Pursuit

by Val St. Crowe

  Gunner eyed her. “Don’t you need to be in the cockpit?”

  The ship was accelerating even faster, and Saffron was thrown into the room. She went sprawling on the floor, struggling to get up as she slid sideways.

  Calix was clinging to Breccan’s cot.

  Gunner turned to Calix. “And you,” he managed. “We’ve talked about this.”

  Saffron was pinned against a cabinet on the far wall. She couldn’t move because the acceleration was too great. Strands of her hair were plastered against her forehead. “Is Breccan all right?” she screamed.

  The beeping of the machine continued.

  Calix’s feet were torn off the ground as the ship went even faster.

  Gunner could hear Saffron’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. His straps bit painfully into his various wounds. He yelled out against the sensation.

  And the ship made it through the atmosphere and popped into space. Its gravity kicked in.

  Saffron fell to the floor in a heap.

  Calix, not missing a beat, began to apply small silver nodes to Breccan’s chest.

  Saffron stood up, rubbing the back of her neck. “What’s happening, Calix? What’s going on?”

  “Saffron,” said Gunner, “I need you in the cockpit.”

  She ignored him. She took Calix by the shoulder and turned him to face her. “What is it?”

  Calix shook her off. “You want me to talk to you or do you want me to do everything in my power for your husband?”

  Saffron’s face crumpled. She let go of Calix.

  Suddenly the ship was rocked to one side. Saffron lost her balance. Calix lost his balance.

  “What the hell?” said Gunner.

  Pippa’s voice over the PA. “We’re taking fire. It’s from the leon out here.”

  Oh, hell. The Swallow was a great little ship, but she was no match for a leon. If they were in an earnest firefight, they’d be destroyed. Their only chance was to escape.

  “Saffron, I know you can’t think about this right now,” said Gunner, “but if you don’t get that virus off, we’re all going to die.”

  Saffron didn’t respond. She gazed at Calix and Breccan. The beeping was still going on.

  The ship was rocked by more fire.

  “Get to the cockpit,” Gunner yelled.

  “Hell,” said Saffron, tears rolling down her cheeks. She went to Breccan, bent down, and kissed his forehead hard. “Hold on, baby. Hold on.” And then she fled from the room.

  * * *

  Eve had come to the cockpit when she’d realized the ship was being fired on. She didn’t know if there was anything she could do to help, but she wanted to be available.

  Pippa wasn’t paying attention to her, though. She was moving her fingers over all the consoles, flipping switches and then returning to her stick to steer the ship. All the while, she muttered to herself. “I’ve got the fake coordinates in, and they’re probing us, and they see everything, but I don’t know how to get that stupid virus off. I could take off now, but if I do that—”

  Saffron appeared in the cockpit, breathing hard, tears drying on her face. She threw herself into her seat and began typing on a keyboard.

  The ship was rocked with fire again.

  “Oh, hell, that’s going to need repairs,” said Pippa. “Saffron, tell me you’re getting the virus out?”

  “Almost there,” said Saffron, fingers flying over the keyboard. “Almost… almost… Now.”

  “Change our coordinates and use the rescav thrusters to go faster than light?”

  “Yes,” said Saffron.

  “Okay, okay,” muttered Pippa. “Thrusters online.”

  The ship shuddered. Pippa’s fingers moved over a screen in the cockpit. “Preparing for warp field creation.”

  The ship lurched. Pippa seized the stick she used to maneuver the ship and pushed it forward. “Coordinates locked.”

  Everything was vibrating. And then the thrusters came online, and the ship sped up. They accelerated, pressed into their seats, and then everything evened out. They had now left the Dern system.

  “We’re clear!” said Pippa, as if she couldn’t believe it was actually true. “We did it.”

  Saffron leaped out of her chair and pushed past Eve out of the cockpit. “It’s Breccan.”

  “Oh, no!” Pippa got up too and followed her.

  Eve brought up the rear.

  They hurried down the corridor, down the ladder and then into the medic bay.

  Inside, Calix was bent over Breccan, his mouth on the other man’s mouth. Then he released the other man and began pressing down on his chest with both hands.

  Breccan was lifeless.

  Saffron let out a cry. “He’s not breathing?”

  Calix went back to Breccan’s mouth.

  Saffron hugged herself. “Oh, what happened? What happened?”

  Pippa put her arms around the other woman. “Shh, let Calix work. Let him work.”

  And then they were all quiet as Calix continued to breathe into Breccan’s mouth and then push on his chest. Over and over and over for what seemed like eternities.

  Finally, Calix stopped. He turned to Saffron and he shook his head.

  “Don’t give up,” said Saffron. “Please, don’t—”

  “It’s too late,” said Calix. He was out of breath and his forehead was sweating. “Even if I got him breathing again, he’s been so long without oxygen that he’d be brain damaged. He would never… he’s gone, Saffron.”

  “No,” she said in a quiet, icy voice.

  “I’m sorry,” said Calix.

  Saffron ran over to Breccan and took him by the shoulders. She shook him. “Wake up,” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t leave me. You can’t leave me.”

  Eve looked away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Gunner woke up in the medic bay, feeling disoriented, but stronger and in less pain than before he’d gone to sleep. The lack of pain might be down to the painkiller Calix had given him. Gunner had been trying to get up and moving, but Calix had insisted he rest. After getting dosed with that, Gunner had fallen asleep.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out.

  There was no one else in the medic bay. Even Breccan was gone. Breccan’s body, Gunner supposed.

  Hell. Breccan had been a good man, and he couldn’t believe he was gone. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to lose people anymore.

  Sighing, he got up out of the cot in the medic bay and made his way out into the corridor. He didn’t see anyone.

  He went down the corridor and climbed the ladder to the next level.

  He poked his head into the kitchen. Saffron was in there. She was sitting at one of the chairs, facing away from the table, staring blankly at the wall. She didn’t react when he came in.

  He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder, but she still didn’t react.

  “I’m so sorry,” he murmured to her.

  Nothing from Saffron.

  He removed his hand. He knew that feeling. He remembered what it had been like after Silvi. How it had seemed to hurt to exist, like there was resistance in the air, and moving through it was painful.

  Saffron and Breccan had met and married after the war. On his ship, in fact. Everyone on board had witnessed their whirlwind romance and marriage. With the war done, they’d all been lulled into a false sense of security, thinking that they might actually survive.

  But it didn’t matter whether there was a war or not. The Xerkabah were brutal, and they disregarded that at their peril.

  He gazed at her, searching his mind for something to say. Nothing came to mind. But his heart ached for her.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered again.

  He left her there, and he wasn’t sure she’d ever even really known he was there.

  Out in the corridor, he ran into Pippa, coming up the ladder to the top level of the ship. “Captain, you’re up,” she said.

  “I am,”
said Gunner.

  Eve came up the ladder behind Pippa. “How are you feeling?”

  “Still stiff and sore, but not bad,” said Gunner.

  “I wanted to say thank you,” said Eve. “We’d never have survived if you hadn’t done what you did.”

  Gunner squirmed, feeling uncomfortable by her gratefulness. “No call for that. I did what I had to do.”

  “You could have been killed,” said Pippa. “I thought you were going to be killed.”

  “Well, that was the general idea,” said Gunner, dragging a hand over his mouth and chin. “You two were supposed to run and get on the ship while I distracted them.”

  “Except you killed them all,” said Eve. “You’re good at that.”

  “At killing?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “At fighting,” said Eve.

  “At protecting,” said Pippa.

  “You saved our lives,” said Eve.

  “No, we just got lucky,” he said. Maybe he had some skill, but mostly, he’d had desperation on his side. He’d had nothing to lose. Maybe that made him powerful, but maybe it was dumb luck. He nodded at the kitchen. “You know Saffron’s in a bad way, I guess?”

  Pippa nodded. “Yes, and we’ve got worse problems. Our communications hub was damaged when the leon fired on us. It’s the kind of thing Saffron would know how to fix, but we can’t expect her to do that.”

  “No,” said Gunner. “But can’t it wait? If we can’t hail ships or do probes, how much of a problem is that, really?”

  “We’d be blind, captain,” said Pippa. “We wouldn’t be able to detect other ships around us. We need to repair it.”

  Gunner considered. With the fact they were being chased all the time, he guessed it wasn’t a good idea to be blind. “Okay, so how do we fix it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pippa, “but I think it’s going to require someone going out of the ship and manually patching things up. I’ve seen Saffron do it before, but I have no idea what she did.”

  “I can do it,” said Gunner.

  “Captain, you’re wounded,” said Pippa.

  “I feel fine,” said Gunner. He started toward the cockpit. “Show me what’s damaged, all right?”

  Pippa followed behind him. “Do you even know anything about communications?”

  “Nope,” said Gunner. “I’ll have to figure it out. Come on, show me the problem.”

  * * *

  “You can’t go out in a space suit,” Calix said, hands on his hips. “You’ve been shot multiple times. You’re barely healed.”

  “It has to be me,” said Gunner. “Who else is going to do it? Pippa?”

  “I could do it,” said Pippa. “I mean, maybe I could do it.” She furrowed her brow.

  Everyone was in the cockpit, including Eve. She spoke up. “Maybe I could do it?”

  Gunner shook his head at both of them. “Neither of you have any experience with space walking. It’s not something you want to be figuring out at the same time you’re figuring out how to use tools out there.”

  “I’ve got space-walking experience,” said Calix.

  “Right, and you’re dead tired from fixing everyone on the ship.”

  “Not everyone,” said Calix, his voice bitter. “Not everyone is fixed.”

  Gunner put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, softening his voice. “What happened to Breccan was not your fault. You understand that, right?”

  Calix hung his head. “Let me go out and fix the communications panel.”

  “I got this,” said Gunner. “You’ve done enough. You need to rest.”

  Calix folded his arms over his chest.

  “When was the last time you slept?” Gunner asked.

  Calix thought about it.

  “You don’t even know, do you?” said Gunner. “I’m going out there. You rest up.”

  “Right,” said Calix darkly, “because I’ve been so helpful thus far.”

  * * *

  Space.

  Gunner stepped out of the air lock. His feet were held to the hull of the ship with magnets on the soles of his space boots. He had to manually detach each to take a step by pressing a button inside his gloves. It was slow going.

  But it was beautiful out here. Gunner always thought so.

  It was infinite and dark and dotted with tiny spots of brightness. He was hugging the side of his ship and moving through the darkness, but all around him was the vastness of space. It could be terrifying. It was impersonal and cold, and it would just as easily swallow them up as help them, but it was a beautiful darkness. He liked it out here.

  They’d had to power the thrusters down and resume a regular speed for him to go out. Going outside the ship when it was traveling faster than light wasn’t possible. If they had been in a hurry to get anywhere, coming out might have cost them time, but they weren’t on any schedule, so it didn’t matter. Powering the thrusters down in the middle of a trip, though, was a delicate sort of maneuver that not just any pilot could get right. Gunner was lucky that he had Pippa onboard. She’d done it without any problems at all. She was brilliant.

  It took nearly twenty minutes to maneuver his way around to the communications panel.

  On the way, there was a weak part of the hull that had taken some fire in the battle, and he stopped to put a patch on that, squirting binsy to hold it down. Binsy was a sort of space glue that came in tubes. It went out liquid and hardened in less than thirty seconds. Once it was hard, it was bonded tight. It wouldn’t last forever, but it would keep them in the sky until they could manage to do proper repairs.

  After that, it was on to the other side of the ship, where the communications panel was located.

  Walking around the ship was disorienting. He was climbing up to the bottom of the ship, but because there was no gravity, and he was held on to the ship with magnets, he was hanging off of it upside down. Gunner didn’t think of it that way, though. He simply reoriented himself as he moved. It was better that way. So, sure, he was on the belly of the ship, but now where his head was up and where his feet were was down. Otherwise, it all started to make him feel confused and a little queasy.

  When he reached the panel, he had to crouch down to get to it. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, especially in the big space suit. If he’d been in regular gravity, he would have preferred to find some way to stretch out his body so he was eye-level with the panel. But that wasn’t possible out here. He needed to be anchored to the ship, so he had to crouch.

  He opened a channel to those inside the ship. “All right,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “About time,” said Pippa. “You have the panel open?”

  “No,” said Gunner. “Hold on.” It wasn’t easy manipulating the turnbolts with gloves on. It took him two tries, but then the door on the panel popped off. It floated away into space.

  Gunner cried out.

  But then he saw it was attached with a string.

  “What?” said Pippa.

  “Nothing,” muttered Gunner. “Okay, so what am I doing out here? Tell me you’ve figured that out.”

  “I think so,” said Pippa. “Honestly, I’m not really sure what’s broken, but I’ve done some research, and I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  “Pretty good?” said Gunner. He really hoped they weren’t going to mess everything up out here. “Well, I hope that’s good enough.”

  “I tried to talk to Saffron,” said Pippa. “But she’s not…”

  “Still unresponsive, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Pippa’s voice was quiet.

  Hell, that wasn’t good. She had every right to shut down after losing the man she loved, but Gunner needed her. If it wasn’t important that they be able to monitor vessels when they got to their destination, he would postpone this fix to make sure they got it right.

  “So,” Pippa was talking again, “what’s it look like to you? Can you see any damage with the naked eye?”

  “Uh…” He gazed inside the panel, which was a mess
of wires and circuit boards. There was some scorching on the upper right corner, but he couldn’t see that anything had been really destroyed. “Yeah, not really. But I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “There should be a big red wire connected to something marked, Main. Do you see that?”

  He scrutinized the panel. “No, I don’t see anything marked anything.”

  “Up at the top,” said Pippa.

  “The top?” said Gunner. “There’s nothing at the top.” And then he saw some words on the bottom of the panel. Ah, that was the problem. Her top was his bottom. He released his magnets so he could move a foot, put it down, and let it catch again, and then released the other foot, and moved it. There. Now, he was looking at it the same way that Pippa was.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No, I figured it out,” said Gunner. “Now, it’s marked Main?”

  “Yeah. You see it?”

  He scanned the words above the circuit boards. “Yup. Got it. But there’s nothing connected to it.”

  “Okay, well, that’s probably part of the problem. Do you see a red wire?”

  “Uh…” He spied it. “Yes, it’s just dangling down here.” He reached down and picked it up.

  “All right, well, plug that back in.”

  “Where?”

  “In the notch marked Main,” she said.

  “There’s no space for it.” He furrowed his brow.

  “There are little holes running along the top, right under the words,” said Pippa.

  “Oh, okay, hold on. I see it,” said Gunner. There were so many other wires plugged in up there that they were obscuring the empty hole. He guided the red cable into the notch and put it back in its place. He felt a click when it was secure.

  And his legs were uncomfortable from being in a crouch for so long. “I gotta stretch for a second. Hold on.” He stood up, unbending his knees. Then he crouched back down. “Okay, now what?”

  “Um, now we have to replace the Telsan circuit.”

  “That’s the thing you gave me?” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Pippa. “You need the kight wrench for this.”

  Gunner had stowed his tools and replacement parts in a pouch that attached to his belt. He reached down and opened it carefully, getting out the wrench. Then he tried to close the pouch again, but it was tough with only one gloved hand. His instinct was to put the wrench in his mouth, and he brought it up, only to have it collide with his helmet.