump. Say your prayers and make your final prep. Check your buddy’s gear. Everybody get water and grab more ammo than you need.”
“We’re not taking the shuttle in for the breach?” a young man asked.
The woman beside him elbowed him in the ribs. “This is a DIP mission, dummy. Die. In. Place.”
The kid’s face went pale. “I didn’t sign up for that shit.”
“Shut up,” Gibbs growled. “Everybody’s got their armor and enough atmosphere for twenty-four hours. You worried about a freighter with guy and some kids inside? Worst comes to worst, you bail, hit vacuum and activate your rescue beacon. Then you hang out watching vids until pick up.”
“Hanging in the big dark gives me the creeps,” someone complained.
“Then you stay on the ship while the rest of us go get paid for hazard duty,” Gibbs said. “I’ll remember you volunteered. Now close those civilians in the emergency closet. When we bail, the rest of the cabin is going hard vacuum.”
Two of the soldiers directed Smith and Harm to the closet—both of them looking worried about how airtight it was going to be when the cabin decompressed.
They continued checking gear until Sandra made a five-minute warning and finally a two-minute. Alarms sounded in the pilot’s console as weapons fire appeared in the holodisplay.
“Is someone shooting at us?” a soldier asked.
“They’re blowing kisses,” Gibbs said. She ordered a last check on Smith and Harm.
Cal gave his gear a final check, locking his helmet in place, and turned control of the shuttle over to Sandra. As projectiles crisscrossed the holodisplay, he gave Gibbs a thumbs-up.
The main cabin airlock cycled and spat environment out into the vacuum. Cal was the first through the door, followed by the squad. Gibbs would take up the rear. He didn’t look back, watching instead as glowing icons populated the HUD. He would lead the team at the habitat ring with Gibbs heading for the engines.
Cal squinted as the icon in his HUD representing the Worry’s End gradually became the dull silver outline of the ship, its wagon-wheel habitat ring spinning in the dark. His suit’s attitude thrusters kicked in, matching velocity with the freighter, jerking him around like a feather in the wind. Cal relaxed and let the process play out, feeling a swelling sense of excitement as the Worry’s End grew larger.
Behind them Sandra flew the shuttle away, describing a long arc as she put it on a course to return to Clinic 46. He had to admit, the timing was good, it looked like they were fleeing in the face of the Worry’s End’s weapons fire.
He and Gibb’s squad rushed toward the freighter, small bursts from attitude thrusters keeping them on course for their hard landing. At a thousand kilometers, the armor’s onboard comps started firing retro-jets, slowing the soldiers enough that they wouldn’t turn to cream when they hit the Worry’s End.
Of course, this meant they were now plainly visible to the weapons on that ship.
On his HUD, two friendly icons winked out, vaporized by the enemy’s point defense cannons. Cal could see the five-meter guns now, rotating with the motion of the ship to send streams of plasma in crisscrossing arcs around the vessel.
“Time to say hello,” he whispered, and readied himself for the hard landing rushing toward him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
STELLAR DATE: 09.22.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Heartbridge shuttle
REGION: Jovian L1 Hildas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The space around the Worry’s End was a storm of plasma. Brit’s shuttle shot among the streams. It wouldn’t do any good to ask Andy to stop firing. The Heartbridge shuttle was coming in at the same time, with the drone patrol fast behind.
If she slowed to maneuver too much, the Mortal Chance’s cloud of debris would catch them, and that would be even more deadly. Thoughts of Rina, Chafri, and Harm pushed their way into her mind and she clamped down on the sentimentality. There would be time enough to mourn them later.
She hoped.
“Are we going to be all right?” Kylan asked, clinging to his harness.
“I’ll tell you in about fifteen minutes,” Brit replied, knuckles white on the physical controls.
A piece of debris…or maybe a body…hit them, and Kylan shouted as his borrowed body was thrown against the console in front of her. One of the cabinets holding the Seed canisters back in the open bay swung open, banging against the wall. Brit looked back and pursed her lips.
“I need you to fix that,” she said. “I can’t leave the controls.”
“I’m going to get smashed.”
“Or we could get burned into slag when plasma bolts hit us because I’m not piloting the shuttle. Your choice.”
Not for the first time, Brit was caught by the awkwardness of dealing with a twelve-year-old boy in a grown woman’s body. The gender switch didn’t seem to have fazed him for the time being, but his overall complaints were starting to annoy her.
“I need you to do this,” Brit urged.
“All right.” Kylan unbuckled his harness and floated free of the navigator’s seat, grabbing at handholds along the wall.
“Look out,” Brit said, pulling up hard to avoid a new line of fire from the Worry’s End. The new point defense system Andy had installed was doing a damn good job of filling the surrounding space with plasma.
She checked the progress of the Heartbridge shuttle in her holodisplay and was surprised to see it was peeling off, slowly falling into the distance behind her. She checked the stats and realized it was outside the effective range of Andy’s cannons.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m closing the cabinet like you asked,” Kylan said, voice on the edge of tears.
“I was talking to myself,” Brit said.
“You have a voice you talk to? Do you have someone inside your head, too?”
“Hold on,” Brit said, unable to waste focus on what Kylan was going on about. She sent the shuttle spiraling between a helix of plasma fire.
Brit glanced back to see Kylan floating stationary in the middle of the bay as the shuttle rotated around him, a look of terror on his face.
“You better grab onto something when you get a chance,” Brit said. “You’re going to slam into the back of the shuttle as soon as I accelerate.
Kylan pawed at handholds in the deck and finally caught two, pulling himself down to hug the alloy. The cabinet door slammed shut above his head. “Why couldn’t you do that before?” he wailed.
Brit didn’t answer. As she focused on the path between plasma arcs, she realized the reason the Heartbridge shuttle was hanging back would be to drop breaching teams in EV suits, the same way she had infiltrated the clinic. With one hand on the controls, she fine-tuned the sensors to search the space between the Heartbridge shuttle and the Worry’s End. Ten objects with barely enough mass to register returns showed on the display. Plasma tore through one as she watched. The others continued to close in. That explained the body.
“Andy,” she shouted into the audio channel, not bothering to see if the connection was open or not. “Andy, you’ve got a breaching team coming in naked.”
A blast of static answered. There must have been some kind of interference. Brit rotated the shuttle and calculated a quick path across the Worry’s End, cutting through the middle of the EV team. She would be exposing herself to more plasma fire but it was worth it if she took out a few of the commandos. If even one got access to the ship, it could be dead in space.
“Is that cabinet locked down?” she demanded.
“It’s locked,” Kylan called.
“Get back up here, then.”
“Why are you so mean?”
Brit nearly laughed then had to focus on a gap between firing lines. The plasma was bright on the display before darkening into cold hunks of metal that would still punch holes in the shuttle. The navigation computer attempted to estimate their trajectories as they became erratic, drawing lines around the Worry’s End as though it was coiling spaghetti.
Brit continued to track the course that would take her through the lines of fire to one of the airlocks, attempting to adjust velocity as she worked closer.
“Andy,” she tried again. “Worry’s End. Cara, are you there?”
Through a wash of static, a small voice answered, “I hear you.”
“Cara?”
“I hear you, Mom.”
The relief and joy at hearing Cara’s voice was tempered by her surging adrenaline. Brit tried not to let it flood her emotions, she couldn’t let it make her start crying. The edges of her eyes grew wet from tears and she blinked furiously. Cara’s voice was like a knife through her heart.
“Mom, I hear you,” Cara repeated.
“You’ve got a breach team in EV suits inbound,” Brit said. “Tell your dad. Breach team in EV suits.”
“We know, Lyssa spotted them.”
“Lyssa?” Brit asked, wondering what woman was with her family on Sunny—the Worry’s End.
The audio connection lagged and squelched out, distorting Cara’s voice. She may have said something else but Brit couldn’t hear. Kylan was shouting again.
They were close enough to the freighter that the ship was visible, spinning like a top. Brit set the computer on matching vector and continued to scan for the small returns that indicated human attackers. They weren’t showing up on the display anymore. They had either been cut down by plasma or they had reached the ship.
She bit her lip. They were on the hull.
Three cracking sounds came from the bay behind her. Brit turned to see a neat line of holes on facing sides of the shuttle’s bay. Fear shot through her as she watched Kylan’s helmet spin toward the holes, following their oxygen out into vacuum.
“Kylan!” she shouted, voice sounding tiny behind the hissing. “Get your helmet!”
Kylan nodded at the back of the shuttle, eyes wide from how close the plasma rounds had co
me.
Brit turned back to the controls, seeing they had nearly matched the Worry’s End’s spin. The ship looked stationary now, lines of plasma still shooting off in all directions but more regularly now. Brit wound between them.
The display highlighted the two airlocks and she aimed for the one on the ring. She had hoped they could use the shuttle if something happened, though it was going to need repairs now. The hull systems weren’t closing on the puncture holes. Something must have burned out.
She considered telling Kylan to find the emergency sealant foam, but decided against it, the woman—boy would just complain and distract Brit from her docking maneuvers.
It was a strange feeling to come back to Sunny Skies under these circumstances. She was almost glad the ship had a new name because this felt so wrong. Sunny Skies was home, family. She had held it safe in her mind for so long that she couldn’t help wondering if she was responsible for this strange new version of the ship, equipped with weaponry like some sort of pirate vessel.
The last three minutes to the airlock were a gyrating dance in all directions. Kylan moaned in the back of the shuttle as he was tossed against the deck and walls. He was going to be covered in bruises. Then the shuttle passed inside the close perimeter of the cannons and Brit finally breathed. Now they might still get smashed against the freighter like a fly on a windshield, but they wouldn’t burn to death from plasma fire.
“Put the helmet on, already,” Brit told Kylan. “But you’re staying here.”
“What? I thought I was coming with you.”
“As soon as I’m on, you’re going to disconnect and clear the airlock. Stay close. We don’t know what’s going on in there and I don’t want Kraft getting his hands on you again. This way you can come aboard when everything is all right. Or you can run if you don’t hear from me. You understand?”
“I can help,” Kylan said.
“No,” Brit said. “You can’t. I can’t worry about you and try to fight my way through that ship if it’s full of mercs. My family is on there, too.”
Kylan nodded. “I’ll stay.”
“Good. Thank you.” A vibration ran through the shuttle as it connected with the airlock on Sunny Skies’ habitat ring. Brit put the navigation system in automatic and left the pilot’s seat, gathering her weapons and checking her armor.