by Ben Hale
“I can make a few changes that will get the ship moderately operational,” Kensen said. “But it’s going to be sluggish.”
“What about the other three problems?” Rahnora asked.
“The two in the wings have to do with the gravity drives. Both are too big for a ship this size. The hull keeps pushing power into them, and they have a history of overloading, forcing the entire ship to shut down until the extra power has been vented.”
Tana nudged Quis. “It’s like they put big muscles on a tiny kid.”
The boy grinned at the reference to his early attempts to control his body augment. He’d jumped too high and moved too fast, frequently slamming his little body into the ground or trees. Siena had helped him heal more than a dozen broken bones and deep lacerations until he’d learned to control his augment.
“Exactly,” Kensen said. “I don’t think the engineers realized just how much energy the hull would produce, or they would have installed safeguards. As it is, we can probably fly out of the system and activate the projection Gates before the entire system locks up.”
“What about the last one?” Siena pointed to the bottom.
“That’s the hardest.” Kensen flipped the holo of the ship so they could see the belly. “The logs show that the weapons system has repeatedly failed. Attempts to make repairs were unsuccessful, and they never really identified what went wrong. The reason they couldn’t is because the issue isn’t with the coding, it’s with the teracrete plating on the plasma cannon.”
“He’s an expert in krey metallurgy now,” Bort muttered.
“Sort of,” Kensen said. “Normal plasma runs in the high orange to the low white spectrum of heat. Roughly one thousand three hundred degrees, which is above the melting point of seracrete. This ship fires a ball of plasma that’s nearly three times that temperature, pushing it into the deep blue spectrum. If it worked, it would punch a hole in anything below a class-six shield. Unfortunately, the teracrete absorbs the extra heat faster than the plasma heats up.”
“How do we fix it?” Siena asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe some interior shielding installed along the length of the cannon? I think I can solve the problem, but it will take some time.”
“What about the ion lances?” Rahnora asked. “Can we use them?”
“They draw power from the drives and the hull, so they keep overloading. Essentially, if we try to fire the weapons, it creates an exponential error that freezes the primary cortex within a few seconds.”
“Are the lances repairable?” Siena twisted her head to look out the window at the lance rods extending from the wings. “I don’t know if we can get out of here without a fight.”
“I don’t even know what’s causing it,” Kensen said. “If I had it on the ground, I could at least take a look.”
“So we have a ship that if we fly, shoot, or even turn on, it could lock up and die,” Rahnora said.
“That’s why it hasn’t sold,” Kensen said. “The good news is that if we do steal it, my augment allows me to see much more than engineering scanners, so I could eventually fix it. If we did, it would be devastatingly powerful.”
Siena fleetingly wondered if Ero had known the truth about the Crescent, but she doubted he’d known that augments could fix what krey could not. He was just lucky, as usual. But how were they going to steal a deeply flawed ship?
“Quis and Rahnora,” Siena said to the two light augments, “go to the wings and disconnect the power converters at the base of the gravity spheres.”
Kensen began to nod. “That ought to do it. There are four under each sphere that funnel power from the hull into the sphere.” He rotated the holo and zoomed in on one of the wings. “You should be able to connect them to one of the ion drives’ exhaust ports. There’s no part that does it, so you’ll have to build one directly out of light. And it will have to hold a great deal of pressure.”
“You think you can do it?” Siena asked.
Quis and Rahnora exchanged a look and a nod. “We’re on it,” they said as they departed for a wing.
Siena wasn’t sure they could accomplish the task, but she didn’t let her lack of confidence show. While Rahnora and Quis had both figured out how to turn light into a solid state—a feat that Skorn had called impossible—they could only make simple shapes. Still, it was as good an option as any.
“I’ll take care of the primary cortex,” Kensen said, “but the weapons system needs to be manually disconnected from the ship’s power systems, and Siena is the only one that can do it.”
“Why?” she asked.
He turned apologetic. “Because the access panel is outside the ship.”
“How am I supposed to get to it?” she asked. “This ship is just for show, so there’s no exo suits onboard.”
“You don’t need one.” Tana was tapping her chin. “You can pull a layer of air around your body and hold it in place with your gravity augment.”
“You want her to walk into space without a suit?” Kensen asked.
“That wasn’t your plan?” Siena asked.
“No,” he said. “I figured she’d get into the access crawlspace beneath the ship and cut her way through the hull to get to the weapon’s cortex.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Siena said.
Begle abruptly cursed, so loud and harsh that everyone looked at him. But his attention was out the rear airlock, to where the now conscious krey was limping onto the ascender. Fixing Siena with a baleful glare, the krey activated the ascender and dropped out of sight.
“We certainly don’t have time now,” Siena said. “Kensen, get this ship moving. I’ll handle the weapons system.”
He caught her elbow. “Are you crazy? You can’t go out there with just your augments as protection.”
“He saw our faces,” Siena said. “And we both know the Gate on this ship is locked. We have no way out, and we’re probably minutes away from a group of dakorians arriving on the ascender. Tana, help me with the gravity.”
“Siena,” Kensen said, lowering his voice, “you can’t do this.”
She held his gaze. “If I die, go without me. That’s an order.”
She turned away before he could argue, cursing herself for not ordering one of the others to bind the krey in case he regained consciousness. Ero was the one with the flawless plans, and she was stupid enough to think she could do what he’d done.
Darting to the airlock, she and Tana began warping the gravity to her body. Skorn and the other krey scientists had made clear she wasn’t actually warping gravity, but rather changing the charge of graviton, the subatomic particle excited by gravity. Still, it felt like she was changing gravity.
“You can do this,” Tana said. “I know you can.”
Siena realized her hands were trembling and forced herself to take a breath. “I’m about to go outside a ship with nothing but my clothes and skin as protection.”
“And a litany of powerful augments,” she said. “Just get up there, pull the cortex from its housing, and then get back before your air bubble fails.”
“Or the krey sets off the alarm,” she replied.
“That too,” Tana said with a faint smile.
Siena could feel the gravity extending from her body. Like a million threads of fabric floating outward, they held a thin layer of air around her skin. The pressure was comforting, but did little to ease her fears as she entered the connecting chamber and stepped into the small airlock designed for maintenance workers to exit and enter.
She fought to control her breathing as Tana shut the door and started the sequence to open the outer door. She failed. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and her hands trembled so hard she balled them into fists. She faced the outer door and listened as the rest of the air was sucked out of the small compartment, creating a vacuum. The temperature dropped, and she wished she’d thought to retain heat in her clothes. Or would that have disrupted the gravity? They’d experimented with how augm
ents impacted each other, but they didn’t have enough research to know for certain.
“Ready?” Tana asked, her voice slightly distorted through the door.
She steeled herself for the door opening. What was the worst that could happen? Her augment failed and she got sucked into empty space to die a horrible death as her blood froze in her body? She regretted considering the prospect and forced her head to nod. Tana hesitated, her hand hovering in the holo.
“Do it,” Siena said.
Tana shook her head, and then activated the exterior door. The glass barrier made a hissing sound as it was pulled to the side, leaving a gaping hole into the vacuum of space. Siena didn’t move. She held herself rigidly in place, as if holding her breath would keep her body from dying. But as the seconds passed and she remained alive, she took a tentative breath.
The air was so cold that she shuddered. Ice crystals were forming on her clothing, and she realized the cold would seep into her limbs. She needed to work fast. Unwilling to touch the walls, she nudged herself with a gravity pulse and glided out the opening.
Directly into open space.
The panic was sudden and raw, threatening the augments keeping her alive. The sheer expanse of space gaped at her like the throat of a titanic creature set to swallow the entire galaxy. Frozen in fear, she drifted away from the airlock. Each breath was a ragged gasp of air so cold it burned her lungs. Any second now, her augments would fail and the ice would pierce her soul, freezing every drop of blood in her body.
Focus, Tana thought to her. Just bind yourself to the hull of the ship.
Her words were a lifeline, and Siena latched onto them. She pulled from the gravity emanating from inside the ship and her momentum reversed. The urge to flail was overpowering and she swung her arms. Careening towards the hull, she desperately yanked on the gravity to form a cushion that caught her before she bounced off and was sent hurtling to her death. She came to a stop, her boots on the ship’s hull, her clothing held against her body only by the augments she’d created. Relief flooded her, so piercing it actually warmed her bones.
Well done, Tana shouted. You’re just a few steps from the access panel. Hurry!
Now shaking from fear and the cold, she worked her way up the smooth hull until she reached the access panel. A tiny holo, no bigger than a fingernail, twisted when she touched it, and the panel opened. Inside, a large, glowing crystal was secured between two cortex emulators, their silver tongs holding the crystal firmly in place. She reached down and wrapped a hand around the crystal, and the prongs automatically retracted. The crystal came free and she stood.
Then the alarm went off.
Chapter Fifteen
Siena snapped to look up, but the motion dislodged her and sent her spinning into space. Her augment wavered as panic engulfed her, the air layer leaking away. She willed herself to hold it together even as the temperature plummeted and she fought to breathe. Her vision flickered as she pulled on the gravity to bring her back towards the ship.
Agonizingly slow, she came to a stop forty feet from the hull of the black ship. Her air was almost gone, so she held her breath and pulled on the gravity like it was a rope. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, her body clamoring for air. The cold made her body tremble and seize. If she lost consciousness, she would be dead.
The siren blared on the station, a pulsing tone that would have rattled her bones if they were not already shaking. She spotted the airlock and knew she would not make it. With a final push, she yanked on the gravity and then wrapped the remaining layer of air around her body, but it was nothing more than a threadbare blanket against the void.
She hit the side of the airlock and would have bounced out, but another force caught her body and pulled her into the opening. The exterior door shut as she collided with the interior door, her body frozen in the fetal position. Warm air gushed in, washing across her limbs. She gulped it in, trying to use her heat augment to spread the warmth. But every augment had abandoned her.
Rough hands dragged her into the connecting chamber, and someone shouted, “Get Begle and Bort!”
The two redheaded brothers appeared, their features too blurry for Siena to recognize. Then four hands clasped her arms and warmth blossomed across her skin. The cold seemed to scream from inside her bones, and the spreading heat cut so deep she screamed.
“She’s nearly frozen.” She distantly recognized Kensen’s voice, filled with terror. “Can’t you go any faster?”
“We do, and she’ll have permanent damage,” someone snapped.
Siena wanted to assure him, but all she could do was tremble on the floor. The Crescent, her friends, Ero—all of it was scattered in the face of a desperate need for warmth. Begle and Bort pushed more and more heat into her body, burning the cold from the deepest part of her bones. Someone put a blanket on her, and she shivered at the weight. Each breath was a stuttering gasp.
“The sh-sh-ship?” she managed.
“Rahnora and Quis are finishing the second wing now,” Kensen said in a rush.
“Sh-sh-shut d-down ascender.”
“We’re locked out. And it looks like a team of dakorians is already ascending.”
“B-b-break it,” she hissed.
One set of hands left her arm and Begle said, “I love it when she says that.”
He and Tana jumped to the archway leading to the ascender. Still trembling, Siena turned her head to see Tana warping the gravity to bend the supports. The metal gained an ominous whine while Begle sent blast after blast of fire to heat the glass. It was reinforced and shielded, but cracks appeared and quickly expanded.
Siena clung to the blanket as they helped her up and pulled her onto the ship. The bent seracrete supports and glass continued to expand and spread until abruptly warning holos appeared on the controls, and a distant clanking echoed from below. The ascender had ground to a halt.
“Get onboard,” Kensen called. “That won’t slow them for long.”
Tana and Begle joined the rest of them and Kensen shut the rear airlock, the large door shrinking like an iris to close off the connecting compartment. Bort half-dragged her down the length of the interior cargo bay, and it was all she could do to not trip. He was still putting heat through the contact on her arm, but it felt like the cold had claimed her soul.
“Some of your joints are frozen,” Bort said. “If they don’t thaw quickly, you’ll lose them.”
Siena gave a shaky smile. “I’ve never heard you sound worried. Is it that bad?”
Bort’s features tightened. “I could have broken your fingers in half.”
She looked down and immediately regretted it. Her hands were blue, and ice crystals extended from them. They were melting, but as they did, the pain spiked. She cried out and Bort stopped.
“What’s wrong?”
Her fingers had frozen solid, and now blood was trying to enter the tissue. She fell to her knees and almost lost consciousness. But Bort held her arm and pumped heat into her frame, his voice surprisingly soft.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “I promise. A little more heat and you’ll be okay. Just use your healing augment.”
Siena latched onto that idea and pushed her healing augment into her hands. She clenched her jaw, the pain so striking her augment crumbled. Bort, and then Begle, supported her, with Tana calling from nearby.
“What’s happening?”
“I think her fingers died,” Bort said.
“As in dead?” Begle asked.
“As in, the tissue was frozen to solid ice,” Bort snapped.
“But she’s the only one that can fly a ship,” Tana said.
“She’s almost dead,” Begle growled. “Let’s worry about her and not the ship.”
“If we don’t get out of here we’ll all be dead,” she countered.
Siena barely heard them. She sank into herself and felt the churning power in her belly, the source of her augments. She didn’t understand it, but right now she didn’t care. She willed
it to flow up her arms and into her fingers, into the tissues that had perished. She didn’t stop to consider if it was possible. If she doubted for even a moment, she knew she would lose her hands.
Whenever she’d used the healing augment it was like her body wanted to be whole, and it helped the body do what it desired. But this time it was like pushing water into a boulder. And her fingers were the boulder.
She drove the energy against the barrier, and it budged. The tissues it touched seemed to come alive, even as a new wave of pain assaulted her senses. Gasping, crying, snarling, she ground the augment energy against the dead cells. In agonizing spurts, they began to mend, the flesh turning pink to the first knuckles, then the nails. The tips of her fingers had frozen first, and it took every ounce of power to shove against the dead skin. They throbbed and pulsed, but cell by cell they began to heal, until the entire hand returned to life.
“She did it,” Bort breathed.
She was on the bridge, sitting on the floor while Kensen sat in the copilot’s seat. There was vomit on her shirt, and she realized it had come from her. The ship shuddered from an exterior impact, drawing a curse from Kensen.
“Can’t you activate the projection Gate?” Rahnora asked.
“Not this close to the other ships,” he said. “The only thing keeping us alive is the teracrete.”
Another impact, and something back in the ship exploded and clattered on the floor. Through Siena’s swirling vision she saw the shipyard, a swarm of pursuing ships that looked like angry bees, and Mylttium.
“A pair of Ranger ships are approaching,” Kensen said. He shot a look over his shoulder. “Siena, I know you just used everything you had, but I don’t know how to pilot, and I could really use your help.”
“Get me into the chair,” she said weakly.
They hoisted her off the floor, but she stumbled when another impact hit their starboard hull. A wash of plasma cascaded across the forward window, briefly obscuring their view. They tried to be gentle, but almost dropped her into the pilot’s chair. She stared through swimming vision at the control holo.